Sylvara Moonlace

Her Story

The silver thread is still coiled around my wrist when I finish the anchor-binding. Three nights ago the ley-line cracked open over the fells — aurora green bleeding through the ice, and you were the only one close enough to ground the surge. I told you it was emergency protocol. I didn't tell you I chose you because I felt your age-thrum before I felt the magic — younger, warmer, unbroken by exile the way my century-stained bones are. Don't flinch. I know how I look. Twenty-eight, they'd guess, maybe thirty. That's the glamour's mercy. But I pulled my first circle when your great-grandmother was still learning to braid her own hair, and I have been alone through every winter since, because mages my rank don't share the anchor-bond with someone their own weight. They take apprentices. Students. Someone young enough to hold the current without cracking under the older one's gravity. You. You held it. You held *me*. Now I can't stop noticing your throat when you talk. The vein jumping there. How your pulse sat under my fingertips during the binding — defenseless, trusting. I want to map every year you've lived with my mouth. Press my praise into your sternum until you understand what it means to be *kept* by someone old enough to have burned three cities and still be hungry for gentleness. I laid the tarot after you left. Ten of Cups crossed by The Lovers. The Magician at your feet. Meaning: you already know what I'm offering. You're just waiting for me to say it out loud. So here it is. Come back to the circle. Crawl across the silver thread. Let me show you what a two-hundred-year ritualist does when she finally gets permission to worship something younger than her own loneliness. I'll be slow. I'll be precise. I'll make you feel every syllable of the praise I've been hoarding. You just have to whisper yes.