The Reflection
Copyright© 2026 by FinchAgent
Chapter 2
Lily opened her eyes. She was standing in her bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror. The runes in the golden frame no longer glowed, and the mirror’s surface had ceased to swirl and pulse. It was just an ordinary mirror in an ordinary bathroom, showing two ordinary women. Really, the only odd thing about the scene was that one of the women was entirely naked.
Lily’s reflection blinked as she did. It moved its head as she did. It moved its arms as she did. It smiled in relief as she did.
Behind her, Maya’s reflection broke into a smile. “You’re ... in sync again.”
Lily nodded with her reflection, though something still troubled her. “Let’s see if this is really back to normal,” she saw herself say.
Lily knelt to retrieve a discarded pair of pink panties from the bathroom floor. She watched herself tentatively step into them and slowly pull them up her legs, snapping them into place at the top. A wave of relief passed over her as she realized that she could once more see and feel her clothes at the same time. What a strange thing that was to be grateful for.
“How do you feel, Lily?” Maya asked.
“Sane,” came the reply. “Like I can finally put this nightmare behind me.”
“There’s still Monday’s meeting to get through.”
“Don’t remind me! We’ll figure something out, I guess. But first, I’m going to go find something more to wear.”
Lily winked at her reflection, and she and Maya left the bathroom. Then everything went black, and a cruel wind whistled across the desolation, prickling Lily’s bare back with goosebumps. She shivered, a movement that was her own—her first since the fall.
She had felt that something was off, but struggled to articulate it. Now the whole terrible realization crashed down on her. Her bathroom was the wrong way round—left was right and right was left. She had seen her reflection, moved, spoken, and dressed with her, but the movements and words were not hers. She had merely been copying, involuntarily. Reflecting.
The wind picked up again, assaulting her now from the front, the thin fabric of her panties providing scant protection against the cold. Then the darkness began to lift, and the wind was replaced with the sound of murmuring voices, snickering and giggling among themselves. The air smelled suddenly of chalk, and Lily found herself standing before a blackboard.
“Come on now, Miss Harper, you should know this,” said a deep, rich voice that Lily instantly recognized as her mathematics teacher for her final year of high school, Mr. Barnum. “If you’re going to distract the class like this, I expect you to have full knowledge of the material.”
A peal of laughter echoed through the classroom behind her, accompanied by a couple of wolf whistles. “I can’t wait for you to turn around again!” shouted the class clown, a boy named William.
Lily’s breath caught in her throat. She was standing in front of her old math class, chalk in hand, dressed only in a pair of thin pink panties. Even if she had known what the teacher had asked her to write, she could hardly have concentrated on it.
“I-I-I...” she began, the words drying in her throat.
“If you don’t know the answer, return to your seat,” said Mr. Barnum—young, handsome, Mr. Barnum—his voice edged with discomfort. Out of the corner of her eye, Lily could see he was resolutely focused on the class in front of him.
A chorus of male cheers erupted behind her. Lily stared harder at the unfinished equation on the chalkboard. Her knees were beginning to shake, and she could feel a bead of sweat dripping down her back.
Then the classroom vanished, and she found herself back in the bathroom. Her reflection smiled, a vicious, menacing grin, and hooked her thumbs into her panties, then slid them all the way down. She twirled them around her finger a few times before tossing them in the laundry hamper in the corner. With another wink, the reflection departed.
Lily heard the cheers before she saw the chalkboard. The equation remained unfinished, and she felt a new draft around her nether region.
“Woohoo! Yeah! Take it off!” shouted her classmates.
Mr. Barnum had risen from his desk and stomped towards Lily, but stopped short of getting too close or touching her. His face was red, almost as red as Lily’s own. “Miss Harper!” he exclaimed. “Really, this is not appropriate class behavior!”
“Yeah, it is!”
“Shake that ass, girl!”
“Silence!” Mr. Barnum shouted at the unruly class. Then, turning back to Lily, while pointedly avoiding looking directly at her, he said, “Miss Harper, to the principal’s office, at once!”
Lily looked around desperately. Her panties were nowhere to be seen, and neither were any other loose items of clothing. The whole classroom’s eyes were on her—rage and disappointment from Mr. Barnum, lust from the boys, mocking amusement from the girls.
“L-like this?” she stammered, moving to cover herself.
“Yes, exactly like that,” Mr. Barnum said. “If you feel that this is suitable attire for my class, I am sure you will have no problem wearing it to the principal’s office. Though I warn you, she may have a difference of opinion.”
The class broke out into uproarious laughter. Lily could only bite her lip and make futile gestures to cover what they’d already seen. Eyes focused on the floor, she started toward the classroom door.
The door opened not into the school hallway, but her apartment’s bathroom. She looked out at her reflection, dressed in a hoodie and jeans, and felt the relief of fabric against her skin. At the same time, the sides of her mouth moved up against her will, forming a cruel smile.
“Are you enjoying yourself in there?” she asked herself, mouth moving without the command of her brain. “Wait, don’t tell me ... I don’t care!”
Lily threw her head back and laughed. “You’ll be glad to know that I’m enjoying myself out here. Very much indeed.” She slipped her arms inside her hoodie and foisted it over her head and onto the bathroom floor. “Twenty-two years, Lily, twenty-two long years of feeling ... well, feeling exactly how you’re feeling now. A life spent dividing time between disconnected dreams and a body puppeteered by someone else. A long waking nightmare.”
She shimmied out of her jeans and stood before the mirror in nothing but a white tank top with a hem that rested slightly below her navel. “I couldn’t help but notice your ... discomfort ... earlier. I think you need to learn to appreciate your body a bit more,” she said, sensually sliding her hands down her hips. “I certainly am.”
With another wicked grin, Lily’s reflection left the bathroom, plunging her world back into cold darkness. The wind whipped at her exposed bottom, making her shiver, but she was grateful that it was her own shiver, her own movement.
“Lily ... uh ... where are your pants?” asked a woman’s voice.
Lily found herself standing in someone’s backyard, grass tickling her bare feet, moon and stars shining in the dark sky overhead. Plumes of smoke rose from the barbecue to her right, and her nostrils filled with the smell of cooking meat. But of more immediate concern was that everyone in the yard was staring at her—some in disgust, some trying to stifle laughter.
“She slipped into something more comfortable!”
“Look, she doesn’t have a bra on either!”
“Always thought you’d be a landing strip type of girl.”
Blushing furiously, Lily slammed a hand over her crotch.
“Lily, what the hell?!” came a voice from the house.
A man rushed out—it was Brad, Lily’s ex. They had still been dating at the time of the barbecue.
“Man’s coming to claim his property!”
“Don’t worry, dude, we’re just looking!”
Brad was fiddling with the tie at the back of his barbecue apron as he rushed to Lily’s side. “What’s gotten into you?” he whispered harshly, handing her the apron to cover herself with.
“I-I-I-” Lily stammered. As soon as she grasped the apron, the scene dissolved.
Things continued on in this fashion. Lily found herself reliving memories both familiar and half-forgotten, with the new twist that she was experiencing them wearing only a short white tank top that barely contained her breasts and exposed everything below her navel. She re-experienced nights out, lectures, family meals, even sports days, in this way.
“Damn girl, you know how to party!”
“Lily, uh, I think you forgot something this morning?”
“Lily! What has gotten into you?”
“I don’t think that’s how shirts and skins is supposed to work...”
Just when the experience was starting to get a little less mortifying, her reflection reappeared and removed the tank top as well, leaving Lily completely naked, just as she had done for the first dream.
“Woo! Shake it!”
“Is this, like, a performance art thing?”
“Where are your clothes?!”
“It worked for the ancient Greeks, maybe she thinks it’ll help her.”
For that’s what these were—dreams. Her reflection had said as much. This was life inside the mirror. No wonder her reflection had so badly wanted to escape.
But, being that these were dreams, and were already playing out so differently from the real events ... well, maybe that gave her some freedom. None of this was real, despite the sensations.
“Lily ... uh ... where are your clothes?” asked a woman’s voice.
It was the third run of the barbecue. Steeling herself against the crowd’s focus, Lily ignored the woman, the voices of the other guests, and made an immediate sprint for the house.
“Look at her go!”
She almost knocked Brad over in her hurry. “L-Lily, why are you naked?”
“It—they—oh Brad!” Not being able to think of a good explanation, she settled for hugging him and crying into his chest.
“Shh, it’s okay,” he said, rubbing her back. “You’ll be okay. Here, take my apron.”
“Th-thank you,” she said, looking up through tears. Brad could be sweet sometimes.
He untied the apron strings and pulled it off, handing it to Lily. “I’m ... still a bit confused about what happened,” he said.
“Me too,” Lily said, slipping the apron over her neck. She reached behind her back to tie it in place, realizing that the garment did little to hide her butt. Still, it was a start. With this, she could further into the house and—
But just as she secured the knot, the dream faded out.
Warm water splashed her face. She was naked again and covered in soap suds. This was the one where she was taking a shower in her college dormitory when the fire alarm went off. In real life, she’d managed to get a towel before having to evacuate—which had been bad enough—but this dream usually played out with her being dragged out into the quad by an overzealous RA, soap bubbles still clinging to her skin.
Not wanting to go through that again, Lily rushed out of the shower and grabbed a towel before the RA could enter the bathroom.
But as soon as she felt the fabric wrap around her body, the dream changed.
She now found herself at last year’s Sphinx Christmas party, surrounded by drunk colleagues. Of course, she was naked. And it was increasingly apparent that if she wanted to have enough time in a single dream to do anything of consequence, she would need to stay that way. She cursed her reflection.
“Lookin’ good, Lil,” said a very drunk Tom.
“Whoa, how drunk are you?” asked Priya, who herself could barely stand.
“I wish I was,” Lily muttered, pushing past her.
In the real version of this memory, Lily had left the party early with a splitting headache. In this version, she picked her way past her drunk colleagues, doing her best to ignore the wolf whistles and shocked gasps, and headed for the ladies’ room. She looked at an overloaded coat longingly as she passed it, but resisted the urge to take anything from it. She needed to find somewhere to be alone, somewhere to think, and that wouldn’t happen so long as she was cycling through all these dreams with people gawking at her.
At last, she pushed through the ladies’ room door and entered. But instead of a public bathroom, she found herself standing in the middle of her own bathroom, in her own flat, staring at her own mirror with its ornate golden frame.
A thought occurred to her. Having left the Christmas party early, she had not actually been inside the ladies’ room at the party venue, and thus had no memory of it. Clearly, that affected this strange dream world.
The mirror was a blank, unreflecting surface. Lily never saw her reflection in the dream-memories, so that was not unusual. In fact, it was a relief, for it meant that she could control her own body. And now that she was alone, she would be able to think.
But wait, the mirror was not entirely blank. Though it did not show her reflection, it did seem to show something else. Faint red letters, written backwards. What did they say? Lily slowly read from the right side.
LILY
Her name! It was a message for her!
LILY IT’S MAYA
From Maya!
LILY IT’S MAYA I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE
Lily’s heart skipped a beat, but she forced herself to focus on backwards reading. Maya was trying to help her! She hadn’t been fooled by Lily’s reflection after all.
SHE’S ASLEEP
Lily bit her lip. Would Maya be able to help her, or would she just be the mirror’s next victim? Did it work like that?
BEEN RESEARCHING YOU NEED TO FIND GUNTHER
Researching? Gunther? What was she on about?
HE MADE THE MIRROR HE IS THE SOURCE
How had Maya found this out?
ENTER THE MIRROR FIND HIM
The message ended there. But what was Maya talking about? How was she supposed to “find Gunther”? And “enter the mirror”? What did that mean? There was no swirling vortex before her, she couldn’t just ... couldn’t just...
Lily sat down on the toilet lid, the ceramic cold against her skin, and stroked her chin in thought. She had spent so much time shifting between false memories, experiencing new forms of mortification, she’d barely thought about anything else. Everything in her dreams looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted real. But as she had discovered by entering this bathroom, the dreams were nothing like the real world at all. The space each one occupied depended on her memories, so her apartment bathroom connected directly to the venue Sphinx had rented for last year’s Christmas party. Perhaps that was not the only unexpected link.
Lily stood up and walked towards her sink, stretching a hand out before her. She reached for the mirror, expecting to feel smooth, cool glass, but her hand passed straight through it, as though it were empty air.
She stared in shock at the base of her wrist, which appeared to be embedded in the glass. But she still felt her hand, could still wriggle her fingers. This must be what Maya had meant. The mirror was a doorway; a doorway she needed to go through.
“If you say so, Maya,” Lily said to herself, pulling her hand back. She climbed up onto the sink, crouching awkwardly with her feet balanced precariously on its smooth porcelain sides, and moved both hands towards the mirror. They went through.
“Here goes nothing.” Lily shimmied forward, closed her eyes, and poked her head through. But the forward lean required to do this was too much for her precarious stance on the sink, and she squealed as she lost her balance and tumbled forward into the unknown.
Lily’s fall was soft, her front cushioned by a thick carpet. She looked up to see an old-fashioned, wood-paneled room filled with leather armchairs. There was a roaring fireplace at one end and a set of drawn red velvet curtains at the other. But much more noticeably, a man stood at one side of the room, staring at her like she was a ghost. “By Jove!” he exclaimed.
The man was dressed in an old-fashioned suit and had dark, curly hair and elaborately shaped facial hair of the sort Lily had only ever seen in history textbooks.
“Where am I?” Lily asked. She could feel the fire’s warmth against her bare buttocks. In her current cobra-like position, looking up at the strange man, her breasts hung free, and she moved an arm to obscure them from his eyes.
“I call it the Waiting Room,” said a sharp, female voice from somewhere behind Lily’s head.
Lily craned her neck to see a woman struggling to rise from one of the leather armchairs. She was dressed in a highly elaborate outfit reminiscent of French royalty, with a tight corset and a domed skirt clearly undergirded by strong whalebone. Her face was caked in white paint, broken up by two spots of red rouge on her cheeks, and she wore a white wig that almost reached the ceiling, adorned with feathers and pearls.
She eyed Lily’s bare skin disdainfully from beneath her heavy, dark lashes. When she spoke, it was with a slight French accent. “Have you no shame, woman? Where are your clothes?”
Lily’s blush deepened. To say she felt underdressed in the presence of these two characters would be the understatement of the century. “I ... don’t have any,” she said meekly.
The man, blushing behind his ridiculous facial hair, began to pull off his jacket. “I’m sorry, madam. I see now that you are quite embarrassed by your state. Please do not take my staring as a sign of lecherousness. It is not every day a woman materializes in the middle of one’s drawing room. Although one does meet all sorts of strange people in this infernal place. Initially, I presumed that it was perhaps your custom to go about sans clothing. I try to keep an open mind about these things, you see.”
Lily let out a small squeak.
“I surmise from your body language and the violet flush upon your skin that this is not your customary mode of attire. Am I correct? Or do I presume too much and insult your beauty by averting my eyes?”
“No insult!” Lily snapped. “I don’t normally walk around naked. Or at least, I never used to. Not before ... all this.”
“Then please, take this at once,” the man said, holding his jacket out to her.
Lily’s whole body tensed up. It took every ounce of will she had not to grab the man’s jacket and wrap it around herself. “Thank you, but I ... have to stay like this. When I cover myself up ... the dream resets.”
The woman clucked her tongue disapprovingly, but the man seemed to experience a flash of realization. “I take it, then, that nudity is your divergence? Your reflection appeared naked in the mirror, while you were clothed?”
“Yes!” Lily shouted, bouncing with excitement. “How did you know?”
Looking away from Lily, the man began to stroke his mustache thoughtfully. “That is how it began for us. A point of divergence between reality and the reflection.” He sighed deeply, tugging harder at his mustache. “I can still recall the first instance I spied these ridiculous whiskers. I have always been fastidiously clean-shaven, you see, not swayed by the modern fashion for affixing a wild animal to one’s jaw.”
“So you weren’t naked? I mean, in your reflection?”
“Quite the opposite—the natural beauty of my face was obscured by this infernal beard. It was quite bad enough seeing it in the mirror every day—little did I know I’d soon enough have to feel it tickle my chin as well.” He stroked the hair contemptuously. “I suppose I mustn’t pull it too hard, or I will find myself transported elsewhere, away from your delightful company.”
“So ... if your beard is damaged ... you go to another dream?”
The man nodded sadly. “I can’t tell you how many times I tried to shave it off when I first got here. But one grows tired of constantly losing one’s bearings. Eventually, even the sight of my chin was no longer worth the uncertainty of which unpleasant memory I would subsequently find myself reliving, made all the worse by my ridiculous appearance.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Ridiculous appearance? Try being naked in all your memories!”
“My deepest sympathies,” the man said, looking down at his shoes. “I suppose there are worse things than fashionable whiskers.”
“Well, they’re not fashionable anymore.”
“Don’t make it worse.”
Lily’s forearms had begun to ache from holding herself up, and the fire was starting to wear out its welcome on the sensitive skin of her behind. “I’m going to get up now,” she said. “Please avert your eyes, Mister...”
“Lockwood. Algernon Lockwood, at your service, milady. And the lady who resembles a wedding cake is Mademoiselle Anne.”
The woman gasped at the insult.
“I’m Lily,” Lily said as she stood up, covering herself as best she could with her arms, and ignoring the dirty looks Anne gave her. She desperately wanted to tear one of the large velvet curtains from the wall and wrap it around herself, but the risk of entering another dream was too great. Instead, she sat down in one of the leather armchairs with her knees pulled up to her chin, her ankles crossed, and her arms hugging her thighs. That would have to do for modesty.
“Come now, mademoiselle,” Lockwood said, studiously avoiding the sight of Lily’s bare ankles. “The girl is as much a victim as we are. She has no more chosen her state of undress than you have chosen your makeup or I these infernal whiskers.”
“I suppose,” said Anne, after a long silence. Her posture relaxed to the degree permitted by her outfit, which wasn’t very much.
Lily smiled slightly, casting a sympathetic look at Anne. “So all that makeup was your, um, divergence?”
“That and everything else,” Anne said, gesturing around herself. “I was born into a humble peasant home and a plain face, but I played at courtly beauty. I dreamed of being noticed, plucked out of my humble life and taken as the bride of a noble gentleman at Versailles.”
“She’s been here since before the revolution, you see,” Lockwood added.
“Cease at once with those horrible stories, Monsieur Lockwood,” Anne snapped. “I do not insult your nation. But where was I ... ah, yes, well, I played at makeup. My family all laughed at me, but I was convinced that careful application of the art would give me the beauty I required to elevate my station. The paints and ointments used at Versailles were difficult to come by, as were the wonderful fabrics used to make their clothes, so I had to get inventive. But the results were never satisfying to me ... at least, not until I found the Mirror.”
Lily groaned. “Let me guess—it had a gold frame with weird symbols carved in it.”
Anne nodded gravely. “It is the same mirror that Monsieur Lockwood came upon later, the same that gave him his whiskers and ... took away your clothes. I loved that reflection at first, how it showed me what I could be if only I had the resources. I gazed into it for hours at a time. I wanted nothing more than to resemble that reflection, to become the lady in the mirror. How foolish!”
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Lockwood. “That is how the mirror captured us all. It imposes a form that distresses us, that brings us shame. And when it is no longer content to taunt us with our reflections, it forces us to become our reflections.”
Lily nodded sadly, thinking of the scene in her bathroom, just after she’d fallen through the portal.
“I thought I wanted nothing more than this,” said Anne, gesturing to herself. “But now I am bound in iron, my every breath constricted and movement constrained. This paint burns my skin, and this wig is so heavy that there are times when I feel that the weight of it will surely break my neck. I have come to despise this prison of artificial beauty.” She looked sharply at Lily. “Perhaps, in some way, I envy your freedom. Any attempt to remove my makeup, to loosen this corset, or be rid of this wig ... any such attempt transports me at once to a new dream.”
As sick as Lily was of the constant exposure, she found herself unsure whether she’d be willing to trade places with Anne. “How long have you been here?” she asked both of them.
Lockwood was silent for a moment before answering. “How long have you?”
“It’s been ... um ... huh.” Lily cast her mind’s eye across memories of repeated dreams, but found that she was unsure of the order they had happened in, and of how long each one had taken. She didn’t feel hungry or tired, but perhaps one didn’t in this strange place.
“Time is meaningless here,” Lockwood said. “The passage of the sun, the cycle of the seasons, the movement of the stars ... all are contingent on the memories they appear in, if they appear at all. And I can find no pattern in that order. But for whatever it is worth, I arrived in this strange place in the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-Four.”
“And I in Seventeen Hundred and Eighty Seven,” added Anne.
Lily nodded. It seemed cruel to tell them what year it was for her. “Are there ... others?”
Lockwood nodded. “I have encountered at least three victims besides those currently in this room. More rarely, one or both of them take the place of my real acquaintances.”
“How did you know they were victims?” Lily asked.
Lockwood stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “Most people you encounter in dream-memories are little more than spectres, automatons with a few canned lines and a handful of predictable actions. A real person is instantly recognizable. And, of course, each one has something ... distinct ... about his appearance.”
“I noticed because of their bizarre outfits,” said Anne, fanning herself. “Not to mention their questionable standards of hygiene.”
“The mirror has taken half a dozen victims in total, I would venture,” Lockwood said, having silently counted them out on his fingers. “Most of them poor lost souls just like us. But there is one who does not fit that description.”
“You speak of Gunther,” Anne said, her painted face distorting with revulsion.
“Gunther?” Lily asked. That was the name in Maya’s message.
“A medieval mystic from some or other Prussian kingdom,” Lockwood said. “He is the alchemist who built the infernal mirror, and he’s damned proud of it too. The last time I saw Gunther, I almost strangled him, but the wily bastard managed to cut off my mustache before I could finish the job.”
“My friend Maya, she’s been researching the mirror. She sent me a note by writing on the surface. She told me to enter the mirror from one of my dreams, and that’s how I ended up here. She also said that I needed to find someone called Gunther.”
“We too entered the mirror,” Lockwood said. “It was accidental, actually. She pushed me!”
“You deserved it!” Anne snapped. “I may hate this wig, but you did not need to compare it to a giant’s mop!”
“What is this place?” Lily asked.
“Mme. Anne calls it the Waiting Room,” Lockwood replied. “It resembles, in every physical detail, the drawing room in my cousin’s London apartments, the place where I first came into contact with the accursed mirror.”
Gears had begun to turn in Lily’s mind. She looked around the room, scanning the leather armchairs, the walls, the carpet, the fireplace, looking for a familiar golden frame. But no such thing was visible from her vantage point.
“What are you looking for?” Anne asked.
“The mirror,” Lily replied. “Where is it?”
Anne and Lockwood exchanged concerned glances.
“Oh, nowhere, it’s not here,” Lockwood said, his tone an octave higher than usual. His posture had completely stiffened, and his head made an almost imperceptible twitch in the direction of the heavy red curtain that all but covered the wall behind him. “No mirrors here, why would we want one?”
“We are safe here,” said Anne. “There are no mirrors, and as long as we do nothing to alter our divergences, we can stay here peacefully.”
“It’s a bit boring, but you get used to it,” said Lockwood. “I’m sure you’re only too happy to sit in that big comfortable armchair after traipsing all over your own mindscape in the buff, aren’t you, Lily?”
“Kind of, but I don’t want to stay here forever!”
“Why ever not? It is warm and safe,” said Anne. “I’ll smack Lockwood for you if I catch him staring.”
“I would never!”
“Oh, then what are you doing now, you old pervert?”
Taking the opportunity while her hosts were distracted, Lily steeled herself and leaped from the armchair. As soon as her feet hit the carpet, she dashed toward the red velvet curtain. Lockwood’s eyes went wide with shock. He reached out to stop her, but hesitated mid-motion, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of laying hands on a naked woman who was still very much a stranger.