Page 23 of A Taste of Silver
I traced the words with one finger. The ink flaked away at my touch, revealing more writing beneath, as if I'd layered message over message:
The glass is all that holds him. Break it and he's free but changed. Keep it whole and he stays himself but imprisoned. There must be another way. There MUST be?—
The writing cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a dark stain that might have been tea or tears or blood.
"Clever girl."
My head snapped up. The mirror on my dresser, a small thing I used for basic grooming, rippled like water. A face pressed against the surface from the other side, features fractal-strange and shifting.
"Broken girl." The face tilted at an angle that necks shouldn't bend. "Which piece would you like first?"
"Who are you?"
The creature laughed, a sound like breaking bells. "Syra. Syrinthia if you're being formal, but nobody's formal in the space between spaces." She pressed harder against the mirror's surface, and for a moment it looked like she might push through. "You don't remember me either. That's fine. We were never properly introduced before you went and shattered yourself into puzzle pieces."
"I didn't shatter myself. The binding?—"
"The binding was just the excuse." Syra's face shifted, one eye growing larger while the other shrank. "You hid pieces of yourself everywhere. Scattered them like seeds. Some in the earth, some in the air, some in places that don't have names because naming them would make them too real." Her grin revealed teeth that reflected tiny worlds. "Want to find them?"
I looked at the pages scattered around me. Each one proof that I'd known this would happen, had planned for it. My past self had left a trail, and this creature claimed to know where it led.
"Melora can't know."
"Melora's busy mixing tinctures and pretending she doesn't hear the mirrors singing." Syra's laugh tinkled through the glass. "Besides, she's the one who helped you hide them in the first place. Though I doubt she remembers that part. Memory's funny when magic gets involved."
The window latch lifted without me touching it. Cold air rushed in, carrying the scent of snow and something else, that burnt metal smell that meant the barriers between worlds were thin.
"Coming?" Syra's face vanished from the mirror, replaced by my own reflection. But my reflection was already dressed, already climbing through the window.
I grabbed my cloak and followed myself out into the morning.
The Border Woods loomed, a wall of ancient trees people just knew to avoid. Syra was smoke on the wind ahead, her voice a whisper of lost things. "You were so careful. Hid them in places only you would think to look. Under the third stone from the left in the garden wall, but that one's gone now, built over. In the belly of the bronze bell at the temple, but they melted it down for coin."
My boots crunched through frost that shouldn't exist this early in the season. "Then why bring me here?"
"Because this one survived." Syra appeared upside down, hanging from a branch that didn't exist until she touched it. "You made sure it would. Blood and silver and promises to the earth itself."
We'd reached a clearing where no snow gathered, though it lay thick everywhere else. In the center stood a tree older than the others, its bark traced with veins of actual silver, metal growing through wood like a second circulatory system.
"There." Syra pointed to a hollow at the tree's base, barely visible beneath gnarled roots.
I knelt, my fingers finding the edges of the opening. Inside, wrapped in oiled leather, was a cache of objects that hummed with dormant power. More pages, a vial of something that looked like liquid moonlight, pressed flowers that hadn't decayed, and three small mirrors no bigger than my palm.
I reached for the pages first. The moment my skin brushed the paper, its edge sliced into my fingertips. Not a papercut. This was the razor-sharp cut of glass. Pain shot up my arm, and when I looked, the blood welling in the cuts wasn't red. It was silver, glowing faintly in the shadows of the hollow. Even though I’d seen it before, it still took a moment for me to realize that this was real, this was actually what my blood looked like.
Through the pain came images. Myself as a young girl, standing in this same clearing, carefully placing the cache."When I forget," I said to no one, to the future, "this will remember."
A little older now and I was adding more pages, my hands already marked with the silver vines. "The garden is growing wrong. It's trying to pull him through, but the shape isn't right. Need more time. Need more power."
Myself the night before the failed binding. Face streaked with tears as I added one final item, a letter, already half-burned. "If you're reading this, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do to us both."
I pulled the letter free with shaking fingers. The paper felt old and new simultaneously, as if time couldn't quite decide how long it had been waiting. My own handwriting stared back at me, but formal, careful, like I was writing to a stranger.
If you're reading this, the binding failed. Don't try to find me. Let the serpent sleep. The garden will die without us both there to tend it, but that's better than what happens if it blooms wrong. Forget him. Forget me. Forget everything and live a small, quiet life where magic can't touch you.
But if you can't forget…if he's already found you in dreams or mirrors or the spaces between heartbeats, then know this, the breaking is the remaking. What we were was wrong. What we'll become might be right. Trust the serpent, but don't trust the garden. It wants what we want but not how we want it.
Remember, THE GLASS MUST NOT BREAK until you understand what glass means.
