The twins' names were Su-Ru and Su-Ru, stressed on the first syllable and stressed on the last syllable. As they told their names, they were a little confused as to which name belonged to whom, but Mother quickly settled the matter by calling the girl Su-Ru and the boy Su-Ru. If anything, they seemed relieved not to have to decide for themselves.
That night, the champions were invited to what Barâan called the royal table, and Mother did not correct him when he referred to it that way. Orì rolled her eyes, but only Sofia and Ami saw this.
Barâan was suspecting his sister of the stunt with the worm, but he wasn't allowed to accuse or punish her. As Barâan had cried out with disgust and started to sputter, Mother had put a stop to it straight away.
"Behave yourself," she had said to him in such a menacing tone that he had obeyed her immediately. Before what had happened could become obvious to the many people present in the courtroom, which would only have resulted in laughter, Barâan had restrained himself and swallowed his pride - along with a few wormy bits.
He had then settled uncomfortably in his throne, the fruit quickly disappearing from his reach, and he had shot Orì looks that spoke of something akin to hatred. Sofia had apologized to Orì for unwittingly putting her on the spot like that, but Orì had laughed and said she only wished that she had thought of doing it.
Mother had asked the twins to perform for them, and not even Barâan, who prided himself on his own skills in this particular category, was able to keep himself from falling under their spell.
Most mirrorers chose scale over execution. Su-Ru and Su-Ru made the opposite choice. Their mirroring was more than mere replication. Without changing the initial object's core, they smoothed and perfected its appearance. As they did so, their faces were serene. It seemed to be easier for them to be doing this than not to be doing this.
They started with a speck of dust. The piece of dust was tiny, almost imperceptible. And yet it seemed to have been chosen because of its perfect embodiment of the thing that was dust. Its multiplication was only logical.
As the dust gathered and became manifold, it slowly turned into another substance. It clumped into a hard, petrified mass which soon turned out to be a perfectly preserved fossil. Its vertebra was curled in on itself as if it had turned into stone while it had been sleeping.
As the twins created mirror-images of the fossil, something happened to the multiple versions of the same, long gone animal. All at the same time, their stony exteriors appeared to loosen. The hardness became softer and, suddenly, like an egg breaking open from the inside, the original animal, as well as its mirror images, started to struggle against their shelter.
Though perfect copies of each other, the animals were not the same. Some remained still, only slowly wagging their tail as if scared by the sudden change of their nature. Others whirled around on the ground so fast that they almost turned themselves into knots. Some were timid, some were bold. Some grew larger as if their growth had been halted during their fossilization, some shivered and shrank, having reached the end of their lifespan quite naturally.
Su-Ru and Su-Ru were fully immersed in what they were doing. The people around them had all but ceased to exist for them. They worked as if they were one, but still, they took full advantage of their double personalities. To them, a mirror image was only the start. Just because something had its beginning in the exact same way did not mean it had to continue like that.
Quite the contrary, as they would explain later that evening to Ami.
"True mirroring -"
"- is impossible. True sameness -"
YOU ARE READING
The Games for Nihon (BOOK THREE)
Fantasy[New Chapter 1-2 per week] Sofia, Orì and Ami are visiting the Kingdoms of Nihon in preparation for the Games that are being held every ten years and that define the power structures of the magical world of Nihon. While trying not to be sucked into...
