The world looks so strange, reflected in a wall of ice: partly fractured, partly re-formed and re-interpreted, hypnotic, unrecognisable and fascinating: like looking in a broken mirror.
Break the ice; return truth and goodness in an avalanche.
I pressed my hand against the wall and watched the cracks begin to form. The Snow Queen stood watching, her silent approval flashing momentarily across the impassionate face.
“Kay, what are you doing?”
I remembered that voice: Gerda. Not just my childhood friend: the truest soul I had met. It shone in her eyes.
“Gerda, you’re here!”
I turned and ran into her embrace.
“You’re safe here in the mountains with me. Quick, we can rid the effect of that evil mirror once and for all,”
It is said that Satan’s mirror displayed all the ugliness of the World but none of its beauty. When it shattered on the ground, evil glass shards showered the Earth contaminating the sight of all who encountered them.
Those who had once been my friends, at the bottom of the mountain,had, themselves, been warped from those fragments and become cracked and treacherous as the ice wall itself.
Only Gerda seemed to have remained free. Those eyes!
She looked at the ice-wall, towering above us, holding back a great cathedral of snow from falling onto the town below.
“An avalanche, Kay? You’ll kill them all! You can’t!”
“This is right, Gerda.”They’d want me to. We can’t help them now but that mirror will be buried with them.”
Gerda bit her lip. “Look at me,” she pleaded.
She looked deeply, so deeply, for the good. As always.
Those eyes! Deep, true and…..
I recoiled in horror.
“No! Not you! Not you too!”
There it was, clearly: in her eyes, a shard of glass.
“Stay away from me!” I yelled, running towards the Snow Queen’s unmoving form.
“Kay,” begged Gerda, holding back her tears. ” Look closer!”
I couldn’t really look away. Not from her. I looked closer, and wept: wept at how pure, evil had appeared to be.
The shard in her eye was not hers:it was in the reflection of my own eye.
My sight cleared. The Snow Queen scattered into a million shards of ice.
“There’s still glass in your eye,” Gerda gasped.
I understood.That mirror would always be there, trying to misguide and control, but it had lost its power. My heart had seen through it and rejected it. I smiled.
“Gerda, you’ve saved me! Thank you!”
We returned to town, hand in hand, and I saw, in my fractured friends, passion for truth and justice, humour,warmth and,yes, the purest,most sacred of loves, burying evil, humbly and falteringly, one heartbeat at a time.
The World looks strange in a wall of ice: partly fractured, partly reformed, hypnotic, unrecognisable and fascinating: much like your reflection in the eyes of one who loves you.
Submitted by: Stephen Andrews