Maple clutched the mirror, ravenous for another glance; as if her reflection was a drug soothing the dull ache in her chest. Her knotted curls cascaded down her back, and her full lips glinted in the pale moonlight shimmering through the windows. Beneath it all, her amber eyes were incensed with obsession.
She held her breath expectantly.
Shadows loomed behind her gaze, slowly devouring her. She drowned further in the mirror’s embrace. Her heart floundered wildly in her chest. She was like Narcissus suffocating in the waters of his own reflection.
Too beautiful for her own good. Her mother had warned her.
She had noticed the way people stared at her from a young age. Her hair was like silk on water; her skin was flushed porcelain.
But those eyes.
Those eyes were pools of fire, fringed by crimson lashes. Those eyes were magma, singing the very ground on which she walked.
Those eyes were her namesake.
And slowly those eyes churned.
They stirred into a kaleidoscope of colors, speckled with gold, and tints of blue. Her pupils became splintered shards of glass, piercing her vision.
She gasped as a sharp throb spiked through her chest, and she toppled backward, her red satin dress splayed on the floor beneath her.
Her eyes.
The window to one’s soul. Her mother had said.
And still, nobody had been able to see into her soul. To peer past her flaming gaze, into a heart of ice.
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she felt a numb sensation overcome her. A gust of frigid air entered the room, and her fingers reached for the mirror, slowly solidifying over its ornate handle.
She felt her pupils dilate once more as a web of ice fractured across them. Her bare legs stung in the bitter air, and her thighs extended outwards. She rolled over on her torso, the mirror entwined in her fingers.
Thrusting herself upwards, she tried to stand. But an arrow of pain exploded between her shoulder blades, and she thrust her hair back, unleashing a feral scream
Her features contorted in the mirror before her, till she was beyond recognition. Her face was a fragmented glacier; her curly hair formed jagged icicles that tore into the skin of her back; and her lips were permanently caved open, in a cry for help.
But her eyes.
Her eyes were glassy droplets of despair; they were swirling blizzards encasing the memory of a girl frosted over by hopelessness.
Maple’s grip on the mirror tightened, it was a scythe welded to her ice-bound hands.
Once more, the moonlight flooded through the iron-barred windows, making her a prisoner of her heart, in a sepulcher by the sea.
She gazed in the mirror once again, imploring for some semblance of her former self. But it shattered in her hands.
The pieces of her reflection scattered before her, shrieking as they hit the marble tiles. And the tentacles of time snatched them into the folds of her innocence, never to be seen again.
Spilled Ink 