Page 11 of A Taste of Silver
Let me ease that.The serpent's voice went soft.Let me return what they took.
"I don't want?—"
Three words, Aurea.The serpent pressed against the glass, and frost spread from the point of contact.Three words you swore to me, and I'll return what you've lost.
The room spun. I could taste frost on my tongue, feel starlight under my skin. Something vast and essential howled to be let free.
"What words?" The question scraped my throat raw.
The serpent's eyes flared brighter, and for one moment, I saw through them. Saw myself as it saw me, not the herbalist with careful gloves and hidden truths but something else entirely. Something magnificent and terrible and absolutely inhuman.
You already know them. You've always known them.
The mirror's surface began to crack. Not breaking but opening, like a door someone had forgotten to lock.
Say them, and remember everything. Refuse, and lose everything. Choose.
CHAPTER FIVE
Chapter 5
Aurea
The serpent's eyes were a vortex, and I was the dust caught in its spin.
A force, ancient and absolute, coiled in my gut and pulled. My arm lifted, a marionette's limb on a silver string. The satchel slid from my shoulder, its soft thud a sound from another world. Moonbloom petals spilled, pulsing like faint, scattered hearts on the dark floorboards.
"What are you doing?" Eirian's voice was a distant echo, a ripple in a world that was rapidly receding.
I couldn't answer. Couldn't look away from those constellation eyes that promised everything I'd forgotten, everything I'd lost. The mirror's surface called to me, not with words but with something deeper. A pull in my bones, in the silver threads running through my blood.
My palm met the glass.
Cold. Not the bite of winter, but a void-cold that sucked the warmth from my bones. It raced up my arm, a network of frost blooming beneath my skin. My blood felt like it was freezing,turning to fragile crystals that fractured with every beat of my heart. A plume of white, the ghost of a scream, escaped my lips.
Then the void imploded.
Searing, silver fire erupted from the point of contact, not burning but forging. It melted the ice in my veins and poured through me, a molten starlight that tasted of ozone and forgotten promises, rewriting me down to the marrow.
The heat shifted again, becoming something that had no name in any language I knew. Not hot, not cold, but other. It tasted of starlight and endings, of promises spoken before words existed.
The floorboards dissolved into a mosaic of frost and silver. The study walls fractured into a forest of crystalline roses.
A boy sat among them, no more than thirteen, with hair like spun moonlight. He looked up at my approach, and the starlight in his hair was eclipsed by the simple, shocking warmth in his eyes. Brown. They were just brown. The most ordinary, beautifully human things I had ever seen, and a breath shuddered out of me.
"You came back." His voice cracked on the words, that awkward space between child and man. "I was starting to think you'd forgotten our place."
My body in this memory was smaller, younger. Maybe twelve. My hands bore no gloves, and silver light danced beneath my skin like it belonged there.
"Never." The word came from my younger self without hesitation. "This is the only real place."
He stood, brushing crystal pollen from his dark clothes, simple fabric, not the scales I'd expected. When he reached for my hand, I met him halfway.
Our fingers interlaced, and the garden bloomed brighter. Every surface reflected us infinitely, two children holding hands in a space between worlds, neither fully human nor fully other.
"When I'm grown," my younger self said, chin lifted with childhood certainty, "I'll make it so you can walk in my world whenever you want. I'll break every barrier."
The boy's smile carried sadness too heavy for his apparent years. "Don't make promises you can't keep, Aurea."
