Silver in the Sea
A fragmented story about elves, otherness, and the quiet lights that bloom in darkness.
When first they came, I was just a boy. I didn’t think much about the space I took up. I wasn’t yet in the habit of staying on guard even at rest, but that day I started to learn how. It began with a knock at the front door of our tiny home, and my mother’s soft voice asking who it was. When the person answered, and the door snapped loudly shut, I knew that something was wrong.
The house fell into tense silence.
Mother stood several feet away from the door when I rounded the corner, her hands held out in front of her, palms facing the door.
“Get back in your room,” she hissed, glancing at me only momentarily.
I loved it when she did magic. It was part of our culture, the things she insisted were important to pass on to me. I could only do a little bit of it myself, but whenever she used her powers I was transfixed. Her casting a protection spell wasn’t altogether troubling, but why was she casting it inside our home? And why was her face so pale, her lips so tight, and eyes so fierce?
“What’s going on?” I asked, my little hands trembling and heart beating fast.
With the spell fully cast, both of her hands, each previously rigid, dropped. She held them up to her chest for a moment. Listening. Waiting. The people outside started slamming their fists against the door, the sound muffled by magic.
“We need to hide,” Mother said, her voice wavering in a way that made me scared. She rushed over to me, and took me firmly by the hand. I remember wanting to cry, but the urgency of the situation made me stuff the feeling deep inside myself.
I didn’t say anything, just let her pull me deeper into the house.
“Miss Sïlvond’sēaye, we know you’re in there!”
They said our family’s name with perfect pronunciation. Back then, there were more people like us around. Back then, our presence in the realm had only just been labeled as nefarious, our culture poisonous.
Twenty years later, when they finally got me, too, they used more words with much calmer confidence, only they no longer cared about how they said our names.
“Mister Sill-von-say, as you know, your extended presence in this realm is a direct violation of the good graces of our great king. We know you’re in there. Should you choose to comply, we will escort you and provide safe passage to a holding facility of our choosing. I must warn you, however, that should you choose not to comply, we are authorized to use extraordinary force.”
Mother wasn’t given the same courtesy. She didn’t choose compliance, at least not at first, but she didn’t take me back to my room, either. Instead, we went to hers, and together we climbed into her closet.
“You can’t run from this, filthy little elf.”
The word was said like an insult, but it’s exactly what we were. Our pointed ears and khaki skin wasn’t what they hated, though. It was the way we treated gender, not as something we are assigned, but something we grow into. Elves are born genderless until or unless our identity is revealed to us, after all, and that’s what they hated the most.
Mother closed the door, and together we sank to the floor behind her clothes, our backs against the wall.
“I need you to be very brave for me right now,” she whispered once we were seated on the floor and shrouded in darkness, our knees tucked to our chests. Her hands were shaking. “Can you do that for me?”
My throat was so tight and my body so tense that I couldn’t speak.
She ran a finger down my cheek, trying to force a smile.
“It’s alright. Everything’s alright. But you need to hide. You need to stay in here for a while.”
I blinked, wondering why she didn’t say “we.”
“Do you understand?”
I didn’t dare say no, so I just nodded.
The pounding at the door continued, making me jump. I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears with my hands. Mother took me by the chin. When I opened my eyes, I saw that she was crying.
“You aren’t in danger,” she promised. “They aren’t going to hurt you. Do you remember the spell I showed you?”
There was only one full-blown spell I knew how to perform. It helped me deal with my father’s violent outbursts, and cope with the debilitating panic attacks that sometimes drove me from my lessons to the outer edges of the village. Hiding in a closet, after all, was something I was familiar with.
“Vanish?” I asked, speaking very quiet.
There was more pounding at the door, this time sounding much louder. The protection spell was fading… but was she letting it?
“Vanish,” Mother repeated with a nod. “I need you to vanish.“
She started speaking fast.
“No matter what happens, do not let them see you. Do not let them hear you.”
I didn’t understand until after the closet door was closed that she wasn’t going to hide with me.
“Don’t come out. Don’t let them know you’re here.”
I kept my hands squeezed very tightly to my head as the men burst into our home. I tried not to listen, tried not to hear the awful sounds of shuffling, thudding, and dragging as they took my mother away from me. I tried to stay very still, to keep the spell as strong as possible, but I was crying so hard that I flickered in and out of visibility.
It didn’t matter. They weren’t there for me. Not yet, anyway. They were only there for her. They had only come to destroy everything we’d fought so hard to build after getting away from my father. And when they were gone, and the house was ominously silent once more, I listened with quiet devastation to the reverberations of emptiness that were left behind.
It was the first time I learned how utterly fragile life can be. How quickly everything can change.
Twenty years later, they came for me as well. By then I was tired of hiding, tired of running, and I chose not to vanish. Just like my mother, I let them march me out of the tiny stable I had been living in, and carry me away to a holding facility at the border of the realm. I didn’t know where I was, or what would happen to me, but I heard many stories that were similar to my own.
“They did the same to my brother,” my cell mate told me once. “They beat him, too. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the sound.”
He and I talked about these kinds of things at night, lying awake in our bunks, afraid to fall asleep for fear that we may open our eyes and find ourselves in a different place. At first, we spoke from separate beds, but eventually our heads ended up mere inches apart from the same pillow, our voices kept to a low whisper.
We didn’t think much about the tears that usually followed our nights together.
We were just thankful to have each other. To not be alone.
When first we met, he told me that my name sounded like a common elvish nomenclature that I was unaware of. I was dark elf. He was a wood elf. They had different stories and sayings.
“Silver in the sea,” he explained. “Sïlvond’sēaye.” He said it back and forth, as if to demonstrate for me how similarly the two sounded. I heard only, “Sill-von-say,” but I adored his explanation. To find silver in the sea is an extraordinary, almost impossible thing, and so, too, was our coming together. He likened the idea, the symbolism, to the idea of the silver lining: something in a dark time, a flicker of silver in a sea of blue, that gives you hope.
I told him I loved him after only knowing him for a week. It was the second night we ever spent together, and it was very late. We were lying side by side on my cot. The only light came from a thin slit that ran vertically up the wall. It was the only window to our cell, and it was a relic of the past, from back when the prison was a fortress, allowing archers to look out and take aim from the inside. It cast a thin line of pale moonlight across only one of his earnest, soft green eyes.
“I love you too,” he whispered back. “So, so much.”
He kissed my tears when I started to cry.
“You will find your mother,” he promised me. “I’m sure of it.”
“You’ll find your brother, too,” I said in return.
It wasn’t until much, much later that he finally confessed that his brother had died in a cell just like ours.
“My silver in the sea.”
you have a wonderful writing style
Great read!!!