“Auren, use your ribbons.”
“Oh, she didn’t tell you? She lost that privilege.”
The dagger changes now, and I’m no longer pinned against Midas’s back, but pinned against a wall. It’s not gilded reins tied around my wrist, it’s my ribbon.
And then there’s a sound that the sword makes as it comes swinging down. It’s not a slice in the air, it’s not a whispered whistle. It shatters. Like a body being flung out a window, or a fist slamming into a mirror.
Or the shattering of a soul.
With it, comes the pain.
Pain and pain and pain again. Pain as I fracture into a million pieces. Pieces that look like strips of satin falling frayed and bloody to the floor.
“This hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.”
I can’t hear my screams. Can’t hear myself wail or beg or grieve. It’s just an endless cracking of crystalline glass.
And then, it’s suddenly over. Jarring in the ringing silence, caught with daggers and ribbons and splintered shards beneath my feet.
Broken. I feel so broken.
“You did this to yourself.”
I just stare at the shards of mirror, seeing my face in a thousand different pieces. Seeing my ribbons in a thousand more.
Seeing him.
Hearing him.
Over and over again.
“Don’t disobey me anymore, Precious.”
“If I can’t have her, no one can.”
“This hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.”
“You did this to yourself.”
My reflection in these mirrors shows every range of emotion looking back at me. Judgment, disappointment, pity, anger, numbness, anguish. My broken faces surround me as I drop to the floor and start digging through the shards with frantic desperation.
I snatch up the ribbons, but the mirrors make it confusing, and just when I try to grab hold of the satin strips, my hands hit the glass instead. I slice open my palms, my fingers, my knees.
Still, I dig through it desperately, tears and blood dripping down simultaneously, while the cut-away ribbons evade me at every turn. But I can’t give up.
I need them back.
I need them back I need them back I need them back
My grip comes away bloody, mangled, not a single scrap of ribbon safe in my hold. Then, I start to sink. Tied at the ankles and dragged under, so the glass starts cutting into my stomach, my arms, my chest.
No matter how hard I try to dig my way back up, I get pulled further down, dragged by a million shards of myself that broke, tangled in the lengths of ribbons I’ll never get back.
And a single gilded dagger, sharper than all the rest, digging right into my throat.
“You did this to yourself.”
My eyes burst open, lids rimmed with the dampness of tears. My hand is already at my throat, frantic movements checking for blood that isn’t there. I take several gasping breaths, sitting up in the otherwise empty bed. I’m shaking all over, covered in sweat, and I fling the covers off the bed, because it feels like the walls are closing in on me.
I pace around the room.
Back and forth, socks gathering static with every quick tread. My back feels battered and aching, as if the dream implanted it with phantom pain. With another particularly nasty twinge, I grab the lantern from the bedside table and pass through the bathroom before heading into the closet. I hang the lantern on the doorknob and then lift my shirt, standing there in front of the floor-length mirror.
When another stitch of pain jumps at my lower back, I turn around and carefully lift the wrapping Hojat keeps bound around my back.
My breath has gone rickety, nearly creaking from my throat in derelict protest. And when I look over my shoulder at my reflection, gaze zeroed in on the spot that’s hurting me, this time I do make a noise that scrapes past my lips.
The pair of my ribbons at the very bottom of my back are hanging on by a thread. Like skin that’s started to peel, left attached to harden and shrivel. My fingers barely skim over them, but even that faintest touch has them both falling off.
Just like that.
Like browned leaves on a stem, dead and brittle they fall. Swaying to the floor in near weightlessness until they land on the rug, two sorry pieces of shrunken and emaciated ribbons that have lost their gleam.
My eyes burn as I look down at them, and they fill when I press my fingers to the indents in my back. Nothing there but a pair of thin scratches on either side of my spine.
As if my ribbons were never there at all.
The sob that comes out of me is cut off as I slap a hand to my mouth. Muffled more when I lean against the closet wall, shoving my face against the spare coat hanging up.