There exist places where the walls between worlds grow thin. Places like this one, where two villages press together like lips on opposite sides of a glass: Renna-tal and Renna-ba, both perched on the edge of the lake called Mirror. Built in the same precise spot, but a world apart, the villages are fraternal twins. Akin, but not the same.
“Look outside, Adya,” said Mama. “Do you know what I think?”
Adya looked. Blue sky and sun, with clouds floating sleepily in place, which meant no wind to ripple the water… She started to bounce.
“Is it a mirror day?”
Her mothers shared a grin. “Let’s go find out!”
They walked along the lake shore, Adya sometimes running ahead, sometimes darting back to tug her mothers along by the hands. When they reached the first bend in the shoreline and turned, as always, to look back at Renna-tal, Adya gasped and pointed, her grin stretching wide and bright as the lake itself.
“Look! There it is!”
There, reflected in the still water, was the village of Renna-ba.
“Shall we play spot-the-differences?” asked Mama. “What do you see?”
Adya always started with the easy ones. “Renna-ba has got its walls, and we don’t.” Renna-tal only had its single guard tower, but Renna-ba had been sheltered by walls of tall, sharpened logs for longer than Adya had been alive.
“And?”
“Renna-ba’s clock tower is faded and always tells the same time. But ours, Renna-tal’s, tells the right time and it’s prettier.
“That’s right. We painted the clock tower this spring, remember? What else do you notice?”
Adya’s face screwed up as she studied the scene, listing off everything she could find. Clear skies and sparse, wispy clouds flecked the lake’s surface, contrasting the fat puffy clouds above Adya’s head. Renna-tal had a merchant barge docked today, while Renna-ba had more fishing boats. Folks of both villages waved to their reflected counterparts.
“And what else?”
“That’s all!” she declared, her short attention span exhausted. “Let’s go!”
Abandoning the game, she skipped along the lakeside, loving how her skirt fluttered, the sound of gravel crunching under her feet. And in the lake… Oh! She had company! A boy—no, a girl, despite the trousers—likewise skipping, mirrored in the water. A girl from Renna-ba. Adya slowed, and the other girl skipped on a few paces before noticing she’d gotten ahead and darting back to where Adya waited.
The other girl knelt by the water, and Adya did too, the hem of her skirts dragging in the mud. The girl looked near to Adya’s age, her hair long and red-gold to Adya’s black, with a scarf of pine green draped lazily over her shoulders. She had a friendly smile. Could they be friends?
Adya reached carefully for the water’s surface, and the other girl mirrored her movements until their fingertips looked almost to touch…
As they brushed the water, ripples spread. Disappointment rippled through Adya, too, until she noticed ripples off to the left, and then the right, ripples dancing everywhere. A game! She joined in, laughing. When the water eventually cleared, she found that the other girl had waited for her.
“I’m Adya,” she said on impulse. Then, louder, “Adya.”
Other than reflections, the fisher-folk said, the only thing that carried through the water was sound.
The girl from Renna-ba pointed at herself and spoke, but what reached Adya was muffled, distorted, like words heard underwater. It sounded like “Eydi,” which might have been her repeating Adya’s own name back at her, but it would serve well as a name for her new friend.
“Come on!” Adya cried, springing to her feet. She resumed skipping along the lakeside with Eydi as her reflection. The girls matched their pace to each other, step for step, giggling when they stumbled or got out of sync, and those giggles echoed across two worlds.
In the winters, the lake iced over, separating Renna-tal and Renna-ba for cold, lonely months. The people of Renna-tal retreated inside to knit and sew, to mend and craft, to tell stories. So they passed the time, huddled around warm hearths, until spring came and the ice melted. Until fishing boats could set out again, and they could greet their neighbors in the lake.
These dark days dragged by with agonizing slowness for Adya, who grew restless when trapped indoors. This winter, though, Adya had a special project that sped along the cold days and long nights. She hurried through her chores so she could practice. As the days lengthened again, she worked harder, and also began to watch, to wait. She was full to bursting with the waiting, a seed ready to explode into life.
Because each spring, there came a day when the water was finally free of ice and the weather was fine and calm on both sides, and the people of two villages gathered to dance.
It was Adya’s favorite day of the year, better by far than the midsummer feast or the harvest festival. It was the returning of the sun, the returning of joy. “Our reward for surviving winter,” Mother liked to say, which Adya understood to mean surviving the deadly boredom. She’d never lived through a winter (or any season) so hard that survival was in question. It was enough to be rewarded for her patience.
Finally, finally, Mama announced: “Tonight, Adya. The spring dance will be tonight.”
When Adya joined the musicians on the barge, she half expected someone to send her away, to tell her she was too inexperienced, but they welcomed her aboard with smiles and bumped elbows. She took out her flute. This was the instrument she’d spent the winter learning: the small joy that had pulled her through slow winter days in anticipation of this greater joy. Ever since last spring, when she’d spotted Eydi in the water playing the fiddle with glorious abandon, Adya had longed to join in the music herself.
The schoolteacher cued them to start. The music started slowly, like the first melting of snow, then swelled into a tumbling rush, and Adya was in it: caught up in the melody and also part of it, making it happen. She was the music of spring, the rhythm for the dance.
The people of two villages met in the shallows, twirling and splashing in their best finery, delighting in each other’s bright-colored reflections, laughing as they tried to align with each other and match the steps of their dances. Bright skirts swirled, a riot of bright reds, yellows and purples, on the Renna-tal side. The folk of Renna-ba waved long, flowing scarves of pink and green like extensions of their own bodies. Musicians played on both sides. Sound from Renna-ba came through muffled, as sound through water always is, but beautiful nonetheless. Over the generations, they’d learned to echo each other in counterpoint, eerie yet beautiful.
Adya found Eydi’s reflection and waved wildly. Her mirror-friend grinned back and gave a flourish of her bow. The people danced and sang and played, celebrating the season of renewal. Together.
As the sun set, Renna-tal lit a bonfire to honor the Sunbearer. The fire burned all night, illuminating the dancers on the lake. Renna-ba’s dancers took up torches with colored flames, sparking green and red and yellow through some trick only their neighbors knew, their own ritual of the seasons. Through the whole dark night, the people of both villages danced and made music until Adya’s lips hurt, yet she never stopped grinning. At dawn, in Renna-tal they laid a table to welcome the Sunbearer home. Exhausted yet energized, Adya feasted on fresh grilled fish with tender early greens, soft herb-laden cheeses, and spicy-sweet meringues. She got her first taste of honeyed wine before falling asleep in Mother’s lap.
That was a good day, one she would cherish in her memories. A good start (Adya hoped, as she drifted off) for a very good year.
Eydi held her breath and dove down, down, down. Adults said it wasn’t possible to dive all the way to Renna-tal, the village reflected in the lake, but Eydi figured, just because no one had managed a thing before didn’t mean it was impossible. Deep-diving was a rite of passage in Renna-ba, maybe for that reason.
It wasn’t that she wanted to leave her home, but things always looked a little bit better in Renna-tal. Their boats a little larger, clothes a little richer, life a little easier than it was here in Renna-ba. The shores always a brighter green. Or so it appeared during the afternoons when she sat by the shore, her foraging of bittercress and wild garlic forgotten as she lost herself in the reflections on the lake.
It was chill, down this deep, leeching the heat from her body. The water, so mirror-sharp on its surface, grew murky in its depths. She kicked, pushing ever deeper, until her lungs burned too hot and the water burned too cold and in one smooth motion she flipped, now kicking up, up, up, arms stretching overhead toward the watery sun…
Maybe this was the key: that Renna-tal was never there to find in the bottom of the lake, but up above. The desperate ache in her lungs felt like hope. If there was a gateway, despite what everyone said, then surely it existed not in the depths, but at the surface itself, that elusive boundary between water and air, a space that was real and yet impossible to exist within. Maybe if she swam for it, reached for the sun which might be that other sun… Maybe if she believed with all her might…
She broke the surface, gasping with the shock of it, blinking water from her eyes. She turned to face the shore, already knowing where she was, because surely that other village would feel different, wouldn’t it?
“Good one, Eydi!” one of the younger children called from the raft. “You were down there forever. Bet you almost had it!”
Crystal blue sky spread above, cursedly empty, not a cloud to be seen. The fields looked sad even from this distance, all mottled green and brown as the barley plants bowed under the drought and the red-belly beetle infestation.
And there was the village, her village, with the paint fading on the broken clock tower . Blue and gray flags fluttered at every doorway, small prayers for rain.
“Eydi!” A voice called from the shore. “All you kids, come on back now! You know you’re not supposed to stray.”
So the little troop reluctantly paddled back while Eydi, shivering now, pulled on her dry clothes. On reaching the shore, her father sent the others home, then turned to Eydi with troubled eyes.
“Haven’t I told you, minnow, not to go doing that? You’ll give the others ideas, and someone will get hurt.”
“I’m sorry. I just wished…”
“You wish for things to be better than they are? Don’t we all, now.”
This didn’t feel like her parents’ usual scoldings. “Is something wrong, Papa?”
He glanced around, then lowered his voice to tell her, “We got word that raiders hit the village of Artol, just over the hills. They’re getting bolder. We’re not telling the little ones, but you’re old enough now, Eydi, to help keep them safe and close. Just in case. If any of us venture out, it should be for food, not…” he gestured at the water, “…games and fancies.”
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
She stood a little straighter, trying to be grown-up—trying to be brave—and her father clasped her shoulder.
“No, I’m sorry. You should be playing games—Great Lady Sky knows I dove enough times trying to reach Renna-tal when I was your age. But however much we love our mirror-neighbors, we can’t touch them. And they can’t help us when…” He trailed off, sighed deep and heavy like a stone plunged into the lake. “It’s hard right now, little minnow, but hard times always end. We’ll pull through, and Lady willing, there’ll be time for games again.”
“I should go back to my foraging, shouldn’t I?” There was little enough else to eat. “I’ll stay close, I promise.”
So she walked back along the shore, pausing when she found a patch of edible greens or a likely spot to dig mussels. As she worked, she hummed unconsciously. It was a song from last year’s festival, and her memory added the wavering counterpoint of the musicians of Renna-tal. She tried to keep her eyes on her feet, not to be distracted, but when she glanced up at the lake, its surface had grown dim and cloudy, nothing like the blue sky overhead. It must be raining, she thought, in Renna-tal. Rain they could have sorely used here.
There’d be no visit from her mirror-friend Adya today. But even if there were, her father was right. They might be pressed up against each other, but they could never touch. They might be fond of each other, but they were each alone.
This was her village, her people, her home. To get through these times, they’d have to rely on each other, and no one else.
Adya knew that their neighbors in Renna-ba were in a drought. The villages’ reflections had grown offset, unsettling to the eye, a sign that the water level had fallen in Renna-ba. The weather in Renna-tal, on the other hand, had been wet and wretched, shrouding the lake in fog. Days often passed without glimpses of Renna-ba.
Finally there came a clear, dry evening, and Adya and her mothers walked the lake-shore as dusk, wearing boots against the mud. Adya craned her neck, looking back. Just a peek, to assure her all was well…
But the lake was glowing with an orange light. Sunset, she thought—yet oddly, it grew brighter as the sky overhead dimmed.
“What could that be…?”
Oh. Oh, no.
Renna-ba was burning.
Adya screamed. Her mothers shouted, and folks rushed from the village, crowding close to see. The reflections were dark and chaotic, the people in the lake back-lit and obscured by burning buildings, but clearly people were running—fleeing, chasing. Shouts echoed, piercing the deeper rumble of crackling flames.
“Raiders,” someone said, and Adya shuddered, curling into Mama’s side.
“We knew times had grown hard over there, but I never imagined the extent of it,” her mother said softly.
“If we’d known, what difference would it make?”
Adya knew this was true. The lake was a mirror, not a portal. They couldn’t send their neighbors aid, nor rush to their defense, no matter how badly they wanted to. In the aftermath, they couldn’t shelter refugees. But Adya’s heart rebelled against this.
Eydi.
“We have to do something,” she said. Folks made sympathetic noises, poor innocent child, and her cheeks heated. “We can’t just stand here and watch them burn.”
“On the contrary, sweetling, that is what we must do.” Mama wrapped a strong arm around Adya’s shoulders. “We’ll watch and bear witness, and I know it’s hard, I know it doesn’t feel like enough, but that is not nothing. We can’t prevent this, but we can make sure it’s remembered.”
So Adya stood with her mothers and the rest of her village, and she watched Renna-ba burn. The shouting eventually faded until she could hear the crackle of flame, the groans of falling beams. She watched her neighbors’ home burn as she shivered in the damp, smelling only moss and muck.
It was the longest night of her life. She began it as a child, but somewhere in those long, dark hours, she became an adult.
By morning, the lake showed only ash and ruin.
Three months later, the first family left Renna-tal. They lived across from Adya and her family, and she watched them load up a wagon with their belongings. When Adya’s mothers went to talk with the parents, she went too.
“Why are you going?” she asked the kids while the adults talked in low, serious tones.
“Papa says there are better opportunities in the city,” the older girl answered.
“Opportunities for what?”
“Lots of things,” the girl said, which meant she didn’t know. She scuffed at the ground with one toe. “I think I’ll like it there.”
“Will you come back?”
“Oh, sure. Eventually, I’m sure we will.”
Adya watched them drive away. Mother squeezed her hand, and Mama stood behind her, arms wrapped around her shoulders, and planted a kiss on her hair.
Adya knew: they weren’t coming back.
Their departure was the breaching of a dam. Another family left a month later, then another, and within a year, the trickle had become a flood. They all had reasons for leaving: a new business venture, or caring for a distant relative, or seeking a more healthful climate by the sea. No one said that the loss of Renna-ba was the cause.
No harm had come to Renna-tal that awful night—not directly. Their villages had never intersected, never traded, never even spoke to each other. Yet everything had changed. The fisher-folk still took their boats out, as was necessary, but with no reflections to wave to, they grew quiet and grim, and even the fish tasted of sorrow. Adya spent more time at home, keeping to the village if she had to go out, avoiding the lake shore and its reflected destruction. Her mothers whispered to each other late at night, when they thought Adya was asleep.
“Should we?”
“Not yet.”
And Adya lay awake and wondered: could more than light and sound pass through that boundary? Could despair reach through, too?
The years dragged by, winter after winter piling over them like layers of dirty snow, interrupted by summers that were warmer but no more welcome. The village of Renna-tal became known as a sober, joyless place. Locals didn’t celebrate the harvests. They no longer danced and made music to welcome the spring.
It wasn’t something they discussed or decided; the seasons changed, and no one ever said, “It’s time for a festival,” and so they simply didn’t.
One morning Adya rose—late, she’d been sleeping later and later these days—to the rich smell of buttery hotcakes and berries, a treat Mama hadn’t made since before. Her mothers were sitting silent at the table, waiting for her, breakfast untouched.
“Good morning, Adya,” Mother said.
“No.” Adya froze in the doorway. “No, we can’t.”
“Adya,” said Mama gently. “We love Renna-tal as much as you do. It’s where we watched you grow up, your first words, your first steps. The first time…”
She trailed off.
“The first time I saw Renna-ba in the lake?” Adya finished, and her mothers tensed. “We never say its name anymore. Renna-ba! Renna-ba! Why don’t we say it?”
“It’s not that we want to leave, but that our home is already gone. This isn’t a healthy place to be anymore. We know you feel that too, Adya.”
“There’s no future here,” Mama said. “You’re practically grown now, and there’s no music, no dancing—hardly any friends, no good work—nothing a young woman should have. You—we—deserve something better. We deserve hope.”
Adya’s chest hurt, it was so tight. She couldn’t take a full breath. “What about our neighbors? What about what they deserve?”
For the first time in years, she let herself think of Eydi’s name. Adya didn’t know if her friend had survived that night. And if she had, what had become of her? Adya could never find out, and the not-knowing killed something inside her. But to abandon this place, to abandon her? That would be worse.
“Renna-ba is gone,” Mother said sharply. “It’s terrible, and yes, they deserved better. But we’re not serving them by staying here.”
“We’re not serving them by leaving! You taught me about bearing witness and remembering. You said that was the most important thing we could do.”
Softly, Mama said, “We did bear witness, sweetling. And we’ll remember them no matter where we go.”
She held out a hand, but Adya hesitated. What Mama was saying made sense, and yet she couldn’t accept it. Being somewhere else, without the lake and its grim reminder, would make it too easy to forget.
“Their memory shouldn’t be a chain around our ankles, Adya,” Mother said. “You’ll see. We’ll be happier. We can live again.”
“I’m happy now, right here,” Adya snapped. Her mothers exchanged a look, Really?, and she knew what was coming next. “Don’t you tell me how I feel!”
She ran out the door, brushing past their outstretched hands.
She kept running, go, go, go, blinded by tears that refused to fall, until suddenly the ground softened under her feet, and she was on the lake-shore. No! Anywhere but here. She spun, desperate for another refuge.
“Adya? What’s wrong?”
She blinked her vision clear. Dale, one of the few young people left who was nearly her age. The closest thing she had to a friend.
“My mothers want to leave,” she wailed.
He took her hand, guided her to an abandoned house with a garden not quite gone to wilderness yet, and they sat together on a bench. Most plants in Renna-tal grew stubby and grief-twisted these days, but the unpruned vines gave them some privacy.
“Tell me,” he said.
It spilled out of her: the dreaded announcement, ensuing argument, and after that all her fears and buried griefs. Dale held her hand and listened.
“I don’t want to go,” she finished. Settled now, no longer wailing in adolescent protest, but reasoned and firm. She let the words out like a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “This is my home, and I can’t leave it.”
“I don’t want to either,” he said. “My parents keep talking about it. If your family goes, I’m sure mine will follow.”
She looked at him, then. The skinny boy she’d once played hide-and-seek with was filling out into adulthood, his cheeks rough with stubble. Adya liked him—not loved, no, but he was kind enough to make a good partner, and stubborn enough, like her, to stay. They were young for it, but not too young, and under the circumstances…
There were worse foundations for a life.
Adya met his eyes. “What if we stayed, together?”
So they stayed.
Their joining, the first wedding since that day, took place without festivity. Soon afterward, they watched their parents ride away.
Adya’s mothers promised to visit; if Adya needed them, they would come back at once. But Adya saw the new lightness in them as they prepared to go, and realized how bleak her family had become, how Mother in particular was hollowed out with grief. They’d talked about leaving as if it were for Adya’s sake, but she saw now that it was for their own, and she couldn’t begrudge it.
Renna-tal remained, and so did Adya and her new husband, but that was the best anyone could say of it. Abandoned houses of departed families sagged from neglect. The paint on the clock tower, once their great pride, peeled and flaked. Adya knew someone ought to repaint it, but no one did, and neither did she.
Strangers arrived from time to time, announcing their plans to lift the village up to its former prosperity, as if all the people of Renna-tal lacked was ambition. Those people never stayed long.
Adya took up trade as a cartwright, a good, useful profession that kept her eyes on the ground. Yet she felt a restlessness that would not ease. She and her husband talked about children from time to time, circling the topic like vultures. Other villagers offered her their unsolicited opinions on it. A village without children has no future, they said, but also, This is a cursed place, and no good will come to children born here. Adya didn’t believe in curses, but she knew in her heart, this was an unhealthy place to raise a child.
Besides, what would she tell a child? That they once had neighbors in the lake, and now those neighbors were gone, and with it their own future? Would she teach her child that other village’s name? Or would she be like the rest and say, We don’t go to the lake, and never say why?
One day in the sticky heat of summer, her restlessness swelled to unbearable levels. She paced her workshop, taking up her tools and setting them down again. She didn’t want to eat, couldn’t bear to sleep. Driven by desperation, she did something she had not done in a decade: she searched through her chest of old belongings and, from the very bottom, she drew out a thin wooden box. Her old flute.
She hadn’t played it since… well, since before. Holding it now, remembering, made her realize the reason for her unease: today was the anniversary of that dreadful night.
We bore witness, but now we won’t even think their name. Our neighbors deserved better.
Adya would do better, for once.
Eydi took long lakeside walks in the evenings to stretch her aching muscles. She’d thought she was used to hard labor from the farms, the easiest place for refugees to find work. But the labor of rebuilding was another kind entirely, and it tested muscles she’d never known she had.
It was good work. She wouldn’t trade it for anything. And yet.
When she and her parents fled the burning of Renna-ba, they’d found their first shelter in a neighboring town. They’d tried to settle there, to make a home… but it never felt right, and not only because their hosts’ generosity eventually wore thin. As they moved from place to place, never staying long, her parents assured her that this was how all refugees felt, and that time would make the unbelonging easier to bear.
It might have been true. But something larger was missing, and Eydi knew what.
The world kept moving forward, as it always did, and eventually times had grown less dire. She’d drifted, taking work where she could, and searching, always searching for something to fill the absence that hid just out of sight at the edges of her vision. She peered into every pond, every pane of glass, every cup of wine, but never found it. The sound of music made her weep.
She wasn’t the only one. When a few other survivors from Renna-ba announced they were going back, Eydi didn’t hesitate.
They’d rushed to the lake on the first clear day. They found Renna-tal still there, but… changed. Grayer than before, quieter, and no one came to greet them. That broke her heart, those early days, and she’d almost fled again. The others persuaded her to wait, and try, and see.
But days of labor became weeks became months, and still no welcome came from their old neighbors, though Eydi walked the shores every evening, often with her young daughter in tow.
“See? That’s Renna-tal, the village in the lake, our mirror neighbors.”
Her daughter asked, innocently, “Where’s all the people?”
And Eydi, gazing out at that mournful reflection, had no answer. Could their neighbors no longer see them, reflected in the lake? Or had they truly forgotten to look?
Feeling wild and reckless, Adya grabbed her flute and went to the lake.
She ran along the shore, the path now overgrown and hard to follow, familiar yet strange in the way of places long missed, but finally she found the good sitting rock where she used to stop with her mothers and play spot-the-differences.
There was no more joy in that old game, but she settled on the stone anyway. Keeping her eyes to the spot where water met shore, she lifted the flute and played an old folk dance. A festival song in the tempo of a dirge. She poured out all her frustrated grief, all her longing for a past that was gone forever. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, but would not fall.
In her memory came an answering harmony: singing, equally slow, but a brighter key—and wavering as if through deep water.
Wait. It wasn’t just memory. What was she hearing? Startled, Adya forgot herself and looked at the lake.
She looked, and she stared.
In the shallows, a woman waved at her, grinning so wide it cut off her song. A child—a child!—clung to her leg. And beyond…
The reflected shores were green again. Where the ashy ruins of Renna-ba once stood, there was a solid new pier. Builders were climbing over the frames of half-built houses.
The woman looked older than Adya, but that might have been the fault of long hardship; her face was thin and tough, her red-gold hair faded by the sun. The light in her shining eyes struck a chord in Adya’s memory, though, and the child had a familiar look. If they took after their mother…
“Eydi?”
The other woman grinned wider, hugging the child, and tears streamed down her face. She waved eagerly and called to people Adya couldn’t see. More reflections joined her, long-missed faces lit with joy.
Adya was crying, too. She cupped her hands and shouted, “Everyone, come and see! Our neighbors have come home!”
She started playing again, this time at the proper, cheerful tempo. As her joyful tears fell and rippled in the water, her neighbors in the lake began to dance.
Jo Miles writes optimistic sci-fi and fantasy, including the Infinite Pantry cozy fantasy series and The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Uncanny, and more. Jo lives in Maryland, where they serve the whims of their two cats. Sign up for updates at jomiles.com
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