Then the imitation Karanissa sat back on the stone and pulled her legs from the little glass circle. She was entirely free, and the mirror once again looked like an ordinary mirror.

This Karanissa, at least initially, appeared indistinguishable from the original. She wore an identical red dress, and her hair was styled just like the original’s.

“Well, so much for using Javan’s Geas on the mirror,” Gresh muttered. “But we must have done something that altered the nature of the spell. Are we going to get a plague of Karanissas now, instead of spriggans?” He found himself thinking that that would certainly be an improvement.

The original Karanissa ignored him as she knelt by the rather dazed-looking copy and asked, “Who are you?”

The copy looked up, obviously confused, and said, “I’m a person.”

“I didn’t ask what you are,” Karanissa said gently. “I asked who you are.”

“I’m…I’m a person,” the other said. “That’s all I know.”

“Where did you come from?”

The imitation looked down at her feet, then pointed. “The mirror,” she said.

“Are you a witch?” Karanissa asked.

The copy blinked, then frowned. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“Can’t you tell?” Gresh asked the original.

“No, I can’t,” Karanissa admitted. “Which is puzzling, to say the least.” She looked up at Gresh. “This… this person isn’t all here, exactly.”

“She isn’t…well, you?” Gresh asked. “Could it be that you’re being confused because her identity isn’t entirely distinct from your own?”

Karanissa reached out and put a hand on her imitation’s shoulder; the imitation started slightly, glanced at the hand, then looked up at Gresh. “Do I look like her?” she asked.

“Very much,” Gresh said, startled by the question.

“She’s pretty.”

“So are you.”

The copy lowered her gaze. “Thank you,” she said.

“You know,” Karanissa said, looking up at Gresh, “until I touched her, I wasn’t sure she was really there. I thought she might just be an illusion, especially given how she squeezed through the mirror when she obviously couldn’t have fit.”

Gresh nodded. He was thinking furiously. He did not understand why this duplicate of Karanissa should have emerged from the mirror, but he intended to figure it out. It would almost certainly explain a great deal about how the mirror’s magic worked, and that might well help them end the plague of spriggans forever-if they had not already somehow altered the spell permanently.

He glanced down at the mirror to see whether anything else was climbing out of it; nothing was.

This woman, this copy of Karanissa, was solid, but Karanissa said she did not seem real…

“Lady,” he said, “do you remember anything from before you emerged from the mirror?”

The copy looked up at him again. “Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t exist before I climbed out of the mirror, did I?”

“We don’t know,” Gresh said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, as far as I know, I didn’t exist until a couple of minutes ago.”

Gresh looked at the original. “You say she doesn’t seem entirely human?”

“She doesn’t seem entirely real,” Karanissa corrected him.

“Do spriggans? Could she be a spriggan in human form?”

“I’m a person,” the duplicate interjected. “I do know that much.”

“She…” Karanissa tilted her head and studied the copy. “She’s not a spriggan, but there is a similarity. I never noticed it before, but you’re right, spriggans aren’t all there, either. If I hadn’t had real humans to compare her to, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with her.”

“There isn’t anything wrong with me!” the duplicate protested.

“Stand up and let me look at you,” Gresh suggested. “Let’s see if you really are an exact duplicate of Karanissa.”

The two women exchanged glances, then rose and turned to face Gresh, standing side-by-side in the fading daylight.

“Oh,” Gresh said. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

The two were identical in appearance in every detail except for one. The dresses were the same fabric, the same cut, belted identically, with the same knot at the same place; the hair was the same length and luster, with every lock and curl matching; the eyes were identical in color and shape; the teeth matched; the nose and mouth were indistinguishable-except for one thing.

The copy was smaller than the original.

She was proportioned exactly like the real Karanissa, but she was about two inches shorter, a shade thinner, and not quite as wide at shoulders, bust, waist, or hips. Her fingers were slightly shorter; her eyes and mouth were slightly smaller. She was the exact image of Karanissa, but somehow shrunken.

Image, he thought. Mirror image.

Gresh looked down at the mirror, then back at the two women.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt simultaneously brilliant and foolish-brilliant because he now was certain of exactly how the mirror’s magic worked, and foolish because it had taken him so long to guess the truth.

It probably explained how Lugwiler’s Haunting Phantasm worked, too.

It explained why spriggans were indestructible while the mirror’s magic was working, but not when it wasn’t. It explained why none of them had names when they emerged, why they sometimes varied in appearance but were sometimes identical, why they didn’t feel entirely real to witches, and why they had no odor. It explained why they emerged at apparently random intervals, and why the mirror had kept working when broken, but multiplied everything by four.

“Oh, what?” Karanissa asked, visibly annoyed.

“They’re images,” Gresh explained. “Mirror images. They aren’t really here in the World at all; they’re in the mirror.” He leaned forward and sniffed at the smaller woman, and as he had expected, smelled nothing at all-no scent of woman whatsoever.

She looked puzzled at his action, but did not shy away, or make any comment.

“Images? What?” the original Karanissa asked. “What are images?”

“Spriggans. The ones we see and talk to aren’t real spriggans; they’re just mirror images. The real spriggans are in another world somewhere, a world that has a mirror in it that’s magically connected to this one. I wonder whether the reason Tobas’s spell went wrong in the first place is because he was doing it in that purple void, instead of here in the World. Instead of linking to the world of the Haunting Phantasm, he linked this mirror to the world of spriggans, which is related to the void the same way the phantasm world is related to this one.”

“But the Haunting Phantasm doesn’t keep spewing out pests.”

“The worlds are different, of course, so the rules are different, and the magic is different. Wizardry is like that.” He turned up an empty palm. “Or maybe he just made a mistake; wizardry is like that, too.”

Karanissa shuddered. “Sometimes I hate wizardry.”

The reduced copy-the image, as Gresh now thought of it-looked from one of them to the other, then said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Spriggan understand,” a squeaky voice said from behind Gresh’s right shoulder.

The Spriggan Mirror

A Legend of Ethshar