Eidolons

Remember how I said there'd be three parts of this?  Remember how
I insisted on it?

I was wrong.  -.-

Four parts.  I swear.  

And any commentary would be welcome.

Ranma belongs to Takahashi.  The Dreamlands were Lovecraft's
creation, and the copyright is now owned I believe by Chaosium 
(or possibly by Arkham House or August Derleth, or maybe by the
Ancient Seers of Bavaria.  We're not sure).  Anyway, both are 
used without permission, as you no doubt have already guessed.

...

Three - Speculum

time takes its crazy toll
and how does your mirror grow
you better watch yourself when you jump into it
'cause the mirror's gonna steal your soul
I wonder how it came to be my friend
that someone just like you has come again
you'll never, never know how close you came
until you fall in love with the diamond rain
throw all his trash away
look out he's here to stay
your mirror's gonna crack when he breaks into it
and you'll never never be the same
look into his eyes and you can see
why all the little kids are dressed in dreams
I wonder how he's gonna make it back
when he sees that you just know it's make-believe
blood crystallized as sand
and now I hope you'll understand
you reflected into his looking glass soul
and now the mirror is your only friend...
-Sonic Youth

...

     Silverhold, the castle of the Mirror-Lord, stands on a
lunar hill and looks down upon the shattered temples of the city
of the dead gods like a king looks down upon his vassals.  It is
toweringly vast, a stronghold of narrow spires and tall keeps 
whose walls all join at exact angles of ninety or forty-five
degrees.  A deep octagonal trench surrounds it, filled with a
liquid that is not water, for it flows flat and calm in an
endless movement, and reflects the star-filled eternal night of
the sky above so perfectly that a fall into it would perhaps seem
a fall into the boundless hunger of the void of space.  

     The walls of Silverhold are mirrors, all of them perfectly
flat.  In them lie an endless sea of reflected images; stars and 
space, the surface of the moon, the ziggurats and minarets of the
city of the dead gods.  The joins of the walls, perfect angles of
ninety degrees or forty-five that they are, are nevertheless hard
to see.  One reflection seems to flow into each other, and as the
eye gazes upon the massive castle, they seem to shift slowly,
though experience and all human rationality tells that it is the
object reflected that moves, and not the reflected image.  

     From the outskirts of the city of the dead gods, Ranma
Saotome comes walking.  He passes by a squat temple from whose
dark archway the laughter of children can faintly be heard, and
by the dusty courtyard of small shrine filled with the skeletal
remains of long-dead plants.  As he walks by the last temple, a
woman fair as twilight beckons from the shadows of a Doric
column; her lips are red as roses.  Ranma ignores her, and 
departs the city of the dead gods at last; the phantoms of that
place have no power except within their sanctums, and they must
tempt rather than compel men to come within to their alien
mercies.

     Now the static and sterile reflection of the moonscape 
within Silverhold is broken, as a thousand Ranmas walk in a
thousand mirrors.  Slowly, too far away for Ranma to see what
happens, a tall mirror on the largest keep of Silverhold ceases
to reflect and turns black, as though it now throws back the 
image of a depth of space so old that every star has long burned 
out.

     As he climbs the hill, images begin to appear from the
blackness.  A short hallway, richly carpeted, leads to a 
vestibule where two matched spiral staircases of crystal wind 
up to the second floor.  It is filled with doors, an endless 
number of them.  All of them look the same, slightly too large 
to have been built by human hands and silver-hinged.  They have 
no knobs.

     The quicksilver circling of whatever liquid fills the moat
ceases for a moment, and a bridge rises soundlessly from the
depths.  Ranma Saotome reaches the top of the hill, and sees that
Silverhold lies open to him.  He pauses to watch his reflection 
in the moat, wondering what the liquid is.  Silverhold waits for 
him to enter.  It is patient.
     
...

     Down a red-carpeted hallway hung with a hundred mirrors, the
mind loses sight and conception of the self.  

     Curved mirrors, straight mirrors, mirrors that cast no 
reflection at all; image reflected into image, an infinitude of
space behind the glass.  Chandelier after chandelier passed by 
overhead, a dozen candles in each to light the way.  The hall 
seemed much longer than it had from the outside; the twin spiral 
stairs did not seem to grow any closer no matter how far he 
walked.  Distorted images of himself paced alongside him through 
the mirrors, shifted and changed their form as they passed from 
one silvered glass to another.

     He ran down the list mentally in his head.  Find the glass
that held the goddess's soul.  Break it.  Go home.  Get back at 
Cologne for doing this to him.  

     The walls and floors were of the same material, a white 
stone whose joins were so seamless that it seemed as though the 
entire hallway could have been carved from a single titanic 
block.  The ceiling was vaulted, and the chandeliers swung slowly 
overhead on tiny silver chains as if moved by wind, so that 
shadows leapt and danced madly about on the dark red carpet.  All 
the mirrors were in filigreed frames of gold and silver, adorned 
with precious gems that winked in the light.  

     Well, he thought as he walked with his head bent in thought,
I did get cured.  Cologne had been right about that much.  It
probably wouldn't have killed her, however, to tell him a little
more about what he was getting into.  Or maybe it would have; the
whole conversation, and Cologne's inability to speak about certain
things, had been extremely odd.

     What time was it?, he wondered.  There wasn't any way to 
tell up here on the moon.  Back on Earth, was the Tendo household
waking up and wondering where he was?  Were they looking for him?
Was Akane looking for him?
     
     All the Ranmas in the mirrors walked with their heads bowed,
lost in contemplation.  Distorted reflections, warped images.
Mirror faced mirror, and as he passed each mirror, the procession
of images stretched out to the vanishing point of the vision, a
thousand miles back behind the glass.

     He'd expected guards, traps, something like that.  Not this
seemingly endless walking.  No hallway could be this long; it
wasn't possible.  He had seen the distance from the entrance to
the place of stairways and doors, and it had been no more than
two hundred feet.  How long had he been walking?  How many 
mirrors had he passed?  He tried to remember and count.  One, 
two, three, four.  Image into image.  Five, six, seven, eight.
His eye caught on a spot on the plush carpet ahead, where a foot 
had come down particularly hard and left the impression of 
itself in the red shag.  He paused.  Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
Chandeliers moved slowly overhead as he crouched, and looked back 
and forth to see at last that he was walking in his own 
footprints.  

     "What the hell?"
     
     Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.  He raised his head, 
and saw that the hallway widened out a few steps ahead, into a 
high-ceilinged room where a single great chandelier hung from 
the pinnacle of the arching ceiling.  There were doors 
everywhere, all of them exactly the same.  Crystal stairs led to 
the second floor, where the doors disappeared from sight down a 
hallway that ran left and right from the top of the stairs.
     
     How many doors?  The eye couldn't count.  One, two, three, 
four.  He swept his gaze from one wall to the other.  Five, six,
seven eight.  What shape was the vestibule?  A square, a 
pentagon, an octagon?  Nine ten eleven twelve.  What were those
twinned spiral stairs made of?  From one angle the crystal seemed
transparent, from another translucent, from a third opaque.  The
light was all wrong here; too bright in one moment, then suddenly
too dark as his eye shifted to another spot.  The doors had no 
knobs.  Why would you build doors without knobs?  Doors without 
knobs kept things in, but he had come here from the outside, they 
couldn't keep him in.

     It began as the tiniest itch between his shoulder blades, a
feeling like a spider creeping along his flesh, or the sensation
of being stared at by a distant watcher.  Even as he turned, he
knew what he would see, and a low sound of fear escaped his 
throat.  Back behind him, a red-carpeted hallway hung with
mirrors extended endlessly, walls slowly collapsing inwards with 
the perspective of his vision until the vanishing point, miles
distant.  The chandeliers swung slowly.  Shadows danced in the
mirrors, light glittered off the gilded frames.  

     One of the doors opened behind him with a bang.  Then 
another.  Another, another, all of them opening in rapid
succession with a squeal of hinges that had not seen oil in a
thousand years and a hard impact as they bounced off the walls.
Ranma whirled around, to see door after door flying open, in a 
cacophonous hail of sound that almost knocked him to his knees.
The hinges whined and screamed like dying children, and the doors
smashed against the walls as if thrown open by some impossibly 
great force.  He clapped his hands over his ears, but the noise
only grew in volume, until it overwhelmed everything, until black
spots danced in front of his eyes like oily snow.  Just when he 
felt as though he were going to pass out, it ended.  A last 
scream, a final echoing bang, and there was silence.  

     All the doors were open.  Hundreds of them in this chamber
alone, and an unguessable number in the unseen hallways of the
second floor.  

     "Ah, damn it!" Ranma swore, kicking at the floor of the
vestibule.  Black and white octagonal tiles had been laid down on
the floor here, endlessly interlocking up to the edges of the
doorways.  "I'm never gonna find that stupid goddess's stupid
soul."

     With a slow rasp, a door on the other side of the room began
to swing closed.  The others stood open still, silent dark maws
open in silent dark laughter.  On impulse (which had caused him 
so much trouble so many times before), Ranma sped across the 
room and leapt through just as it slammed completely shut, nearly 
losing the end of his pigtail as he did.

     The first thing he noticed in the darkness was that he had
splashed ankle-deep into water.  The floor beyond the door was
several inches lower, and the water was almost uncomfortably 
cold.  "Damn," Ranma muttered, as moisture began to creep up from 
the soaked cuffs of her now-loose pants.  Gingerly, trying not to
splash herself any more than she already had, she turned around
and sought for the door handle that should have been right 
behind her.  

     There was no handle, and no door.  Absolutely blind, she
stepped forward in the darkness, and her questing hands found
nothing.  One more step, and her fingers touched a smooth, cold
surface of glass.  At that, as if it were a trigger, the light
came back in a gradual process of fading dark.  At first there
was the dimness of twilight or sunrise, and then a full if
artificial daylight.  It was hard to say, however, exactly where
the light was coming from.  Perhaps from the mirrored walls, or
from the mirror-coloured liquid she was standing in, which she 
saw now was not water at all - though it certainly felt like it.  
Where it had soaked her pants or splashed onto her shirt, she had
been coated in silver so that she reflected as a mirror.  The 
room itself appeared to be a maze, constructed entirely of 
mirrored walls that curved and stretched all around him.  Now 
that there was light, she could see that the silver coursed 
slowly, its movements visible in the occasional ripple that 
passed through it.  Strangely, there was no feeling of flowing 
around her ankles.  

     With a step back from the wall, she took her hand away from
the mirror.  The prints of her fingers remained for a second, and
then faded away like mist.  A hand wiped down her shirt came away 
with the palm covered in a half-dozen dime-sized patches of 
silver liquid.  Each one was a tiny, perfect mirror.  A flick of 
her wrist sent them spattering against the walls of the maze, 
where they seamlessly merged with the glass.

     "A maze of mirrors," she snorted, perhaps to conceal her
anxiety at the disappearance of the door.  The normal laws of
physical space - that solid objects do not abruptly disappear,
that distances remain constant - did not seem to apply here. 
"That's original."

     By tilting her head back, she was able to ascertain that the
ceiling high above her head was a flat mirror, and reflected a
perfect image of the entirety of the tangled maze, with her tiny
and indistinct shape somewhere near the centre.  Unfortunately, 
she wasn't able to see any exits.  Far in the distance of the 
reflection, though, she saw something quick and dark moving. It 
was growing closer.  Up in the ceiling, the shape darted through 
the maze as it approached.  Everything in here was a mirror.  The 
walls spanned from floor to ceiling, mirror looking into mirror, 
the endless falsity of infinity in flat glass.  Ceiling into 
floor, entire worlds that did not exist shaped out of the easy 
deception of light upon the eye.  A thousand Ranmas, a thousand 
shapes heading from a thousand directions towards her.  Illusions
of eternity, and horrendous crushing sameness, a difference only
of perspective and symmetry that fooled the eye into seeing as 
real what was not there.

     When she could see by the mirror of the ceiling that the
shape was almost upon her, she readied herself for combat.  The
water - if it was water, it had to be water, it had made her
change - had grown colder, numbingly so.  If only the ceiling
were not so high; she might then have had some idea of what she
was going to face.  She saw the reflection of the foe in an 
angled mirror of the maze before she saw the foe itself, but
before it entirely registered the reality was before her.

     It was Tatewaki Kuno.  She nearly laughed out loud with
relief, before she realized that there was no way he could be
gotten here, and then she saw that he walked atop the silver
water and left no mark of his passage.

     "Pig-tailed girl," Kuno breathed.  No; not Kuno, not Kuno.
The thing striding on the water down the corridor towards her
wore Kuno's skin and his clothing, but it was not him.  "Come to
me, my love.  I long to drown myself in the perfume of your hair,
to inhale the fragrance of your bosom."  She felt as if her feet 
had been nailed to the floor.  Kuno was a half-dozen steps away, 
his arms wide to embrace her, and she knew, knew absolutely that
if he did, that was the end.

     "I number your eyes among the stars.  Your face haunts my
nights and fills my days."

     It sounded like Kuno, looked liked him, moved like him.  But
it wasn't; it wasn't, and it was cloaking itself in his flesh but
_it wasn't him_.  
     
     "My love, oh my love, conjoin with me, spend eternity at my
side, and we shall watch the stars wheel overhead until the
Dancing Maiden and the Wounded Bear intertwine."

     Just as he was about to come close enough to reach out and
grasp Ranma, she managed to find the memory of how to move.  
Without another moment of hesitation - for that would have meant
the end of everything - she turned and ran.  Mirror-water 
splashed as her feet came down, sinking into mirror-glass,
staining her clothing.  No time to look up to see where she was
going, because although she never looked back she knew that the
thing with Kuno's face followed - she could see it in the 
mirrors, always a few steps behind.  She turned a corner, and 
another.  All around her, her reflections ran alongside, or in 
front, or below, or towards.  The air seemed thick and hard to
breathe.  Silver water coated her to the waist.  It seemed to
grow heavier by the second, slowing her down, stiffening.
     
     She was running down a long, straight section of corridor
when she heard the laughter.  High and shrill, it echoed through
the maze and the mirrors vibrated to the pitch of it.  Kodachi
Kuno, slender and tall, stepped from around the corner with her
dark eyes flashing.  "Ranma, my darling," she purred.  Her feet 
slid along the silver water as though along ice, and she seemed 
almost to dance as she came.

     "My love."
     
     "Ranma, my body cries for you with all its being.  I am
unspoiled for you, I am all that you desire."

     "Your beauty outshines the sun, your voice makes the
heavens weep."

     They were coming down either end of the corridor, and Ranma
had never been more afraid in all his life.  Something was
terribly, terribly wrong.  His eye caught his reflection in the
mirrors, and the stunning horror of the realization that caused
dried all the saliva in his throat in an instant.  He was neither 
male nor female; the full, rounded breasts that strained beneath
his shirt were contrasted by the sudden existence between his 
legs of something that most certainly affirmed his masculinity.

     "My--"
     
     "--love"
     
     Tatewaki and Kodachi were nearly upon him now, eyes filled
with lust.  But it wasn't Tatewaki and Kodachi; it was something
else, he realized, something that had reached down into his mind
and pulled out their images and thrown them on like masquers at a
ball throw on their costumes.  Terrified as he was, he realized
that whatever lay beneath would be infinitely worse.  If they
touched him it was over, it was the end of everything, it was the
night coming down.  With a scream he - or she, he did not know 
anymore - whirled and punched a mirrored wall as hard as he 
could, but the glass did not shatter.  His arm sank in, his 
momentum threw him forward, and he fell, stumbling, as if through 
a curtain of water.  The surface of the mirror rippled as he 
passed through, and fled down another corridor of mirrors that 
led into another, and another, and another, all stretching out 
ahead, endlessly, until they fell beyond the range of sight.  
There was no end to this place, no end to the running, no end to 
the nightmare.

     How long he ran he did not know, through one mirror after
another, until he fled through corridors that must have been 
reflections of reflections of reflections.  The pursuit behind
him was inexorable, a vaguely human shape glimpsed out of the
corner of his eye, or on the edge of a reflection for a moment.
At last, though, he stumbled and fell from exhaustion, and landed
with a great splash in the ankle-deep mirror-water.  It tasted
slick and oily as he inadvertently swallowed some, and made him
want to retch.  He was coated in it, now, almost completely 
covered, and it did not run off as ordinary water did.  A film of
it clung to his skin and clothing, and he had become a living
mirror.  For a few seconds, he lay on his stomach, almost 
sobbing, and then he rolled over so that he might push himself to
his feet.

     Something stood but a few steps away, a shape out of a
nightmare.  It looked as though Tatewaki and Kodachi had been
rendered down, melted like wax yet somehow retaining their
features, and then poured into a single mould of rough protean
humanity.  The thing was perhaps nine feet tall, blubbery as a
newborn infant, and two faces fought for dominance upon the lumpy
visage.  It was nude, prodigiously proportioned even for its
immense size in the attributes of both woman and man.  The 
fleshy mouth was open in a yawning smile, and a half-dozen 
tongues like great bloated worms stretched forth from the gaping
maw.

     "My love," it slurred, as pus-coloured drool squirted out 
from between the rotting stumps of its broken teeth.  "My love,
my love."

     Ranma scrambled backwards on his hands, shrieking, all hope 
and rationality gone out like snuffed candles at the sight.  All 
the images in the mirror were him, neither male nor female, all 
the illusions were real, time and space stretched infinitely on 
in the lies of the mirrors but the mirrors were not lies.

     One, two, three.  Three times he used his hands to push
himself back, as the thing gibbered and strode colossally forward
with its arm open wide to grasp him.  The fourth time, he touched
empty air, and fell backwards as though into a gaping abscess
beneath the mirror-water.  It closed over his head, flowed into
his lungs, choked off all air and all light.

...

     Consider a mirror.  The purpose of it is the deception of
the eye, the creation of entire worlds in flat silvered glass.     
But even the most perfect mirror does not reflect true; left is
right, right is left.  A convex mirror broadens the perspective
of the world, a concave one narrows it.  Stand between two 
mirrors, and you stand between the illusion of infinity.  Some 
have believed that a mirror can steal the soul.  Whether they can 
or not, there is a power in reflected images that we cannot deny.  
Narcissus saw his face in the mirror of the waters and was 
captured by it; Amaterasu was drawn out of the safety of her cave 
by her own reflection.  Even the gods are not immune to the power 
of vanity.  Imagine then that there may be mirrors more complex, 
more distorting, than any that men have yet discovered.  Most
terrifying of all might be the thought that we ourselves might be
mirrors; that all actions that we think are the functioning of 
our own free will are merely reflections of the movements of
forces we can never hope to glimpse.

     No one in the Dreamlands, of Earth or otherwise, can say
from whence the Mirror-Lord came.  Some say he sailed out of the
west in the days when the Dreamlands were young (however 
infinitely far gone those days might be), and that he came from
splendid Cathuria.  The priests in Celephais speak in hushed
whispers of how Silverhold appeared in a single night on the 
light side of the moon, and of how it sometimes vanishes 
completely from view.  

     The young gods, who have their power only because men choose
to worship them, live in fear of him.  Their numbers dwindle, as
he makes his bargains with them, and as new temples appear in the
city of the dead gods, desolate as if they have stood for ten
thousand years.  The old gods, who lie sleeping or bound and wait
as the slow millennial turning of the stars rouse them from their
slumber to horrific wakefulness, leave him alone.  Perhaps he is 
one of them.  No one can say for certain.

     Silverhold travels from one plane of existence to another,
flitting through the worlds as the image of man flits through
mirrors as he passes them.  The unwise among the sages say that
he is confined to the lands of dreams and nightmares.  There are
others who know better, and who understand the mechanism behind
entire towns found abandoned, or the ships found adrift at sea
undamaged but empty of all their crew.  To every world he comes 
to, he brings his bargains.  Few can resist them, man or god.  
It is the one who comes to him that must be most careful, 
however.

     One of the oldest and mightiest laws of what we choose to
call reality is that to be a part of something once is to always 
in some degree be a part of it.  We are never entirely separate
from anything we have known.  Thus, on the cusp between the light
and dark side of the moons, as he led the Cats of Ulthar and the
cats of other worlds on a grand and noble quest, Ranma the Cat
suddenly threw back his head and let out a cry of utmost despair 
to the apathetic movements of the stars above.

...

     There are a lot of worse ways to wake up then in bed next to
a beautiful woman.  This was one of them.  The first sensation
was one of cold, a biting chill that gnawed him to the core of
his bones.  The second was of wind, blowing over and across him,
turning the air into freezing blades.  Naked, he lay on his back
on what felt like a plane of smooth ice.  Shivering almost
convulsively, he stood up and wrapped his arms around himself, 
crossing his legs to try and find some shelter from the air.  
There was none.

     He was on a floe of clear, hard ice that floated on a sea of
silver water which stretched out as far as the eye could see.  
The sky was a clear and cloudless expanse of pale blue.  There 
was no sun; the light seemed to bleed in an unnatural albedo from 
the flat sheen of the ice and the restless surgings of the 
mirror-sea.

     Yeah, he was definitely gonna get Cologne for this.  This
place was colder than Hokkaido, and he'd had clothes then.  The
only advantage of his relocation was that he appeared to be very
far away from the malformed monstrosity, that impossible 
challenge to sanity that had pursued him through the maze of
mirrors.  He found it hard to recapture the image of it in his
mind, or even to remember much of his terrified flight from it.
That was fine; he didn't want to remember it if he didn't have
to.  He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, and jogged on the
spot to try and get his chilled blood flowing.  White puffs of
breath came from his mouth and broke apart.  The ice floe tilted
slightly under the impact of his feet.

     From nearby, he heard a high voice.  "Are you trying to wake
them up?"  Ranma started, and turned towards the speaker.  A 
small child of indeterminate gender sat with its bare legs 
dangling over the edge of the floe, almost dipping toes into the
mirror-sea, and looked back over one small shoulder to address
him.  It was as naked as he was.  "They're not going to wake up, 
you realize.  Not for all the stomping in the world."

     Ranma blinked.  "Who?"
     
     "Look down."
     
     There were bodies in the ice.  Thousands of them, dark
shapes stretching down within the frosty embrace of the floe
until they disappeared from sight.  They wore the garb of many
nations; some of them seemed to have wings, or more arms than
two, or the heads of beasts.  Horrifying as the sight was, it was
worse, far worse, than he'd thought it was at first impression.
Because in the open brown eyes of the body closest to the 
surface, a bearded man wearing the skin of a lion, Ranma saw the 
light of life and intelligence.  He heard a splash, but that 
couldn't pull his eyes away from the bodies frozen in the ice.
The man's mouth was open in a scream, as if he'd been captured in
the midst of seeing something too terrifying to comprehend.

     There was another splash.  This time, he turned, to see a
silver figure rising from the mirror-sea.  It looked like a
beautiful, androgynous child; where the identifying genitalia 
should have been, there was a blank expanse of flesh.  The skin 
was blindingly bright, so bright it was not possible to look 
directly at it.  The figure rose entirely from the water,
appeared for a moment to stand upon their shining surface, and 
then emerged fully to hover several feet above the waters.

     "Lemme guess," Ranma said through chattering teeth, trying
not to think of the bodies in the ice.  "You're the Mirror-Lord."

     It didn't answer.  Even the eyes were silver; it looked like 
a Grecian statue, perfectly proportioned, but blank of all 
pigmentation.  The expression on its face was vaguely 
condescending, as if it were confronting a very minor annoyance.

     "So," he continued.  "I guess you're not just gonna give me
what I want, so I can get out of here, right?"

     The Mirror-Lord said nothing.  Its expression didn't even
condescend to change.

     "Do you think I could have my clothes back?"
     
     There still wasn't any response.  Ranma was starting to get
annoyed.  And more than a little nervous.

     "Look, you dumb silver freak, you deaf or what?"
     
     This was starting to get rather spooky.  It didn't even
respond to insults.  Ranma wished he had something to throw at
it.  He could almost see it happening; a rock, a baseball,
anything, bouncing off that perfect, expressionless face.

     "Why don't you come closer?" he snarled.  His body was
becoming number by the minute; he tried stomping his feet again
to warm up, but that forced him to glimpse again towards the
bodies in the ice.  "You scared, or something?  Pretty cowardly
for some kinda mystical-weirdo-god-thingy, ain't ya?"

     He had never seen anything look quite so bored as the
Mirror-Lord did in that moment.  

     "Okay."  Ranma was starting to grow a bit desperate; the
thing simply wasn't responding, and he had no idea how to 
complete his bargain with the goddess while trapped on an ice
floe in the middle of God-knows-where with no clothes.  "This is
a dream, right?  Well, I want to wake up."

     Slowly, like the ripple of wind across water, a flicker of a
smile appeared on the flawless silver face.  

     "Okay," it said.  The voice of it was like the shattering of
glass, like some vast and delicate construction falling to a 
stone floor.  The mirror-sea seethed, and from its silvery depths 
immense slabs of transparent ice began to appear, thrusting up 
like reaching talons amidst clouds of icy vapour.  "Wake up and 
see."

     Ranma's arms snapped out to the sides as an invisible force
drove his body rigid as steel.  Suddenly, he didn't feel cold at
all anymore; he didn't feel anything.  Slowly, one slab of ice 
turned translucent.  Then opaque, until it was the same 
blindingly bright silver as the skin of the Mirror-Lord.  It 
began to darken, as though the light were going out of it.  
Finally, it became a mirror, a mirror as tall as a building.

     The Mirror-Lord said, "Look."
     
     Ranma looked, and saw, and then he began to scream.
     
FIN THREE