“Sylvie, it’s Snowpepper, please, look at me!” Snowpepper pounded on the wall that separated her from her otherside self. “Sylvie, please!”

She had already called until her throat was sore, to no avail, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She must get her attention—somehow!

On the other side of the invisible wall, Sylvie appeared to have fallen asleep. Frustrated, Snowpepper gave up for the moment. She tried to think. What had the image on the fourth card been? What had Mother Maples said about it? She seemed to remember her saying the fourth card was important. If only she were smarter, more like Sylvie! She was letting her otherside self down, she was letting Mother Maples down, and herself as well, she supposed, though she couldn’t imagine that she was very important compared to the others. Snowpepper had only come into existence upon entering this side of things. Sylvie was real, the important one, the one who mattered. She had no right at all to be alive without Sylvie.

“Oh! Sylvie!” the faerie whimpered, in an agony of anxiety. “Please, please wake up, please notice me!” When nothing happened, she sank to her knees, her back to the invisible wall, tears flowing down her cheeks in a steady stream. However long it took, she must wait for Sylvie. However long it took, she would make her notice her. She had to.

Snowpepper abruptly woke from a dim dream of hopelessness when the wall she leant against dissolved into nothingness. She fell over onto her back before her groggy mind realized the significance. Leaping to her feet, she turned and rushed toward the prostrate Sylvie.

For a moment she felt overwhelmed by the strangeness of seeing the other girl separate from herself for the first time. She looked like a stranger, with short brown hair, small and thin and ordiinary, nothing like the way Snowpepper saw her inside. In her mind, Sylvie appeared tall and regal, with an air of intelligence and authority. Could this really be she? Yet she knew it was; she couldn’t be mistaken. Her heart’s compass was firmly pointed toward the magnetic north of her otherside self.

“Sylvie!” she whispered, touching her hesitantly on the arm. “Sylvie, wake up, it’s me, Snowpepper.” Sylvie looked so pale, almost as though she were… Jolted by the sudden memory of the dead body in the fourth card, Snowpepper shrieked, “No! Sylvie, don’t be dead! No, please!” She shook Sylvie desperately, but she only rolled limply and settled into a position that seemed too awkward for a living person.

She was dead! She must be! Snowpepper felt an aching howl of grief rise slowly from the depths of her belly up through her heart and toward her throat. It seemed to take minutes from the first time she noticed it until it finally burst out of her throat. Her fingers curled into rigid claws, her mouth stretched wider than it should, and she screamed in profound, disbelieving, griefstricken horror. There were no words in her howls, merely a vacancy, a loss so deep as to defy expression. She bent forward, slowly, like a sapling felled in a storm wind, until her face rested, quivering, on Sylvie’s chest. Her howls settled into wrenching agonized sobs. She couldn’t imagine surviving this. She couldn’t imagine, period. Pain occupied the place where her mind normally resided.

After some endless time, she became aware of a ray of hope illuminating the memory of Mother Maples’ description of the fourth card. The chocolate witch had said, “Your tears shall call her back from the dark place she wants to hide in.”

Her tears could call her back. Could they? Even as she wondered, she was sobbing to Sylvie, attempting with all her heart’s might to penetrate the darkness to touch her wherever she was. “Sylvie,” she wept, “I need you! Please come back, please be you again! I’ll do anything, I promise, I’ll go away if you want me to but you have to come and be alive again! You are so important, you’re the one, please stay and be real, I don’t know how to be without you!”

“No, Snowpepper…” Sylvie’s voice whispered, startling her so that she jolted as though touched by a live wire. “You’re wrong. It’s me that needs you.”

Snowpepper’s emotions shifted mercurially from grief and loss to joyous salvation. “Sylvie! Oh, Sylvie, you’re back! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” The faerie threw her arms around the slender form of the girl she had cried back to life and hugged hard.

Sylvie wriggled, protesting weakly, “Hey, don’t smother me! I have to breathe, you know!”

Hastily drawing back, Snowpepper cried, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to! I’m just so glad you’re back! I cried and cried, and I wanted you, oh please don’t go away like that again!”

“I don’t want to,” Sylvie said. “Believe me, it wasn’t my idea. Hey, Snowpepper, how did you get here, anyway? How did you find me?”

“Mother Maples helped me. She is so wonderful!”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” Sylvie sighed, sinking back into torpid depression . All right, so she was awake, but so what? Almost, she wished the faerie had not found her, had left her to drift in oblivion, so she wouldn’t have to be oppressed by the burden of awareness. Where was she supposed to go from here? How was she supposed to deal with her new understanding? How could she face the world again?

She looked at Snowpepper, at her anxious heart-shaped face, her crystalline eyes still welling with tears, her fluffy, feathery pale hair. Snowpepper was so simple and pure, so… innocent. And she had hurt this innocent, long ago. She hadn’t meant to, but she had done it. She was responsible.

She sighed again, deeply. Well, she had to start someplace. “Snowpepper,” she began hesitantly, “I…I’m really sorry, you know. About the way I treated you when I was a little kid. It wasn’t fair to you. You deserved to be alive as much as me, and I really missed out, not having you in me all that time.”

The faerie blinked. What was Sylvie talking about? “I…” she began. She didn’t know what to say.

“You have to understand, though,” Sylvie pleaded, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t even know there was a you. I didn’t know what I was doing. If I had, I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it.”

“What?” Snowpepper finally managed to squeak. “What do you mean? What did you do?”

“I pushed you out of me when we were little. It’s a long story, and I know it sounds weird, but…” Sylvie took a deep breath. Might as well get it out now. As briefly as she could, she explained to Snowpepper what she had learned. “So you see, you’re really me, after all, just like the voice said, though I didn’t want to hear it then. I guess I must have felt guilty even though I didn’t remember what had happened. I didn’t want to hear it or believe it. I wanted to push it away. But now that I know, I can’t pretend I don’t know, you see?”

Snowpepper had never felt so bewildered. “But…where have I been, then, all this time, if you pushed me out? I don’t remember anything until we came to this side of things. Wouldn’t I remember something?”

“I dunno how it works, really,” Sylvie confessed. “Maybe Mother Maples can tell us. But I know it’s true. Will you trust me on this?”

“Um…okay,” Snowpepper said doubtfully. From the outside Sylvie didn’t seem quite as infallible to her. But, she told herself, it was still Sylvie, and she would try to believe her until she really did. She wanted to. It was nice to imagine that she might be a legitimate part of their shared self and not just a spinoff.

Sylvie felt stronger now. Must’ve been that weight I got off my chest, she thought, grinning faintly to herself. She sat up and looked around. “Hey, this isn’t the same place I was in when I fell asleep. I was in a kind of glassed-in room.” She shook her head. “Things are even more changeable here than in…” She gestured vaguely. “You know. ‘This side of things’.”

The faerie nodded, shrugging helplessly. She was so confused, she didn’t know what to think.

After a moment, Sylvie asked, “Snowpepper, do you know how to get back to Mother Maples? Can you take us back?”

“I think so. I walked here. I guess we could just walk back.”

Sylvie stood, a little shaky, but ready to move. She was sick to death of this place.

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