>>6080196“I know what I saw,” Salicera replies, scoffing. She wouldn’t allow her good mood stained by this. “Besides, you have been talking — talking — talking ever since the Well. And remind me which one of the things you said turned out to be true so far? Hm? Can you even name a single thing?”
Silence.
Of course.
She reaches for the inside pocket of her blouse, producing a series of empty crystal vials. Only one is still filled with sacred oils.
She raises it level with her eyes, the faint golden glow of the enchanted serum bathing her face in the darkness of her house. Something writhes inside the vial. It looks like a grey worm made of many others, a braid of pulsating strands, smooth as silk, coiling around itself in slow, languid pulses of movements, like a jellyfish in a placid sea.
The oil does not like it. The surface of its body is covered with tiny bubbles where the sacred liquid is trying to burn it alive, like peroxide would with an open wound back on Earth.
She’s almost out of vials.
Luckily, she stocked up on empty ones.
“You’re lucky I agreed to give you one month,” Salicera chuckles, putting the vial with the worm back into her blouse. “You and your Mistress.”
Salicera is back into the darkness, barely tinged by the silver glow coming from outside.
“God, I miss the moon. Couldn’t they send me into a normal world? One with a fucking moon?”
She’s not even sure who ‘they’ are.
Whoever or whatever sent her here when—
“But another world wouldn’t have Argia Candente,” she says, stopping her mind from lingering on bad memories. “I suppose it’s worth something. Especially now. It’s finally over. We are going places together… just you wait, Argia. Just you wait.”
Salicera grins in the darkness as she fills her pockets with the empty vials she stored inside her drawer. The glass tinkles against empty glass, almost loud enough to cover the silky whisper that graces the inside of her ear:
<span class="mu-s">You will discover the Night is the greatest of teachers.</span>
