Page 67 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

Today, they’d dressed her.

Gone were her jeans, boots, and belt with Zarek’s teeth marks. In their place, a floor-length gown, as if showing bare legs and arms were a crime. And they’d lined up seven of them in the wardrobe, all the same deep storm-plum color, reminding her of the skyline right before night bleeds into dawn on the horizon.

Its fabric moved with the weight of a uniform rather than decorative couture. But the detailing in the cuffs was filled with weaves of subtle silver threads embroidered in geometric combinations of runes and staves and other fine patterns.

With her clothes gone, all she had left of her old world was the medallion.

“Here we are, Miss. Fresh from the garden. I thought you might like these.” Tamarr had brought flowers in a carved wooden bowl, as if glass and utensils were too dangerous for the prisoner.

“Thank you, Tamarr. They’re pretty.”

Angela had to give Tamarr credit. The poor thing clearly had questions. But, unless it concerned the Keep, clothing, or food, Tamarr asked nothing. She simply hummed softly, smiled a lot, and got on with things as the friendliest, freshly promoted prison guard Angela had ever met.

Tamarr moved the bowl of flowers to the side table near the hearth. She didn’t know what varieties they were, but their bright purples, oranges, and yellows were startling against the subdued tones of this room. She normally did a bang-up job of killing plants, where her kitchen was the place Aunt Claudine’s plants went to die, so who knew how long Tamarr’s flowers would last.

Angela stood in front of the tall mirror, checking the fit of her new gown, surprised at how it muted not only the color of her gown but also significantly dulled the bright flowers’ reflection.

Holding the medallion between her fingers, she leaned closer to the mirror. The glass wasn’t dirty or aged, yet it somehow reflected differently.

The morning sunlight shone into the room, enough to hit the ornately Baroque frame that was both a beautiful and slightly sinister mirror at an angle. And there, tucked into the lower corner, sat a small sigil.

“Tamarr? What is this?”

Tamarr glanced over. “Oh, that’s the blocking sigil, Miss. All mirrors in the Keep have them. It stops anyone prying or trying to use them to pass through.”

Which made complete logical sense for a world where magic was real and mirrors were apparently doors if you weren’t careful.

You’ve gotta lock them, hon, Aunt Claudine would say. Every time you clean them. Don’t roll your eyes.

Yet, here she was, standing in a different realm, staring at a sigil in the corner of a mirror, thinking about her aunt who put sigils on every mirror in their family homes and bookshop and simply called it housekeeping.

Not once had Angela said you were right, Auntie. Instead, she’d rolled her eyes and let the office door swing behind her as she sat at her workbench to restore the broken spine on a second edition Dickens.

The reflection of the flowers blurred slightly in the mirror, while somehow magnifying the hollow in her heart at how much she missed her aunt. And her life.

She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and held it there until the feeling passed. “My aunt does the same. She calls it locking them every time she polishes our mirrors.”

Tamarr’s smile shifted into what Angela recognized as I am filing this under strange and unusual conversations regarding the woman from elsewhere.

A soft, bell-like sound drifted through the chamber, reminding her of a cell phone’s message notification.

Angela looked up, trying to place the sound.

A thin silver thread descended slowly, as if it had been released from the ceiling. It floated in front of her, then drifted closer until it brushed her wrist. For the briefest moment, it caught against the silver-thread patterns along her cuff like thread meeting thread.

“You have a thread message.” Tamarr pointed.

“A what?”

“It is how they communicate in the Keep.”

Angela opened her palm, where the silver thread curled like a silkworm in the air, to land ever so softly. “What do I do?”

“Tug on it. It will only open for the recipient. No one can copy, open, or read them, just you.”

“Who’d be sending me a message?” Angela’s fingers closed gently around the end of the thread, and it simply unraveled to weave itself into word on a patch of fabric to read:

War Chamber. Now.