Page 61 of A Taste of Silver
For an instant, I saw what lay beneath, not beauty but hunger given form, an absence where a soul should be. The Crimson One's grip tightened painfully.
"Careful," he warned. "Your prince filled this room with observers. One wrong move and they'll see you for what you are, a danger to their ordered world."
The binding circle was complete. Power crackled through the air, and the dancers stumbled as the compulsion released them. But something was wrong. Instead of closing inward to trap the Crimson One, the circle inverted.
The polished floor began to pull.
Guests screamed as they found themselves sliding toward the marble despite desperate attempts to stop. Their reflections in the floor grew solid while their physical forms grew translucent. The binding wasn't meant to trap. It was meant to trade. To pull the court into the Mirror Realm while letting its inhabitants through.
"No!" Prince Aldric shouted, but his mages were already caught, their magic feeding the very ritual they'd tried to control.
I hummed.
The ghost-melody rose from my throat without conscious thought, harmonizing with Silvyr's distant song. Where our combined resonance touched, the pull lessened. A pocket of stability in the consuming chaos.
The Crimson One's perfect mask cracked, revealing the nothing beneath. "Clever little queen. But you can't save them all."
He was right. Guests were vanishing into their own reflections, pulled through despite their terrified struggles. Prince Aldric had reached the edge of the circle, his fingers bleeding as he clawed at smooth marble.
But I didn't need to save them all.
I just needed to reach the right mirror.
The binding circle's pull intensified, reality folding in on itself like silk drawn through a ring. I released the Crimson One's hand and dove toward the nearest wall of windows. My feet skidded on the polished marble as screaming courtiers slid past me into their own reflections, their fingers leaving bloody trails on the floor.
The windows reflected chaos, not the ballroom but a dozen different vistas of the Mirror Realm. Gardens of glass, corridors that spiraled into infinity, and there, in the third pane from the left, Silvyr's true form materialized. Not the serpent, not the fragment, but him, whole and desperate, his hand pressed against his side of the glass.
The Crimson One's laughter scraped against my bones. "Running to your imprisoned love? How perfectly tragic."
I slammed my palms against the window where Silvyr waited. The ghost-melody surged through me, harmonizing with his presence until the glass grew warm, then hot, then something beyond temperature entirely. The barrier thinned to gossamer.
"Jump," Silvyr commanded, his voice cutting through the chaos. "Trust me."
Behind me, Prince Aldric's fingers finally lost their grip. He tumbled toward the marble floor that had become a gateway, his scream cut short as his reflection swallowed him whole. The binding circle pulsed, hungry for more.
The Crimson One moved toward me, no longer wearing Silvyr's face. His true form emerged, a writhing mass of crimson smoke and hungry mouths, beautiful and terrible as a plague given consciousness. "You cannot escape through glass. You are glass. Every mirror, every reflection, every surface that throws back light, and you belong to them all."
My marks blazed through the silk gloves, silver fire racing up my arms. The window beneath my palms cracked, not breaking but opening, like a door remembering its purpose.
"Now!" Silvyr's hand burst through the glass, solid and real and impossible.
I grabbed it.
The world inverted.
Falling through silver light and crystalline song, through spaces that existed between heartbeats, between thoughts, between the pause of breath before a scream. Silvyr's hand in mine was the only solid thing as reality unwove and rewove itself around us.
We landed hard on ground that chimed like struck crystal. The garden. But not the memory of it, not the dream, the real Garden that existed in the space between all mirrors, between all reflections.
Silvyr pulled me to my feet, his touch sending silver fire through my veins. He was solid here, completely present in a way that stole my breath. His constellation eyes blazed with triumph and terror in equal measure.
"You're here," he breathed, as if he couldn't quite believe it. "Actually here. Not just a dream or a wish or an illusion, but actually here."
The garden pulsed around us, responding to my presence. Crystal roses bloomed instantly, their petals singing harmonies that made my bones ache. The paths beneath our feet rippled, reshaping themselves into patterns that matched the silver marks on my arms.
Through the mirrors that hung from nothing, supported by will alone, I could see the ballroom. The binding circle had completely inverted now. Courtiers were being pulled through their reflections while things from the Mirror Realm pushed through in their place, not monsters, but memories given form, dreams made solid, the shadows of possibility becoming real.
"The realms are merging." Silvyr's hand tightened on mine. "The Crimson One's ritual, he perverted it, but it's working. The barriers are collapsing."
