Before this story found its voice, it lived for a time inside someone else’s dream.
Carnival Land was a luminous and enigmatic graphic novel created by an artist I loved. In its dreamlike world, she imagined herself as a heroine of transformation—poised to step through the Mirror of Selves into a perfected image of who she might become. Alongside her stood Peri, an acrobat who offered her shelter and quiet loyalty while she stitched her new self into being. That character was drawn from me. I had been written into Carnival Land not as a partner, but as a supporting character, one who would steady the mirror as she crossed the threshold alone
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Illustration by Tatiana Tavares. From a gifted print in the author’s collection. Shared here for non-commercial, illustrative purposes. Copyright remains with the artist.
At the time, I didn’t fully recognise the deeper currents beneath that dream. But as our relationship unfolded, we became enmeshed in unconscious patterns that mirrored the roles from Carnival Land. I found myself becoming what I had been drawn as: a container for someone else’s metamorphosis. Her quest for perfection, for self-creation, left little room between us for shared reality.
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Illustration by Tatiana Tavares. From a gifted print in the author’s collection. Shared here for non-commercial, illustrative purposes. Copyright remains with the artist.
In writing The Mirror Made of Bone, I found myself turning the glass inward, revealing an older current — a shape formed in childhood. A deep attunement to the pain of others. A longing to mend what was broken. An instinct to quiet myself, to tread lightly, to disappear — so as not to add to the weight already carried.
The Mirror Made of Bone is a way of making sense — of re-entering the dream and speaking from within it, in my own voice. It’s a story about the tenderness of devotion, and what it means to become a symbol in someone else’s search for wholeness. It’s about the subtle cost of projection, and the inner strength it takes to see clearly when the spell begins to dissolve.
This tale is offered in wonder —
for what was revealed,
for what remained hidden,
and for the love that lives, even in silence.
— Nicholas Monks
Dedication
In remembrance of Carnival Land
and the weaver of costumes
Epigraph
THE MIRROR MADE OF BONE
Once, in a half-lit kingdom where dusk and dawn blurred, there lived a dreamer named Tinuviel. Her smile curved like a crescent moon, and her eyes carried old storms, shimmering with the loneliness of someone who had walked too long in the dark. She spun enchanted worlds from thread and dust and placed them in a cabinet of curiosities. There they hummed with seductive light, filled with spells and broken clockwork. The world admired her artistry, though few understood the sadness that moved within her. She lived half in shadow, hidden behind the glow of her creations — pouring herself into the light, yet drawing a deepening darkness behind her.
In the same world lived Peri, an acrobat who hadn’t yet remembered his own grace. He moved through life as if underwater, his limbs reluctant to stretch into the shape of his longing. Deep inside him was a stillness, unshaken by the noise of the world. And though he carried that stillness untouched, some part of him was already weary beneath its weight. Without movement, he remained a container of dreams, not the dance of them.
One day, they met in the velvet dusk, and something unspoken passed between them, like roots shifting under frozen earth. A canopy grew up, and in its branches hung glass jars glowing with captive stars — vessels of hope, longing, and unspoken dreams.
Beneath that canopy, in flickering pools of light, Tinuviel and Peri studied illuminated spellbooks written in celestial ink. They intuited the mystical language that turns dream into form, though its meanings lay just beyond the dawn of their understanding. And so, they cast their spells in a world of mirrors with blurred edges, floating like shadows in a mist with no end.
“Stay,” she said. “Hold this space for me—and in it, absorb the things I cannot remember. These veiled mirrors are constellations only your stillness can transform. You, Peri, whose heart is a deep well, and whose spirit I would turn in secret spirals toward the sky.”
They reached for each other with the urgency of those who are drowning, for neither was made only of light. In each other they saw what they longed for—And yet misunderstanding each other’s inner world's they grasped after illusions, each unable to name what was truly missing.
In time, the darkening well swallowed the light, and the jars, one by one, fell and shattered—silent star-glass settling in the depths. The spellbooks faded to whispers only the attentive might still hear
The mirror-world mist thickened until Tinuviel and Peri could no longer see each other’s outlines. They did not find each other again.
But sometimes, Tinuviel would discover a single shard glowing on her windowsill, filled with a sliver of light.
And Peri, wandering the edge of the realm where gravity bends sideways, would feel the tension of an invisible wire beneath his feet, leading him toward a place he nolonger feared.
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Love often begins not with understanding, but with recognition — a flash of familiarity that draws us toward another, believing they hold something we lack. But recognition is not always truth. Sometimes, it is a mirror held at an angle, reflecting only the outline of our longing.
In The Mirror Made of Bone, Tinuviel and Peri are archetypes of this deep human pattern. Their tragedy lies not in their meeting, but in the misreading of the magic they see in each other. True intimacy requires more than feeling — it asks for clarity. More than devotion — it demands self-awareness. Without clear boundaries, love too easily becomes a spell — where self-erasure is mistaken for devotion, and sacrifice mistaken for intimacy. In such a spell, one may vanish in the name of love. Or one might disappear behind a choreography of appearances, where each gesture becomes a mask — protecting the wound it cannot name.
In the end, The Mirror Made of Bone reveals how co-dependence, projection, and trauma bonding can masquerade as love — weaving a spell that binds through longing rather than truth. The deepest learning for me was recognising how I allowed myself to become a container for another's person's unprocessed pain, while my own emotional reality was denied, dismissed, or distorted. What began as devotion became a slow erasure, as I contorted myself around someone else’s wounds in the hope of preserving the connection.
But within that rupture lies the beginning of healing. By naming the pattern and reclaiming the voice I had withheld, the story becomes an act of self-repair. It is not a tale of failure, but of awakening — the breaking of a spell, and the return to what is real.
And this, perhaps, is the night-sea journey of the artist — and of the soul: to descend, to gather lost light from the well of the psyche, and through that descent, to rise reshaped. For it is through those luminous fractures that we begin to return to ourselves — not as illusions, but as beings finally capable of love.
Illustration by Tatiana Tavares. From a gifted print in the author’s collection. Shared here for non-commercial, illustrative purposes. Copyright remains with the artist.
