Time Invariance of Snow

The Devil once made a mirror that showed people warped versions of themselves. Some it enlarged in stature and virtue, others it shrank down to their worst qualities. A physicist testing the symmetry of physical law shatters it by accident, and the shards scatter through reality, leaving casual evil in the world.

The narrator sees an unaccountable malice in her lover's eyes. She goes to the Snow Queen's frozen castle, then past it into the Devil's own domain, determined to get an explanation. The Devil can only shrug and answer that he was bored.

This is a Snow Queen retelling with a physics experiment braided through it, moving between hard science and fairy tale. It was published as an original story on Tor.com.

The question running underneath is what accountability looks like across a very long life. The story closes decades later, on a quiet reconciliation that has been hard won.