Tarnish (Silver)
Silver was almost as unheard-of as purple. All human eyes shone; even the dullest browns shone. But just as no deep blue eye truly shaded into violet, no grey eye should shine its pale way quite to silver.
And more than any pair of eyes, which are small and must be looked right into to be seen, a child's silver hair stands out against the bobbing sea of dark heads. As if age were grasping at him well before his time. Marked out. Painfully still. That silver boy was never for a moment one boy among many.
Your mother's eyes and hair, your father's chin and brow. The long bones of one grandfather and the inherited will of the other. And so a fate taken from all of them, to be born and born and born again, until you had been remade for every ancestor hanging in the darkness, until you had gone beyond humanity, the only freedom from them by obeying until they had no more unintelligible commands. Washing blood with blood. Every time, again the pure and newborn moonlike child who had never sinned, until someday…someday…
Was it possible for silver to forget what it was to sin?