Written by @Feyona (because she's an excellent writer and is able to capture all of the tone, mood, and essence of the story that I wanted her to go for. She has incredible word dictation too. If you don't like that I commission people to write, I don't care.)
Dahae had taken up the penchant of collecting mirrors like children collect raven feathers and shiny rocks. It was a passive habit at first that had snowballed into the collection she had now; silver frames were her favorite, especially the ones with little gemstones, fake or not, embedded in lavish carvings. It gave her an off-sense of wealth, even though so many of them had been bartered or stolen and lifted from various sticky fingers to another. They were the only things Dahae bothered polishing and keeping dustless in her room, if just because she was fond of catching a glimpse of herself in the reflective surface while she ran the oilcloth through the crevices and a bit more carefully over the polished front.
The day had been long and overwhelming, and her feelings had ranged from the highest tides of anxious rage to the darker depths of something much worse, a feeling that started as a small, pinprick hole just below her heart, behind her sternum. By the time she retired to her room that day, that feeling had ripped open like a festering wound, letting off a sick sensation of a sweltering darkness, muffling each breath and threatening to engulf her from the inside out. It made her short of breath, with each inhale making that hole a little bit wider. It was an internal vacuum, depriving her of comfort and by the time she made it to her room that night, she was dizzy with the inability to breathe.
The doorknob jiggled a bit as she moved to open it, though as the door swung open, and she found her eyes readjusting to the new lighting, the sensation that came with looking in her room made her stomach drop to her heels and her breath freeze in her chest. Though she didn't remember positioning them so, every mirror in her room felt like it was faced to her, standing in the doorway. She saw herself from every angle, the shadows playing across her face and making her look gaunt. Old, and worn. It was as if someone had taken her face and shown her, in an instant, what she would like like in fifty—no, hundred—years.
Her hair looked faded, as if it had lost all luster she made sure to brush into it daily, her eyes sunken by this weariness and her lips too thin to be pretty. A vile taste rose in the back of her throat, making her stomach clench and for a moment, she feared she would be ill, until it seemed to cease. A cold, uncomfortable calm settled over here, a soft freeze of ice, her expression fading to neutrality as she addressed this farce, this maze of mirrors that had her looking back on herself, a ghost image, with disdain.
Just as quickly as the ice set it, it snapped. Her eyes widened briefly and she took a step into the room, seizing the first mirror within grasping range, and hurling it into a long mirror against the far wall. Both shattered in unison, a shrill crash of a noise hinting at the first blow, before the shards of broken glass fell from the frame, crumpling into a glistening pile of reflection, skewing her appearance a million more times.
Dahae's jaw clenched so tightly her teeth hurt, threatening to crack under the weight of her sudden, ferocious anger. The first mirrors were not to be the only victims—as she charged through the room, her breaths shortening into frantic, grunting cries of fury, she seized mirror after mirror. One dented the wall with its heavy frame smashing against it, one she outright broke in hand, a flimsy thing as thin as paper in her hand. Though it drew blood, shattering shards against her fingers and palms, she was blind to it.
The next were two large mirrors, both next to her doorway. Balling one bloody hand into a fist, she punched at one, every odd angle of herself seeming distorted and unreal. Was that too much pudge to her thighs? Did she look wraithlike in the other, like a demon or a beast of legend. Her fist shattered the mirror quickly, splintering it into twenty more of her, larger fractions and each one more ghastly and horrible than the last.
She didn't want to see that reflection any longer. That haggard, ghost of a woman that she wasn't yet, but would someday be. That woman that wasn't worthy of acknowledgement now, the one who had the shadows of countless cast over her face. How long would she live in those shadows? The shadows of her elders. Her siblings. Everyone who managed to outshine her and cast that darkness over her face. The blood pooled in her palm from her cuts, but she wasn't finished yet. Everywhere, the pretty visage she was so proud of leered back at her, and her rampage had not ended yet. Three sat on her bedside table, and with her hand aching where the shards of the last mirror were still embedded like small, invisible swords digging into her flesh, Dahae moved with one arm to swipe them. They crashed against each other first, though with the force of her launching them to the side, the tumbled to the wall first, then the floor.
Miraculously, one of the three survived, landing at an angle on the wreckage of its not so fortunate twins, both warped and twisted under it. Her eyes caught sight of herself once more, and unable to bear the weight of the knowledge of her own inferiority, Dahae kicked at it, relishing in the sick crunch of grinding glass and metal under heel, even though a little flash of pain told her of her mistake in doing so. One particularly long shard had pierced her shoe, driving up against her ankle and leaving a thin slash in the skin there. It was only in the silence and with the bright, flash of pain running through her hands and now one leg did she realize that her rampage had left her room in tatters.
Dahae's shoulders heaved with the force of her breath, and though that stifling, terrible pressure had left her chest, it had left only a gaping void. As if someone had taken a hot spoon and carved out an infection in her, leaving a hollow, scorched wound in his wake, still sore and tender to the thought of it. With a slight limp, careful to not embed the glass in her shoe any further against the tender skin of her foot, bleeding now, she moved to the bed. The process of removing her ruined shoe was slow, unbearably dangerous with how sharp the edge of the jagged glass was against the wounded flesh, and it was twicefold painful to do so with little slivers of glass still embedded into the skin of her fingers and hand, dripping blood like a small fount from the scrapes of her fingers.
It was to her benefit and luck that no one had heard her loss of control, but it was to her shame that she was left to view the carnage she'd left in her wake. None of her collection had survived, and even now, that haunting, ghastly figure looked at her from a thousand splintered variants, every mirror breaking giving that many more of her damned reflections to look back, more warped than the last. Biting her lower lip hard enough to almost draw redness to the skin, Dahae lowered her head and fought back tears.
@LlamaDelBae @Soli_Is_Salty @Arrogantus @Caverly @irisamicitia @Lumiess @NChulingeth
