The Mirror

By Asche

Copyright 2017

I spent some time binge-reading Dorothy Colleen's stuff this morning, and it inspired me to write something like her stories, but it didn't turn out that way. I guess the muse had other ideas. Oh, well, what can you expect for 3 hours' work?

Once upon a time, I was a young man, rather like you (well, some of you.) But not much of one. I had a dead-end job in some office, doing meaningless work for some clanking machine of a corporation. I had no friends to speak of, merely people who knew my name from work or local hangouts. I always felt something vital was missing from my life, that I was an empty shell. And so on weekends and vacations I would travel, hoping I'd find that missing something.

On one of those vacations, I was hiking in the mountains and chanced upon a round valley enclosed by mountains, with peasant farms and a rather medievalish town by the meandering river, and, on a rise in the very center of the valley, an almost cartoonish castle.

I wandered along dirt paths connecting fields to the cottages and barns and cottages to one another, enjoying the day and watching the peasants hard at work in their fields. I could tell they saw me, but none seemed to think I was all that remarkable. When I got tired, I sat down on a convenient log and ate the sandwiches from my backpack. Later, I found my way to a wagon track running along side the willow-lined river. By the time I got to the town, the sun was getting lower and my stomach was telling me it was dinner time, so I went into the local tavern and sat at one of the long tables which already had a fair number of people dressed in various types of old-fashioned working dress and asked for some dinner. I showed the innkeeper my collection of coins from all over and he picked one out, saying that it was enough to pay for dinner and even a night's lodging.

As I ate, I asked the people around me about the castle.

"Been there since I was small," shrugged one, more interested in his neighbor's tale of an uncooperative cow.

"Nope, never been inside. Don't know anyone who has," went the next. Everyone I spoke to showed a strange lack of curiosity about it.

The next morning, I headed for the castle. None of the paths led towards it, I had to zig-zag and finally simply bushwhack through the underbrush and weeds until I reached the flagstones in front of the heavy wooden door. From up close, I could see that the turrets were too small and delicate to be more than mere decorations. The partly open door sported a thick collection of cobwebs, but otherwise the castle was remarkably clear of vines or moss or any other signs of age. I pushed open the door and walked through a stone-walled passage to a large, brightly-lit room with an empty banquet table in the middle, surrounded by chairs, and around the edge, a comfortable-looking bed with a brocaded bedspread and a thick rug in front of it, a writing desk with a huge ancient-looking book opened on it, a long wardrobe, and on the wall near the passage into the room, a large full-length mirror. The light came from the high ceiling, which had large windows around the edge and white globes hanging like chandeliers.

By now I was more than a little hungry. I had seen no doors other than the one I came in by, and no evidence of a kitchen, so where would a banquet come to fill the banquet table? At that point, I didn't need a banquet, I would have been happy just to have more sandwiches like the ones I'd had yesterday. I sat down at the table and looked around the room. When I looked back at the table, I saw in front of me a china plate with sandwiches exactly like what I'd thought of, and next to it a crystal goblet full of water. No silverware, I noticed, but then one doesn't need silverware to eat a sandwich. I looked around the room again, then back at the table. The sandwiches and the goblet were still there. I said a silent thank you to whoever or whatever had provided the sandwiches and tucked in.

After lunch, I wandered over to the book. It was written in a crabbed script that resembled no alphabet I had ever seen, and there were odd diagrams sprinked about that I could make no sense of. I tried to turn the page, but it wouldn't move. When I tried harder, I ended up turning a whole packet of pages. They weren't stuck together like a book that has gotten wet, because they slid smoothly and lay flat when I turned them.

As I leafed through the pages that would consent to be laid open, I noticed that some of the other pages had yet another script, written in a different ink. Some were elaborately illuminated, others looked like scrawled lab notes.

By this time, I was tired and sleepy, so I took off my boots and lay down on the bed. It was the most comfortable bed I'd ever slept on and I was asleep in moments.

When I awoke, I could see from the light in the windows that it was getting to be evening. I didn't fancy dragging myself back down to the tavern, so I tried sitting at the table, closing my eyes, and wishing for a dinner like the one from last night. When I opened them, it lay before me, except far better cooked, and the goblet had red wine in it.

After I'd eaten, I realized that I was dirty and stinky, not having washed in several days, and, more urgently, I needed to find a toilet. When I looked around, I saw an opening that I somehow hadn't seen before in the wall opposite the entrance. Going through the opening, I saw on the left a remarkably clean toilet with a full roll of toilet paper and a sink with a fluffy white towel on the towel bar. On the right was a large bathtub with steaming water. I used the toilet, washed my hands, then took off my clothes and got in the tub. There were bottles of bath oils and shampoos and such arranged on the side of the tub and I tried them all out. By now it didn't surprise me to find a huge bath towel, which got me quite dry, a bathrobe, and fuzzy slippers. By now it was dark and the white globes were lighting the room like moonlight. On the bed was a silky nightgown. I dressed for bed and crawled in. The moonlight dimmed and I fell asleep.

The next morning, I wished for bacon and eggs and pancakes and there they were, including a caraffe of real maple syrup. After breakfast, I looked in the wardrobe and found not only my own clothes, now clean and smelling like they'd been line-dried, but two sets of clothes in the style of what the men in town wore, and on a shelf a leather purse with coins like the one the innkeeper had taken. And when I looked out the door, I saw that there was now a flagstone path leading down to one of the wagon roads.

I spent the day wandering the valley, enjoying the sights. In the afternoon, while I sat on the edge of a well, a pretty country girl came up to me to fetch water. I'd never had any luck with the fair sex, but she seemed to find whatever I said fascinating. We talked for a while, until we found ourselves in each others arms. I helped her bring water back to her family's cottage and then she led me to the barn, where, hidden among the piles of hay, we made love.

Over the next few weeks, I found that things seemed to always arrange themselves as I wished. Farmers' wagons came by going my way whenever I was tired of walking, when I wanted a beer in the tavern, someone was always standing a round of drinks. And whenever I took a fancy to a pretty girl, she seemed to be as interested as I. I suspected all this had to do with my living in the castle, so I made a point of always spending some time there. I did find out that I could stay away for a few days and still have use of its magic.

But I found that all this didn't appease the hunger I'd always felt. I came to realize that I envied the girls I bedded. I didn't so much want to have them as be like them. And so, one night, as I went to bed, I laid out my wish on my mind: I thought of a few of the young women I'd been with and put together an image that wasn't exactly like any of them but was a little like them all.

Next morning, I awoke to find blond hair halfway down my back, two largish breasts on my chest, and of course a pretty little crack at my crotch. The wardrobe contained typical young women's clothes for the area. I dressed and went down to the town, where all manner of young men flirted with me. When the innkeeper saw me, he wanted to know why I was socializing with the boys instead of serving in the tavern, so I went in and to work and he settled down. The work turned out not to be hard, the customers treated me kindly, so I didn't mind.

But when I got back to the castle, late at night, I glanced at the mirror and saw -- me, as I'd always been, but dressed in women's clothes, and the clothes, which looked pretty on a curvaceous young girl, simply looked ridiculous on that scrawny man. I found a towel and covered the mirror up.

Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, until I lost track of the time. When I got bored with being a tavern girl, I tried being a milkmaid, and then, when that palled, a wealthy lady with servants. I made love to young men, to old men, and to women.

But every few weeks, my curiosity would take over and I'd look at the mirror. And each time, the man in the mirror would look a little more grotesque. He became fat, with a beer belly. His hair receded and became thinner. And his face and body began to look less human and more like some orc or goblin or troll from a Tolkien movie. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I kept finding that in my happiest moments as a woman, the image of the ever more troll-like person that the mirror had shown me would intrude on my thoughts and spoil my pleasure.

Finally, I could stand it no longer. One night, when I looked in the mirror and saw a monster with a gray-green wrinkled, wart-covered face, randomly placed tufts of hair, hulking body, clawed hands on scaly arms, I took a chair and smashed the mirror. It took several tries, but eventually the frame was empty and the floor covered with shards.

Then darkness filled the room, lit only by sparkling light from the shards. The room dissolved into a kaleidescope of colors until I didn't know which way was up. I started to get dizzy and closed my eyes and eventually felt my bum hit the floor -- hard. I clutched my knees until it stopped feeling like everything was spinning around me.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was sitting on the floor in my drab studio apartment, my butt was hurting, and the first light of dawn was shining in my window. I turned on the radio and when they eventually said the date, I realized it was the first day of work after my vacation.

• - * - * - * - *

Over the next few weeks, I kept trying to replay the adventure in my mind. In my spare time, I tried to figure out exactly where I'd gone and how I might get back to that hidden valley. But I came to also realize that I now knew what it was that had always been missing. I eventually found a transgender support group, but the first few times were really hard. I would look at the 'women' there and think, they look like what I saw in that mirror, I can't come back, it's too awful. But then I'd come again, and by the fourth or fifth visit, I saw people, not monsters, and by the tenth when I looked at the people transitioning to be women I saw -- women.

I began to see that this was a path that I might be able to travel. It would be hard, and I wouldn't ever look or feel like what the magic in that magical valley gave me. I'd always see hints of the orc in the mirror.

But it would be real.