Esowiki - Spiritual Terms Simply Explained

The Mirrormaker of Valdoria

The Mirror Maker of Valdoria
Valdoria lay on an old trade route that carried more rumors than goods. In a side alley, where the stones were warm from the breath of the glassblowers' furnace, the mirror maker Iacopo had his workshop. His mirrors were famous, not for the sharpness of their images, but for what they could conceal. It was said that Iacopo mixed a pinch of ash from torn letters and the dew of early morning into his polish. Thus, his mirrors showed the world as it is, but left open who one wished to be in it.
One day, a customer entered, veiled as if she were a new moon. "I want a mirror," she said, "that doesn't show me myself." Iacopo looked at her, and in the blinks between breaths, he recognized in her gaze the weariness of those who had been someone else for too long. "I can make you a mirror," he said, "that will show you as you don't yet dare to see yourself."
He blew a pane, polishing it in long circles until the glass breathed. Then he spoke the three sentences he rarely uttered: "Don't be frightened. Don't ask questions. And when you see yourself, don't look away." The woman nodded, as if accepting a burden she already knew.
At home, she placed the mirror between two windows. It captured the morning and the evening simultaneously, a frame for transitions. Days passed, not many, but enough for habit to pretend it would last. One evening, as the light grew thin as paper, she didn't see her face in the mirror. She saw a door in a wall she had known since childhood. Behind it lay a garden, but not the old one with the lavender and the fountain. This garden was untouched, still nameless. She placed her hand on the glass. It was cool as water. "I am not here," she whispered, "and yet..." The mirror didn't answer. Mirrors don't answer; they remember.
In the nights that followed, the images changed. Sometimes she saw herself writing—not the letters she'd been signing for years, dutifully and busily, but poems that smelled of salt and apple. Sometimes she saw herself walking—not down the corridor hung with photographs of people with the same forehead, but along a path by the riverbank, barefoot. And once, when it rained outside, she saw herself dancing, awkward and childlike, but free. Behind all of this, there was always the door in the wall.
On the seventh evening—perhaps the fifth, perhaps the ninth, for time counts differently when spent in mirrors—she heard a click. The air in the small room shimmered, as if between two heartbeats the curtain between worlds grew thinner. The door in the mirror opened. No music, no choir. Only the sound of footsteps on gravel. They were hers.
The next morning, she returned the mirror. "It shows me too clearly," she said. "I'm afraid I'll recognize myself." Iacopo nodded, for many fear clarity more than darkness. "Keep it for one more day," he begged. "And if you're still afraid, bring it to me. I'll blind it." She paused, looking at the wrinkles in his hands, where stories lived. "No," she said then, "not blind. But... put a frame around it. One that reminds me that I can choose."
Iacopo carved her a frame out of olive wood, simple, warm, with a barely visible notch in the top left—a reminder that a mirror shows but never compels. The woman took the mirror with her, and in the weeks that followed, her days didn't suddenly change. But sometimes she paused in front of the door in the mirror, took a deep breath, and stepped through. And when she returned, there was something about her that was both serene and serious, a calm that could also be felt in the alley as she passed by. Valdoria had many mirrors. This one showed how fear becomes play, play becomes courage, and courage—a life.

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