Go insane.
You let the silver take you. Borne high and rising on the hurting tide of it, you slip the shackles of your mind at least, though some dim awareness, some silver-locked little prism of thought that does not go, sings out to the surging silver seas that the body they claim is manacled. Pinioned. Even the fact of it is absurd. Pinions of a gull, driving flight feathers home into flesh, as if you could take wing. Pinions. Pinioned.
This then your existence. You live, and live, and live till you are full of it. Sometimes, often, or always- how are you to know?- you are hooded, though silver paints the inside of your skull in great gaudy canopies nonetheless, and then- at those times, maybe- liquid food and dribbles of brackish water are forced down your throat. Sometimes there is more water: they throw harsh pails of it over you, silver rusting down your back and congealing slowly as the wet dries. Sometimes there are sounds. Perhaps they are yours.
After a while, you notice a darkening. It starts when the open bars are bricked over; only a narrow slot is left for food, water, pushed through now and then onto dirt, just within reach of a hairless tail, when it amuses you to eat and drink. Mostly your vision is hemmed and traced with silver, flowing down and down, creeping from your forehead to your torso and carving bright rivulets through and over your slack legs; occasionally, you dream that water, silver-tinged with everything else, sluices past your manacles and flows away down a narrow drain, untouchably far away at your feet. A ragged mat of silver shrouds your filthy body to your waist. You notice it when the silver leaves you bubbles of air in its snail-track conquest of your flesh.
Sometime after the bars are bricked, the pain forgets itself away: becomes as much a part of you as skin and nails. You are bloodied with your silver.
The hand that slots the food in is smaller. Slender fingers tapering to silver-gilt points. Or perhaps you imagine that. The sleeve is red. You cannot quite look at it, nor quite look away.
Then one day you are changed. Or changing is beyond you. You are no more a changeling, a creature of many skins. You will never be bird or beast or bright fish again. The silver has seared out the change in you. But you are no longer silver. The cell of self balloons up through sheets of silver. Tolerant. A disease has become its host. The oppressor becomes the oppressed. And you shift the shape of the manacles at your wrists and ankles, almost-not-quite as you used to shift your own shape.
Not sane, but spent- different now- you huddle to the floor and weep silver tears from your silver-burnt face, pushing a long, silver-nibbled finger through a silver-edged channel that pierces the loose muscle of your thigh.
The silver in the cell flows and re-forms- the seal melting at last from your forehead- and forms chisel tips that drive into the joins in brick and expand there, cracking the fourth wall till it splays out in boulders of worked stone, jacking apart the close-packed bars.
You crawl from your prison, both of you in ruins.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 20 July 2016