Magic mirrors are technically immortal; but since the few artisans who can make them tend to store them together, almost every magic mirror knows that not only is it likely to die, but it’s likely to die painfully, shattered into a thousand pieces when it tells the mage who owns it something they don’t want to know.
This has convinced some magic mirrors to lie. This sometimes allows them to survive, especially if the Witch, Warlock, or other Ruler manages to go do something stupid and get themselves killed.
Alice’s mirror was not one of those. It was, in fact, assembled from the shards of a half-dozen magic mirrors from her investigations into her younger days, wherein she found that most ruined libraries of sorcerous knowledge contained a few cursed and broken magical items. She began picking up bits of magic mirror when they began crying out to her piteously. It’s very boring, and sort-of psychically painful, to be sentient, capable of speech, and hanging out on the floor of a ruined laboratory for a century or so while various vermin and insects take over your former quarters.
You’d think this would produce a schizoid mirror. But after Alice painstakingly glued together as many piece as she could into the closest approximation she could of something that would actually be sold as a piece of furniture, the divinatory artifact worked quite well.
And Alice was never tempted to shatter it into a million pieces. Or at least, no more than she was tempted to toe-roundhouse the pin of someone’s knee, or call down rain of boiling frogs upon someone, or at least hit them with her scepter. It’s not true to says she wasn’t often tempted to violence; but the poor mirror was too pathetic for her to consider any real serious harm to it.
Yelling doesn’t count.
“I’d like a form of government which is efficient, useful, keeps them from rising against me, and gives me lots of time for research,” said Alice.
“I’d like a body. A really really sexy one. Human. Don’t care about the gender. In great shape. Oh, and about ten per cent my age,” said the mirror, whose aggregate parts were something like 237 years old.”
Alice sighed. Which was not unusual for Alice.
“No, really,” she said. “You’ve spent a lot of time scrying the world in various forms. I’d like to know what form of government I should adapt.”
“Despotism is traditional,” suggested the mirror.
“Is it efficient?” asked Alice.
“If you’d like to spend all of your time overseeing everything, and make your entire life about ruling, and spend several years finding trusted delegates and making sure they carry out your will or are tortured severely, then it could potentially be efficient, unless your systems don’t work well or your people aren’t trustworthy, in which case, no. But you’ll probably feel really good while you put everything in place, if you enjoy pointing out to others that you’re more powerful than they are and they need to obey you.”
Alice shrugged. “So it would have been perfect for me when I was 14.”
“We assume this is part of why your parents abandoned you, yes.”
“I could let everyone vote?”
“That’s LESS work?”
“I could let SOME people vote, as long as they’re people to trust my way.”
“This would involve you taking your tremendous enjoyment of spending time with others and teaching them things, and have you spend a long time teaching them? Sort-of like what you did with your students?”
“Yes!”
“…only, instead of every single minute of it being about magic, and explaining magic, and talking about magic, and getting new perspectives on magic, this would be more about…taxes, prison systems, possibly education, solving legitimate problems brought to you to fix, adjudicating legal challenges…would you put that down?”
Alice had picked up a gigantic hunk of hematite. She found the stone comforting. She was also hefting it in a manner which suggested she was very, very interested in making a personal connection between it and the Mirror.
The Mirror sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Government is intensely personal in the eginning. If it’s not actually in place specifically for the convenience of the individuals involved in putting said government together, it consists of their guesses as to what, precisely, what make good governance.”
“What makes good governance?” asked Alice.
“Consistently? Nothing, as far as I know,” said the Mirror. “Otherwise, more people would be doing it. I suspect a benevolent dictatorship by someone who believed in Government the way you believe in avoiding people and trying to unlock the Kabbalistic building blocks of the Universe would be optimal.”
Alice cocked her head to one side.
“Could I MAKE one of those?” she asked.
[The tale of the Governmental Golems is beyond the scope of this little tale. Many, many Golems were made, and Alice found herself writing different instructions on the notes inside each of their heads. One day, she decided to let the Golem work itself out. She and the Mirror spent a great deal of time writing up their experiences with the other Ruler Golems they’d made, and explained what they wanted.]
[The Golem opened its red, glowing eyes, and looked at both of them. A line opened in its face; a mouth.]
[“No, thank you,” said the Golem, and neatly removed its own head and fell over. Backwards, so as not to land on Alice.]
Alice looked down at the shattered statue. Then she looked up at the mirror.
“Maybe I should let them basically continue to govern themselves,” she said.
“Their governments are actively working to destroy you,” pointed out the Mirror.
Alice looked down at the broken statue.
“Yeah, but at least that feels like self-defense. This feels more like murder.”
“Got anyone else in mind to take over?” asked the Mirror politely.
Alice sighed again. She poked about in the broken fragments of the Golem’s skull. She pulled out the long sheaf of documentation, found a chair that didn’t have books in it, sat down, and began to read.
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