A silver bullet. A silver blade. The creature falls.

Elemental silver in the hand is inert. Dietary silver is sequestered in the gut by sulfhydryl compounds and bound in the liver by metallothionein. Intact skin does nothing. The mythology's toxicity is direct tissue introduction of Ag+: a blade treated with a silver compound, a projectile of elemental silver or silver alloy, or — the most efficient historical formulation — a wound contaminated with silver nitrate or another soluble salt. Chloride-assisted dissolution in physiological fluid puts free silver ions into interstitial fluid and into mitochondria within minutes. The gut never sees them.

Timing is the variable the folklore missed. Stage One, glycolytic, first forty-five minutes: survivable. Stage Two, fat oxidation, forty-five minutes to two and a half hours: electron transport at ceiling, maximum sensitivity, a wound that would have been local becomes systemic. Stage Three can force a premature termination. The first twenty-four hours after reversal still run dense enough mitochondria for an attenuated kill. A Lycian who looks like an exhausted wounded man at dawn is not safe from the metal already in the wound.