When I look in the mirror, I see a demon looking back at me.

Let me elaborate.

My name is Morgan Ordell. I am sixteen years old. And I have a problem with mirrors.

It’s not as unusual as you’d think. Most of the people this side of the Divide have special abilities, gifts, curses, whatever you want to call them. I know people who can turn into bats or deer or foxes, purify water with a touch, or manipulate metal.

My ability, though, is special. I’m a Seer, a classification of abilities concerned with foretelling. Some Seers can touch an object and know everywhere it’s ever been, everyone who’s ever touched it, and if they encounter one of those people, they’ll know immediately who they are. Other Seers dream of future events, or see the color of people’s souls.

Me, I see their true natures in their reflections. Or maybe it’s their fates. I’m not sure, and it doesn’t really matter. Either way, if I look at someone’s reflection, I don’t see their material body, I see something else. Sometimes it’s a delicate spirit wrapped in misty white robes. Sometimes it’s a skeletal child with long grasping fingers and an eerie grin with too much teeth. Sometimes I see animals, or skeletons, or weird rippling shadows. The abstract ones are always the most unsettling.

Wait, scratch that. The most unsettling is what happens when I look at myself.

Do you know how awkward it is, never able to look at your reflection? Bad enough trying to avoid mirrors—since I can never translate the reflections, and all they do is haunt me, I try to go without looking at them at all, unless someone asks me to and I can’t say no—but when you don’t really know what your own face looks like?

Because trust me, I think I would know if I was actually a grinning skeletal demon with curving horns and pupil-less yellow eyes, completely lacking in a few of the outer layers that make we living onions recognizeable as human.

I have hair. Lots of it. And skin—it’s a pale tan color, much like many other people I know—and I definitely don’t have horns. I’ve asked what my eyes look like, and everyone agrees they’re a nondescript hazel-green color, much like many other people. There’s a possibility they’re lying, but I’ve thought long and hard about it, and have failed to come up with a single logical reason for them to lie.

So anyway, this demon is what makes me really hate mirrors. And sometimes my life. Because when I tell people I don’t like to use my ability because I don’t like what I see, they don’t understand why, exactly, I’m so reluctant. I don’t blame them. How could they? When they look in a mirror, they see the world reflected back at them, exactly as they’d perceive it if looking at it head-on. I’m the only one who knows what I see when I look in the mirror, and I’m the only one who’s spent countless sleepless nights with that grinning yellow-eyed face looming over me in the dark.

Why was I explaining all this? Oh, yes. The eighteenth of May. It was the eighteenth of May when all this started.

The day started normally enough—waking to the gentle summons of the early-morning sun, its familiar whispers of a day just begun and full of possibilities one of the best possible ways to wake up. I rolled upright, feeling the previous day’s hours helping to mine star-dust amethysts in the dull morning ache of my muscles, and stumbled, stiff and bleary, to the opening through which the sun beamed, unreasonably cheery as always. The climb down my tree—I live in a tree like every self-respecting person, not sure why that would be strange—was awkward, and I slipped once, scraping my calf on a rough-barked branch. On another morning I might jog the short distance to the river, but that morning I merely walked, along the path outlined in sun-glow flowers to my rock, where I slipped out of my shift, leaving it in a graceless pile on the rock, and jumped, making a splash that doubtless terrified any number of smaller creatures in the surrounding trees. Listen, I know people who try not to displace a single leaf, slipping from place to place with all the quiet, graceful dignity they can muster. It has always struck me as a miserable way to live. If no one’s watching, why try so hard? We all leave marks on the world whether we want to or not. Might as well not worry about it, and spare yourself vast amounts of energy better spent pursuing your own happiness.

Ah, well. Back to how it all started.

I completed my swim, feeling much better, and dragged myself up out of the water a ways downstream, then jogged gently back to where my clothes were waiting. My hair was wet, which meant both it and my shift would be that way for a while, but that was swimming for you.

My day continued uneventfully until a little after noon, when, completely without meaning to, I stumbled across the thing that would change my world forever.

Hidden in the shadows of the cavern, small and inconspicuous, I only noticed it because I was looking for more hints of the amethyst we were mining, and there were specks of the stuff outlining it, little swirls and stars of purple star-dust.

It was a door, dear reader. A door to someplace strange, someplace unimaginably flawed, yet flawless in its utter difference from the world I had always known.

A door to someplace new.