Page 24 of A Taste of Silver
With love and sorrow, A.M.S.
The initials hit me like psychic shock. Not just letters but a key, turning locks in my mind I hadn't known existed. A.M.S. Aurea Miren?—
The final piece slammed into place with enough force to drive me to my knees.
"Solis." The word tore from my throat, raw and powerful. "Aurea Miren Solis."
The moment the name completed itself, the world cracked.
Not broke, but cracked. Every mirror within a mile radius split down the center with a sound like thunder made of glass. In the apothecary, Melora cried out as every reflective surface spider-webbed. In the manor houses, servants scrambled as looking glasses fell from walls. In the market square, the fountain's surface fractured into a thousand pieces that reflected a thousand different skies.
And in the hollow tree, the three small mirrors began to sing.
CHAPTER TEN
Chapter 10
Silvyr
The garden shattered the moment she spoke her name.
Not breaking, not the violent collapse I'd witnessed in mortal structures when reality decided it no longer wished to support them. This was something else entirely, a fundamental reorganization of everything I'd built, everything we'd built together across the stolen moments of her childhood. The crystal roses exploded into bloom so rapidly their petals sliced through the air like silver knives, each one singing a note of pure recognition that made my bones ache with harmonics they were never meant to contain.
Aurea Miren Solis.
The syllables echoed through dimensions I didn't have names for, rippling outward from wherever she stood in the mortal realm with the force of a stone dropped into perfectly still water. Except this water was reality itself, and the ripples were tearing holes in the careful separations that had kept our worlds apart for longer than most mortal kingdoms had existed.
I was in the center of our garden when it happened, maintaining my endless vigil through a hundred different reflections scattered across her world. Shop windows in distant cities, puddles in forgotten alleyways, the surface tension of wine in crystal glasses, anywhere light could bounce and show me fragments of the realm I was barred from entering. It was exhausting work, this constant surveillance, spreading my consciousness so thin that sometimes I forgot which reflection held which piece of me. But I'd done it every day since she'd left me, since Melora had stolen her memories and scattered them like seeds she hoped would never take root.
The garden knew before I did. The paths beneath my feet, normally solid despite their appearance of flowing mercury, suddenly bucked and heaved like a living thing in pain. I dropped to one knee, pressing my palm against the surface to steady myself, and that was when her name hit me with the force of a physical blow.
Every mirror in existence cracked.
I felt it through my connection to the realm, thousands upon thousands of simultaneous fractures creating a symphony of breaking glass that would have driven mortal ears to bleeding. But to me, trained by centuries of listening to the ghost-melody, it was something else entirely. It was an awakening, every surface that had ever held a reflection suddenly remembering its true purpose, suddenly understanding that the separation had always been artificial, always temporary, always meant to be overcome.
She remembered.The thought was barely coherent, shredded by the intensity of what I was feeling.She spoke her full name and the realms heard her.
My form flickered, serpent and man and something between warring for dominance as the garden's transformation demanded more power than I'd used in decades. Thetrees around me, those impossible constructs of crystallized moonlight and captured starfire, began to grow at visible speeds. New branches spiraled outward in geometric patterns that hurt to perceive directly, their surfaces showing not just reflections but possibilities, what could be rather than what was.
The flowers responded next. Moonblooms that should only have opened once in a lunar cycle burst into simultaneous bloom, their petals spreading to reveal centers that pulsed with her magic, with the silver fire I could taste even from here. They were singing, actually singing with voices that sounded almost human, and the song they were performing was one I hadn't heard since before the Sundering, the song of a Mirror Queen claiming her birthright.
"No, no, no." The words tore from my throat as I struggled to my feet. The cost of this awakening was already mounting, I could feel pieces of myself being pulled toward her across the dimensional divide, drawn by the magnetism of her completed name, her fully realized identity. It was like being torn apart and reassembled simultaneously, every cell in my body trying to exist in both realms at once.
A presence manifested beside me, fractal and flickering. Syra, her mismatched eyes wide with something that might have been excitement or terror or both at once. She took form as a young woman this time, though her edges remained deliberately undefined, as if she wasn't quite committed to the shape.
"Did you feel that?" Her voice carried harmonics of a dozen different tones. "Every threshold just thinned to gossamer. The barriers are practically begging to collapse."
"I felt it." My jaw clenched as another wave of her power rolled through the realm. The air itself had begun to glow with traces of silver, her silver, marking everything it touched with evidence of her claim. "How bad?"
"Bad?" Syra laughed, the sound like wind chimes in a hurricane. "This isn't bad, this is magnificent. This is what we've been waiting for. The realms are finally remembering how to touch."
But I wasn't listening to her anymore. Through my network of reflections, I'd found Aurea. She was in a clearing in the Border Woods, kneeling before a hollow tree, and in her hands were three small mirrors I recognized instantly. We'd made those together, me and the child she used to be, crafting them in the garden before everything had fallen apart. They'd been meant to be anchors, points of perfect resonance between her world and mine.
She was holding pieces of our history in her blood-stained hands, and the sight of it made something in my chest cavity crack open like an egg.
"I have to reach her." I was already moving, following the silver threads of our connection toward the nearest stable threshold. "She's going to draw attention, Syra. Every entity in both realms felt that awakening."
"Including him." Syra's voice dropped to something serious, the playfulness evaporating like morning dew under harsh sun. "The Crimson One stirred when she spoke. I felt his hunger wake up and start searching for the source."
