The Silence and the Storm

When I ask my Amma to tell me the story of the Silence, her telling is like a river; it never takes the same shape, the same path. Each time she spins the tale, new details weave together like trickling streams, joining one after the other until before you know it, the story has gathered enough pace and depth to sweep you off your feet and out to sea. But when she sets her mind to this telling, there is one thing that is as fixed as the stars that paint the sky each night: she invariably starts with the Storm. 

The beginning of her telling goes like this: She speaks of the first sightings of ill weather on the horizon, weltering banks of cloud that roiled and clawed their way across the Whispering Sea, heaving and thundering like a creature summoned from the depths of the Shades itself. 

Should she be in a benevolent mood, she may offer up some fresh detail to captivate her audience, as precious and polished as a river stone; how the ocean’s surface had remained smooth as planished silver, even as thunder clouds piled up overhead, puffed up with violent energy and roaring winds; how the molten globe of the mid-morning sun was blotted out by the gathering dark, as swiftly as a candle extinguished by a puff of air. 

Storms of such magnitude are no unfamiliar sight in the Skirl, an archipelago of verdant islands freckled across the Whispering Sea. But for a storm to appear unannounced? With not an inkling of warning sensed by the Sceoda, those who could speak to the wind and call clouds or clear skies on a whim? Or the Vatnul, who would pull water forth from both earth and sky without breaking a sweat or creasing a brow? For such Crafters to be caught unawares—well, our storyteller would shake her head in disbelief at the very suggestion. 

Swept up in the current of the tale now, my Amma might tell the story through the eyes of another, recounting exactly where they had been, what they had been doing, as the first, fat drops of rain fell from the skies:

The smith, a Múspella, banking the embers of his forge with a curl of smoke on his lips. 

Or: A water-carving Vatnul, arms raised in the act of pulling moisture from the earth to irrigate her crops. 

Or: An earth-weaving Jǫrðsinga and sky-whispering Sceoda, shaping houses from the hillside and scouring rough-hewn stone smooth with decisive blasts of air.

At this stage of her telling the details diverge, her story fracturing like an estuary, spreading its watery fingers wide as it reaches out towards the open sea. The smith may have first sensed something was amiss when, without warning, the heat from his forge had guttered and died. The Vatnul farmer might have felt a cold touch of fear slide down her spine as the water she had called forth leached back into the hungry earth. Our Jǫrðsinga builder and and Sceoda air-singer may have shared an uneasy glance as the earth suddenly stilled, and the breath of the wind vanished. 

She might speak of their gazes being drawn upwards, upwards, as the first flashes of lightning exploded overhead, illuminating the storm-shattered heavens. 

Or of the fulminating blasts of thunder that crashed down from the skies, so forceful they threatened to level towns and shake mudslides from the hills. 

Lost in the story, my Amma’s eyes might tell of something else entirely: the terror, the horror, of reaching for her magic—and finding it was no longer there. 

For, as the first sheets of rain broke free from the belly of the Storm and rushed towards the earth, the hum of magic that ran through the Skirl, through every person and creature, every rock, root and river, grew strained, and thin, and simply—

Vanished.   

One moment, magic flooded the world like a river in spate, and the next, it was silenced, leaving behind nothing but a hollow, un-speaking wrongness. 

It was as if, in the space between heartbeats, a chain of mountains had been replaced by a gaping abyss, an ocean had been drained of all water. It was a loss that echoed across the islands of the Skirl—a silence that screamed, a stillness that devoured. 

If you were to ask my Amma what brought the Storm across the sea, she would say, without hesitation: Magic. After all, what could be powerful enough to bleed all the magic from the world but magic itself? 

And the matter of who would do such a heinous, unthinkable thing? 

In the confusion of the Storm, how tempting it had been to blame the Vatnul—after all, had it not been rain that had carried the magic-devouring blight, rain they could have pulled from the sky with the flick of a finger? 

But then again, Sceoda too were known to sing storms into life, perhaps they were the ones to blame. Might Jǫrðsinga or Múspella have grown jealous of some talent they did not possess, and sought to cast out the other's magic? 

With a faraway look in her eye, my Amma will tell you how, as the storm raged overhead, these questions tore through bands of Skirlish like a wildfire devouring a hillside in the dry months, threatening to rent our people apart island by island, village by village, family by family. 

Who had claimed the world’s magic as their own, leeching it from the very earth, like a parasitic vine strangling the roots of a tree? Each Silenced Crafter readied themselves to face whichever corrupt, unholy soul had Silenced their brothers and sisters.

Yet, while the wind screeched and howled overhead like an untethered spirit, and rain pummelled the earth with unbridled ire, a painful truth soon became obvious:

There was no single Crafter to whom magic still spoke.

___

I was raised on the story of the Storm. I have heard it told and retold so often I could spin the tale convincingly myself, though I wasn’t born until after the first year of the Silence, after the people of the Skirl had begun to resign themselves to a magicless world. I have never seen teams of Jǫrðsinga pull islands from ebullient waters, or Sceoda and Vatnul working in concert to coax gentle, warm rain from the sky during growing season. The fires that now light my village were drawn from stick and stone, not tempted to life by the whisperings of a Múspella. 

There are some amongst us who believe that magic isn’t dead. Maybe, they say, it was captured by the rainwaters and sucked deep into the hull of the earth, held captive in the cavernous Shades by some ill spell. 

Or, perhaps, it fled far across the Whispering Sea, chased from the islands of the Skirl by the Storm itself. 

There are even a few who maintain that magic shut itself off from the Skirlish, an act of retribution against some grave misdeed, some dark misuse.

I don’t know if any of that is true. After all, if you hear something repeated often enough, truth or not, it will eventually take on the air of a story, a fanciful fable to keep unruly children from harassing their mothers or sticking their noses where they don’t belong. 

But lately, I’ve had questions. Questions whose answers I can’t seem to find in the story of the Storm.

When my I tangle my fingers in water while I pull up my fish traps from the mouth of the river—

When I look to the horizon at dusk, as the sun lowers to its rest in the Shades and rouses a cool evening breeze as it sinks—

When I warm my hands against a snapping fire, listening to Amma spin her stories under the tapestry of the night sky—

When I lay my head against the cool, packed earthen floor of our camp, waiting for sleep to overcome me—

Why, after twenty years of Silence, can I hear a humming?