Where silver runs, the world remembers.
[The Silver's Ache]
The silver woke him first; a sharp, pulsing sting that raced beneath his skin like a river of fire. A boy of fifteen, not yet grown, but marked by the ruin in ways no elder could name; he lay curled on the cracked stone floor of the tunnel's deepest chamber; spine twisted, breath ragged. Beneath his thin shirt, something flickered under the skin of his wrist and throat: a ghostly vein of light, quicksilver pulsing like it had a mind of its own.
He stumbled, falling hard to his knees on the cold, slick stone. The tunnel's biting cold meant nothing to him; sweat beaded on his forehead, trickling into his eyes. His body burned with a private heat, a silent, internal struggle unseen by those around him.
Outside, rain drummed like a thousand small fists on rusted vents overhead. Lightning cracked in the distance; a brief, searing vein of light that found its echo in the silver threads writhing beneath his wrist. Each thunderclap shuddered through the old bones of Haven Below, rattling loose flakes of concrete and rust from the corroded pipework above. The low, arched ceiling, patched with rusted metal, dripped sluggishly, the rhythmic plink of water echoing through the oppressive gloom. Cold drops striking his bare shoulder. A weeping from the world above, echoing his pain. Silvery light snaking in the wall mirrored the storm outside, hissing and rattling as if the tunnel itself groaned with him, mourning the thing coiled in his veins.
He bit down on a raw cry, tasting blood. The ruin's damp breath pressed close; stone walls stitched with rusted pipes, scraps of tarp sagging over cracked concrete like old wounds half-forgotten. Far away, thunder rolled, a low growl swallowed by the earth above. He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached. A hissed breath. A low, animal sound that escaped before he could swallow it down. He pressed his palm over the glow at his wrist, as if he could dam the river with bone and skin alone. But the silver only shimmered brighter, answering the storm outside with its own wordless hunger. As the silver throbbed, a blinding, insistent flash behind his eyes, the world dissolved into pure white.
For a timeless moment, there was only the searing light, the all-consuming pain. He squeezed his eyes shut. He could see it, even in the dark behind his eyelids; that memory. And when the thunder fell silent for a heartbeat, the ruin's hush whispered back: Remember.
And he did. In the flicker between thunder and breath, he was that boy again. He wasn't in Haven Below anymore. He was back there.
The beasts came, glass-back things with pale plates along their spines, eyes like clouded moons. They moved in packs, silent except for the scrape of claws on old stone. The boy could still taste the fear, how it sank into his tongue like bitter smoke. The glass-back's drool hit the tunnel floor in tiny burning drips. Each one a promise of what would happen to him if he stumbled.
He was small, smaller than he'd ever admit now, his bones sharp under ragged clothes. His ribs felt cracked from hunger. His throat was dry, but his palms were wet—gripping a broken pipe like it was a sword. He wasn't alone. Not entirely. Beyond the beast, beyond the pulsing terror, he registered the figures huddled by the rusted shelves. There was a girl barely older than him, kneeling amidst the debris. Her filthy hair, matted with dust and fear, fell over her eyes, but her small body was rigid, a desperate, fragile shield for the two tiny forms pressed against her back. He could hear their choked sobs, their small fists pressed tight against their eyes, trying to block out the malevolent glow of the beast's unnatural eyes. In the faint shimmer of that same light, something at the youngest child's chest caught and quivered. It's just a glint, like a droplet of metal, before vanishing as she buried her face deeper into her sister's back.
"Don't look," she whispered, her voice a thin, ragged thread, repeating the plea like a desperate prayer. "Don't look. Don't look." But they looked anyway. Their faces, pale and streaked with tears, were turned towards him. Their eyes, too big, too hollow, reflecting the impossible blue of the beast's veins - burned into his back. An unspoken plea, a desperate understanding. A horrific certainty settled in his gut: If he ran, they would die first.
He knew it. He wasn't fast enough to escape with them anyway, not with their small, stumbling legs. The grim truth settled in his gut like a lead weight: he was their only shield, a fragile, useless one.
So, he didn't run. He stood his ground, the cold weight of that truth settling deeper than the dust on his skin. He whispered,
"Please, stop," like the words themselves might somehow penetrate the beast's corrupted mind. The silver's whisper flickered in his blood again, a strange echo of the cosmic impact, and tiny veins under his wrist glowed a faint, trembling silver. He didn't understand it. He only knew, with a desperate, primal urge, that he wanted it to help.
The beast didn't care. Its inhuman eyes, still fixated on him, held no recognition, no mercy. It crept forward, slow and deliberate now, its claws scraping faint sparks from the ancient stone floor.
He raised the broken pipe, its jagged edge a pitiful defense against the oncoming horror. His breath cracked in the frigid air, sounding as fragile as the floor beneath his bare feet. The glow under his skin flickered once more, a desperate plea for power, but it was too soft, too weak, like a dying ember. He thought he felt something within him reach, straining for a connection, for something deep under the tunnel's old bones – a vast, hidden reservoir, but there was nothing there for it to find. Not yet.
When the glass-back lunged, the boy braced for its jaws, . . . and for a heartbeat, he almost wished it would take him first. The silver's whisper, that faint, nascent power, died in his veins, leaving him cold and utterly helpless.
But the dark behind him changed. A sharp tap - metal striking stone once, then again. A dry voice, like grit in a cracked throat, uttered a single word, too low and alien for him to distinguish. The beast's eager hiss of corrosive acid suddenly turned to steam, dissolving into the air.
Light flared, not from the boy, but from the intricate runes carved into an iron staff, held by a figure that had materialized from the shadows. The beast shrieked, a sound of agony and rage, as hairline cracks spiderwebbed across its mirrored plates. It writhed, a monstrous dance of splintering light, then scattered, dissolving into foul-smelling smoke, a metallic tang, and the scent of old, old dust.
The boy fell to his knees, the broken pipe clattering from his numb fingers. His hands were shaking too hard to hold anything. The three girls, silent and wide-eyed, didn't run. They only stared, their small faces pale with shock and a dawning, fragile hope. They should have died there.
A figure stepped into the leaking, hesitant light of a broken lamp, his coat heavy with the ancient dust of the tunnels, his iron staff flickering as if it held a storm in chains. His gaze swept over them, landing first on the boy crumpled on the floor, then on the girl still shielding the smallest ones with her thin, trembling arms. His eyes, old and sharp, lingered for a moment on the faint silver pulse dying beneath the boy's wrist.
"If you stay alone, you die alone," he rasped, his voice a low, gravelly sound that seemed to echo from the very stone. His staff tapped the ground once more - a promise, a threat, an invitation.
Later, the boy would wonder if the glow he had seen was truly fire, or something else entirely—the silver's whisper, the subtle, terrifying hum of Celestia. But, the mysterious old man never answered. He simply led them back through the labyrinthine tunnels, a silent guide in the creeping darkness. The girl's tiny hand was locked around the boy's wrist, clinging so tightly he could feel her pulse hammer against his skin, a fragile beat of life. With the other siblings trailing, they moved as a single, cautious unit.
In deep thought: "I will not be powerless again." The boy pressed a small, dust-grimed hand to his chest, just as he had done countless times since that night, as if he could still feel it there – the silver, the secret. In his blood. Waiting.
The old man had spoken of it, just after leading them into the relative safety of Haven Below, his voice like stone dragged over stone. "When the sky bled silver," he had rasped, his gaze fixed on the scarred horizon, "the world learned to breathe again—in a voice none would ever tame."
The boy hadn't understood all of it then, but the words had clung to him, a cryptic prophecy of his own burgeoning nature
The children stayed together. The boy, with no family left to claim him. The girl, with her sisters clinging to her shoulders like frightened fledgling birds, forever bound by the terror they had shared. And the old man, the enigmatic mentor who taught them how to hold a knife, how to draw a bowstring taut, how to feel for traps hidden beneath crumbling stone, and how to sense the low quake of a glass-back's breath, or any living shadow that waits in the ruins and the endless dark.
Years passed. The boy's veins, for a long time, stayed quiet . . . until they didn't.
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