“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He walked to the window. Pale light shone across his face. “The silver’s deep tonight. It’s almost over the wall.”
I crawled to the foot of the bed to look. Kneeling beside him, I leaned out the window.
Temple Huacho was built at the summit of a softly rounded hill. I looked down that slope, past the orchard my mother had planted, to see a luminous ocean lapping at the top of the perimeter wall. The silver’s light filled all the vales so that once again our hilltop had become an island, one of many in an archipelago of hills set in a silvery sea, though all the other islands were wooded. Ours was the only one where any players lived.
The oldest stories in existence, the ones brought forward again and again through time, tell us that in our first lives we came from beyond the world. A goddess created this place for us and the silver was her thought: a force of creation and destruction that could build the bones of the world or melt them away. She brought us out of darkness to live in her new world, for it was her hope that each of us might gain talents in our successive lives so that someday we would grow beyond this world and ascend to Heaven too.
The goddess had made the world in defiance of darkness, but the darkness was an angry god and he pursued her and sought to slay her world. A great war fell out between them and while he was cast back into the void, she was broken, her existence reduced to a fever dream with the silver the only visible remnant of her creative power.
We call it silver, but other languages have named it better. In one ancient tongue it is the “breath-of-creation.” In another it is “the fog of souls,” and in a third, “the dreaming goddess.”
That was how my mother spoke of it. When the silver rose she would say that the goddess was dreaming again of the glorious days of creation, and certainly the silver brought with it both the beauty and the madness of dreams. It was an incoherent force, wantonly powerful, that entered our world at twilight and stayed until dawn, reshaping what it touched. In the course of a single night it might dissolve a hundred miles of highway, or the outer buildings of a failing enclave, or a player unlucky enough to be caught out after dark. In the same night it might build new structures within the veils of its gleaming fog, so that a columned mansion would be discovered in an uninhabited valley, or a statue of glass would be found standing in meditation amid a field of maize. But while the silver could both dissolve away the structures of our civilization and build them anew, it acted always as an impersonal force, never seeming aware that this was our world, or that we existed in it.
So we walled it out.
A silver flood might get past the protection of the temple kobolds that lived within the perimeter wall, but not without losing most of its strength. More temple kobolds guarded the orchard, and more existed in the temple itself so that the silver could never reach us. So my mother promised.
Every temple was an enclave, an island of safety in the chaotic wilderness of the world. The truckers had brought their vehicles into the courtyard; my father had closed the gate behind them. They would sleep in the guest rooms tonight, and we would all be safe.
I watched the silver lapping at the top of the wall, somehow eerily alive that night. I watched the first tendrils reach over the wall’s flat top. When they encountered the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds they smoked and steamed, rising as a fine mist into the air. But the advance of the silver did not stop. More tendrils spilled over the wall, and these were not turned back so easily. I watched first one, then many more, flow down the face of the wall, gathering against the ground like smoke on a cool morning.
I retreated from the window.
My fear must have shone because Jolly said, “It’s okay. It won’t come inside the temple. It can’t.”
That’s what Mama would say—but she didn’t know about my adventure in the well. She didn’t know I’d disturbed what was there.
Jolly left the window to sit beside me on the bed. Moki followed him, snuggling in between us. “How’s your hand?”
“Better.”
He was silent for a minute. I could smell the silver: a fresh, strong scent as I imagined the ocean would smell. “Do you… ever feel like you’re having a dream?” Jolly asked. “Even though you’re awake?”
I puzzled over his question, wondering where it had come from. “You mean like a daydream?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
I could see he was already regretting saying anything. “Never mind.”
“Are you having a dream right now?” I asked him.
Silver light glittered in his eyes.
“So what do you dream about?”
But he looked away. “Never mind. Go to sleep.”
I was tired, so I lay down again, wriggling about for a minute so the stars on my blanket gleamed brightly. I looked at Jolly, still sitting at the foot of my bed, gazing out the window at the silver, his hand moving slowly as he stroked Moki, who had fallen asleep in his lap. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw faint motes of silver sparkling over his hand. Then I was asleep, before even the stars in my blanket had begun to fade.
Moki woke me, his sharp high bark like an electric shock. I sat up. Jolly had fallen asleep where he’d been sitting. Now his head jerked up. I was astonished to see motes of silver dancing in his hair and over his hands and in the folds of his clothes. He turned to the window.
The silver light was brighter than I had ever seen it. Jolly was silhouetted in its glow. He rose slowly to his knees, staring out the window like someone mesmerized.
“Jolly!” I spoke past Moki’s frantic yipping. “There is silver on you.”
He looked at his hands. Then he swiped them against his pants as if to wipe the evidence of silver away, but the motes would not leave. “It’s too late,” he whispered. “I called it, and now it’s coming.”
At first I didn’t know what he meant. Then Moki went ominously silent, and a moment later the silver rose over the windowsill. It had rolled up through the orchard all the way to the temple. Now it spilled through the window and into the room: a luminous stream that spread in a smoky pool across the floor. Its fresh, crisp scent filled my lungs and planted a quiet terror in my heart.
I crept backward, to the far corner of my bed, pulling my blanket of stars with me until I felt the wall against my shoulders. I could see no way to escape, for the silver had already rolled up against the door.
“Mommy!”I whispered it like a spell, a word with magical warding powers. “Mommy.” Too frightened to shout.
The silver started to rise. It inflated in ghostly tendrils that swirled toward Jolly, who seemed hypnotized by it, for he didn’t move. I reached out, grabbing a fold of his shirt where the silver motes were thinnest, and I yanked him backward. “Get away from it!” I whispered. “Move back. Move back.”
He seemed to wake up. Had he still been asleep? He scrambled into my corner. Moki came with him, barking frantically again. I put my hand over his muzzle and hissed at him to hush! I did not want Mama to wake. What would happen if she hurried to our room, if she threw open the door? She would be taken.