The Mirror’s Truth (Manifest Delusions, #2)

by Michael R. Fletcher

Before the Menschheit Letzte Imperium there were thousands of gods. Every copse of trees had its own Ascended spirit jealously guarding its patch. Every pond held some mad demigod. It was a world of numen. When the Menschheit Letzte Imperium united mankind under one rule there was but one religion, the Wahnvorstellung. With the fall of the Imperium that religion changed and fragmented over the ensuing millennia. Three thousand years ago we had twenty gods and now we have hundreds. And the number is growing. How can this not signify our descent?

The Reflection, trapped in the mirror, watches and waits for the Mirrorist’s fall. When the Geisteskranken finally reaches the Pinnacle, the Reflection steps from the mirror, becoming real and taking the Mirrorist’s place. Most often the Mirrorist is then trapped in the mirror, themselves becoming a Reflection awaiting the fall of the Mirrorist. If they may change places back and forth so readily, is either ever truly real?

Time crawled past like a thousand regrets drowning in blood and guts and an infinite ocean of lies and deceit.

“Why do you hate me so much?” Wichtig asked. The horse was too angry to answer. “I bought you that beautiful—albeit incredibly uncomfortable—saddle. The lovely blanket…” From down here he saw where the wet blanket chafed the beast’s back raw. “Shite. Sorry.” He laughed. “Why didn’t you say something?”

No doubt built by men, she decided. A woman would never build something so obviously and ridiculously phallic. Only men stumbled about littering the landscape with monuments erected to their little stickers. Such colossal insecurity. She imagined women building domed breast-like structures and laughed.

Self-loathing is the natural state for humanity. We know there is something wrong with us. We are at war with ourselves, and it’s a war we are doomed to lose.

Anyone remember Pfeilmacher? He wrote those awful books about a reality that was fixed, unresponsive to the beliefs of man. They were drivel. I met him years after reviewing his novel and he was a lumbering beast, with flesh like one of those armoured swamp creatures with all the teeth. He said the reviews of those who themselves wrote nothing of value no longer bothered him, that he’d become inured to rejection. I told him I thought his second book was worse than the first and he cried, his skin growing even thicker.

Zukunft stared at the mirror, entranced. “Your friends are going to be there too,” she said. “They’re in danger. Something is following them. Something cold, evil. It’s in the sky, above the clouds. Wings bigger than the sails of the biggest ship, sheets of snake skin. It vomits insanity, melts flesh from bone with its madness.”

Looking back, he realized that was easily the highest paying, least demanding job he ever held. He’d been swimming in coin, bedding wealthy wives and daughters by the score, and drinking with his fellow guard every evening. Why his wife demanded they leave the city, he’d never know.