Into the Glass
“Shit.”
Everyone stopped and stared at Alec's back as he stood dazed, attention glued to a large silver mirror with glass so dark it looked like melted charcoal. His body blocked most of it from their gazes.
Jace turned towards his parabatai but Alec held a hand up, stopping him in his tracks.
“No one move.” You could have heard a pin drop. No one breathed as Alec inched towards the mirror. “No one look into the mirror.”
“I thought all of these had been destroyed and burned”, he muttered in both dread and awe.
Maryse broke first, unable to be out of the know. “What is it, exactly?”
“An Empathy Glass,” Alec shuddered, “made of the blood of a willing Warlock, Vampire, Werewolf, Seelie, Shadowhunter…. And… a Phoenix...”
Maryse scoffed, “There are no such things as Phoenixes”
Alec shrugged, “Not any more- no. Not after the massacre.”
Simon's face, already too pale, became ashen. “The massacre?”
“An Empathy Glass can only made by a combination of all these races blood. Phoenixes always had the smallest numbers, once Shadowhunters figured out how to kill them- permanently I mean, they were the obvious choice to kill off in order to prevent any more of these being made”.
Alec still hadn’t taken his eyes off the mirror. The others weren’t sure if he had even blinked since first spotting it.
Magnus spoke up, “And what exactly does it do that Shadowhunters can justify killing off an entire race and turning their very existence into a myth?”
Alec’s body shook, like Magnus’s words had taken away a pillar of support that no one could see. His hand trembled as he wove his fingers through his ink black hair and he laughed bitterly.
“If you are the guilty, it shows you and everyone else who gazes in the mirror your every sin, your every secret, and every cruel thing you’d ever done is done to you tenfold. And if you are the victim, it causes the one who caused you harm to feel your pain as you felt it but-”
“Tenfold?” Izzy guessed.
Alec made a rough sound in the back of his throat, that was suppose to be an agreement.
“How come you can look at it,” Clary asked, “Are you neither a harmer or a victim?”
“Everyone is either guilty or a victim, when they look into the mirror, when in a room filled with others they know- but to answer your question, I can look into it because none of you have and activated it.”
Jocelyn looked up sharply, taking care to look at the tense shoulders of Alec rather than the murky glass. “And what does that mean?”
“It means if any of you look in it and have been grievously wronged by me, I will be deemed guilty and I will face the pain I have caused you. If any of you look into it and have grievously wronged me, I will be considered the victim and you will face my pain.”
“Why you?” Jace questioned.
“I was the first to gaze into it and I can not look away. It means the mirror has determined me to be one or the other. ”
Simon voiced the obvious question, “So what do we do?”
Alec sounded frustrated, “I don’t know. I’ve never been in this situation before.”
“But you’re the only one who knows anything about it” said Clary.
“Yeah, but not from experience.”
Robert spoke for the first time since he had found himself in an abandoned house. “So how do you know of it?”
“I have a couple of friends from other institutes. One day, one of them was crying. She was holding this old, and by old I mean older than anyone in this room, book- including all Downworlders. It had been passed down through her family. She was crying about all the injustices that our kind had done that was documented within the book. It also talked about Empathy Glasses.”
Alec took a deep breath. “Her ancestor was one of the ones who created them. It was at a time where even Shadowhunters were horrified by the cruelty of other Shadowhunters. It was created in hopes of making a change- it did, just not in the way they had hoped.”
Alec rolled his shoulders and sank to the floor, the power of the glass draining his strength. He tried to close his eyes but found himself unable.
“It makes sense though, why we all ended up here...” Alec said.
Lydia cocked her head but did not look at the wall holding the mirror, “What do you mean?”
“The mirror has a siren call, if you will. It’s to prevent the guilty from escaping or to lure in the victims who are unwilling or unable to get justice. I mean, Magnus and I were having a date at a diner near here and then found ourselves here. Lydia, Jace, Clary, and Simon were on patrol, Mom, Dad, and Max were out for dinner. I’m not sure about Jocelyn. But Raphael and Luke negotiating and were somehow lead here as well.”
Everyone nodded. That did make more sense than them all just randomly showing up at the same place.
Alec shuddered suddenly and quite dramatically. Magnus who had been watching him in his provisional vision since his boyfriend first cursed, bit his lip in worry.
“Okay. This is getting to be a little much. So everyone should start heading towards the exit. Concentrate on getting out and ignore anything that makes you feel like you should look into the glass.”
Everyone silently took note of a melody in the back of their heads that seemed to call to them without them noticing before.
They all took steps towards the door they had entered from when abruptly, the walls began to shake and a voice- beautiful but wrathful screamed overpowering the calm and lovely music from before and all heads snapped towards the mirror and it began to glow and everyone was drawn into the glass.