Silver Road
Overview
The Silver Road, the only one of Arcadia's Royal Roads to survive the Sundering, bent and reconfigured with the estrangement of the worlds. It is now peculiar, even among trods, because where it formerly led to Arcadia, it no longer leads anywhere; it only twists and loops around all the other faerie roads. Does this mean that the Silver now leads nowhere, or everywhere? To my knowledge, nobody has succeeded in walking the Silver itself since the Resurgence; instead, we watch the Silver while we're walking our own road and use the former not as a road but as a road sign. Perhaps there is a clue in that.
Anyway, the Silver points the way to wherever you're going. When you see it woven into the trod you're on, that means you're on the right track. The presence of the Silver... whether in the form of an actual silver-brick road, or of silver ribbons woven into the roadside trees, or a pillar of silver cloud... indicates that your journey will follow all the rules of Dán and the Story. It will be Glamourously fulfilling, magically right. The Silver indicates that the pointless, the boring, and the gratuitously hurtful will be kept outside the shape of your journey. Perhaps it actively keeps them away; perhaps it only serves as a token and a sign. We've lost so much of the old trodlore.
Of course, bad things can still happen to you within sight of the Silver Path, but they'll be of your own fault and making. The Silver only enforces the logic of Story along its length, it doesn't make everything on it perfectly utopian. If it did, it would still lead to Arcadia, wouldn't it? No, you can still get hurt on the Path, but you can at least relax a bit, with the knowledge that anything truly threatening to you will be, at least in some part, your own fault. These monsters will have to wait for a show of weak resolve or secret guilt from you before they can hurt you. The traps will wait courteously for you to trigger them before slowing or stopping your progress between Here and There.
Off the Silver, of course, nothing is obliged to make sense. The world gets very deep into the Dream very quickly, with common sense melting like sugar in the rain. The solid shape of things breaks loose and becomes wild out there, and anything can happen at any time. The deepest of the deepingward realms are all like this, in their own way: the Milderwood, the stark fastness of Chakravada, and especially the tidal ebb and swell of the Sea of Dreams itself. Without the obvious presence of the Silver, the older, stranger laws of the world keep their old preeminence. This is part of the reason the fomorians are so dangerous: their fate is not that of the Arcadians, and their story does not play by the Arcadian rules.
References
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, pp. 102-103.