Coin, Then Words
The coin was still warm in his fist, throbbing with a biological rhythm that matched his own pulse.
Marcus sat at the booth opposite Eira and Liri, his forearms resting heavily on the table. The neon from the OPEN sign painted the front window in a wash of bloody red, casting long, wavering shadows through the near-empty diner. The hum of the sign was a constant, low-grade irritation, a reminder that the world was still turning outside, oblivious to the fact that monsters had just walked through his front door.
The old woman's warning wouldn't dislodge from his brain. It looped like a corrupted audio file.
You shouldn't have interfered.
Every witness has a price.
He looked from the locked door to the sisters, then slowly uncurled his fingers.
The coin lay in his palm like a small, dark planet, heavy and dense. It seemed to absorb the ambient light rather than reflect it. The symbol carved into the center—a perfect circle intersected by three sharp lines—caught the overhead fluorescent glare and held it. It looked like an eye, or a compass that pointed nowhere good, or perhaps a crosshair target.
"Okay," he said quietly, his voice rough. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything. Who she was, what this is, and exactly how much trouble I'm in."
Eira didn't answer immediately. Her gaze was fixed on the metal in his hand, her expression guarded. She lifted her free hand slightly, palm out, a gesture of pause.
"Wait," she said. Her English was still broken, the syntax jagged. "Words first. Or we drown in wrong ones. Too much meaning lost."
Marcus frowned, closing his hand over the coin again. "Pretty sure my words are the only ones I've got, and I'm fresh out of Rosetta Stones."
She shook her head and stood up, the movement fluid and graceful despite her exhaustion. "We make a bridge," she said. "Very old thing. Safe. Wise. It helps tongues listen faster and better. It plants the seed of meaning."
Marcus had a brief, absurd flash of memory—a dusty paperback sci-fi novel he'd read on deployment about a fish you stuck in your ear to translate alien languages. Then he thought of modern tech, the way AI apps could clone a voice from thirty seconds of audio.
"Like a language scan?" he asked, skeptical. "You sure this is safe? Because my brain has had a rough day."
Liri perked up from her corner, her eyes bright. "Yes," she said, nodding vigorously. "We do it with traders. And stubborn elders who refuse to learn. And goats." She hesitated, her brow furrowing. "They do not like it, but it works. mostly."
"That is not helping, kid," Marcus muttered. "Being compared to a stubborn goat is not a selling point."
Eira stepped closer to him at the end of the booth. She moved into his personal space with a lack of hesitation that was disarming.
"You sit," she commanded softly. "Look at me. Do not look away."
He sat back against the vinyl, more out of curiosity than obedience. He crossed his arms over his chest. "If my head explodes, I'm haunting both of you. Aggressively."
She smiled faintly, catching the playful edge of his threat. "If your head explodes, you do not need to haunt. You will already be everywhere."
"Comforting. Let's do it."
She reached out.
Her hands were cool and dry. She placed one hand lightly against his forehead, her fingers spreading wide into his hairline. The other she placed gently over the lower half of his face, her palm spanning from just under his nose to the curve of his chin. She didn't press; she just held him there. Her skin was soft, but he could feel the calluses on her fingertips—the hands of someone who worked, who fought.
"Breathe slow," she murmured, her voice vibrating against his jaw. "Do not fight the current."
He had been told that before in doctors' tents while medics dug shrapnel out of his shoulder, and in SERE school while instructors tried to break his mind. It had never involved an elf with glowing green eyes touching his face in a diner.
She closed her own eyes and began to speak.
The words were in her language—low, rhythmic, flowing in a steady cadence that sounded almost like a chant or a song without a melody.
As she spoke, something prickled against his skin. It started as a tiny static buzz where her hands touched him, like the feeling of a limb falling asleep, then intensified. It made the hairs on his arms rise. It wasn't painful, but it was invasive. It felt like someone was walking around inside his skull with soft shoes.
His ears filled with sound.
It wasn't just her voice. It was echoes of his own.
Fragments of sentences he had said in the last twenty-four hours swirled around him, overlapping and distorting.
"Welcome to The Slipgate…"
"You're safe…"
"Burger. Drink. Good."
"Don't die on my floor."
They layered with words he didn't know—sharp consonants and rolling vowels—sliding over each other like transparent pages in a book being shuffled.
For a moment, reality blurred. He saw flashes behind his eyes that weren't his memories.
A forest under two pale moons. A stone gate rimmed with cold blue light. A group of people in robes standing around a fire, their mouths moving in patterns that his brain suddenly, terrifyingly, understood a little more. He felt the cold of a mountain wind he had never stood in.
Then, it was gone. The static snapped.
Eira drew her hands back with a soft, sharp intake of breath. She swayed slightly, looking dazed, as if she had just taken a shot of strong liquor on an empty stomach.
"That is part one," she said, her voice husky. "Your tongue is in my head now. A little. The roots are planted."
Marcus rubbed his face, feeling the phantom pressure of her hands. "I feel violated," he said, checking his mental perimeter. "In a gentle, consensual way. But still."
Liri giggled, the sound bright and jarring in the heavy atmosphere.
Eira held out her own hands, palms up. "Now you," she said. "You touch here. You must plant your seed in me."
She tapped the center of her forehead. Then her lips.
Marcus hesitated. He looked at his own hands—large, scarred, capable of violence. "You're sure? I'm not exactly a mage."
She gave him a look that was both weary and trusting. "You have guns. You saved us. You hold the Mark. If you wanted to hurt me, Marcus, you do not need hands on my face to do it."
He couldn't argue with that logic.
"Fair point."
He stood up and leaned over the table. He raised his right hand to her forehead, his fingers resting just at her hairline. He was careful, gentle. His left hand he placed across her mouth, his thumb resting near her high cheekbone, his little finger near her chin.
Her skin was incredibly warm, softer than he expected, pulsing with life. She closed her eyes, leaning into his touch slightly.
"Now what?" he asked, feeling awkward.
"Say many words," she said, her voice muffled and warm against his palm. "Simple ones. Things you say a lot. Things that are you."
He thought for a second, his mind blanking.
"Marcus," he started. "Texas. Coffee. Fryer. Door. Gun."
He paused, then kept going, letting the words spill out in a stream of consciousness.
"Pie. Burger. Safe. Stay. Run. Duck. Get down. You're okay. It's alright. It's going to be fine. Soldier. Home. Brother. Gone."
He just talked, letting the small, ordinary words of his life spill out into her skin.
As he did, he felt something push back against his palms. It wasn't forceful; it was a gentle, magnetic awareness. The faintest echo of her listening, of her mind reaching out to grab the concepts and pull them in. His own voice seemed to loop back at him from somewhere inside her skull, then bounce sideways into another language entirely and back again, translating in real-time.
The hairs at the back of his neck stood up. The connection was palpable, a thread of electricity running arm to arm.
After a minute, she tapped his wrist lightly.
"Enough," she said softly.
He let go, pulling his hands back as if they had been burned.
Her eyes opened. For a moment they looked unfocused, the green irises swirling like smoke. Then they sharpened, locking onto his face with new clarity.
She tried a sentence.
"You speak very fast," she said carefully. The grammar was still a little off, but the flow was miles better than before. The consonants still had an exotic, melodic tilt, but more of the vowels landed in the right places. It sounded less like she was reading a dictionary and more like she was speaking a language.
He blinked. "That was new. And effective."
She touched her temple with two fingers. "You put the seed of your words here," she said. "I put the seed of mine in you. They grow now. Not perfect. But faster. Like vines."
Liri bounced on her seat, unable to contain herself. "My turn," she announced. "I want the words too."
The next few minutes looked like the world's strangest children's game played by adults in a war zone.
Eira scanned Liri. Liri scanned Marcus. Marcus scanned Liri.
At one point, Marcus found himself with one hand on each sister's forehead while both of them reached up to touch different parts of his face. For a second, he had the surreal realization that if any of his old squad—Rook, Jaro—walked in right now, he would never, ever live this down.
"It looks like a very slow fight," Liri said at one point, laughing as their hands overlapped and bumped.
"Or a bad trust exercise from corporate HR," Marcus muttered.
By the end of it, his head throbbed dully behind his eyes, a tension headache blooming like the first day in a new language class multiplied by ten. But the fog had lifted.
When Eira spoke again, her English had smoothed out. The edges were rounded off.