The Boy With The Glass Scar.

(approx 1800 words, less than 10 minute's read)

‘The Boy Who Loved’. Henry hated the epithet – his classmates seemed to think it made him a hero. He wasn’t. If he was a real hero, then the world wouldn’t be full of hate, and his mum would still be with him, and the Laird of Lies wouldn’t be supported by a full quarter of the school.

Oh, certainly, they said they despised the Laird, but in quiet corridors and the Dark House’s common room, they said quite the opposite. Henry knew it would only be a few yeas until they started saying it openly, instead of pretending it was ironic, that they were being edgy teenagers, that anyone who complained was overreacting.

Which was why Henry wasn’t certain if Lycus was setting a trap, hoping to put Heart House’s star Feather-Chaser out of commission, or if, after saving Lycus’s life last term, his long-time rival just wanted to repay the debt as quickly as possible. There were, after all, dangerous life-debt spells they’d be learning next year...

He checked the hastily-quilled map Lycus had given him, to the mirror, and turned around. He’d definitely gotten lost.

He loved the school. He loved it with all his heart – that damn epithet! – but sometimes he got tired of its endless corridors, the disused classrooms. Bigger on the inside than the outside, which was a thing Henry’s best friend Jan claimed, authoritatively, had been copied from Magisters. Everything good in the mundane world had been copied from Magisters, apparently. Even mirrors.

Especially mirrors.

He found it sixteen wrong turns later, and a long few minutes holding his breath while the school janitor, whom everyone hated, passed by. (Though Henry couldn’t understand why anyone disliked him – the man had a dirty job, that didn’t make him dirty, surely? Or was there some magical contagion only Magisters knew about, justifying their bigotry towards the poor, the unkempt, the unbeautiful?)

The classroom had a few clear footprints across the floor, where someone’s steps had done more to clean the school than the janitor ever could, poor man. (Why deny him the use of magic, anyway? Two whips of a wand and this dirty old pile would be as good as new!)

Desks were piled up against one wall, against a blackboard still marked with the lines some poor student had scrawled in detention. Mustn’t lie, must obey, that sort of drivel. The mirror, if that’s what it was, stood in front of windows that looked out onto the Avialis field, but the shape was all wrong – he’d never seen them from outside. (Avialis. Such a damn-fool name, just call it magic football on brooms and be done with it!)

Sometimes, Henry had to admit to himself, it was hard to love the world he’d found himself in. By turns whimsical and playful, all sparkles and lollipops, and then you found out criminals went to a jail where the bars were made of massacre-victim’s bones. Those bones didn’t need to be enchanted to give everyone there nightmares, not at all. He tried to love the magical world, though. He always tried.

He was the boy who loved.

That was the last thing his mum told him, before the Laird of Lies took her away forever.

“I love you, Henry. You have your mother’s love in your heart, and your love will save the world.”

A whisper. The words had been a whisper, not from his memory, but from beneath the dust cover across the mirror.

He approached, wand out, and cautiously used the tip to nudge the dust cover aside.

The place he was born. Not the hospital, where he’d been a baby, but the café in mundane Edinburgh where the Laird had taken his mum away, forever. It was in the mirror, and it made his scar hurt.

A cracked old mirror in a golden frame. The Mirror of Sussicarn, which would, legend said, show all that the viewer loved. Living, dead, missing. One who loved widely, who loved openly, unafraid, would be able to use it to scry and see almost anything at all, but it would be a useless looking-glass for those who only loved themselves.

And among all the people in the world Henry loved, he loved his mum the most.

He was small – only a couple of years old, not like the legend about him only being a baby – and scrawling with crayons while his mum typed on an expensive laptop she’d bought with a loan from a friend, in her brother-in-law’s café. She looked up at him – for a moment he wasn’t sure if she was looking at him, outside the mirror, or the toddler drawing castles and owls and horses that looked like skeletons.

“A mother’s love,” she said, in her crisp English accent – not Scottish at all, “is the most powerful love there is.”

He stared into his mother’s blue eyes, and clenched his fists. “Mum?”

She was looking at both of him at once, a faint ghost in the past, smiling, bright... thin, almost serpentine, now.

His scar hurt. He opened his shirt, and looked down at his chest – at the glass shard that was part of him, forever. Pulsing red as his heart beat.

At least, that’s what everyone else thought.

Then, typing at her novel and making jokes about how poor she was while scoffing cakes from the café and turning down work so she could keep writing, she was beautiful. Everyone loved her like that.

Now, in the distant Scottish estate where she was surrounded by her private army, amidst decay and blackness, she stared at him with a hungry serpent’s eyes.

“Hello mum,” he said, voice tight.

“Hello, Harry.”

“I go by Henry, now.”

She shook her head and laughed, both then, and now. “Don’t be silly. No one can change their name. You’re my precious Harry. And I love you so much.”

Tears sprang to his eyes. “That’s not true, mum.”

“Of course it is. Where are you? Come to me – I need you.” He could see more of the serpent in her – the twisting in her hair, the coldness in her eyes, like ice. “They don’t love me, like they did. I need you, so they’ll love me.”

The glass scar hurt. Twitching in his chest, faster and faster as his mother grew excited. As the slow beating of her cold heart turned quick, twitching the glassy blade in him. It flashed red, red with her blood, with her heartbeat.

“I’m not coming back, mum.”

“But I need you.” Her eyes grew large in the mirror, almost hypnotic. “They don’t love me without you, Harry.”

“You have the others. You have your homonculus. Leave me alone.”

“They don’t love it. It’s going on the television and even the new actors don’t love me, not like the old ones did. And they stopped. Did you know they stopped?”

“I know, mum. I know.” Henry snuffled into the back of his hand, and stared at the glass scar. The cracked shape of it, like a lightning bolt.

“Where are you?” Her cloudy face pressed closer to the glass. “You’re not... the mirror? Bring it to me – if I put another shard of it into you, more people will see themselves in you. Then they’ll think I love them, the way I love you... And then they’ll love me back!”

He put his wand to his scar. “Accio,” he whispered.

“No. No! Harry, break another piece off the mirror and bring it to me, please. Please. I need them to love me. I need everyone to love me—”

It hurt. It hurt so badly.

Henry loved his mum. He really did. But she wasn’t his mum anymore, never would be again – she was a Scottish Laird, owned the estate and everything. A Laird of Lies.

The shard fluttered, tearing his skin as the wand tugged at it. Inch by gruelling inch it slid out of him, reflecting the only thing it could, after his mum had ruined the magic.

He looked into the shard, and saw her blue eyes, not his green. Her bigoted hatred, not his desperate attempt to love.

“Harry – Harry, it doesn’t have to be this way. I have all the money in the world, I can make it better, everyone will love us again... please.”

His voice shook. “Reparo.” He lifted the wand, and the shard, to the crack in the mirror.

“Harry! Harry! I’ll curse you – I’ll summon all the devils under my command and they will come for you unless you put that back into your heart and you keep loving me.”

“I’ve always loved you mum,” Henry cried. “But loving people is letting them go.”

“My devils, Harry, I’ll send my—”

“I don’t give a toss about your solicitors, mum.” He pressed the shard into place, and the mirror healed. The cracks his mother had placed in the magic shrank, chasing themselves into nothingness, until the only thing left on the shining surface was a thin smear of blood.

Henry’s, and his mum’s.

He saw her in the café, writing. He saw her first husband hurting her in a way no one should ever be hurt. He saw her loved by millions of children, because of him, and he saw her hurt almost all of them as they grew up, because of him.

No one would have cared who she hated, or how, unless for him.

He cried at the mirror for what seemed like hours, until a kindly voice whispered, “Feeling better, Henry?”

“Professor Doubledoor. No.”

“You will,” the silly old man said. “In time.”

“But she’s still out there. Hurting everyone.”

“Yes,” Professor Doubledoor said. “But now you’re ready to hear a secret.”

Henry turned to face his schoolmaster. He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Sir?”

“While one must be careful to evade the Laird of Lies’s devils... that’s simple magic. Changing names, a few details. Powerful magic, changing a name – it can protect us from the most awful things.”

“Yes, sir. Copyright law.”

“A thing the mundane world copied from the Magisters, of course.” Doubledoor smiled. “But, if you’re careful to evade her devils, my boy... you can be anything. Anything you like.”

“I know, sir. I know.”

“You’ve been very brave, Henry. Go to the sick room, and then off to bed.”

“Yes, sir.” Henry stopped at the door, looking back. “Sir... what do you see, in the mirror?”

“I’d say a comfortable pair of socks, just to fit the image you have of me... but, to be quite honest Henry – I see the possibility of a better world.”