Page 16 of A Taste of Silver
"Instead, Vaen died and I forgot everything."
"Perhaps that was mercy."
I wanted to argue, but exhaustion crashed over me like a tide. The night's revelations pressed down, Eirian's betrayal, the serpent's transformation, Silvyr's name on my lips, and now this. The truth I'd sought was heavier than the lies had been.
"I need to rest."
"Of course." Melora moved toward the stairs, then paused. "The mirrors will stay uncovered now. Your magic won't letthem be hidden. But Aurea, be careful what you look for in them. Sometimes we're better off not knowing what we've lost."
"And sometimes we can't move forward until we understand what's behind us."
Melora nodded, sadness etching deeper lines around her eyes. "I'll... I'll be here if you need me."
The silence in the room was different now. It wasn't the comfortable quiet of before, but the vast, empty space between two strangers. The apothecary was still home, but the feeling of it was gone, shattered into pieces too sharp to put back together.
I climbed the narrow stairs, each step an effort. My room was unchanged, a narrow bed, worn quilts, herbs hanging from the rafters. But I was noticeably different. The silver markings caught moonlight from the window, casting patterns on the walls that looked almost like writing.
I collapsed onto the bed without undressing. The mirror shard was still in my hand, its weight both comfort and torment. Through its surface, the garden continued its eternal bloom, waiting for something. Waiting for me.
Sleep took me between one breath and the next.
The dream began immediately.
Not the falling nightmare I knew so well, but something else. I stood in a place that wasn't quite the garden and wasn't quite the real world. The edges of everything blurred, reality soft as candlewax.
He emerged from that softness like smoke taking form.
Not the serpent. Not the boy from my recovered memory.
A young man, perhaps twenty, with hair that caught light like spun silver. His clothes were simple, dark fabric that seemed to drink in light, but he wore them with unconscious grace. When he turned to face me fully, I gasped.
His eyes were black. Not dark brown or deep blue that looked black in certain light. True black, edge to edge, with starsscattered through them like someone had captured the night sky in his gaze.
"Aurea."
My name in his mouth was prayer and pain combined.
"Silvyr."
He smiled, and for a moment, the stars in his eyes brightened. And then I fell.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chapter 7
Aurea
The fall was different this time.
Instead of tumbling through familiar darkness, I was pulled sideways. A rip in the fabric of sleep, and I slipped through it, landing on feet that weren't mine. Or, they were mine, but the ground they met was all wrong.
Ground met my bare soles, when had I lost my boots? It was smooth as glass but warm as sun-heated stone. It held my weight, but just barely, a promise it might forget at any moment. I curled my toes, testing its reality.
I stood in a garden that shouldn't exist.
Crystalline roses climbed trellises of frozen lightning, their petals chiming in harmonies too pure for mortal ears. I looked into a bloom and saw not my face but fragments, my hand reaching for something, my mouth forming words I'd never spoken, my eyes silver-bright with power I didn't remember having. The images shifted with my breathing, showing different angles of moments that might have been memories or might have been lies.
Paths of polished obsidian wound between flower beds where silver poppies grew alongside midnight orchids. Their stems twisted together in patterns that made my head ache to follow, geometry that belonged to no earthly mathematics. When I stepped forward, the stones beneath my feet rippled outward in perfect circles, as if I'd disturbed the surface of a vertical pond.
