When I look into the onyx-faced mirror, I see her. Such rabid hunger in her eyes, such impure charms serpent-entwining her thighs, seducing me through this darkest reflection. And I become aware. Aware of my untamed heartbeat, aware of my unquenched taste for desire, aware of my undying need for sex. Lips stained crimson set free a sigh, when she watches me untie the ribbons of my bodice, letting fall my dress -- not completely -- just enough to lay bare my breasts. Then she sinks her charcoal claws into my nipples, pulling me forward to suckle them. Slowly engulfing me, we each become one, swirling within her abyss. Pain of lightning slashes through me, the ragged gasps for breath, as two halves of a conscious whole go to war, and always I am the one who submits. She enters me thirsty and ripe for suffering, she reminds me I am the broken doll, the perfect whore, the tainted childe who forever deserves this.

Once, I was frightened of the mirror, frightened by the truth it would bring. Now, her truth has eclipsed my truth, swallowing all there ever was of me.

Now, I go to the mirror every night, so that I may worship what lies within.

Shards of glass fell through Nevira's fingertips like icy daggers. A pale moon mourned the slowly waning night, as she crouched in its shadow by the broken mirror, curled close to the ashen floorboards with a single teardrop sparking her eye. How long had it been since the mirror offered up a reflection, an image of truth or of lies? How long had it been since she had been able to feel -- more than an empty hunger, an empty guilt, caged by even emptier regrets? Surely longer than the crossing over from that dimly-remembered mortal life.

Placing one of the fragments to her lips, she paused to ponder the lily still safely housed in its silver vase, impervious to the sorrow, a perfect token for all the world's sorrows. Innocent, in a way that she was not. Another reminder, of the one who was now gone. And though time meant nothing, both the flower and the moonbeams were painful pointers to the hour that fast approached.

Miranda had always come to her in this moment before dawn, all sweetness and siren songs in lieu of the reflection that she herself could not cast. The girl in the mirror, mirroring madnesses, a one-way door into a world that was lost. Nevira remembered the call of the ocean on the other side, the sounds the waves made, whispering to the darkness, the way the wind and the silver light of the stars cast a halo over Miranda's fragile form. Never a moon -- though it was her first love -- so as their secondary love entwined and grew, Nevira had taken to placing the mirror by the window so in that blessed hour her fey angel might even set free a smile.

That was a long, long time ago. Nevira never had seen Miranda smile.

Holding the fragment now to her wrist, she closed her eyes to the mocking shadows and false hopes of the half-light and, sharing a parting kiss with the lily, pressed down hard.

The skin would not shed any tears of its own, of course. Morning would see the pain and the scars rescind, but that one truth would never fade...

Without Miranda, she would always be incomplete.