What’s even more unlucky than breaking a mirror? When the mirror breaks you in return…

Mirrors are fascinating things. They reflect without bias, copying our world perfectly within their surfaces. We use them all the time, when we comb our hair, brush our teeth, flex our muscles, or try on new clothes. But the mirror holds a secret.

Children know this secret: they know that mirrors are windows. They know that it just might be possible to step through, to the other side…if only their reflection wasn’t in the way. We’ve all played the games…jumping out in front of the mirror, trying to fake out our reflection and reach across the threshold before it can block us. What the children don’t realize is that there are very good, very important reasons why our reflections always bar our way, and that sometimes, just sometimes, someone manages to pass through their reflection.

There’s only one point in time, one circumstance where this is possible: at the instant of one’s inevitable death, just before falling into a glass surface, eyes wide with horror, staring into the glass reflecting one’s eyes wide with horror staring into the glass reflecting one’s eyes wide with horror staring into the glass reflecting…infinitely. And then they disappear completely from this world, the mirror shatters into blood-stained shards, and in some nearby world endlessly reflecting our own, an Unreflected is born.

An Unreflected is a special kind of revenant, created when someone passes through their reflection and past the barrier of glass at the instant when they should have died.

This transformation warps reality…majorly. Those near the glass will vaguely remember hearing a scream, and will see the glass shatter to pieces, often stained with blood…but there’s no body. Such incidents are particularly baffling in modern countries, for the blood, if tested, does not match with any existing human being.

The reason for this is that mirrors reflect our reality. They even reflect the dead. They are assertions that whatever is reflected is real. When one crosses through their reflection, the real and the reflected cancel out. Their body and the body of their reflection cancel out. Their existence has canceled out. Reality has been shifted as if they had never even been born.

But the fact is, unknown to all but one, that person was born, and did exist. And still exists, barely, on the other side of the mirror. The fact is that reflections have no souls, therefore the soul doesn’t cancel out. At its essence, an Unreflected is the soul of a person who reality forgot, trapped on the other side of the mirror.

Most Unreflected go insane. Quickly. By all accounts, they just died. Horribly. Their self-image is covered in and pierced by broken glass. That’s worth a handful of violence and unnatural checks right there. Once they realize they don’t really have a body, they’ll run into another unnatural check. Once they realize they’re in a world where everything is reversed, they’ll face another few unnatural checks. Once they realize they don’t reflect in any surface, they’ll likely have to face some unnatural and helpless checks. And once they figure out that there’s no trace in this world (or the “reflected” one) that they even existed, they’ll face a barrage of unnatural, helpless, isolation, and self checks. Oh yes. They’re definitely insane.

Thankfully, the suffering of the Unreflected fades quickly. Most try unsuccessfully to interact with the world. A lucky few manage to make contact with a adept, though they’re usually mistaken for demons. Most wind up on the floor, curled into a ball. They would have clawed out their eyes if they still had a corporeal body. They get so insane that they just lose their sense of identity completely. And since that’s the only thing keeping them there, their spirit just snuffs out like a candle flame.

What you’ve heard
The only way you would have heard anything about the Unreflected at all is if you managed to stumble across the notes of Leonard Ashe, a private detective and Enoptromancer in New York. Leonard’s been trying to piece together several cases involving broken glass and blood belonging to non-existent people.

At a carnival house of mirrors, the scene of one of the incidents, Leonard actually managed to make contact with an Unreflected, and took down as much of the barely-coherent story as possible before the huddled image in the glass faded completely.

Such insight has led Leonard to connect the Unreflected with another kind of unnatural creature, the Shatterfreak.