Between Two Minds

The next morning, Elara found three things on her desk.

The first was Nyx's response to her two-word note, which read:

Good. Pay attention to more things like that. It will be useful later.

—N

P.S. I am choosing to interpret "I noticed" as meaning you found it interesting rather than unsettling. Tell me if I'm wrong.

The second was a small bunch of moonflowers, left at her doorstep sometime before dawn—silver-petaled and faintly luminous, smelling of night air and something she had no name for. She had never seen them before. She knew them completely.

The third was a note in Kael's handwriting:

These bloom only at night. They don't exist in the mortal realm under ordinary circumstances. She used to keep them in her chamber.

I thought you might want them.

—K

Elara stood in her doorway in her nightgown, holding moonflowers that had no business existing in the mortal world and felt something happen in her chest that she was not ready to examine at any level of detail.

She put them in water and went to write in her journal.

N—

He left flowers.

—E

The response, when she woke the next morning, was:

I KNOW. I felt it happen. Go back to sleep, you're exhausted.

—N

P.S. He hasn't left flowers for anyone in three hundred years. I'm choosing not to make a large thing of this. I'm failing.

Kael came to the shop at ten.

Not as a customer this time—he came to the door, knocked, which Elara thought was interesting given what she had heard about his approach to doors in general, and stood in the doorway with the particular quality of someone who has something specific to say and is choosing the order of the saying.

"There is a way," he said, "for you to meet her."

Elara did not need to ask who.

"You said the curse won't let you tell me directly. That she forgets."

"That is true for direct communication in the waking world. But there is a place—" He paused. "A structure, in the liminal space between realms. Where the veil is thin enough to allow something it normally wouldn't. Two halves of the same soul, meeting in the space between."

"The Chamber of Echoes," Elara said.

She had not known she knew the name until she said it.

His expression shifted. "You got that from the ring."

"I think so. I'm still working out what I know and what I remember and what the difference is." She set down the book she was holding. "Is it dangerous?"

"The process requires significant power from her side. She will be weakened after. If the Shadow Realm is attacked while she is recovering—"

"I'm asking if it's dangerous for me."

"You would be entering a liminal space. Not fully in either world. Your body stays here." A pause. "If you go too deep, get disoriented, cannot find your way back to the surface—yes. It could be dangerous."

"What keeps that from happening?"

"I will be outside the Chamber, maintaining the boundary. I can pull you back if needed."

Elara looked at him for a moment.

"You'll be there the whole time."

"Every moment."

"Alright," she said. "When?"

"Tonight, if she's ready." He held her gaze. "I should tell you—she is nervous. She would not want me to tell you that, but I'm telling you."

"You two have discussed this."

"We discussed it last night. In the Shadow Realm." He said it matter-of-factly, which it was—he spent every night in the realm where Nyx ruled, or some portion of it. The casual reality of that was still something Elara was mapping. "She is—" A brief pause, selecting. "She wants this. She has wanted this for a long time. She is also afraid of what you will think of her."

Elara absorbed that. "What would I think of her?"

"She has ruled a realm of shadow for three hundred years," he said. "She has made decisions a bookshop owner in a small village would find—" He searched for the word. "Significant."

"You mean she's done things I might not like."

"Yes."

"And she's afraid I'll reject her for it."

"She would not use that word."

"She would not have to." Elara looked at the moonflowers in their glass on the counter. "We're the same person. Whatever she's done, she did it as the version of me that had to survive three hundred years alone and in charge of an entire realm." She paused. "I think that deserves more than a little grace."

Something in Kael's expression.

She was getting better at reading it. This particular shift was one she had seen twice before—once when she had taken the ring, once when she had reached for his shoulder wound without thinking. It was brief, and it was considerable, and it looked something like relief.

"Tonight," he said. "I'll come at dusk."

Mira arrived at noon with soup and the expression of someone who had been thinking hard since the previous morning.

"I've been processing," she announced, setting the pot on Elara's small stove.

"I know. How's it going?"

"Slowly. But I think I've reached some conclusions." Mira sat at Elara's desk—not in the chair, on the edge of it, the way she always sat when she was going to say something real. "She's you."

"Yes."

"The other version. The queen. She's you."

"Yes."

"Which means when I read the notes in the journal, I've been reading you." Mira thought about this visibly. "A bolder version of you. One who's had three hundred years to get comfortable with herself."

"That's one way to put it."

"I've been worried about you getting too close to strangers," Mira said. "Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about. But the main stranger in this situation is technically yourself." She paused. "I don't have a framework for that."

"Neither do I," Elara said. "I'm building one as I go."