Through the Looking
Glass
Idol of Glass, the
third book in my Looking Glass Gods
trilogy, reveals the significance of the series title in a way that Idol of Bone and Idol of Blood only hinted at. If you’ve read the first two books in
the story, you’ll know that mirrors are an important element in the magic of
this world.
Fantasy and science fiction are full of stories about
“mirror worlds” in which we all have doppelgangers who are our exact opposites.
And usually, they’re evil opposites, as in the famous Star Trek episode,
“Mirror, Mirror,” where we meet the evil Spock and Kirk. Perhaps the concept of
the mirror world being intrinsically evil comes from the superstition that
left-handedness is evil, and therefore reflections, which flip our perception
of right and left, would be the ultimate evil. Or maybe it’s about the “evil”
of vanity.
One of the earliest examples of a mirror being connected to
evil in literature is the mirror in Snow White, in which the Evil Queen seeks
to hear only the truth she wants to hear: that’s she’s the fairest in the land.
The mirror in that story represents female vanity—as if vanity were the
exclusive domain of women, and as if a woman who admired her own reflection were
the epitome of evil. But it was also a sort of scrying tool that let the Evil
Queen seek her nemesis.
Scrying, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, is an
ancient method of divination in which the diviner stares into a reflective
surface, such as a crystal ball, water, or a mirror. In modern witchcraft, it’s
often done using the reflection of a dark mirror (a glass painted black on the
back instead of silver). The idea is to look deep into the darkness of the
reflection until you begin to see visions, whether of future events, or of
other answers you’re seeking.
Anyone who’s ever attended a slumber party has probably
engaged in scrying without even knowing it. Standing in front of a mirror in a
candlelit bathroom chanting “Bloody Mary” is supposed to give you a glimpse the
legendary apparition. Though exactly who she is and why you’d want to see her,
I’ve never been sure. She seems fairly mean. A divination ritual that probably
influenced the legend involved staring into a handheld mirror while holding a
candle and walking backwards up a flight of stairs. This would allow a young
woman to see the face of her future husband in the glass—or maybe the face of
ghoul, which meant she would die young and unmarried. (Probably by tripping
while walking backward up a flight of stairs holding a mirror and a candle.)
Despite its dubious uses for hapless young women, scrying
has a long tradition in both magical practice and paranormal fantasy. It
definitely plays a part in Looking Glass
Gods, as does the possibility of seeing another world through the mirror’s
glass and traveling through it to the other side—which may not be so nice.
Idol of Glass
Looking Glass Gods
Book 3
Jane Kindred
Genre: Dark fantasy with erotic
and romantic elements/LGBTQ
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Date of Publication: October 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-161922-373-8
ASIN: B0118ZFO4W
Number of pages: 268
Word Count: 91,000
Cover Artist: Kanaxa
Book Description:
Madness didn't destroy her; atoning for it might.
Ra has ruined everything. Returning to life through “renaissance” was her first mistake. Magical excess was her second. Now she must face the consequences of her reckless conjuring. Her beloved Ahr is dead by her hand, and the comfort she’d found in gender-rebel Jak seems lost to her forever.
Ra takes solace in punishment—and in communion with her punisher, the mysterious and merciless MeerShiva. But Shiva has spun a skein of secrecy over centuries—secrets about Ra’s origins and the origins of the Meer themselves. And as the secrets begin to unravel, someone else’s magic is at work from the hidden realm. Someone with the ability to redraw the fabric of the world itself.
As the picture becomes clearer, Ra must face some harsh realities: not everything is about her, and punishment isn’t enough. She must stand before Jak and try to atone for what she’s done. But seeing Jak will reveal one more secret Ra never saw coming—and one that may mean her own undoing.
Product Warnings: Contains scenes of intense BDSM, non-binary genders, and a preponderance of kick-ass women.
Excerpt:
Even spattered
in dried blood and pieces of the dead man’s flesh, they cut a striking pair of
figures on the dunes of the falend. Jet and dark poppy, their hair hung down
their backs in the colors of atrocity. Light caressed them, knowing they were more
than human, rippling iridescent over their tresses like quicksilver in the
presence of the divine.
As in the youth
of her former life, Ra was attired in the manner of a Meeric prince, the plain
kaftan of black silk muting much of the violence that covered her.
MeerShiva was
less subtle, the pearl-embroidered train of her sheer citrine gown, from the
same ancient era, dragging behind her, caked in mud from the heath they’d left
behind. They were two livid strokes of pigment on the canvas of sun-blanched
sand.
Satisfied with
the decimation of the remains they’d dumped in the marsh outside the small
trading post beyond Mole Downs, they had simply walked away, and continued
walking until they’d left the high country altogether. Coming down out of the
mound-riddled moors and across the lowland heath, they followed the Filial
River toward the east, past the falls that plunged beneath the bluff at the
wasteland’s edge, and into the high desert north of the Anamnesis delta, until
at last even Meeric sensibility demanded rest.
The palette of
the sky behind the scattered stars held the deep lack of pigment that came with
the hours after midnight, and they were in the center of nothing, a vast
stretch of arid land that separated mound country from the Deltan lowlands.
With a few murmured words, Shiva raised a single tower around them, round and
made of stone, with windowless walls that stretched up over them into
immeasurable heights. Meeric conjuring was often merely out of whim, influenced
by the current state of mind and body. They lay on a floor of heather, an
anomalous afterthought, with barely a pause between waking and sleep.
§
Jak lay at
Geffn’s side, staring at the ceiling. They shared a bed for comfort, though
nothing more. The question of their long estrangement had been settled once and
for all in the formal dissolution of their bond after Ahr’s body had been
consigned to the elements in the Bone Fire. During all that ceremony—the
harvest rites marking the turn of the year, the final parting with Ahr, the
unbinding rite in which Jak and Geffn had cut the red braided strings they’d
worn around their wrists to symbolize their union and set each other free—Jak
had been in a state of stasis. Unable to feel anything, unable to fully
comprehend the loss of Ahr, despite the grand Deltan memorial.
In mound
culture, funeral rites were less dramatic. Haethfalters didn’t believe in the
necessity of the destruction of the body by fire to free the spirit for its
next life. Hadn’t, at least, until Ra had come, having effected her own
cremation from the grave in order to hasten her return, “renaissanced” as a
fully formed adult in an instant on a cold winter night. But that was an
exception to the rule. Ra’s renaissance was devilry and madness, and Jak should
have recognized it from the start.
Haethfalters
practiced a form of sky burial, building a platform for the deceased and laying
the body out in the elements to be excarnated by carrion birds. Burying bodies
below ground was impractical in a place where the ground was frozen half the
year and where underground real estate was at a premium for their souterrain
dwellings. When the bones were picked clean, they were taken and placed in the
family’s burial cairn—a place that didn’t require such deep digging, and which they
had to dig only once, during the warmer months.
They’d used the
sky burial platform as Ahr’s crematory, and Jak had watched his elements spiral
up into the warm autumn wind. Smoke and embers and ash. It hadn’t seemed real.
It hadn’t seemed like Ahr’s body wrapped in fragrant oils and spices and
covered in flower garlands. It hadn’t seemed like anyone’s body at all as the
platform was consumed in bright flames against the dusk sky. It had all been
too surreal.
But there’d been
no denying the reality once the urn was placed in Jak’s hands. Within the
unassuming clay vessel was all that was left of Jak’s dearest friend.
Jak had led that
final ceremony, the procession to the family cairn, the slow march alone down
the dank steps beneath the circle of stones, accompanied by Oldman Rem’s
mournful highland fiddle from above, to place Ahr’s vessel in the narrow vault
that normally held the bones of the dead. By custom, and not belief, Jak
murmured prayers to the ancestors—Jak’s mother, Fyn, and Fyn’s parents, whom
Jak had never known—and then tried to say good-bye to Ahr somehow. The finality
made it impossible, and Jak dropped onto wobbly knees before the vault and
wept.
Ahr was family
to Jak, and no one had questioned his interment under the cairn. Family, after
all, was a broad term in mound society, having little to do with blood. In the
niche beside Ahr’s were the bones of Fyn, the last person Jak had said good-bye
to here. And on Fyn’s other side lay the remains of Geffn’s brother, Pim, who’d
died before Geffn was born. They were all connected to Jak in one way or
another. But kneeling there among the sputter of tallow candles as the sobs
receded into sighs, Jak had felt the wrongness of it. Ahr was a Deltan. His
ashes didn’t belong below the highland moor.
Jak sighed,
still staring up at the stone ceiling. There was still so much damage in
Haethfalt from the rains. It was a terrible time to leave. But Jak couldn’t let
this wait until spring.
“I have to take
him home.” Jak spoke in the darkness beside Geffn. “I know I’m needed here to
help rebuild, but Merit deserves to know. They were lovers. He should have the
ashes.”
“You do what you
need to.” Geffn squeezed Jak’s hand atop the blanket. “The moundhold will be
here for you. Whatever you decide to do will be all right.”
But it wasn’t
true. It would not be all right. Nothing could ever be all right with so much
gone wrong.
About the Author:
Jane Kindred is the author of epic fantasy series The House of Arkhangel’sk, Demons of Elysium, and Looking Glass Gods. She spent her formative years ruining her eyes reading romance novels in the Tucson sun and watching Star Trek marathons in the dark. She now writes to the sound of San Francisco foghorns while two cats slowly but surely edge her off the side of the bed.
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