Sowilo’s Mirror

Some objects hold things. This one holds a person. 

You know me by now. I don’t shock easily. Seen too much. But the first time I stood before Sowilo’s mirror, I found myself checking my own reflection like it was a stranger. 

It’s glass now. Full-length – tall enough to look a grown man in the eye. It didn’t start as glass. It started as water. 

In Galicia, when the Moorish occupation of Spain was at its height, a man named Gil left a crust of bread and sip of honey to the mouras of the ancient gateway. That was the way on feast days, San Xoán above all. Young men and women, looking for love, hope, success. Gil’s dream was a wife, children, a life played out in the peace of his farm and the beauty of the coastline. 

Sowilo noticed. 

She’d say later, she’d watched him before. Liked the curl of his black hair, the shade of green to his eyes in the sunlight. She left the keystone of the gateway and struck a pose beside the nearby fonte, combing her long hair, sending threads of enchanted colour towards him. 

A catch.

They fell in love, of course. Lived, loved harder, had a child – a daughter. Born against the backdrop of a midnight storm on the road. Wolves circling. Him beating them back with a stick while she laboured in the rain. The child survived. They all did. 

Ten years of perfect happiness. But then fate intervened and without going into the detail of it, just know they lost her. Separated by a demon and a destroyed gateway. Stones scattered. Her on one side, them on the other. 

Sowilo set her purpose then, a thousand year quest to rebuild, get back to the child. 

And Gil? 

He slowly declined. Neglected crops withered, farm stock died. A broken heart for the daughter he searched and begged for, never to be returned to him. Fell to drink and violence. Looking for revenge on anyone he chose. Murder. 

A human stuck in a small stretch of time. And as he aged, so Hell beckoned to his soul.

Their marriage died before he did. She found him beside the fonte poisoned by the black bile of his own destruction. She saw the glimmer of the Red River in her minds eye. 

So, she did a desperate thing. As he breathed his last, she cast his body into the water where they’d first met, hoping to make him enchanted like herself, and so cheat the death sentence.

It could never work. The Moor who had first bound her to the gate, rose from the the water. Kind, and firm.
The power wasn’t hers. But fondness that old counts for something, so he ruled no Hell. The DeadLands instead, and the slow making of a Trickster — with a chance of eventual redemption.

Then, as a concession, he stilled the fountain, gathered a portion of its water, and folded it into a hand-mirror. So she could watch Gil’s progress. Guard him. Try to reform the love they had by feeding him with the hope of his daughter’s return. Anything to make that chance real. 

She has since worked that little glass up to a full-length one, and the two of them stand on opposite sides of it to speak. A window into each others’ worlds. She cannot cross. He cannot step out.

I’ve stood before it. I saw shapes of myself that I thought were lost – and a promise of future forms. A view of truth and lies. 

Not a door – yet.