THE SHATTERED REFLECTION
1160 Words
The last thing Kael Blackthorn heard before the world went silver was his own laugh.
It tore from his throat and ricocheted off the obsidian walls of the Fae Court, cruel and certain. He’d just called the Veil’s magic a “child’s trick” and dared its keeper to prove him wrong. The words still tasted like iron and arrogance on his tongue. Behind him, his pack stood in rigid silence. He felt their unease prickle along his spine — even Borin, his Beta, wouldn’t meet his eyes. They knew. He’d gone too far.
Clara didn’t flinch. She knew exactly what kind of creature stood before her: a wolf who thought the moon belonged to him. She stayed silent, her face carved from ice. Then, slowly, her lips curved.
It wasn’t a smile. It was a promise.
Kael’s hackles rose. The pack shifted, disturbed. What game was she playing? But his pride was a living thing, roaring louder than instinct. Let her plot. Let her fume. No Fae witch could touch an Alpha of the Blackfang line.
Clara’s gaze never left him. One delicate finger lifted, nail painted black as a crow’s wing, and tapped the ancient mirror at her side. The glass was old, the frame twisted with thorned silver. It drank the torchlight.
“Then look, wolf,” she whispered. “Look at the king you truly are.”
Something in her tone scraped down Kael’s ribs. A dare. A sentence.
He was young. He was furious. He was Kael Blackthorn.
With a snarl that split the air, he half-shifted spine bowing, claws ripping from his fingertips, fangs bared in a muzzle not quite human. He’d shatter her toy. He’d show her what a real king did to insults.
He swung.
The floor vanished.
Kael didn’t fall. He was pulled. A hook through his sternum, yanking him from his boots, from his pack, from the hot, arrogant blood in his veins. The air turned to knives in his lungs. His claws extended on instinct, grasping for purchase, for throats, for anything. They met nothing.
He slammed into cold glass.
Not through it. Into it.
The impact rattled his bones. His palms slapped against a surface that hadn’t existed a heartbeat ago. On the other side, Borin’s face filled his vision mouth open in a soundless howl, eyes wide with horror and disbelief. The pack surged forward. Borin’s fist crashed against the mirror.
Kael felt it. The vibration sang through his teeth, his skull. The glass didn’t even shiver.
Panic, real and ugly, clawed up his throat for the first time in his life. He spun, searching. Clara was gone. No scent. No shadow. As if the Court had never held her.
Then her voice came. From everywhere. From nowhere. Silky. Amused. Damning.
“Pride demands an audience, Alpha,” she purred, drawing out the title like a blade. “Now you shall have one. For eternity.”
Rage detonated in his chest. He threw himself at the glass again, again, leaving silver smears of blood from his split knuckles. His eyes ignited wolf-glow, red as fresh murder and he saw his own pack flinch back. Good. Let them fear him. Let them remember.
Clara’s laugh was soft. “That won’t work.”
He roared, the sound trapped with him, turning his prison into a drum.
“Until a Daughter of the Veil loves the beast she sees,” she continued, each word a nail in his coffin, “there your freedom lies.”
The words hit him like a second blow. Love? From a Veil-blooded witch? Hatred was a river between their kinds, old and deep and drowned in bodies. He’d sooner tear his own throat out.
“Never,” he spat. “I’ll die first.”
“Then die,” she answered simply.
The Fae Court dissolved. Borin, the pack, the obsidian walls all of it bled away like ink in water. The cold, the silence, and his own reflection were all that remained.
He howled until his voice broke. Until his throat was raw and bleeding. Until centuries learned his name.
Borin’s loyalty became a curse of its own. He stood before the mirror for days, then weeks, whispering vows through glass. I’ll find a way. I’ll burn the Veil to ash for you, brother. But vows don’t break Fae magic. Eventually, the pack needed a leader who could bleed with them. Borin took the mantle, but the crown never sat right. He ruled in Kael’s shadow, his eyes always haunted.
To the pups of Blackfang, Kael became a ghost story. The Alpha Who Laughed at the Veil. The King in the Glass.They’d press their hands to mirrors on dare nights and run, giggling, when nothing happened.
Decades bled into centuries. The mirror traveled from Fae vaults to warlord’s halls to a collector’s estate, sold and resold. Curiosity. Haunted. Value: Unknown. Until it landed here: a university basement, tagged, forgotten, smothered under a moth-eaten sheet that smelled like dust and defeat.
Cold. Silent.
Until tonight.
A key scrapes in the lock. The sound is foreign, shocking after so long. Footsteps, heavy with exhaustion. A woman’s voice, muttering: “Overtime pay better be worth this, Dr. Harris, you dusty bastard.”
The sheet rips away. Light harsh, fluorescent, real stabs his eyes.
And for the first time in a hundred years, Kael Blackthorn, Alpha of the Blackfang Pack, is seen.
A girl stands there. Twenty-something. Tired eyes rimmed with smudged eyeliner. Ink-stained hands. Coffee, long dried, streaking her oversized hoodie. Not a queen. Not a witch. Not a warrior.
She looks at him the way she’d look at a leaky pipe. A problem she doesn’t have time for.
Panic, sharp and unfamiliar, lances through him. No. Not again. Not unseen.
He drags in a breath. It’s been a century. His voice is a graveyard, rusted and broken. He has one hour. That’s all the curse allows each day.
“Don’t,” he snarls, and the word tears his throat. “Don’t you dare look away.”
She doesn’t hear him. She can’t. The curse isn’t that kind.
She tilts her head, assessing the ornate frame. Her lips move. “You’ll fetch me a fortune on eBay,” she murmurs to herself, already turning her back. “Antique Fae glass? Art majors will lose their minds.”
Then she’s gone. The door slams. The lock clicks.
The silence that follows is heavier than any he’s known.
Fortune.The word echoes in his skull. Not savior. Not Daughter of the Veil. Fortune.
Kael stares at his own reflection — older, wilder, eyes gone feral with despair. For the first time since the Court, something colder than rage takes root in his chest.
Fear.
With a growl that’s more grief than threat, he slams his fist into the glass. Silver blood wells. It runs, slow and bright, and disappears before it can reach the bottom.
What will become of him tomorrow?
- Writer
