Far over the Ten Thousands Sea, beyond the Mroice Islands, deep in the continent that was called Wophentree, there was a kingdom. The kingdom had previously been called the Flighter Kingdom, but nobody remembered that name anymore; as far as anyone knew, it was the Mirror Kingdom, and had always been the Mirror Kingdom.
     The reason that it was called the Mirror Kingdom was because the kingdom's most prized possession, as anybody from the lowliest farmer's daughter to the King himself would tell you, was The Mirror. The Mirror was kept in a gilt frame, which was covered in gold-leaf and encrusted with one of each kind of precious stone, even those of which only one had ever been found; that was how dear it was to the kingdom. The flag of the kingdom had a little Mirror embroidered into the top right-hand corner, and in each household a painting of The Mirror hung above the door to bring good luck to them. The Mirror had even more guards than the King and Queen did, and was kept in a secret room, deep beneath the Flighter Castle (that was all that remained of the kingdom's previous name).
     There was a peculiarity about The Mirror, however, and this peculiarity had previously been a cause of much debate amongst the more erudite philosophers of the kingdom: it did not reflect a single image, and never had. This of course immediately caused a few philosophers to ask, is The Mirror really a mirror if it doesn't reflect anything? Of course it is, said the King's men, and promptly beheaded those philosophers.
     In any case, The Mirror was undoubtedly the sole guiding light of the Mirror Kingdom; many wars had been fought, and all of them won, to defend it. So one can imagine the consternation that the inhabitants of the kingdom felt when it was discovered, precisely at 4:58 (actually, 4:59, by Mouflaster Benderkins the Yam Farmer's clock – the only other clock in the kingdom) on a Sunday afternoon, that it had gone missing.
     The King beheaded all of the seventy-eight guards of The Mirror. Then he beheaded The Mirror Guard Appointer. Then he beheaded the Chief Appointer, who had appointed The Mirror Guard Appointer. And had he not been himself the one to appoint the Chief Appointer, he surely would have beheaded him, too.
     By the tine the King had had his fill of beheadings, news of The Mirror's disappearance had spread through the whole kingdom. This caused widespread riots, during which Mouflaster Benderkins the Yam Farmer's clock was broken; the riots eventually led to the Great Famine of Wolfyear, as the Yam Farmer was offended by the riots and left the kingdom, and when his fields went to waste, the other farmers suddenly discovered that his yams had been the main source of nutrition for their own fields, providing very good compost (nobody that had tried eating the yams survived to recommend them), and were forced to turn to other means of enriching the soil, for which they invited the Great Inventor Irushid back from exile – but that is another story entirely.
     The King, who really wasn't good at anything much but beheadings, asked the Queen what he should do. The Queen, who was a good deal wiser than the King, frowned. “Well,” she said, “I suppose we need an Adventurer, don't we?” And then, to make him think it was his own idea, she asked, “Who do you suppose we could call?”
     “Why, we must call the greatest Adventurer of them all, of course! That would be – that would be...”
     “Finnikan Smith?” she hinted.
     “Yes, my dear Queen, that is exactly what I was about to say. We must call Finnikan Smith!”
     “Very well done, dear; what good ideas you have!”
     Finnikan Smith, for those who still have not heard his name, was the greatest Adventurer in the kingdom at the time; great enough, indeed, that some even were starting to call him Hero – a much higher rank. He had saved the Southeast Province (located in the northwest corner of the Mirror Kingdom) from the ravages of the terrible Zuddragon and her brood, had discovered a rich mine of starpolite rock in a secret location (the money earned from it was donated to the orphanages of Mirror Kingdom), had prevented the assassination of the King, and had been nominated “Best-looking Adventurer of the Year” by the Mirror Gazette nigh on twenty times, among many other noteworthy accomplishments. He had blonde hair, striking sapphire eyes, and was six foot three inches. In other words, if anyone could find The Mirror, it was Finnikan Smith.
Soon enough, he arrived at Flighter Castle, on his faithful steed, the black horse Ralix. He was led to the secret room below the Castle, and it was there that the search began.
     Finnikan was humble as well as heroic, and requested that the gazetteers and reporters stay away from him; the only other people thus present in the room were the King and Queen.
Finnikan looked around. There was the satin-covered stand on which the full-height mirror had stood; there was the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. There wasn't much else in the stone room. As he bent down, though, he spotted a Clue.
     “There!” he cried. And indeed, between two of the granite blocks in the floor, a gem was lodged – a gem from the frame of The Mirror. It was a crimson, glinting ruby, and the King hurriedly pocketed it. “All right,” said Finnikan, starting to get excited. “If they were careless enough to let one gem come off, there must be more. I do wish,” he added with a tone of reproach, “you hadn't beheaded all those guards – they could've told us whether they'd seen anyone coming or going.”
     The King was speechless for a full twenty-four hours after this; it was the first time in a long while anyone had said anything close to a criticism of him. Finnikan left him to his speechlessness, and hurried out the room.
     As he left it, Finnikan noticed another gem, in the hallway; it was one of his own starpolites. He handed it to a startled guard, and continued out. Every few feet, he came upon one jewel from the frame of The Mirror; he was quite relieved, as he knew he was a terrible tracker and would have been doomed had there not been such a trail. When it left the castle, he fetched Ralix; as if to accommodate the speed of a horseback rider, the gems grew further apart as they cantered down a little-used dirt road heading into the Twining Forest.
     However, being a relatively intelligent person, he began to grow suspicious. After all, the gems were quite firmly embedded into the frame; he could recall an incident where, during the yearly Commoner's Parade – the only time The Mirror was brought out for all to see – a thief had tried to wrench one from the frame. Needless to say, he'd failed, and been beheaded. So why would somebody who'd stolen the mirror leave such a trail for him? And how did they get the gems out? And – where was the next gem in the trail, anyway? He hadn't seen one in a while...
     At this point in his train of thought, Finnikan was interrupted by a cry from the left side of the trail, by someone far out of view in the dense thickets and oak trees. “Help! Help, oh – oh!”
     Being a generally good person, he felt himself obligated to help; besides, any aid he gave to a stranger went on his resume. It did sound like a damsel in distress, and there were few enough of those to go around after the suffrage movement had resulted in a removal of the law against damsels helping themselves out of sticky situations. He hopped off of Ralix's back and led the reluctant horse off the trail. The sunlight barely penetrated the forest canopy here; he strained to make out the shape of a person in the emerald gloom. He heard the cry again, closer this time - “Help!” - and hurried onwards. Finnikan decided it was most definitely a damsel in distress.
     Panting heavily, out of breath, Finnikan stumbled into a clearing, Ralix following behind. The sudden wash of bright sunlight meant it took a few moments before he could see clearly, and he sank a few inches into the boggy frog-green ground. Ralix stepped back onto firmer ground, under the shadows of the trees, to watch his master.
In the middle of the bog was, strangely enough, a little girl. She had two blond pigtails and was wearing a pair of little pink overalls over a clean white shirt. She certainly didn't look like a full-grown damsel, nor did she seem to be in distress. And, stranger still, The Mirror was by her side.
     “Help!” she said, in that strange adult voice of hers, then noticed him standing there. “Oh, there you are.” She cleared her voice, seeing his strange look, and repeated herself. “Oh, there you are!” It came out slightly more childlike, but not much.
     “Er – are you in need of assistance?”
     “I most certainly am, Finnikan. I am having some trouble with this – mirror of yours.”
     Bemused, and not a little bit wary, Finnikan walked through the bog, sinking to his knees in the thick, oozing mud. The girl was sitting on a little raised island of sorts, and he clambered up onto it.
     “You see,” the girl said, “it's the oddest thing – I can see myself in The Mirror! I thought it never reflected anything.”
     Finnikan looked at the girl. He looked at The Mirror. He looked at the girl. It was true; she was reflected in it. “Did you steal it?” he finally asked; he felt that he wasn't quite sure what was going on, and he did not like the feeling. There should have been a damsel in distress, and perhaps a dastardly villain or two, or perhaps the Zuddragon's distant cousin. Not a – a little girl in odd clothes, sitting altogether too calmly in the middle of the Twining Forest, miles from civilization, with The Mirror by her side.
     She laughed. He didn't like the laugh. “Of course I didn't steal it, Finnikan dear! I simply borrowed it – or, actually, I lent it to you, and I'm taking it back. Can you see yourself in The Mirror?”
Finnikan couldn't. Of course he couldn't. Because, as everybody knew, The Mirror – for which thousands of people had died in long-ago and not-so-long-ago wars – never reflected anything. Anything. Especially not little girls. Especially not little girls with pigtails and odd clothes.
     “How?” he whispered. For a brave Adventurer, his knees felt quite trembly at the moment; this tended to happen to people whose whole worldview had just been usurped by five-year-old girls.
     Ralix neighed from the edge of the forest.
     “Quite simple,” the little girl replied. “There are some very strange things on the continent of Wophentree, Finnikan dear; old things, things that existed long before the first Adventurer, or even the first farmer.”
     As she spoke, she began to change, in a dizzying way, in a way that terrified something deep within Finnikan. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ralix turn and gallop away, back to the trail. This was not turning out at all how it was supposed to. When she fell quiet, she was no longer a little girl. In her place stood a tall, extraordinarily tall in fact, human – or not quite; something graceful, with a human face but hair of leaves, in a golden-shining flowing dress. Then she looked back at the mirror. “Hmm,” she muttered. “My reflection seems to be fading. Only to be expected. Let me tell you a story.”
     Finnikan listened. The wood nymph, or goddess, for she had to be a goddess, spoke. The Mirror, it turned out, reflected things; reflected them very well indeed. It only reflected certain people, however – people that were, for lack of better words, pure and good and honest in every way.
     Not once, in the whole history of the Mirror Kingdom, not during any one of the Commoner's Parades – when everybody in the kingdom filed past The Mirror, one by one – had it reflected a thing.
     And it certainly was not reflecting poor Finnikan.
     The fact that the goddess's reflection had disappeared worried him in some little way, but it did not matter much. He was still trying to cope with the existential crisis he was experiencing as a result of the goddess's story; she had spoken a lot longer than that,   with lots of little details, but he'd tuned most of them out.           “Anyway,” she sighed, “that's that. I gave your kingdom a long run, but I suppose it's officially time for me to retire from Wophentree Continent. Perhaps I'll settle somewhere North; I hear that there's very little of anything there. Certainly no people, no selfish little impure things running about my land. Not even you Adventurers. Ha! The cream of the cream, isn't that what you were called once? You see, the trouble with being immortal is that you have to come to grips with these sorts of things. And I'll be taking my mirror. It seems it falls to you to announce to the King what's happened; I could help you of course, but I'd really rather not. Probably why I'm not reflected anymore. Ta-ta, Finnikan dear!”
     With a sickening lurch of swirling and a hint of transdimensional teleportation (not yet mastered in the Mirror Kingdom, though theorized), she vanished.

     It is not clear to history what happened to Finnikan after that. Some say that, unable to cope with the shame of being a failed Adventurer and not wanting to be the one to suffer the King's wrath, he lived out the rest of his life in Twining Forest, living off of sour pusberry plants and wild firelighter bugs. Others say that he did indeed carry the news to the King, only to be promptly beheaded, like so many others before him. In any case, whatever happened, word eventually got out about the true nature of The Mirror.
     It was agreed collectively by the kingdom that all paintings of The Mirror would be quietly burned in fireplaces across the provinces, and that they would never breathe a word about it to the neighboring kingdoms – especially not the ones they'd fought wars with about The Mirror. The kingdom, of course, was the Flighter Kingdom; and in a few years, with the aid of judiciously applied beheadings and good old common sense, nobody remained who would claim that it had ever been otherwise.
     Except for Mouflaster Benderkins the Yam Farmer, but as he was happily living out his days in the far South on a pleasant little island in the Phoigrass Gulf, nobody was around to listen to him anyways.