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Deep in the forest, well past the clearings and waterfalls where all the trails end, there is a lake.
It’s a very odd lake: it is a perfect circle, and no trees grow to overshadow it, nor do their roots encroach upon its banks. No tumbled branches disturb its perfect serenity; no fish nor frogs leap from its depths. No breeze touches it; the water lies as still as stone. Sometimes it seems as though it is a pool of molten sapphire as deep as the summer sky above; sometimes it is a sheet of lead, flat and gray as the clouds. And when the full moon rises, the lake turns to silver in its light, shining so brilliantly that any who approaches must shield their eyes and look away. The water is clear as glass; if you stand upon the shore and look down, you can see every small stone upon the bottom, but if you look out into the middle, though the water grows no less clear, somehow the bottom fades away into darkness, as if it is too deep to see.
Past the lake, there is an ancient path that winds up into the mountains; it is broken, now, by rockslides and tree roots, and it has been centuries since anyone could clamber up the steep curves to find the keep that lies hidden at the top. The keep is older than the path. Its walls are broken in a dozen places; vines make green traceries against its dark stone. In the dry moat about its walls, bushes thrive in wild tangles, and only very keen eyes could ever spot the paleness of bone hidden here and there among the verdant growth.
No one remembers, now, who used to dwell within the keep’s cold corridors -
No one, that is, except the man who lives beside the lake.
He has a little cottage in a clearing by a stream - the stream does not feed the lake, nor does it run out of the lake’s still waters, but somehow the lake is never stagnant, its water always clear as polished glass - and he has lived there for as long as anyone can remember. There are accounts in texts so old that they are kept in climate-controlled display cases in museums, their proud illuminations the subject of study and awe, that speak of the man who lives beside the Silver Lake. They do not name him, for he does not speak his name, but they describe him carefully:
He is neither young nor old; his hair is dark, his shoulders broad, his height unbowed by endless years. He bears three scars upon his face that turn what must have been remarkable beauty into a visage that makes many visitors recoil in terror. His eyes are yellow as a wolf’s. He speaks a tongue which only scholars know, one that was old before the great universities were founded, but to those who can speak with him, he is polite and even welcoming.
He spends his days hunting and mending his house and tending a field of flax, which he turns evening by evening into thread and thence to rope, and the rope he knots, little by little, into a net.
He has been working on the net for as long as he has been there in his little house beside the stream, barely a stone’s throw away from the Silver Lake. So say all the books which describe him, at any rate, and if anyone dares to ask him, fumbling for words in a language long dead, he will reply that yes, he has been making this net for a very long time indeed.
Someday, he explains, it will be large enough to reach the bottom of the Silver Lake.
There are two kinds of people who come to the Silver Lake. The first are scholars seeking the man who lives beside it, mouthing words in his ancient tongue and begging for his knowledge. He will, if bribed with cheese or wine or honey, speak sometimes in his soft, archaic words of the world as it was when his was the common tongue, of the fabrics they wore and the rhymes their children recited and the food they ate, all the priceless things which are never written down in books. Dissertations and theses have been written based on the tales he tells; great scholarly arguments have been won and lost on the weight of a single word from the nameless man beside the Silver Lake. Many scholars have begged him to come away with them, to visit their universities and museums, to make his knowledge accessible to those who cannot come trekking out into the forest farther than even the park rangers dare to go. The nameless man always refuses, politely and inexorably. This, he says, is his place, and he will not leave it.
The other people who come to the Silver Lake are those who seek their dreams. If you come to the lake, the story goes, with a net made by your own hands, and cast it into the water beneath the light of the full moon, when the lake is a sheet of silver, smooth as a polished stone, when you draw it back again, it will hold in its strands your heart’s desire. So people come - not many, for it is a strange tale, and there is very little magic in the world, all the monsters long since slain, all the enchantments bound in cold iron, all the sacred mysteries solved with colder logic - and they bring with them nets made of string or rope or fishing line. They cast their nets into the water under the shining moon, and though there is nothing in the water - not weed nor stone nor fish nor bone - when they draw out their nets again, the strands hold strange things: spheres of glass, iridescent and fragile as soap bubbles; or gleaming gemstones polished into cabochons; or shards of ice that burn with cold.
They take their prizes away with them, and somehow the images reflected in glass or stone or melting ice are enough to lead them to what they seek, whatever that may be.
It’s said, among those who have dared the lake and drawn their dreams from out its clear and shining depths, that the deeper you can cast your net, the better your chances of finding what your heart most truly desires. That nets cast into the shallows yield only little dreams, small triumphs; a net cast out into the center of the lake will gain the caster something more nearly their heart’s deepest desire.
And those who are both scholars and dreamers - and they are few and far between - those who have spoken to the nameless man who dwells beside the lake and spends his evenings knotting rope into a net so wide it could stretch from the lake all the way to the crumbled keep in the mountains high above - they say that someday, he will finish his net. He will wait until the full moon rises, bright and clear and silver, without a single cloud to mar the sky. He will take his net to the Silver Lake and cast it in, and the perfect silver smoothness of the lake will fragment and shatter into a million tiny mirrors, flashing the moon’s light back into the midnight sky. The net will sink down, down, as deep into the lake as the moon is in the sky above, and it will catch on something down at the very bottom of the endless water, down deeper than any dreamer has ever reached before.
And he will draw it up, hand over hand, the water dripping from the net to stain his skin with silver like the moon’s bright blood, until at last he pulls from the lake what he has spent so many ages waiting for:
A sword as silver as the lake itself.
And as he lifts the sword, his heart’s desire will find him, rising from the lake to follow the path his net has made:
Men with gleaming swords upon their backs, silver as the lake and steel bright as stars, and leading them a woman with hair like moonlight and eyes like emeralds, and a man with hair like starlight and eyes like gold.
Those he has lost, returning.
They will bring with them all the magic the world has lost.
His net, the scholars say, is very nearly done.