Page 18 of A Taste of Silver
I stared at that offered hand. In the real world, I would have analyzed, questioned, found seventeen reasons to refuse. Buthere, in this space between sleep and waking, between memory and forgetting, other rules applied.
The moment my fingers touched his, the garden exploded into memory.
A girl with silver ribbons in her hair, laughing as she chased light-sprites through crystal corridors. Her hands leaving frost patterns on every surface, beautiful and temporary as breath on glass.
The same girl, older, standing at the boundary between worlds while a boy with midnight eyes watched her work. "I can cross whenever I want," she said, proud as any princess. "The veils are just suggestions to someone like me."
Older still, teaching that boy to see the spaces between reflections, to understand how reality folded in on itself. His hand in hers as she pulled him through a mirror for the first time, his gasp of wonder echoing through seventeen dimensions.
The memories layered over each other, past and present existing simultaneously until I couldn't tell if I was remembering or experiencing. In all of them, one constant, this boy, this young man, this creature who wore shapes like seasons, always at my side.
"We were children."
"You were." His thumb traced circles on my palm, each rotation sending sparks up my arm. "I was already ancient when we met. But you made me feel young. Made me feel..."
"Human."
The word hung between us, heavy with meanings neither fully grasped. In the memory-visions, I saw it clearer, how he'd shifted from serpent to boy when I was near, how my presence had given him form beyond his cursed shape.
"You promised to free me." The gentleness in his voice made it worse. No accusation, just statement of fact, soft as falling snow.
I pulled my hand away, but the memories lingered, ghosting across my skin like persistent kisses. "I was a child. I didn't understand what I was promising."
"Didn't you?"
Another memory bloomed without touch, myself standing in a circle of silver fire while he watched from a mirror's surface. My young voice speaking words in a language that predated human speech, words that meant binding and breaking, joining and severing. Power pouring from my marked skin in rivers of light, reaching for him, trying to pull him through?—
The memory shattered. I gasped, stumbling backward. My foot caught on nothing as there was nothing to catch on, but I fell anyway, the garden's reality responding to my emotional vertigo.
He caught me before I hit the ground, arms solid and real despite everything about this place that shouldn't be. This close, I could smell him, frost and old books, silver polish and that particular scent of air just before lightning strikes.
"You promised to free me," he repeated, his face inches from mine. "Then you disappeared. Fourteen years, Aurea. Fourteen years of nothing but silence and my own reflection staring back."
One of his hands cupped my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone with reverence that bordered on pain. His touch felt like coming home and burning alive simultaneously.
"Do you know what it's like to be forgotten by the only person who ever saw you as human?"
The question broke something in my chest. Not my heart, something deeper, older, more essential than any organ.
"Do you know what it's like to have a hole in your memory shaped exactly like a person? To feel the edges of it every single day?"
The garden reacted to our proximity, to our pain. Cracks spread through the crystal roses, leaking silver light that drippedupward, falling into the indecisive sky. The paths beneath us began to fragment, showing glimpses of other times, other places, a ballroom made of starlight, a library where books grew on trees, a bed of silver petals where two shapes lay intertwined.
"I didn't choose to forget." My hands found his chest, not pushing away but not pulling closer either. Suspended between resistance and surrender. "They took it from me. Melora, the binding, the?—"
"I know." His forehead touched mine, and suddenly I could feel his memories too, watching me collapse after the failed ritual, seeing them carry me away, calling my name into mirrors that would never again show my face. "I know you didn't choose it. But knowing doesn't make the silence hurt less."
The garden continued deteriorating around us. Petals fell like snow, each one whispering secrets in languages I almost understood. The mirrors hanging from nothing began to crack, their surfaces showing not reflections but possibilities, what could have been if the ritual had worked, if I hadn't forgotten, if the world had been kind to children who loved across impossible boundaries.
"The garden's dying."
"No." His arms tightened around me, holding me steady as reality shifted and reformed. "It's changing. It can't exist without you, but it doesn't know what shape to take now that you're here but not here, remembering but not remembering."
"I want to remember." The admission scraped my throat raw. "But I'm terrified of what I'll find."
"You'll find me." His lips brushed my forehead, not quite a kiss, more like a blessing or a curse. "You'll find us. And you'll find the price we both paid for loving across realms that were never meant to touch."
The silver light leaking from the fractured roses began to pool at our feet, rising like reverse rain. Each droplet thattouched my skin left a mark, not visible, but present, adding weight to my bones that would follow me into waking.
