Et Sequitur Magazine

Et Sequitur Magazine, Issue 16

Issue 16 (Autumn 2026)

Infinite Possibilities

By Rosalyn Robilliard

(cover art by Heinrich Vogtherr the Younger; Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch, Folio 52 - c. 1552)

My kind are not made to be caged. We drop in, try on skins of supple flesh, oil-slick feathers and sequinned scales, then crawl, fly, dive through forests of steam and teeth, drink sulphur from copper oceans, dance in markets of sweat and spice. Then back up, planet to planet, we skip across lives. An endless chasm of ink black velvet peppered with fiery stars and possibility. Forever expanding, rushing outwards.

“This is not for you,” he says, hand tight on my shoulder. Cracked hangnails and liver spots, musty and damp.

So, I turn, trudge through the mud with bare feet. A hundred thousand million possibilities, distilled into one being. My hands small and chubby. Hair on my head and eyes of blue glass. Trapped by his circle of mirrors.

Of all the worlds I have seen, of all the forests and purple skies, this planet is different. It is grey and brown, empty and cold. The air smells dry, the bread crumbles in white webs of mould, the gravity aches heavy over my thin skin. Houses cracked with age and towers that creak in the wind stretch over the land, but they are empty. There is no one. No one, but him.

“Best you work,” he says, shoving buckets into my hands. “Best you work and know your place. Best you get used to it.”

Each morning, I rise with the same sun and carry the same bucket of slops out to the same pigsty. Sometimes the pigs flick their ears and nuzzle at my leg, my own thin face reflected in their small black eyes. Once the smallest had died. She was lying on her back with her stomach distended and eyes wide black and open. I looked away. I wanted to run. To zip and spark far from the death and the smell. But I stayed, the mirrors holding me back.

At night, as I rub lotion into his callused feet and scrape dirt from his yellowing toenails, he looks down at me with a wry smile.

“Suppose you’re used to finer things, ‘ey? Used to skipping from one joy to the next? Suppose you think I’m a villain, keeping you here?”

“This planet will burn,” I tell him. “One day, it will fall into your sickly sun and burn. And I’ll scatter your dust and dance across the stars.”

He swallows, looks down, almost smiles, then, “Make sure you scrape off the corns,” he says, switching feet.

It was his prison of possibilities that drew me from the sky: a circle of mirrors reflecting the infinite selves I could become, an illusion too tempting to ignore. I realised too late the mistake I had made, my weak pink form crouched on dirty straw, looking back at me through distorted glass.

I let the energy course through me, leaping from my skin, a bolt into the universe. But only a spark bounced and fizzed around the circle of mirrors. Wings clipped by my own reflection, multiplied by infinity.

And in the shadows behind me, he waited. Like my new shape, but larger, full of brown teeth.

“Hello,” I said. “I seem to be lost. I’ve wandered here by mistake. Maybe you could point me in the direction of some help?”

His smile grew wider. “You’re not going anywhere, little one,” he wheezed, and then he began to laugh, a deep rasping cackle. “I’ve waited so long.”

There are many rooms in this place. Grand bedrooms with plush carpet and four posters with carved headboards, and smaller ones too, with blankets embroidered with little animals and coated with dust. He gave me a bed with plain sheets. And a tiny window, through which I could see, if I positioned my head just so, a sliver of silver sky.

In time, he widened the ring of mirrors: a small courtyard outside, where I could stand and watch the universe I had lost. Then the whole farm. 

Maybe he thinks he is being kind, stretching the bounds of my prison, giving me extra inches of muddy ground from which to look at the stars I cannot reach. Or maybe it’s just so that I can tend to the pigs, dig the garden, sweep the yard.

I have tried boredom before, spent decades lying in the muds of a green moon that orbits a planet far from here, feeling nothing but the slick bodies of the creatures that live there sliding over my own. But that was my choice, and when the mud got too heavy I split into light again, and hurtled through the darkness to try something new.

This is different. A feeling I’ve never had before, of being held against my will. The question of why consumes me. I have seen terrible things in this universe, but never without reason.

Maybe there is something I cannot see. Some need that this skin cannot feel. I think of the mud creatures, of the way our bodies entwined, nutrients passing through membranes, warmth pulsing between us. But he does not come near me.

When he speaks, his voice is curt. Instructions on how to clean the yard just so, or when and how to plant the seeds that will feed us. But he watches me with hungry eyes, and when I speak his mouth twitches, again with the tiny edges of a smile.

“Why?” I ask him each day, as the sun sinks and the sky darkens.

But he gives me no answers, only more work.

Sometimes, in the evenings, he tells me things. How the pigs are faring, the chances of frost, why we must plant one crop here and another there. Sometimes I reply, and his mouth quirks again. But he never answers my question.

Now, this planet has spun around the sun five times since I landed. I have spent endless days with fingers numb from cold, working in the mud, surrounded by my reflection, as he polishes ovals of glass, shaping them until they catch the light.

He watches me still, with narrow eyes hooded under folds of skin, stomping in boots crusted with dirt. But less than he did before. As though he trusts that if he glances away, or blinks, I’ll still be here when he looks back. As though I don’t captivate him the way I once did.

Every month, when the grey moon rises, he takes the glass and builds a new set of mirrors in front of the barn, tilting each one like white petals. And every month, I watch from the barn door, willing him to fail.

This night, he mutters as he twists and locks the mirrors into place. Among the stars, a light flares green and his smile widens, then softens, eyes round as another of my kind shoots from the sky. I want to stop him, call down rolling black clouds, a hail of diamonds to pierce his skull, lightning to cleave him in two. But this soft pink form is barren of such power, this planet a grey insipid expanse.

As always, he angles each mirror as the light flashes into the circle, perfecting the outer ring, but this one is stronger than any he’s tried to catch so far. Usually, they zip and smash through the glass, soaring away, but tonight anger splinters through the mirrors.

With a crack, three shards slice his stomach and he falls back, smile gone, wrinkled eyes wide. I watch as the green light zips and sparks far into the night. I don’t begrudge being left behind. I would do the same. We fly alone, untethered.  

He sprawls on the ground, face pale, lips chapped with each ragged breath. Then he drags himself towards me, reaching up one bloodied hand.

I stand over him, remembering the hail and the lightning I wished for so long to cleave him in two. But I cannot escape this mirror prison without him.

“Why?” I ask, again.

He has me. Is that not enough?

But he just trembles, hunched and bleeding on the straw. I bend down, peel his jacket from his thin frame, press it hard against the wound.

As the sun sets again, I sit at his bedside, drinking curdled milk from a thick glass. His breathing rattles as he leans against coarse pillows, his own glass of milk spilling onto his blood-stained shirt as he clutches it in one gnarled hand.

“Please,” I say, “give me a reason.”

He looks at me, then down at the bundle of cloth wrapped tight around his wound, fresh blood already blooming.

“Does it matter?” he asks. It’s the closest I’ve had to an answer, and I feel the air become still.

“Yes,” I whisper.

He takes a creaking breath.

“Before you, I was alone on this planet,” he says, and his eyes are swollen with tears. “In a box of my own thoughts. Words rattling around, but I couldn’t even remember if that’s really what words sounded like. I’d talk to the earth, to the pigs, to the sky. But they wouldn’t talk back.” He tilts his glass, gazing down through the soured pool. “Loneliness so deep you could drown.”

I sip my milk and he stares at me, jaw working, large fists clenched. I have seen the pigs clamour and nuzzle, snorting and rubbing at each other’s thick skin. And beings across the universe clustered like stars, warming one another in the darkness. But it is not the same for my kind. We do not feel the need to fly together.

 “There used to be thousands of us,” he says, and there’s a pleading note in his voice now. As though begging me to understand. “Great cities, bustling markets, friends around the campfire. You and me, it’s not enough.”

I think again of the mud kind on the green moon, knotting together. I think of my kind, zipping free.

“All creatures are born with needs,” I say. “Some need mud, some need air, some need companionship. I need freedom. What you have taken from me is... everything. My greatest need. To satisfy your own.”

I have never felt alone, even when soaring through the darkness a million light years from another life. The thought of it is strange. I cannot understand it. But I can use it.

“I cannot live without companionship,” he says.

“And I cannot live in a cage,” I reply.

We stare at each other in the dim bedroom light, and I am struck by an idea.

“Why don't we travel together?” I ask. “Take my hand. We can spin across the stars as one. I'll take you anywhere you like. Worlds made of clouds and oceans that dance with life, festivals and parties, cities that sprawl to the horizon.”

There is a look in his eyes. Half hope, half terror. Like a child taking boiled sweets from a stranger. As if all this time, I had been cleaning his feet for him to dance. His hesitation only fear of waltzing on the polished floor alone.

I am not sure if he knows it is impossible. I am a being of light, and he is of flesh. How can he flash across the stars in a millisecond, without leaving a cloud of blood droplets dispersing in his wake?

Even as he breaks the circle of mirrors, clutching my hand as we leap from this world, and he explodes into nothing—I am still not sure. Maybe he knew all along that this is what would happen.

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