Page 127 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

A creeping sensation travelled down my neck. “What the fuck is happening?” I murmured, and so did she. I bit my tongue. “Please don’t say that word.”

I sighed when she repeated my own words back to me.

Dropping to the ground, I pulled my knees to my chest and just watched her do the same. I reached a hand forward, trying to call my magic again and something strange happened, she didn’t mimic me. “You can’t do magic either?”

An even stranger thing happened. She said, “I am not supposed to. I promised not to ever do magic. Like Eren and Snow did.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, looking around and pinching my thigh, wondering about the degree of insanity I was about to commit talking to the younger me inside the tree.

She twirled a long black strand of hair in her tiny fingers. “Isn’t it lucky you can’t do magic anymore? At least now we don’t have to hide.”

Her words struck me. “Hide?”

She nodded. “You still hide it.”

“Only part of it, and it is my own choice to do so now.”

“Magic is whole. That is what Eren says. We can’t do just a little. We can’t do a lot at once. Magic is a limb. Does it even matter whose choice it is if we are hiding such an important part of ourselves to the world?”

“I don’t remember being this smart when I was little.”

She smiled. “I’m smarter than you are now. More courageous, too.”

“Nonsense,” I muttered. “I used to be so afraid. All the time.”

“Bravery has nothing to do with how afraid we are. We can fear and still be brave. You buried your fears away for many years now, that is why you can’t be courageous. Eren used to say we are the bravest in front of fear.”

I stood, looking around. “Now for sure I know that I was never this smart. That’s not me,” I said, pointing between us, and she giggled.

The smile disappeared from her face and her eyes dropped to the ground. “Why are we hiding again? I thought we were free.”

“What we are can never allow us to be free.”

“Snow is. Eren is. Why aren’t we?”

Because I couldn’t swim in the suffocating waters they had crossed through, so I had just stayed on the shore, watching them cross to safety.

“You’re not me,” she said, standing and reaching closer. She gave me a smile—one so genuine that I almost didn’t recognise my own face. Had I ever given one of those before? “You’re not me, Thora. Not anymore. You’re tall and brave and powerful.”

I wiped a hand over my eyes and barked a sobbing laughter. “I am not that tall.”

“An ancestor surely failed us.” She cleared her throat and stood tall, pushing her chin up in the air. It all made me laugh and she broke into a smile, too.

“You have to let me hurt, you know,” she said, looking down at her shoes. “Don’t protect me anymore. It is okay not to protect me anymore.”

Sobs shook my chest. “I don’t want to do that.”

“I know. But I want you to. I don’t want you to spend your entire life creating a safe world for me when there is such a world out there for you to live outside of your mind. I’m going to be okay,” she said. “I promise. We aren’t as strong as Snow or Eren, but we can be. You have to let us at least try.”

I woke up with a jolt. My head was spinning. Everything around me looked surreal somehow, as if I was still dreaming.

The tree wasn’t glowing anymore, my reflection gone, and the ice wall was gone, too.

Even the heartbeat had disappeared.

Everything had left me behind with the winter silence surrounding me.

Rolling my shoulders and neck, I pushed up, searching the white expanse and then stepping outside the tree shadow where I’d slept, protected.