The Fast Mirror and the Slow

One Spring, Princess Ateh said: "I have grown accustomed to my thoughts, as to my dresses. They always have the same waistline, and I see them everywhere, even at crossroads. Worst of all, they make it impossible to see the crossroads anymore."

One day, hoping to amuse her, the princess' servants brought her two mirrors. They were much like other Khazar mirrors. Both were made of shiny salt, but one was fast and the other was slow. Whatever the first mirror picked up, reflecting the world like an advance on the future, the slow mirror returned, settling the debt of the former, because it was slow in relation to the present as the other was fast.

When they brought the mirrors to Princess Ateh, she was still in bed and the letters had not yet been washed off her eyelids. She saw herself in the mirrors with closed lids and died instantly. She vanished between two blinks of an eye, or better said, for the first time she read the lethal letters on her eyelids, because she had blinked the moment before and the moment after, and the mirrors had reflected it. She dies, killed simultaneously by letters from both the past and future.