Then the Book just walks away, leaving the grotesque pair tottering about in the street, screaming. It laughs with my mouth, turns my head and glances back, purrs a spell, and instantly the gruesome twin is turned inside out; intestines and organs where their skin once was, mouths, ears, and eyes trapped within.

The macabre heap collapses to the cobbled pavement, where their now external hearts pulse wetly. The Book leaves them like that, alive.

Walks away, giggling.

The old me would have been overcome with horror, and while I was reeling, the Book would no doubt have driven another knife into me and twisted.

The new me observes with dispassionate calm: distraction/irrelevant/discern its true aim/impede it.

After a long moment in which I make no response, it probes, Mac-KAY-la, in a singsong voice. I know you’re IN there. T-T-T-Tea for two and two for tea, me for me and you for me…did you like that one? I did it just for you.

I say nothing.

Pretending not to care? You can’t fool me. You bleed for everything. You were born to be bled. Born to be RIDDEN, until there’s nothing left of you but bones. Broken horses DIEDIEDIE.

It had always mocked me for caring. While goading, pushing, prodding, trying to make me feel even more emotion.

Don’t talk to it, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had said. Never talk to it. More recently he’d cautioned, It’s not about eating the candy, it’s about giving away words—even that broody ass poet’s. He’d told me over and over: do not engage. Not even with rhymes to drown it out. Perhaps there were many Fae things one should never, ever open a dialogue with.

After all, how had the Book finally worn me down?

By going silent.

Silence can’t be interpreted. It can’t be anticipated. It gives away nothing. And in most people, prolonged silence instills unease. We fill it up with the very best or worst of our imagination. As Ryodan said, the wise man is the silent one.

Each time I’d conversed with the Sinsar Dubh, I’d leaked information about myself, what mattered to me, what didn’t, intentionally or not. The Book had learned something about me every time I opened my mouth. Perhaps it had even learned from my dreams.

Barrons was right. I’d been its willing victim. By my consent, I’d engaged, interacted, let it gaslight and disorient me until I had no clue which end was up, then once I’d lost my bearings, I’d been easy to point whichever direction it wanted.

If I had a body, I would draw my first deep breath since the moment it evicted me. I understand now. I know what I have to do. Anger was never the answer. It was the precise wrong approach.

I stop looking out from behind eyes I can’t blink, detach from limbs I can’t control, and retreat into myself, eliminating all distraction so I can give one hundred percent focus to my aim. I sink deep into the belly of my body, draw in, small and fetal.

It can make itself invisible.

I can, too.

I believe myself undetectable to the Sinsar Dubh. I devote all my will to that thought then get down to ferreting out and stripping away my emotion, peeling myself down to only those things that are ferocity, power, and will.

Distantly, the Book continues to taunt me but I tune it out. I can’t stop it, so there’s no point in paying attention to it. I must do my work, and return ready.

It takes time, it’s slow going at first, but the more I butcher myself, the simpler it becomes.

I focus like a laser, slicing away every ounce of compassion and mercy I possess. I obliterate kindness, love, laughter, and joy. I scorch doubt and fear from my being. Every shade of terror, anger, frustration, and rage gets burned away. I gouge out confusion, which is so frequently an emotional state, not a mental one. I eradicate guilt, shame, even mild consternation.

I go even further.

I char hope into ash. I don’t need it. Hope postulates a tomorrow. There is only this moment, and the one that focuses most fully on this moment will win.

I singe even desire from my essence, as that, too, could be used against me.

I hack ruthlessly at the finest parts of me, those things that make me feel, those things that make me alive—something the Book can never be, and it knows it and it frustrates it to be so empty, so it tortures and destroys everyone around it—until I, too, am cold and dead: savagery wed to resolution.

I find it startlingly…pleasant…to strip myself down to this unfeeling core as if it’s always been there, waiting for me. I have a skeleton inside my skeleton and it’s made of pure titanium.

I know what it is, where it came from: the rape of the Unseelie princes. They’d made me feel powerless, helpless, a useless piece of trash to be desecrated and crushed beneath their heel when they were finished amusing themselves with me. As if I were a plastic Barbie doll to be violated and broken and tossed away. And, as I’d laid there in the gutter, seeing myself through their eyes, as the complete irrelevance they’d considered me, I’d hungered to be the predator they were. The one standing. The one destroying.

I’d thought they’d destroyed me.

They hadn’t.

They’d made me stronger. A beast of pure instinct and savagery had been born in that gutter that day.

I’d been afraid of it. I was no longer.

Barrons was right.

There is a monster inside me.

And she’s beautiful.

AOIBHEAL

The Elixir of Remembering worked in similar fashion to the passing of the True Magic from the Fae queen to her successor, with three significant differences: one, the elixir restored memories, while the passage of the matriarchal power contained no memories, just magic and lore; two, the elixir didn’t immobilize the recipient while it was fully absorbed; and three, the memories from the elixir were integrated far more quickly and seamlessly than the queenly power.