A Gothic fairytale

In remembrance of Carnival Land

Author’s Note

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. 

Bricolage illustration from the graphic novel Carnival Land (2011), incorporating a photographed image of the author posed as the character “Peri.” The work was gifted to the author.

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.

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 what it means to become a symbol in someone else’s search for wholeness. It’s about the subtle cost of projection, and the 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

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Dedication

In remembrance of Carnival Land
and the weaver of costumes

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Epigraph

The leaves were long, the grass was green,

The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,

And in the glade a light was seen

Of stars in shadow shimmering.

Tinuviel was dancing there

To music of a pipe unseen,

And light of stars was in her hair,

And in her raiment glimmering.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lay of Leithian (from The Silmarillion)

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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. The shelves carried the scent of candle wax, and old kauri, as though memory itself had settled into the wood. There her creations 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 quiet of her cabinet, Tinuviel tends the curious things from which her dreams are woven.

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. He listened in a way that made unspoken things feel heard, his calm something others leaned toward instinctively. 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, cool enough that the air brushed lightly against their skin, 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. The jars chimed softly when the breeze moved through them,  their faint glow illuminating the leaves overhead in trembling arcs of light, as though the night itself were breathing.  

Peri sets the stars dancing, while Tinuviel traces the runes of an old magic.

Beneath that canopy, in flickering pools of light, Tinuviel and Peri studied illuminated spellbooks written in celestial ink, their pages thin as gossamer, luminous where light passed through. In that quiet glow they intuited the mystical language that turns dream into form, tracing its symbols slowly with a fingertip before speaking them aloud, though the 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 without 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 worlds, they reached for illusions, each unable to name what was truly missing.

This folly shaped their entanglement and cast a thousand shadows: flickering on the surface of the well, and sinking them into its depths, a drowning place they confused for love.

At first, the shadows beneath the canopy seemed no more than flickers cast by the turning of unseen stars. But as the darkness began to gather, Peri tried to name it. He spoke softly, almost as if testing whether the words could survive the air between them, and the ground gave way. So he grew careful with his speech, and the mist between them thickened, the light in the jars growing dimmer at their edges.

The jars break, and their gathered starlight sinks into the well.

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.

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A little star fell in the night,

Broke its mirror, lost its light.

One by one, the pieces gleam

Each one holds a quiet dream.

Look inside but do not fear,

The face you find is waiting here.

Not too perfect, not too bright

But full of shadow, full of light.

When you’ve cried and when you’ve grown,

Your shape will rise with the stars you’ve sown.

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The light diffused until direction itself felt uncertain, and the mirror-world mist thickened until Tinuviel and Peri could no longer see each other’s outlines. So, in time, they did not find each other again, though traces of starlight lingered in memory.

Sometimes, Tinuviel would discover a single shard glowing on her windowsill, filled with a sliver of light,  cool in her palm, its colour shifting with the hour.

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 no longer feared.

Peri feels the tension of an invisible wire beneath his feet.

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Starlight shards upon the sill,

Mirrors made for those who will

Dare to look with open eyes

Where the silent sorrow lies.

Not for beauty, not for pride,

But the truth we hold inside.

When we fall, when we break,

That’s the shape our hearts must take.

In the shadow, in the well,

Where the soul begins to tell

All the parts we used to hide

There, the dreamer turns the tide.

Only one may stand alone,

In that mirror made of bone.

See the face that’s worn and true,

Every crack a light shines through.

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Yet even the smallest shard remembers the light

This work is a personal memoir and reflection. It expresses my recollections and understanding of a past relationship as part of a creative exploration of memory, love, and loss.

The poems in this work were generated in collaboration with AI and curated, edited, and placed by the author as part of the story's mythic and symbolic structure.