Chapter 9 Silva
Silva
The gate stood just a few feet before the road, wrought iron with bars blackened by age and cold, their finials tipped in ice-coated leaves, practically hanging from its frozen hinges.
Silva was certain that at one time, the entire field beyond was likely enclosed by similar wrought iron fencing, pointed spires keeping would-be grave robbers away, but if it had indeed existed, it did so no longer.
The gate itself was the only remnant, a lone sentry in the snowy landscape, guarding nothing. Nothing she could see, at least.
Snow lay heavy at the base, drifted up against the stone threshold, so sunk into the earth that it barely existed.
Beyond the gate stretched one small section of the cemetery, the oldest section.
Indistinct stones were uneven lumps of varying heights beneath the snow blanketing them, all that remained of those interred beneath.
The world around her was hushed, as if the heavy layer of snow necessitated holding one’s breath.
The cold was worrying its way through the thick material of her coat and the leather of her gloves, making her tremble.
There was no noise, no traffic, no birdsong.
The whole world felt blunted, muffled by the endless white heaps.
Silva took an experimental step off the road, the toe of her boot crunching through the frozen top layer of the snow, sinking into the rest, up to her ankle.
Another step, squealing once she found herself stumbling the next several, the momentum of the downward pitch from the road being steeper than she expected.
She halted just before the gate, arms pinwheeling at her sides to ensure she stayed upright on the uneven, icy terrain.
She was breathing hard, but not just from the exertion of her short journey from the car.
It’s just a gate.
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting.
A visible rupture, perhaps, a fissure in the earth.
Something that screamed unnatural. Instead, it looked like an ordinary, neglected cemetery on the edge of town, one she might have driven past a hundred times without noticing.
It was the ordinariness of it that unsettled her more than anything overtly strange might have.
It wasn’t humming, there was no supernatural waver about it, the air around it did not shimmer.
It was a hunk of frozen old iron in the snow. Nothing more.
She was able to take a step around it with ease, as she did then.
There was nothing stopping her. Silva half expected to be zapped by an invisible force field when she did and felt foolish after she braced herself for an electric shock that never came.
The backside looked the same as the front — nothing worth the journey.
Pivoting clumsily, she backtracked in her own footsteps, the only thing marring the unbroken snow, stumbling back up the small embankment and practically collapsing into her car.
That was the furthest she’d managed since her arrival.
The closest she’d been to the gate itself, the closest she’d been to actually doing something.
Instead, she went back to what she’d been doing all morning — sitting in the car, crying.
It was not lost on her that this was a place of mourning.
He had been gone more than a year, and she’d never had the opportunity to grieve.
That was why this all still felt so raw, she thought, why her heart still refused to heal.
Those few scant weeks when she’d never left her apartment were spent in a shocked stupor.
By the time she was back to work, everyone expected her to simply be over her bad breakup.
She’d never had the chance to mourn his absence before she’d been cast in her next role, and now in this place — surrounded by nothing but snow and quiet, what remained after the loss of a loved one — she couldn’t stop crying.
She missed him more than she thought it would be possible to miss something.
She missed the silky heft of his hair and the way it slid down the side of his head gradually through the day, like a glossy avalanche.
She missed the weight of his arm around her in the dim, pre-dawn hours, missed the warmth of his hand around hers, walking down the street.
She’d not noticed how particular the sound of his gait was when he was there with her, but now she could lie in bed for hours, staring up at the ceiling, hearing the click of his heels echoing through her head.
She missed the version of herself she’d been with him.
It seemed so silly now, how miserable she’d made herself over afternoon tea. She’d give up her world and everyone in it just to have him back for a moment.
And now here she was, standing at the edge of a cliff, prepared to jump, to leave everything and everyone she knew behind, on the off chance she might come a step closer to him. She might not be here at all if it hadn’t been for the phone call.
This was all bad for her. Silva knew that.
It was unwise to pick off these scabs; knew that she would never, ever heal if she did.
Bad enough that she would always feel like a piece of her had been cut away and that she would never be happy again, but that wasn’t the same as being actively miserable.
All of this, though; the Otherworld rabbit holes and clandestine auctions, it had opened her wounds back up, brought her pain and grief fresh to the surface, bleeding freely.
Which was why she found herself digging through the closet after Tannar left one morning, shortly after that disastrous night in their bed, seeking out an old cosmetic case.
Inside it was his phone. The phone he’d left on her dresser the night he’d disappeared, beside the little porcelain bird locket on its chain.
Silva had wondered if he’d left it behind specifically so that she would understand there was no contacting him.
She’d been foolishly optimistic that he had left it so that he would be able to reach her, but it had never so much as buzzed.
She’d tucked it away in this little mirrored case, hidden with the rest of her vanity table items when they’d moved, and she had never taken it out again.
Better to let her heart forget as much as it could. Forget the lilt of his voice, forget the warmth of his skin when she pressed herself against him in the early morning hours, best to forget it all. It had been more than a year, and she needed to start forgetting.
Instead, she’d plugged the phone in, charging it fully, prepared to go through his texts and photos until she was a snotty, sobbing mess, just in time for her husband to come home.
She hadn’t counted on his password being a biometric.
If only he and his fingerprint were there.
Silva had raged, stomping around the bedroom, flipping over the laundry basket, and screaming into a pillow.
She’d still been sulking, slowly putting the still-folded laundry back into its basket when the doorbell rang, the goblin who had been hired to come over once a week and meal prep standing at the front door.
She was in the kitchen with the goblin when she heard it. A melodic phone chime, short and repetitive, and not one she recognized. She’d spun, mouth dropping open. The sound was coming from up the hall, not from her phone, clutched in her hand. There was only one other phone in the house.
“You don’t need me in the way,” she’d told the goblin, who’d already pulled open the refrigerator. “This is your kitchen, not mine.”
She hit the wall in frustration as she turned into the room, the call already ending, but didn't need to wait long before it started up again instantly.
Caoimhe - Main Line
There were too many vowels for her to work out, and Silva had no idea how to say the name that flashed on the screen, but she had an inkling of who it might be.
“Tate? Tate?” The voice was instant and demanding, higher and younger sounding than Silva had expected, off and running the instant the call connected. “Tate, they won’t let me leave to go to the shop. I’ve told them over and over, but the bastards won’t listen. Can you tell them I need to—”
“He’s not here,” Silva cut in, suspecting she might not get the opportunity if she let the voice on the other end of the line keep talking.
Just hearing the sound of someone else saying his name was enough to squeeze the air from her lungs.
She had the sinking realization that his mother was entirely alone in the world with him gone.
She’s probably been calling this number for the last year, never getting an answer.
“He’s . . . not here. You’re his mother, right?
I can try to help, if I’m able.” Silva didn’t know how to explain to the other woman who she was or why his phone was in her possession, deciding to simply avoid the issue altogether unless she was directly asked. “I’m Silva.”
“Silva,” the other elf breathed. “That’s a beautiful name. A proper Silme name.”
“I’m a Silme elf,” Silva agreed, tears burning in her eyes.
“Like you.” He had been raised in a household like hers, raised to honor the goddess of starlight in the moon temple .
. . raised in the same brittle environment that didn’t accept him.
We should have run away from all of this when we had the chance.
It was enough of a distraction, evidently, for the purpose of the call to be immediately forgotten. Silva listened as the other woman chattered about nothing she understood, fast and manic. She sounded too young to be his mother, and that was using the supposition that Tate was the age he looked.