Work Text:
A stock photo of the Eye of London, to evoke a sense of absolute duality (open image in new tab to zoom).
In a small and quiet village somewhere, there lies a warm and friendly tavern. It's quaint and homey, and the staff always has a smile for everyone.
While the layout, people, events, and whatnot are nothing like those of Café René, I find myself thinking of it as feeling so very much like that.
To the left, as one enters, lies the main bar. An elderly gentleman much like Monsieur LeClerc can often be found there, wiping dry a glass. Behind that stands a mirror, fully six feet in height from waist level upward and stretching perhaps twelve feet or more to the right.
The mirror itself isn't special at all, but it occupies a very special niche. It has been in service for a very, very long time. It has seen empires fall, the march of time unwinding as a forgotten cloud of dust behind a weary traveler.
But that's not the niche that makes it special, only a fact about it.
It happens to occupy the membrane of connection between one world and another. The only two worlds in existence, in fact.
It doesn't lie on this membrane by chance, but is in fact the physical manifestation of it. Long ago, it had been found, then lost, and over again many times, wondered at, worshiped, reviled, and traded by those who knew nothing of mirrors, much less of universes. It is the fact of its true nature that has permitted it so long and illustrious a life, as any normal mirror — had such been made before the necessary technology with which to make mirrors — would surely have fallen to one or another of innumerable disasters over such a stretch of time.
But this is also not precisely what makes it so special.
No indeed, its special nature is that it acts not solely as the membrane between them, but also as the boundary manifold of each, as if it were the banks that defined a stream while that very stream defined the banks. This is no mere allegory: although the mirror exists physically in each of these two worlds, it is only through the auspices of the membrane's dualistic vibrations that either exists, or more to the point, that each exists in quite the way that they do, for you see, it is not that these worlds happen to kiss at this one rather delimited plane, but rather that its very vibrations call forth a flow within it that manifests as a three plus one dimensional menagerie, and this is mirrored through seven further dimensions in such a way as to cancel out all but a single stream of actions and its complement.
In this, the mirror herein acts like a tangent sheet adjoining a pair soap bubbles. Their volumes are wholly separate within their surfaces, but the two are nonetheless intimately bound in their travels.
No simple positive and negative reliefs, this mirroring is much like that of the aforementioned stream banks: while the stream itself flows, the sides wander in whatever manner suits them, straying nearer and farther, curving into eddies and dropping sharply, bounding over stones and around them — but always in keeping with the stream itself, and so in keeping each with the other, after their fashion.
Picture a pastiche in which a story is played out in two parts, side by side. The arc is directed by an infinite roulette wheel of weighted-random events, but each chapter is written by different authors, decided by drawn lots. In each alone, certain shared events and such might be dictated, dependent on the outcomes of prior events of both worlds, but the authors aren't particularly constrained in their specifics beyond the immediate plot points planned.
Where in the one world someone might marry the girl next door, they might die in the other and their sibling marries her. A child might be born to one set of parents here, and another there, yet remain the same person throughout. When one's story is cut short, the other continues on, but makes no great ripples in the narrative, much as a branch draping into the stream by only one bank causes no discernible constriction to the flow overall.
Perhaps in the other world, this tavern is a saloon in a spaceport, dust kicking in for dramatic effect.
The details of either don't matter; only know that at every turn, the mirror finds its way to just these places, just such quiet settlements, the staff never knowing of this, nor anyone else, but that it stands there, something special in its own special way.
O ~~~ O