Day 30: Reflection
The man in the mirror looked a little like his father. He could find traces of his elder brother too. He had inherited the same thick, straight fall of jet black hair, and the same pronounced hawk’s beak of a nose. He had something very near his father’s height and breadth of shoulder and the same long ears that were far less awkward now the rest of him had grown into them.
He did not see his mother when he looked in the mirror, though he was aware there were traces of her there too. His skin was fairer than his father’s had been, tawny instead of dark and that was her legacy. His eyes were the chief thing that set him apart from all his nearest family. His father’s had both been golden, his sister’s too. His mother’s and Seraphin’s had both been blue. He bore one of each, though he thought their shape more akin to his father’s. Yet those mixed colors too had come from his mother’s family and with them the legacy of a Sight that showed him the person standing behind him in the mirror.
That sudden presence in a room he’d thought empty made Silvaineaux’s hand jerk, just a little. Just enough that he watched a droplet of blood well at the corner of his jaw. “Damn it.” He whispered to himself and continued the pass of the razor a bit more carefully, following the line of his jaw. He watched the blade rather than the presence behind him, but now he had noticed it he could not ignore that pallid shape standing somewhere behind his shoulder.
Silvaineaux finished his shaving carefully as blood ran down his jaw and onto his neck, then wiped the blade and put it away. He straightened and wiped blood and shaving soap alike away onto the towel. Pressing a clean corner tightly against the small wound on his jaw he slowly turned to study the intruder. He did not recognize the man, though there was no reason he should expect to recognize a spirit encountered in an inn room where he had not stayed before and would likely never stay again.
The ghost did not study him in return. It only stood there in the middle of the room, looking rather lost. Someone had stabbed him, the wound showed clearly the blood oddly brilliantly crimson against the faint pallor the rest of the image held. Perhaps he too had been a long way from home, Silvaineaux thought with pity, and did not know how to find the place he should have been. Or perhaps the stabbing had happened here, that blood too cleared away as neatly as his own would be.
“I don’t know who you are.” He told the ghost quietly. “Or how to help you. I am sorry.”
It didn’t look at him or respond. They so rarely did. It only continued standing there, looking around the room with a look of such desolated confusion that Silvaineaux’s heart ached with helpless pity.
After a moment he tugged the towel away, turned back to the mirror to see the bleeding had stopped. Then he moved about the room dressing himself and bundling all his things back into his saddlebags. His strange roommate did not respond to that either. He only stood there, lingering so that when Silvaineaux paused at the door to look back over the room, he saw them with their positions reversed, his own living face reflected over a ghostly shoulder.
He wondered if the dead man had seen his father in his own reflection too.
