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
The memory had teeth. It was pulling him under — back to the storm.
He could taste ash.
Then a bolt of lightning struck the surface, straight above the ventilation bore.
For a split second the shaft hummed.
White light blew out the world behind his eyes.
Heat. A roar. Ozone sharp in his nose, then pine, then scorched metal — a smell old as graves.
Haven was gone.
He was there again.
The rain on the vents became the crackle of fire. The pipes groaning became screams.
He was back.
They came on silent feet.
Glass-backs. Pale plates along their spines caught the firelight like broken mirrors. Eyes like clouded moons. Claws on stone, soft as a secret.
He could taste the fear. Bitter. Thick. Smoke in his mouth.
Drool hit the floor. It sizzled.
He was small. Too small. Bones sharp under a ragged shirt. Ribs hollow with hunger. His hands shook around a broken pipe, but he held it like it mattered.
He wasn't alone.
Behind him, by the rusted shelves, a girl knelt. Older than him, not by much. Hair plastered to her face with dirt and sweat. Her arms were spread wide, shielding two smaller kids pressed to her back.
He heard them. Small fists. Choked sobs. Trying not to see the things with moon-eyes.
In that light — wrong, hungry light — something glinted at the youngest one's chest. Then it was gone, buried in her sister's shirt.
"Don't look," the girl whispered. Thin. Ragged. "Don't look. Don't look."
But they did.
Pale faces. Wet tracks down their cheeks. They looked at him.
No words. But he knew.
You're the shield.
Thin. Useless.
If he ran, they died first.
The truth dropped into his gut like a stone.
He wasn't fast enough. Not with their little legs. Not with three of them.
So he didn't run.
He stood his ground.
The cold stone bit into his bare feet.
Years earlier.
He was ten. Arms too thin. The broken pipe shook in his hands.
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.
Boots on stone.
"Enough," Ruvio said from the dark.
The word wasn't loud. It cut through the silver, through the thunder in his head, through the memory.
Eris gasped. The glow under his wrist stuttered, then thinned to a pulse.
He wasn't alone. Not since.
He still saw the iron staff — etched with runes, humming like it held a storm in chains.
The memory didn't fade. The present burned it out.
The whisper was a roar now.
Silver didn't pulse. It flooded — hot, fast, pushing under his skin like it wanted new room.
His jaw locked. Teeth ground. The air went thick. Burned dirt and lightning.
Silver lines climbed his throat. He could see them through his skin, tracking his jugular.
"I will not be... powerless," he choked out.
It wasn't a vow. It was a fact he was trying to make true.
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.
***