Page 42 of A Taste of Silver
Chapter 16
Silvyr
The null room calls to me like a siren song of annihilation.
I hover at the threshold between realms, every instinct screaming retreat. The chamber ahead pulses with malevolent purpose, runes carved by those who understood exactly what I am and how to unmake me. They glow with the sick light of binding magic, each symbol a tooth in a trap designed to tear consciousness from form, to reduce me to nothing more than scattered thoughts dissolving in the void.
This room was built to kill creatures like me. Not quickly, not kindly, but through slow dissolution, each second within its walls stripping away layers of existence until nothing remains but an echo of an echo.
I should not enter. Every law of self-preservation demands I turn back.
But she is in there.
The bond between us thrums with her distress, a silver thread pulled taut to breaking. Aurea does not remember our connection, but it remembers her. It sings her fear through myconsciousness like lightning through water, each pulse a clarion call I cannot ignore. She is in danger, not the ordinary danger of the manor's tricks, but something deeper. Something that tastes of old magic and older hatred.
The choice is no choice at all.
I push forward, and the null room receives me like acid receives flesh.
Pain is too simple a word for what happens when I cross the threshold. The runes activate instantly, recognizing me for what I am. Neither fully spirit nor flesh. Neither wholly real, nor completely imaginary. I exist in the spaces between definitions, and the null room abhors such ambiguity. It seeks to resolve me into nothing.
My form immediately begins to fragment. The careful architecture of consciousness I have maintained for centuries cracks like ice under spring sun. Pieces of me scatter, memories, thoughts, fragments of identity spinning away into the hostile air. I am dissolving, and I have barely moved three feet into the room.
The serpent rises in response to threat, base instincts older than human thought.Flee, it hisses.Survive. The snake form offers protection, a simpler shape that might withstand the room's assault longer. But if I let it take me now, I will lose the capacity for human speech, human thought. I will become nothing but scales and instinct, unable to warn her, unable to save her.
I force the serpent down, though the effort tears something vital inside me.
Forward. One step. Another. Each movement is agony crystallized into motion.
The room's geometry defies understanding, walls that are too close and too far simultaneously, corners that bend wrong, air that tastes of copper and endings. My vision fractures, showingme multiple versions of the same space. In one, Aurea stands frozen before a mirror that should not exist here. In another, she reaches toward something I cannot see. In all versions, darkness coils around her like a living thing.
"Aurea." Her name emerges as barely a whisper, shredded by the effort of maintaining human speech while the room tears at my throat.
She does not hear me. Cannot hear me. I am not solid enough yet, existing more as intention than form. The null room fights my every attempt to manifest, each push toward corporeality met with crushing resistance. Silver blood, not truly blood but the essence of what I am, begins to leak from wherever the runes touch my consciousness. It drips upward, defying gravity, dissipating into nothing before it can fall.
The cold here transcends temperature. It is the cold of unmaking, of spaces between atoms, of the pause between heartbeats that never resumes. It burrows into me, seeking the core of what I am, trying to extinguish the spark that maintains my existence.
But she is so close now. Ten feet. Eight. Six.
Her back is to me, her attention fixed on something that sets every protective instinct screaming. The mirror before her is wrong. It’s not one of mine, not bound to the mirror realm, but something else. Something hungry. I can feel its malevolence like oil on water, seeking purchase in her unguarded mind.
I must become solid. Must warn her. Must?—
The effort rips a sound from me that is neither human scream nor serpent hiss but something between, the cry of a creature caught mid-transformation. More essence tears away, silver blood now flowing freely from wounds that exist in dimensions the human eye cannot perceive. I am coming apart at the seams, unraveling like a tapestry pulled thread by thread.
Let her go, the practical part of me whispers.You have survived centuries. You can survive centuries more. Let her go.
But I have been letting go for so long that I have forgotten how to hold on. And now, faced with the choice between existence and her safety, I find that existence without her presence, even her unremembering presence, is not existence at all. It is merely haunting.
I push harder, forcing matter to coalesce around my consciousness. Every atom I claim costs me months, perhaps years, of accumulated strength. The null room shrieks its protest, runes flaring brighter, their acid light eating through my manifestation like flame through paper.
My hand, I have a hand now, trembling and translucent butthere, reaches toward her.
"Aurea, do not…" The words fragment, each syllable a battle. "Do not look…into…"
She turns, and our eyes meet across the impossible space of the null room.
Recognition flares, not of me, she still does not remember, but of danger. She sees what I am becoming in this space, the dissolution happening in real-time, silver blood painting patterns in the air that should not exist. Her face transforms with horror and something else, something that looks almost like grief for a stranger's pain.
