Of evil mirrorselves

Duality is surely a nice trick to understand and simplify the world. We can take anything and divide it into two distinct essences. The good and bad, for instance, can easily be two essences of one same thing. When it comes to heroes, it’s frequent in their stories a moment when they must confront with their vile side. And for my flames it seems to be no different.

But as I think of it, for some flames there is just one opposing force to it, like laziness opposing energy or lost self-control against reasoning behavior. This evil mirrorside, as I’m thinking of it, is more the sore side of the same essence. That is the difference between an archenemy and an evil mirrorself, apparently.

 And this kind of foe seems to be more about Hephaestus and Áine than the others, somehow. There’s not much of a dark side to reason, energy and resistance that isn’t covered by the other flames (like Vesta covering the simple plans of Zhu Rong). Vesta does quite cover some of Hephaestus’ flaws too, but Hephaestosis is a phenomena that is very close to him. After all, it would be the incredibly heavy and dizzy feeling that comes from the overwhelming inspiration, usually after gigatrances. Hephaestus’ Fever, on the other hand, deals with Hephaestus own demise, like the very essence called Hephaestus was poisoned.

And so there’s Áine, as the power of her love can be very dangerous and unhealthy too. One of the scorching reverberations of her doings is how it seems to be useless and fruitless. What use loving things even has? Those would definitely be stringed as characters aside (maybe it goes for Sfayi and Qareen themselves) as I suppose Áine’s essence would be really pure and clean. It’s the love that is genuine and is given with no reward in exchange.

So far I’m really avoiding the insertion of these elements in the story. I don’t know if I should make Hephaestosis being a smokey mirror of Hephaestus born from some curse, or Áine having a secret of her past boiling around dark influences. Honestly it can work with it as there are enough characters for a long story already, though the idea here is exactly to practice these exercises and face these troublesome twists with the strings.