Page 36 of A Taste of Silver
My knees buckled. I caught myself against the wall, palm flat against stone that thrummed with old magic. My mother'spainted eyes bore into me, silver and knowing and desperately sad.
My hand rose to my own face, tracing the bones beneath my skin. "This is from you," I whispered to the painted eyes. "All of it." The last word was an accusation.
Movement in my peripheral vision. Another portrait hung beside my mother's, smaller, as if added as an afterthought. A young man, perhaps eighteen, with features that echoed Lyralei's but softened by youth. His hair caught the light strangely in the painting, not quite brown, not quite silver. Like mine before the marks awakened.
No nameplate. No inscription. But the defiant tilt of his chin, the way his hair seemed to drink the light, it was a face I'd seen in my own reflection before the silver came. A ghost of my own features.
"Vaen."
My brother. My brother who died in the Sundering. Except the painting was too recent. The style, the frame, the very paint itself, all crafted after the Sundering. After his supposed death.
If Vaen died in the Sundering, why did his portrait hang here, painted years after that event?
The covered mirrors pulsed. All of them, all at once, as if something behind the cloth had suddenly awakened. The temperature plummeted. My breath misted in the air.
A tear appeared in the nearest mirror's covering. Not a cut, a burn, as if something on the other side pressed too hot against the fabric. Black smoke leaked through the gap, pooling on the floor like oil.
The smoke rose. Took shape. Semi-solid tendrils reached toward me, dripping shadow.
Not smoke. A wraith.
I stumbled backward. More tears appeared in other coverings. More smoke. More shapes emerging with predatoryintent. They moved wrong, too fluid, too hungry, without the hesitation of living things.
The first one lunged.
I threw myself sideways. Its tendrils raked across my shoulder, cold beyond winter, beyond death. The nightgown tore. Blood spattered the floor?—
My blood wasn't red. It was molten silver, glowing with its own power. It spattered the stone and hissed, eating into the floor like acid.
The wraith recoiled with a sound like steam escaping. The light burned it, ate through its smoky form like acid through paper.
Three more wraiths circled me. I pressed my back to the wall, heart hammering against my ribs. No weapons. No escape route. Just me and creatures made of shadow and hunger.
A single, desperate word tore from my throat, raw and resonant. "Reveal!" It wasn't a plea; it was a command, and the hall shuddered in response.
Every covered mirror responded, not with obedience but with violence. The wraiths shrieked, a sound that existed more in my bones than my ears. They rushed me all at once.
I slashed my palm against the stone wall. Silver blood flowed freely now, painting light across my skin. I flung my hand out, droplets arcing through the air. Where they struck shadow, shadow burned.
But more kept coming. Dozens now, pouring from every covered surface. They grabbed at my arms, my legs, trying to drag me toward the largest mirror. Its covering had burned away entirely, revealing a surface that reflected nothing but darkness and reaching hands.
Cold fingers wrapped around my throat. My vision sparked. I clawed at the wraith, my bloodied hands passing through smoke that somehow had enough substance to strangle.
The mirror behind the wraith exploded outward.
Not shattered, but opened.
Silvyr erupted from the glass. Not like a reflection stepping out, but like the mirror itself had birthed him, all sharp angles, silver fire, and furious purpose.
Solid.
Real.
More real than I'd ever seen him.
His hand closed around the wraith's throat, or where its throat should be, and silver fire erupted from his grip. The creature dissolved into nothing.
He spun, placing himself between me and the advancing shadows. No longer flickering between forms, he was wholly here, wholly present, though I could see the effort in the rigid line of his shoulders.
