Mirror Mirror Mist-face

Mirror, mirror, mist-face,

Dancing where the dusk is laced.

Threads of silver, tongues of sleep,

Singing secrets shadows keep.

Breathe in deep, then close your eyes,

Whisper twice and tell no lies.

If you hum and dream just right,

They’ll come to stitch your soul at night.

At dusk, the song of the Myrcari drifted through the village like smoke, stitched into children’s play, fragile as moth wings against the dying light.

Mirror, mirror, mist-face… they sang, laughter lilting where shadows lengthened, never knowing what door their voices touched.

It is said the Myrcari breathe within dreams, spinning the veil with silver sorrow and threads of mist. Their faces are a blur of glass and fog; their tongues whisper without mouths. They come for the fevered. They come for the wicked. And when the sun sinks drowned in night’s black throat, they rise to answer.

They hunt the mind’s dark corners, slipping between thoughts like blades through cloth. They circle in silence, patient as the slow drip of fear, until the dreamer grows weary and the walls of self begin to crack. Their hunger is for what hides beneath the skin, the secret, the grief, the guilt no one dares speak. They take it, unravel it, consume it, leaving behind only hollow eyes.

I knew this.

I knew because I watched my mother’s lips form the words in her last breath. Her hand stretched into the dark as though someone unseen gripped it. The air thickened until even my own lungs felt heavy. Mist gathered low, silver threads twitching faintly inside it, and though nothing stood plain before me, I felt them. A pull, subtle at first, as if the room itself leaned forward. When I narrowed my eyes, I glimpsed the suggestion of a face, no features, only shifting mirror and mist, silver veins quivering in the hollow. My mother’s gaze fixed upon that emptiness, and she whispered “forgive me” into the silence that pressed in all around us. Then her chest stilled, and the hush that remained was not natural. It was deep, consuming, a silence that belonged to them. That was how I knew.

My father followed her not long after. His refrain trembled, thinning like a frayed thread, until it faltered. The pull returned, stronger, this time I felt it grip at me too, dragging from somewhere deep inside my ribs. The mist quivered, silver glimmers threading through the dark, and when I forced myself to hold my gaze, I saw the faintest glimmer of mirrored hollows bending toward him. His song broke off mid-breath, stolen, and the silence that followed carried their weight. The Myrcari had taken him too.

Now I sit alone by the fire, its crackle the only sound to keep me company. My cheeks are wet again, though I don’t bother to wipe the tears away. What use, when there is no one left to see? The wood hisses, spitting sparks into the black, and I speak to it as though it were a friend.

“You’re monsters,” I tell the flames. “You feast on us. You drink our souls to feel alive. You steal fathers, mothers, anyone who dares whisper to you. All of us feed your endless greed.”

The flames answer in smoke and sighs, its breath curling against my skin like the touch of ghosts. I draw my knees tighter, as though I could fold myself small enough to vanish, to escape the hollow that grief has carved inside me. Yet the song does not let me go.

Mirror, mirror, mist-face…

The rhyme clings to my tongue, a bitter prayer I cannot swallow. I whisper it into the flames, half curse, half confession. The sound trembles back at me, a fragile echo in the dark.

The night deepens. The embers sink into themselves, glowing like the last eyes of something dying. My body aches with weariness, but still the tune threads through me, low, unbidden, a hum rising from the marrow. The crackle fades into stillness.

I do not remember lying down. Only the heaviness seeping through me, as though the dark has reached up from the ground to cradle me in its arms.

And when sleep comes, it does not drift soft as it once did.

It seizes.

It drags me under.

Mist thickens around me, until it clings to my skin like breath from something vast and unseen. Each step I take feels heavier, as though the dream-earth has turned to mire, sucking me down into its silence. My lungs burn. I cannot draw enough air; the night presses too close.

Then the threads appear.

They do not lash or strike, not at first. They drift toward me in delicate arcs, silver as moonlight spun fine. Almost beautiful. Almost harmless. Until they touch my wrist.

The sting is sharp, searing cold, and I cry out,

or try to.

The sound leaves my throat but vanishes before it reaches the air. Swallowed. Devoured. The thread winds tighter, and another finds my ankle, my other wrist, my throat. My body jerks as if caught in a spider’s patient snare.

I thrash, panic rising like fire in my chest. The threads pull me down, not cruelly but inexorably, until my knees strike the dream-ground with a hollow crack. I stare upward, and they are there.

The Myrcari.

Their robes shift with the color of storms, folds alive with mist and gleaming filaments that spill outward like rivers of light. Shadows drag behind them like broken marionettes, always a half-breath late. Faces without faces, glassy and blurred, but not blank. They reflect. They mirror. I see myself inside them, doubled and tripled until the air is full of my own wide eyes, my own open mouth, my own terror looping back at me from every angle.

And then,

In one reflection, I see my mother. Her lips trembling with that final breath, humming the song. Reaching out into this same mist.

Forgive me, she had whispered, and I had thought she meant the monsters.

“No!” The word tears in my throat, yet no sound escapes. I scream again, each cry torn away, stolen by their humming. Their song is low, resonant, so deep it shakes the marrow of my bones. I can feel it inside me, like a second pulse, like an echo of my own heart that does not belong to me.

I beg the firelight to come back. I see its memory in my mind, a fragile ember glowing in the dark, but it gutters, swallowed by the veil. The Myrcari’s presence eclipses all else.

The threads rise higher. Not strangling, but lifting. Binding me in the air, suspended as though I am being unstitched from the earth itself. Their faceless mirrors tilt, a slow and patient movement, as if to study me. The longer I look into them, the more I see: my father’s trembling mouth; his apology breathed into their silence. His death not stolen, but given.

I cannot understand. The grief claws inside me. “Why?” I whisper, but my voice is gone, buried beneath their chord. I mouth the word again, and this time I feel it answered, not with lips, not with language, but with the hum that surrounds me.

Because they asked us to.

The song swells, a dirge that rattles the dream into fractures of silver light. And in that trembling moment, terror and grief fold over each other, and I do not know whether to fight or to weep.

My mother, my father, they had not been stolen into shadow. They had asked. They had chosen. My mother’s trembling apology had not been meant for the faceless ones, but for me, her daughter, left behind in the hollow of their mercy.

And I saw at last.

The Myrcari do not take for pleasure, nor for greed. Their hands are not hungry; they are steady. They do not feed on souls, they gather them gently, guiding them across the veil as a shepherd leads the weary home. They lift the suffering from their chains, unraveling agony thread by thread until silence is all that remains.

And the wicked, the cruel who stain the earth with torment, they claim them too. Not to grant peace, but to spare the living from their cruelty, to remind the rest of us that evil is not without consequence. The Myrcari are mercy. The Myrcari are judgment.

How blind I had been, cursing them as monsters. How small my rage seemed against the vastness of their song.

The dream shudders, silver fractures spilling light around me like the veins of a shattered mirror. Their faceless gaze lingers one moment longer, heavy with a sorrow I cannot name. My body trembles between terror and awe, grief and understanding, until both bleed into the same ache.

The threads loosen. I fall.

Mirror, mirror, mist-face…

I know now what the song means: it is not a warning. It is a prayer.

And in their faceless song I understood the truth: they are not the ones who haunt us. It is we who haunt them, until they take us home.

They were never monsters. They were the mercy we feared most, the kind that ends us to save us.

I woke with a cry, swiping at my wrists, my throat, as though the threads still lingered. The fire had sunk to ash, but the ghost of their veil-song clung to my skin, humming low in the marrow of my bones.

I woke alone, yet this time, less lonely than before, because now I know whose song will one day carry me home.