Silver’s Ring

While helping Lilia pack up his dorm room in Book 7 Silver discovers a ring inside a candy tin (with an acorn bracelet) that immediately makes him sleepy.

Lilia says that the ring belongs to Silver: he was wearing it on a necklace as an infant when Lilia discovered him.

Lilia says he had been waiting to give the ring to him when he grew up.

The rules of the ring are still vague: when Silver loses his fight against Malleus in Sebek’s dream and Malleus tries to send him to sleep “in a deeper, darker place,” Silver is aware of darkness, coldness and sadness, and then the ring begins to glow.

He calls upon his father to give him strength, enabling him to escape.

The ring glows again when he is battling back darkness to save Sebek, with Grim saying that it causes the darkness to shrink away, while Silver says he can feel power emanating from it.

He calls upon its light to banish the dark and it does so, saving Sebek.

The ring glows again when Silver sees the Dawn Knight for the first time and Sebek, too, says that he can feel a strange power emanating from it. 

The same light effect that the ring creates appears multiple times to Sebek after he follows Silver into the darkness, showing him memories from his own childhood. The light also enables Grim and Sebek to locate Silver in the dark.

Silver is mistaken for someone else by various enemies throughout Lilia’s dream, and we see the Dawn Knight is revealed to have an identical ring that glows when he calls upon guardian faeries.

When the Dawn Knight’s mask breaks he is revealed to have an identical face to Silver (they also share a voice actor).

The Dawn Knight explains that he was gifted his ring by “guardian faeries” when he was a child and it should be one of a kind, asking who Silver is.

Silver concludes that the Dawn Knight of the Silver Owls must be his biological father, which is news he does not take very well.

(The Dawn Knight using the ring to call upon Guardian Faeries and Silver using it to call upon Lilia is a fascinating parallel: Silver received it from his bio-father, who is not who he has in mind when he calls out for his “father” when using the ring, while the person he actually means—Lilia—is very much a guardian fairy to Silver.)

After discovering his lineage Silver sinks into the darkness, saying that he does not want to think about anything and being alone in pitch black is what he deserves.

Silver decides he doesn’t want to go back and would rather stay in the darkness forever.

The light from the ring glows and he is shown the day that Lilia discovered him as an infant, as well as a scene from the past where his father is confirmed dead and his mother flees, leaving him under the protection of faeries.

Lilia guesses that the Dawn Knight’s blonde hair might have come from a diurnal fae blessing, as his own blessing turns the naturally(?) blonde Silver’s hair silver.

Silver struggles with the revelation that he is the son of the Dawn Knight and Queen Leah, saying that he has always seen himself as Lilia’s son but he cannot call himself that any longer and having an emotional breakdown at the thought that Lilia could never love him.

(Silver also appears in the body of the Dawn Knight.)

Sebek discovers Silver in the midst of his mental collapse, where he tells Sebek that Lilia and Malleus must hate him for being the son of their mortal enemy: “How could I ever face them now? How must my father have felt, raising someone who shared the same face as his foe?! He could never love the son of a man he despised! He has to hate me! He has to!”

After Sebek brings Silver back to his senses Silver declares that he will be making his dream happen, a dream of becoming a knight who protects Lilia and Malleus.

With his declaration that he will end their nightmare and make them smile again the ring once more begins to glow, showing Silver an image of his biological father in a dreamway.