"Where silver runs, the world remembers."
The pain woke him first.
It wasn't a sharp sting, but a heavy, rhythmic thrumming, a heartbeat that wasn't his own. Groaning, Eris forced his eyes open. The lids felt like they had been glued shut with lead.
"Where... am I?"
His voice cracked in the hollow silence. The room was dimly lit, the shadows clinging to the jagged stone walls like ink.
The only light came from the Luminescence Shafts high above, casting pale, ghostly pillars that barely touched the floor.
Then, the silver in his blood pulsed.
The pain didn't just return; it surged. It felt like liquid glass being poured through his veins.
He was in the Chamber of the Bound. The secret sanctum where Elder Ruvio had spent the last year training him to control the "beast."
He was fifteen now. Still too thin. Still haunted by the strange, ethereal glow that threatened to spill out of his skin.
To the village, he was a curse. To Ruvio, he was a gift. To himself? He was just a boy on fire.
The silver burned. It tore him out of his broken sleep, forcing him to curl tight on the cold stone. His fingers clawed at the floor, leaving jagged white marks in the dust.
Control it, he hissed to the darkness. Don't let it out.
Beneath his shirt, thin lines of ghostly light began to thread along his wrist.
Silver. Alive. Relentless.
He tried to stand, but his legs were weak. He dropped hard to his knees, the impact echoing through the chamber. The pain was so loud he couldn't even hear his own ragged breath.
The rhythm of the rain outside becomes the rhythm of the memory.
The storm didn't just shake the mountain; it shook the walls of his mind.
With every roll of thunder, the silver beneath his skin flared brighter, a frantic neon pulse that turned the veins in his arms into glowing maps.
He pressed his palm over his wrist, his skin burning to the touch, trying to dam the light with sheer will.
It was like trying to hold back the tide with a handful of sand.
The glow brightened, writhing, hungry. A raw, animal sound tore from his throat, lost in the groan of the shifting concrete and the hollow plink-plink of the leaks.
Not again.
Then, a bolt of lightning struck the surface directly above the ventilation bore. For split second, the shaft acted like a conductor, sending a jolt of ionized air straight into the chamber.
White light exploded behind his eyes.
The heat became a roar. The smell of ozone became the smell of burning pine and ancient, scorched metal. The cold stone of Haven vanished, replaced by a memory so vivid it felt like a physical blow.
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.
The rain on the rusted vents transformed into the crackle of a forest fire. The groaning pipes became the screams of a dying settlement.
He was back there.
The beasts came on silent feet.
Glass-back things, with pale mirrored plates along their spines and eyes like clouded moons. They moved in packs, claws scraping softly over ancient stone.
He could still taste the fear. Bitter. Thick. Like smoke in his mouth.
Drool hit the floor in sizzling drops.
He was small then. Smaller than he liked to remember. Bones sharp under ragged clothes, ribs aching with hunger. His hands were shaking, but he gripped a broken pipe like it was a sword.
He wasn't alone.
Behind him, by the rusted shelves, a girl knelt in the debris. She was barely older than him. Filthy hair clung to her face, but her body was rigid, her arms spread wide to shield two smaller children 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, Eris's eyes caught something quivering at the chest of the youngest child; just a glint, 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.
They were asking him something without words.
And he understood, he was their only shield.
But a fragile, useless one.
If he ran, they would die first.
The truth settled into his gut like a stone, anchoring him to the spot.
He wasn't fast enough to escape with them, not with their small, stumbling legs.
So, he didn't run. He stood his ground.
The cold stone bit into his bare feet. His arms felt too thin. Too weak. The broken pipe trembled in his hands.
"Please," he whispered. He didn't know who he was begging. The beast. The world. Whatever might still be listening. "Stop."
Something shifted in the marrow of his bones, stirred in his blood.
A faint glow flickered under his wrist. Thin. Weak. Like a dying ember.
The silver.
It wasn't a gift yet. It was a scream waiting to happen.
Eris didn't understand it, only that he wanted it to help. Needed it to.
The glass-back didn't care.
It crept forward, slow and deliberate. Its claws scraped sparks from the stone. Its eyes never left him, reflecting a boy who was already a ghost.
His breath came out in white mist.
The glow under his skin flickered once more,
Then faded.
It was too soft, too weak, like a dying ember.
He felt something inside him reach, stretching downward, deeper than the tunnel's bones, searching for something vast and hidden.
There was nothing.
Not yet.
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.
When the beast finally lunged, he braced for its jaws.
For a heartbeat, he almost hoped it would take him first, that the end would be quick.
But the dark behind him changed.
A sharp tap of metal striking stone.
Once.
Twice.
The sound was sharp. Final.
A dry voice spoke a word he couldn't understand, a word that felt ancient, heavy with the weight of the earth itself.
The beast's hiss turned into a scream of steam.
Light flared, not from him, but from runes carved into an iron staff.
A figure stepped from the shadows.
The glass-back shrieked. Cracks spiderwebbed across its mirrored plates. It writhed, its body breaking apart in splinters of light and smoke, until nothing remained but a metallic stink and drifting ash.
Silence fell, heavier than the noise.
Eris collapsed to his knees.
The broken pipe slipped from his numb fingers. His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
The siblings stood frozen.
Hope, small, fragile, terrified, flickered in their eyes.
They should have died there.
The man stepped into the leaking light of a broken lamp.
His coat was heavy with dust. His iron staff hummed faintly, like it held a storm in chains. His eyes were old. Sharp.
They passed over the siblings.
Then settled on the Eris.
And stopped.
For just a moment, his gaze lingered on the faint silver pulse dying beneath the boy's wrist.
"If you stay alone," the man rasped, "you die alone."
His staff tapped the ground.
A promise. A threat. An invitation.
Eris snapped back to the present with a gasp, but he didn't see the crumbling concrete of the chamber. He saw the old man's iron staff.
The memory didn't just fade; the present reality burned it away. The "whisper" he had felt as a child was now a roar.
The silver under his skin wasn't just a pulse anymore; it was a deluge, a flood of liquid light that felt like it was trying to rewrite his essence.
His jaw locked tight, teeth grinding. The air turned thick, heavy with the stench of burned earth and electricity.
The silver lines on his throat climbed higher, tracing the path of his jugular, glowing through his skin like a furnace behind thin glass.
"I will not be... powerless," he choked out, the words a jagged echo of his childhood vow.
The echo of that night still lived in his bones, a silent scream that never quite faded.
He was hunched on the cold tunnel floor, breath unsteady, the distant storm rumbling through the rock like something huge turning in its sleep. He didn't want to remember, but it kept coming back.
And the silver was no longer staying quiet.
It was singing a song of the Celestia, a terrifying, celestial vibration that rattled his bones. The stone beneath his fingertips began to hum in sympathetic resonance.
The silver burned under his skin.
And this time...
It did not fade.
***