Light Reflecting from Broken Glass

"I can make you beautiful," he said, holding her gaze with his blackly reflective eyes.
She nodded, once, slowly.
"All you have to do is to give me something beautiful in return."
She thought about this, blinked once; slowly. Struggling under a canopy of dreams she heard voices rolling in the deep, turning as whiles might when they feel like stretching. "What will I have to give you?"
Her words were as dim and syrupy as molasses, and his smile as quick and dangerous as breaking glass.
"The deal is that you don't know how you will become beautiful, and you do not know what I will take. But I promise that I will take something that is beautiful, and in return make you so beautiful that you yourself recognise it."
That is what she wanted. Not just to be called beautiful, to be treated as beautiful, but to understand that she was beautiful. To know it.
She nodded.



When she awoke, the world was a rearranging of fractals. It was darkness and shade. It was an underlying chaos.
She blinked once; slowly. She blinked again, frantic. It did not change.
"What have you done?" she asked. She aimed this at a pulsing center of the chaos, which she knew to be the shape of some dark sorcerer without having ever seen anything like it before.
He sighed, in both boredom and hurt pride. "I just gave you what you wanted," he moped.
Her mind eloped with itself as it tried to remember what that was. Then it lay down with fear and refused to answer.
She stared at him in blank refusal. Then she saw it.
He was a pulsing centre of darkness, a convening of meaninglessness and interruption. But there were two points of brilliant light in his head: order, continuity.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," he reminded her as he left. "And my eyes found you very beautiful. I hope you enjoy looking at yourself."

And she knew that, once she found a mirror, she would be the opposite.