Page 20 of A Taste of Silver
From downstairs, I heard Melora moving through the shop, preparing for the day. The normal sounds of morning, a kettle whistling, herbs being ground, bottles clinking, but underneath them, something else. A resonance, like the echo of massive bells ringing in the distance.
Every mirror in the shop was singing.
And I knew, with certainty that bypassed thought and lived in my bones, that he was watching through every single one.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chapter 8
Silvyr
The garden trembled in her wake, reality struggling to remember its shape without her presence to anchor it. I stood where she'd left me, my hand still extended toward the space she'd occupied, fingers curled around an absence that burned colder than any physical wound.
Fourteen years I had waited. Fourteen years of silence, of watching through every reflective surface in her world, catching glimpses of a girl who didn't know me, who walked past mirrors with careful avoidance, who wore those damned silver-threaded gloves like armor against her own nature.
Now she was beginning to remember, and the garden,ourgarden, didn't know whether to bloom or wither.
Crystal roses shed their petals in sheets of silver light, each one carrying a fragment of memory. Here, her seven-year-old laughter as she discovered she could walk on vertical surfaces in this space. There, her twelve-year-old determination as she swore to find a way to bring me fully into her world. Andscattered everywhere, like drops of blood from a wound that wouldn't heal, the memory of our last visit before the Sundering.
I moved through the deteriorating landscape, my form shifting unconsciously between shapes. Sometimes the serpent, ancient and patient. Sometimes the boy she'd first known, young and eager and foolish with hope. Sometimes this shape, caught between, neither fully human nor fully other.
The mirrors that hung from nothing showed me what I already knew, Aurea waking in her small room, silver petals dissolving around her like morning frost. She sat among them, one hand pressed to her lips where that last petal had lingered, and I could taste it too, that ghost of connection, sweet and bitter as a farewell.
Through a hundred mirrors in her world, I watched her. The shop below her room was alive with reflections now, each surface singing with the resonance of her awakening power. The older woman, Melora, stood frozen in the middle of it all, understanding finally that her careful suppressions had failed.
Good. Let them fail. Let every binding she'd placed on my Aurea shatter like ice in spring.
Even as I thought it, I knew the cruelty in that wish. Melora had saved her when I couldn't. Had given her fourteen years of life, even if it was half a life, even if it was built on forgetting. I should be grateful.
But I wasn't.
A sound echoed through the garden, not quite voice, not quite music, but something between. The realm itself was calling, summoning me to the heart of this fading space. I followed the pull moving through paths that reformed beneath my feet, past reflecting pools that showed not images but emotions given form. Her confusion, swirling silver and violet. Her fear, sharp-edged and crystalline. Her recognition of me, warm as summer starlight.
The garden's heart was a cathedral of mirrors, each one showing a different moment of our shared past. But at its center stood the one that mattered, the Last Mirror, the one that had never broken, never faded, never stopped believing she would return.
It was massive, reaching from the garden's floor to its endless sky, its frame carved from frozen starlight and bound with threads of fate I'd spent my life trying to understand. This was where we'd performed the ritual. Where she'd tried to pull me through. Where everything had gone wrong.
I pressed my palm to its surface, and it showed me what I least wanted to see.
Aurea as a young girl, her power at its peak, standing in a circle of silver fire while her brother Vaen anchored the spell from my side of the glass. She spoke words that predated language, her voice harmonizing with itself across dimensions. The veils between worlds grew thin, then thinner, then began to tear.
I watched my younger self reach through the mirror, my hand almost grasping hers. One more second, one more breath, and I would have been free. Would have been real. Would have been hers in truth instead of in dreams.
Then the Sundering hit.
Not from our ritual, we'd been careful, so careful. But from the Crown's forces, their systematic severing of every connection between realms. The timing was perfect in its cruelty. Our ritual, designed to open one door, was caught in the violent closing of every door.
Vaen screamed as the power reversed, pouring through him like molten silver. His body couldn't contain it, wasn't meant to channel that much raw force. He dissolved into light, into nothing, into a memory that would haunt us both if Aurea could remember it.
She'd tried to hold on, tried to complete the ritual even as her brother died, even as the realms tore apart around us. But she was just a girl, no matter how powerful, and she couldn't stand against the combined will of the Crown's mages.
The backlash threw her out of the circle. I watched her hit the ground hard, silver blood streaming from her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Watched her crawl toward the mirror, toward me, my name on her lips even as consciousness fled.
Then darkness. A gap in the memory where the mirror itself had nearly shattered.
When the images resumed, she was gone. The ritual circle was scorched black. The mirrors surrounding it were cracked or destroyed entirely. And I was trapped more thoroughly than before, the failed ritual having tangled my nature with hers so completely that I couldn't even maintain a solid form without her presence.
I pulled my hand from the mirror, not wanting to see more. But the memory lingered, her blood on the ground, her voice calling my name, the weight of our failure crushing us both.
