[MY MODEL]
I

In the hush of November, when the air in Oxford carries the faintest hint of frost and the cobblestones gleam like spilled ink, a certain don sometimes dreams of the Backward Lands. The place is not a map’s concern but a memory’s: a valley of stone and shadow that breathes backwards, where each soul walks in the direction of its own past and where the future is the one country no foot may tread.

It began as a legend whispered in the college dining hall, a tale my tutor, Master Aldred, once told to a small circle of students as if recounting a particularly obscure footnote in the history of the world. “There are those who say,” Aldred would say, his voice a dry, gravelly thing, “that the world runs like a river, and the Backward Lands are an eddy—a place where the current reverses and time becomes a path you can walk upon, but not into.”

I kept the looking-glass Aldred left me on my sixtieth birthday—a mirror not of polished brass but of heavy oak, painted and varnished so that it reflected like a pool at dusk. When the light fell just right it seemed to hold more than skin and bone; it seemed to hold a room, a corridor, an entire evening. Sometimes, in the quiet of my rooms, as the candle flame caught its edge, I swore I could see a shadow move behind my own reflection, a figure that walked the opposite direction, away from the light.

I told myself it was the play of candlelight, the way the varnish swallowed and returned illumination in odd, slow waves. I told myself it was only memory, that the Backward Lands were a story meant to be told around fires, not to be believed in the dark.

But on a particular November evening, when the fog lay thick and the college was a dim constellation of lamps and windows, the mirror did what mirrors do: it gave back what I offered. I was sitting by the fire, the pages of an old treatise spread before me, when the candle guttered and the room filled with the scent of rain. In the mirror’s glass, my reflection wavered, and for an instant the face that returned to me was not mine.

It was a child’s face. Small, earnest, and ancient all at once, as though the child’s features were carved from the very memory of the earth itself. The child’s hair was a dark, curling thing, the color of old ink. Its eyes were wide and bright, like coins held to the light. When it looked at me, the look was not recognition so much as recognition’s echo—like a bell whose note had been carried long and far.

“Who are you?” I asked, and the question was foolish and small.

The child’s mouth shaped the word back to me. “You are not the one who asks,” it said. “You are the one who remembers.”

The mirror seemed to deepen then, as if the oak had become water and the varnish a sky. From the surface emerged a sound that was not quite voice but the memory of it—a chorus of small things, like a thousand pages turning in a distant wind. The child stepped forward, and in that step I felt the floor of the room shift, as though the world had tilted a fraction to let the past through.

“Come,” the child said. “Walk backward.”

It took me a moment to understand. To walk backward was to step into a different kind of time. The child moved away from me, and I followed, not across the room but into the reflection, into the mirror’s dark pool. The air changed as I stepped through—thinner, cooler, threaded with a scent that was neither smoke nor rain but something like the smell of old books and distant stones.

The Backward Lands unfurled before me like a map folded in a child’s hand. The ground was a mosaic of weathered stone, where moss grew like hair and the grasses leaned in the opposite direction of any wind. Trees stood as if frozen mid-breath, their leaves turned to the past. The sky was a hush of color—an absence that seemed to hold more than light.

We walked. The child led me along a path that was not a path so much as the seam of a memory. Each footstep I took felt like stepping into my own life and finding it slightly altered, like seeing a photograph where someone’s face had been painted over. The child’s pace was slow, patient, like a thing that had all the time in the world.

“Where are we?” I asked again.

The child paused. For a moment it looked at me as if it had been waiting for me to ask. “Here is where we remember,” it said. “Here is where we do not go.”

“Do not go?” I echoed. “To the future?”

The child tilted its head. “There is no future here. We are not bound forward. We walk into what has been. The future is a country we do not know how to cross. It is a country we cannot enter.”

It was a strange thing to be told. I had spent my life studying the future—reading the small, stubborn things that hint at what might come next. I had built models and written equations, convinced myself that if I could understand the present enough I could predict the next turn of the wheel. But the child’s words were like a stone dropped into my chest: the future is a country no foot may tread.

I felt suddenly small, like a child returning to a house it had once known and finding it unfamiliar. “What is it like?” I asked, and the child’s eyes softened.

“Like a place you cannot be,” it said. “Like a mirror you cannot look into and still be yourself.”

We walked for a long time. The landscape shifted subtly—sometimes we were among rocks that looked older than any language, other times we were in a field of wildflowers that had been dead for centuries. The child led me through a forest where birds sang the names of things that had once been. Once, we passed a river that ran backward, its current pulling the light into itself instead of out. I reached down to touch it and my fingers came away wet with the memory of rain.

“Why show me?” I asked, when the words finally came. “Why let me see?”

The child stopped and turned to me. In its face I saw something like pity and something like sorrow. “Because you have a choice,” it said. “And the choice is a small thing that can be terrible.”

I felt my chest tighten. “A choice?”

“Not a choice between life and death,” the child said. “But between remembering and forgetting. Between keeping what is and letting it go.”

It was then that the world tilted. For a moment the mirror’s surface was a window, and through it I could see my room again—the candle, the old treatise, the fire casting long shadows. The child’s hand found mine, and in its touch I felt the past like a stone in my palm.

“Remember,” it said softly. “Remember that you were a man who could be merciful.”

The words were a small, sharp thing. They cut like the edge of a coin. I thought of the years I had spent in my study, of the papers I had written, the lectures I had given, the students I had watched with eyes that sometimes shone and sometimes dimmed. I thought of the small kindnesses I had offered and the small cruelties I had ignored. I thought of Aldred’s voice in the dining hall, of the mirror on my wall, of the way the college smelled of old books and new ink.

“Choose,” the child said. “Who will remember the other?”

The question was not asked as a riddle but as a demand. The child’s face was a map of all that had been. I felt the mirror’s edge cool against my skin, the room’s firelight catching the varnish and throwing it back like a second sky.

“Remember what?” I asked.

“The thing you have done,” the child said. “The thing you have not yet confessed.”

The mirror’s surface rippled, and in the ripple I saw myself standing at a window in a room that was not mine but could have been. I saw a younger man, a man with the same eyes, a man who had been careless and bold. I saw him close the door to a room, a room with a child inside. The child’s small hand was on the door handle, and the door shut.

For a moment the world held its breath. The child’s eyes were wide with something like grief. “You left,” it said. “You left the child to remember.”

I felt the room tilt again, and then the mirror’s surface was the mirror again, the oak and varnish and candlelight. I was in my study, the fire low, the pages of the treatise untouched. The child stood before me, and for the first time I understood the shape of the thing that had been done. It was not a great sin, not a crime that would make headlines. It was a small, private thing—a man closing a door he should have opened, a teacher leaving a room when the child inside needed him.

The child’s mouth was a line. “You remember,” it said. “You remember that you left.”

I felt the weight of the years like a stone in my chest. “I remember,” I said, and the words were small and true. “But I do not remember how to undo it.”

“Then you must choose,” the child said. “Who will remember the other? Will you let the world hold both the memory and the absence? Or will you let the mirror keep its secret and the child go on without knowing?”

I thought of all the things I had studied, the small certainties I had built like scaffolding in a library. I thought of the students who had come and gone, the lectures and the papers, the quiet hours with a book and a candle. I thought of the mirror, of Aldred’s voice, of the way the Backward Lands felt like a country I had been taught to visit only in stories.

“Choose,” the child repeated. “Choose who will remember the other.”

There are moments, in the life of a scholar, when the mind is so full of equations and proofs that the world seems like a machine you can set to rights. There are other moments, rare and terrible, when the world asks for something you cannot weigh—when

[...starts looping, repetition issue with it not cooking long enough]




[Base Model]
In the hush of a November evening, when the fog curled like smoke from an unseen hearth and the Oxford streets lay wrapped in a silence that pressed against the windows, Dr. Alistair Vane sat hunched over a desk in his college rooms. The fire had long since died, leaving only the faint glow of a single candle to illuminate the cluttered study. The air was thick with the scent of old parchment and the weight of unspoken thoughts. He had been reading, or perhaps merely staring at the words, when he noticed the looking-glass on the far wall.

It was an old thing, its frame carved with the symbols of a forgotten age, its surface clouded with age and mystery. His late mentor, the enigmatic Professor Elric, had left it to him in his will, along with a note that read: *“The mirror is not a mirror, but a door. Use it wisely, for the world behind it is not what it seems.”*

Alistair had dismissed the note as the ramblings of an eccentric scholar, but now, as he traced the glass with his fingers, a strange warmth pulsed beneath the surface. The candlelight wavered, and for a moment, the room seemed to tilt. He blinked, and the looking-glass was no longer a mirror—it was a portal.

With a slow breath, he stepped forward and looked into the glass. What he saw was not his reflection, but a vast and endless land, bathed in a pale, ethereal light. It was a place where the wind carried the sound of distant laughter, and the trees whispered secrets in a language that was not quite words. The sky was a deep, unbroken blue, and yet it felt distant, as though it were not *here* at all.

He stepped through.

The world around him was not the world he had left. It was the *Backward Lands*, a realm where time did not flow forward, but backward. Every soul here walked in the direction of its own past, and the future was the only land that could not be tamed. It was a place of echoes and unfinished stories, where the future was a shadow that could not be touched.

He soon found himself in a clearing, where a child sat by a fire, its face both familiar and unknowable. The child’s eyes were the color of storm clouds, and its voice, when it spoke, was like the wind through old stones.

“You have come,” the child said. “The mirror has called you.”

Alistair knelt, his heart pounding. “Who are you?”

The child smiled, a knowing, ancient smile. “I am what you have forgotten. I am the echo of a sin you have buried.”

A cold weight settled in his chest. “What sin?”

The child tilted its head. “You once stood at a crossroads, and chose the path of convenience over the path of truth. You let a friend go, not for love, but for fear. You let them die, and you never told the world why.”

Alistair’s breath caught. That was the secret he had buried for decades—the day he had chosen to silence his friend, Professor Elric, when he had been accused of a crime he did not commit. Alistair had stood by, out of fear of scandal, and let the man be cast out. He had not spoken a word in his defense.

“You have come to undo it,” the child said. “Or to let it remain.”

The world around them shifted, and the air grew heavy with the weight of possibility. The child’s voice grew softer. “The Looking-Glass is a bridge between two worlds. If you choose to return, the future will remember the past, and the past will remember the future. But if you stay, the future will fade into the glass, and the past will remain as it is—unforgotten, unmade.”

Alistair’s mind raced. He had spent his life building a legacy, a reputation, a life of quiet scholarship. What would it mean to let go of that? To let the world forget the truth? To let the past remain, unchallenged, unspoken?

The child reached out, its hand hovering just above his. “Choose, Alistair. Choose what you would have the world remember.”

He closed his eyes. The Looking-Glass shimmered, and for a moment, he was again in his study, the candlelight casting long shadows across the walls. The mirror was still there, but it no longer felt like a door. It felt like a choice.

With a deep breath, he reached out and touched the glass. The world around him dissolved, and in the silence of his study, he made his choice.

He chose to let the future fade into the glass, to let the past remain as it was—unforgotten, unmade, but not unremembered.

And in the hush of his candle-lit study, the mirror reflected not a world, but a memory. A faint ache, a whisper at twilight, a truth that would never be spoken, but never forgotten.