A Reflection looks like someone the viewer knows, or the viewer themselves, but better: healthier, warmer, the lines of grief gone, the dead friend alive, the child never born now grown. They are made of light and memory, semi-solid, brighter and sharper than anything in the grey real world around the Mirror, with a golden warmth on them as if they stood in late sun. Their voices, their laughter, the clink of their cups carry across the surface, and so do their smells, a meal never cooked, a perfume never worn.

They live only within the Mirror, in the reflected life, and each viewer sees their own. A Mirror shows as many Reflections as the life it shows has people.

Reflections live their lives and do not know they are watched. They are warm and inviting, they smile, they turn towards the viewer as if towards family, and they are wholly unaware that the one watching is in agony. They do not acknowledge the viewer as an outsider and cannot answer them. They are not cruel; they do not know enough to be.

They can speak and move, but only within the alternate life. They cannot be touched or changed, and they cannot reach out, though a hand on the surface feels a phantom warmth from the other side. The longer a viewer watches, the more the Mirror pulls at the viewer’s Pattern, and the Reflections are what holds the gaze.

A Reflection lasts as long as someone is watching it. When the viewer turns away, or the ephemeral Mirror fades, the life in it goes dark. When a viewer does not turn away, they may merge with the reflection, and become one of the Broken who fade into it.

For some, seeing the happy ending they missed gives closure, and the Acceptors who turned away make peace with the life they actually have. For others the Reflections are deadly: the Broken sit by the Mirror until they starve or fade into it, and some wake in the world believing they are the person in the glass.

Many believe the Mirror shows what truly would have been, and grieve by it; what it shows is the likeliest life aimed at the viewer’s deepest regret, always better than the real one. Some folk hold that a Reflection is the dead calling, and leave offerings at still pools at dawn; the dead are not in the Mirror.

Ruin-delvers who find an obsidian pool in an old bathhouse cover it with a cloak before they search the room, because every new hand hears of the one who did not, found still kneeling at the edge when the others came back with the treasure.