Page 77 of A Taste of Silver
"I'd trust you to choose," I corrected, meeting his gaze without flinching despite the vertigo of looking directly into eyes that reflected impossible geometries. "To decide who you want to be when the tempering is complete. To choose between the hunger that's defined you and the love that created you. That's all any of us can do, choose who we become in the moments that matter most."
He moved closer, his monstrous form beginning to shift and soften at the edges like wax near flame. The change was subtle but unmistakable, as if proximity to hope itself was reshaping him on a fundamental level. "Then I choose to remember what I forgot in my hunger," he said, voice carrying harmonics of silver bells and distant thunder. "I choose to be both warning and possibility, both the price of obsession and the proof that love can survive even consumption. I choose to become what Seraphina saw in me before I lost myself to grief."
The marble floor erupted with light as every reflection aligned, every possibility converged on this single moment of collective choice. Through the labyrinth of mirrors I'd created, I could see the realms pressing together like hands seeking to clasp, ready to merge or destroy each other based on what happened in the next heartbeat. The weight of that responsibility should have crushed me, but instead it felt like the moment I'd been preparing for my entire life without knowing it.
"Now," I said, and everyone, even Aldric, even his transformed guards who'd finally seen themselves clearly, added their voice to the working.
The sound that emerged wasn't quite song, wasn't quite scream, but something between and beyond both, the noise of reality itself being reforged in the heat of collective will, the universe taking a deep breath and choosing to become something new.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Chapter 29
Aurea
The marble floor beneath us had become a living thing, pulsing with the heartbeats of two realms trying to find a single rhythm, its surface rippling like water disturbed by stones that fell upward instead of down.
The air itself had grown thick with possibility, each breath tasting of silver fire and distant starlight. Through the labyrinth of mirrors I'd constructed, I could see our reflections multiplying infinitely, but each one showed us slightly different, some crowned with light, others wreathed in shadows, all of them singing with voices that belonged to futures we might or might not choose to embrace.
Then Vaen stepped through the dimensional wound, more solid than I'd ever seen him, and the sight of my brother nearly shattered my concentration entirely. I realized then that he was really there unlike before where he'd only been either a reflection or a manifestation. I knew that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch him.
He was taller than before, his frame carved lean by sacrifice and loss, but it was his eyes that stopped my heart. Silver blood wept from them like tears of starlight, each drop that fell creating tiny fractures in the air itself, hairline cracks in reality that whispered of worlds beyond counting.
The very space around him seemed to bend, as if recognizing his nature as something that existed in the spaces between definitions. Scars of silver thread ran along his arms in patterns that mirrored my own marks but told a different story, one of willing exile and patient guardianship.
"The song needs all its verses," he said, his voice carrying the weight of a decade spent in liminal spaces, each word echoing with harmonics that belonged to no single realm.
His form flickered and the air around him shimmered with heat distortions that weren't quite heat, weren't quite light, but something born from the friction of existing in multiple realities simultaneously.
As his voice joined our working, I felt the song's structure shift and strengthen, finding new patterns it had been reaching for but couldn't quite grasp. The harmony we'd built suddenly had foundation stones it had been missing, anchors that prevented it from spinning away into pure chaos.
The Crimson One's attention snapped to something beyond our immediate circle, his fractured features suddenly sharpening with an intensity that made my stomach drop like a stone into deep water. His perfectly carved mask began to show hairline cracks, and through them leaked not darkness but a kind of desperate, hungry light. His gaze fixed on a point in the infinite reflections where I could see her.
Seraphina.
Not as memory or echo, but as consciousness trapped within him for centuries, aware and watching through every moment of his descent into monstrosity.
She wasn't dead. She wasn't even truly absent. She was there, inside him, a prisoner in her own love's body, forced to witness every atrocity he committed in her name. The horror of it made my magic flare so bright that several nearby mirrors cracked from the intensity.
"She's been there," he whispered, the words barely audible over the growing symphony of transformation, each syllable dropping into the song like stones into still water, creating ripples that threatened to destabilize everything we'd built. "All this time, she's been conscious inside me. Watching me consume others, feeling every soul I devoured, unable to speak, unable to stop me, unable to?—"
His voice broke entirely, the sound raw and human in a way that made his earlier perfect performances seem like elaborate masks. His form began to crack like overstressed glass, crimson light bleeding through the fissures in patterns that looked almost like writing—a language of pain and regret written in the very substance of his being. But this wasn't dissolution—this was separation, the beginning of something I'd thought impossible.
Seraphina began to emerge.
Not pulled or forced, but flowing out of him like smoke given purpose, like morning mist finding its own shape in the growing light. Her form coalesced from the very essence he'd stolen centuries ago, drawing substance from his guilt and her endurance, their shared history becoming the clay from which she rebuilt herself. She materialized in fragments, first her eyes, winter-star bright and filled with such profound sorrow I felt my own heart fracture in sympathy, the pain so pure it sang its own note in our greater harmony.
Then her hands, translucent but growing more solid with each heartbeat, reaching not for freedom but toward the Crimson One with a gesture that could have been accusation or absolution or something more complex than either. Her fingersmoved through the air like she was conducting music only she could hear, and where they passed, frost formed in delicate patterns that looked almost like musical notation.
When she finally stood separate from him, translucent but undeniably present, the temperature in the theater plummeted so sharply that frost spread across every surface in spiraling patterns that looked almost like script, some ancient language of loss and longing made manifest in ice. My breath came out in silver clouds that hung in the air longer than they should have, each exhalation adding its own small harmony to the greater working.
The change in the atmosphere was profound. What had been merely cold became something deeper, the chill of deep space, of the void between stars where light itself grows tired and slow. Yet there was something beautiful in it too, the kind of pristine clarity that comes only from absolute truth.
"My love." Her voice was broken crystal, each word cutting the air with edges sharp enough to draw blood from the silence itself. She swayed on feet that had forgotten how to bear weight, centuries of imprisonment having eroded her sense of physical form until movement became an act of will rather than instinct. Her dress, or what might have been a dress, or might have been mist given the suggestion of fabric, stirred around her ankles with no wind to move it. "Do you... know... what you..."
She couldn't finish. The words fractured in her throat, becoming a sound that made every mirror in our constructed labyrinth crack simultaneously. Not breaking. Cracking. Creating a web of fractures that caught and reflected her pain in infinite recursion, each reflection showing a slightly different angle of the same absolute devastation. The sound resonated through the song, adding a note of such pure anguish that several of the others stumbled, nearly losing their places in the harmony.
Through our bond, I felt Silvyr's power surge to support me as the broken melody threatened to tear apart everything we'd built. His serpent-fire flowed into me, steadying my voice even as my heart broke for the woman who'd been trapped in her own love's consuming hunger for longer than I'd been alive.
