Silver Silence

Short, Sparkly, Orange Magic

Merry Christmas and happy 4th day of Hanukkah. S/o to the 3-4 people who read this and comment for motivating me to keep writing this year. Here's to hoping for another good year. XOXO ~ Taborix

Siles prepared the deck for a new game, his hands so accustomed to shuffling that it had become instinct. They had played more subgenres of card games than he could remember, and yet each of them had become monotonous. At one point he had taken to teaching August sword fighting in the uninterrupted expanse of the throne room – the castle grounds were still too muddy for sparring – but August had hated the exercise as much as Siles had hated chess. They read books together, sometimes, but delving into separate worlds destroyed the point of sitting in the same room. What they really wanted to do was wander outside the castle, even just within the twenty-mile perimeter of the royal city, but Siles didn't want to run the risk. Tensions were high inside and outside the royal city, and he preferred a bored king to a dead one.

Several cards tumbled onto the floor, slipping mid-shuffle when they caught on something. Siles stared at the deck, then at the dropped cards. Shuffling was supposed to be second nature by now. August moved to pick up the dropped cards, but Siles held up a finger.

"Something is wrong."

Siles slid the remaining cards against each other, examining their movement and the way their surfaces glinted in the sunlight. Something had made them stickier than usual, and it wasn't the weather. Siles turned to the guards outside August's door. They had added additional guards as a precaution since the protests, which became useful now that Siles had found himself trapped in place.

"Get the royal alchemist," he told the closest guard. "Now."

August stared at him, and Siles knew he looked strange as he stood frozen in place like a mannequin. He held the cards away from himself as he explained, "There might be poison on the cards. I've probably spread it on my hands and clothes by shuffling the deck and I don't know where else it might be in this room. I wouldn't sit anywhere if I were you."

August reluctantly remained standing. "How do you think they got into my rooms?"

Siles squinted at the window, but it didn't appear to have been opened. "I imagine the culprit is a magician, most likely one of the ones living in the castle. There are no guards for your quarters, just for you, so I imagine they snuck in through the door while we were elsewhere. Of course, I'll place guards on your quarters from now on."

Poison was more terrifying than any armed intruder. Poison meant August's enemies were getting smarter, as they recognized that only chemical attacks could overcome both magic-resistance and mind-reading. There was a chance they wouldn't even find the attempted assassin, since August's ability to detect traitors only extended so far.

The royal alchemist interrupted Siles' thoughts as she swept through the doorway, her nose immediately scrunching as if she had smelled something terrible. That meant Siles was right. "Yikes," she said in her high, nasal tone. "This is a mess." She had always seemed like a different species to Siles, not just because of her strange voice and dwarfism, but because she moved and acted differently than any other magician he had met. He didn't like the way most magicians acted, at least, so her strangeness was welcome.

August's jaw dropped indignantly. "My quarters are perfectly tidy."

"She doesn't mean it like that," Siles said. He had worked with the alchemist before. She was the only magician with her ability that he had met, and nobody expected it to work the way that it did. The way she had described it, the poisons shone like vibrant colors. They were messy and chaotic like paint splatters to her.