“Broken Mirror” is an experiment in a serialized short story. I’ll share it with you as I write it. The story’s form came to me as a whole download, and I dashed it down in shorthand onto notecards which I then tucked away somewhere “safe” and instantly forgot. I found them last week, unclear how long after they were written. Now, we’ll coax it into being. The story is about a planet who, desiring to see itself, creates life.
My name is Narcossium. I circle Orisian, a small star on the shoulder of Orion, a star I have all to myself. She loves me, so much and so intensely that she’ll have no others. For a long time, that love was the only thing I ever knew.
From the day she captured me, Orisian always held me close. She’d tell me how beautiful I am, as she sculpted me to her desire. I flew around her, intoxicated by her power. I’d rotate slowly to feel her warmth on all my skin. My insides sparked and transformed beneath her touch, all the precious elements of my body alive and dancing to form new energetic sequences. She made me become. I created an atmosphere that reached out towards her, translating her light. I created vast liquid mirrors to show my lover her own beauty. My skin heaved and stretched towards her, in passions sometimes delicate, sometimes bold. My insides gushed with the molten fire she created inside me, electric and reaching.
Then one day, a comet flew by, a sparkling thing that glittered in Orisian’s red light. She didn’t want to let it go. I felt her weight shift as she pulled for it, trying to break its infuriating speed and snare it into her gravity. I was horrified. Orisian was mine, and mine alone. I pushed with all my might against her power, letting the comet fling itself around me and use my weight to rocket out of her grasp. In my shadow, it was nothing but a hole in the endless expanse of space. But in that hole, beyond her seeing, it whispered to me, a quiet and silvery gratitude.
The comet gone, Orisian cradled me again, as if nothing had happened. She shone on me and twirled me and caressed me with her heat, burning every hotter, pulling me ever closer. But I was wracked with something new: doubt. Was I not enough? Would she have taken this other lover? What did that comet have, that I did not?
All I’d ever had was Orisian’s praise, Orisian’s love, Orisian’s promises. What did she see, when she looked at me? I’d seen her, and I’d seen the vastness of our galactic home, but I’d never seen myself. I’d felt my oceans swell and my skin glow, but feeling was an internal thing - I wanted to witness from the outside. I wanted to know.
I felt something awaken, deep inside, beyond the glow of my lover. Something hidden and inevitable.
So I sent out a message into the stars. I called for help, for someone to come to save me. I wasn’t lying. The desire to see myself tore my insides to shreds, my core churned molten pain. It erupted violently through veins that burst through my body, pouring out to be cooled in the darkness of space, or bubble under Orisian’s gaze. My atmosphere became cloudy and thick, Orisian could no longer admire herself in my boiling oceans. My orbit swung wild and severe, like I could fly off into space, or dive in to be swallowed by her heat.
From the dark side, the side hidden from my sun, I howled into the dark maw of the universe.
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