"LookingGlass" by Charles Mills Trowbridge

When you look into a crystal, you see yourself ten thousand times reflected.

  Our tale opens in a glassblowing shop somewhere in the Old American Empire, long before the Great Fall.
  There was a man who knew the magic of glass, how to mold it, shape it. He could shape it into anything he desired.
  So strong was he with forming glass that he could even use air to mold it, without touching it at all. However he was disgusted with the world around him and would have no part in it. No wife, no children, totally apart from the realms of man he lived, happy in his seclusion.
  The way that humans clouded their emotions confused him. He wanted to see only the smooth and clean glass that surrounded him day and night.
  In time his loneliness overcame him, and he devised a plan to eliminate it forever.
  Late into the night he would work on his project, his ultimate expression.

  It was to be a woman. She was to be formed from the glass that he loved so much, clear and naked as to never be capable of hiding anything from him.
  When he finished his statue, he kissed it once, and with the breath of life he animated it.
  She was as perfect in mind as she was in form, but without words, for every thought that she had appeared in her head for the glassblower to read.

  They lived happily together to some time. During the day she would assist him in the shop, always careful to never melt herself on the blowtorches.
  One day, however, as the glassworker was spinning a piece of his magic to elongate it, she strayed too close to her progenitor, and the pipe from which the master was blowing hit her, and caused her to shatter into a million parts.

  He sunk to his knees crying, knowing that he had destroyed the only perfect thing in his world.
  He left her there, and went to sleep. Trying to put his worried mind at ease, so that tomorrow he could start fresh. Perhaps build her again, from better, stronger glass.
  That evening he awoke to a strange sound. It was like something was scratching agent his doorknob. He went to his door, to find something he never thought imaginable. It was a woman made of a million jagged pieces of glass, whose long talons of shattered glass that served as fingers now could not manipulate the doorknob.
  When he looked into his former creation's eyes, flat planes of glass, he saw his own face reflect ten thousand times in his head. Her mind now infused with his guilty conscious ten thousand times intensified, she could think of nothing except for starting over again, fresh and new. And so she cut him down, determined to build him new from scratch, just as he had been determined to rebuild her.

  Now, my children, you know the story of the glasswalker who haunts the ruins outside of the village. If you meet her when you play, or happen to wander into her den when you go searching for firewood, be careful of your own feelings.