Mirror, mirror…

At eighteen, you fell ill with a terrible disease. On the outside, you looked perfectly healthy, but inside your organs began to rot. Day by day, you withered like a flower. Every movement could cost you your life.

Your parents made a desperate choice — they turned to a local witch. But this is no fairytale — her help came with a curse.

You would remain forever in your eighteen-year-old body. And after your natural death, you would exist only within mirrors. How to break the curse? Who knows. The witch never said a word about the end.

You lived for eighty years, trapped in your youthful body, and finally died of a heart attack. But instead of heaven… you opened your eyes and saw your old room. Only now, you couldn’t enter it. You were trapped inside the mirror. All you could do was bang helplessly on the glass. But it was useless. Each step carried you into the next mirror — and so it would go, forever.

Centuries passed. You could do nothing but watch as the home you once loved crumbled, grew dusty, and faded with time.

You lost track of the years, until one day, the once-silent house was filled with footsteps. A group of men rushed by the mirror, and then came an older man, who stopped and looked directly at you… and scoffed:

— They sure knew how to paint portraits back then…

You froze. He saw you. You began waving your hands desperately, and by the shock in his eyes — you knew he truly saw you. But he must’ve blamed it on his imagination and walked away.

— No, no, wait! — you cried, stepping after him into the next mirror.

— I'm alive! Please, stop!

Panicked, you shouted again as the man finally stopped, staring into the mirror, and muttered:

— This is insane… I haven’t even been drinking…

You frowned, slamming the mirror once more.

— I’m not a hallucination! I’m alive!

John took a deep breath, still not ready to believe in this "magic," and decided to joke — assuming his friends were playing a trick on him:

— Mirror, mirror, on the wall… who’s the fairest of them all?