Page 71 of Foresyth Conservatory
Ineededhim closer to me. I needed to know what it felt like to be bit by Eden’s serpent.
He stepped closer. The flames behind him cast his shadow long across the floor. I crashed into him, my body caught in the pull of something dark and unspeakably sweet. My hands fell across his neck, our faces only inches apart, and our breaths mingling at one another’s lips. I was pulled—and pushed—into him.
My lips found his, and relief flooded me at the warmth of him. He groaned in response. I inhaled the smell of sulfur and stone, relishing as it scorched my lungs. Our lips danced on each other’s like a ballet, him supporting my every lurch and spin. It was as if we had danced many times before.
In the next instance, the spell was broken, and I pushed him off of me.
“What the hell?” I spewed, wiping the taste of him from my lips.
He considered me for a moment, the corner of his lips upturned. “I’ll give you a second to figure it out.”
I heard the glass sculpture breaking all over again. He used the cards. He wanted to prove to me that he’d been honest, that he hadn’t used them on me before, and the only way to do so was to show me how it would be when hedid.
The counter factual.
“We can’t just channel the cards whenever, wherever. The use of magick requires sacrifice. Something we make, something we cast our energy into.” He shrugged, stepping around his spoiled work. “I channel mine into these sculptures. Breaking these represents the sacrifice that Sophia made, all those eons ago. I forge, I cast, I break. Only then can the power be unleashed. Everyone has their unique method, but the underlying principle is the same. Unless you’ve seen me breaking vases around you, you can be assured I haven’t been using any magick on you. Whatever you feel around me is yours, and only yours. It’s real.”
The words settled over me, and I grimaced.
“I can’t believe you made me kiss you,” I said, still reeling in shock. I had never been so overcome with emotion. “How disgusting.” The feeling of the press of his lips still fresh on mine, I felt their absence.
His smile grew. “I’ll have to challenge you on that one. Free will still exists, some argue. I can only amplify emotions, not create false ones.”
He must have drugged me. Or confounded my senses in some other way. I couldn’t believe that shattering some glass could completely overpower me.
“You must have done something else. Poisoned me or something,” I started. My head was spinning, trying to come up with a logical explanation for what happened.
He laughed, but it was humorless. Not like the laugh from before. “Gods, I’ve never seen anything like it. You don’t take magick for granted, do you?” he asked before continuing, “Damn, youinterrogateit.”
“Then how?” I almost shouted. All the thoughts in my head rattled against my skull, their cage. They begged to be free.
He took a long breath in. “The cards, they don’t make up new emotions—they just heighten the ones you already have. Tapping into them is what gives you power. I forged this,” he said looking down at the shambles at his feet, “thinking of you. Of your eyes. And how they made me feel like I was a puzzle, being endlessly turned this way and that, studied. A hypothesis, always changing with the introduction of new facts, new perspectives.”
The color. I recognized it now. Prussian blue. They were the same as my eyes.
“I know you still don’t believe me, Dahlia, and perhaps for good reason. You should be suspicious of everything—everyone—at this school. But I want to earn your trust. I want you here at Foresyth.” The way he looked at me made me want to break down in tears. It reminded me of the desperation I saw in my patrons, them so desperately searching for answers to their messy lives. They thought I held all the answers, but I didn’t.
“If you wanted me here so badly, then why did you poison me the first day?” The accusation was hot in my throat. I wanted to believe him, but the weight of everything I’d seen, everything I still didn’t understand, was suffocating.
The look of confusion washed over him as he scrunched his eyes and nose together. He didn’t even know what I was talking about.
“The first day—I came into the breakfast room. You piled my plate up high, and gave me a tea no one else was drinking,” I explained. “It had an herb in it—something along the lines of a truth serum. I read about it in the library.”
“Dahlia, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I might have suggested a tea, but I didn’t poison it.”
My shoulders slumped, a wave of disbelief crashing over me. He had to be lying. Hehadto be. Why else would he have pressed me with all those questions afterward? He was the one who poured the cup, watched me drink it. But the uncertainty in his voice, the confusion in his eyes . . . it gnawed at my anger, unraveling the edges of my certainty.
“You need to be careful. You might be trusting the wrong person.” He reached out, placing a hand on my shoulder, but the gesture felt too familiar, too invasive. I shrugged him off, the anger flaring again, hot and wild inside me.
“You’re right,” I spat, stepping back from his touch. “Iamtrusting the wrong person.” My voice cracked, the words tasting bitter on my tongue. “I should go.”
The look in his eyes—the hurt, the confusion, and something else I couldn’t name—was almost enough to make me hesitate. Almost. But I couldn’t afford to beswayed, not now. Not when I didn’t even know if I could trust my own instincts anymore.
Before he could say another word, I bolted for the door, slipping past him and running through the tunnels as fast as my legs would carry me. The darkness closed in around me, swallowing every shred of light. The damp chill clung to my skin, but it was the suffocating panic that made it hard to breathe. Tears blurred my vision, but I wiped them away furiously, trying to keep the dam from breaking.
The sound of shattering glass still rang in my ears. It pierced, sharp and relentless, reverberating through the tunnels. And that’s when I realized, it wasn’t just the glass that had shattered.
Something inside me had splintered too—my grasp on reality, my sense of control. It felt like the ground beneath me had cracked open, exposing something dark and terrifying just below the surface. How could I trust anything—anyone—when even my own mind felt like that perplexing, ever-changing sculpture?
