Nightmares and Nocturnes

The Looking Glass

Chapter 2: The Looking Glass

The boy was so steeped in sun, and his childhood so saturated by it, that he knew nothing of darkness, or stars, or moon. He lived his days in favor and in privilege, glorified in the sun.

One day, he caught sight of an animal unknown to him; one familiar, but distinct, and it settled into a hollow which the boy himself could not reach. He gave chase, noting the chaos the animal left in its path, but with great leaps and bounds, the creature stole farther and farther ahead of him, and vanished. Defeated, he turned to his keeper.

"What animal was that?" he asked. "How did it escape?"

"The Chosen One," his keeper sneered. "A young lion, who seeks another path."

"A coward, then," the boy determined. "Easy prey."

"For now," his keeper replied. "But one day, you will learn the hunt is not without its challenges."

The boy realized the young lion must be one of the creatures about which the monster, who cast an immutable shadow of fear to rule over both the boy and his keeper, had ominously warned. But once the boy had seen it, his curiosity could not be assuaged. He continued to hunt, but not with his usual spirit. He could not find it in him to pursue the hunt with fervor.

When the time came for him to capture his first lion, he ventured for the first time into darkness. As the light of his charmed existence first began to fade, he felt a sudden tremor in his heart, a sense of fear that overtook him. He could not think what it was, could not reconcile it with his mind; but knew, somehow, that he was no longer the boy he had known, or even near what he had thought himself.

He found that he himself was nothing, and it made him feeble, and he saw himself a coward.

The beast who would have been his prey stole upon the boy; he reached within himself for courage and came up empty-handed, and could not even raise his hand from his side to strike. The only courage he could muster was a coward's; the only strength he had within him was to run, and not to fight. The only element that remained was his own contempt, and the ghost of his failures that howled after him, filled with screams and shrieks and roars which neither time nor distance could quell.

As he fled back to his home, to the safehold of his naive virtue, the moon peered up over its edge; it was only then that the boy realized the extent of the darkness that surrounded him. There was fresh terror, ghastly and gruesome, and he was desperate to escape; but despite all this, he had never known another way, and so he plunged in, struggling to surface.

The monster, having given orders, took for granted they were obeyed, and that he ruled unquestionably over all the creatures of the day and night. But the monster could not get into the habit of peering into the depths, and by chance, his gaze passed over the day boy and the night girl, leaving one to slip out of the dark.

Then it seemed to the girl that some ball of light, some source, was watching over her.

. . . . . . . .

"Do you realize what you've done?"

Lucius was furious.

"Do you not?" Draco countered, feeling his expression go cold with contempt. "Are you really just as far gone as they are, that you can't manage to see her value?"

"You are living in the past, Draco," Lucius seethed, his teeth gritted in anger as he paced the marble floor of the manor's foyer. "Whatever value she once had, it amounts to nothing now."