290
Mirror mirror on the walls
🪞

You and Kensley 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 Kensley as you walk past. Even though you know they are just ordinary suits of enchanted magical armour you can't help a little gibber of fear.

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.'

Kensley 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 granny's got one in the bathroom."

"I'm not sure I want to look..." you say, but your curiosity compels you to step up in front of one of the mirrors.

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

...a beaming, chubbier and slightly older version of yourself. You are wearing a lovely pair of green wellington boots and a fetching brown tweed waistcoat. In one hand you hold a bunch of the largest carrots you have ever seen and in the other a trophy on which you can just make out the words 'Gardener of the Year'.

"Kensley look, I'm chief gardener. And look at the size of those carrots!"

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 calmly sitting at a table, wearing worn out clothes, and pushing seeds one at a time into little pots filled with compost.

"That's funny," you say. "The reflection of my reflection in the mirror behind me doesn't look like an award winning gardener at all..."

Then it dawns on you.

That Gardner of the Year version of yourself doesn't want all that fame and attention. He's tired of it - I would be tired of it. What you are seeing is the top gardener version of you's most earnest desire - which is for a quiet life, doing what he really loves: growing vegetables.

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 chief gardener version of yourself is just that little bit less successful, with slightly shorter carrots, and the quiet version of yourself becomes a little bit less shabby. 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 Kensley what you saw.

"That's it!" she says. "That must be it! The person you really want to be, when you get right down to it, is yourself."