The Sea of Silver is the great ocean of the Deep Dreaming.
Overview[]
The limitless ocean of light, twilight, and shadows that becomes the Deep Dreaming, and the Black Court of the Fomorians; the Sea that has a thousand names, one for every heart that dreams; these infinite reaches divide the Far Dreaming from the Deep Dreaming. Call it the Depthless Sea, or the Sea of Eventide, or the Twilight Sea, or the Ocean of Dream, or even the Tempest. All journeys that hope to take leave of the Far Dream must take leave, also of the clearly marked boundaries of the Silver Path and all other comfortable guideposts and trial markings.
There are isles and strange ships on this sea, and great ruined temples with the half-forgotten memories of humanity. Meantime, there are fomorians and other old horrors plying the ancient waters or lurking beneath the surface. Time has no power here, and Banality is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Dreamstuff that has collected in the Sea of Silver. The only sign here that Winter is coming to the world at all it the fact that the Sea has withdrawn so deeply from the Earth and is now so difficult to reach. Once one reaches its shores, though, Winter is only a memory, the dream of a dream, and a fast-fading one at that.
The Riddle of Silver[]
The Sea of Silver has always existed, depthless and infinite. Somewhere here is Arcadia, the rootless isle churning at the center of the boundless ocean, forbidden empire of joy and wonder. Also here are the enigmatic, yet vaguely archetypal Ocean Giants, who sleep fitfully at the bottom of the Sea and occasionally rise to the surface to fight with, eat, or give wisdom to smaller souls. Some say the Giants are the Titans, or the Tuatha de Danaan. Others say that each of the Giants carries an entire Dreaming within its vast body, which would make them another face of the vast Oneiroi themselves, the omnipresent Dreamers of the Dream.
The Riddle of Silver, quite well known, is actually two riddles. First, the whole Sea is contained within the pool at the heart of the Irrgarten, which is itself contained within the Nautilus Hearts shared by the guardians of the Snail Graveyards. The big contains the little, which in turn contains the big again. At the center of the human heart lies the bottomless well of the universe, and vice versa.
Second, the Sea is Silver not because the Silver Path has faded out this deep into the Dreaming, but because the Path is so close and so strong that it has overflowed its shape. The Sea is the ultimate trod, the sum of all Silver Paths poured together. In the Deep, meaning does not disappear so much as it becomes so blindingly obvious that it is hard to see clearly. The more sacred, the deeper the dream, the less there is to say.
The Ocean's Heart[]
The Sea is incomprehensibly vast, forming the final and deepmost layer of the Dreaming short of the timeless reaches of the Deep Dreaming itself. As such, it includes limitless numbers of unique islands and perhaps even new Dream Continents, each of which might be filled with its own chimerical peoples and empires. A voyager could literally spend forever exploring the Sea of Silver and never finish charting its expanse. The true underlying difficulty in sailing the Sea is not boredom, but in finding your way back when, eventually you have seen enough.
Still, at the center of the Sea (or so it is said), something strange happens. According to some, there is a vast whirlpool or waterfall or cataract that sucks all the flotsam of the Dreaming down into itself, casting it into some unknown and perhaps unknowable abyss beyond. According to others, this phenomenon is not a cataract but a waterspout, sending the waters of the Sea eternally into the sky.
By contrast, according to still others, the center of the Sea is a place of absolute calm. There, the voyager may find a small isle, which is Arcadia. Of course, the fact that the Sea of Silver is infinite means that its "center" would be rather difficult to encounter, if it exists at all. All voyagers but the most dedicated should treat such tales as rumors as they relate to the Riddle of Silver.
Dwellers in the Deep of the Dream[]
While any aspect of the Dreaming can find its way to the great Sea, the oceanic dominion is home to untold chimerical races and strange elder creatures, most of which no longer exist anywhere else in the Dreaming. Under the best of conditions, these creatures' motivations and attitudes toward smaller faeries are ambiguous, and under the worst, the Sea is home to the most terrible monsters of the Dreaming. In addition to the great giants and other apparently divine entities such as the Constellar Court of astrological chimera and the great Oceanidic water-masters, the careless voyager can encounter the Green Court of the fomorians, the oldest and least merciful of the three elder courts. Compared to such creatures, the Wave Dragons and Ocean Giants are almost welcome sights.
Beyond the Red and White, beyond Glamour and Banality, the Green Fomorians lie in their chains at the bottom of the Sea. Unlike their lesser cousins, the Green could not be bound by the Arcadians, unless by their own consent, which they refused to give until the chains were brought them by the smallest of the Arcadians at the end of the Last Battle of Chakravada. When the chains were brought, the Green maimed the child who offered them, locked the manacles on themselves, and slowly retreated under the waves of the Sea, while the Arcadians stood guard and shuddered as the ground shook and the waves pounded.
The role played by the Green within the Fomorian Dream is perhaps incomprehensible to smaller faeries.
The Empire of the Depthless[]
As the majestic personifications of the great ocean currents and coastlines, the Depthless rarely enter into extended alliances with changelings of the land, but instead pursue a dark and fatalistic introspection. Few have voices and they communicate instead through eye contact and gesture. The Depthless (also known as Oceanids) are almost infinitely subtle and secretive, and may well be pursuing some complicated agenda... either a magical ritual or a work of art.
In general, the ondines (or the inanimate spirits concerned with the Waters and lesser beings than the Oceanids) are the Inanimae most fascinated of all with humanity, and stories of ondines falling in love with human beings are fairly common. Wistful, nomadic, highly concerned with memory and forgetting, these mer live in a half-world inaccessible even to the dreamiest of meat changelings and filled with fancies, illusions, shapeshifting, and mirages.
They keep their secrets very close to their watery breasts. To most outsiders, gatherings of the mer are strangely sad events for, as the saying goes, "An ondine is thinking of goodbye before she says hello."
References[]
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, pp. 85-87.