The Weight of Silver

The Weight of Silver

She closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe, to order the chaos that roared inside her skull. The vision was not done with her. It unspooled again in jagged fragments, then sharpened until she saw it with unbearable clarity: the Veil, fissured and bleeding light. Not a single rupture, not one sudden cataclysm, but a steady, insidious unraveling—like silk tugged apart strand by strand. The decay was accelerating.

Selene’s knees wavered under the weight of what she knew. The knowledge pressed upon her chest like a stone slab, as though the sky itself leaned down to crush her. She was the Lunar Oracle. Her title was no longer abstract, no longer a ceremonial mantle draped in honor. It was a burden, and the whispers of ruin were no longer whispers at all—they were shrieks, demands, a direct call to action.

Her solitude, once her chosen peace, now cut like chains. For centuries she had believed herself content in the quiet of the Silverwood, believing silence to be strength, believing separation from the world was wisdom. But now silence was suffocating. Now solitude was prison.

The Silverwood itself seemed to shift around her. The ancient trees, those eternal guardians, leaned inward as though conspiring, their bark groaning softly in the night air. Their silence was no longer serene but expectant, thick with unspoken dread. Every leaf seemed to vibrate with tension. The air carried weight. It throbbed faintly, like the echo of a drumbeat beneath the earth, the pulse of the Veil’s unraveling seeping into the world.

Selene pressed her palm to her temple, silver glow sparking faintly beneath her skin. Her magic pulsed there, not soft as it once had, but sharp—coiled, restless, serpentine. It twisted in her blood as though it no longer belonged wholly to her, as though some larger force had slipped its fingers into her veins. She could feel it waiting, vibrating, ready to strike at the faintest summons.

But it was not comforting. It was agitating.

Every flicker of power seemed to magnify her visions, to make them heavier, more immediate. Her body ached with strain. The Veil’s weakening was no longer abstract—it pressed on her, burned her lungs, scraped at her bones. She could feel it like a wound layered over her skin, tender, throbbing, impossible to ignore.

The whispers of the old lunar currents—the very language of her ancestry—had shifted too. They no longer sang of patience and cycles. They screamed warnings, urgent and insistent, like drums pounding to war.

Selene looked down at her hands, trembling in the pale glow. The moonlight clung to them like a second skin, dripping and curling along her knuckles. They were beautiful, terrifying, as though sculpted from silver fire. Once she had taken comfort in this intimacy with the moon, in the way its light had always felt like a companion. The moon was her confidante, her constant, her unseen mother. She had spoken to it since she was a child, asking questions of its silent face and receiving comfort in the hush that followed.

But now—even the moon felt distant.

The connection was strained, brittle. She imagined she could feel the orb weeping above, silver tears trickling unseen into the night, powerless to hold the Veil together. The bond between them felt stretched thin, threadbare.

Her vision had shown her more than cracks. It had shown her a wound in the fabric of reality itself. A wound that bled light so wrong it turned her stomach. A wound only she had witnessed—so far. And that knowledge hollowed her out. She was alone with the scream of a dying world.

The silence around her did not soothe. It amplified the horror. Every rustle of wind through the branches sounded like a hiss of something tearing. Every sigh of the forest echoed like a scream caught in its throat.

The weight of her lineage fell heavy on her shoulders. Generations of oracles gazed back at her in memory, stern faces lined by prophecy, eyes silver-bright with visions. They had been seers, prophets of tides and cycles, able to glimpse what might be and prepare the people of Lunaris. But what Selene had seen was no tide, no cycle. It was not water flowing into water.

It was an ocean turned to storm. A maelstrom of annihilation.

And it was hers alone to carry.

Her magic responded to her panic, pulsing wildly beneath her skin. It was no longer the serene current she had cherished, but a churning dissonance, like the surface of a lake pounded by unseen storms. It made her breath hitch. It made her ribs ache.

She stumbled backward, clutching herself, and her hand flew to her mouth to catch the gasp that tore free. The vision crashed over her again—shards of light cracking through the Veil, widening, bleeding that phosphorescent sickness. It seared her mind. It made her teeth ache.

The light was alive with corruption. It dripped wrongness. Every instinct screamed that it was not just a thing to fear, but to resist, to fight, to destroy before it destroyed everything else.

Selene bent double, shuddering, her white hair falling across her face like a curtain. She forced herself to look up, to drink in her surroundings as if the familiar could ground her.

Her glade, usually a haven, was changed. The moon’s glow painted the leaves in sickly hues. The ancient trees cast shadows not still but shifting, writhing like unseen creatures crawling against the earth. The branches no longer seemed like arms lifted in worship—they looked like claws.

The air thickened further. She could taste it now: ozone, sharp and metallic, tinged with storm. It clashed with the sweetness of night-blooming jasmine, creating a dissonant perfume that made her throat tighten. Her sanctuary had soured into something hostile.

The Silverwood was not safe. It was listening.

Her breath came fast, ragged. She thought again of the faces that had seared themselves into her vision. Not specters—flesh. The woman wild and fierce, crowned with bones and brambles. The man dripping with sea-brine, eyes like storms. Selene did not know their names, yet her blood pulsed harder whenever she thought of them. As if her body recognized them as surely as her vision had demanded them.

She hated the way her hands shook at the memory. Hated the heat that flushed her throat when she remembered their nearness, their breath mingling with hers, the raw and frightening intimacy of that impossible joining.

Her body remembered, even though it had been only vision.

And with that remembrance came shame.

She had not sought this path. She had not invited this hunger. Yet desire twined with dread until she could no longer separate them.

Selene lifted her chin, forcing her trembling to still. She would not collapse again. She could not.

“Enough,” she whispered aloud. Her voice sounded foreign in her own ears.

The Silverwood did not answer. The leaves only rustled, carrying a hiss like mocking laughter.

But Selene was done with silence. She pressed her hand to her chest, to the wild thrum of magic that felt more curse than gift, and she made herself stand tall.

If the Veil was breaking, she would not remain caged in the woods to watch it fail. If her solitude had become a coffin, she would claw her way out.

She would follow the vision. She would find the faces. She would bind her fate to theirs if she must.

The thought chilled her and burned her in equal measure.

For the first time in her long, lonely life, Selene understood: her path would not be quiet. It would not be still. It would not be safe.

The Veil had chosen her. And she could not refuse.