This post was inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #1096 - Hidden Mirror
Enjoy !
The three adventurers looked at each other in confusion. They had expected, and were used to, terrifying underground ordeals. Battles against fearsome monsters, deadly traps and terrifying magics.
Not a small, ordinary man sitting on a box next to a sign, with the ventriloquist's puppet on his hand speaking for him. He wasn't even a very good ventriloquist; he had a distinct problem with his "r"'s. Well, the puppet did, but that is only to be expected when someone's got their hand up your "r"'s.....
"Wowwl-up ! Wowwl-up ! Come see Dingwell's Dangeh Dungeon ! See the beawded lady ! The two life-size nutcwackews ! The fabulous Miwwah Maze !"
Sulinn the halfling rolled her eyes at the others. She had a low tolerance for nonsense of any kind. Her views were pretty simple; sneak in, take all the loot, and sneak back out again without getting in trouble. But Cato, the group's sorcerer and Una the gamble-oholic warlock grinned at each other, overtaken with childlike delight at the idea of this unexpected place they'd found deep in the mines below Freiland.
They stepped past the sign, painted in garish gloss colours, and Sulinn could be heard muttering that they couldn't even spell it right. She was correct, of course....
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio - which can't spell, but hey it still looks good 😁
The first chamber they came to was a cavern with a half-marquee erected at it's entrance to make it look like a fairground tent.
Standing guard either side were two six-foot high carved wooden nutcracker soldiers. They looked exactly like the trope said they should, even down to their gloss red coats with gold-painted buttons the size of saucers. But they were crudely made, very poor in fact, and they appeared to do nothing.
Cato and Una's glee faded a little, as they worried the whole place might be a sham, like those awful Yuletide Winter Wonderlands where the creators used chopped paper for imitation snow because they were too stingy to pay for a decent illusion spell or even a simple prestidigitation.
The next exhibit, if you can call it that, was even worse. The bearded lady. She was sixty if she was a day. Her blonde hair was an obvious wig that had seen far better days, and her gown appeared to have most of last week's dinner staining the front. As for the beard....
Well, Una gave one snort and pulled it, exposing cords wrapped behind the ears. "I can see the strings, you silly man !" she cried in a tone of absolute derision. And it was true; the poor man hadn't bothered to shave his chest or tuck in the rolled up socks that made his bosom, and the beard appeared to be made of teddy bear fur, hiding a good week's growth of grey stubble.
The poor man blushed, tears of shame filling his eyes. "I'm sorry, so, so sorry," he sobbed, "Mr Dingwell is a harsh master. But please, go and see his mirror maze. It is honestly worth it, the one thing here that is real."
And there it was; a huge, brightly striped tent with the Mirror Maze inside. Light could be seen emanating through the joins in the canvas panels, even though they were tightly tied. The entrance was a short tunnel with scarlet canvas hanging at each end to prevent those outside seeing in.
The three companions strode in. "This looks more like it !" Cato declared.
As they pulled the second curtain aside, they were greeted by bright light, chandeliers overhead reflecting off a profusion of vertical mirrors. Each pane was fixed in an ornate gilt frame, creating a solid reflective surface from just above the floor to a height of around eight feet.
They could all see infinite images of themselves, as mirrors on opposite sides of a glass corridor stretched off into the distance. Some were distorted; deliberately, they guessed. That old circus game of using mirrors to make the observer look taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, or squeezed in at the middle.
Looking carefully, they could see that some of the frames on each side of the corridor gave no reflection. "I guess they are side-corridors," Una said to her friends, wonder coming into her voice.
"Well let's go and find out !" Cato boomed cheerfully, stepping forward.
He was ten paces ahead of them when they felt and heard a grinding sound. A panel in front swung rapidly through ninety degrees, and Cato was gone. Trapped on the other side. Instinctively, Sulinn looked behind. The entrance was gone, too; another panel had swung around.
"Umm... chaps ?" Cato's disembodied voice came from.... somewhere. It echoed. As if many voices had said the same thing, each separated by a fraction of a second. It sounded worried, plaintive.
"We stick together," Sulinn told Una firmly. Just as a fresh mirror slid out from the crack between two panels, separating the two of them.
Meanwhile, Cato advanced into the maze, no longer sure of his bearings. He was sure he had felt the floor rotate as well as mirrored panels slide in and out or swing around to create new blockages and fresh entrances. This maze certainly wasn't the fraud that the nutcrackers and beardy-weirdy had been, but he was starting to get worried.
Something in the corner of his eye made Cato look hard to his left. One of his reflections had a hand raised, when both of his were at his sides. His eyes widened as he recognised the pose. It was casting a spell at him !
He tried to side-step, to duck into a side-corridor. But he was too slow ! A mirror shifted and slammed into his face.
Una heard Cato's scream, echoing throughout this awful place. It was brief, cut short. As were the echoes. Now she, too was getting worried. There was no sign of Sulinn, and no response when she called.
The mirrors shifted again. Una found herself boxed in; a freshly made glittering chamber ten feet square.
She saw Cato and Sulinn, and momentary relief flooded though her. Until she saw that they were just reflections. Trapped in the glass, unmoving, expressions of absolute horror locked onto their faces, arms raised in terror. Not reflections; images. Images of their dying moments.
Una felt terror too. The mirrors had stopped moving. The last shift had somehow bought two panels in to roof over the chamber she was in. She thumped a panel with the hilt her falchion; it didn't shatter or even chip. Magic. The only light was the lantern she herself carried. What would happen to her when the oil ran out ?
