Garden of Silk

Frigid wind bit into me, but I hardly felt it. Everything was numb. Ash had left; I’d walked out on Azalea. Sect and family weren’t options, which only left a passphrase and directions in Hearthome. Which would lead me back to Azalea. Somehow, even if it didn’t make sense.

Everything seemed to lead back to her, and I couldn’t even tell if I hated her for it. Some twisted part of me liked the attention, and not just the kind words on the surface. The thought that someone would be so… obsessed with me bounded around my throbbing skull as I fled through the snow.

No destination, just walking.

Nowhere in particular, in a gap that might have been a pond in wetter times, I heard footsteps coming up behind me.

“Go away.” I sat down in the snow and leaned against the biggest tree.

Azalea pulled up short into the clearing and stared at me, biting her lower lip. Her hair was a mess, drills splaying apart, snow clinging to the strands. Wide eyes stared at me.

“You… you don’t mean that.” She didn’t ask it as a question.

“I do,” I said with more force than I felt.

“No… You—I… that’s not possible. That’s not possible!” She threw her head into her hands and half-leaned, half-fell against a tree.

So many other words wanted to make themselves known, but the mounting blizzard around us suffered only silence. We sat like this for a while, until the snow piled up in the folds of my clothes and the cold reached my bones.

Azalea had slid to the ground and stared at me like I was some sort of imposter. Like she was a stranger and I’d just shown her the monster that lurked under my silken face. The person who’d always seemed so unflappable now looked like a broken doll.

Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to freeze to death and got up to head back to the cabin. When I passed Azalea, I pulled on her shoulder. She jerked and glared at me, but her eyes were glassy.

“Come on. Let’s just go back.”

I pulled, but she grabbed my arm in an iron grip. We locked eyes and just stared, shivering. Until she blinked and seemed to regain some of her senses.

“You’re real.”

“What?”

She broke the gaze and looked at her own pale, perfect hand gripped around my arm. “I’m real.”

“Yes, Azalea.” I hauled her upright and she didn’t resist. “And now we’re going to get warm and get some sleep. Then we’ll talk.”

“No!” The iron grip returned, her eyes manic again. “I have to tell you now! You’ll believe me, right?”

“I can’t very well answer that until you tell me what it is I need to believe.”

“Right, right. Yeah. Okay, think… What would work? What would make sense… I can start with trains maybe?” She said another word after that, one I didn’t know.

“You’re not thinking clearly, Azalea. We need to get you inside and get warm.”

She shook her head and made me drag her. “He can’t hear. He’s… he’s real too, isn’t he?”

I raised one eyebrow. “Finder? He’s not a technique or something sinister, he’s definitely a person. Mundane or not, he’s equal in most all respects to—”

“Real. It’s all real. So much has changed—like you!”

“Azalea.” I stopped and turned around. “Either you start making sense, or I will drag you back to the cabin.”

She stared at me. Hard. “You’re Slate, right? Just Slate… and now Silk?”

“Yes, Azalea.”

“And you’re really okay with being Silk?”

Now that was a question I had no prepared answer for. All the same, a “Yes” slid out just as easy as it had been before. Before Azalea followed me, out of all the terrible thoughts that ran through my head, not one of them was about being Silk.

I liked the power, when I had control. And… I think I even liked being a girl.

But that realization paled in comparison to the next words out of Azalea’s mouth. To use her words, they derailed my train of thought.

“I’m from another world.”

“You’re… what?” I blinked. I don’t know what I’d expected but it hadn’t been that.

She gulped, chuckled nervously, and pulled her shoulders in. “Don’t make me say it again.”

“What can you possibly mean? You said you’re from another world?” What in this world is she talking about? Couldn’t be social class. Sect? Kingdom? Continent? Something else?

Azalea fell to her knees. “Yes. Yes, damnit!” She groaned and threw her head forward into her hands, hair tumbling around her shoulders, falling further into an unruly mess of curls. “I knew this wouldn’t work! I knew this stupid story wouldn’t—”

“Hey! How… about you tell me what exactly you mean? Maybe you can help me understand.” I cut her off, hoping I could keep her coherent. But this wasn’t some noble child’s tantrum, easily distracted and assuaged with words. She was beyond listening.

Azalea gave no indication that she’d heard me, her words degrading into wracking sobs. The forest was no more frozen than I was. Halfway toward reaching for her, feet pointed toward running, I stood there.

Think!

She’s obviously crazy, but you know that, Silk! No way I could take her back to Finder—I trusted him only to look out for his cause. At the same time, I couldn’t very well leave her. Whatever had happened to Ash had me on edge, ready to jump at every tree’s shadow the moment I started thinking about it.

But…

Words. I… no, nothing I could say would work, would it? Even if she heard me, what she was saying wasn’t making any sense. What could she mean by “another world?” But she looked so pitiful, so small. I can’t just leave her!

A touch on her shoulder saw her jerk away, sobbing still. Unable to pull her, I swept away the snow and sat down next to my distraught friend. And she was a friend—no matter how strange she acted or how little she seemed to care about what I wanted sometimes.

No touch, no contact, I waited, staring at shadows.

Eventually, she broke the silence with a voice that quivered like a strand of spun glass. “H-how can you be real?”

Without warning, I was sitting on a tree branch in the spring mist, a bright smile I didn’t ask for hovering over my shoulder. Asking why I’d been crying without a shred of self-awareness. In Azalea now, I saw myself, strung out and desperate, yet unwilling to grasp a proffered hand.

But, I was not her and she was not I. An easy smile wasn’t something I could conjure; a brilliant, gleaming non-sequitur that would wipe away the shadows wouldn’t slip out.

Slate dwelled in cold logic; Silk in passionate analytics.

“I believe I’m real,” I replied carefully. “I think, I act, I make horrendous mistakes sometimes.”

“N-no… that’s not…” She pulled her arms around herself, barely mumbling the words.

“Well, I’ve surprised you, haven’t I?” I looked up at the bare canopy and the dark clouds beyond. “If I weren’t real, would I be able to do that?”

“...My dreams surprise me.” A note of indignance crept into her voice.

“Do you believe this is a dream?”

I saw out of the corner of my eye how she furtively looked up at me. I glanced over, only briefly meeting her eyes like I was scared she’d disappear.

Azalea took a long time to answer. Snow gathered around our shoulders, dusted our hair and piled around our legs.

“I think I did,” she said eventually.

“And you don’t now?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Informal, stay informal. “Still working on it, then?”

She nodded slowly.

Deliberate movement was something I prided myself on. Slate Graystone would not move an eyebrow out of place. Silk, however, was relearning impulsiveness. And so I bypassed all the mental barriers that would have stopped me cold.

I flicked Azalea’s nose. Not an intimate gesture, not a grand statement. A simple tiny action so momentously impossible to the person I had been before meeting her that we both froze, staring in shock at the offending, slender finger.

She giggled first, my own laughter bubbling up after, and the snow covering us fell away like a spring thaw.

“You’re real.” She pointed at me and I nodded. “And I’m real. Azalea’s real, and I’m her and she’s me!”

“...Yes?” If anything, whatever she just said made less sense to me than the “other world” bit.

“Yes!” She jumped up and winced. “Oww… I didn’t even know cultivators could get cramps! I swear only like half the magical bullshit actually magically bullshits properly, ya know?”

I stood myself and dusted off the last flakes, only for more to replace them. “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but you’re gonna! I’m gonna teach you about slang and electricity and… the internet!” She said the last part with a sinister wave of her hands, looking at me expectantly.

I simply blinked. “I’ll ask later? When we are not half frozen in a snowstorm.”

Azalea opened and closed her mouth like a fish before throwing her head back and laughing again. “Oh you’re totally real! How dense was I? Wow, I need to call, err, write a letter to Camillia apologizing again!”

“Azalea, if you’re feeling better, may we return to camp? You can consider my abruptness callous, but I am very cold and I wish to rectify that.”

She took a breath in and sneezed out, nose turning red. “Oh… yeah we should go back.” She glanced down at the snow as we started walking back. “I’m already getting sick of this stuff and it’s barely winter. Never snowed like this in Seattle, and the mountains were special, ya know?”

“No, Azalea. I don’t.” I shook my head. “I really don’t.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna talk about a LOT of things, Silk. Honestly… this is great. All that secrecy stuff was really getting to me and—”

“You were pretty bad at it, to be honest.”

“I was not!”

“Azalea, I had our family perform three different background checks on you and I was still convinced you weren’t who you said you were and working for some powerful figure or another.”

“But you didn’t think I was from another world, did ya!” She thrust a finger victoriously at me.

I just rolled my eyes. “No, because that’s insane. And I don’t even know what you mean by it.”

“But you believe me now.” An uncertain smile crept across her face.

“Without even understanding what you mean? Azalea, you do not get to be smug about this.”

“But you believe me.” Her smile grew wider.

I sighed. “Yes, I suppose I do. Pending a more reasonable explanation like an ancient artifact or a Sect tampering with your head.”

She nodded sharply, clearly pleased with herself. “Then I totally get to be smug! And right. Right and smug.”

“Is the cold getting to your head now?”

“Nope!” She sneezed. “Okay, maybe a little, but let me have this! It’s been so long and now we can finally figure out how to prepare for the plot and figure out what’s changed!” She threw a fist in the air. “Gale’s dead early, so that’s really good for Camillia, and Talon’s friends are still alive which is probably good for him. Oh, and thanks to me helping you—you’re the best character by the way—the war might not even happen!”

I stopped walking, a full-body shiver shaking me from head to toe. It had very little to do with the cold, rather a sudden, terrible feeling. “Azalea… What are you talking about? Prepare for… the plot? What plot? A Sect plot, Finder’s organization, or—”

“The plot!” she chirped, as if that somehow answered anything at all. “You know, the story we’re in!”

“Azalea, I really want to believe you’re not crazy, but…”

“I’m not crazy! I’ve just been reincarnated into the plot of The Tree’s Branches, and let me tell you, the world’s waaay better than I’d expect from a mid-tier—at best—otome game!”