Mirrored Cloak

Lore

There are tales, plenty of them, of lone travelers who multiply before the eyes of their enemies—shimmering silhouettes that move with intent, laugh with malice, or simply stand still and breathe like real men. These are no illusions cast from the hand of a mage, but phantasms woven from the shimmering folds of a Mirrored Cloak.

Smooth as polished silver and dazzling when caught in the sun, the Mirrored Cloak hangs like liquid metal from the shoulders. From behind, its surface appears utterly reflective—yet not of the world, but of the self. It is said the cloak does not mirror surroundings, but thoughts, fears, and imagined selves. When activated, it allows the wearer to project non-corporeal duplicates of themselves in a wide radius. Most conjure three to five shades, each echoing the wearer's actions with uncanny precision. But some—whether by desperation, talent, or madness—have been seen to manifest a dozen at once, forming a disorienting ballet of impossible selves.

The duplicates possess no mass, no voice, and no scent. They do not bleed when struck. Yet to the untrained eye, they move as surely as any living thing. For those unfamiliar with the cloak’s trickery, this illusion is often fatal—an arrow wasted, a sword swung too wide, a step taken in the wrong direction. The cloak buys moments. Sometimes, that's all a soul needs.

Despite its eerie brilliance, the cloak carries no known curse, though some users report headaches or disorientation after prolonged use. The mental strain of controlling multiple phantasms simultaneously can grow taxing, especially in chaotic or magical environments. A few tales speak of wearers who lost track of the real self among their projections, a phenomenon ominously referred to in esoteric texts as mirrorfade.

Curiously, cloaks of this kind are often recovered not from mage towers or royal vaults, but from the bodies of Glass Walkers—a nomadic sect of spellrunners and reflection-mancers who journey across the Shardlands. To them, mirrors are more than tools; they are passageways, omens, and sometimes... prisons. Whether they crafted the cloaks or merely sought them out remains uncertain, but their presence among the fractured reflections of that wasteland is no coincidence.

Some scholars theorize that the Mirrored Cloak functions best in places of fractured reality—deserts under eclipse, halls of old crystal, or forests where moonlight bends wrongly. Wherever it came from, and however it truly works, one thing remains certain:

If you strike the wrong target, you may not get another chance.