Mimic

We call the old gods The Eleven.

We call the demigods The Twelve, though the Mimic Prince is the least of them. Born not from the witch’s tamperings, but of a strange cosmic coincidence. He has the least power of all his siblings, but he makes up for it with his quick wit and cunning. He is the dimmest star among them. He knows this, and he accepts it.

Beautiful things lurk in the darkness between the stars. In his diminished form, there is freedom. He was born without the witch’s chains that so menace his siblings, shifting his shape like the whims of the wind. He lurks in mirrors, dances with mimics, laughs with the haunted wind. He is the jack of all trades, the master of none. He will wear your face and smile. He will celebrate with mimics on the shortest nights of the year.

He is every wrong expectation, every self-laid trap. He is the reflection of the mirror. He is change, whether to be embraced or feared.

And he appeared in the mirror of a Wildclaw’s basement room, once, lurking unseen in reflections and gaps, as he is prone to doing. Her breathing was funny. It would have hitched, if she could cry with her mutated, grotesque swarm of eyes. The shaking of her shoulders is familiar, though. He has seen dragons cry, though he’s never seen much use for tears himself.

This Wildclaw feels familiar, though. Sister, whispers something in his mind. It spurs the Mimic Prince to do something he has never done before.

He steps out from the mirror.

The Wildclaw moves like lightning, and without thinking, he melts into mist. But she does not run forward to slash at him. Instead she stumbles back, cowering behind melting wings. “Stay back.” The stranger (sister) rasps, her hands trembling. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” The Mimic Prince answers, or, at least, he tries to, forgetting that he has no mouth with which to speak. He coalesces into the perfect mirror image of the Wildclaw, his head tilted in idle curiosity. “It’s bold of you to assume you could hurt me.”

And… she pauses. Freezes. Blinks, holds a hand over her heart. “Wait.” She answers quietly. “You aren’t… Illa didn’t make you. So why do you feel like…?”

“Shattered pieces of the same star, perhaps?” Mimic offers. They wear the same body, yet they hold themselves so much differently - one cowering behind her wing, the other’s stance confident but his bearing uncertain. This is… a strange form, indeed. He’s struggling to fully find his balance. “Who’s to say? There are more things in this world than I would ever claim to understand. That’s quite the beauty of it.”

His sister fidgets with a necklace that lingers around her neck. “You really should go.” She says, not unkindly. “Do you know what I am?”

“Hm.” Mimic closes his eyes (tries to - she has so many) in thought, a melodic hum escaping him as he ponders the question. “My sister, a Plagueborn, a Wildclaw, a witch’s daughter?” He supposes, hoping one of those will be right.

“... close enough.” The raptor sighs, sitting down on her bed. Now that she doesn’t look so wary, she mostly just looks tired. “I can’t leave this house. My magic runs too strong. It sickens everything around me. It was nice of you to come visit, but I doubt I can do anything for you.”

“On the contrary!” Mimic grins with a stolen smile. “Perhaps - just perhaps - I can make it go away.”

“My magic?” She prompts quietly, something between tired and afraid. “Wouldn’t that kill me?”

“Wellll, yes.” He shrugs. “I can’t take your magic away. But I can contain it so that it wouldn’t hurt the others around you. Right now you’re an open circuit, leaking magic everywhere. It wouldn’t be that hard to just close up the gaps…”

His sister’s gaze is wary. “Illa’s been trying to do that for years.” She says sharply. “There’s no way you can just fix it overnight. I might not know what you want from me, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

“Please.” Mimic scoffs, his many eyes gleaming as he leans forward to strike the killing blow. “Illa is an idiot. She can’t keep any of her children home. Altair, Moonstone… and now me, her forgotten son.” He offers a grin. “You think she would ever actually give you the ability to leave this place? No way you’re that naive.”

For a long moment, the Plagueborn does not respond. Her hands shake. For a moment, he thinks he might have pushed too far, wondering if she’s about to stay crying again. … but when her voice cuts through the air, it is not sorrowful.

It’s bitter and sharp as a knife.

“Of course I’m not.” She scoffs. “But I don’t have a choice. She’s the only one I can count on. She’s… I’d kill anyone else I tried to turn to for help. Any port in a storm.”

A heavy pause, and a creeping grin. “Any port, you say?” He prompts, sizzling wings dripping acid onto the floor. It sizzles against the wood like a warning.

She rises to her feet, eyeing him warily. “... yes.” She says, steeling her voice. She’s trying not to sound afraid. Admirable. “Any port.”

The Mimic Prince brightens like a predatory thing, extending a hand. “Give me your name,” He says, a smile playing on his lips. It’s meant to be reassuring. The scariest part is that it actually is. “And I’ll make it go away.”

She sees the trap. The myriad traps that he’s laid. He doesn’t know if she knows the power of a name, she’s carefully avoided saying hers so far. If nothing else, she must have caught how vague his promise was, to make ‘it’ go away with no true clarification on what it was.

He looks into her fractal eyes, and realises that she is too tired to care. She extends a hand, and as he takes it, he can sense the weariness that he many years have taken on her. “Pandemic.” She breathes her name, and her soul opens up like a storybook before him. All the loneliness, all the stubborn regret, all the days spent staring out the window. All the days where she had cherished her younger Earth-born sister but refused to ask something so selfish as to stay with her-

All the bitterness and love. Oh, the love. The sheer exhaustion that led her to putting her life in the hands of a brother she’s never met, just in the hope of this ending one way or another.

What a trusting fool.

The Mimic Prince reaches out, and plucks her name from her. There’s resistance, and for a moment, her eyes are lost. Almost gently, he sighs. He can’t not take it. Only by offerings can he gain the power to actually make wishes come true. It isn’t merely transactional; the sacrifice itself is what enables him to lead his lost sister through her bedroom mirror.

It flickers like a veil. In the space between spaces, he collects all her wayward magic, all the plague and rot and parasitic, stubborn magic. He collects it in his claws, crystalizes it into something small and scarlet, and tucks the gem inside her, in the hollow of her chest right next to her heart.

There. That will collect her magic, keep it from leaking out to everything around her. The Wildclaw is unresponsive, from the dreamlike shock of losing her name and the strange place between places, from the warmth of a new synthetic organ that he’s pressed painlessly into her chest.

It’s quite a lot for a mortal mind to bear all at once. She is not mortal, luckily, but that does not make her entirely immune to the strain. “It doesn’t have infinite capacity. You’ll need to use your magic to drain it, okay?” He’s shifted into the form of a Veilspun, giving her nose a gentle nudge to grab her attention.

She doesn’t answer verbally, not at first, but the ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “... thank you.” She lands on eventually, her voice confused and wary and so, so grateful. What a fool, putting all her trust into the Mimic Prince. And Mimic has always had a soft spot for the fools. They are his kin, all things considered. Her, even moreso.

He drops them back into reality, on the right side of the mirror, somewhere where the sun shines down upon them and figures of windmills churn in the distance. She gasps, preparing for the worst, for the world around her to turn dead and sick and tainted- but it does not. Her horror slowly subsides to merely caution, then to a quiet hope.

“You kept your word.” She says quietly. “Why? There’s a price to this, isn’t there?”

He shrugs. “Not beyond what you gave me. A name is more than enough.” He could abuse the power of a true name, of course. He could create invisible puppet strings, could shift her fate without her ever knowing, could nudge her decisions with all the subtlety of a spider…

… but there is no reason. The world is a cruel place, and he craves change by nature. To someone braced for betrayal, the most subversive thing, then, would be kindness. He closes his eyes and lets the old Name dissolve into ash. “It didn’t suit you, anyways.” He shrugs. “A bit insulting, really.”

The Wildclaw closes her eyes. “It was… It started with a P?” She hums thoughtfully, almost at peace. “I remember Moonie called me Pan. I’m glad I still remember that.” She raises her face to the sky, and folds her hands over that hollow in her ribcage where the gift of the Mimic Prince lives, collecting her magic with a rhythmic pulse that feels like a second heartbeat.

She can’t bring herself to mind. It’s a bit eerie, but… Plague always is evolution, in the end. Her body is nothing sacred. It has always been an uneasy ally at best.

“Pan.” Says the Wildclaw, tasting the name on her lips. “... Panacea.” She pauses, the wind picking up as she turns to glance at her brother. “Do you have a na-?”

But as she turns, he is already gone, the faintest chill still lingering on the wind. Her youngest brother, she supposes, is not very eloquent when it comes to goodbyes. She smiles faintly, and can bring herself to accept that.

She thinks they might just meet again.