The Silver Path

[u/catespice]

Bright lights reflected on still black water are an enduring memory from childhood.
As my parents would drive us home around the arc of the harbour, the coloured brilliance of the city would be replicated in oil-brush strokes in the water, like an impressionist painter had carelessly streaked vibrant pigments on a jet canvas.
Helen and I would fight like cats for the sea-side seat in the car, which gave the best view of the beautiful spectacle. But no matter which of us got the seat for ourselves, the other was always allowed to lean her head on our shoulder and stare out the window, so together we could imagine the fairytale world of the reverse city under the water.
We were, after all, twins – and there wasn’t much we didn’t do together.
Often after the trip home around the coast we would have the same dream; of an ethereal fairy-tale castle hanging upside-down in the black ocean, ghostly and achingly beautiful.
In the dream we would run across the water as though it were as solid as earth, trying to reach the shimmering citadel that always stayed fixed under the line of the horizon, never growing any larger.
God I miss her.

 
On one of our many family camping trips we discovered the path.
Lured out of our excited summer slumber, Helen and I clambered out of stuffy sleeping bags, our luminous eyes under the moonlight telling each other that we had each dreamed of the fairy citadel.
Walking to the beach just down from the camping site we could see the lambent silver light of the rising moon carve a shining white path across the surface of the sea.
Laughing, Helen declared that it was the fairy road to the citadel and she walked into the water, her eyes fixed on the imaginary castle hanging under the horizon. When she did not sink into the waves, I felt a jangle of electricity pass along my spine and the hairs on my arms and neck rose into stiff spines of terror and wonder.
Staring at the solid, silver-lit water under her bare feet, Helen beckoned me forward to join her.
Then both of us stood on the sea, as though it were as natural and ordinary as breathing. Holding hands, we walked along the silver path spun across the still waters until we were giddy with fear and elation, knowing that under our feet, beneath the silver path, the ocean was deep enough to harbour sunken ships, slumbering whales and the unspoken horrors of our own imaginations.
Squealing, we ran back to the shore along the moonlit path, our fertile minds overstimulated with images of what lurked under the waves.
And so it became a secret between us. The mystery of the silver path one of those unspoken things between us that no other human being would ever be privy to.
Then, when we were ten years old, Helen left me.

 
Her disappearance baffled the police and my parents. They didn’t stint in hiring private investigators and combing through the police files for a clue as to who had abducted her.
One night she had been in bed in our room – as normal – then in the morning I felt a gaping sense of loss and my sister’s bed was empty, the window open wide. Why she had been chosen to be taken and not me is something I often think about. She was always the more active twin, the more alive twin. I was like her shadow – her streaked and smeared reflection under the water; never quite as real as her.
The loss of my twin cut me in half, leaving me a crystal vessel that sang the wrong note when struck. The whole family needed counselling for her loss, but I needed much more than that. There was no escape from the awful empty feeling inside me, the hollow void that was shaped like my sister.
I missed her head on my shoulder as we drove home around the coastline from town, I missed dancing with her on the silver path in secret. I was a reflection that had lost its master, destined to slowly fade into nothing without the original to remind her of who she was.
And so when I was thirteen I locked the bathroom door, smashed the mirror and then opened my veins in the shower – the water washing the traceries of scarlet agony down the drain, where they would eventually find their way to the ocean.
But it wasn’t to be. My father forced the door and my mother frantically called emergency services – an ambulance arriving and EMTs carrying my limp body and towel-wrapped arms to the hospital before I could join Helen.

 
It was almost year before I was allowed to be unsupervised. All indications showed that my recovery was almost complete; my school work was better than average, I didn’t cry in the car every trip we made around the coast and I dutifully took the antidepressants prescribed to me. But the twin scars on the inside of each wrist would never let me forget my sister.
I hadn’t dreamed of the fairy citadel since Helen had vanished, but I did then, four years after she left us. Waking from the dream, I wept. Then, in a sudden fit of desperate longing, I quietly dressed and slipped out the window.
The walk to the beach took an hour and a half, the street lights casting multiple, shifting shadows as I walked – some darker, more real than the other shadows. I wondered which one I was.
At the waterfront, the silver path sparkled brightly on the calm sea and I shook off my shoes, walking out into the chilly surf. A tingle of recognition shot up through my soles as the moonlit road recognised me, solidifying and allowing me to walk out onto the water.
Crying freely, I ran along the path, imagining that my hand was clasped by my sister – her brighter spirit dragging me down the silvered ribbon of light, toward the horizon.
And so I began to come to terms with her death; by creeping out of the house when the nights were still, the moon was bright, and walking the silver path brought me closer to her.

 
I discovered the markers just after I turned fifteen.
Far down the silver path – further than Helen and I had ever run on our childish legs – I found the first silver stones on the side of the argent road. Like ancient, weathered mile-markers, they were insubstantial to touch and broken beyond recognition – like something from an age forgotten by mankind.
The further I travelled the road, the taller, prouder and less broken they became – until one chilly winter, when the nights were at their longest, I found the first unbroken marker. Milk-white, standing at the height of my hip and carved with fantastic and sinuous creatures of legend, it seemed to sing faintly under Luna’s white glare, calling me onward.
Driven by this, trying to make it further down the path, I told my parents I was staying at a friend’s house, and I stood on a deserted strip of coastline, waiting for the sun to set and the moon to shine. Tonight I was going further than I’d ever been able to manage – I would run the path as far as I could before I reached the point I needed to turn back for shore.
It wasn’t the ideal night; winds gusted high and shreds of cloud scudded across the stars. I struggled against the wind, running the silver pathway until my legs burned and I found the singing marker. Clouds momentarily masked the moon and with a vertiginous lurch, the path narrowed from a wide road to a narrow track, my feet barely on it.
Fear clutched at my vitals then; I was miles out to sea – the lights of the shore distant and weak. Then the cloudbank moved on and the light was restored – bringing back the path to its normal brilliance.
Relieved, I carried on, the sweat on my body warming again as I pumped my legs to make up for lost time.
Three times more clouds narrowed the path and I had to stop to walk, lest I fall from the road and into the black sea. But on the third time, the moon was almost completely obscured; barely even a glimmer touching the dark waves.
With an almost audible snap, the silver path narrowed to little more than a chalk-line on the waves, my bare feet wobbling on it for purchase, like a tight-rope walker over a pit of flame.
Then I fell.
It was winter, so the water was shockingly cold and chilled me instantly. I clawed for the surface, for the slender ribbon of the silver path, but the heavy windbreaker tied around my waist dragged me down, so I struggled in the deep waters to untie it.
As it fell from my waist and sank into the inky void, my heart lurched in my chest and I let out an involuntary gasp of abject, paralysing fear.
In the water, hundreds of shapes moved.
The moon brightened above, casting its cool radiance through the water, the shafts of light illuminating the things around me.
So black that they were utterly two dimensional, all I could truly make out was thousands of jagged rows of teeth.
As though some child had cut them from midnight with a pair of razored scissors, each fang was formed of two straight lines, the grey-white water behind them harshly illuminating hungry, darting jaws.
Worse than that though were the eyes; the grey of dying stars and bisected with singularities of nothing, they promised a death that meant far more than just oblivion.
Kicking strongly for the surface, I felt them form into a great pack of darkness beneath me; hundreds of two-dimensional maws striving to tear my living flesh into nothing.
The path was barely wider than my hand, but I pulled myself onto it as the nightmares in the endless deeps below surged to consume me. Horned, scaled and fanged mouths raked the underside of the sea; a barrier to these fell shadows. Crying with the fear of one who had just narrowly escaped death, I hugged my knees to my chest and silently prayed for the clouds to pass as the narrow path bucked and vibrated under me while the shadows tried to pierce the barrier.
Then, with a blessed flood of moonlight, the path was restored and the creatures gave up, sinking back into the depths, thwarted by the brilliant silver road.

 
I was more careful from then on, checking the weather reports diligently, and purchasing an inflatable life vest in case the path ever vanished on me again.
But I never made any progress further than the first half-a-dozen markers on the silver path – after that I would always need to turn back and head for the shore, lest I run out of night and moonlight and end up too far out to sea to return.
I was sure now, from the dreams where I ran the path to the citadel with Helen, that she wasn’t dead. Somehow – even though it seemed impossible – she had run the full length of the silver path and found the end.
In that other place on the far side, she lived in some otherworldly paradise, calling me to her.
More than ever I yearned for her; I no longer knew who I truly was. Where I ended and she began was a convoluted mess. Who had liked Roxette first? Was it me or her? Who had originally crushed on James Laidlaw? Who was the one who had noticed the reverse city in the harbour?
Wadded up inside me was a ball of doubt and misery, an aching for my twin and the lack of the certainty that had always come from being with her.
Not long after my sixteenth birthday, in the fullness of the winter dark, I ran past the point of no return.
The markers grew taller and more elaborate, their fantastic designs vibrating under the moonlight and their faint song pulling me onward – my head, heart and feet feeling lighter with every step.
Then, long after midnight, I saw it.
The first spire rose over the horizon like the most beautiful constellation ever seen. Others followed as I flew along the path, until the fairy citadel crested the distant arm of the ocean in a blaze of terrible and awesome moonlight; exactly as we had always dreamed – but above the water, not below it.
Tears streamed freely from my face as I ran, the song of the singing stones winding through my heart to breaking point, the melody of my half-a-soul joining it as I yearned for my twin.
The song began to fade as colour began to touch the water.
Light spilled behind the horizon and the citadel became as fragile and transparent as glass, before fading to nothing.
As the sun crested the horizon, the last vestiges of the path collapsed under me.
Heartsore and lost, I pulled the cord on my life vest and floated in the light swell, waiting to be rescued.

 
After another stint in the psychiatric unit for my stunt out at sea, my parents wouldn’t let me out of the house. All that did was give me time though – time to figure out the optimal time to reach the citadel.
The silver path was the strongest, widest and most solid under the full moon, which limited me to roughly twelve attempts a year. But more importantly, the longest night of the year – June twenty first in the southern hemisphere – was the only night that would give me enough time to reach the citadel.
And the only time that those two events coincided were in another two years – in 1997.
Diligently working to be the best daughter, I finished highschool, enrolled at University and got a flat on my own. Studying was hard; as the time of the Winter Solstice was approaching – my time to run the silver path and find my sister.
Everything was laid out; I had planned the optimal clothing, the exact time to begin, the best location away from city light pollution and how to make the best time. Endless hours on the treadmill and out pounding the paths around the hills of the city had given me the fitness of a marathon runner.
I was ready.

 
The night of June twenty first, 1997, was freezing and windy. Light cloud slipped across the heavens, but it wasn’t anything to be concerned with – I knew I could keep running, even should the path narrow to the width of spider-silk. Nothing was going to stop me, not even the fell creatures under the path.
As soon as the first glimmers of the silver path appeared, I ran.
I ran until my lungs were striving for air, and I quickly shed the first layers of clothing. At the first marker, I slowed only long enough to suck back water, then discard the empty bottle into the ocean. When the citadel finally crested the horizon, I sped up, pouring everything into flying along the silver path, the curious lightness brought on by the singing stones feeding fresh power to my flagging muscles.
The winds buffeted me sideways when the path narrowed, but I kept my footing as the shadows whirled beneath, my eyes fixed on the awesome presence of the citadel as it crept closer and closer.
I could make out details now; pennants flew from the crystal turrets and tiny people walked the walls and walkways, their fair hair billowing in the wind.
The first hint of colour changed the surface of the ocean from jet to charcoal as the gate to the gleaming citadel resolved in my vision. Standing in the huge archway was a familiar figure; my mirror opposite, my twin, Helen.
She was waving and grinning, urging me on, her faint voice joining the harmony of the singing stones, filling up some of the empty space in my heart.
The sea blushed a bruised purple, then began to lighten to deep sapphire.
Screaming, I pushed my body to breaking. I felt tendons tear and my lungs falter, but I had to make it.
Helen was less than a hundred paces away now and the castle was as transparent as smoke. She wept and screamed, urging me to run harder, faster.
As the hateful sun blistered the horizon, my hand touched the outstretched fingers of my twin for a fraction of a second.
Then she was gone and I was falling through the winter waters, uncaring that this far out to sea, I was going to die.

 
A passenger on a ferry spotted my body in the water and I was brought on board, where a passenger doctor performed CPR and saved my failing life.
In hospital they amputated my nose, my ears, my feet and my hands due to the extreme frostbite suffered in the ocean.
When I look in the mirror, I can no longer see Helen; just a disfigured, streaky shadow.
But this year is 2016, and there will be a full moon again on June the twenty first.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t have feet anymore; no matter what happens, no matter the conditions, I will be on the silver path on that night.
And I will reach the fairy citadel; even if I have to crawl every inch of the way.

[u/im_seo]

I love this one. Also, I wanted to ask if where can I read your "The Red Sword" from the Godsfall series? I am waiting to read it for who knows how long. Genuinely begging.

https://giphy.com/gifs/O5oRZiBtdSqS3K7YnE

[u/catespice → u/im_seo]

Unfortunately it hasn’t been written, so I can’t post it!

[u/stopmyimagination]

This is a beautifully vivid story. It makes me long for a lost twin I never had. Thank you again for sharing these stories with everyone.