¹Editor's Note: This transcription was translated from an engraving by a colony of termites discovered on the the insides of the bark of a Great Rowan Tree, felled the year of the Great Reality Quake at the conclusion of the Nineteenth Junction of the reign of Her Magesty, Queen No'Ra the Witch Queen. It is hereby published by the office of the Grand Chronicler of Her Magesty in anticipation that more shall be recovered.

Still yelling in horror, I fell backwards and scooted out of sight of the mirror. As my voice died in my throat, I took a deep breath, and gathered my wits, staring at the back of the frame. There had to be a suitable explanation for this that didn’t involve me having been turned into - ugh - an angel. Slowly, I peeked back around and found myself nose to nose with her. I flinched and she did the same. It took all my willpower not to hiss, settling instead for backing out of view for a moment before I stood and moved around in front of the full length mirror.

The girl in the reflection was wearing a long white robe. Her hair was black as a raven’s feathers, starting straight but with a wave towards the ends that suggested it was usually held in braids. Her eyes were likewise dark, with delicate rutilations of violet, and her skin was an off-white on the side of olive. I’m not a good judge of mortal age anymore, but I guessed she was at most in her late teens. If it wasn’t for the halo and the fluffy, ash-grey feathered wings, I would have mistaken her for an ordinary human girl. I started turning my head to the sides, watching in sick fascination as my apparent reflection did likewise. I heard a stifled sob, and realized that her face was wet with tears.

Slowly, my paw went to my face as the angel in the mirror raised her hand likewise. My fingers traced the corner of my eye before I pulled my paw away to regard them, rubbing my thumb and forefinger together where I could see them. My digits were dry, and what’s more they were still lightly furred and tipped with the pink beans that hid my claws. I gave them an experimental flex just to be sure. My eyes returned to the angel girl’s, and I reached up with both paws to lightly pinch my ears. Her hands raised to grasp at empty points in the gap between the top of her head and her halo, distress plain on her face. I dropped them down to my hips and cocked my head to the side in thought as she mimicked the pose.

“Who are you? Where am I? Why can I not move on my own? What is going on?!” Her low, rich voice startled me. I furrowed my brow.

“I am the witch you seem to have inadvertently possessed, little angel girl,” I said in a guarded, half-accusing tone. “You’re in my Atelier. I found your broken halo resting atop a pile of your feathers on the front stoop. I repaired it in an attempt to be hospitable, but now it’s stuck on my head just like I’m stuck with you.”

Her eyes flickered upwards for a moment and I found myself glancing at the counterpart to the halo still lazily rotating as it floated over my head. The sensation was very disconcerting as I hadn’t meant to do so. With a shock, I realized I wasn’t the only one who could control the other’s movements. I grit my teeth and forced my eyes to return to hers before she could see, working to keep my face neutral. She looked back at me and seemed to wither a little, and I realized I was scowling.

“I-I am sorry, I did not mean for this to happen,” she stuttered. I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, managing a slight smirk. Before I could respond, she continued. “Did it just…I mean, how did it end up on your head?” My face fell as I looked away.

“Well, you see, I was just examining it after I took it out of the kiln when I decided I should, uh, test it to see if it worked, and then when I tried it on, it…I mean, that’s not important!” I replied in a huff. She looked nonplussed. “What’s important is that I have to figure out how to get you out of there!”

Embarrassed by my oversharing, I began to bustle about in the corner of my living space that I called my library, searching for … something, anything that might have an answer to my predicament. Our predicament, I reminded myself in an effort not to be too selfish regarding someone I had effectively invited into my home. Tomes, scrolls, and the occasional engraved stone slab went tumbling over my shoulder in frustration. I sneezed mightily. With a sinking feeling, I felt sure I was ruining any impression that I was a great and powerful witch instead of a furry goofball in an oversized hat. Oh no, would my hat even fit anymore?

“Bless you!” came the voice of the angel from the mirror, sounding like she was yelling from another room. I paused and looked back at it, curiosity piqued. I walked to the other side of the room. “What is going on?” she asked as I passed by, voice subtly changing in pitch as I passed into and out of the bounds of the frame with her.

“Testing a hypothesis. Do me a favour and keep talking? Tell me about you. What you remember before now, your favourite colour, anything,” I responded from the window nook behind my hanging bed, more a fabric basket than a hammock.

“Well…there was a lot of wind, and I was high up. I think I was falling? Oh, and before that, I was somewhere else that I did not belong anymore,” she began, very much sounding like she was talking from the other side of a wall with her voice reaching through an open doorway. Trapped in a mirror universe, tethered to me by the halo? I walked back into view but away from her, stopping in my kitchen before turning around.

“I was…sad there, lonely. I had responsibilities and for a long time there was no one else but the ones in masks until she came. My new friend, the first one like me that I had ever seen. There was something that I could not get away from, something that was destroying me. My friend saved me…I cannot remember her name!” The angel had run the gamut of emotions from confused, to happy, and then scared. Now she was getting just plain upset as I watched her stand in the reflection of my kitchen nook.

There was no smell to her, obviously, so while she looked and sounded unhappy I was able to maintain enough detachment to think. I continued to make observations. From far away, she looked like she was considerably taller than me based on where she landed in the reversed image, giving credence to the mirror universe idea. Like all of my fancier furnishings the mirror itself was an artifact, enchanted with a divination magic that was the remains of a cursed spirit I’d freed some time ago and later reinforced into a useful spell. Maybe it was a pocket universe left behind by the entity’s passage? I needed a way to test this.

“It’s okay. That’s explainable by the interplanar transit you seem to have been on, especially since you appear to have fallen through the Fairy Wylds. Memories of people are always the first to get messed up there,” I  said soothingly. It was a white lie that travelers often forget those they care about, quite the opposite in fact, but the last thing I wanted was an eldritch creature panicking in my living space. I’m the only one allowed to throw a fit in here, after all. I urged her to continue. She hesitated, then straightened a little. Her wings twitched as I walked us both towards the mirror.  

“Alright, if you say so. I am not sure what happened next. She saved me and things felt more resolved. I remember fireworks, walking through a dark forest, and then flying up and away, carried in a beam of light…oh! My halo…” We reached up to touch our shared headpiece. My beans tingled as I acquiesced to the impulse from her. Increase in anomalous sensations and susceptibility to remote control the closer I was to the mirror? This pocket universe hypothesis was looking better all the time, and that meant I had a leg up on the solution already.

“I saw it flying through the air, flying away from me!…I reached to catch it, but I could not. So I tried harder and then I was out of the light, but then I was falling. I think I caught it, but then something hit me? Or, I hit something…” she trailed off, eyes unfocused and distant, not meeting mine. I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I poked my cheek. She poked herself, then startled back to the present.

“Okay, I think I have an idea as to what you’re about. Now, as for what you’re doing here…I’m speculating, but I think you might have gotten tied to your halo when you squirmed out of an interplanar teleport, probably when you were being recalled to wherever angels go when they’re done messing about in the Material World. That was stupid, by the way,” I chided, though impressed. “Squirming out of an interplanar transmission conduit? You very clearly nearly died when your halo got smashed up. Pity you can’t tell me how you got here, or why it was very carefully placed on a bed of your feathers. Oh, wait a second, I’ll show you. I have some of those over here,” I said as I scampered off to fetch the basket.

It was resting under my bench in the Atelier proper, safely stowed behind wards where it wouldn’t be affected by the heat of this morning’s spell along with other fragile and flammable items. When I pulled it out, I spotted the plain handle of an early project and plucked it out as well. I put the basket on the bench top and idly spun the hand mirror I’d retrieved on my paw like a top. It was my first attempt at making a scrying surface that wasn’t an orb, with a coating of sputtered starmetal and a backing of soulsteel. It also wasn’t very usable because I took a shortcut on the prep work. Well, a few shortcuts, and I rewrote the procedure a bit because I thought I knew better and didn’t. I stopped its motion and pushed a bit of magic into it. The dull, iridescent metal became reflective, and there she was.

“Oh! We are…somewhere else?” asked the angel girl. I nodded.

“Just in the other room. This is the studio of my Atelier. Here, I’ll give you the tour…” I began walking around, holding the mirror so that she could see behind us. “Here’s my bench, this is my torch - I adapted it so it can use magical reagents as well as mundane fuels - over here’s the altar I use for the big stuff…”

While I showed my guest around with a practiced enthusiasm, it was a vigour I did not feel inside. The hand mirror had kinda poked a hole in my hypothesis about the bigger one trapping her inside a pocket universe. I had really gotten hopeful about that since it was a problem I already knew how to fix. My disappointment must have been plain on my face because she picked up on it right away, and brought it up as soon as I had made it past explaining all the different colours of glass rods I had in a drawer.

“You look kind of like I feel,” she observed.

“You feel like a cat that got too curious and got punished for it again?” I snapped back with a lot more venom than I had meant to deliver. She flinched, taken aback. I drooped. “Wait, no, I mean…sorry,” I fumbled with a sigh. “I just hate puzzles when I don’t get the clues right away. I thought I was on to something with our problem, but I just disproved myself and I’m feeling salty.”

We were both silent for a minute. I put my paws on my hips and sighed, one of my less feline gestures. I must have let the mirror droop, because the angel girl piped up again.

“Are those my feathers?” I looked down at the mirror, raised it to look at her and nod, then tried to figure out how to position it so that she could … see … wait.

“You saw the basket from where I was holding the mirror? Or were you just getting me back on track?” I gave her a curious look, my dejection departing in favour of intrigue.

“Neither? I could see you in the mirror out of the corner of my eye, but you were looking in the direction of the basket. Why? Is that helpful?”

I stuck the handle of the mirror in a jar of bead mandrels at one end of the bench, using the metal rods to prop it up, then backed off to the middle of the room and faced away from it. I looked at one of my servitors. “Alright, humour me, what am I looking at now?”

“A glass spider? A glass … cat that is lying down with its legs spread out? Now it’s a piece of white brick. You just pinched your thumb and forefinger into a fist while moving them away,” she narrated. I boggled at the realization. She wasn’t seeing through the mirror, she was seeing through my eyes while I was being reflected!

“Whoa,” I intoned. She repeated my utterance but as a question. “Hang on, I just had a breakthrough on how this works. You can see through my eyes, but when you talk it sounds like it’s coming from the mirror. Do I sound like that to you, too?”

I watched her nod and considered the possibilities. Both of the mirrors were silvered, after a fashion at least, and they were both enchanted. I wondered if mundane silver would do the job as well. It would make the next test I could do much easier. Now, to see if I still had the reagents to make new ones. I crawled under my bench, brushing aside the dangling wards as I started sorting through various bottles and jars of things I always tell myself I should probably get a proper storage cabinet for.

“Miss Cat Witch? I…can no longer see anything,” came her voice from the other room, calling for me by descriptors as though they were proper names. I jerked my head to the side in surprise, realizing I’d done that by disrupting the mirror connection. Our shared halo caught on a support rib of the bench, levering my head to bang against the solid wood, and I squawked in pain. “Miss Cat Witch, are you okay?!” I crawled back out and flopped on the floor, cradling my poor noggin, ears flat against my head.

“Me-yowch, that sucked, owww,” I mewled. “Yeah, I’m okay, I just bonked my head,” I called back, looking up to see that the hand mirror had gone dark. I made a face at it. Useless thing wouldn’t stay reflective for more than a few minutes unless it got a steady trickle of mana, and that was all it was good for. ‘Mirrors as a service’ was not something I had any intention of cursing this part of the multiverse with, especially since near as I could tell it wasn’t capable of doing anything more than reflecting. Oh well, first tries never work out perfectly, especially when you don’t follow the directions. I got up and fed the mirror new magic before grabbing the bottles from under the bench. “Sorry about that. Okay, here’s the plan…”

A couple hours and a few bottles of hazardous mundane and magical reagents later, I had made several new mirrors and placed them about my Atelier. My guest could now see through my eyes wherever I was, so long as I was inside. We’d continued to make small talk the whole time, and I was now fairly certain she wasn’t actually an angel. No, my guest was more like a precursor to one. She was remembering little details here and there of her previous incarnation such as a predilection for rolling her own clove-flavoured spliffs, which explained the aroma of her feathers. She seemed fascinated with those, particularly since she couldn’t look over her shoulders at her own. 

I hadn’t shared this speculation yet since, after all, it was just a speculation, but it seemed feasible that she had basically been dropped off by whatever divine power had summoned her away from where she was before. This was really not something I liked the sound of, particularly since I didn’t have the raw power to make wards that would keep out even local gods or higher tier angels. Her limited ability to move independently would also need more investigation and  improvement, since save for her eyes, I had to go along with it if she wanted to move on her own at all. Those were both going to have to be problems for future us because by then it was getting dark and I was both tired and hungry.

I curled up in my hammock basket with half an old summer sausage that was the last of the thank-you gift from the meat wizard as well as some homemade mustard and jam, looking up at the mirror I had adhered to the ceiling to regard my guest. It was a big meal, but it’d been a long and busy day and I hadn’t exactly eaten much. She seemed to be enjoying it too, based on the colour in her cheeks. We’d also figured out she could taste and smell things that I did, though there was a discrepancy in how well we could hear that I hadn’t decided as being the fault of the way sound transmitted through the mirrors versus her sensory abilities. I smeared a crumb of fallen mustard off my tummy and licked it from my beans. 

“Ooh,” she squeaked. I blinked and looked at her, puzzled. “S-sorry, it is, I mean, y-you are, well,” she stuttered, glancing down, bright red. That was another thing we’d figured out for certain, by the way. She could look around as long as I was facing in a general direction, and it was a sign that she wasn’t completely locked to my perspective and just a passenger. I followed her gaze, then looked back in puzzlement.

“Did I miss a bit? Well, it’s no matter. I’ll just groom myself and bibbity-bobbity up the mess before I have another nap, anyway,” I reassured her. The angel-like girl made another noise and nodded, still blushing. I blinked a few times and then it hit me that I’d never actually gotten dressed again after my mid-day nap. “Ohhh, it’s because I’m naked, isn’t it? Does my indecency offend your delicate sensibilities, dear girl?” I teased, giving her a Cheshire grin in the finest fae feline tradition. She shook her head.

“No, no, it’s f-fine, you are very pretty, Miss Cat Witch,” she stammered, the contraction underlining the honesty of her words. I chuckled at the disaster lesbian suspended in the mirror above my bed, and stretched languidly. Now that I knew she wasn’t actually an Agent Of The Divine, I was much more comfortable with her presence.

“Well, thank you. That reminds me, though. I think it’d be better if I had something to call you instead of "little angel" and "dear girl" all the time, and I'd like it if you didn’t have to call me ‘Miss Cat Witch’ anymore. You’re probably going to be my guest here a while until we sort this out and, even though I’d usually hesitate to give my name to someone I’ve just met, I’ve got you at a disadvantage. How does the name ‘Rebecca’ sound, since you’ve lost yours? I’ve been fond of the name for a few lifetimes.”

The raven haired girl considered it, then nodded. “Alright. I shall be Rebecca. What do I call you?”

“To my closest friends, I, my dear Becky, am Morgan the Glassblowing Witch, a name I will insist you promise not to share once we get you free. To my clientele and other outsiders, I am the Witch Cat Whom Glass,” I said with a yawn as I cast a quick cleaning spell on myself and my bedding before settling in to sleep, then looked up at her with a smile and a slow blink.

“Welcome to my home.”