Chapter Text
First story, which tells of the Dark Lord and his Mirror.
Now, at the end of this tale we shall know more than we know now, but to begin:
Once upon a time, a Dark Lord arose in the land of Great Britain, and he amassed many followers, who were called Death Eaters. He and his Eaters of Death caused much suffering and destruction in their wake, and even among themselves, for they were all fond of inflicting misery and pain. The Dark Lord himself would often torture his own followers, who afterwards thanked him gladly for the honor.
On one such occasion that the Dark Lord was greatly displeased with one of his Death Eaters, however, he summoned not the guilty party to be punished, but instead decreed that his son was to suffer in his place. The Death Eater's son, almost a man in his own right, trembled when he heard this because he had in secret become the lover of one of the figureheads of the Light, and lived in fear that it might be found out. But it was not the Dark Lord's goal that day to dig into the boy's head for his secrets – no, he intended a far worse torture.
The Dark Lord had a collection of Dark artifacts in his possession, and one of these was The Mirror of Evil, which when looked upon would distort good people into horrible frights, the most beautiful landscapes into no more than limp, boiled spinach, and things that were already ugly became magnified and increased in their ugliness. This mirror, therefore, the Dark Lord treasured above almost all of his other artifacts, for it pleased him to see everything as ugly and distorted as he was.
When the Death Eater's son had been brought to the Dark Lord in his Manor, this mirror was set in front of him, and the Dark Lord bade him look. The boy had no other choice, and so he did. What he saw within was all horrible and terrible, but the boy knew not the nature of the mirror, and that all that it showed him might not be the truth. Devastated by what he saw there, and unable to bear the sight of more, the boy drew his wand and began to cast spells at the mirror in an attempt to destroy it.
The Dark Lord and all his Death Eaters laughed, because they enjoyed the boy's distress, and did not worry about the spells being cast at the mirror, for they thought it indestructible.
Their belief was proven wrong when one of the boy's spells struck true, smashing the mirror into thousands and thousands of tiny shards, sending them flying in all directions, into the air and out the windows and the doors, and even striking a great many of the Death Eaters. The Dark Lord, too, was struck by a shard, and at first he was angry that his lovely mirror had been broken, but then he realized that this occurrence was fortuitous, because the effect of each individual shard was the same as the whole.
The Dark Lord was still of a mind to further punish the boy out of spite for breaking the mirror, until he saw that the boy himself lay bleeding on the floor. The boy should have been dead – one or two shards would not have killed him, but he had been closest to the mirror, and at least a dozen shards had struck him directly. Unbeknownst until this very moment, however, there was fairy blood in the boy's bloodline, despite the apparent purity his Death Eater father claimed, and now that natural magic rose up to protect him. From the boy's unconscious body, ice began to creep, covering everything, and the air grew steadily cooler.
The Dark Lord quickly changed strategy and fled, calling out to his followers to gather up as many shards as they could as they went. All the Death Eaters obeyed, even the boy's own father, and soon he was left frozen and alone in a Manor of ice.
But there were still a number of these little shards floating about in the air, and soon you shall hear what happened with some of them.