Chapter 32 Silver
Silver
It’s funny, looking at the Primes—with all their weapons and armor, all their magic, all the soldiers ready to die at their command—to think about how unworthy they used to make me feel.
Right now, they’re all terrified.
They hide it behind different veils—brawn, perfection, gloves, and walls—but they can’t hide it from me.
I’m scared, too. But I’m realizing that power doesn’t lie in how well you hide that. It lies in how well you can face it, and what you’re facing it for.
What we’re about to do is probably the most reckless thing I’ve ever attempted, and I’ve set a pretty high bar. I know that the Citadel can change, because it’s bigger and it’s darker than it was even a day ago. So if it can change in one direction, then surely it can change in the other.
But do I know what to do once we plunge back into its heart? Not entirely. Do I know whether we can even survive it a second time? Not at all.
My skin buzzes with the familiar jolt of adrenaline I get before I do something ill-advised.
There’s a white mist rising out of my chest, and there’s even more haloing Mance.
I take a moment to appreciate the fact that she’s feeling all that fear and she still put her hand in mine and chose to walk beside me. Her trust makes me feel unconquerable.
We explain our plan to the other Primes and they look worried at best, and disdainful at worst, but even through all of that Mance doesn’t waver. And neither do I.
All too soon, we’re standing in the doorway, still and solemn. We lock eyes, memorizing what it is to be with each other in this moment.
Then . . .
We step into the darkness together and let it envelop us.
Mance’s grip tightens around my fingers and I hear her gasp, but otherwise I can’t see or feel her at all. It’s like she’s been stripped down somehow to only a breath and a softly applied pressure on my hand.
“It’s okay,” I say, rubbing the back of her knuckles with my thumb. I have to assure myself that she’s still there, still connected to the fingers I can’t actually see.
I’ve only just started to believe it when the darkness rushes in.
Even though we expected it, the force of it still hits like a hurricane, pushing and pulling us from every direction. We scramble to hold on, only to be torn apart.
“No!” I cry as her grip slips. “Mance!”
If she forms any reply, I don’t hear it. And I’m not sure my own words actually make it out of my mouth, either. It feels like the darkness snatches them from my throat as it rushes in to coat every bit of my insides.
Again, I get the sense that it sees me, knows me, more than anyone else ever has. Like I can’t hide a thing from it, even those things that I hide from myself. I feel its perception of me, like eyes on every bit of my being, watching, knowing, seeing, breaking me apart for study.
Only this time, I look back.
The Citadel feels different now than it did before. It takes effort, but if I focus, I can still sense the wisps of fear that stitched the Citadel together. Even though I can’t make out its color, I can feel its shape. Through the oppressive force of it, I can find pockets of insubstantial smoke.
And I can grab hold of them.
I feel my own smoke dimming. Because the darkness having any kind of shape at all makes it less scary somehow. Less like an all-consuming and terrible supernatural force and more like something tangible and real. Something that can be understood. Something I might be able to affect?
In being aware of the shape of the darkness, I also become more aware of my own body.
Of the fact that it can move. And I press forward, toward where Mance was ripped from my side.
I lean into the fears I sense, letting them guide me, and as I touch them I feel a misty impression of the ancient terrors that built this place.
It’s almost like last night. It’s more muted, but I’m still wading through so many layered fears from multiple sources that it’s hard to keep my own identity straight.
They are all so different and yet also somehow, at the very core, they are all so very much the same. Fear, I realize, is truly universal.
Then, with a jolt, I find Mance’s fear, and it’s almost like finding myself.
I’ve felt her fears before. I know them. So it’s easy to latch on to them and let them pull me in, so much more real than anything else in this oppressive milieu.
I lean into them, living her failure, knowing her weaknesses, experiencing her regrets and worst-case scenarios. And then all of a sudden I’m holding her hand again, one single point of connection in the immutable blackness, and from that single point, sense and reason flood back in.
Mance
For a moment, I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone. When the darkness overwhelmed me, it did so completely, and I was nothing but torn-apart fragments. The world was nothing but invading shadows.
And then . . . Silver found me.
The moment I feel his touch, everything else becomes grounded.
I respond immediately, clawing at the air in an effort to get to him, and at the same time he’s pulling me close to his chest. I smell pine smoke.
I feel the familiar curve of his arms around me, and it’s like finally catching a gasping breath of air after struggling underwater.
I bury my face in his neck, crying into his skin, and he doesn’t let me go.
Even as we cling to each other, the darkness still doesn’t let up.
It feels like we’re in the middle of a hurricane, the force of it whipping around and through us.
But we hold on. And I suddenly realize that I can see Silver as well as the darkness can.
We are laid completely bare, not just before the force of the magic, but also before each other.
I see him and he sees me and for all the ugliness that that intimacy reveals, it only makes us hold on tighter.
Until, at last, the magic goes still. As one, we brace ourselves for the twisting. I feel the muscles of his arms tighten at my sides, and I am holding myself so rigidly that I feel almost about to break.
But it doesn’t happen this time. There is no new wrenching in my soul, although the memory of it echoes deeply.
And then the door reappears, tempting. A way out of the blackness, a way out of the fear. We don’t have to linger here; we could run and never look back.
But the sunlight on the other side of the doorway shines on Silver’s face, and he cups mine, and I remember that we came in here for a reason. We came to understand the dark, and to change our relationship to it. “What do you think we do now?” Silver asks. “Attack?”
“No,” I say, suddenly sure. “That didn’t work. It could never have worked.”
“So then . . . ?”
“We need to heal.”
Silver
When she says it, it feels right. Her expression gets serious, and her fingers clench the back of my shirt as she looks around. “How, though?” she muses. “How do you heal something so much bigger than yourself? How do you even start?”
“Understanding.” I reach out, keeping the connection between Mance and me open, and I tap into my link to the magic, letting her experience what it feels like for me. At her sharp intake of breath, I know it’s working. She sees the wisps of smoky fear that I do, and she presses closer to my side.
But I can see more than just the fear now.
“When I first came in here, I was afraid,” I say, although I’m not sure whether I’m talking to her or to myself, because it’s almost like I’m only realizing the truth of things when I put them into words.
“I thought what I needed was power. Over the situation, over other people. Over fear itself. I don’t think the Citadel gave me magic.
I think I pulled it for myself from the depths, according to what I thought I needed. And when you first went in—”
“I thought Alect was dead,” she whispers. “I thought Mara was dead. All I wanted was a way to bring them back.”
“You reached out and claimed the power to resurrect,” I confirm. “Even though you didn’t realize you were doing it.”
She shakes her head slowly. “But it’s so twisted. It’s so wrong. It didn’t protect me; it only brought me more pain.”
“That’s because it came from something built in fear and darkness. You took what power you could to survive, but you took it from a dark place.”
She tilts her head back, looking up, almost as though she can see the sky above. “It’s only dark because that’s what we’ve been feeding it, though. The Citadel was created in war and that’s all we’ve been using it for since. How do we break that cycle?”
“The only way you can,” I say. “One bit at a time.”
I pick out one specific tendril of fear and I pull it toward me.
Instead of stoking it into something bigger, I lessen it.
I let it ease. Not the same way that I pull fear out of my own chest, because that’s just ignoring it.
Refusing to feel it. Instead, I listen to the fear and console it gently, until it dissipates between my fingers on its own.
Mance
I stretch my hand into the space that the strange, wispy fear just occupied, awed to find only emptiness. Stunned by the implication of what Silver just did.
Then I straighten my back, determined to join in the effort. I can’t do exactly the same thing, obviously, but there must be a way to use my power, my twisted, fierce power, to do something positive, too.
Fear is not the only thing that festers here.
There are also memories of those who have entered the Citadel.
Either ones they came in with and left behind or ones created right here.
With a hitched breath, I reach into the stream of magic and pull out these memories, these consciousnesses that the different parts of myself can see and understand.
And I let those different parts of myself step forward and relate to them.
Livid sees anger. Poise sees the urge to hide. Asset sees plans gone awry.
But Heart sees a yearning for something better, too. And I respond to all of it.