Page 14 of A Taste of Silver
Eirian's betrayal had been a cold knife. This was a fire, starting in my gut and consuming everything, leaving ash where trust used to be. This was Melora. The woman who'd raised me, taught me, held me through nightmares I couldn't remember having.
"How long?"
"Since the day I found you." Melora's fingers traced patterns on the wooden table. "Fourteen years ago. You were seven, though you couldn't tell me that yourself. Couldn't tell me anything."
"Where?"
"The Temple of Forgotten Stars. Middle of winter, worse than this one. You were half-frozen, clothes torn to ribbons, clutching something in your hand so tight I had to pry your fingers open to get it free."
Melora stood, moving to a cabinet I'd never seen her open. She pulled out a small lead box, its surface etched with binding runes. The weight of it seemed to surprise her, or maybe that was just age showing in how her arms trembled.
She set it on the table between us.
"I should have destroyed it. But something stopped me. Maybe I knew you'd need it one day. Maybe I'm just a sentimental fool."
The box's lid lifted with a sound like breaking ice. Inside, nested in black velvet, lay a shard of mirror no bigger than my palm. Its surface showed no reflection of the room.
It showed a garden made of glass.
Not a memory of a garden. Not an image. The garden itself existed within that fragment, roses blooming in eternal frost, pathways that led between worlds. And there, barely visible in the distance, two figures walked hand in hand.
"You held this so tight it cut through your palms." Melora's voice barely rose above whisper. "The wounds wouldn't heal properly for weeks. They kept weeping silver."
I reached for the shard. The moment my fingers made contact, warmth flooded through me—recognition so profound it brought tears to my eyes. This wasn't just a piece of mirror. It was a piece of our mirror. The one Silvyr and I had made together, before?—
Before what?
"Tell me about the Sundering."
Melora flinched. "You've heard that term?"
"I heard it was what happened when the Mirror Realm was sealed. But that's not the whole truth, is it?"
"No." Melora pulled her cloak tighter, though the shop wasn't cold. "The Sundering wasn't just sealing the Mirror Realm. It was severing it. Cutting the connections between worlds socompletely that anyone caught between them would be torn apart."
"The Mirror Queens were guardians of those connections." The line I’d been reading when I was so rudely interrupted floated to the top of my mind.
"Were." Melora's laugh held no humor. "Your grandmother was the last official Queen. She died trying to stop the Sundering. Your mother... she tried a different way. Tried to preserve the connections through her children. Through you."
"Children. Plural."
"You had a brother. Vaen. He was older, already showing signs of the gift when the Prohibition Forces came."
The name stirred nothing. No memory, no recognition. Just emptiness where family should exist.
"They killed him?"
"The records say he died in the Sundering." Melora's fingers worried at the edge of her cloak. "But records lie, especially about that night. All I know is you appeared at the temple, alone, calling for someone who wasn't there."
"Silvyr." The name escaped before I could stop it.
Melora went rigid. "You remember?"
"No. Yes. I—" I pressed my palms to my temples, fighting the pressure building behind my eyes. "He was in the mirror at Eirian's estate. A serpent, massive, made of starlight and shadows. But I knew him. My body knew him even if my mind didn't."
"The texts speak of bonded entities. Beings from the Mirror Realm who form connections with Mirrorwalkers." Melora's words came carefully, like she was picking her way through thorns. "The bonds are supposed to be sacred. Protective. But after the Sundering?—"
"They became curses."
