Dysthaumia And Other Dirty Words

Hege%20Falling.gif

Hege Falling

So, you listened and hoped beyond hope she would find a way to right the dissonance of her flesh placed upon her by the world.

Where There Is A Flame Someone Is Bound to Get Burned

Seas of Orcadia Hub

But Just Because It Burns Doesn’t Mean You’re Gonna Die

Make Me a Rainbow, I'll Shine Down On My Mother

I wish they would start already.

Astral beams of light rippled across the translucent, stained crystal panes. Each frame flushed a grand space with dancing flutters of history and mythologized scenes from past ages. Bleached white and gold organo-metallic polymers gave life to the never-ending panacea. Together, flowing across the immense and heavily packed hall. Banners of rich color combinations flutter in an artificial breeze from where they are wrapped carefully around sculpted columns.

Beads of sweat were already pooling from the pores in-between her crimson scales. Brynhild’s digits trembled from where they wrapped around the trident, the other hand purposely laid flat against her thigh. The temptation to reach up and pull on the collar itched at the back of her skull. It wouldn’t take much, just enough to get some air into her uniform.

No.

Instead, she straightened her spine and focused.

The towering columns lining the center of the room, carefully shaped and carved with the flowing embodiment of concepts made manifest, Rustics, posed as the great monarchs who came before. Each were studded with precious gemstones in the place of eyes and teeth.

She wondered, for but a moment, if the magic within them would bring them to life under the right circumstances. They weren’t cognitive threads, that much she was sure of. It was a question for someone else; they moved far too fast for her to read.

Arches of water pour out into waterfalls; tumbling to earth and creating cooling mist where they strike grooved channels far below.

She got lost in watching the trickling rainbow reflected by the falling water, eyes tracing the path downwards to follow the channels. She was just close enough to one of the waterfalls to catch little flecks of cooling moisture every now and again but not close enough to enjoy the mists. If the line was just a little farther back, if she leaned just a little bit, she’d be in the cool spray.

Don’t think about it. Focus.

The channels, miniature canals, snaked in carved patterns on the floor, dancing with light and Rustics in the shape of further scenes and murals upon which the occupants of the chamber stand. She wondered what the little oscillations in the flow of the symbols felt like, or if they produced any sensation at all.

The whole atmosphere brimmed with excitement threatening to flow over. It buzzed in her bones, begging her to move.

I will have to spend the entire evening in an ice flow after this.

She pivoted her eyes without moving her head to find something else to focus on.

Any minute now the bells will ring.

The frescoes, murals and carved etchings embedded in the walls changed with every glance that Brynhild gave them. This was normal, but the rapid oscillation was not. There were new marks in that maelstrom, and a part of her tingled with envy at those getting to feel them for the first time. Perhaps they were supercharged by the atmosphere and concentration of Magisters and Adepts.

Or perhaps that was her wandering, itching mind that was trying to admire the depths of beauty of the room without being pulled into the Rustic-laced cognitive threads embedded in every piece of art. A task that was proving far more difficult with every passing moment.

The silk vines of history and myth were calling her name, offering her experience that she would never normally have.

Come on now. What is taking so long?

Officers of the academy stood at attention all around her. Around a hundred Hlérsyngva, the Sea singers, the Finnfolk, in their finest uniforms lined on either side of the algal carpets and the canals of trickling water. Here she was in the middle of them all, Brynhild of the Growing Storm, trying her best to stand utterly, completely still. A task which seemed to be amusingly difficult.

Her uniform itched. It was like she had a rash from the alchen vines, those promiscuous things that creeped and crawled upon the great huts, the abodes of the nomads erected upon the backs of greater-mudcrab’s in the outer cylinders. The itching was made all the worse by the sweat causing fabric to cling to scaley skin.

If I move, I'll get the tongue lashing of my life. If I get lost in a cognitive thread I might move. If they don’t start soon, I might melt. I could have gone into a path that didn’t require self-torture, but noooo.

As if for emphasis, Grinwald walked up and down both lines of officers.

There was no one in the world Brynhild respected more.

I'll Tell You My Sins And You Can Sharpen Your Knife

A thread of magic snagged against the wandering thought spooling out into memory. Colored pencils etched into the pages of a sketchpad, filling in the frame of a warmly lit equipment room. It smelled of metal, oil, and copious amounts of sweat.

You stood there nervously, a tiny thing in the shadow of the black-scaled woman. Her gills lay flat to you and her lips were curled down. The way she stood, with legs held slightly apart in a powerful stance, and the appraising look gleaming in her eyes told the story of her life. A hard Finnwoman, no-nonsense, holding your fate in her hands.

“So, you’re the Agrusa child?” she asked, looking you over yet again with pursed lips.

Too afraid to mess up the words, you simply nodded. You wished your legs and hands would stop trembling.

“Do you have a name?”

“B-b-brynhild, ma’am.” You winced at your stammering voice.

She sighed, gills pulsing once, as if you were a tremendous inconvenience.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had any training before you got here?” She turned away from you to an equipment rack.

Your heart sank; she was going to throw you out.

“A little… but I’m only eleven.”

Wood and metal shifted. You looked up, just in time for a blur of brown to flick through the air.

It was reflex really. Instinct that set your path in stone.

Before you knew what was happening, you had snatched the wooden frame of a practice trident from the air. Twirled it once and set the butt against the stone.

You stood there, staring at the practice weapon, then your hands, dumbfounded, and then looked up at Grinwald.

Her arms were crossed over her chest and there was a smile plastered across her lips. Her gills were fluttering.

“Better than most and you have the instincts.” The smile vanished into an intense, narrow-eyed gaze. “But talent won’t carry you alone. Life in the mud and sand requires discipline, patience, sweat, blood. Tell me now, no lies, is this what you want?”

Your spine stiffened, eyes filling with flame. “Yes. I want to live up to my name.”

She nodded once. “Then we start now.”

I Will Find My Way, If I Can Be Strong

The colored lines and pages faded away as Brynhild returned to the moment. Right as Grinwald was about to walk past.

The older Finnwoman’s lips were puckered so tight you could have balanced a quill perfectly atop them.

A shift of the hips, closing her feet too much, rippling her gills, shifting her head, it wouldn’t take much to set the old soldier off.

Despite the discomfort grinding against Brynhild’s red, scaly skin, the twitch of webbing in her fingers, toes, and the flutter of her gills, she was excited. Infernos burned a vicious dance in her eyes. The rapid beat of her heart gave it away beneath all the distant gazes; thankfully no one could hear just how fast it hammered.

There were so many eyes and expectations on her. She shifted her eyes up to the stain-glass pane of Agrusa, her many-great grandmother.

The threads wormed deep into her mind, snagging perception. A thousand images flaring against the threads of time and history. Grasping the calloused hand of the gold-scaled Triemedes, the Unifier and giant upon whose shoulders they all stood. Dances upon boat and distant ancient shores, — salt burning in her nostrils from the sea. She was teaching the one who would save us all.

The great sweeping storms of the scarlet desert where heat burned against her neck and dried out scales. The frigid depths of black in the bay where the great serpent of knowing gnashed at their heels.

The wind blew against her hair, roars of a Kraken’s engine filling the sky. She stood upon the prow of the great, shimmering thaumic machine as it barreled through the writhing storm. Barometric pressure smeared heavily against her skin.

Five terrible arms cleaved through cloud and rain, memory evaporating in its antimemetic conceptual wake. She roared, Krakens streaming towards annihilation.

On the shores of the Southern Basin, she bought enough time. In her fading moments, conceptual ideal eroding in the Odr’s wake, she basked in the coming glory of legacy. Then it came. The Astral Fire of Finnfelheim smeared the sky and struck the Starfish into the depths of its writhing prison.

The threads faded away as Brynhild returned to the moment. This is who she was. She was the last in the line of Agrusa.

A twinge of tight longing crawled up her spine before being banished as she focused on the moments that led her here.

Her eyes drifted to another panel, a great coral spire shining in the brilliant light of the afternoon singularity. A place that existed now in naught but stories.

The threads wrapped around her mind once again.

She was shouting, magic pouring off her numbed fingers as she streaked through the freezing sky on a sicklemoon hammerhead. Magic she’d never known, worming beneath every inch of flesh. It ached, carving a hollow cavern in her belly.

She rode, dipped, dove, and weaved through a fog heavy sky – droplets of water shattering against her scaley skin like needles. The Northern White Wyvern roared in her ears, the blast of her singularity driven thaumic beams smashing holes in its fibrous membranes.

Then she was riding great winged beasts through the highland lochs and fjords of the northern realms, yipping and hollering with wind blowing through her wild crimson hair. Trekking strange mountains far to the west with a woman of soft golden character and stunning blue eyes. Laying in bundles of twigs and bush gazing upon hatching eggs producing birds wrapped in thunder.

Gleaming metal gates framing proud, glimmering walls that towered like sheer cliffs above the Mediterranean. Behind the walls scaling up off into the horizon, a sprawling city of crystalline metal stretched as far to her left and right as she could see. The sky above was filled with the streaking shapes of hundreds of sundfljúgavagns1. Far away standing proudly defiant on the horizon, a tower, glimmering with light and Magistry.

Then it all burned in a ferocious firestorm of swirling smoke and falling metal. The heat it radiated near-blasting against her face Fraying and dissolving beneath the threads of fate.

Brynhild crashed back to reality, many other names and stories flashing through memory burning through the panes.

She had seen these moments countless times and focused now on the emotional heights instead of the details. Though some, like the grandiose scope of Finnfelheim, dizzied her even now.

These were monuments to the blood that ran through her veins. She had stood here beneath their grandeur when she was but a small child, staring and losing herself in the threads of a past that was so close and yet so very far away.

She understood, in theory, how they worked. It was a signature component of her people’s artistic traditions. Cognitive threads carried through the millions of tiny Rustics embedded in every pane, brush stroke, ink line and chiseled carving of stone, metal and crystal. Of course, it largely depended on the artist, but memory, stories, and emotional evocation were the point.

For the brief seconds and minutes when she was swept away in their conceptual threads, she could live alongside them. Feel the magistry sinking deep into her bones, feel it all around her in the moments her ancestors lived through.

In those spaces she felt like she belonged.

And now, as they almost always did when she emerged, their deeds and glory sat heavy upon her shoulders, threatening to crush her beneath their expectations.

She tightened her grip on her many great aunt’s trident, scales and webbing pressing into the smoothly polished organo-metallic alloy.

She stood in the shadows of their deeds determined to live up to their reputation.

But there was a problem — well, multiple really. But there was one that stood out above the rest and weighed heavily upon her.

She was near Astrally dead.

Must Be Homesick For The Real

The pencils shift across the page, carrying you through those initial days of training. The hard days in the sand and mud, sweating. Bruised and battered. Grinwald’d knock you down, tell you to get up, and do it again. Again, and again until you learned, until you rolled out of reach and turned it back against her.

Each step conquered earned a “good job”. Then she shifted approach and did it all over again. Training stopped being about single moves, became a dance of technique and drills as you grew.

When you were caught out of line, forgot to clean up the practice yard, or missed practice, you’d scrub the stone and crystal floors of the equipment room until they shined. No excuses.

You had a schedule: Wake, mischief, eat, mischief, learn, mischief, practice, mischief, eat, mischief, academics, clean, eat, bathe, sleep and surprise, more mischief.

When you finally beat her for the first time in a spar, you got a pat on the back, and the next day off.

She was hard, but fair. More than that. She listened. She fought for you when no adult would.

She caught you once breaking down in the equipment room on the anniversary of that night. You were sat cross-legged on the stone, wiping your eyes and sniffling when she walked in.

For a moment it seemed she was about to scream and yell. But she didn’t. She sat on the ground, didn’t touch you.

“What is it?” she asked, in the softest tone she’d ever used. She listened, as you cried and spat it all out.

She didn’t utter a word, just sat there with a faraway look haunting her eyes.

And next year when that black day rolled around again? You showed up in the barracks, she took one look at you and said the words you’ll never forget.

“Go home. No lessons today.” It wasn’t pity in her eyes. It was something you wouldn’t understand until you were much older. Understanding.

You tried to ask why, but she just locked the door and walked off clutching a golden locket suspended from chain around her neck.

It wouldn’t be until much later that you’d see the little dark scaled spawnling's Rustic painting suspended inside.

Slick oil pigment moved along the confines of a dry canvas, pressed by a narrow brush along pre-marked lines as the palace training yard smears into definition.

Grinwald's imperious shadow arcs over you in the light of the singularity's afternoon adjustments. The metallic chill of the trident's heft seeped into your small fingers; a blunted child's toy to the giant that is your opponent.

A short Finnman stood between the two of you, preparing the field for your coming struggle.

The drop of a rock could have shattered the tension resting upon the oil film pulsing around you.

Seated on the spartan steps and benches are, perhaps, two hundred or more observers, come to watch the last of your line, you. The blood of champions burned in your veins and that made all the difference.

Their expectations pressed the meniscus of the film down, crushing against your shoulders.

None were heavier than the princess’s; seated on the stairs. She was a centerpiece all her own in her flowing twines and ribbon robes of fine silk, auric scales and hair gleaming in the singularity’s light.

Your eyes traced to the crowd. Her father, the King of all the Hlérsyngva, sat among the Magisters and Ministers. His wife, Queen Astrid, obscured by the reflection of the bright light of the singularity upon her golden scales, sat beside him, soft smile invisible to you in this moment. But it was there, you were sure.

“Begin.” The Finnman said, snapping you back into the moment.

You circled each other in measured steps, trying to keep up with every gigantic step she takes.

You sought the slightest opening in Grinwald’s impenetrable defense. Scanned the twitch of her muscles.

Motion, a feint designed to bait you into striking.

A year ago, it worked, and many times since, but not today. No, the opening came in the aftermath.

You didn’t take the bait, she shifted, and you sprang your trap.

You burst right, drew the reactive swing. The blunted tips of the training trident flicked past as you stutter stepped to her left. All the while the trident twirled in one hand like a baton.

One, two, three you hit her leg and hips with the twirling metal. Enough to bruise, but not much more. You weren’t strong enough yet to fracture. You wouldn’t have even if you were.

Grinwald grunted in surprise, pivoting to force you away, but you were behind her now, jabbing the butt of your trident into her spine.

She stumbled forward with another grunt. You spun on one heel, rebounding trident arm thrusting in a direct dash to follow through.

“Iss,” hissed from Grinwald’s lips, the Rustic burning in the air in the milliseconds before you reached her. Perhaps there was a smile there, however briefly. Your trident smacked into the film of ice formed between you and her, biting cold surging through the metal and stinging your fingers hard.

All those lessons squirmed back in, as you reached for threads of your own. You tried to yank your trident back with one hand while drawing the symbol in the air. All that theory, the practiced motions to counter opponent’s magistry… and nothing came. Tiny embers trickled off your fingers, ineffectual.

Grinwald’s trident knocked yours aside, snapping it out of your hands as the ice shattered into cold fragmented panes.

Metal collided with your chin in a retaliatory spin.

You were knocked into the air, electrostatic shocks from another spell squirming through nerve and muscle.

Landed with a hard thud and rolled in the sand. Flesh twitched beyond control for far too long. Stunned confusion twisted in your mind before flaring into a flame of determination in an abdomen that was defiant of these events.

You weren’t done; you refused to give up at one surprising blow and misfire.

Iron taste of blood polluted your tongue. You rolled, dodging the hammering butt of the trident seeking to knock you out. Teeth clenched, you tried to rise, summoning another thread to try and pull your trident back into your hands, but it only wiggled ineffectually across the yard.

You stared at it, then down at your fingers, at the abject failure of your attempts.

Panic crept into your small chest, tight with icey fear as you looked up. The expression rippling across King Aske’s gills and face dropped a pit into your stomach.

It was over.

Grinwald’s trident leveled, inches from your throat. “Match,” she barked tersely. Disappointment burned in her dark eyes; gills closed to you. You couldn’t meet her gaze, looked down at your feet as she pulled you up. Hot shame crawled up the back of your neck and through your flattening gills.

The crowd’s murmurs and affectations faded as the light changed in the sky, drawn forth by broader brushes.

You hadn’t moved a muscle for an hour, staring straight down. Everyone was gone. So was your confidence and any idle hopes of having lived up to your family name. You stared absently at your fingers. All that training, Grinwald’s lessons, for nothing.

Of course, they’d lose interest the moment you couldn’t do the most basic expectation of your people’s world, magic.

Dark bruises lay upon your chin, chest, and legs from Grinwald’s blows. They ached and throbbed as you limped absently through the palace halls. Too ashamed to go see the healers.

They’re Marks of what shame you’ve brought upon your hallowed house. Upon the man and woman who took you in for your worth and potential.

How many skittering messenger and servant constructs skittered past you in your stupor? How many stopped in your path, thaumo-mechanical servos whirring as their crystal lenses dilated to adjust for your presence?

Something compelled you to stop outside the cracked door of Grinwald’s office, posted next to the King’s personal quarters. A deep rattling urge to apologize, for the failure that you embodied, swirled in your belly like a maelstrom. Raising a webbed hand to knock, you stopped hearing the voices within. Ministers, Grinwald, the King, and the Queen.

“We ran the evaluations during the spar, Majesties; the outcome is unimpeachable.”

“Surely it must be a mistake.” His majesty’s normally upbeat tone sat grimly in your stomach as you leaned against the wall next to the door. Felt all the vibrations of the palace, of their voices filter into your skull. Pressed your hot and swollen face against the cool crystal and stone.

“It’s not. She tried to draw on fire and recall basic concepts in and of themselves. Sparks, embers, and the twitching of metal but nothing more. I fear it’s a worst-case scenario.” It’s the voice of a young Magister, Skreyja. A man who always looked at you as if you were far beneath him. His abject distaste for your very presence was never noticed by anyone else, and he shared that gaze for the Princess.

Hot shame wormed in the terse flattening of your gills and clenched teeth.

“Not for lack of trying, she was able to do something. I’m confident with a little more training…” Grinwald’s voice.

“Training won’t fix the root problem. Her Astral density is the lowest I’ve ever seen, nearly zero.” A different magister now.

“She can’t be dysthaumic. She’s of Agrusa’s line, noble magister-warriors.” The King’s voice again.

“Denying it will not unmake the truth, Majesty.”

A deep sigh through the doors. “This will devastate her.”

“There are ways around such things, no? She is my second daughter and I am loathe to abandon her dreams so easily.” Astrid’s voice, soft and harmonious in your ears.

“Your ward of the state, Majesty,” Skreyja’s corrected. “Adoption does not make her of royal blood or your daughter by the accords of unification.”

A sudden, intense burst of silence filled the interior space, permeating out and reaching you. The words echoed in your mind, an indirect punch to the gut.

“If Majesty cares for her to such a degree,” the other Minister, not Skreyja, began gently and far more diplomatically, “then it would be wise to recommend a different path for her life. Without Magistry she will be vulnerable, weak and easily laid low by a skilled warrior who can. It’s a risk in the defense force or even the Royal guards. Not to mention this sign of disfavor from the Mither.”

You hung your head, biting back the tears.

“Nonsense,” Grinwald barked tersely. “In the yesteryears of our ancestors, your words would be true, but there are approaches to compensate as Queen Astrid suggested. She is more physically skilled at her age than any recruit we’ve had in a lifetime of remembrance. Strong, and fast. With the right tools, she would have had me today. She deserves, on merit alone, to see her ambitions unfold.”

“The compensation will never be enough Grinwald, you know this. Think of the cost if something were to happen? You’d risk the last in the line of Agrusa, prevent the preservation of the bloodline, for a single child’s ambitions and feelings against the will of the Mither and needs of the Work?”

“If the bloodline is dry of access to the Rustic weave, perhaps it’s time to consider deemphasizing the despotism of our so-called ‘sacred bloodlines’ for the good of all. A slot filled with no merit is nothing but nepotism manifested,” Skreyja purred.

“Must you speak about her like she’s farmstock?” Astrid snapped. “Mither’s harvest she’s a spawnling!”

“A spawnling with a limited future and value to the greater work we all seek,” he rebuffed.

“She is far more than that and you faen well know it Skreyja. I will not stand by and let you smash a spawnling’s dreams beneath whatever ambitions you’re puckering and plucking from your carrion filled—” Grinwald snarled.

“Enough!” Aske’s staff rang with a metallic echo in your ears, cutting further debate off.

You didn’t hear the rest, already limping towards your quarters with barely suppressed despair dripping from your eyes. As soon as the door shut, you collapsed onto the silken algal sheets of the bed.

Silent sobs racked your body, wallowing at just how abjectly broken you were.

To be without the ability to do magistry? A critical component of your people’s lives. Used to access everything from transport, building and facility access, even direction of the vehicles you so desperately wanted to command.

You were dead to the Mither’s gifts and voices. She had rejected you, left you as nothing more than an incubator to carry the next generation of your bloodline.

So deep in wallowing were you, you heard neither the knock, nor the opening of the door and subsequent footsteps. A webbed hand pressed gently into your back, startling you from the spiral to look up. Through blurry tears, you saw the Princess looking down at you.

She had placed a stack of books upon the sea-oak end-table.

Her gills pulsed three long times, surveying your bruises.

“You’re hurt still, why didn’t you go to the healers?” Her voice was gentle, as if fully cognizant that you could break at any moment.

“I wanted to be alone.” The response poured so fast from your lips that you flinched at the harshness of wishing her away conveyed in your tone.

Ever the curious and yet socially oblivious creature, Hege simply ignored you. “Sit up, so I can heal you.”

The command was blunt, and you obeyed without really thinking about it.

The soothing warmth of healing Rustics wormed into your flesh with more than a bit discomfort. That was of course a mark that Hege was not an experienced healer. You watched, feeling all the worse as you were reminded by burst blood vessels mending beneath the skin of what you could not do.

“Now, tell me, why you are shedding such copious tears? I did not take you for one to weep after a defeat?”

Of course she wouldn’t know. She’s blessed with more magistry in her pinky than I have in my entire body. you thought bitterly as the words stung with potential implications laden behind them.

But then you banished them, remembering that she was simply matter of fact, something you’d learned very quickly after you first met. No ulterior intent, a refreshing characteristic compared to even Grinwald’s games of careful words.

You lived in a political world of disagreements between officials over how best to accomplish the purpose and drive of the Mither’s ever present will.

Nonetheless, the truth was hollowing a hole in an abdomen too small to support it.

“I-I-I’m dysthaumic.” You hung your head, a few more tears dripping off one scale covered cheek.

“Of course you are, I could have told you that the moment we began magistry lessons,” Hege’s voice scoffed, gills pulsing three times in annoyance. “Any magister worth their salt can detect the threads of a spawnling learning the concepts. The simple act of forming a Rustic in the mind spawns a twitch in the fabric of the Magistry weave.”

You looked up at her, anguish twisting to disbelief in the open disposition of your membranes. You were broken and she was dumping mechanistic details of her special interest upon you.

“Dysthaumia is rare, but not unheard of. It is nothing to despair over, simply a condition beyond your control.”

“It’s disqualifying. I can never be in the defense force now. I can never live up to my ancestor’s name.”

Hege snorted air out of her nostrils. “Who told you that? The Ministers? Magisters?”

“Yes… No. I overheard it. I’m sure they’ll tell me in the morning. Aske will send me away.”

“Don’t be ridiculous Brynhild. The ministers are political fools and father wouldn’t dare. Brynhild, look at me.”

You obeyed, raising your head to look up at Hege.

“Good. Wipe your tears. You may cry further, but not until you hear what I have to say.”

You wiped your eyes and sniffled. She watched waiting for you to gain some measure of composure and dignity.

“You do not need magistry to become what you most desire. It would help yes, but there are ways around such limitations.”

“But… even if I do, the Mither has forsaken me…”

Hege sighed languorously.

“Nonsense. Utter nonsense.”

“Bu—”

“No buts. Noone knows the Mither’s will but the Priestesses, and I have never met a priestess who didn’t talk in riddles of the old tongues! Especially to the ministers. Pure conjecture and speculation. I’ll have none of that sort of emotional speculation from you.”

You stared at her, bewildered, unsure if she was simply trying to cheer you up or if, for once in her life, she actually had an ulterior motive you couldn’t see.

She pulled diagrams and sheets of algal sea-paper off the end table and spread them out on the bed between the two of you. You admired her confidence in that moment, the ache in your chest lessening for her presence and assuredness of purpose.

Eyes tracked to the paper, admiration becoming abject disbelief. As the paint began to fade, she told you of all the tools she had already designed, all the ways she would make you equal to a warrior capable of great magistry. Make you capable of functioning in this world with accommodations that would be so smooth, that sun-fish butter would feel chunky in comparison.

You were grateful for her… but the opportunity was purely nepotism. If you had never been taken in because of your family legacy, then you never would have this chance. Advantaged over who knows how many others among your people who were dysthaumic.

You hated it. For what it meant you were taking rather than giving.

Though The Road May Wander, It Will Lead Me To You

Bells chimed in Brynhild’s ear, stirring her back to reality as the thoughts and echoes of memory lingered.

They let me in, not on merit, but because of who is around me, where my blood runs through the undersky, and who I had make me tools.

They thought she would be nothing more than a lowly officer, a pity case for some bureaucratic post. Just an incubator for the next great Agrusa. But here she was, with all of Hege’s tools and devices.

I trained, fought, struggled in the dirt, sparred, pressed my body to its limits.

She proved them all wrong. She was the top of the class in all areas except one. The one that always haunted her, Magistry.

But you didn’t need Magistry to be a great commander. Not with Hege’s tools. Not with her tactical and strategic mind. She was going to prove it.

Her eyes dart to the stain glass window of her great-great-grandaunt. Segrusa, grand general of the southern provinces in the height of their people’s glory.

Today I go to make my name, Auntie. Today I finally get to make something of myself. I will secure command of a Kraken.

There were talks, ambitions in play in the upper echelons of the defense force. Arcane whispers of reaching out to make contact with the world. Humans, speakers of the mud and dirt, be damned. They were going to find the refugees from the South who scattered to the winds. Who knew what grand feats they had accomplished, how they had survived the drowning of Finnfelheim.

There must be some, no, many alive.

Now was the time to strike while the will was there.

Change was coming, opening from isolationism. Too long had they hidden from the world, sank into the dark of the night and depths. Even now the pendant burned against her chest beneath the uniform, the neglect of the Mither’s ethos shaming her flesh. Shaming all of them. That purpose with which they had been burdened, all their kind, demanded a return to form. The four golden eyes burned like fire in the back of her mind, ever watching.

The King must know it’s time. It’s been time. But for too long he failed to act due to politics, the old guard, the cowards whose scars at human hands linger on the tide.

But change was here in the shape of a golden-scaled girl.

The din of the hall began to settle around her, briefly drawing her back to the moment. It lasted but a moment before the halls of memory called her back in, urged by the dancing murals and their threads of memory.

Fifty-two cycles ago, princess Hege Aquaillian was born. The name seared in her skull, ache tightening in her ribcage. She almost lost composure. Almost flinched. Gritting her teeth at the thought of her former friend.

Fourty-four cycles ago, Brynhild lost everything she’d ever known. How she’d been taken in by the Royal Family, how she lost everything, orphaned by a horrible fire. The hand around the trident trembled as the inferno caught again in her mind.

When It All Burned Down

Watercolor pigments swirl atop a faded canvas, drawing you back to the past.

Your heart thrummed in your ears, tiny footsteps carrying you down the street as fast as you could run.

You were late, of course you were late. You should have stopped at the market after lessons. You had the sandstars in your pockets after all. But no, you didn’t when you should have.

No, you were returning home with the herbs of your mother's asking, kicking yourself for forgetting and delaying dinner another two hours. Roasted floatbirds, grilled eastern-lumifish from the outer cylinders — filled with nuts and those waxy green stalks of which their name always tingled delightfully on your tongue. A favorite meal.

Your stomach growled, mouth salivating at the unbidden echoes of taste and smell wafting across tiny nostrils. You couldn't notice the glow above the buildings, unnaturally intense. It’s not until you were a street away that the sound of whirring pitches snapped you from your salivating reverie. Sirens, shouts, voices, a menacing crackling buzz in the air.

Rounding the corner; acheing tiny legs skid to a halt as the horror rose before you. Flames, huge orange, red, and yellow tongues lapped at the sky. Responders, servicemen and women in green uniforms flared against the backdrop of the inferno. Sundfljúgavagns painted in bright orange and red tones, maneuvering and spreading the air with Rustics that spewed gouts of thick water into the relentless conflagration.

Your home was burning. Precious abode of crystal and wood with all its paintings, little comforts and rich familial history, swallowed by a firestorm.

The bag of herbs hit the ground. Brushstrokes along the canvas whipped the insidious tongues of heat back and forth in the atmosphere.

You stared, gills flaring open in total horror. Frozen, internally screaming at your flesh to move, to fly into the blaze and save them.

Minutes later you writhed in a burly Finnwoman’s arms, screaming “Móðir! Faðir! Systir!” reaching for the place you once called home. Desperate hot tears wormed down your face.

Through the tears you saw a young Finnman, yellow-green scales shimmering in the light of the flames. You didn’t know his face but could see the smirk in his eyes as he turned and walked away.

When the smoke and flame cleared, the burnt-out shell of your home rose at the whims of the cruel brushstrokes of fate. There was nothing left for you in this hellish husk of memory, only ash, charred flesh and bone that you no longer recognized.

A trident, your family’s ancient heirloom was all that remained salvageable. You clung to it like its loss would unravel you fully from the world.

Everything you love consumed, leaving you and you alone the last of your bloodline.

They looked at you with such sorrow. Pity, sympathy filling their eyes and gills as you knelt in the grass and cried your heart out.

Hours later the stencils and narrow tipped brushes carried you to a mural lined room within a service station. Depicitions of heroic sacrifice danced upon the walls, hollow in their messaging now with the failure that cost you everything. Laying on a finely crafted, fabric stretched couch, red eyed and dissociated.

What would happen to you now?

Where would you go?

Who would take you in?

You were eleven namedays of passing, no skills, no value to the community or family unit.

You were too young for that and now damaged by loss.

All you had was a name, an important name, but no weight or added deeds behind it. Who would possibly take in such a sink of resources? Not on merit, but out of pity. All hope of the future evaporated. Tears wormed out of your eyes, flanks and gills rising and falling in stuttered, despairing gasps.

Then, voices, hushed whispers, scuffling feet and rippling parchment. Stunned gasps through the door to the front of the station. Someone shushing the cacophony in muted whispers.

“Let me see her.”

Momentary flow of pigments, as the door opened, a pair of cloaked figures in the dim light of the early morning. They stood in the squat service lobby with its shell shaped chairs and intricate murals.

One shorter, round and portend. Hidden by the shadow of their cloak. A Finnman most like, they rarely stretched more than 6 hands high.

The other was tall, elegant, and bright despite the concealing robe. Radiant like the sun, soothing, if only a little, the grief churning in your belly.

The looming stranger glided into the room with you, door closing behind them.

Sitting up; crimson scales and green hair dancing in the reflection of mirrors and murals, you looked up at them. Your jade eyes widened. Gills opened, fins extended, staring at the royal crest luminescing and holding the cloak in place. Traced its trajectory as the figure kneeled before you.

Flush embarrassment squirmed up the back of your neck, a strange and unfamiliar heat as they lowered their hood. You should have bowed, gotten down on your hands and knees. But you were frozen in place.

She was beautiful, with golden scales, auric hair with the fine definition of silk in the braid that tied it to her skull. Her eyes paralyzed you, the brightest, purest gold you’d ever drowned in.

Air rushed in through green lips filling your belly; realization dancing like stars in your view as it clicked who knelt before you.

“M-m-majesty,” you dared to whisper.

There was such compassion in the way that all-consuming smile spread across her lips, in how it reached her eyes.

Queen Astrid the Kind, beloved wife of the ruling King Aske. There was no pity in her eyes, no sympathy, just pure empathy and understanding. She radiated calm, certainty, and comfort that threatened to make the tears flow again from your eyes. Painful images of your mother and her loving presence drug into the front of your staggered mind.

“Hello, Brynhild, my name is Astrid.” She didn’t belittle you with descriptors such as “little one”. She simply offered her name as if you didn’t already know it.

“Hello,” you managed meekly, voice faintly croaking.

“Do you mind if I sit here and talk with you for a minute or two?” she asked so gently of you.

You nodded, acheing for the company of her presence, her gentle voice, her steadying aura.

She sat next to you on the couch, a tower next to your tiny form.

“You don’t need to speak.”

You scooted closer to her, aware of the dozen possible cultural taboos it would be to touch her without permission. She immediately smashed them into a thousand pieces. An arm bundled around your tiny shoulders. Her warmth, her kindness a blanket across you, washing away the numbness and locks blocking the grief and emotions squirming beneath your skin.

She rocked you gently as the dams wavered beneath her support. Then, she spoke.

“Everything you are feeling, it is valid. That sense of aimless, listless, sudden deprivation of everything you’ve ever known. Of everything you’ve ever loved. Your loss, your sadness is valid. But through this trial, sweet Brynhild, I want you to remember that this loss is not a burden upon you. These feelings do not define your worth. You are not suddenly less for being away, for failing to stop it. You are not a burden for having nothing but a name to offer now, as easy as these thoughts are to fall into. Your potential is endless, and the house you will rebuild will be all the stronger.”

You burst into tears, all the dams breaking. Sobbed into her cloak, gills stuttering with your breaths.

On and on you shed those broken tears until you had no more to shed.

Then you listened to her coos and wordless notes of comforting song. A voice of soothing tone against your ears, shivering against her.

Though her words rang in your ears, a hollowness grasped your bones.

“What if, what if I have nothing left to give?” You choked out quietly into the fabric of her robes. “What if nothing ever comes of me? If I cannot rebuild a house whose greatness I will never see?”

Her great webbed hand gently held the back of your skull, long harpists fingers parting the strands of your locks.

“Such things a spawnling should not worry about,” she cooed quietly. “But you will, for the sight runs heavy through me and I have foreseen it.”

You absorbed her words, stunned by the declaration. “How?” you sniffled, sitting back to look up at her warm and loving features.

“That would be telling.” A wry, clever upturn of the lips and rippling gills. “You have had a great ordeal this night, but I would ask of you to make a choice. It needs not be made now, but it is of importance.”

You sat up a little straighter, the offering of an important choice stiffening your spine. Puffed out your chest in the pride of being given a task by someone of such importance.

“What is it, Majesty?”

“Please, call me Astrid.” She smiled warmly again with an undertone of curiosity at your sudden discipline shining in her eyes.

“My daughter has just passed her seventh nameday. The life of a princess is a lonely thing, with no friends and great expectations. Do you have any friends?”

You shook your head. You weren’t quite old enough yet to go to school with peers. Your sisters had been your friends and now they were gone.

“Would you like to be her friend? Would you want to come and live with us awhile?”

The question was like being hit with a Kraken’s beam weapon, it knocked the wind from your lungs.

You looked up with wide eyes and flared gills.

“You’d… you’d take me in?”

“It would be a great shame on my house and name to not do so. No spawnling should go without a home, without friends, without structure and parents to love them.”

You trembled and burst into tears again, nodding fiercely against her robes.

“Then it shall be.” She rocked with you until they came in with all the papers filled out. Took your hand and walked you out on towards your new home with the fading lines of the brush and stencil.

But no matter what was said to you that night, you could not help feeling you were a burden, only given another chance because of who you came from.

But I won't Lose Hope

"Whose bones shall carry us into the night?" Bells rang as words filled the hall and jolted Brynhild back to reality.

A priestess, standing on the dais cried out to the audience. Her skin glistened, twirling tattoos of ten thousand vibrant Rustic marks swirling across her barren scales. The voice echoed in the fractally endless rafters of the palace.

Brynhild had to force her eyes straight ahead, feeling the heat crawl up the back of her neck.

"Aquailian!" The response danced off her tongue, electrified with the aura of the power worming through all their bones.

There she saw him, the King of the Hlérsyngva, Watcher of the Deep, Arbiter of the Mither’s Will and the Thousand Eyed Watch of the Creation. He was once a jolly, portund Finman. But now he showed his age and the strain of his post. The gold of his scales had dulled. His hair was greying at the roots, and bags hung heavy beneath his eyes as he walked past.

Heavy is the crown.

Grasp of webbed digits clenched around her trident as her gaze fell upon his escort and accompaniment.

Nearly two heads shorter than her, the crown princess. Her former friend and heir to the Astral Throne. In equal parts Brynhild attempted to shift her gaze up without moving and yet at the same time strained her eyes to see. The princess’s golden locks wove into a single long braid; scales flush and brilliantly shining in the dancing auroras of light. Her twine robes flowed like a river of stardust behind her, gleaming with waltzing Rustics.

Heat flared along the back of Brynhild’s neck beneath green locks of hair.

“Aquailian!” Boomed around her. She missed the call this time and cursed herself mentally for being so inattentive.

Hege’s head turned, roving across the lines of soldiers like a lighthouse illuminating a convoy of ships on a clear night. Their eyes meet; the pearlescent depths of blue threatening to swallow and drown Brynhild in the depths of memory.

I Know You Got My Back, And You Know I Got You

Acryllic strokes over metal primers sat in glaze upon a far-off wall in your mind, dragging the images of the past to the forefront. Crystalline hallways, dimmed lights of canal bound Rustics illuminating your small face. Queen Astrid led you beneath and along the mural lined architecture, the images grabbing at your mind with their threads of color and history.

You drifted as if through a dream, nearly missed the man with yellow-green scales who greeted the Queen with a bow. As you passed, he gazed upon you with utter disdain, forcing your skin to crawl.

Astrid never noticed.

Though you barely remembered it, you came to a stop outside a dim-lit door. What you’d later come to know as Grinwald’s office. A hushed exchange spilled into the hallway as Astrid gestured at you in your nigh dissociated state. Grinwald took one look at you, raised an eyebrow, and then shrugged.

“I can make no promises.”

Then you were moving again, tiny hand clasped in Astrid’s immense palm.

She showed you a room, a place all your own. It had a bed, kitchenette with amenities aplenty, shelves and drawers and places to sit.

She left you there, to your own devices, numb, and full of dread for the empty days ahead. Of course, she promised to introduce you to her daughter in the days to come but for now you were all on your own to get some rest. Your first parental instruction, take as much time as you needed to grieve.

Or so you thought as you lay on the sea algal sheets, wanting nothing more than to return to a place that no longer existed.

“Hello.” the voice was soft, beautiful and resonant in your finned ears.

You bolted upright, nearly tangling in the silken sheets. A double take rocked your head. In the middle of your quarters, with a tiny twisting cube of light and color hovering just above her hand, was a miniature copy of the Queen.

The eyes were a sharp contrast to the gold of her mother’s, clear blue but less overtly kind. Filled with mischievous, curious, and adventurous spirit that instantly screamed of trouble to come. Your eyes traced up trying to identify how she got into your Rustic lit, crystalline room. To your great befuddlement, there was an open duct grate. You looked back down to the rather soaked nature of her nightgown and did the obvious math.

“Hi…” you replied cautiously, still shaking off the bafflement of her daring feat. “Did you crawl through the vents?”

“Yes, I did. I know them like the back of my hand.” She held up the webbed appendage for emphasis. She was entirely too pleased with herself. Lips upturned at the corners; gills fluttering in amusement.

“I heard Móðir and Faðir talking this evening about what had happened… and took it upon myself to come meet my newest neighbor and soon to be friend and partner in mischief.”

Her vocabulary dizzied your head and confirmed your suspicions. She was the princess, daughter of the king and queen. And here she was so… casually breaking into your room and talking to you as if you were the next curiosity for her to interrogate. You weren’t sure whether to be offended or delighted at her rather forward entry into your space. But you were sure of something, beneath that triumphant gaze, there was a deep sadness in her eyes, in the way she slouched and covered herself with cloth.

Unusual for one so close to the heart of the Mither, to cover up like that.

Then you processed again that she was the princess. Unannounced and in your room. Some part of you internally began to panic, if guards came looking, they might cast blame upon you.

“Should… should you be talking to me? Should you even be in here? Won’t they be looking for you?”

“At this hour? Hardly.” Her voice lilted in rebellious defiance at the suggestion. “No one, not the ministers, magisters, or fadir can cage my mischief!”

“What about your Móðir?”

“She would never!”

You stared at her once again, keenly aware of how slack your jaw had become.

You were going to tell her to leave, you really were… but your curiosity got the better of you.

“Mischief?” you asked; unconsciously leaning forwards.

“Chaos, experiments, sating of curiosity and bending of rules.” She held up a webbed digit as she listed each item. “The keys to progress!”

“Why me? Aren’t there—” You stopped yourself, remembering Astrids words. There were no other spawnlings around, she must be very lonely.

“Because you need something to do. Something other than the mundanities of life here in the palace. If you sit idly in here, the grief will consume you.” Her words cut to the bone, seeing straight through you.

“Uhm…”

“Don’t you want to be part of something greater,” She interrupted as you stumbled over your words. “There is no greater blessing than making chaos to ensure progression.”

She had you dead to rights, though you had no idea what she meant by “chaos to ensure progression.” But that hardly mattered, the princess of all the Seasingers had made you an offer, just like her Móðir, and, well, you didn’t see any better options for how to spend your coming days.

“Alright,” you said quietly, fidgeting with your hands. “What do you need me to do?”

Her lips curled up, gills pulsing. “That’s the beauty, I don’t know yet, but I can tell we will do great things. I am Hege.” She offered you her tiny extended fin.

You extended yours next to hers. “Brynhild.”

So began your bond with a thaumic genius to be, and a royal pain to her advisors.

The paints danced across the page, as your friendship grew.

Your first bit of mischief was sneaking through the grates to the generator systems deep in the heart of the palace. To your utter amazement, you found dozens of diagrams hewn into the organo-metallic polymer walls. She asked you to move components larger and heavier than she could manage, and you obliged, lifting her on your shoulders to tall places she couldn’t reach.

Nobody knew of your schemes until an inspector visited for a yearly audit and caught the two of you. Oh, he was angry at first, until he realized Hege had increased the efficiency of the thaumic output by 20%. The look on the Finnman’s face you’ll never forget.

The canvas twisted again, paints rolling across the fabric through your growing chaotic explorations, improvements, and mischief. Roiling adventures through the palace and an eventual absconding to the outer cylinders.

Rustic pranks and experiments woven into places to measure things you didn’t understand. Miraculous successes that Hege scrawled on sheets of paper larger than she was. Where she was the mastermind of your schemes, you were the physical effort, and you enjoyed it. Lifting things she couldn’t, sneaking around the palace, putting things places to be found or for some purpose you barely understood. It was all ultimately harmless mischief. Occasionally something backfired in your scientific endeavors, and you both got in trouble.

Grinwald was perhaps the biggest surprise in those moments. For a woman tolerant of little nonsense, she had a remarkable obliviousness to your antics.

There were more than a few events where she happened to be in the same vicinity as your schemes.

She’d walk into the hallway or the room, glance your way, very clearly see you both were up to no good.

You’d both freeze, try to press yourselves into shadow, but it was always too late.

Then, as if she hadn’t seen you at all, she’d just turn around and pretend you weren’t there.

Neither of you addressed it, terrified as you were that there was some unspoken rule. Discussing it aloud might, in fact, change things.

Then there was that particular magister from before, his name was Skreyja. You were not alone in receiving his disdain, he looked much the same at your erstwhile partner in chaotic mischief. He kept a closer eye on you both than you would like. He always seemed to be there when something went wrong. So, it became a game to evade him.

This only got worse when Queen Astrid passed away.

Hege failed to outwardly notice his disdain, only his ever-present chill on your adventures. This too went on as the years went by. He was never really of much consequence beyond a lecture, at least until he became one of Aske’s main advisors.

And that’s when you sprung the greatest of your heists.

Stowed yourselves away in a crate and slipped to the outer cylinders! The first royal family members to do so in a lifetime’s memory. It was a wonderous adventure among the streams, the forests and hillsides, the small towns you toured full of lively peoples clinging to the old ways. They were certainly surprised to see you both, still young as you were.

Of course they sent people to track you down. And of course, Skreyja was furious. You brushed him aside, both of you really, as an authority figure out to stomp on your fun.

As the paint faded away, an ache built in your heart, longing for those carefree days.

And You're By Yourself?

Reality swims back in with the continued call and response echoing all around Brynhild.

Now what are we? Will we ever be the same again after what happened?

"Whose fire dances highest with all the light?" the priestess called. In Brynhild’s periphery, a staff of pure white with a head of precious gems and metalwork rose. Directed a choir to answer.

"Aquailian!" she belted, not daring to break the eye contact between herself and Hege. Hege held it, fully aware Brynhild couldn’t look away.

In that moment of colliding gazes, Hege’s eyes caught aflame with a powerful emotion fanned higher by the light pulsing of her gills. Brynhild knew it well, pricks of anxious static worming through her gut and up her spine.

Shame.

Hege broke the line of sight, head turning frontwards with an imperious tilt of the chin as she glided past. But the slight slump of her shoulders signaled the depths of regret that lay between them. Brynhild’s stomach churned and twisted, and for a moment she surely believed that vomit was coming.

No, I don't think we'll ever be the same. That's why I need this command, why I need to go. To prove to her that we're more than that. That I will fulfill her vision, no matter where it takes me.

The childhood visions and experiments had blossomed into serious ambition, vision and hope for a new dawn for their people. A new dawn they’d both committed too.

Now that vow between them felt like a frayed string held taut, threatening to snap. The only way to let that tension out and repair the frays was to get distance and dedication to their roles in the cause.

"Who will call our fires to rise?" The priestess raised an ornate censer, carved of golden metal and glimmering jades.

It caught the light of the stained crystal windows, sizzling in the air before the grand statue of the Mither. Viscous green smoke dripped in belching waves to the floor, passed to another younger Priestess. The elder cleric stepped effortlessly forward, fingers pouring light into the stone and metal of the statue’s palm in sweeping Rustics.

"Aquailian!" Butts of their tridents slammed hard against the ground, cacophony echoing and resonating with the words in a maelstrom of harmony. The whole room shook with the echoes, unsung pitches squirming from the organo-metallic alloys and stones to form their own aria.

"Who shall share in our end?" Lights burned to life behind the eyes of the statue. Four golden fires, star forges of creation all unto themselves.

"Aquailian!"

"Who shall go to the ends of creation and shatter the binding chains?"

"Aquailian!"

"And what shall she proclaim?" The priestess turned in slow motion to face the King and the Princess as they stopped upon the dais of the sparkling Astral throne. Her eyes lay fully on Hege, almost completely ignoring the King.

Shock rippled through the room like a tsunami; the heads of two hundred Finnfolk officers snapping towards the dais as a great and thunderous gasp swept the crowd.

Then, deathly silence. Tension so thick you could cut it with a barnacle knife. Rather than verbally tearing the officers to pieces, Grinwald whirled to face the throne and priestess. All sense of decorum and tradition burned off her face in a fraction of a second. It was replaced by such a wildly uncharacteristic look of shock that Brynhild, for a moment, thought Grinwald might have relieved herself in public. The rest of the officers’ expressions weren't much better.

The Priestess made a mistake?

Brynhild dared to look with everyone in so blatant defiance of protocol.

No. No, she hasn't, she's looking straight at Hege.

Brynhild's neck prickled, gill fronds fluttering with a sudden bout of anxiety.

Some among the political class would surely see this as a coup. A sign the King was preparing to abdicate. That wasn’t necessarily the problem, the problem was that it would be to someone so young. The crown Monarch was supposed to make this address, and only them.

Was this Hege's doing?

Brynhild craned her head, thanking the Mither that Grinwald was still stunned with shock. She moved just enough to get a better look.

The expression roiling on Hege’s face was unmistakable. Her gills were pulsing, fins half flush with blood, and eyes wide. Just as stunned as the rest.

She pivoted her head around the chamber, as if assessing the mood. Perhaps she was more socially observant than Brynhild had long thought…

No, she's not a political creature. But if anything snaps her into awareness of machinations behind the scenes, this will. She's just as surprised as everyone else. Are the priestesses making a play? They’re a strange bunch but… Or… no, it can't be. She's not whispered to a Royal since the end of Embla's reign. Why would she interfere now?

Brynhild’s eyes widened. Unless she sees what the young see.

She couldn't see Aske's face; the angle was wrong. Hege turned her head to look at her father. He nodded, approving the gesture, hesitant as the motion of his head was.

Brynhild’s jaw almost dropped.

Hege turned in a slow arc to the crowd. Unsteady and awkward, as she always was in social situations this dire. Even at this distance, Brynhild’s gaze absorbed the nervous flutter of the princess’s gillflaps. The twitching of one hand as she flexed webbed fingers.

"Too long," Hege began, her voice crackling, nearly faltering. Brynhild bit down on her tongue, watching the trembles worm through Hege’s legs.

You can do it. I know you can.

"Too long have we lingered here in the safety of our wards and hallowed halls. We were driven from the shores; from the lands we called home. We left many to die, and in doing so strayed from the path the Mither set before us." Each word cracked in the air like thunder, as if the very room itself was supporting her nervous song.

That’s when Brynhild knew for certain a hand was on the scale. All the Rustics began to dance around them. The longer she spoke, the more thunderous it grew. The more steam she gained.

The nervousness visibly settled in curling fingers that became a balled fist.

Brynhild's heart pounded in her chest. She and everyone else present, leaned forward, hanging on every sung note.

Her eyes roved off Hege, scanning the Magisters, the ministorial class. Fighting back the entrancement, she focused briefly on them. They gave nothing away, but this could cause problems.

They've been weakening the power of the Royal House for centuries. Whoever they assign to her when I take on my command, they need to be loyal. She'll need it now.

"We have preserved our culture, we have survived, but we are still dying. Every year that passes we waste away from what we were. Now is the time for us to right the course. These new officers, the finest class to ever grace our academy shall be the first of many to expand our reach beyond Gud-Bani. We shall seek out those who were scattered and resume the path which we've been tasked to walk."

The growing storm of Rustics on the walls and floors danced faster, glowed brighter. Brynhild was no Magister, but as she looked on, it was as if new Rustics wove themselves into the air drifting from Hege’s lips, joining the maelstrom. Combined with the harmonies weaving against the backdrop it was almost as if she was projecting, no, as if something were projecting through her.

“I stand before you now not as a child of the royal bloodline, not as princess, but as hope. A lighthouse in the dark to guide us out of the shadow of Finnfelheims gaping absence.”

Weaving a narrative to come that enriched the air with a near physical aura that Brynhild was simply unequipped to understand. It sank into her flesh, teased against her skin. Infernos smoldered in her chest, determination as some long-buried part of her, and all the others present rose to greet this beautiful song calling them to action.

To Brynhild this moment was even more special. It was the fourth time she’d ever heard Hege sing.

Your Song Sends Me Higher

Watercolor brushstrokes burn across a wrinkled canvas with burns along the edges of the memory it encompasses. Moments frozen in time of love, of growing together with your friend, watched over by one who became a Mother in place of the one you lost. Sweeping your heart again with acheing love and deep wells of grief.

The first time you ever heard Hege sing was a black week, the day after you lost your second Móðir.

Queen Astrid the Kind, beloved mother of all seasingers, collapsed in the gardens six fortnights hence the hour in which gloom burned upon all in the palace.

In the fifteen turns of your name since she took you in, she had been strong and healthy. She regularly lifted you and Hege on her back, and carried you about the palace grounds, playing games and pointing out things you’d never see otherwise at your height.

But some illness took to her in the last five.

She grew steadily frailer, weak in constitution. Some days she was bound strictly to bed. She had good and bad days, but the Magisters had no answers, despite a parade of new and old healers. All magic failed to improve her condition. Herbaceous compounds bolstered her health in short spurts but never for long. Even consultation with the nomadic outer cylinder priestesses and shamans gave no solid answers.

The arguments were many, the young petitioned for consultation with the seiðkonur in her temple upon the Croon. But fear of her price bulwarked against this path. You had to dissuade Hege from pursuing that path herself and only succeeded with Grinwald’s intervention. The Magisters and Ministers would frustrate every attempt, especially the middle-favored newcomer Skreyja and his quiet disdain for Hege’s chaotic innovations. The chances of success were low and every moment away would deprive Hege of precious moments with Astrid she would regret forevermore.

For five complete cycles of the cylinder, you watched her waste away, a pale and faded shadow of herself. Barely filling those once glowing dresses, gowns, and robes.

Despite the pain, the physical burden, her eyes never lost that shine, bright as the most polished pearl. Sharp as a jelly’s nematocyst. Right up until the end.

You and Hege looked past this illness; considered it an obstacle to be overcome. Searched for new approaches to try, new concoctions and spells to bear against this unknown, looming villain over one you so dearly loved.

Unlike the joyous adventure of previous escapades, these journeys into mischief and experimentation had a jagged edge to them.

Grinwald’s blatant ignoring of your antics became passive assistance. She’d leave doors unlocked to reagent rooms. Forget pieces of paper with lists of wall fixtures, segments, gates, and doors that needed to be fixed in places you could snatch them.

Fewer jokes and laughs, more earnest urgency in the way you snuck about and borrowed reagents. The intensity in the way Hege worked. This wasn’t a game.

Then, she collapsed.

You weren’t there. Training with Grinwald when the messenger burst through the doors into the middle of your sparring. The blood drained from your watercolor faces, and you rushed across the palace compound to their aid.

They tried to deny you, they had denied Hege and Aske at first, sought to hide and cover up how bad things were. But Grinwald opened doors you could not.

When you stepped into that suffocating chamber of black, she was pale, drained of all the luster. A sharp ache deep in your chest bore its fangs upon seeing her skeletal frame in those sheets. Then her eyes opened and she smiled weakly at you and Hege.

“I pushed too hard. I will be okay in a few mornings to come.” She announced to the room in a soft, barely audible rasp. Like it was nothing more than overexertion. Hege sat next to her, eyes red and rimmed with heavy lines of worry across the scales.

It was a lie, and you all knew it.

The king ushered you out, to give her space to rest. To recover. But not Hege. King Aske never truly took to you the degree the Queen did. The other spawnling of the house who kept his favorite daughter from blowing herself up. His acknowledgement and distance from you mistaken for an adoptive father who struggled with the ides of his expectations. But no, you were wrong, and he proved it now.

You were not family. You were a ward of the state. Unable to do magic, you were of diminished value. The tears came hard that night, hoping beyond hope that the ship would right itself again.

But everything just went downhill from there.

Hege was beside herself, vanishing into the depths of her quarters. You knew her well enough to grasp, in those fleeting moments where she called upon you, she was deep in denial.

Tomes scattered over every open surface and floor. Half scribbled notes, formulations, and arrangements that were utter nonsense to you.

Desperation stank on her scaled flesh, refusing to stop clawing at some potential hope beyond both your reach.

But she was doomed to fail.

And you? Well, you threw yourself into your training, the rage, the anger at fate, at the Mither’s lack of answering your own tear-filled prayers. It weighed so heavily on an acheing young heart.

Grinwald was always there. Never questioned the intensity with which you needed to train. Only stopped you before you collapsed, listened and sat with you through the sobs.

And when you weren’t wearing yourself to the bone slamming metal against wood, you sat next to Astrid’s bed and held her increasingly skeletal hand.

When they would let you in.

Sometimes Hege was there, barely holding everything together.

Two days before the black settled in, she asked for you. The room was filled with a thick haze of anger, and even in her dilapidated state she barked for the King to leave you both alone. Those kind features so twisted with a quiet fury you’d never seen.

But she was all smiles once her beloved husband was gone, apologies and a deep sadness in her eyes. “Brynhild, my darling daughter.”

“Daughter”, the word hit you like a Kraken, instantly reducing you to tears.

She smiled at you with all of her strength. She was naught but bone and sallowed skin in the dim lighting of the room. It was like looking upon a draugr, someone who no longer belonged in the realm of the living.

“I have loved you as my own these last twenty turns of name. I am sorry, sorry that I am not enough, not strong enough to walk with you for the many more you deserve. I deeply regret my coming absence, the fight you’ll have to navigate against those who see you not for what you can be, but for the flaws they see as impossible to overcome. I hoped to see the future you would build. I am so sorry my love, but I have a favor to ask of you yet.” She rasped, pausing for a creaky inhale that burned a pit in your gut.

Tears blurred down your cheeks as you managed a nod.

“Anything, Móðir,” you offered on instinct, barely holding back the ugly sobs.

“I loathe to shackle you, to ask something of you so young, but Hege is too pure for this world. Too lost in the depths of her dreams and ideals. There are those, even now, who creep in with the shadows crawling in place of my dimming light. She will need you in the times to come. You will need her in the deep trials ahead. I do not ask this promise lightly, but will you protect her in the trials to be?”

You’d seen Skreyja’s momentary twitching sneers buried beneath the polite refrain of political gainsay. You didn’t know if she meant him or some other force beyond.

Yet still you didn’t fully understand.

In the dark of the room her eyes glew bright, unfocused and seeing something more. You realized as you sat there, she saw all the things beyond time and you.

“I will try,” was all you could manage, voice breaking in the oppressive dark.

She squeezed your hand, gazing through you with sad and tired eyes. In that moment there was something deeper, something more. Something that felt as if you were gazing upon all creation in the golden light of her brilliant quadruple orbs.

This made no sense, as when you blinked, she only had two, which closed.

She sang no more that night.

When you left that suffocating space you heard the magisters speak to Aske in hushed, small whispers.

You missed Hege there in a chair in the dark.

“There’s nothing more we can do Majesty, I’m sorry. She has but hours until the end.”

They were wrong.

You were both there when she drew her last breath a full two days past their prediction, such was her strength of will.

With her last rasping breaths, she sang to Hege softly. "Remember, I will always love you." in a voice that filled the room with ethereal melodic echoes.

Her voice was otherworldly. Like a songbird, lyrical, free, plunging the singer and all who listened in the deepest swirls of emotion and interpretation.

Then, her Lifesong came to a quiet close.

The last moment you remember in that suffocating room was a brief flicker of a sated grin writhing across Skreyja’s face. Gone as quickly as it appeared. Perhaps you should have put it all together then, but you, Brynhild of the Growing Storm, were not ready to realize that truth.

You had never felt more alone than when Grinwald softly placed a hand on your shoulder, gently telling you it was time to go. Everyone else was long departed and you were so very numb.

In a listless haze you wandered the disparate crystal halls until you found yourself in the Garden. It seemed as though all the tones, pallets and flecks of color were dimmed and grey. Even the elaborate statues, invocations, lustrous bannerments and fixtures seemed dulled by the loss of their caretaker. Astrid had so loved the gardens; she practically made them her own.

A bittersweet flowing melody filled the air, pure notes bridging to the corundum starry sky far above in a quaking spectacle of light and fire.

Snared in the emotion squirming through your skull with each anguished note, you drifted along. You found her atop the hill where Astrid had fallen, your best friend in all the world, pouring her soul into a heart wrenching song.

She sang for her Móðir, the loss and deep purple grief pouring the tears from your eyes.

She sang for you, what you’d lost twice now. For the pain of fleshy connection you didn’t share. The wayward cast of the King’s love away from your heart.

She sang for all the seasingers, their hearts shattered at the loss of a beloved symbol of kindness and hope for the future.

Then, she sang for herself, fat droplets of salty tears running down her cheeks as you came to sit next to her.

How she had failed to save one she so deeply loved. For the loss of support and kindness and what would be missed in the future. You reached then, and pulled her in, listening to her song ring in your ears.

And then she sang for something else you didn’t fully understand, not yet at least. A deep, squirming, yearning and discomfort of the skin and flesh she was born in. As if Astrid’s departure had stripped a precious protective layer between her and the world. Exposed some hidden insecurity to the full whims of a darkened night.

Maybe you missed it before, but it was impossible to ignore now.

When she could sing no more you held her. You held her beneath the warm summer sky, clinging to each other as the paint swirled at your feet and above, clinging to your scales and flesh as the scene changed.

The second time she sang for you was on a sleepy autumn evening in the outer cylinder, staring up at distant mountains. The white caps of their snowy tops glimmering in the setting light of the corundum sky, a stream gently burbling nearby.

Adolescence had its powerful hold over you, hormones raging as you towered ever taller with each cycle that ticked on by.

You laughed in the early afternoon, making camp with her. Bantering about how furious Skreyja would be with your escapade. But there was a stiffness to her words and gestures that scratched at the back of your skull.

Strange murmurs sat in your belly when you looked at Finnwomen now. Befuddling, longing desires for touch, the collision of lips and flesh that dragged fire squirming up the back of your neck, storms in your belly and rapid oscillations of gills that you couldn’t hide.

It was at its worst around Hege.

You didn’t know why.

It was the first time you were truly beginning to grasp feelings for her. The soft love of friendship beginning to burn in your chest like aldrnari’s fire. You wondered then, as you often did, if she was beginning to feel the same.

Her eyes stared at the growing embers of the campfire, avoiding your gaze. For a moment, you were afraid she knew of the strange, bottled desire sitting deep in your guts.

Your mind reminded you she’d been distant the past few days, covering more of her flesh than usual. This happened from time to time, but you’d learned early on that asking got you nowhere. She simply didn’t want to talk about it.

“Brynhild, do you ever wish to hide from the world?” she asked.

They were her first words of the night.

You looked at her, before looking off towards the glimmering snowcaps turning the question over in your mind.

“Often. There’re so many expectations on me. I—I worry I won’t be able to live up to my name,” you admitted. “That I’ll have nothing to offer—and whenever magic is asked after, I—” you trailed off letting the words fail.

You thought of all the things you couldn’t do without Hege’s devices, the tiny Rustic invocations needed to access public transit, the flow and slipways throughout New Finnfolkaheem, simple appliances and thaumic tech abounds.

“I want to bury myself in sand beneath the sea and lay there until the Undersky claims me. It’s not enough, to be growing into a warrior my namesake would be proud of, to wield these strange tools you make for me and best all others who come my way. I am less for—” you stumbled over the words. “I am less for my lack of magic.”

Hege was quiet in the light of the fire.

“Some days, I wish to run away from it all. Abandon the throne, the crown and blood. Become a hermit in the deep wilderness of the cylinders or flee to the world beyond. Go to a place where all I have to worry about is my designs, the magic, and the future heights I would take us all too. Perhaps if I went to the Witch of the Lake she would take—” she trailed off.

You sat in silence together beneath the false corundum starry sky, absorbing her words, before finally finding the right courage to provide structural support for her.

“I know,” you responded simply. You did; you really did. After discovering your dysthaumia, you understood the impulse. Not in the context she spoke of, but there were things that were beginning to stand out. “We could.”

“Could?” She looked up at you.

“Run-away together. To the Witch of the Croon, or to the world beyond. Brynhild and Hege against the wider world. No titles, no princess and line of Agrusa, just us.”

Her eyes softened, gills gently pulsing.

“You’re sweet Brynhild. I am glad for you.” She looked back down into the fire.

The compliment burned in your mind, heart hammering in your chest.

“But these are idle dreams.”

“I know,” you said simply, leaning back against the tree. Knowing she would never abandon your people.

She said nothing back, poking the fire in its pit with a stick.

You looked at her then, really looked at her. You both were almost fully grown, and it was hard not to notice how small Hege was. That wasn’t all, where protrusions had grown more weighty in your chest, hers had stayed flat and you had no explanation for that. Perhaps you even dismissed it, it was rare for Finnwomen to be that small. Maybe it was also rare for them to be that flat of chest? But neither of you were particularly normal by your people’s standards, and it endeared her more to you.

Maybe you should have put the pieces together earlier, she dropped so many hints.

She sang then as you sat with your thoughts. Pure wordless notes cutting through the bubbling of the stream, overshadowing the squeaking and cricketing of insects deep in the woods.

It resonated with that same acheing discomfort, skin itching and sitting wrong across your bones.

Pierced deep into that well of despair and insecurity buzzing around your dysthaumia and dragged it into the light.

Your stomach twisted in knots in your belly, feeling the rawness of her emotion intertwining with your own. Harmonic penitence.

It clicked in that moment why she never let you linger on the alienness of dysthaumia.

Of how wrong it felt, doing everything she could to make it easy to be yourself. All that effort to allow you to pursue what you desired despite it.

It’s because she suffered a wrongness deep inside her, an incorrectness and inadequacy of the flesh that was apparently beyond her reach to correct.

Something you didn’t fully understand, couldn’t because your shape was perfectly you. Yet in that moment you understood, in the way her song touched your dysthuamia; the way It burned through the harmony and rhythm of her wordless notes into your crimson scaled flesh.

So, you listened and hoped beyond hope she would find a way to right the dissonance of her flesh placed upon her by the world.

And she did.

The swirl of color brightened across the page as you recalled the third time she sang to you. The hope of resolution within grasp, and the joy burning in the notes. You knew then that she had found her glowing solution. Celebrated with her, dancing in the artificial moonlight of that hot summer night in her quarters.

And then, it all fell apart.

I Won't Accept Defeat

Hege’s song carried through Brynhild’s flesh and bone, as it had in the times before.

Mesmerizing, confusing, Brynhild didn’t quite understand the song’s magistry or how it moved the way it did, even now.

It was like a whole different degree of Magistry, one so far beyond her it was hopelessly out of reach of her comprehension.

Right now, though, right here she understood the voice. It was pure, crackling with hope and possible futures and triumphant images of a resurgent world where they no longer had to hide. A better world. But there was an undertone to it. A profound bittersweet sadness that brought tears to the eyes. Even Grinwald, the woman of corundum flesh, began to sniffle.

It was doleful, as if Hege was swept up in a deep otherworldly melancholy. A sadness so thick and rich that it threatened to reduce all of them to blubbering. A longing for something more tore through the crowd. It dug its claws into Brynhild’s heart as she pressed down the memory trying to rise.

Deep sentiments and emotions Brynhild didn't know she was capable of, flowed through every inch of flesh and nerve. It was all so ethereal, and it stole every ounce of reason from every person in the room except one.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Grand Magister Skreyja. His sickly yellow-green scales tinged with dark red. He was fuming.

♫ In the spring we sailed for home,
To retrieve those forgotten bones,
But we lost our guide along the way,
And found ourselves stumbling in the spray.

So, find your voice, my lovely friends,
Strap into interpretation's saddle,
Rise in joy as it all unravels
As your arms take hold of our mantle
And reclaim that old, desperate choice.♫

♫ So come onto the planes of Orkney
Where our old friends wept against the sea,
And lets dance against the tempest's sky
She's fire, she's freedom, she's got our hopes in
The heart of her fingers shifting motions
It's honor, it's glory, beneath the Mither's devotion
There's something building in every measure of your emotion, it's searing
Into your hearts divide. ♫

The symphony of her voice electrified every ounce of air in the chamber as it echoed and faded. Brynhild reopened her eyes as thunder crackled in the sky outside and the thick pitter pats of rain came on. She wondered for a moment if Hege called it down.

Hege stood on the edge of the dais, eyes unfocused swaying as if she’d just come out of a trance. She wavered in place and began to tip.

A trance? Or a vision?

Aske caught her as she fell. This seemed to break the enchantment strangling the room.

Murmurs rose among the crowd. Someone stomped their foot, an officer banged their trident butt on the floor.

Brynhild realized, with quiet confusion, it was her, she was banging it on the metal. For a fraction of a moment, there was a laugh, somewhere behind her. She turned her head to look and caught the barest hint of a swirling limb, formed from Rustics. It was sinking back into the column. It was gone an instant later. The deed was done. A ripple of stomps and banging trident butts spread outwards through the room, echoing in its own harmonious reply tinged with uncertainty.

"Thank you," Aske called to the crowd. A raised hand brang the raucous melody to a halt.

"What a wonderful, if unexpected, ceremony. Come now, let us get to the part that our fresh trainees have been waiting for excitedly." The jolly king chuckled quietly with a raw melancholy and nervousness. The absence in his eyes, in his voice never fading since the death of Astrid.

A hollow shell of the man he once was.

A porter handed him a scroll encrusted with multi-colored Rustic seals.

"As is the tradition of the matter, when I call your name of birth, please come forth to receive your assignment."

Brynhild straightened as Grinwald turned back to the group with a death stare that immediately restored order. Bewilderment was still present in the light of her eyes.

This is it. Perhaps I should temper my expectations. They don't give Kraken commands to greenhorns. Maybe something smaller at first. Even one of the Mahi's would be a boon.

She tried to focus on the excitement again. But the ceremony, the song, lingered in her mind.

Names rattled off in order of alignment. One by one, with each name called anticipation built in Brynhild's chest. Her moment seemed to barrel down atop her at furious speed and yet crawled towards her like a seaslug.

"Brynhild, House of Agrusa." Stomps rose from the crowd as she marched with perfect physical form down the aisle.

Her approach halted before the King, and the Crown Princess. She presented her trident as she’d been taught, in a series of perfect twirls and spins, before kneeling. In that moment of artful display, her eyes met Hege’s in a brief exchange of distant congratulations.

"By the Mither's blessing I bequeath upon you command as an officer of the Royal Guard. You will be assigned to the family retinue." The anticipation of the room abruptly deflated, as if the swim bladder of a float fish had been abruptly popped. The world around Brynhild trickled away, time slowing to a halt.

Her stomach bottomed and then dropped. Dread gnashed its teeth against the walls of her belly.

It must be a mistake. This can’t be.

Hege's gaze flicked to her father. Her gills flared open, eyes wide in shock, lips curled strangely. It was a new expression.

Was it anger?

Disbelief?

Horror?

"Congratulations my dear Brynhild, it's a role of great honor," Aske commended her, picking up on the room’s shock. "As is the tradition, we shall feast and sing once all candidates have received their assignments."

There was nothing to celebrate about this. She’d been sidelined. Benched. Her lack of Magistry, being taken in but not accepted as family, all of it haunted her. Skreyja, Aske. This must be their conspiracy to keep her leashed, to keep the wounds between them from healing.

Her future, and any hope of mending what had happened with Hege was gone in an instant. She’d never be able to prove herself, get the distance they both needed.

All opportunity evaporated with a single slip of paper. As she rose to return to her position in the formation, that hollow ache in her bones that first arose in that fire so many years ago ripped a hole deep inside.

She had the deepest sinking feeling that Hege would be her direct assignment.

And A Thousand Years Would Be Worth The Wait

Brynhild stood to the side of the door of Hege’s tower, Grinwald positioned on the other side.

She was alert, but more relaxed than she would be in any other location, which was a paradox in and of itself given what had happened here ten years earlier.

Though she couldn’t feel them, the many lines of fluttering Rustics weaving through the walls and door beheld a dizzying number of protective and destructive concepts ready to discharge upon an intruder at a moment’s notice.

Many were of Hege’s own design. Others were already there long before.

Brynhild did everything in her power not to look at the princess, going so far as to stare at the overly dramatic plant in one corner. It was starting to wilt, despite having been watered not an hour earlier.

Hege wasn’t making it easy to not look at her. She’d parked herself at a positively ancient sea-maple table. It had more ornate woodworking than the doors of the grand throne hall and it was right in the center of the room.

And with a sudden flick of her fingers, a watering can lifted off a shelf and sprinkled its contents on the primadonna plant.

The princess was grinding thumb and forefinger into the scales of her temples, just as she had done when they were children when presented with a conundrum. Her mumbles were incomprehensible, but almost certainly pertained to some arcane innovation prototype.

The Rustics were practically pouring from her lips into the paper.

Both Brynhild and Grinwald straightened when Hege abruptly slammed the tome closed and then dramatically sighed.

“No, no, no. It’s not in this one either.” She slumped in the chair, then tilted her head forward to press forehead to the wood.

Brynhild glanced at Grinwald, who met the look with a raised eyebrow.

‘You know her better than I do. What’s about to happen?’ was the implied question.

Brynhild shrugged. ‘Could be anything.’

‘Anything’ here meant she either walked upstairs or decided to run off to the library to find what she actually needed.

Hege straightened and abandoned the chair before Grinwald could mime further questions, walking towards the pair. Grinwald opened the door for Hege when it was clear she wasn’t going to veer up the stairs.

But she didn’t step out. She stopped before them, looking at Grinwald and ignoring Brynhild.

“Grinwald, you can go home for the night.”

“Majesty?” Grinwald blinked, looking at Hege, and then glancing at Brynhild.

“Its fine. I need to make a trip across the grounds to the library, but I don’t need you both.”

Grinwald hesitated, meeting Brynhild’s gaze. Brynhild realized then that Grinwald must have picked up on the tension between them for the past ten years. How could she not have?

“Majesty, if it would make you more comfortable, I could go and Grinwald stay with you for the night.”

“It wouldn’t,” Hege said, still not looking at Brynhild. Heat crawled up the back of Brynhild’s neck.

When Aske had died… she fully expected Hege to reassign her. But she hadn’t. And now, here she was telling Grinwald to go and Brynhild to stay.

What is she doing?

“If Majesty is sure—”

“I am.” Hege cut Grinwald off.

Grinwald simply nodded, gave Brynhild an inscrutable look, and departed. Hege waited until she was fully out of sight before stepping out of the tower.

Brynhild followed, at an appropriate distance as they trekked silently through the quiet crystal and metal halls of the palace. A thick knot of tension sat suspended across the gap between them.

Brynhild wanted to say something. Anything. Apologize. Tell Hege she missed her. But the words never came, and her mouth refused to move.

She found them, abruptly, in the gardens with their glimmering scultures, rare and exotic plants, and amenities aplenty. They walked past the spiraling flowering plants and corals deeper in. It wasn’t the normal straight route to the library. And there it was, the spot where, so very long ago, Brynhild had held Hege as they mourned Astrid’s departure.

At the foot of the hill next to the rocks they once climbed every evening, Hege came to a sudden stop. Brynhild almost noticed too late and came to a wheeling stop to avoid running her over. She backed up slowly, keeping space between the two of them.

She watched the muscles in Hege’s neck tense and relax, tense and relax.

“Brynhild?” she finally asked. The tone was gentle, the same intonation she’d once frequently used before a deep conversation. She hadn’t used it to address Brynhild since that night. Heat crawled up the back of Brynhild’s neck.

“Yes, majesty?” Brynhild defaulted to the formal address in this moment, not wanting to violate that space that had been so clearly demarcated between them in both their roles.

She realized, too late, the mistake.

Her stomach sank in her scaled belly as Hege’s shoulders bunched up tightly to her frame. Silence sat heavy between them for a moment.

“Nevermind.” Hege started walking again, and the opportunity slipped away.

Brynhild’s chest tightened in a vice. Breathing suddenly hard as she fully grasped the slipped chance.

Idiot, why did I address her like that? Why?! Why didn’t I use her name! She was looking to talk as just friends. What are you doing?

She let her shoulders sag as they walked, well as much as they could while she was still on alert.

The Library stood proudly before the two of them, ancient heavy doors rich with scenes of history and myth that threatened to drown Brynhild’s mind in memory.

Hege stood before it, hand resting on the ringed handle glimmering with gold and gemstones.

“Brynhild?” she asked again in that same soft tone. Brynhild’s heart welled, a second chance presenting itself in the luminous light of the flickering Rustic torches.

“Yes, Hege?” The desperation almost leaked into Brynhild’s voice. Almost.

No bunching of shoulders this time, a quiet relaxation in the princess’s muscles.

“I’m not ready… Yet. But someday, I will be.” The statement flamed around Hege’s frame, as if the words were carving into the air and thus Brynhild’s mind.

Brynhild didn’t know what to say, or if saying anything would be any good. So, she simply acknowledged it for what it was.

“Okay. I’ll be here.”

Wind rustled through chimes as Hege turned her head to look at Brynhild with one crystal blue eye.

Flame wicked and thundered in Hege’s irises. It swirled all around Brynhild, on the cusp of swallowing her in the depths of being that lay within.

Then Hege was looking forward again and Brynhild was staring at the back of her neck.

“Go get some rest. I’ll be fine on my own for now.”

Brynhild blinked, and hesitated.

“Are you sure?”

“Very. You’ve earned a rest.” She opened the door and walked into the Library before Brynhild could debate further.

The trip back to her room was a blur of halls and moving artworks. Brynhild barely registered the soft mattress or the silk algal sheets as she stared at the dark ceiling.

All she knew then was that there was resolution on the horizon. Maybe they could finally heal from that horrible night ten years ago.

Lights Out, Follow The Noise

The night that changed everything between the two of you was a matte painting of throbbing, hot colors and emotion.

You arrived before the gleaming, sea-oak door marked in burning letters with Hege’s name. Rustics twirled over every inch of wood, carved and freely flowing fluorescent lights dancing in the reflections of your crimson scales.

You knocked, the marks grasping and clinging at your curled fist. Whispers simmered in your finned ears. Threads of memory coiled in your skull drawing forth names and key aspects.

A mechanical click cut through the thickening silence. The door unlocked. It opened of its own accord, without your interference. In the moment in-between it was almost as if a woman’s voice filled your ears, whispering some future yet unseen.

Then you were standing in the middle of Hege’s kitchenette.

You rubbed the side of your skull, having lost any memory of moving across the crystal-inlaid-wood floor.

The lingering aromas of a homemade meal brushed against your nostrils. Books and half-finished experimental aggregations of metal, wood, and crystal sat on the counters, tables, and floor.

“Hege?” You called into the space, scanning for the traces of her golden scales amongst the chaos of a thaumic-genius’s habitation.

Only silence greeted you.

“She must be upstairs,” you murmured to yourself, looking to the fractally spiraling steps of the tower she called her own.

You considered going up them to knock on her bedchamber door but banished it just as quickly. You’d not been up there since the throes of adolescence and maturation spindled you into a ball of sapphic desire.

Nor had she invited you that far since.

Unspoken boundaries between you that carved an acheing throb in your heart, but you weren’t about to risk what connections you had.

Then, she screamed.

A sharp, surprised squeal that pitted your gut with alarm.

Instinct and training seized hold, bounding the stairs in heavy stomps. Your heart thundered in your chest, heavy breaths filling your ears. She was in danger; she needed you now.

The door creaked and thumped beneath your webbed digits, flying open with a loud bang.

You froze, eyes wide in shock at the state of the room, at Hege.

Outwardly spiraling fractals connected by lines of glowing light consumed the floor. Circles, Rustics pulsing with heat and light, all of it flowing inwards through objects and places of power towards the center.

Gasping for air in the middle of it all was Hege. She was half bent over. Runic marks flowed across every inch of her barren flesh. She looked up at the bang of the door, expression twisting.

Her gills were flared wide open, eyes wide and dripping with dread.

Your own horror writhed across your flared open gills, extended fins, and gaping mouth in her mirrors.

“Oh fukka!” Hege cried and fell to the floor writhing in spasms of muscle and flesh.

There and then she exposed the truth to you without meaning to. The reason for her height and the discomfort of her flesh.

Shown before she was ready, if she would have ever been.

Time slowed to a crawl as more than 40 years of observation and lightly dismissed detail clicked into place. Heat crawled up the crimson matte paint of your neck, shame at being exposed to her deepest, darkest secret without being invited into that confidence.

But now she was in danger, and you had to do something.

“Hege!” you cried, shifting as if to move into the room.

“Don’t!” she shouted at you; her voice filled with such commanding emotion. You recoiled, as if struck by a wayward hand. "I don't know what will happen if someone else steps in!"

You panicked, trying to think of what to do. "I should get your father, he'll kno—"

"No! You especially should not do that."

You took another step back, finally looking away. Your gills oscillated in three second intervals.

"I don't know why it feels like this, but it's what I want. It's what I need, Brynhild. I can't let it stop. I can’t keep going like this. Please, please don't do something that will stop it."

The fear in her voice, the warble in her vocal cords, it told you what she was doing. How important it was.

Fleshcrafting.

What now?

Why did you have to barge in?

Why didn’t you call out first, see if she needed you?

"Do you want me to go? I won't leave you like this but I can…"

"No. Stay, I don't — in case something does go wrong, I don't want to be alone. Just don't look at me." Another sharp gasp and the sound of shifting flesh filled the air. “I don’t ever want to be seen like this again.”

The sound of her change seared in your mind forever, as the paint faded. You spent the rest of the night sitting in the doorframe once it was all done.

She’d cried.

Cried until the false moon was high in the night sky. Then she asked you to go.

Nothing was ever the same between you after. A chasm, a void in your chest where inseparable friendship once laid as she put distance between you.

Every Word Shot Down In Flames

Brynhild jolted into wakefulness. Roaring klaxons filling the air of the palace.

She bolted from bed, instinct taking over as the trident came free of its holder on the wall, leaping across the gap to her hand. She burst through the door of the chamber, charging out into the hallway like a moon-sickle hammerhead. Adrenaline screamed in her veins as she looked left and right.

Magisters and guards were running back and forth like anchovies swept up by a riptide current. Brynhild’s hand snatched out and grabbed a minister.

“What’s going on?!” She practically roared in his face. He shrunk in her grasp.

“Fire! The Library is on fire!”

Brynhild’s eyes widened. “Hege. Hege.”

“Hege?” The blue-scaled Finnman asked wide-eyed.

“She sent me away for the evening while she was in the Library.”

His eyes widened.

Brynhild dropped him, turned, and sprinted. Ministers and Magisters swerved, tripped, fell, and tumbled to get out of her accelerating mass.

Her heart drummed in her chest. Feet pounded against stone, metal, and crystal. The growing crowd of confused faces parted before her like when Triemedes parted the Orcadian Lochs to put Terran deep in the earth.

She skidded to a halt on the grass, staring up at the firestorm filling the night sky. The grand spiral columns of the royal library were stained with growing smoke and ash. Its structure groaned over the roaring Klaxons. Service workers were already rushing to the building with their Rustics and vehicles, but the fire was already huge.

Brynhild lept forward, straight over several Finnmen frozen on the lawn. Someone’s hands slipped off her arm, trying to get her to stop, but she didn’t. The doors to the Library crumpled beneath her hands, flaying apart and weakened by the heat in a shower of splinters.

She pressed the hem of her top over her mouth to protect her airway from the smoke.

“Hege!” she shouted, voice drowned by the roar of the flames. A ceiling beam collapsed somewhere ahead, a shower of masonry and crystal smashing into the floor and shaking the structure. The lustrous golden timepiece was melting, shelves tumbling down into showers of sparks and wood.

Brynhild waded into the inferno, clearing a path with her trident, ignoring the heat pulsing against her flesh.

She found the lump deep in the shattered shelves, blackened and burnt.

“Hege!” Brynhild cried over the roar of the flame. She braced and lifted the once ornate and beautifully decorated shelf. It rose with a great groan pulling it up and over her head.

With a great roar, she flung it. Wood shattered as it smashed a clean path through the maze of burning debris.

Brynhild lifted the broken and burnt body from the rubble, wrapping it delicately in her cloak. No pulse, no breathing, no trace of life.

In that moment, despite the inferno blazing around her, Brynhild’s heart broke. Shattered into a million pieces. She cradled Hege close. Rocked her, whispering.

“Don’t go. Please don’t go without me.”

Tears tried to pour from her eyes, evaporating in the rampant heat as she walked towards the smoke occluded doors. Didn’t run, walked. All around her structural beams gave way, shelves collapsed, tumbling with calamitous noise.

She emerged from the smoke like a ship cutting through the grimmest fog.

Her scales were dried out by the heat and fire, shallow surface burns throbbing against her forearms and legs.

She stood framed by the flames, smoke pouring from the once great hall of knowledge behind her. She stared up to the sky above, and then down at the mass of Finnfolk, multi-colored scales a rainbow in the dancing luminescence of the hateful fire.

The din and roar of chattering voices, hundreds of eyes staring at the flames, frozen in inaction. Some pointed at Brynhild, others soon joining, and then all eyes were on her and her once precious cargo.

Brynhild stared out at them, those who had stood by and watched while the fire consumed all that she had left. Her face twisted in acheing grief. She took a deep shuddering breath.

“The Line of Aquailian is gone,” Brynhild sung with deep sorrow burning in the air from her voice. “H-Hege is gone.”

The world seemed to stand still, even the flames seemed to freeze in acknowledgement of what had been taken. The crowd stared, gills opening wide, hands flying to mouths.

A line unbroken for more than 10,000 years, extinguished in a single, final night.

Brynhild’s legs moved of their own volition carrying her forward down the stairs. Reality swirled about her head; vision blurred with the weight of what was gone. The crowd parted before her, webbed digits reaching, touching the bundle that was their princess. Their hope for an ambitious future was taken from them on this terrible night.

Grinwald’s grim face met her at the edge of the crowd, a cadre of guards surrounding Brynhild.

A whisper in her ear. “Where will you take her?” Acknowledgement, quiet as it was powerful, of Hege being her last link of family in this darkened world.

A voice that wasn’t Brynhild’s own swam through her throat into the world.

“To the heart of the temple, where I shall claim her bones.”

Grinwald stepped back in surprise, the color of the air swarming with the weight of sudden realness beyond what any had ever seen in these halls. Then it was gone.

“As the Mither wills.” Grinwald’s hands shook, but Brynhild was in a nightmare all her own and beyond hearing. The singular purpose of bringing her precious cargo to safety overwhelmed all other drivers.

Everything else was a blur, as she found herself once more in that temple to time. The mirror of the throne room in its ornate Rustic murals and columns shaped into statues and depictions of rulers of the past. The Priestesses, barren flesh borne to the eyes of the Mither, let her in but barred Grinwald and the guards with tridents.

Through the haze of numb purpose she heard, “The goddess forbids all but the aggrieved this night.”

The Mither’s word was law. Brynhild walked step by step across the crystal path through time and the great Astral sea stained into the temple ground. She stopped before the immense carved statue of the Mither that dominated the room. Here her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor clinging to the bundle.

Here beneath the four golden eyes of the creation goddess upon a great mass of fertile dirt, she wept. Wept for all that had been taken from her, every link in her familial chain cruelly snatched away by the jaws of the Undersky.

What was she without Hege?

Without Astrid?

Without her parents?

Without the care and adoration crafted into a shield against the cruelties of the world?

A dysthaumic girl, barely a young adult, in the eyes of the world. A failure of a royal guard who wasn’t there when she was needed most.

“I’ve lost everything,” Brynhild croaked out, body shaking with tears. “I failed you Hege. I should have been there. I could have gotten you out. Why did I leave? Why did I go when you told me to? Why didn’t I stay?”

Brynhild slumped, squeezing the bundle against her. She pulled the cloth away to rub the burnt and ashened flesh of the body’s cheeks. Brittle flakes disintegrated as she wept, tears streaking ash into the cloth.

The goddesses’s golden eyes stared down at her, weighing all her failures on the scales of the Astral Sea. She wept, realizing then and there what she should have realized so long ago. She loved Hege. She loved her. Deep and binding love of romantic and platonic entwining with the flesh now cold and lifeless. They were the hope for the future, the burning pyre signaling to all that a better future was coming.

“Goddess, I failed you,” she weeps to the lifeless statue.

It was all gone. Her love, broken and burnt in the flames of their people’s written knowledge.

“Why didn’t you take me too?” She looked up at the statue, looming. “I have nothing left.” She gasps for air pressing her face into the cloth, chest pressing into the dirt.

The air cracked with the thunderous rumbling of something of immense mass moving. She froze, slowly looking up, Shadows changed on the floors and walls of the temple. Lit candles and censers were buffeted by wind and then extinguished. The star-studded crystal floors around the winding path dropped into the waves of Astral Star sea. Dust, rock, and twirling galaxies danced above.

Brynhild trembled and slowly looked up. The crystal and organo-metallic green skin of the statue flushed into shifting flesh, oscillating into an infinite changing array of tentacles, claws, and writhing limbs.

A grand green hand scooped through the stars beneath the soil, lifting Brynhild and her bundle through nebulae and clouded planets into a warm and loving sky. She was frozen as the hand came to a halt, held before four auric spheres in an incomprehensible face embodying the fabric and web of creation.

“Child,” she spoke to Brynhild, voice consuming her entire existence in the rasping song of infinite worlds. “All is not as it seems.”

Brynhild stared, wide-eyed, as one of many arms shifted, pointing. At first Brynhild thought the goddess was pointing at her, and then she realized the Mither was pointing at the bundle. Brynhild looked down at the body and then back up at the monolith of writhing flesh and concept.

“Mither, please, what do you mean?”

“Deceit pollutes the air of my children. The time has come to fulfill oaths and promises to protect the future you swore in cycles past.”

“I don’t understand!” Brynhild closed her eyes, a fist smacking the soil. “What do you mean?!”

When she opened her eyes again, the temple had returned. The statue once more Inert, finger still pointing at the cloth wrapped form. The goddess was silent.

Brynhild laid the body on the ground, hands shaking as she unwound the algal-derived fabric, looking closer now.

As she was scanning the shape, she saw it.

The body did not have a certain something. A feature that Hege had not gotten rid of on that faithful night. The thought made Brynhild turn her head away in hot shame.

Confusion grasped her brain.

Then realization.

“It’s not her.” Her hands shook harder as she rose, staring down at the body. “It’s not her… but where is she?”

A stranger? A sacrifice? Some poor minister? Magister? A child easily mistaken for her?

Brynhild looked up at the Goddess statue slowly, grappling with the truth of the situation.

The light of the false sun streamed through windows as she wandered the halls of the palace, lost and aimless. She’d stood in Hege’s quarters for hours, hoping for some clue to jump out.

Some had tried to stop her in the grandiose hallways, get her to come sit somewhere, eat something. None of it penetrated the fog of confused grief.

Now she wandered without a purpose, no idea where to look, unsure of who to trust, who would know.

It was late into that morning that she was shaken from the trance.

A commotion ahead. She flattened herself into the long shadows as Skreyja and a group of guards rounded a corner, hauling Grinwald along behind them.

“What is the meaning of this?! Unhand me! I am captain of the Royal Guard, and you cannot haul me out of my quarters in this manner!”

“A captain of the Royal Guard who failed the singular most important task required of them. Oath to protect the line of Aquailian at all costs,” Skreyja’s voice dripped with contempt. “Now she is dead, and no one was there to save her. The blame falls upon you and the other Royal Guards. Where were you? Asleep in your chambers? Drunk in the palace mead hall?”

“This is outrageous!”

“It’s perfectly reasonable to hold negligence to account dear Grinwald.”

“You don’t have the authority—”

“The monarchal line is dead, and we are without executive head of state. By right as Chief Magister, change of regime and designation of a new head falls to me.”

Grinwald stared at him as they came to a stop in the hallway.

He took her chin in his slimey hand. “It is time for us all to wake up, leave the past behind and forge a new era. One where we take the fight to the demons above. Thank you for volunteering to be one of the first soldiers.”

Brynhild was abruptly slammed, memory flashing through her mind. The fire that took her parents, the after reports of accelerants in strange places in the house.

Skreyja there in the moment when she was taken away.

His lurking presence, building disagreements with Astrid. Her abrupt illness, rapid decline and changes in policies.

Aske’s sudden departure after assigning Brynhild to Hege.

The cannisters in the library. Identical to the ones used in her own home. Brynhild clenched her fist, fourtyfour years of history slamming into her stomach like a Kraken’s beam weapon.

He did this. He hurt, no, killed his fellow Sea Singers. For what? Power? Ambition? She fought with every fiber of her being not to leap out then and there. This crime could not go unmet.

“No… no it…” Grinwald’s face twisted through anguish, disbelief, dismay, and then cold rage. “It was you. You did this. It was always you. I should have known, I should have kept you under closer watch. The fires, Astrid, Aske, now her too. When did you fall? When did he corrupt you?”

Skreyja released her and stood up, wiping his hand on his robes. “You three, take her away for the transports to the outer cylinder.”

Grinwald fought tooth and nail against the guards dragging her.

“This is not over! The Mither will not forget this Skreyja! One day, the whole world will come to know what you’ve done!”

Skreyja ignored her, already moving on to the four guards that remained. Brynhild’s attention dragged back to Grinwald, tempted to leap out and free her old teacher from the grasp of these traitors. Their eyes met in the black, Grinwald’s widening.

She shook her head furiously, gills oscillating in rapid strokes. ‘Don’t throw your life away now, find a way out and get help.’ The unspoken message passed between them.

Then she was gone.

“Griss, Ledrhals, Stella, and you… whatever your name is, go deal with our loose end. Do not fail. Then find the Agrusa child. Force your way into the temple if you must.”

“So, finish off the princess and we swap the body with the simulacrum?”

“Easy work by all other comparisons.”

“Fools!” Skreyja stepped forward and slapped Griss across the face, almost knocking her to the ground. “That ‘easy work’ slew twenty-five of my best men with an Elder Mark! She is a force to be reckoned with. Kill her quickly, if she’s alive. Do not underestimate her and fail me, she will end you.” He simmered for a moment. Then he turned with a flourish of his cloak, and vanished into the halls beyond, leaving the guards looking bewildered.

All the other words blurred together as the truth smashed into Brynhild.

Hege was alive.

She knew what she needed to do, fingers tightening around Segrusa’s legendary trident.

She slipped closer in the shadows. The group of traitors turned to descend the stairs down into the depths of the dungeons for their grisly task. They were completely unaware that Brynhild of the Growing Storm crept behind them.

She was going to destroy them and there wasn’t a soul in the world who could stop her now.

rating: +30+–x

Where There Is A Flame Someone Is Bound to Get Burned

Seas of Orcadia Hub

But Just Because It Burns Doesn’t Mean You’re Gonna Die

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