Sweet Romance16 min read
The Mirror Ruin and the Fox Who Kept Tails
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I woke up because someone called me "Empress" and because a warm, heavy tail was pressed against my side.
"Why would the Empress sleep like a stone?" a soft voice asked.
"It is morning." Another voice said, bored. "You always sleep more than twenty times a day."
I opened my eyes. The ceiling was a tent of faded cloth. Beside me, a young man—no human, really, his ears tipped like a fox's—was pretending to be a king. He had a long black tail, big and warm. He blinked at me like a child.
"You said you wanted to leave the palace," he said, when I only stared.
"Because I think the palace is haunted," I replied.
"Haunted?" He frowned. "We have lived here for two hundred years and the palace has only fox fur and dust. Not ghosts."
The other one, a small white thing curled like a rope, lifted its head from the bedpost and hissed politely, "He lies."
"I? I don't lie." The fox—Roman—rolled his eyes. "We told you palace stories because you woke up here and we thought you'd be frightened. You are a human. Humans get frightened."
"What are you then?" I asked, calm. My voice had an almost flat feel in my mouth. Strange. I had no name I could hold to.
Roman smiled like a child showing a broken toy. "I'm Roman. I am the Emperor." He puffed his chest and tapped his tail tip. "And this is Neil. Neil is a dragon."
Neil—now a man of thin shoulders and eyes like red beads—uncoiled from the bedpost and lifted his head. "Dragon is too much. Snake is quicker with the truth."
"Okay," I said. "I am Petra."
"You have a name?" Roman and Neil both gaped.
"I do." The three of us had three different ways of being surprised.
The palace was a ruin. Vines crawled over stone, and the rooms were made whole with imagination. Roman had woven a cover of pomp about himself because when I first opened my eyes he looked like a noble and I took him for a king. He had the worst lying charm I've ever seen—too honest to be a good liar.
That first night we argued like children. I accused, he explained, Neil snorted, the little white snake hissed explanations that sounded like jokes, and still we laughed at our foolishness.
"Why did you call me Empress?" I asked once the candles burned low and we lay with two blankets between us.
Roman turned his face toward the darkness and whispered, "Because the stone we found you in had a pattern like a crown."
"A stone," I repeated. "What stone?"
Neil answered before Roman could. "You were not a breathing thing. You were asleep in a water jar—a round blue thing in a buried house. We found you there."
"You mean I was a jar thing?" I tried to keep my voice steady and failed. The room seemed smaller when I thought of being a stone.
Roman's ears tilted. He had been so brave until my words. "We put you in a warm bed. You opened your eyes and called me Empress. I was happy."
"You lied to me," I said quietly later. "You said this palace was real. You said I was safe forever." I kept my hands still so the words would not tremble.
Roman wrapped a big tail around my ankles. "We thought you'd break. Humans break. I was brave like a fool."
"You hid things," I said. "Why hide that I'm not a human? Why hide anything?"
Neil's red eyes softened. "We were frightened," he said. "The place we live—Mirror Ruin—is tricky. Time is sticky here. We have been here for two hundred years according to our clocks, and outside is younger. We wanted to keep you peaceful."
"Two hundred years," I repeated. It meant something, and it meant nothing. My memories were smudged like charcoal on stone. Faces, murmurs. A man who once told me I smiled well. A river. A song.
We stayed. Roman fed me boiled chicken that always tasted like a memory of fire. He taught me to tie knots in my skirts and to close the curtains just so, because he liked things neat like a child who tries to be an adult.
"Roman," Neil said one afternoon as sunlight carved thin knives through the tent, "we should find out about the village in the pit again."
"The pit?" I sat up. "What village?"
Roman blinked. "There was a village, down where the stones are eaten by roots. I remember a water jar. I remember—" His voice went small. "I remember bones."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"I wanted to protect you," Roman said.
"You protected me by keeping the truth?" My voice cut. He flinched.
Neil laced his fingers together. "There are many questions. Let's go together. If you are Petra the Empress or Petra the stone, you deserve to choose."
We walked. The Mirror Ruin swallowed our footprints. Where once Roman had pretended a throne, now he was a fox that moved like a tall man; Neil moved like a line of smoke. We descended into a hollow where trees collapsed on old roofs. There were stone houses partially eaten by earth. In a jar, there was the exact spot Neil had said.
"Here," Roman whispered. "We found you right here. You were a stone that glowed." He still spoke of me like a treasure.
I knelt and brushed away the moss and found something that made my throat go hollow: a half skull, a fox's head mangled at one side.
"Who did this?" I breathed.
"Some danger," Neil said. "Some very old thing."
That night I dreamed of a crowd in the dark. Fox faces leaning from roots, eyes like little lamps. They chanted, a rustle like leaves: "Bury them, bury them. Break the tail. Hide the light."
When I woke my hands were closed around a small thin bone. I could taste metal in my mouth. My chest felt lighter and then heavier because when I tried to breathe there was little response—like a bell with muffled sound.
"Your breaths feel small," Neil said. He had watched me like a hawk for days. "Petra, you are shrinking like a candle."
"I feel tired," I admitted. "My chest... I cannot feel my heart sometimes."
"Then you must rest." Roman's tail twined warmly around my shoulders. "We will find a way. There is talk in old stories about wood that calls spirits back. The human world may have things we do not."
We left the Mirror Ruin by a secret stair, the stone moving like a lid opening. The stair dropped into black water. Neil slid in and became a white man. Roman slipped and fell like a child into my arms; he was alive, wet and heavy. For a moment I felt everything—my hands warm with blood, his breath close, the taste of fish on his skin—and I bled enough to feel suddenly stronger.
When we came up out of the water we found a valley, and beyond the valley a small town. People walked and shouted with the noise of ordinary lives. The smell of soap and market smoke hit us like a new sun. It was human length, human pace.
In a small clinic run by Mark Martins—a man with steady hands and better eyes than the rest—we hid. A girl named Kathy Miller, bright and fearless, fussed over me. Mark looked at my pulse, frowned with true worry and called Neil "Dragon" by habit.
"You were in the water for too long," Mark said. "You have lost a lot. You cannot stay on such a journey. Rest. Eat."
Roman sat across from me like a patient child who had eaten too much sugar. "You should rest here," he said.
"If I rest," I whispered, "what becomes of the others we left in Mirror Ruin? What becomes of the foxes and the bones?"
"Then we go back," Neil said, slow and steady. "We find out what carved out their tails and why the pit kept them. We will get help."
We learned pieces. The village in the pit had once been full of foxes—black foxes that had been hunted by a power that called itself Windlord in local myth. People in the town said odd things at night: a child's cry, a whisper on the gate, a smell like old fish. They remembered strange nights where the moon flickered and someone took the bones.
"Who took the bones?" I asked the baker one noon while Roman pretended to want a second loaf.
"There's an old story," the baker said. "They say a man named Grey Farley came in a wind like a hat turned inside out. He wanted the best hides and the strongest tails. He traded for them and he took 'em away. Till folk died and left. He was not a man but a wind with a man's face."
The name stuck like rust. Grey Farley. Wind with a man's face. The more we asked, the more villagers lowered their eyes and nodded too quickly.
"I will speak to him," Roman decided that night by the clinic lantern. He was both fierce and small then, like wet wood that might break or blaze.
"Do not," Neil warned. "If he is what he is, he will blow away your courage."
Roman puffed. "I will not be blown."
We found Grey Farley exactly where the baker said he'd be: under the high stone arch in the market square, counting hides like he was counting fine coins. He wore a cloak that shifted like a breeze over water. His hands were long and the nails dark.
I stood near Roman, my chest a raw place that sometimes forgot to work. He moved like a king who had been caught in his own nets.
"Grey Farley?" I called.
He looked up slowly, smiling like a man who has been expecting a guest. "You called?"
"You took their bones," Roman said. "You took their tails. You left a village buried and made stones from their bodies."
Grey lifted a hand as if sampling air. "I took what I desired. Great things are taken. Trade, my child. Trade is the law of the wide world."
"You made them die," I said.
He laughed. "They thought to run. They dug at their houses and wrapped in dirt. I pulled their tails. They became stones and made the pebble roads. Sad, but necessary. I needed pieces. I build things that live off the other things."
The crowd around the square began to gather. People had been listening. The baker, the market women, children on their fathers' shoulders—we had an audience.
"Stop!" Neil hissed.
"Leave!" Roman tried.
I stepped forward. "No more," I said in the voice I did not know I had. "Restore them. Put back what you took."
Grey's smile became full. He turned his cloak like a flag. "And what if I cannot? What if they wanted beauty more than them? What if you like the stones on the road?"
The crowd's murmur rose.
A woman cried, "They were my kin!" A child clutched at his mother's skirt and whispered about a dead fox that once followed him like a dog.
Grey's eyes shone with cruel light. "You want trial? You want public truth? Very well."
He lifted his arms and called wind like a man calling in a favor. The market square filled with a cold that ran under skin. The villagers pushed back from him, but many stayed like moths drawn to flame.
"You took bones," I said again. "Show where you put them."
"Where is the showman who asks me for bones to be returned?" Grey's laugh turned sharp. "I will perform."
He snapped his fingers. The path of the market came alive: pebbles shifted; a small mound of soil sighed and opened like a mouth; hair stuck up on people's arms.
Grey Farley's punishment was not simple arrest; he had no jail to be put in. The people wanted something to see—something to turn their pain into punishment they could watch. So they demanded a reckoning designed not by law but by the town's blood memory. He would be shamed, he would be forced to undo with hands that stole.
That night the square was full. The baker stood on the steps, the miller with flour on his sleeve, mothers with lanterns, children wide-eyed. They wanted spectacle and justice. They said so to Mark and to Neil and to Roman. Mark, with the steady hand that had mended my ribs, arranged a circle for the gathering. The law of men here was simple: admit, restore, or be undone by the people.
Grey stood at the center with the wind playing him like a puppet. His cloak wanted to drift, but he had pinned it like a proper gentleman to himself with a ribbon of pride.
"Tell us," someone shouted, "where are the fox bones?"
Grey folded onto himself like someone who smelt thunder but yet loved it. "Here," he said, and the wind around him began to show. It carried a whisper of pebble and bone and fox fur. It lifted a pebble and dropped it at his feet. It scrolled rocks like a deck of cards and spilled a dozen or more upon the earth, each a small white thing.
The first punishment began simple: the villagers demanded he bring back one bone per household. If he could not, he would be ashamed. Grey mocked their request, throwing his head back. "You will make me return what I hide?" He clicked his tongue, and the wind shrieked. A gust tore coats from shoulders and laughed with the panic of the crowd. People shrank back. Neil hissed.
"Bring the bones," Roman said. "Now."
Grey scowled. He put his hand into his cloak and pulled out a pouch. In it he had kept things—jewels of memory, brittle feathers of fear. He pulled out one shinbone, pale and curved, and held it up like a prize.
A woman recovered—an old fox-woman in human years—let out a great cry and threw herself to the ground. "That's my child's bone," she screamed. "Where did you find him?"
Grey's face curdled a little like curdled milk. "Trade. I had a map. I paid hands. I promise no one was harmed for my pleasure—"
"You say promises," Roman said, voice small and bright with fire. "You say promises and there are holes where lives should have been."
The crowd pressed closer. The miller, whose brother had been one of the hidden ones, spied the pouch and saw little bones, and his hands changed from workman to judge.
"Make him bring every bone back!" he shouted.
Grey sneered. "You want the whole story? Very well. I will bring them back with my wind."
He raised his arms, and the wind around him grew, warbling like a bell. But this was the first time he misjudged: the more force he used to take from the world, the more the world resisted. The villagers, raw with grief and memory, formed a ring louder than the wind.
"Return them!" they cried.
Grey's face tightened. "And what proof have you that I will?" he asked.
"Your bargain," said Mark calmly, who had been watching from the steps with hands folded. "You bargained with bones. A bargain is a thing that must be kept."
Grey laughed again. "You speak with the authority of mending, doctor. But I break and make my own bargains. Even the sky listens to me. I will show you how small your laws are."
He tried to summon the wind like a big man drawing a sword. The air swirled. Roman answered by standing in front of me. Neil hissed and wrapped his body like a rope around Grey's ankle. The villagers shouted over the wind. Grey's plan was to make the bones scatter like leaves and slam them into his palm and vanish. But there was an irony to theft lived long enough: stolen things will have lodged in places that do not like being moved.
The punishment grew because the town demanded not only the bones but also his humiliation. A punishment must fit the deed: he stole living things and turned them into stone-pebbles. The people wanted him—publicly—to create life with what he had destroyed. They wanted him to undo what he had done, not in private, but under the eyes of those who still remembered the moved ones.
So the crowd agreed on this: Grey Farley must, before them all, return the bones and stitch back the tails, and to do so he must be bound with his own wind until he confessed the route of every bone. They imagined him as a man whose voice would break like glass and whose hands would be forced to build. The town elders arranged the ritual.
Grey's reaction at first was pride: "You think you can bind me?" He scoffed.
Then the first ropes of wind twisted him, and his face froze into shock—he is a wind with a man's face, but wind is shy of being held. The ropes were human-made too: cords of iron in the baker's hands and a ring of willow hammered to force his flow. They pressed them around his arms like collars of night. He struggled; the sound he made was like a seal writhing in sand. People crowded close.
"You dare not," he gasped.
"You stole from us," the baker said. "Take back every bone, or be known as the man who could not honor a word."
Grey's face shifted from arrogance to fury. He stood and said, "I will never—"
Then the woman whose child's bone was at his feet spat in his face. "You will," she hissed. "You will because we will undo you with the smallest and loudest things we own: memory, voice, and each fishbone you put on our roads."
The crowd chanted. It was a loud, ugly song that named each stolen fox and called them: "Return them." In the middle of the chant, Grey's bravado broke like glass.
"Stop! I will—" he began. Pride slid into pleading. "You cannot make me—"
But the willow ring constricted and the ropes pulled him down until he kneeled in the dirt. The first step of punishment was public confession. The crowd would not allow silence to continue. Grey began to say names, but his mouth lied as well as his hands sometimes. He said he sold the tails to keep his mills running, to trade them for spices. The villagers spat and called him liar after liar.
"Confess where you put the rest!" the miller screamed.
Grey's voice became smaller. He had been strong at counts and patterns; numbers were his rule. Under the crowd's eyes he was forced to perform each transaction, to say names and places. With every named place someone else in the crowd recognized, the willow ropes tightened.
When the town recognized a place from his list—a hollow, a field by the second stone arch—people ran and came back bearing pale pebbles. An old woman spooned out a nest of pebbles like eggs and cried, "Here; here; my son's pebble!" A child found one in his pocket that he had been kicking with bare feet and held it up like a flag.
Grey's face shifted. Triumph became terror. He had thought the wind would hide all he took. Instead, the people had been stone-collecting all along. They had been looking inside his shadow.
Pride changed to shock. "No," he whispered. "I cannot—"
He tried to command the breeze to put things right. The wind lashed and tore at garments. Roman, desperate, shouted, "Make them return! Make them remember!"
"Remember yourself," Grey spat, and then the crowd—who wanted him to fix everything—realized that to undo what he had done Grey must give of his own breath. That was the terrible part: the wind had already been letting him take life. Now they demanded he pour himself back into the things he had made. Like blood forced back into a wound, the wind must be coaxed and surrendered.
Grey's denial slid into denial with pleas. "I will go find them. I will find every bone. I will put them back."
"Then do it here!" the baker cried. "Return them now."
He did not find them immediately. The town would let him walk, but with a tether: a ring of willow around his neck that the elders would hold. He would not go alone. The punishment transformed from spectacle to labor. For three days Grey walked with the old men in small parties to the places he named. He dug up the pebbles he had made and the eyes of those who had been lost watched him. Each bone or pebble he touched required a price—a shame, an admission, the reading of the names of the dead.
At first he flared: "This is theft for art!" He tried to maintain dignity. The people spat and called him names. Then his face changed through stages: confident, stunned, furious, denial, then a slow collapse of the will. He could not understand why their anger did not end in a sword. Instead they wanted a story repaired. He had to unlatch his wind and whisper softness back into the pebbles. He had to bend over the stones and blow life into them with breath made small and private. The old women watched; children recorded quietly in their notebooks; men who had lost kin looked on like judges. His attempts failed at first. The pebbles remained pebbles. Then, on the second day, he made a mistake: he stumbled in a field and a pebble popped and rolled into a child's hand—inside it they found the faint image of a fox's paw.
It took him the better part of a week. Each returned piece forced a crack in his pride. Little by little, the pebbles broke and shimmered into bone and fur in the market square where he had first claimed his trade. Grey's reaction went like this: first, he called for the winds to hide him; then he tried to bribe the villagers with gold; then he denied having met them; then he wept, and finally he begged.
At the humiliating center of the punishment he knelt and asked, "Please—please forgive me!"
The crowd answered: "Restore them or be buried in your pebbles."
He begged like a child, hands stretched like a beggar. The crowd watched. Some wept. Some rejoiced. Children pointed. Old women spat. The baker refused to touch his hand even when Grey offered his last coin.
When the last pebble unrolled and a small fox shook itself like a wet dog, the crowd circled and fell silent as if the sound that came next was something religious. The fox was small and quiet, blinking with eyes that did not fully remember sunlight. The woman who had lost her child flung herself on that fox and sobbed until her shoulders shook. The town watched its wounds knit with the slow craft of breath and regret.
Grey's final humiliation was not chains but a task. The town required him to plant a line of willow trees along the edge of the pit and to spend every day of the next year tending those willows by hand, telling the saga of each fox he had stolen. If he failed, the willow circle would snap; then the town would decide how to punish an even greater crime.
Grey tried to stand tall until they planted the first willow. Then he sat and dug, and his face gave off nothing but the desolation of a man out of breath. He spoke his shame aloud and the crowd turned to listen. Pride had gone, and what remained was a small and honest thing: a man with a wind for a garment, hands dirtied by the soil he had once bypassed.
The villagers watched him crumble and regenerate under a dull sun. They hissed and they clapped and they whispered. Children who had once seen nothing but horror now stilled to watch a man learn to plant willows. That was the worst and most public punishment: not the yells or the stones, but having to return the things he stole, hand them to those who loved them, and to witness the softness of the living return.
Grey's final state was not the dramatic collapse with a public speech and a rope, but a small and gritty shame: skin cracked like old leather from wind, eyes like stones smoothed. He begged, then admitted, then wept in front of the very mouths he had preyed on. When the first fox padded out, everyone cried. The crowd took out their grief like a blanket and wrapped it over the town square. Grey pleaded and was turned, piece by piece, into a working man of the square who kept watch on the willows and read the names aloud when needed.
After the willow line grew, time stitched a new pattern into the pit's edge. The foxes that returned were not all the same; some had changed and some still blinked at new days. Roman sat by a woman who had lost a fox and touched the thin ears cautiously. Neil watched, silent.
"Do you regret it?" I asked Roman when we sat together after the ceremonies, watching Grey plant a sapling with hands that trembled.
"All the time," he said simply. "But the world is long, and people's memory is long. We helped with hands, even if at the start we kept things from you."
"Why did you hide?" I asked.
Roman blinked. "I thought I was saving you from a horror story. I wanted you to enjoy a life while we had you. I am sorry."
"Then why did you call me Empress?" I demanded.
Roman's face went bright and foolish. "Because you smiled and called me king and I liked it."
I could not help but laugh. There was a softness in his apology that fit in my bones.
We stayed a long while in the town. Kathy Miller helped with my meals and taught me how to hush to sleep without pretending I breathed. Mark checked my pulse and called me stubborn. Neil tracked rain patterns and made small charts for the miller, and Roman learned to knead bread with the baker with a patience that grew like yeast.
I did not get all memories back. The edges were still rough. But when Kathy said, "You look better now," I could smile and mean it.
At the end, I stood once more at the pit where the fox village had been hidden. The willows we had planted were young and green. The river that had whispered to me in my dream still moved like clear glass.
Roman's tail brushed mine by accident, warm and absurd. Neil lay coiled at my feet.
"You will not hide from me again," I told Roman.
"I won't hide," he said, embarassed.
"And you," I asked Neil.
"I will speak less riddles and more truth," Neil promised.
We walked away from the pit together and I thought of the fox skull, of Grey kneeling, of the willow line. Memory will catch like worms when you hold the hook steady.
Later, as we left the town, I slipped the small fox bone I had found into my pocket. It was not a jewel nor a crown. But when I slid my hand into my pocket, Roman caught my fingers.
"What's that?" he asked.
"A piece of the story," I said.
Roman grinned foolishly. "Don't hide it from me."
"I won't," I promised.
We passed the market where Grey still worked and tended willows like a penitent man. A child tugged on my sleeve and asked in a loud, brave voice that only children have: "Are you Petra the Empress?"
"I am Petra," I said. "And I was once a stone."
The child looked at Roman's long tail and then at me and laughed like someone who has heard a good story.
Neil's mouth moved. "Don't forget. The Mirror Ruin is not a prison if you go together."
"Never alone," I answered, holding Roman's hand.
At night when the town sleeps and the willows lean like old friends, I sometimes take the little bone out and hold it to my chest. I remember the fox faces in shadow, the children's bouncing curiosity, Grey's smallness at the end. The last thing Roman ever said to me before I drifted off into sleep in that curious town was, "You smile like a promise."
And I keep that promise in my pocket like the bone: fragile, stubborn, and oddly warm.
The End
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