Page 44 of A Taste of Silver
But she is moving away from the false mirror. She is leaving the null room. She is safe.
The last thing I see before consciousness fully fragments is her looking back, her face a mixture of determination and something that might be sorrow. Her lips move, shaping words I cannot hear over the roar of my own dissolution.
"I'll come back for you."
Then darkness takes me, not the familiar darkness of the mirror realm but something deeper, colder, more absolute. I am unmade and remade, scattered and gathered, destroyed and somehow, impossibly, preserved.
When awareness returns, I don’t know whether it’s seconds, hours, or centuries later. All I know is that I am back in the mirror realm. Diminished, certainly. Weakened to the point where taking human form might be impossible for years. But alive, if what I experience can be called life.
The null room did not kill me. It could not, quite. But it took its price in essence and agony, carved away parts of me that will take decades to regrow if they ever do.
Worth it. Every second of dissolution was worth it for that moment of contact, for the warmth of her hand in mine, for the knowledge that she is safe from the false mirror's lies.
I coil into my serpent form, the shape that requires least effort to maintain, and try not to think about the way she looked at me. Like I mattered. Like my pain mattered. Like a stranger's suffering was worth risking herself to ease.
She does not remember me, but perhaps she does not need to. Perhaps this, whatever this becomes, can be enough.
I settle into the darkness to heal, to wait, to remember the weight of her hand in mine. The null room took much from me, but it gave me this: the memory of touch, the proof that I can still be real enough to matter.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chapter 17
Aurea
Not numbers, not directions. The coordinates were a sharp, silver pull in my bones, an ache behind my eyes that drew me down, ever down through the palace's forgotten depths. Each step on the spiral staircase took me further from the world of councils and politics, deeper into foundations that predated the mirror prohibition by centuries.
The stone walls wept with condensation that caught no light. My fingers traced the moisture, and where I touched, frost bloomed in patterns that matched the marks beneath my glove. The air grew thick with the taste of old magic, copper and starlight and something else… Possibility, raw and untamed.
At the staircase's end, a corridor stretched into darkness. No torches here. No need for them. My marks provided their own illumination, casting shadows that moved wrong, bending toward me rather than away.
The door waited at the corridor's terminus. Black wood bound with silver that formed symbols my conscious mindcouldn't read but my blood recognized. The sigils pulsed in greeting.
I pressed my palm to the silver. It wasn't warm or cold. It was a thrum, a vibration that skipped a beat with my own heart.
"By blood and birthright," I whispered, words rising unbidden from some deep well of genetic memory. "I claim passage."
The door dissolved. Not opened—dissolved, becoming light that reformed as an archway leading to?—
I stepped through the archway, and my breath hitched. The ground looked solid, but when I took a step, it rippled under my boot like a reflection in dark water. It was impossible. It was here.
Silver trees twisted into spirals that made my head ache. Their bark was polished mirror. Between them, flowers bloomed in patterns that felt like a math I could almost understand, a language written in light. Each bloom pulsed with its own inner light—silver petals that chimed softly when they moved, though no wind stirred them.
Moonblooms. But not like the withered specimens I'd harvested in Virelda's cold earth. These were the true flowers, each one containing a crystallized memory, perfect and terrible in its preservation.
The nearest cluster drew me forward. As I approached, the flowers responded, their light intensifying. I could almost hear them, whispers of moments lost, experiences abandoned, truths too painful to carry.
A movement in my peripheral vision. Black fur against silver grass.
The fox sat on its haunches, watching me with eyes that held too much intelligence for an animal. One eye silver, one violet. Its tail, tipped in moonlight, twitched once.
"Hello," I said, because what else did you say to a creature that clearly wasn't quite real? "Are you here to help?"
The fox, a mirror entity of some kind, my mind supplied, though I didn't know how I knew, tilted its head. Then it rose and padded deeper into the garden, pausing to look back with clear expectation.
I followed.
The path the fox chose wound between memory clusters, each grouping distinct in its arrangement. Here, a spiral of flowers that reeked of regret. There, a perfect circle of blooms so bright they left afterimages. The fox navigated with purpose, leading me past temptations and dangers I couldn't quite perceive.
