Okay, so basically, here you have this kid, FREDERIC Blanc (don’t laugh at the blatant reference to a certain someone) who is a narcissistic asshole (and don’t laugh at this blatant reference to a mythological figure) who lives in Paris. He’s a pretty little French boy, with the most gorgeous blond hair (you can start laughing now) and the most delicate blue irises, an ungodly shade of an unearthly color, so rich and so deep, so mesmerizing women are to said to have simply fallen in love with from a single glance (laugh, you bastards, laugh).
And here you have NICHOLAS Tremble (this is a less blatant reference to Nyx, laugh anyways), who falls in love with Ric-I mean FREDERIC, who completes scorns the guy because he is in love with PERSEPHONE Faye, the daughter of some rich nobleman who is, like, the Paris Hilton of 1884 Paris. Of course, NICHOLAS is a retard and is mournfully heartbroken.
Oh, right, NICHOLAS meets FREDERIC while hunting and NICHOLAS has a big thing for guns and weaponry and all that nice technologic what have you’s of the 1884, think Crystal Palace and whatever (fine, NICHOLAS is…now…uh, British). And so, as a parting gift of sorts, FREDERIC buys him a French flintlock dueling pistol (retard) and sends him off happily on his way, or so FREDERIC thinks.
In the meanwhile, PERSEPHONE’s parents arrange for her to be married to some random guy, AIDAN Leroy (yet another reference), who is like the Renaissance man of Paris at the time, he does, quite literally, everything, hunt, fish, swim, duel, draw, paint, write poetry, sing, dance, plays three different instruments and has a cult of women following him everywhere he goes.
In the meanwhile, NICHOLAS, having seen FREDERIC flirt with PERSEPHONE and all that nice noise, is more heartbroken and kills himself on FREDERIC’s doorstep with the pistol he was gifted and pleads to the heavens for divine retribution. FREDERIC, slightly shaken by the whole event, is the talk of the town and people give him really odd looks and PERSEPHONE’s parents totally hate him.
Did I mention Freddy has a thing for mirrors? And built himself a hall of mirrors, like that of Versailles? And he ponders up and down his hallways just starring at himself.
Then, Freddy finally learns that his beloved PERSEPHONE is going to be married off to AIDAN. Of course, he gets ridiculously angry and even angrier after PERSEPHONE is seen spending more and more time with AIDAN. After having a chat with Eris, one of his friends, who jokingly suggests just simply killing AIDAN because she, too, was scorned by the Adonis (haha, get it?) of 1880’s Paris, FREDERIC takes up the proposition and plots to kill Mr. Renaissance Man.
Instead of hiring a mercenary, or something smart, FREDERIC goes and seduces KERES Charron (not a reference, I swear), a servant in AIDAN’s house. The girl is so completely and devastatingly in love with FREDERIC that she’s willing to do absolutely anything, and boy do I mean anything, for him. So one night, he brings up the idea of hey, why don’t we kill your lord and master because I said so! And because he is the only obstacle to our deep, deep, deep love? The latter is most definitely a lie but she goes and she kills AIDAN anyway, with, gee, let’s guess, a flintlock dueling pistol and comes back to FREDERIC covered in blood with a loaded gun in hand. After having celebratory sex, or whatever, or something, KERES suffers this giant emotional breakdown and goes completely insane and in this really odd battle thing, argument (after the sex) FREDERIC just shoots her (dipshit) and gets one of his servants, ALDRIC (more obscure references), to dump the body into the Seine on a misty morning.
The kid is not so torn up over the death of KERES, but rather, that he might be incriminated for murder and what not, but is comforted by his gorgeous reflections in each and every one of his beautiful, gigantic mirrors lining the entirety of his home now, every single room, mirrors and mirrors. And his servants are no longer allowed to walk around the house without a mask because their reflections are so inferior to his. His lifestyle becomes more and more decadent and exuberant as he spends his fortune on random pieces of furniture, tea cups, weird, useless technology, silks, oriental mysteries, his house, his mansion, his so called palace with a beauty and expansiveness to rival that of Versailles, as the stories go, flourishes. Giant fountains, gardens, flowers, marble staircases. FREDERIC, after murdering KERES, becomes slightly insane himself, imagining his life story to be that of the gods, his home is not Paris, it is not even Earth, but it is the heavens up above, Mount Olympus, only the gods can rival his beauty, his brilliance.
After AIDAN is found dead in his house, PERSEPHONE is crushed and crying and sad and weeping and weeping and as it so happens, bumps into FREDERIC at AIDAN’s gigantic funeral, chock full of other weeping women with a gigantic procession of spider lilies from FREDERIC (him and his obsession of the orient and yet another reference). They go back to his home, with all of its mirrors and for a brief moment, PERSEPHONE is amazed by the wondrous display. They also proceed to fornicate in the middle of all his mirrors (American Psycho) and FREDERIC looks up every now and then to admire his beautiful reflection. PERSEPHONE, slightly annoyed by his constant narcissistic weirdness jokes that he should look at her instead, after all, she’s so much prettier. This really ticks off Freddy more than it should, his beauty insulted and what you have. He finds a letter opener somewhere and in this awful fit of rage (or, crime of passion) stabs PERSEPHONE to death a million times.
And at the end of it all, he’s left, covered in blood, naked, a total mess with a look of absolute vulgarity across his beautiful visage and he starts having flashbacks of the night KERES killed AIDAN, the way she looked, the way she looked when he was in her, the way she looked when he told ALDRIC to toss her into the Seine. Then he looks down and see PERSEPHONE, face covered by her once beautiful chocolate hair, smeared in blood across her naked breasts, rich, warm blood oozing slowly across the cold marble floor from the gashes on her body, her limp hands twitching slightly and suddenly he felt the urge to vomit, to regurgitate his sins and wash his hands of this spilled blood. He sees no exit, just mirrors, mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors, every room he ran to, footsteps trailing blood, every hallway, every possible crevice covered by his own reflection, a reflection of absolute madness.
He bursts out into his garden, with all the fountains and lilies, which he had received as a gift from Eris (who traveled to Japan) and had planted so happily because of their rich color that had reminded him of blood, along with red poppies and blood red roses (man had a thing for red flowers, neh?). And all he could see, letter opener in blood-stained hand, was blood and more blood, seeping as it did across the marble, across the expanse of his garden, across the horizon as a wine red sunset fell lugubriously across the sky. And suddenly, he shrieks, utterly loosing his mind, what little sanity he has left and in an attempt to escape from this nightmare, tears across the blood soaked garden and leaps into the fountain in effort to cleanse him soul. All he sees, instead, is another reflection of himself.
PERSEPHONE’s parents are going nuts looking for her because she hasn’t returned home and has left no word. ADRASTEIA Tailler, a long time secret lover (by that I mean stalker) of FREDERIC, tells them that she has seen them walking together, towards his home, after the funeral. The parents send the police over and the first thing they see is the naked, bloody corpse of their daughter and her reflection in a billion mirrors. They find FREDERIC later, rolling around half naked in his fountain, mind broken and muttering absolute gibberish, suffering from a hypnagogic fit.
As the police attempt to constrain him, he screams, imagining that Hynpos and Thanatos, the twin brothers of death and sleep are here to take him to Tartarus, to suffer the same fate as Tantalus or whoever else happens to be stuck for an eternity in Tartarus. Instead, Nyx, night, appears (ADRASTEIA in real life) and comforts him and offers him solace in Elysium. Following the comforting voice of the dark goddess, FREDERIC quiets and is led away to an asylum. ADRASTEIA visits him nightly and nightly he is haunted by the nightmare of his own savage reflection, the beauty that he once possessed and the maimed, blood corpses of those he had murdered, his own eternal damnation, NICHOLAS Faye’s plea for divine retribution finally find its way to him. FREDERIC Blanc, being a man of rather remarkable, dies slowly and miserably of old age in the Paris asylum, dreaming, a gift of Morpheus, of mirrors and the decay of human nature.
The Blanc estate is said to be abandoned, the gardens unkempt and the fountain dry. Nicknamed the House of Thousand Mirrors, many of them broken, it’s still a hot subject of debate among the gossip artists of Paris as to exactly what happened in the curious mirrored house. By some strange force of nature, spider lilies, not a native plant of Paris, blossom yearly between the cracks in the blood stained marble floor, covered in shards of glass, where Persephone Faye met her death.