Therisia's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Therisia meant to trap her own reflection tonight, before the mirror showed her one more thing she refused to become. She sat in the abandoned watchtower, a candle burning low, her contract laid flat on the cold stone. Every contract she wrote worked on other people. She read the fine print fast, after they said yes, and the words closed around them like a snare. But she had never signed a thing herself. Now she needed to. The face in the polished glass was hers, and it was changing, and she wanted it bound before she had to look at it awake. She read her clause aloud. "The undersigned surrenders all claim to the likeness herein." The reflection smiled with her mouth. Then it stepped sideways, out of the clause, and the words meant nothing. Her wording was too loose. Any image could slip a loose knot. Boots scraped the broken timbers above. Therisia snuffed the candle. "You'll want a stronger verb than 'surrenders,'" a soft voice said. A young woman climbed down through the ruined floor, ink stains on her fingers, round spectacles catching the last light. A satchel of rolled maps hung at her hip. Therisia had cheated her once, years back, on a map deal she still remembered word for word. "Sable Vorn," Therisia said. "Come to collect?" "Come to hide." Sable tugged her long sleeve down over her wrist. A glow leaked through the cloth anyway. "Something tracks me. Stone walls dull it. I didn't expect company." She looked at the contract on the floor. "You're binding yourself. Badly." Therisia's jaw tightened. She hated being read. "The clause keeps failing." Sable knelt. She turned the paper toward the moonlight and traced the lines. "You wrote it like a trade. A trade has two parties who can walk away. You don't want a trade. You want a definition." She pulled a pen from her satchel. "Name the reflection as property before you bind it. Then it can't act. Property doesn't sign or leave." The simple fix landed hard. Therisia had spent her whole life trapping others with careful words. She had never turned that skill inward. She took the pen. She scratched out the old clause and wrote a new one. "The likeness herein is hereby declared the sole property of the undersigned, without will or voice." She pressed her thumb to the glass and read it aloud, fast, the way she made everyone else agree too late. The reflection froze. Its mouth opened and no sound came. It could not step aside. It could not smile. It stared out, fixed, a thing she owned now. Therisia exhaled. The contract held. Then the trapped face turned its eyes to Sable's glowing wrist. Slowly, deliberately, it lifted one hand and pointed at the mark under her sleeve, as if it knew exactly what hunted her, and meant to tell.