Page Section Written 11/05/2025
SILARIN
The Venom’s Stillness
Coolth uncoils around you like a thought that prefers to be kept. The oasis holds its breath, mirror-flat water under a roof of leaves that do not stir, stones warm as held hands ringing the pool, dragonflies stitched from glass threading a geometry you can taste. The Whispering Eclipse leans overhead, the sun surrendering a crescent to night while day refuses to abandon the rest. Light here is cautious. Shadows are honest.
Your body wakes from the outside in, scales acknowledging dawn before muscle does, muscle before blood, blood before mind. The heat of your core meets the pool’s hush across the thin diplomacy of skin and reaches an agreement: slower. A line of script glows faintly under your ribs, venom-prayer learned syllable by syllable from a master whose eyes never changed when yours did. Every word of it is a hinge. You open one: Balance before remedy. Silence before strike.
The Hushed Market of Serin-Kal drowses beyond the palms: awnings in the color of bruised figs and wet loam, silent stalls where apothecaries sleep sitting up. A windless bell marks nothing at all. You lift your palm and the water lifts to meet it, not as a column but a soft dome, consent made visible. Within it tiny motes hang, dust, skin, and an almost invisible green thread snipped from a leaf by something that wanted to remember. You can taste its truth across your tongue: yesterday’s quarrel, tomorrow’s cure.
A ripple disturbs the pool from beneath. Not a creature; a pattern. Circles breed circles, canceling and compounding until a flower you have never seen opens on the surface and does not wet. In its center a drop of venom rests like a star caught in a web. You know its profile. It knows you back. When you breathe on it, it darkens to the color of night’s first thought and slips into the water without widening.
A novice stumbles between date palms with a basket of white jars, lids unsealed, fear sweating from the thin places of his wrists. He does not see you. He does not spill. Your tongue flickers over your teeth and returns a report: none of this required you, therefore all of it did. Beyond the market, wind finds a single chime and asks it a question. It answers in intervals of three you learned before you had a name.
The eclipse deepens; the oasis brightens. Somewhere, a serpent sheds and keeps its skin. The pool remembers your reflection before it decides to give it back.
When everything remembers you, will you remember yourself?
A leaf detaches without falling; the bell strikes again, meaning nothing and everything, and the first choice arrays itself like tools beside a wound.