Mirrorspace felt...comforting. Quiet. Calm.

“Quiet” and “calm” were things that, of late, had been in thoroughly short supply in Levi’s life.

It had been an impulsive act, to dive into the mirror and hide in this between-space, this shelter where he couldn’t hurt anyone else. But it seemed to have worked. He no longer felt quite so strongly like he was coming apart at the seams, or—much more worryingly—like he was going to turn around and murder the next person that looked at him wrong.

Perhaps he ought to stay here. Mirrorspace would kick him out eventually, he supposed, but he could spend a significant amount of time tucked into this place. Could go to his Realm. Fix it up some more. Stay there, alone, where his out of control magic wouldn’t hurt anyone. Or maybe Mirrorspace would take pity on him. Lock him up somewhere he couldn’t hurt anyone else, like a fairy tale monster that needed to be sealed away.

It seemed like a reasonable solution. Perhaps the only solution, to a Senshi who couldn’t control his powers when they were so dangerous. He’d thought he was over this—that the fear he’d felt when he had his own magic used on him, that soul-shattering terror that had made it impossible to call on it, was left behind. But what he had now was so much worse, by leaps and bounds of magnitude. Not being able to use his magic would be a blessing, compared to having it rear its ugly, monstrous head when he didn’t want it to.

Fundamentally, it seemed, there was something wrong with him as a Senshi. Something Leto and Tybalt and the cats who upgraded him had never noticed, never realized, because it was buried so deep inside him that it had rotted his magic, made it unstable, made it bleed in a way he’d never heard of before.

Something in him was a monster. And monsters needed to be locked away or killed.

He wasn’t quite ready to lay down and die, not just yet. But perhaps trapping himself in the Mirror would be the best option. Stay here. Stay hidden. Keep everyone else safe.

It wasn’t the best idea, he knew, to set out into Mirrorspace at random. There were things that lurked there, and not all of them were friendly to Senshi. But it was the only thing he could think to do—choose a hallway and start walking.

Normally, he didn’t get cold as Elsa. Normally, Mirrorspace felt perfectly comfortable, temperature-wise.

This time, the longer he walked, the colder he felt.

Maybe it was all in his own head. The monster that wanted to eat him from the inside out was a creature of snow and ice, after all; it made sense that he might feel a little cold, with thoughts of it chasing him the whole way down. Maybe he really was headed for somewhere uniquely dangerous, and the cold temperature just came with it.

Maybe he would freeze, here, and be left in an icy prison for some unfortunate Dark Mirror to find. That was probably dramatic, though. Besides, it wasn’t Mirrorspace’s style. It would probably trap him in….well, a mirror, or some kind of Snow White-style glass coffin.

The hallway turned. Elsa turned with it. To his surprise, he noticed a niche in the wall—and resting in it were three vials of strange golden liquid.

He frowned, picking one up, and turning it over in his hands.

“Is this you trying to help?” He asked Mirrorspace—as if he could expect an answer. There wasn’t one, of course, but then, the vials were an answer in and of themselves, weren’t they?

And really, what was the worst that could happen? Elsa was already a danger to those around him. What more could happen?

….And at least he was alone. No one else was at risk.

He opened the first vial.

“L’Chaim,” he said, grimly, and he drank it.

It was a grim scene. Something out of a horror game, Elsa thought, for a moment—a little walled town, and he stood at the gates, looking over it and seeing bodies strewn everywhere. Blood spattered the ground, the walls of buildings, everything, and the state of the corpses was—

Chilling.

They were torn apart, ravaged, and there were—

Eugh—

He/she/they—he was not himself, he was someone else, a woman with sharp eyes and dark skin and blue hair, but he WAS himself in some undefinable way—stepped closer to one, and knelt, and shook her head.

“Bite marks,” she said, coolly, as if she were remarking on something—anything—less horrible than corpses with teeth marks. “Just like at the other villages.”

“So the rumors are true, then,” an armored woman said, from her position next to Elsa. “What are we to do, my lady?”

“Find the culprits. Find the source. And root it out. Winter is coming on fast, and we can’t have these….beasts prowling our outlying towns.”

He jolted back to reality in a rush, and found himself reaching down to touch his chest and confirm—yes, still flat, still like it should be.

“What was that,” he wondered aloud, though he had a feeling he knew the answer. White Moon Senshi had access to memories of their previous lives, or so he’d heard. It seemed, perhaps, that he had just gotten one. The woman whose eyes he’d seen through—that was him. Or, the previous Sailor Elsa.

And she’d spoken of monsters. And the bodies—

Elsa felt bile rising in his throat.

Desperately, he picked up the second vial, tossed it back, and squeezed his eyes shut—but it didn’t stop the vision from coming. A blessing and a curse. Answers he both needed and feared.

At first, Elsa wasn’t sure what kind of place he was looking at. It was clearly inside, and it took him a moment to recognize the trappings of ritual—a blood-spattered altar, sitting in front of a patch of a strange flower that glowed bright blue.

Somehow, that pretty blue flower felt like the most dangerous thing he had ever laid eyes on.

Scattered around the room were jewels, gold, chests—even a beautiful full length mirror, carefully leaned against the wall.

Spoils, it seemed.

“Thieves,” the voice of the armored woman from before drew Elsa’s eyes to her. Her expression was filled with contempt, and she cast her gaze over the loot with clear disdain. It was also clear, however, that she had suffered—her armor was damaged, blood stained her face, and there were what looked like claw marks on her breastplate. “They performed the ritual, became wendigo—and for what?”

“As the stories say,” Elsa said, and she shook her head, “for greed. For gluttony. For a desire to hoard that which is not theirs.”

“Unfortunately,” the armored woman said, “they’re as powerful as they are in the legends. My men and I—we can try to hold them, my lady, but I don’t think we’ll last long.”

Elsa cast her gaze over the soldiers with them. Nearly half their company had been lost in the first ambush, when they found the entrance to this place. They’d retreated inside, but in the end, they’d found themselves trapped. The men who had made themselves monsters for their greed were coming, and would, Elsa knew in her heart, slaughter them all. Even her magic would not be enough to stop them, and they would be free to run rampant, slaughtering however they saw fit.

Worse, they might bring others here, make them into monsters, too. A chilling thought. A threat to her entire world, and one that could only be ended with decisive action.

“We need a monster of our own, I think.” Elsa said, softly.

“My lady—“ The armored woman’s eyes widened in horror.

“I won’t ask anyone else to do this,” Elsa said, gently, “but Arielle, it’s our only choice. I’ll make the tincture. I know the old methods. And we’ll burn the flowers that are left, to make sure no one else can do it, even if they somehow find the instructions. But it’s the only way.”

The woman—Arielle—looked conflicted, for a long moment.

Finally, she nodded.

“At your command,” she said. “My men and I will hold them off.”

Elsa felt a chill run down his spine.

It wasn’t hard to guess what happened next, but still, he reached for the last vial. Prayed that whatever he saw, it wouldn’t be what he knew was coming.

The last of the thieves was in her grasp. Elsa smiled, wild and monstrous and hungry, and she squeezed her clawed fingers into his throat.

He laughed.

That laugh jolted her out of the effects of the transformation—at least for a moment. A moment of clarity, in the haze of hunger and bloodlust.

“Look at you,” the thief said, wetly—her claws had already pierced his throat. “You’re just like us. You want power, too, and you took it when you could find it.”

“I am nothing like you,” Elsa snarled, and he only laughed louder.

“Oh? Look around you. Look at what you’ve done. Wasn’t me or mine who tore your soldiers apart.”

“You’re lying,” Elsa gasped, and she shook her head, hand coming up to clutch the side of it. It was all a blur, after she drank the tincture and changed—a blur of howls and blood and fury, of carving her way through—

Through—

“Look at where the claw marks are, Your Senshiness,” the thief mocked. “Then you’ll know for true.”

“Be SILENT.” It was an angry snap, and she hurled him away, but his laughter—wet and awful—just kept going.

She staggered over to Arielle’s body. As she did, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—limbs elongated, skin gray, eyes sunken, hair bleached of all color.

Truly, she had become a horror.

She knelt next to Arielle, and as delicately as she could with her awful claw-finger-nails, she examined the body.

The claw marks on her breastplate were still there.

But the great bleeding wound that had killed her was not on her chest.

Claws had torn through the back of her armor. She had been slain from behind.

Elsa covered her mouth, horror seizing her. The transformation—it was unstable, dangerous. It had made her dangerous.

The laughter was gone—the murderous bandit was dead—but as she looked between her soldiers, the ones who had been willing to give their lives to protect her and her people, she found more and more evidence—attacked from behind, by a monster they were too shocked to stop.

By her.

By the wendigo she had become.

“No,” she said, softly, as if denying it with words could possibly help her. “No, no, it cannot be—“

But it was. Undeniably.

She had thought she could control it. But the beast had controlled her.

Surrounded by the corpses of her slaughtered soldiers, she collapsed on the bloody altar and wept.

She was not a Senshi.

Or if she was, she was more the Senshi of the Wendigo than of—

Anything else. Certainly more that than—

The altar was warm. Hummed with old magic. And this place was a danger, as long as it existed.

She stood up. Walked to Arielle’s body. Gently took her sword from her hand.

“I am sorry, my friend,” she said, softly. “You deserved a better end. You all did.”

She slammed the sword into the center of the altar, and it cracked.

As the temple collapsed around her, she felt a moment of relief.

She had become a monster, yes. But at least she would entomb them all here with her.

As Elsa came back to reality from the vision, the floor beneath him collapsed.

Perhaps he ought to be used to that sort of thing. Mirrorspace loved to collapse out from under them, to show the Dark Mirror new places only by throwing them into chaos. And this time, it dumped him in a room that made him think, for a dizzying, distracted moment, ”oh, this is the most boss fight arena place I have ever seen in my life.”

A large, round room, empty except for a full length mirror in the center.

As Elsa lay there on the ground, trying to process what he had seen—to even begin to understand—the surface of the mirror rippled.

He swallowed.

Every boss fight arena needed a boss, after all.

And the thing that stepped out of the mirror was alarmingly familiar.

It was the awful, twisted version of his past self that he’d seen in the mirror—emaciated, gray as a corpse, stringy haired and bloody clawed.

She snarled, and launched towards him.

Elsa rolled, and scrambled to his feet just in time to avoid getting impaled on those ragged-looking nail-claws.

His heart raced. In the vision—in his memory—he could have sworn that she’d said, or thought, that she wasn’t the Senshi of the Wendigo—not really, not when things were right. Had what happened to her scarred her/their starseed so thoroughly, that the Mirror had reflected….something else?

Was he wrong? Had they all been wrong all along?

Was he….the Senshi of something else?

The monster was coming for him, and it was all Elsa could do to dodge. Throwing punches wasn’t, he suspected, exactly going to be super effective here—he knew he felt no pain when his magic was active. So he would have to stop the monster-Elsa another way, keep her from making a corpse of him, too.

He dodged. Ducked. Weaved. And all that time, he tried to make himself remember what she’d said—thought—whatever—what the sphere she’d actually identified was. But it felt just out of reach, another fragment of memory that he couldn’t access properly, because he was a Dark Mirror and not one of those White Moon ******** who just got memories whenever, and who probably didn’t have broken starseeds—

The monster lunged.

Elsa stumbled.

Her hand lashed out and wrapped around his throat.

She lifted him off the ground with ease, and he kicked and struggled, wrapping both his hands around her wrist and digging in his nails, but nothing made her let go.

’I’m going to die here,’ Elsa realized.

And then, he thought, ’no the ******** I’m not.’

He could not just lay down and die.

He had his sister. Even if she had her own life and wife now.

He had Reiki—who he needed a chance to apologize to. To try to make amends.

He needed more answers—about his previous life, about who Sailor Elsa really was. He thought he’d known, but he was wrong, and he couldn’t let that go.

And in a rush, he knew.

”Endless….Void…of Emptiness!”

The magic came to hand as easily as breathing.

The monster looked startled, and dropped him, staggering backwards and reaching up to clutch her head.

Elsa got to his feet, and moved forward, walking through the black void created by his magic, and when he got to her, he put a hand on her shoulder.

The monster looked up at him, and made a noise of pain, and then she changed.

There, in front of him, was a vision—a version of his past self, the woman who had once been Sailor Elsa. She looked haggard and miserable, and even knowing that she was just a creation of Mirrorspace, a reflection of his own conflicted heart—still, it made his chest ache to see her.

He pulled her into his arms.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll fix it, I promise.”

She let out a creaky sigh of relief.

Then, she collapsed into shards of glass on the floor in front of him.

The full length mirror the monster had climbed out of was still there, in front of him.

As Elsa approached it, his way out of Mirrorspace, he felt, for the first time in a long time, at peace.