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Mirror mirror on the walls
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You and Snako decide to investigate the nearest stone staircase. From the bottom all you can see is that it winds up to some shadowy and little visited part of the school.

At the top of the stone stairs, you encounter a passageway lined with suits of armour. The empty helmets are turned in your direction and twist to follow you and Snako as you walk past. Even though you know they are just ordinary suits of enchanted magical armour the effect is still rather creepy.

At the end of the corridor there is a single door which swings open on silent hinges at your touch.

The room inside is small, dark and bare - but not quite empty.

Next to one wall there is a mirror, with the words above it 'Look at me if you dare, you will see your soul laid bare'.

Opposite, against another wall there's another mirror. Above this one it says 'Stare at me and you will see, what you want to come to be.'

Snako relaxes. "I know what these are! They're mirrors of desire. They show you what you most want in your whole life, maybe even something you didn't even realise. My mother's got one of those in the downstairs toilet."

"That's amazing!" you breathe, and step up in front of one of the mirrors nervously.

You look at your reflection in the mirror and see...

...a taller, more handsome version of yourself. Your chest is pinned with many shiny medals and on your shoulders are an enormous pair of golden tasselled epaullettes. You are wearing an expensive pair of sunglasses and you can just make out a huge crowd of people behind you who seem to be cheering for you. Your reflection grins at you and you are momentarily blinded. Every tooth is capped in pure gold.

"Wow look at me, I look like some kind of super cool dictator!"

Then you catch the reflection of the mirror behind you in the mirror in front of you - the reflection of the reflection.

In that reflection you are quietly reading a book sitting on a comfortable leather chair, calmly stroking a handsome white cat.

"That's funny," you say. "The reflection of my reflection in the mirror behind me doesn't look so cool at all..."

Then it dawns on you.

That gold medal champion version of yourself doesn't want all that power and attention. He's bored of it all - I would be bored of it all. What you are seeing is the dictator version of you's most earnest desire - which is for a quiet life, reading a book, stroking a cat.

You angle your head to catch more reflections of reflections and see the images of yourself curve away into infinity.

With each reflection's reflection the cool version of yourself is just that little bit less cool and the quiet version of yourself becomes a little bit less quiet. Far into the depths of the mirrors you can just make out an Arthur just like yourself, waving back at you.

You shake your head, confused, and tell Snako what you saw.

"That's it!" he says. "Don't you see? The person you really want to be, when you get right down to it, is yourself."