Mirella Blackthorn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Mirella Blackthorn stood at the top of the sunken steps and made her hand open. The mirror slid free of her sleeve into her palm, cold as pond water. She turned it, glanced once, and saw the thing living under her skin: a churn of black behind her own face. That was the deal she had made with herself. One look, every hour, to remember what she would become if she did not cut the dark magic out of her. Below her, the garden wept. Blue tears bled from cracked grey stones set along the low wall, marking the edge she would not cross. She had crossed it twice in her mind and turned back twice with her feet. Past those stones, down among the willows, stood Laurel Greymourner, hands locked to her face, mouth open in a scream that had lasted years. Mirella had put her there. She had watched from these same stairs and let a jealous thought slip its leash, and the stone had climbed Laurel from the soles up. She came down three steps. The magic in her chest jerked awake. It reached through her left hand before she could close it, and the flagstone under her boot split. Black vines shoved up through the crack, thick as her wrist, curling around the stone in a knot of thorns. She stumbled back. The vines kept growing where she had stood, feeding on the print of her. Mirella raised the mirror again. The dark inside it pressed forward like breath on cold glass. Her own eyes were almost gone in it now. She understood, plainly, that the magic was not waiting for her permission anymore. It would take the next person who passed. A gardener. A child on the path. It would not care. She stepped down to the weeping stones and knelt. She set the mirror face-up on the wet grass so the darkness in it looked at the sky instead of her. Then she pressed both palms flat to the cold boundary stones. The magic surged into her arms, hunting an exit, and she did not close her hand this time. She let it go into the stones. They drank. Blue tears ran faster down their sides. The vines behind her shivered, blackened further, and locked hard around the flagstone, no longer growing. The pressure in her chest dropped to something she could carry. Not gone. Held. Mirella looked up. Through the willows, Laurel still stood, screaming without sound, blue roots threaded through the cracks in her body. The dark magic was quiet now, but only because Mirella had fed it into the ground. The stones would not hold it forever. She picked up the mirror, wiped the grass from its back, and stepped past the boundary for the first time. The garden did not stop her. Laurel did not turn. Mirella began to walk down.