NOTICE:
This is a fragment page.
It is an internal page used by the SCP Wiki, and is not meant to be read directly, but included by another. This page should be parented, see above.
Medea of the Daevic House of Colchis1 sits across from the interviewer, an unremarkable young woman in plain clothing. Medea is noted to have the following defining features: long brown hair and purple tips, lilac eyes, long pointed ears, and intricate tattoos of a thaumaturgic nature across all exposed areas of skin. Aforementioned tattoos are constantly shifting.
Interviewer: Can you tell me what it meant to you?
Medea: What what means to me?
Interviewer: SCP-9000
Medea: …
Prolonged Silence.
Interviewer: Medea?
Medea stares at the table, jaw visibly clenched. Her hands are shaking violently. The tattoos across her body luminesce brighter and move faster across her skin than moments before.
Interviewer: I apologize if I offended you, it wasn’t intended.
Medea: No it’s the—No. It’s the audacity of the question. I shouldn’t be furious because how could you possibly know? How could you understand when the greater organization has wiped the essence of the crime’s existence from reality.
Medea: It meant everything to me. It changed my life, the direction I was running. It woke me up to the truth of the world and all its many wonders. What would happen to me if I didn’t change. I can’t even begin to describe it to you, because you’ve never experienced such a fundamental revelation, and probably never will. This hell-thrust of containment and normalcy insulates you from it.
The interviewer shifts in their chair but maintains a neutral expression. Medea takes in a long and shaky breath.
Medea: And that’s not even the right question.
Interviewer: What is the right question then?
Medea: What did [Unintelligible, possibly Elder Finnfelk]2, Finnfelheim, the Singing City of Endless Spires Grasping At the Star Skies mean to the Hlérsyngva, the Singers of the Sea, Children of Creation?
Medea bangs her hands on the table, startling the interviewer. Her tattoos flare, near completely obscuring her from the camera's view.
Medea: With a raised voice. Everything!
Medea's concept art of several SCP-9000 structures including the central spire.
Medea stands up, knocking the chair back from the table. The Interviewer flinches again, and two security guards step into the room. Both appear nervous, even afraid. Another pair of guards enters the room shortly with more advanced looking weapons as Medea stares.
Medea: Really? Really?!
Interviewer: J-j-just a safety precaution for everyone Medea. Please, go on.
Medea huffs air, visibly agitated.
Medea: It was their home, their greatest cultural achievement, engineering unrivaled even today. Towers and spires filled with knowledge, of their arcane musings, of their thaumic understandings and scholarship, history dating back tens of thousands of years to the ascension of the first divinities of Sumer!
Medea gestures dramatically and with increasing animation while pacing the length of the room.
Medea: What did it mean to the world? A bastion of knowledge, culture, arts, trade and understanding. It is the only place I have ever seen humans: from vast flung cultures like the bell beakers, the Hattians, the Kemet, the Phoenicians come to trade with Nalka, Central and Western Mekhanite Orthodoxies, Southern Daevae all in the same place. A city of plenty, a city where there was no such thing as scarcity!
Medea turns and points at the interviewer, whose expression is no longer professional neutrality. As she speaks she points at each person in the room, tattoos flaring.
Medea: What does it mean to me? What does it mean to me you’ve asked. It means I weep when I think of those canals, spires, places of learning. I weep for the mother figure, I weep for the Hlérsyngva who were slaughtered like livestock.
Several thaumaturgic markings appear where Medea steps as she paces. Balls of lavendar flouorescence rise from the floor, and unwind into twisting shapes and lines. These manifestations curl and drift across the room but avoid the other occupants.
Medea: I weep for Freydis, for the world she built that lasted 1000 years. 1000 years of peace! You can’t even begin to comprehend that can you? She died, they died clawing to survive.
Medea: And the worst part is you don’t know. Humanity doesn’t know. You've forgotten! I seethe in rage every time I step foot in one of the great worldly citys of humanity. New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Jakarta, Paris, London, Moscow, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shangzhou, Calcutta, Delhi, Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus, Athens, Cairo, Buenos Aries, Sao Paulo, all of them hoisted by the people in these very offices as the greatest cities in all the world. They are pale imitations raised from the memory of those spires burned in your subconsciousness. You will never escape it. Everything you have ever built, it was raised on the funeral pyres and ashes of a place that has all but been erased from the world.
Medea: It’s gone. Genocide. It was unrepentant, unabashed, Genocide. Like humans have done again and again to themselves over and over, but on a scale you can't imagine. You sit here across from me, with your clipboards and stacks of paper, and wonder why you can’t find the Hlérsyngva out in the world. Why they won’t come meet your emissaries after five thousand years? Its cause humanity stole everything from them. North and South. They forced them into the sea and tried to hold their heads under the water to drown.
Medea stops before the one way mirror and stares into the reflective glass. Several tears roll down each cheek.
Several minutes of silence. The interviewer looks down at the opened folder before them, before up again at Medea. They touch one ear and their expression shifts to fear.
Interviewer: W-w-would you be willing t—
Medea spins abruptly to face the interviewer, light flaring across her entire body in extreme agitation. She jabs her finger in the air at the interviewer, and thaumaturgic discharge sparks off the digit. The guards raise their weapons, pointing them at Medea.
Medea: How dare you. How dare you! You have the audacity— raising weapons against me and— how dare you! By Hecates sacred fire you sit here before me after everything I’ve just said and ask me to do the blood work for you?! No, I will not do the hard part you don’t want to. I will not reach out on your behalf and make amends; you have to prove it. Humanity has to prove they have changed; they are ready to change and restore the Hlérsyngva back to the world that makes them whole. Reparations, restoration, restitution, and even then! Even then that may still not be enough. Nothing may ever be enough for what you did.
Medea remains standing, pointing at the interviewer.
Several more minutes of silence.
Medea drops her arm and resumes pacing the room, which she continues for several more minutes. The guards continue to track her with their weapons until she picks up the chair and sets it back next to the table where she sits. At this point she is no longer visibly agitated.
Medea: I won’t discuss that topic any further.
Month of the Blooming Sea, 2000 BCE.3
Incident Subjects: Alanna Bree Freydis Aquailian4, E-001-00
Incident Location: Site-212 A Finnfelheim.
Foreword: ACTIVE REPORT GENERATION IN PROGRESS. At 10:18 A.M., Site-212 A's Ontokinetic and Noospheric stabilization systems failed. Onsite RAISA operative Alanna Bree was shocked by the sudden lack of responsiveness from her workstation. She pushed her chair back from the desk, a mild panic rising in her chest.
It took her but a moment to get out of the chair, to attempt in quiet desperation to open the door.
A door that no longer existed, not even the shape of an outline remained.
She'd heard the voice from the speakers; a honeyed, alluring cadence that sang of a storyteller hovering just before a bonfire. Now that she faced the computer again, she saw them: hands, tentacles, eyes, infinitely many limbs, and orifices breaching through the gaps of the screen.
There's nothing to be done, she thought, This is my end.
She didn't scream. This was an expected part of the job. She'd had good training. She was ready to meet her fate.
She was wrong.
This was only her beginning.
A Forgotten Dream, The Astral Sea.
Beginning central spire generation.
Alanna writhed as every corner of her flesh was gripped in a cocoon. An ontokinetic entity sank its essence into the concept of her being.
No sound would rip from her lungs as everything changed, flesh and essence shifting. She closed her eyes as the honeyed words faded, vanishing from perception.
She squirmed.
She lost consciousness.
For how long wasn't clear. But it was dark, black, and empty.
Then she fell.
Tumbling through an astral starry sky that all too quickly became a churning maelstrom of current rippling apart all around. Tumbling as she became you, and you became her.
But you weren't alone, were you?
Someone was falling with you, tumbling through inked and oily scenes.
Symbols arose at the whims of the brush, flowing and filtering into definition as they burst to life across the canvas. Some forgotten instinct, a screeching howl, arose in a chest that wasn’t quite was remembered.
You reached, you desperately reached for her, never seeming to get any closer no matter how much you squirmed.
Pulsing infernos spreading across a shattering pane of glass.
A brush drawing gleaming, streaking metal swirling through the sky, a dome of power and Astral Fire raging in one last desperate mire. Streaming drops of paint flecked across a blackened horizon, bursts of color and ruptured minds.
It snarled and snapped in every crevice of your waking mind, demanding your attention, but you had to get to her.
Why was this happening?
Flowering brush strokes drew a twinkling spire, towering above undulating pillars of glass and metal. Thirteen rings spreading beneath a swiftly moving, cloudy sky. The bristles drew them ever outwards in exhilarating patterns.
Why couldn't you reach her!?
Was this part of it all?
Had it finally come to claim you?
You were changing.
Ontological variables twisting and pirouetting through unimaginable currents, hails of fire, light and creation smashing into striations of hue and texture.
All the fight drained away as the fracturing dream and reality smashed against flesh and fury and the wail of a dying race.
Your eyes felt heavy, and before you knew it, they were closed.
The barrage of sound, overwhelming feeling and inevitability gone.
Just like that.
Strokes of light and color burst across a fragmenting mind, a starry sky and grass beneath where you sat.
Grass?
Grass.
You were seated on gentle blades, soft and cooly damp with a gathering dew. Grass and earth set afloat on a never-ending sea of twinkling lights, fraying at the edges of the parchment out of sight.
A brush swirled in a grey circle, dipping here and there as a full and brilliant moon took shape. A gentle touch rested on your arm; a voice you knew yet didn't know rising in your ear.
An inky fire wavered gently at your feet, lazy warmth washing across golden scales.
"Freydis, peace has risen like none before. A peace that resonates in your very bones." The voice caressed your ear with a warmth of reason that made your heavily pigmented eyes dip, the brush attempting to draw them closed again.
"Always remember the carnage, the chaos, and the death. That which we fought so hard to achieve this feeling. Remember what your mother and I gave. The magic, the Rustics will ever be the key to our people's peace."
"I will," you said. "I've seen the scars, the burned remains."
"Remember my child, my greatest creation. The written word is ever mightier than the sword."
"I promise, Mom, I shall dedicate my whole life to understanding the world, to peace and peace alone. To our people, violence will be dead."
She said nothing to that, your painted eyes drifting to see her expression. A bittersweet sadness sat heavy in the acryllic lines around her four golden eyes.
“Before this tragedy begins again, my dear Freydis, we need to go back. The stage is yet to set and requires much time. So we will go back, back to the beginning.”
Tragedy burned like a night fire in your mind, provoking a tornadic cell of confusion in your breast. Almost enough to snap you back awake.
But not quite enough.
The sudden fury of ontokinetic wrappings bore down on you. And so, the brushes won in their war against your will, and painted your eyelids closed.
Painted your eyelids shut as the roaring wave of the thrashing tide approached.
Phase 2.
Ghosts of the Past, The Astral Sea.
Lightning, a jagged edge stroke of acrylic in plasticized emulsion, scarred the acid-green clouds etched into a metal frame.
You were born between the dissonant brushstrokes of an oppressively dark night. Came into the world aboard a nascent Kraken struggling towards the green land to the distant north, caught in the middle of a ravenous winter storm.
Your mother's roaring voice, my roaring voice cut through the howl of furious winds. She braced herself against the cot, steadied against the rocking waves.
A midwife and healer waited on hand, with deeply concerned furrows across acrylic scales and gills. They looked on at your mother's wholly alien and twisting anatomy. Features that made little sense to their mortal eyes.
Voices drowned beneath your mother's driving cries; words of comfort and reassurance lost in the fray.
She was deep in the throes of labor, and you? Well, you were well on your way to making your first mark on the world.
Towering waves, pressed to canvas in matte and oily green. Threatened to swallow all aboard in the dark abyss waiting below; eager for its next flesh and metal meal.
Rustic lights, far simpler than the complex enchantments that you'll grow to understand in the coming days, flickered with every roll. The hull groaned, rock and organo-metallic alloys straining against the wind and water.
When a true dragon, a pure universal concept, reemerges into the material world, many things great and small can seize whole planets in a storm.
Then and there, as the shield against the storm groaned and threatened to buckle and drown you all in the raging fury of the storm beyond, you made your grand entrance.
Chaotic brushstrokes burned away, the room in which you came to be aflame with Astral Light.
There were no cries.
No wails of a newborn, experiencing everything all at once for the first time.
No, just sudden, calm silence amidst a maelstrom of universal ripples.
The Midwife's acrylic scales and eyes searched for signs of life with a gloomy gaze.
You gave them to her, opening those crystal blue orbs for the first time. Looked at her, and then beyond to all the threads of reality unfurling at the reach of your tiny fingertips. Gazed up from the swaddled sea-silk blanket at the tiny realm you'd been deposited into.
"What is it? Is she…" Your mother's voice filled with that quiet fear of stillborn life that haunted so many in this forgotten age.
In that moment her web tangled with your own. Her never-ending song echoed through all before you. It was the first time you heard that siren’s invocation from so far away, calling you to a place that already declared itself home.
How strange it was that you wouldn’t see it for another thousand years.
"She's so—" You stared up at the midwife with those piercing eyes and she lost the words, drowning in your depthless gaze.
The world swirled away, eyes fogging in the reflection of the deep hues of her irises. Many firsts all at once it seemed as a vision of things that could be stormed your gaze and held on tight. Stone tearing all apart in a wash of fragmentating fire and light.
The vessel groaned again, the midwife's words lost in the spire of Astral Sight.
It was then that you set your will in stone, knowing what must come next.
All it took was the extension of one tiny hand aloft. Astral flame wrapped around the symbol that flew off microscopic fingers and seared the air.
There on the night of your birth you silenced the storm.
Clouds shorn apart beneath the might of nascent conceptual magic. Waves and rain peeled back like a curtain, and the ripples continued to spread across sea and sky and void. For but a moment, all the earthly storms cleared and the infinite star sea high above shone upon your life-vessel with gentle warmth.
In this way you laid your claim to bear upon all the realms.
You, the bearer of two pure concepts in your soul, were here. Peace and protection burned in your name and you shouted it for all to see.
And you did not go unnoticed by all those things of the greater spheres.
And yet this very nature would come to bear the pain of loneliness and isolation from most around you. Such is the nature of these things.
Then you were in your mother's arms, swaddled and loved.
"Freydis. That is a name worthy of one of such furious spirit.”
Shafts of starlight glimmered off golden, acrylic scales. Tiny fingers reached to wrap around your mother’s index finger, finding no purchase as she pulled farther away from you.
You slipped, blanket billowing as she dropped you! As she let you go.
No, wait, she didn’t let you go, you were falling. Sunk through her fingers like a greasy rope!
You cried out for her to no avail. She simply watched, eyes shifting to four glimmering golden orbs.
A resonant reflection of the life to come.
So, you fell.
Fast now, back into the waves, the star sea flowing all around you in puffs of gas, space rock, and swirling hues of rapidly spinning planets burned into the sky with freeform lines.
And somewhere beyond the acrylic strokes, mist and spray peppered scale and skin that was so very alien to you.
“Freydis!” A voice burned in the muffled fog of all of creation writhing around you.
It was so close and familiar, yet so far away and strange. A name flittered in song-like tone from lips that both were and weren’t yours. Impossibilities in that strange infant’s body from so long ago.
And as you tumbled through bleeding astral sky, the swaddled blanket tore from your scales and twirled about you. In the dancing reflections of icy worlds you grew, cloth molding itself in skirt and frills about your form.
The next ghost of a past that wasn’t quite yours came forth.
Phase 3, generating water physics.
Acrylic brushstrokes flowed like a river into solid lines of stencil and colored pencil. They arced outwards all around you in graphite and stained, charcoal tinges. You grew there in that green place, so very far away from a world that brimmed with so many things you wished to see.
But you weren’t old enough yet, not ready.
It was just you and your mother in these early years. An unmeant torture in and of itself, so strangely it seemed. You looked very little like her, covered in those golden scales and auric air of fine strands.
A mudwoman she resembled, though she was so very much not. The other spawnlings and adolescents looked on you strangely, whispered when they thought you couldn’t hear about the girl with the human mother and no other parent.
And standing there alone in the areas where children would play, you wished they would come to know you and not simply stare. You certainly tried to deice the stares, but they gave you space even with the friendly attempts with home made snacks.
After that you didn’t try again, not with them. How could you ever make them understand how you felt? How could you begin to communicate when you could feel what everyone else felt.
So it was just you and Alva against the world.
Oh, the stories she told of your other parent by the fire. The woman of fiercesome spirit and gentle touches embroiled far away in the toils of the world. You sat on the edge of the chair, eyes wide and brimming with wonder at the great toils of her journey in the isles and fjords and rivers of the north.
Full of questions of her purpose.
And every night as you lay in bed, staring out the crystalline window at the glimmering stars, you knew one day you would go to meet her. Longed for that day that seemed so very far away.
Wherever she was.
Then there was a bright blue sky on a warm summer afternoon, green fields of grass and flowers along a gently burbling stream that wound down into the bay below.
Your tiny, webbed feet pounding into dirt.
You were ten names old, and full of life. Had spent the years since your coming into the world grabbing hold of everything by the roots and learning how it all meshed together.
The world was a great oyster, and its secrets must be plied forth for all to see.
And today was no different.
“Freydis wait!” Another familiar, yet foreign voice.
Somehow along the way, you’d made a friend.
Some twisting thread spoke of what he would become to you, but when you turned your head, you found the silver scales of his face a blurred mass.
Is that truly how you came to view the face of one you so deeply loved? Is this truly the price of the isolation burning in your breast?
How could he have understood what you were?
Why didn’t I see these thoughts and fears sooner in you? Maybe the end would have been different if I had.
“Can’t you keep up with me? It’ll be too late if we don’t get there soon!” you called back and took off again, not waiting for him.
You rounded over the crest of the hill to a new sight.
Porters, across the coastal plain on a distant hillside, hauled their cargo along well tread paths.
Glowing molten rock in insulated containers that shimmered with lines of heat visible even at this distance. The magistry in their weaves, keeping the stone from melting, burned against your threads even from here.
How well your mother had taught you in these first few years.
You’d spent an entire evening following them not too long ago, pestering the Finnwomen and Finnmen with questions about every step of their process.
Down they descended to the sprawling settlement of spiral, jelly, and coral shaped basalt homes. The early morning breeze sang through their structures with an old folk song, Harmonic penitence flowing into moving magic across the seams.
And beyond the stenciled sand, the tide of the ocean washed in along the beach. Basaltic spires of additional submerged structures arcing across the bay into larger, fluid complexes of open design.
Stone vehicles, shaped like ocean fauna, flittered in the sky in small numbers. One buzzed right over your head with an exciting whrrrrup. It made your heart soar.
You traced his zigzag arc through the sky before the porters and their cargo fell back into your focus. They wove and wound through the town before arriving at their destination in makeshift docks. Molten rock poured into fish-shaped molds for more vehicles yet to come.
A beautiful place to live and grow, loneliness aside, and to think there was so much more out there to see?
You grinned, heart pounding in anticipation.
Webbed hand pressed to the leather tube strapped to your back; secrets held within surely soon to be a boon to their laborious tasks.
A dozen different designs and innovations born from knowledge harvested from the central shell-shaped spire of the town and it’s guiding thaumic lights. Designs, of course, needed to be tested.
And your perfect testing ground? A secret lava vent some ways from town where you’d made your own molds. With him by your side, that chilled cinch in your chest wasn’t quite so tight.
Of course, the hidden singes in your hair told ballads of both success and failure.
The grin spread fully across your lips, matching the flutters of your gills and fins. It was time to show the world what you had learned. Your secret solace from the loneliness, innovation.
Finally, his silver shape caught up to you as you stood basking in the moment to come. He closed his eyes, holding out his arms, and let the wind blow through his long hair.
“I love it here, every time! It feels like the top of the world! The only view better is from the high cliffs!”
“I love it too, but both are nothing compared to the great thunderous mountains of the south! One day we’ll go see it! Now, come on! We have to show them!” You snatched his hand and ran down the hill towards the bustling town, dragging him along as fast as his little legs could run.
Down through the winding paths between homes and tidal gardens. Right past your mother, with her green-tinted scaleless skin, crimson hair, and golden eyes. She was balancing a basket atop her head.
“Freydis! Where are you going!” The song of her voice cut through you, rattling in small bones yet not fully grown.
Its simmering echo called your eyes to the southeast.
You froze in place. It buzzed in your ears, that cry of a place so very far away that knew you’d make it yours one day. In return that sickly longing for a home you’d never seen gurgled in your belly.
You stood there amidst the world you knew, hunger for more hollowing a cavern in your chest. To fly, walk, swim, and run across the sprawling sea, land, and skies of a world you were so very new to.
You wondered if all your people heard that call. Did they long to return to some sacred place, and reach towards the stars?
Or maybe that was just the smell of sweet breads pouring from the bakers lava-fired ovens.
When your eyes tracked down a new swirl of feeling poured into the mix. A little Finngirl giggling happily, lifted high into the sky by a joyful mother, watched by a smiling father. An old, growing ache sat in your chest for the Mother you had yet to know. That loneliness and longing for a normal household home stinging against your eyes.
She was important, of that you had been reassured.
“The future of all our people lies in her hands. She will come when the first leg of her journey has been seen to its end,” your mother frequently said when asked.
It was never enough. Surely these things that set you apart, there must be something that you weren’t yet old enough to understand.
“When will that be?” you always asked, desiring more every passing hour to set out to meet her than wait on idle hands.
And she simply looked at you with such deep sadness in her golden eyes.
“I do not know.” And you knew she was lying. Or speaking in cryptic tones as she often did in the quiet deep hours of the stenciled night.
How often had she seen what was ahead, and spoke in riddled rhymes of things that would come to be?
Too many to count.
‘Later than should have been to know her child.’ Unspoken in her eyes, but you saw it all the same.
Yet there was no resentment in your heart for her secrets, for she had greater purpose that was beyond the understanding of your tiny mind. You loved her, and she loved you in turn.
“Freydis, are you alright?” Your eyes refocused, mother’s face filling your vision.
You squeezed your partner in crime’s silver scaled hand and looked into her gaze.
The emotion lingered, but you let it flow back and away to focus on the excitement of the day.
There was no point in worrying about things you could not yet control, after all. This isolation and loneliness would end someday.
“I’m great! I finished the designs!”
“So soon?” Your mother blinked with surprise.
A warm flicker of pride sizzled in your small chest. You couldn’t help but let the smile spread across face and gills again.
“Yes and no time to discuss, the shapers must know this secret right away!” You patted the leather tube on your back.
“Now, To the docks my assistant, there are presentations to make!” you cried, bolting around where she knelt, dragging your hapless friend along once more.
Her laughs echoed in your ears.
“Don’t be too late for dinner! You must eat and be in bed for rest! It is important for one so small.”
“I’m not that small! I’ll be big soon!”
“Don’t grow too fast, she could be coming any day now, and she deserves to see you small!”
The declaration seared into your minds eye, such finality in its frame.
So too did this ghost twist into another as time flowed by.
You sat under the twinkling stencil lined stars, laying on a hillside in the summer grass. Four pouches of mead and half-finished snacks for the late-night excursion lay at both your feet.
His silver scales were always so lovely in the panorama of the great milky bands’ neverending light.
“Hey,” you said to him without turning your head. “Do you ever wander what’s up there? In all those twinkling dots?”
“All the time… I think they’re great holes in the sky that are very far away! That’s how all the magistry gets in the world.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. What about you?”
“I think they’re great balls of burning fire, like Sowilō. Someday, I think we’ll all go up there to the great star sea and capture those fires. It’ll carry us across all the stars to places we can’t even imagine.”
“Wow… how do you think of these things Frey?” he asked, reaching out a webbed hand as if to grab hold of a chunk of stars.
“I see them, when my eyes get all foggy and I fall down… I go places. I think they’re things that could be, that might be, that could have been, and that were.” There was a deep sadness in the words as they trickled from your lips.
A bittersweet flutter of wings humming in your chest and gills. It was like sometimes you didn’t know what was real, if you were actually there talking to him again, or if this was another moving pool of color that once was.
“That seems like a lot. Do—do the Röskr ask you to see things for them?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes Mom asks about strange things and I think she knows it’ll make one happen. She’ll ask what I saw… and then just hug me tight.”
He was quiet for a long time after that, staring at the sky. As if he was now piecing together, why the other young spawnlings and adolescents always looked at you so strangely. Why you buried your mind in adventure, schemes, and intellectual things.
“I’m sorry. I can’t—no one else understands, do they? That’s why they look at you like that.”
“They’re afraid of what they don’t fully understand. They don’t mean ill, they just don’t… know I’m just like them.”
“It must be lonely. Hard to stand apart from everyone like that.” His words cut to the core of your acheing heart.
“I’m less lonely for you here,” a single tear rolled down your cheek into the grass, before you brushed your eyes away. The words were hollow, a lie you didn’t fully believe.
You were different and would never be just a normal girl. Fate had you bound up in its hands, so is the role of a True Dragon with two glimmering souls.
And yet it was true that he lessened the isolation. As others would come to in time.
“Then I’ll always be at your side when I can.” He took your hand and squeezed it tight.
You looked at him, knowing the lie of his words unintended as such as they were, he was mortal, and you’d already seen and carried his ashes in a thousand folded blades. But for tonight, his words meant the world and you deluded yourself into believing such things would never come.
“Do you ever just—tell me full and tell me true,” he lay flat against the ground as you sat up fully and looked off towards the southeastern sky.
“Frey?”
“Do you ever look to the southern horizon and hear a song that you know, but have never heard before? Somewhere or something calling you to a home you’ve never had? Like it’s deep in your soul.”
He fell silent, absorbing your words, and staring off to the southern starry horizon.
“Yes,” his voice was small and filled with wonder. “Not all the time, but some days yes.”
“It’s been calling me ever since I can remember. Always there. I think I see it in my dreams, in those places between the frames. A singing city of great walls and crystal towers and a spire that curls towards the star sea. I wish I knew its name.”
“I think I know that too,” he looks at you, face a blurr of silver. “I asked mom once… and she wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t say why… but I think it has something to do with your mom. I see them talking all the time.”
You were quiet at this new revelation. Just like her to keep a name of a place that called her name across time and stars hidden in cryptic tones.
And as the ghost faded away the stars were all the were left on the rolling paper.
Tower generation complete base spiral generation beginning.
Full tower generation complete. Stand by for city generation.
All the colored lines began to blur together, and you were falling again, clothes morphing into dark hued, formfitting waterskins.
Oil pigment set in melamine resins washed across a stone surface in large brushstrokes. The star sea above reflected off the darkened waters, the light of a sheen-glazed full moon waxing lazily upon your auric and silver scales.
You swam noiselessly towards your quarry.
Two stone sharks, sleeker than the models they used to make. Your first designs. Brimming with thaumic radiance. You drug webbed fingers across one’s surface, whispering lovingly of the fun you were about to have.
Felt it’s soul squirm with tacit oily flame in affirmation of your name.
It was simple to free them from the moorings and commandeer them. You’d be gone and back before anyone knew.
Or supposedly that was your ingenius plan.
Your blurred faced, silver-scaled friend seemed less certain.
“Are you sure the map is right? That it will guide us to it?”
“Of course! It’s mothers! She would not make a map that would lead herself astray,” you hissed back, unable to contain the confidence and excitement worming through the oscillation of your gills.
You were only fourteen names and yet so self-sure.
“Will it be safe, given… well, you know.”
“Do you just want to stay here?” you snipped, perhaps more cruelly than you meant. The week had been especially lonely since he had gone on a trip with his mother, and you missed him dearly.
“And let something happen to you out there alone? No! I just want to be sure.”
“It’s been 65 turns of the sun, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Your confidence was enough to silence his fears for the moment.
But he did murmur a quiet “Many possible things,” when he thought you couldn’t hear.
You rode together out into the starlit night, quiet until you were sure you were far enough from shore to not be heard. Then you yipped, yawed, and whooped to both your heart’s content.
Felt the spray and mist against your scales with every crested waved.
It was some hours later that you found the place, some ten thousand beats of a raven’s wings from your green home.
Both of you brought the skiffs to heel.
“We dive now!” you told him as he pulled alongside above the oily waves. “Stay close and don’t stray too far once we hit the bottom.”
A simple compression of the palm in the central control pad, and the eyes of your artificial shark flared to life with penetrating light.
“Freydis, are you sure we should do this? You know what this place means… aren’t you afraid we’re committing sacrilege?”
He was having second thoughts again.
You hesitated; his words had something of a point.
Yet you only considered it for a moment because the solution was so simple.
“Then we’ll make a memorial while we’re down there. It won’t be sacrilege if we honor the dead and preserve their knowledge.” You dove and didn’t give him a chance to gain further frost in his webbed feet.
Down through the black you dropped, his lights trailing right behind yours.
Down, down, down until the great ruin of the age loomed out of the gloom.
The shattered shape of your ancestral home lay split across the seabed.
The titanic leviathan, last of its kind, had been laid to a broken end beneath an evil hand you barely understood.
Once a carcass, now hardly more than a hollowed out cerulean shell; it gleamed in the sharks thaumic lights.
Its sickle moon head was far beyond view; its legs disintegrated beneath the ever-advancing crawl of barnacles and sea scavengers.
Yet still it grew ever closer.
“Hildaland,” you murmured to yourself in the silent dark.
“It’s so big,” he sang to you in the gloom. You spared a glance backwards, his wide-eyed orange gaze shimmering in the black.
Then you saw it, the ancient glimmering crystal city of Finnfolkaheem. Murals danced beneath the lights of your shark, glimmering stories brimming behind the colors of their carved lines.
It was beautiful in that way abandoned places often are. Frozen in time it seemed at the moment of its destruction.
Yet its grandeur was marred by shattered walls and torn foundations. The artistic flares of handcrafted crystal, brick-layed roads, and flare-fly lantern poles eaten away by sixty-five turns of the sky beneath the black waves.
As you pulled up to find a place to land in the oily black, it seemed so much smaller than you’d heard it would be, even as it sprawled across the great beasts back.
Perhaps only twice as big as the grotto you had grown up in.
It was as if time and ghosts had in dual parts increased the city’s written grandeur and diminished the true embers of beauty.
But you knew the truth of the matter, it was a foreign hostile thing that smote it from the sea. A disastrous night seen in the looking glass of the Sight as a moment of turning in all your fates.
A cold pit burrowed deep in your belly.
How many died here on that night?
Your feet touched down upon the silted dirt that once knew the sky, eyes briefly fogging with visions of a place once full of laughter, of love, and life. A bustling city of golden scaled people of whom you would have truly belonged.
When your friend touched down beside you, it shook you from that far off lament of what had once been. The broken city seemed especially haunting now in comparison.
“I don’t like it here,” he said softly.
“It’s full of ghosts. Let’s not linger long.”
You walked on, retrieving a hooped device from the skiff and placing it on your skull. A simple release of marks burned the pearl embedded in the band to life and light arced over the ruins.
It was a depressing scene in the sheen filled dark.
Carts and discarded implements scattered in the streets.
Children’s toys crushed, torn and thrown aside.
It was not far in among the growing barnacles and sea life that the first remains appeared. Skeletons wielding tridents and swords still pointed from where they’d fallen to the ground. Crushed beneath some unseen foe.
They were protecting other skeletal remains that were caught in transfixed poses of fear.
More with every step, fleeing, running inwards towards the center.
There was only one word for this.
Genocide. Perhaps not the first your kind had faced, but one whose ripples echoed that day.
You clenched your fist tight to palm, feeling the burn of their fates haunting all around you. A deep shifting sadness curling icy tendrils in your heart.
A prayer given for each, and then on you moved. What more could you do than set their spirits at peace in the undersky? How little of worth it felt.
You stepped carefully, so as not to disturb those who once lived so carefree. Towards the large crystal apex of the city center you crept. Deeper in toward the central palace.
Where once there would have been great sea-oak doors separating the palace interior from the outside world were naught but rust and torn hinges. You pressed cloth over your mouth and gills, momentarily stunned by the stacks of bones scattered about the entrance.
A crush in their final moments.
Through winding spiral halls together, you tread in the abyssal dark. The crystal was marred with great gouges; a battle lost in desperate last hour. Every inch of crystal carved with lines and colors that would have danced across the stonecast floors.
Dark now with stories that would never see the light again.
Sound echoed in the black, distant memory of song, children laughing, utensils clinking, crystal being shaped and carved haunting the narrative of lives long departed.
And then the screams. Cries and roars tainting the pulse at the end.
It felt terrifyingly familiar, as if something was to come that you could not yet see.
The great combs of knowledge were easy enough to find. Your prize for the danger of shirking curfew and entering this sacred place. And thankfully, it was a quiet, boneless place in the abyss, untouched by the horrors that happened beyond.
Why? You couldn’t say.
Into the bottomless packs you stuffed countless scrolls until the ornately carved and crystal-laced shelves were emptied of all their precious contents.
Priceless knowledge once thought lost to the depths of an angry tyrant you didn’t know.
Now it was yours. Yours to return to the people.
Your first grand act as an explorer and scholar. Yet here you stared at a stamped and flared scroll. Precious treasure you once imagined would bring great tides of joy to your heart and mind.
Yet now it felt so hollow in the face of the fate its maintainers bore.
Why?
Could this have been avoided?
You saw it, on the far wall of this place of knowledge, carved into immense panes of crystalline glass. It filled your vision, consumed your mind with the gravity of that pull upon your body and soul that had tugged you since birth.
Distant shores, images burned across your fogging vision of that place so far away in the south of the world. The spiraling coral tower clawing at the star sea and sky above, burning light at its apex so bright it could be seen from hundreds of leagues away. Sprawling towering walls, organo-metallic towers stacked against a shimmering sky, and the song of a place you’d come to know as home.
No, it wasn’t just any song, it was the whole city. Its sky-scraping pillars of crystalline metal glass, the coral spire high into the clouds, every structure sang in time with a momentous magic that synchronized with your very core. Harmonic penitence.
You reached for it, a voice whispering distantly in your ear. Promises of a future a thousand years away that you were bound and entangled in.
Then it was gone, banished by your friend.
“That’s…?” he whispered, staring up at it with wide eyes. “Why do I know that place?”
“It’s the place I told you about. Its singing, do you hear it?”
A sound tore you from the reverie of your mutual wonder. A throaty growl somewhere deep in the black.
It was some monstrosity left behind to guard this place, and here you were ill equipped to deal with any such beast.
“Skritr, Freydis!”
“Your light, turn it off,” you hissed. Cavernous black crept in and drowned the room of light before your eyes adjusted to the gloom.
You stood there, listening to the heavy steps echo through the water. Something large, with angry yellow eyes poked its head into the sprawling room, sniffing. It lingered there for several minutes while you both pressed yourselves narrowly against the wall, hoping the oily black would shield you.
Then it turned and left, steps echoing through the water.
You waited until you could hear the steps no more before gesturing to your partner in knowledge-crime. ‘Time to go.’
The hallway was dark, but the dim natural light of the crystals glimmered all around you like the star sea itself. Quick and quiet you moved the opposite way of the steps, following the map.
Then, bone crunched, and something metallic hit the floor as you stumbled into a shelf.
The shattered remnants of a Khopesh glimmering in the star shine when you looked down.
A loud roar from behind you.
“Swim!” you yelled; all caution to the wind. His silver smeared beside you as you bolted down the corridor.
Then another roar ahead in the spiral.
Trapped in the dark, hunted by monsters in a place you weren’t supposed to be.
How could you be so foolish to come so unprepared?
You grabbed him and darted through a pair of huge double doors, somehow still intact after all these turns of the sun.
There were smears of color and murals on its surface you ignored. No doubt millennia of careful work that was about to be destroyed.
It took both your strength to slam them closed and lower a heavy wooden bar across the front. Just in time as something big slammed into them on the other side.
“Freydis what now?” Your friend turned to you, desperation in his eyes.
“I-I-I don’t know!” You stepped back, almost scrabbling for purchase and distance. Panic constricted your chest as you glanced around for some potential rescue through the silt and dusty your swim strokes had kicked up.
The door shook in the melamine resin, strokes rippling as something large slammed into the frames again.
With nowhere to run, you both backed away, praying to the spirits that the doors would hold.
It was then that you looked down, and saw the floor littered with bones. A choked sob of despair burned through your gills and lungs.
You were going to die just like the people in this place.
Oh, spirits help us.
You looked up at the ceiling to escape the dread and despair creeping in. A sigil was blazed into an ancient swirling mural. It was the sigil emblazoned in all your clothes.
You shuddered, steeling yourself to recall your thaumic lessons, and turned to find another way.
At the opposite end of the room, a great sea oak stepped table arced behind lifted seats. At the very top was a skeleton, bigger than the rest. A tiara rest atop her skull. In her arms, a staff shaped into a great jellyfish, three times your height. It was crested with a giant sapphire, its tentacles flares of smoothed sapphire peels from the main body.
It was pointed at the door, some last desperate spell lost to the ages. The ribcage was broken in many places.
Hard thumps of the monster against the door faded into the background. Lines of light burned across your scales, fog rolling through the corners of your eyes. A waking dream, one all too familiar as the Sight called your name.
Freydis.
You were there in front of the earthly remains, hand reaching for scepter and crown before you knew it, someone desperately shouting your name.
Metal, wood and smooth gemstone beneath your fingertips, color and fog swallowing all reality in its maw.
“You will take with thee 100 seafaring vessels, and 2000 warriors from each tribe to the Great Southern Basin. The entity known as Alva shall be bound to you and only you by oath of blood. It shall serve as your teacher in all things arcane.”
Blurring incoherent contextual images and memories swirling through an age not so long ago and yet so far away.
A council on the eve of war, a thousand different scenes between a mother and daughter, name blurred and obscured in the arcane threads spindling about you.
Your heart pounded in your chest, seized as the realization washed over you.
This was her.
The other modir you’d yet to know in her final tense discussions with her own. With your grandmodir.
You shook explosively, the intensity and splattering blood of her final acts as storms raged outside.
CRACK.
Burning light enveloped you both in a bubble as you rubberbanded back to reality. Tiny voice a roar of raw magic, those twin concepts flaring inside your bones. The doors smashed apart.
Two undulating monsters ripped through the wooden splinters towards you, smashing themselves against the shield. The water filled with splinters, silt, dust, and an acrid blood that curled about your nostrils.
The scepter’s sapphire head burned with Astral Fire, held outward from your hand.
Five new shapes ripped through the dark, tridents and Khopesh gleaming with magic in the dusty gloom.
The creatures were dead before you could really process what was happening. Fell to your knees with the staff clutched between your fingers in a death grip.
You stared at the bones of the woman in the council throne as the shield washed away.
“Grandmother…”
Then you were being swept out with your friend. Limp in the arms of familiar grotto warriors with grim expressions. They tried to pull the staff out of your fingers, but you refused to let go.
They said nothing, but their worry bled through your empathic senses. You couldn’t stop shaking as they darted through the crystal ruins and dark.
They’d never see you the same. Another pedestal beneath your webbed feet. Even he, with his silver scales pale as ghosts in the phantom light, looked at you with new eyes.
Then you were on skiffs back to the surface.
Your mother was there, her words biting with worry and fury as you came up.
“What were you thinking? Something could have happened!” But it all bled into the background.
You were still shaking as the adrenaline faded.
Solemn quiet as she saw the things you still clung tightly too. Her face was a mask of emotion you had trouble reading in the night.
She hugged you, pain of a night you didn’t know leaking between the lines into your threads as the oil paint faded back into stone.
Beginning city regeneration.
You were falling again, a common theme. Wetsuit flared and peeling off your flesh and returning to fluttering cloth. Cloth morphed into a formal attire of flared hues and pigments.
Fine watercolor brushstrokes streaked upon a wooden canvas bound with epoxy. The darkened sky split with the first tones of royale purple, crimson, orange and pink at behest of narrow tipped brushes. Signaled the arrival of the rising sun’s first peek over the horizon.
Cool threads of white-tinted morning breeze flared through your golden hair.
You stood three hands width from the edge of a jutting cliff flanking the bay, grass beneath your feet. The air was rich with the scent of morning dew and baking bread. Crashing waves and people waking for the day floated up from below to your ears and then on towards the quickly flowing sky.
You held tight to the scepter you’d found a week before; it’s hidden power a comfort to your tiny form.
How you lifted it back then ever a mystery. Yet now it meant all the world, both as a memory of what had been, and a pillar on which to steady your ever vision-shaken steps.
They appeared shortly before the sun had begun to rise. The lights in the dark, perhaps fifty or so luminescent shapes cresting the waves of the horizon.
Stone craft of simple and soon to be outmoded designs.
You closed your eyes to the blinding light of the sun and reached out beyond through that snaking web of greater ontokinetic bliss.
It grew every day of every hour, and through it you sought the deep fire spoken so frequently of in those midnight story pyres between you and your mother.
That raging spirit that tarried in your dreams every night since the haunted halls of Hildaland.
There, Alva stood in the tides, the web pulling the images and vivid gesticulations of her snaring threads across your mind.
Then, an impossibility that provoked a sharp gasp.
There she was again, in the lead craft approaching the shore. Unmistakable distortion of conceptual threads burning against the frame of your imagination.
Two? But mother, how?
And beside her? The one you’d longed to meet these past fifteen turns of name. The one from the dreams. She of golden scales and raging fire burning in her chest.
Your second Mother, standing on the prow of the rippling vessel racing to shore in defiance of wind and surf. You felt her inferno stretching high into the clear summer sky.
They landed as the sun was halfway over the horizon.
Your webbed fingers shook with anticipation. Gills flaring and closing in rapid succession.
She was finally here. A year ago, you would have ran to her… to meet her.
Finally, finally you could be a full family.
If she loved you. If she wanted you. Did she even know you lived?
Your stomach churned, chest tight and thrumming as you swallowed down the early breakfast that kept trying to evacuate its new home.
You listened, and all other stimuli fell away as you sucked in their conversation.
“Alva, what is this? Two of you?” Disbelief in the tone. Confusion. Then amused acceptance.
“Surprised, really? You should know by now that I’m capable of many things.”
“Right, but—never mind. Is this what you brought me here to see? If it is, then I am this far north for naught, and we’ve left time wasted we could have used to prepare for the Scarlet in the deep sands. I will be upset, no I’m already upset, I could have been in Finnfelheim—”
The name rammed you straight through, seizing in your chest as conceptual associations poured across your mind. That city of singing crystal spires, coral tower reaching towards the stars for a purpose yet unknown to you.
Finally, you had a name for that echoing siren’s song that spoke deep inside your bones.
Why did your mother never tell you it when you asked? Why did Alva so clearly lie to you?
“This parlor trick isn’t why I brought you here.”
“Then why? To see the dockyards? Molten rock is clever…”
“No, that’s not why either.”
A sigh of deep irritation. Your fingers curled against your scaleless palm. You could burst down the cliffside now, make your announcement known… but your legs refused to budge.
Why was mother doing this now of all days?
“Then what?! Why am I here!”
“To meet someone. This way.”
“I swear to the spirits Alva…”
You waited, breath seizing in your chest as they followed the winding path up the cliffs. Trembled with anticipation as they crested the edge.
It took everything in you not to turn and run to her, to not burst into tears. Fifteen turns of name, and finally you’d get to meet the woman you were a mirror of. Finally you’d be not so lonely. Finally you’d fit in with two whole pieces at your bedside in the night.
The trek felt as if it took ten thousand years to reach where you stood. You ran through your head a thousand different things you might say. Their footsteps on the dirt path echoing in your ears as the breeze billowed against your hair.
You shut out the ontokinetic web, wanting nothing else to sway this moment.
The steps stopped with such abruptness; you were afraid they’d gone inland out of range of where you could hear.
“That…” her voice tickled at your ears. “How…”
Then came a sharp intake of breath. She was close. Closer than she’d ever been to you before.
You tried your best to steady the quaking writhing through your limbs, incurred by all the emotion flowing through your breast. The joy, the love, the sadness, all of it swirling in a maelstrom inside.
“My love, this is Freydis.” Your name filled all the sky and empty space, rippling across every thread with implicit weight that drowned out all others.
Somehow that still pierced through your ontokinetic senses.
You turned then and opened your eyes.
Stared across the space between you at the golden scaled Finnwoman from your dreams. Thickly decorated with scars on her arms and legs. She was strong, muscles thick with the power of a warrior. Tall, seven and a half hands in height above your paltry young two.
Her face a near mirror to your own. The tears were already starting to trickle out of your eyes.
The recognition bloomed in her eyes in a storm of pigmented watercolor. Those same crystal blue eyes reflecting back at you. Hardened by conflagration and war but softened now in her gaze upon you.
There were so many things to say, but the words didn’t come, and your lips felt glued shut.
“Alva what…” She trailed off, staring at you. There was a deep web of emotion in that face and eyes, tracing to the staff in your hands and then back to your eyes.
“I think you already know.” Alva, the modir that had raised you, placed a gentle hand on Triemede’s bicep. “It’s alright. Talk to her.”
“Is she…?” The question hung in the air between them. Her eyes never left yours, a storm of confusion, then joy, then sadness squirming across lips and shifting gill movements.
“She is yours, love. Child of Triemedes the Unifier. She has been waiting to meet you. Don’t keep her, say hello.”
“Modir?” You finally managed, shifting to take a step.
Then the name burned on the breeze and in your ears. Triemedes, the Unifier. Your vision and all of space seemed to tunnel and stretch and warp.
The sky flickered sickly green, and a thousand whispers filled your ears.
You were dimly aware in that eternity of fog starting to roll across your eyes of your windmilling arms.
Then you fell, tripped backwards beneath weakening limbs. Earth trembled past, plunging to the water beneath. A mélange of images and futures shearing apart sky and sea of what was to come.
Of whom you’d be.
Of the throne you’d sit upon for 600 years.
Voices resonating in the mist. An aria old as time burning through your very soul.
“Why didn’t you tell me about her!”
“I will show you.”
Then your modir was falling with you in all her golden glory. Snatched you from the air in thick arms and wrapped you up in a cocoon of safety. Together you plunged into the ocean.
“Hold on Freydis!” she roared above the whistling air squeezing you close and shielding you with her body. “I’ve got you now and I’m not letting go!”
It was true. Everything you thought about her touch, her presence, washed away that isolation freezing deep inside of you.
In the milliseconds before you hit the water you clung tight.
“Mom.”
A wave cut your fall from the sky, and you were in the tide.
And all the color and pigment washed away in the lines of the coming story.
The story of a person whose name you’d just remembered was not your own.
And now we are almost ready to begin.
<At the Gates Before the Tide of Destiny.>
The West Gates of Finnfelheim.
City regeneration complete.
City regeneration complete.
City regeneration complete.
City regeneration complete.
Generating Final Textures.
Consciousness returned. Her mind rammed into awareness like two ships colliding in a narrow strait. A searing, pounding ache that suffused across her brain and drew her into the light.
She was standing, no, leaning against a metal side rail. Flecks of invigorating, salty moisture tickled her cheeks.
Sunlight poured in, the heat of a Mediterranean sun beating down against her shoulders. She shielded her eyes against the brightness.
Realization slotted into place like a gear meeting its perfect match; she was… tall? Yes, much taller than before.
She looked down, aghast for a moment, realizing her skin was completely consumed by shimmering auric scales. Strands of brushed and braided gold hair were perched upon one shoulder, a shoulder that slid down into an abdomen decorated in alien robes and gills.
Pinpricks of seared and writhing tongues of fire washed across her mind in a synaptic storm. That storm of memories that she’d just emerged from looming larger with every passing wave.
The memories of Alanna Bree fell farther and farther away, difficult to grasp but not gone.
Washed away in a tide of new memories that were once but visions burning in her skull. They filled the immediate space in-between, strange, and foreign. Incongruous at first, but with every passing second, clarity rose.
Emotions, thoughts, and feelings bubbling up and washing through her confused and quickly changing brain. Neurosynaptic pathways completely rewiring.
She placed a webbed hand against her skull, feeling the trace of finned ears wiggling ever so slightly with her rapidly shifting expressions.
She wasn't human anymore. Maybe she never had been.
The threads of a story, an identity that flickered with a fire greater than she'd ever been, forced upon flesh and mind.
She shuddered, drawing in breath as she looked up at the sky.
She was Freydis Aquailian. Freydis the Erudite, who gave up the throne in Gud-Bani to her daughter, after six hundred years of prosperous rule.
Child of the Goddess, Daughter of the Unifier, Second Queen under the brilliant Orcadian Nights.
The heart in her scaley chest beat hard. Odd bundles of excitement rose to the surface as her fingers wiggled, leaning forward against the rail. Gills flapped to the beat of her heart.
Yes! Yes, that’s who I am!
A piece of paper sat cushioned in one webbed hand, the quill of an inkfish clasped in the other. Her staff leaned against the rail.
Thousands of microscopic Rustics5 wove across and into the parchment.
The scroll was painted with those distant ghosts, a past she'd lived tumbling off that cliffside. The tiny magic symbols glistened and called to her, attempting to draw her back into the interpretation.
Only to fade when she looked up.
She rolled up the scroll and tucked it away.
She arced her head back and forth to take in the surrounds. She stood on the prow of a surface Kraken, a design of her own conception.
It was impressive in the way the sleek body curved into organic curves. Behind, tentacles curled around cargo buoys trailing in the surf.
Yet, she tilted her head up to look at that which was ahead. The kraken was nothing compared to what rose before her.
A thousand years she had waited for this moment in the shadow of that ballad that flowed through time.
Rising from the surface of the ocean, stood gleaming metal gates framing proud, glimmering walls. They towered like sheer cliffs above the Mediterranean dwarfing everything within distance, even the island that hovered with cliffs in the distance were swallowed by the wall’s shadows. Immense murals, flowing carvings, and proud luminescent lights swam across every exposed surface.
“Surely… they seem larger than even in my youth.”
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 sundfljúgavagns.6 Shimmering patches of air belayed the presence of powerful Rustic shielding. She could not see much of the immediate city behind the walls, but the rising layers in the distance stacked towards the sky.
She gasped in air, those thousand-year-old memories burning in her head failing to capture the magnitude of awe swimming in her chest. She had been many grand and fantastical places in her life to date. Even these same walls. But memory was a poor substitute for the truth of scale.
“Mither above…”
And far away standing proudly defiant on the horizon, a tower, glimmering with light and Magistry. Primal Astral7 discharge flowed and ebbed, tingling her senses even this far from its center.
Finnfelheim! Beautiful, a feat of thaumic engineering that will never again be rivaled. The time has come, and I am finally here again. I cannot wait to explore every nook and cranny, to study every mechanism in play. It shall all benefit the continued expansion of New Finnfolkaheem in the north pushing us ever closer to the endless destiny spiraling in the sky.
Even Gud-Bani and its sprawling crystal city in the Riverlands of Doggerland paled in comparison.
The wind blew in from the east, billowing her braid like a spider’s web trailing from its abdomen. In that moment the whole world became swallowed by the resonant tones of hundreds of thousands of structures.
Then the voices, as if every person in the whole city was all singing at once.
♫We swim with the Tide
Let currents take us on a Ride
Through the ‘strom we find that Place
In the kelp we find creation’s heart Resides
We are singers swimming with the Tide.♫
♫We Reach Towards The Sky!
Our Hearts Belong On High
Through Their Storms We Find That Place
To Astral Clouds Where We’ll Break Her Chains
We Are Singers Swimming With Her Tides!♫
♫Eyes That Glow With Gold
She’ll Catch Us When We Fall!
Through the Stars and Darkest Nights
We’ll Sail Where Singers Have Never Dared to Ride
We’ll Come Home To Finnfelheim On Her Tides♫
Freydis. For but a moment, it felt as though she were there. As if Alva’s fingers were holding her face once more, stroking her cheek like when she was just a small girl again.
She slipped into the artifices of the gate, the murals and arts coming alive.
Whispers of a story, of many experiences flowing into one, burdened by the sensation of home, of pride and destiny.
That same tug that had called to her for so very long.
And then she was staring upon the past. That tiny girl who had sailed through smaller gates when the city was only ten of rings. She had then, as she does now, stared up at the gleaming facade of the place at the heart of creation, hand extended outwards towards the spire curling in the sky.
And there next to her, her modirs. Alva and Triemedes watching her younger self with loving smiles and fondness in their beating hearts.
Freydis reached for them, heart acheing in her chest at what had been left behind all these years ago. Alva’s wind-formed fingers slid from her scales as she tried to reach to find some physical contact. Tried to hold on for just a moment with fingers outstretched.
But it was gone, snapped away with the change of the breeze and the dying away of the song.
"You're excited." A voice rang against her eardrum, familiar, and pushing forward a soft warmth in her bosom.
It shook her from the grasp of longed for memory and the living magic embedded into the murals of the great gate. She shoved those deep emotions back away for now. Let the burn of isolation and loneliness melt into the comfort of another in the present.
"Of course I am, Segrusa! This is it. The pinnacle of everything my mother and our Goddess worked for." She bounced on the balls of her feet, the webbing of her toes catching the spray of the ocean as they dipped into another trough.
Then she froze. For a moment her brain was caught in a storm of recognition and confusion.
That’s not English, but I understand it? Wait… what is English?
She stared blankly ahead, trying to grapple with the strangely alien yet familiar texture of the vocal motions and her perfect understanding of them. Then the sharp, but brief headache that followed.
The other Finnwoman, with her chiseled physique and gentle demeanor, stepped up next to Freydis. Her hair and eyes were dark as blood, a sharp contrast to the dark blue scales coating her whole frame.
She banished that headache and any lingering dissonance by just being there.
Segrusa, for she already knew her name, slid her fingers near perfectly into the creases and gaps between Freydis’s webbed digits.
"For all of time she serenaded for me, across sky and ocean. Yet I have only been twice in the entirety of my life. A travesty!" Freydis declared, banishing any residual confusion with an all-consuming grin.
"We're here now, aren't we?" The other Finnwoman leaned in and planted a soft kiss on her cheek.
"How your husband ever kept you confined to the halls of Gud-Bani is a mystery to me." Segrusa shifted and kissed one of Freydis' gillflaps. The affectionate motion drew a shudder from the other woman as the fire of sensation creased down her spine in stuttered steps.
Freydis let out a small gasp, pushing Segrusa away with gentle mirth dancing along her extending fins.
"A Queen has her duties and responsibilities, and we bore them together. But he could never keep me contained." The corners of Freydis' lips curled up mischievously.
The memories of that night in Hildaland burned against her mind, and then a thousand images more smearing together of their life in the waves and beneath the stars.
How she had come to love him in that so gentle way friends can bloom into.
Solemness washed over her as she dipped her head.
"Goddess rest his soul in the undersky."
Segrusa tilted her head in turn in acknowledgement of the loss.
"He was a great man who built an empire of peace at your side. I stand in his shadow forever. May his rest be long and graceful," Segrusa said, a hand coming to rest against Freydis’s shoulders with narrowed intonations of the eyes and curving up of the lips.
"Majest— Uh, Freydis!" A Finnman called from farther back in the vessel, disrupting the bubble of their dream. "The Gatehouse is asking us to transmit our entry encryptions."
"Entry encryptions," Freydis mused, banishing the melancholic emotions in favor of gleeish excitement. Her gills lay flat as she tapped on the railing, then pulsed in rapid flickers. Her lips curled at the edges in feverish delight.
She leaned over and drew her fingers through the foaming air. An animated motion that left lines of light forming into a blazing symbol; Rún.
Metal plates on the prow of the Kraken slid down with thunderous approval at the Rustics that leapt from her fingertips. The Royal Insignia shimmered in the sunlight, brilliant colors on full display.
"Let them see that as our encryptions!" She held her hands up as they approached the gates.
The great monoliths towered higher by the moment, banners suspended from the battlements above, billowing in the breeze.
Rustics blossomed from her fingers dragging through the air, illumination searing into the atmosphere in a display of flowering gold, greens, blues, yellows, and reds.
With a thunderous noise, the grandiose gates rippled, the metal groaning as if they hadn't been moved in ten thousand years.
They slid between the massive sheets of sculpted forge work as the Kraken surged forwards, and into the first loch. The gates rumbled closed behind them in a storm of thaumo-mechanical trumpeting that signified their arrival. The sweet music of engineering waxed its symphony in Freydis' ear.
For a moment she drifted into her thoughts as she slowly rotated, taking in the interior.
Look at that! A beautifully crafted system of pumps and drains, designed to raise and lower the water level to allow ships into and out of the city without flooding the fields beyond. I must reward the designer with a visit someday! Oh, what I could learn.
Segrusa cleared her throat and spoke, shattering the reverie.
“Well?” she asked expectantly.
“Well, what?” Freydis looked at her with a ripple of her neck gills.
"I'm waiting for you to start explaining how every little mechanism works," Segrusa teased, a spreading grin arising.
"No no, I have to save my voice to explain the rings to you! That’s the most important part. If we're going to stay here of course?” She asked as if that wasn’t an obvious component of every one of their plans.
Much less the threads of vision polluting her Sight for the past thousand years.
“We are going to stay here, right?"
And then there was the fact that Freydis needing permission from anyone to do anything was absurd on the face of the matter.
Yet, she asked her partner nonetheless; they were equals.
And of course, Segrusa laughed.
"Of course we're going to stay here. You are the governor now, where else would you stay?" Before Freydis could reply, Segrusa laughed and added.
"I could never deprive you of the sheer joy I know you'll get from harassing the engineers and commonfolk about every aspect of their lives." The grin on Segrusa’s lips spread to her gills, fluttering from neck all the way down to her abdomen.
Freydis' cheeks flushed with warmth, the skin coloring beneath her scales.
"I do not harass them,” she replied indignantly, crossing her arms and pulsing her gills twice.
“I ask them questions politely." She playfully and gently shoved Segrusa.
The normally reserved Finnwoman burst into deeper laughter.
“As if I could stop you anyways. You are a force of nature when you want something, and it’s better to strap in for the ride.” Segrusa’s muted grin grew.
“Oh, how cruel your words are oh dear warrior of my heart!” Freydis held an arm over her face, grinning behind the scaled flesh.
Then she dropped it and pivoted back to face the oncoming loch gates, twirling her hair braid about like a cloak.
"Look, we're about to exit the lochs…" Freydis started to point, muscles twitching in her arm. The last few words struggled to escape her lips. Her voice slurred.
Drums pounded against her ears, the crash of roaring waves simmering out of reach.
Legs that were stout as poles moments ago, wobbled like gelatin, her grip on the rail weakening.
She couldn't get her fingers to close properly.
She leaned dangerously over the rail, unable to keep control of her balance.
Her eyes went up as the gates began to open before them, the atmosphere swirling overhead as above her, the blue of the sky discolored.
A wound, an oozing, ugly gash in reality, slowly grew and dripped thick blots of scarlet into the tides ahead.
She knew what was happening. The question was, would Segrusa notice? Or would she be able to get the words out in time?
"Vision." Freydis slurred out and then tumbled over the side of the Kraken.
The metal flickered by in slow motion as the doors opened.
A Forgotten Dream, The Astral Sea.
Scarlet darkness swallowed you in a sickening wetness, hot and cloying against your scales. Colors and hues swirled, vision consumed with threads of stars and black. You were falling, deeper and faster, into clutches painfully familiar.
War, deep, scathing and firey war to build the seals. Then garbled, blurred sounds and voices, as if the memories had been eroded and faded. Then, your modir, Triemedes, was gone. You were only fifty five turns of the name, still too young to fully understand. She was just gone. Forty good turns of the name with her.
Unclear lines of pigment and a mess of base and primers swirled across stone and canvas and wood and steel.
It was just you and Alva. For a hundred turns of name she taught you to rule as you were still growing. Slower than your peers until you were one-twenty. Watched you grow into peace and diplomacy with that melancholic little smile that never reached her golden eyes.
She stood by you at your wedding beneath the twinkling star sky of the Orcadian Night and showered blessings on you and your silver scaled betrothed.
Then one sleepy tearful day, she took you deep into the wilds and told you of what was to be.
She was leaving.
“I must return to the whole of the beating sum. I do not want to, but I have expended so much, meddled for so long that I am exhausted.”
You had begged her not to go. Weeped at her feet, asking her to explain, trying to understand why you were being abandoned by her too. But she had none to give other than what had already been said.
She had given so much to bring about your better world. A peaceful world.
Too much even. It killed you. It killed her, a harsh oozing wound in her eyes as she hugged you. As she told you goodbye.
“I’ll be with you, always.”
Then she was gone. Your goddess, your modir, simply gone. And you were alone, drowning in that chill of isolation that even your silver scaled beloved could not mend.
For 600 turns of name after the departure of Alva, 700 after the departure of Triemedes, you had sat upon the throne in Gud-Bani’s sweeping palace. At your side that silver-scaled prince and friend of such timid but adventurous spirit and character for 630.
Despite his ever gentle and warm hands, you were silently drowning. On a pedestal, child of a goddess. Only he ever treated you as just another person. A woman trying to make the world a better place for her people in any way they could.
Such a strange experience it must have been, to watch your people pivot from worship of the spirits and her to focused worship of your modir with the spirits in the backseat. The ever-driving purpose in her song, well, you and they knew now it was what shaped your whole kind. Reaching for the heavens to break her chains.
A unifying purpose.
And yet, they looked at you with reverence. Blind to the person behind the image. It was lonely, isolated. You made public appearances, participation in daily ceremonies, life and attempts to normalize yourself in their eyes as just one of them.
None of it stuck. You were the daughter of the Goddess. You may look like them, talk like them, but you were not them. You were something more. Even your nature with two pure concepts embedded in your soul and flesh defied that desperately sought relief of just being like everyone else.
So to escape, you sank into your role.
In the early years of a memory that would come to be called empire, you wove a network of trade and peace across the High Northern Seas and the plentiful Southern Basin. In the first hundred there was fire and blood and blades, but peace unrivaled settled at the behest of your gentle winding hand.
Creation of the great seals changed the world all for the better. At least in the reaches of your many fingered endless arms.
But nothing lasts forever.
Past images of the massive thaumo-mechanical mass of Gud-Bani sat squat in the middle of the crystal pillars of Riverland.
The night you lost the last living embers buffeting you against your adrift dissociation was brutal. He went quietly, in his sleep. Earlier than any expected, and so young. A problem with his heart that never would have been caught.
You sat in highest room in the palace on its balcony, staring off into the star sky, acheing and broken.
How could you possibly go on?
The scene shifted before you. The funeral pyres of your beloved King Consort and the great hued tongues of flame that leapt into the sky from his silver scales.
The heat against your scales, the poignant scent of burning seaweed and ash in the air as they coated you in the sticky residue upon which they would layer his ash.
Then the cool touch of the oceans love, as his ashes were washed out to sea in the green volcanic land far to the north. You wept for the man you’d come to love. Wept for the life you’d had together, and the youth of adventure lost under the pile of sovereign expectations.
It was a dream, drifting through a numbed haze you didn’t quite know was there. Where had the time all gone? They all left you behind, and you had nothing left to lean on.
There on the cliff where once you had first met your modir so long ago you stood facing out towards the sunrise as cool dew filled your nose, and chill breeze swept your hair. On those cliffs you reached the epiphany.
For most of your life you were defined not by who you were, but by what others saw you as. What others defined you to be in the shadow of what had been done by your bloodline.
As you wiped the tears from your eyes, you realized what you’d need to do.
You needed to find yourself again. That little girl who dreamt of the wider world and adventure, who experimented in the rocky lava vent and on the ash sand.
There was a perfect excuse standing before you. The seals needed to be maintained. And through that you had your oyster. So you leapt from the cliff once again to plunge to the waters below.
Down another layer you tumbled past the moving frames of your abdication of the throne and crowning of your daughter.
Narrow tipped brushes danced along an algal-paper canvas, layering wax paint bound by alkyds in talc filter. At their behest arose the rocky crags and rolling green hills and valleys of a mist covered land dotted with ancient stone and crystal homes.
The home of the nomadic Selkie Fowk clans who stuck to the old ways of hunter traditions.
You stood on a rocky outcrop shaped by wind, rain and hand. Carved into a flat tower with ladder steps by some long-forgotten mason of your people.
Fifty turns of the sun since you’d given up your throne, setting out to check the state of the seals, large and small. Protective cloth squirming with Rustics and carefully arranged metallo-organic plates decorated your body in a mishmash.
Much better prepared than you were in your youth for that twisting loop through Hildaland.
“Majesty!” your pink-scale assistant called up from the ground. “The equipment is ready!”
“Please Ral, just Freydis.” You sighed and then straightened up. “Excellent!” You were there in the grand standing stone complex before you knew it, leaning on the jellyfish staff of your grandmodir’s making.
You had started on this journey for the adventure, and yet your history still haunted you. Followed around by servants and several far too young and starry-eyed scholars who were, quite happy, to continuously remind you of how separate you were from them.
Yet you were too kind to ask them to go home and leave you to your work. A double-edged blade that you could put down at any moment but didn’t. Their curiosity was a bolster, even if they alienated you.
Rustics flowed across the cool grey of the hinges in waves of oscillating color. 750 turns of the sky on and already the floors were becoming obscured by silt and soil.
As Alva had predicted.
Fortunately, this did not obfuscate their function.
“Everything seems to be working normally, but there, there, and there—” you pointed at several readings on the thaumic-crystal screen, flaring lines and twirling arcanographic depictions of magistry output.
The sharpened butt of the staff clicked the whole way to the stone with the most erratic signals.
“It looks like those stones are going to need some repairs.” The monolith loomed above you as it did so long ago when you helped set it in place. You were so small then, but even now it still doubles your height.
Webbed fingers danced over the thickened stone, tracing the carved lines about their surface. It was uncomfortably warm beneath your fingertips.
“Some noticeable weathering…” you mumbled to yourself. Then your fingers stopped, dancing over large indents where something had chipped the stone in radial patterns.
“That can’t be right…” The disbelief slid over your lips and gills in slow, swaying waves.
“What is it?” She leaned in to look.
“It’s like something has been biting the standing stones.”
“What? Do you mean like a—” before the Finnwoman could finish, a roar filled the air.
It was familiar in the worst way possible.
“Wyvern!” You swung your head about, looking for the source, but it echoed loudly through all the ravines.
“Skirtr, it’s a Northern White!” your assistant cried, pointing.
Streams of lightning cut through the sky, tearing up turf and singing the ground. A quick dive and roll behind another stone saved you from the static burst merely half a hand from your skull. Your heart hammered hard in your wax painted chest as the air filled with ringing.
Summoning every ounce of courage, you peeked out from behind the stone. There it was, alighting on the edge of the hillside.
It was huge, fifty hands long at least. Scales of white. Beady, menacing eyes, a maw full of horrible teeth and razor claws.
“What do we do?” your assistant hissed, head poking out from behind a parallel monolith.
The porters, scholars, and technicians tagging along on your journey hid behind low stones and monoliths of their own. Their expressions were twisted with terror, and they all looked to you.
You glanced out onto the rolling valley and hills out behind you. The nearest defense force outpost was too far, at least another league away.
There was no path or mechanism to outrun a Northern White in such exposed terrain. You never should have turned down the guard retinue your daughter offered when you set out.
“Faen,” you cursed yourself. You really should have felt the beast coming, but the magistry of the seal site obscured it.
Nonetheless a plan was already forming in your mind.
“I’ll keep it occupied; you go for help.” Your digits clutched tightly around the staff, already calling forth the marks.
“On your own? Freydis, you might be the Goddess’s daughter but you’re no warrior. Tha—” You cut him off.
“I can handle myself, go!” you hissed at him, indignant at the very idea that they had cast you as a fragile princess.
You stepped out from behind the stone, standing tall with the staff already blooming with light.
The symbol flowed off your fingertips with swirls of dancing fluorescence.
Beady eyes flicked to you. It roared, wicked skull snapping to your pulsing form. Both wings sprung forward like shifting blades of metal. With them came a storm of white scales ripped from its flesh in a hailstorm.
Typical for a Northern White, killing for sport rather than food.
“Vǫrn!” roared from golden lips, and the scales shattered against a pulsing bubble of purple enchantment.
It was then your crowd of tag-alongs darted out from behind the stones and ran for it down the hill. Some of them certainly were capable of quite a bit of Magistry, so the fact that all of them ran rankled you with annoyance.
But you didn’t need their help.
It snarled in your direction and then paused. Sniffed the air. The beast’s sclera dilated to slits. Its attention snapped to the scattering shapes fleeing down the hill. It licked its lips, sensing easy kills.
The cruel monster screeched with delight, clawing the earth underneath its talons. Spread its wings to take flight.
“No you don’t! Skjǫldr.” Another symbol burnt off your fingertips.
The great mass of scales and teeth ripped forward like a siege ram and smashed headlong into a thick golden dome of light that enveloped the henge. It tumbled backwards, dazed, tail thrashing in the air.
The spade caught you in one of its erratic arcs before you could get off another spell, flinging you back against a stone. The echoes of the blow rattled bones and knocked the wind from lungs. By the time you regained your senses the Wyvern was up again and stalking closer.
Spittle dripped from its lips and teeth, claws tapping against organo-metallic floor with every thunderous step.
You scanned the ground and found your staff flung away, more than five hands between you and it. You were certainly not faster than this malicious snow stain.
The somatic motions would take too long to call another Rustic. Its fetid breath washed across your senses, the static heat of its widening jaw preparing to swallow you whole. It’s gullet was pink, teeth stained with residual blood from a recent kill.
You were next on the menu and the beast inside your soul wasn’t woken yet. You were almost furious that this is how it would all end.
So, you did the only logical thing this close to death. You accepted its certainty, closing your eyes and preparing for this unexpected fate in the solace of the dark behind the lens. Some unbidden power within you that had lept forth at other moments might or might not come, but you were ready to go. You’d had a good life, and this path was clearly not working like you’d hoped.
So you waited.
And you waited.
And waited.
Nothing.
You opened your wax-painted eyes once again to find the monster’s advance frozen in place, brushes having snagged it into complete stillness.
There was something else on the wind, another sound—
With such suddenness, the Wyvern ripped its skull around, staring up at the sky with a dangerous rumbling growl in its belly. It burst forth from its maw a strand of flickering lightning, arcing up into the clouds at dancing shadows just barely visible on the breeze.
The sky filled with whoops and yips and roars of joy in response. Winged shapes burst out from the clouds, strings of puffy grey and white cling to their armor like a great ramship surging from the fog. Four limbed dragons, at least ten, their armored riders swirling spears and tridents in unabashed circles.
Rustics smote the atmosphere, filling your nostrils with the radiance of Astral Fire from their enchantments and evocations for the hunt to come.
You almost laughed at the fortuitous timing. Of course the universe wouldn’t let you go that easy. And yet, A quiet relief filled that battered abdomen and spine in trickling cool waves.
But that certainly didn’t last.
The Wyvern, screaming with deafening tones, rippled forward with wings flared. It tore you, silt and dirt from the ground in a wayward talon and burst into the air like a missile.
It was sheer instinct and the reflexive motion of your fingers that called forth fara heim in twisting bubbles of light as you squirmed against the iron grip of the beast. Then, the staff was in your hands once again.
“Ha!” you cried triumphantly. “Put me down you great overgrown skink! No damsel in distress am I, have at you! Ljóss!” Magistry burst through your scales, the head of the staff burning with light.
Fat, throbbing, strobes of burning light seared in a scything line out, smashing into a patch of air where it burst into blinding waves. The Wyvern roared, twisting in the air, and nearly slammed into the jagged islets of a jutting hillside. It shook its head desperately as you spun erratically, trying to shake off the effect.
Some eager huntress zipped an arrow into one of the wings, a burst of flame roaring from the giant feather-quill projectile against the scales.
Another passed inches from your face, neatly clipping through a strand of your hair.
“Hey! Watch where you’re shooting!” You shouted with indignant rage burning in your chest.
“Ease up Greyjoy, it has a Damsel in its claws!” One of the riders shouted over the blustering wind smashing against your face.
“Yes, please no shoot me!” you shouted in reply. “But I assure you this Wyvern has picked the wrong traveler to abduct!” Bursts of electrostatic curled and whipped out from your fingers and staff, searing into the creature’s muscle.
You were trying to get it to let go, but it certainly wasn’t working. If anything, it just squeezed you tighter.
The Wyvern snarled, eyes snapping to you, and then it dove down, away from the fast-approaching riders. Twisting through narrow ravines, wings barely scraping against rock and stone in dizzying spirals and turns.
You had to give it credit, it certainly knew how to fly.
Then it had the audacity to dunk you under the surface of three different lochs, and you were much less enthused.
“You alicarl haufknefr haensa kamphundr!” You screeched, bashing its claw with your staff.
You weren’t a violent woman by any means. In fact, violence against animals, well, the thought normally sickened you. Wyverns were destructive, cruel, and vicious creatures. Wyverns could quite handily go smash themselves against cliff faces.
And this one was certainly trying your patience.
“Segrusa, I think this one is all yours,” someone shouted.
The name burned against the framework of your mind, familiarity lingering like an old song in your ears.
“C’mon, show the juniors how it’s done Seggy!”
“Making me do all the work again eh? Suit yourselves, I get to cook it.”
“Ah fukka, now hold on a minute!”
Still recovering from the indignity of being dunked in water like a fish about to be gutted, you almost missed the diving winged shadow. The Wyvern leveled out onto the coastal grass plains. The twinkle of the green waters of the ocean grew ever closer over quite sharp cliff edges.
“Støkkva!” thunder boomed as a dark blue shape smeared the sky above the beast’s great wings.
The Wyvern roared, thrashed, jerked down by a furious blow and discharge of magistry. It rattled through you, momentarily stilling your struggle.
It rolled trying to shake whoever or whatever had just impacted it. Veered up abruptly, as a riderless minor dragon swooped down.
The feisty beast was maybe a quarter of the size of the Wyvern, crimson and yellow scales in flexed patterns of dancing flames. Despite the size differential, it was trained for this sort of fight, and it spat hot blue flame balls right into the Wyvern’s face.
The Wyvern screeched and lashed out with wings and claw; it’s unwanted joyrider forgotten in the moment.
And you? Well, you were certainly getting lashed about and jostled. It was miserable on your stomach and denying you any chance to get incantations off to help your would-be saviors.
“Leiptr!” A crack of lightning and thunder smeared the Wyvern’s back, and it screeched. Arcs of crimson and maroon streaked off it’s back in wax-painted streaks and curtains.
The Wyvern’s lashing of claw and wing slowed, its flaps stalling.
“Hold on lass, it’s almost dead then I’ll get you free!” The voice had that old northern accent, just like Triemedes, your modir.
Except stronger in intonation and a deep contra-alto. Your heart and gills fluttered.
“Please do take your time, it’s not like it’s been shaking me about like a milk nut or anything.”
The Wyvern leveled out with a few last desperate flaps. Then its head was gone, cut clean through.
You were abruptly falling, the air whistling like an arrow all around you. In one last spiteful act, the faen fell beast had let you go. You arced your neck, spinning in the air, and saw sharp pillared rocks below.
“Skirtr! The raven starved coward dropped her. Shuri!”
“It’s always falling, why is it always falling.” You shouted to yourself more than anything.
You tumbled back upright; rocks were coming up fast and there wasn’t much time to think. A shape leapt off the Wyvern’s falling corpse, dark navy and maroon diving like a shooting star straight towards you.
Síga was starting to burn on your lips when a pair otherworldly arms, thick with muscle, scars, and dark blue scales, snagged you out of the tumble. Your rescuer had, unintentionally, shaken the spell from your lips and mind just by the very act of caressing you from the air with muscles thicker than your torso.
“Got you!”
“You certainly do!” You were an adolescent again, heat burning behind the gold scales of your cheeks staring at your rescuer’s rippling musculature.
Then you looked down and remembered the peril rocketing up from below.
“The rocks!” you shouted and slammed your eyes closed, cursing your sudden burst of absentminded attraction to this stranger.
You probably could get a slowing Rustic or anti-gravity off, but your brain was so scrambled.
At the very last second there was a jolt through you both, and then the air was flowing horizontally through your hair. You were, contrary to what your senses were screaming moments before, not a macabre painting all over rocky spires.
You opened your eyes and found yourself caught in a bridal carry in your rescuer’s arms. Perched atop that tenacious minor dragon as it beat its wings over the surface of the rolling waves of the water. The cool spray of the sea peppered your cheeks.
The sight was unlike any other as the sun hung low in the sky, pinks and oranges beginning to roll over the horizon.
You looked up at her face for the first time. Crystal blue eyes reflected in the sharp vibrant red of your rescuers eyes as you met her gaze.
She was young, no more than 150, but her eyes carried the height of years of seeing the world and the weight of a violent early life. She was a warrior, but with deep curiosity and intelligence squirming as flames in her irises.
You sat there in her grasp, drowning in the depths of her eyes, the strength of her arms holding you so very gently.
The recognition blossomed in the ripples of her gills and spread up into her eyes and mouth.
“Lady Aquaillian!” She almost dropped you, but to your great embarrassment, you clung to her. Almost afraid if she let you go this strange dream would come to a roaring end and you’d wake up on the cool floor of the standing stones.
And for a moment all that attraction and embarrassment died as that cold trickle of lonely isolation curled back in your gullet.
“Oh Mither’s grace, I did not realiz—”
“It’s fine, Segrusa was it?” your voice flattened out, neutral.
“Aye ma’am, Segrusa of House Agrusa.”
Ah, that is why the name was familiar. She had been before you when you were still on the throne, though you didn’t recognize her.
“Thank you for flying and…” you paused, amusement flashing through your chest in a loose chuckle, “falling to my rescue.”
She didn’t know what to say for a moment, several expressions flicking across her face, and then she just smiled with slow pulses of her gills.
“I’m always onboard to fall for a beautiful woman like you.”
And that was the moment you knew you were in trouble.
The dragon circled back in a gentle arc toward the spikey rocks, lit by the halo of the setting sun warmly kissing the soaked cloth on your back. Back to the wyvern corpse, already being lifted from the rocks to be hauled to the standing-stone site where it would be butchered and skinned and all its parts used for your people never would waste a kill. There as the wind cast your hair alight in a trail of golden thread, you had already fallen for this former warrior.
She treated you just like another person, regardless of whatever your name.
Together you and them flew back to the seal. It was both a pleasant and unpleasant to find your entourage had returned with a platoon of defense force patrollers. The looks in their eyes as the Dragons crested the hill, hauling the wyvern's corpse with thick algal ropes must have been surreal. To see your former Queen riding saddleback hair gleaming in the final light of the sun and roaring in the wind, what a sight that must have been for them.
As the wax painted sun set below the horizon, roasting wyvern meats and stews and kebabs permeated the sky and your nostrils with delectable flavors to come.
You sat with Segrusa by the fire, speaking in low tones. Telling her why you were out here, where you were going, what you would be doing. You could not look away from her crimson eyes, drowning in their fires.
She listened, occasionally asked questions, but was otherwise contemplative in the light of the flame's waxxy sheen. Looking back, it seems so obvious she was reading between the lines. It seems so straightforward that she didn't see the regal former Queen. No she saw that lonely woman, that girl laying in the grass beneath the stars from so long ago wishing to ride the winds and waves to places that could only be imagined in dreams.
You thought she didn’t notice your occasional glances of apprehension at the entourage of admiring scholars chattering uneasily around the bigger fire with those riders who'd saved their skin. Those who didn’t see the person behind the tapestries but the legend and reputation painted onto the surface.
But she did. She saw all of you.
So abruptly she stood up, when you had sat and had no more to say about the journey’s ahead, your shoulders started to sank, afraid you had given some stark offense. She was difficult to read then, those mischevious flutters of her gills should have given it away.
She banged a rather suspiciously trident-like fork against a metal pot.
“Riders, this night it is settled! We will be joining Freydis’s expedition to the seals and across the world.” She winked at you. “There ain’t nothing like a scholar to bait the Wyverns and other hostile beasts of the realm out of their holes! And what better excuse to travel all the seas and rescue damsels from all varieties of beasts!”
Her compatriots roared with demonic delight and laughter. Then the mad dogs burst into song there before the fire.
Segrusa turned to your entourage and said with the biggest grin “Are you lot in? The more the merrier!”
The very idea of more deadly encounters drained the color from behind the other scholar’s cheeks, with the exception of a few who were little of word and unbothered by such things. Perhaps two or three.
“If its all the same, and without meaning offense Majesty, I think we’ll deign to go separate ways,” your former pink scaled assistant said nervously.
“No offense is taken,” you buried the relief and glee buzzing in your heart, lest you be the one to offend.
That night was the first night in more than 750 years you didn’t feel quite so alone. The first night, that you started to truly be seen. If you could have, you would have lingered there and in the years yet to come. For they held their word so very deeply and true with an honor only those who have
The lines began to wash away.
As the wax melted away you were falling again, dimly aware of the water thrumming around you. Somewhere in the distance there was a splash, and someone sang your note through the waves in desperation.
“Freydis!”
You were falling fast, tumbling through fire, ice, fog and time. Falling deeply in love with Segrusa all over again.
Through strokes of oil and flame in the tone of paint upon the canvas of the stars. You rode, dipped, dove, and weaved through a fog heavy sky – droplets of water shattering against your scaley skin like needles. Laughing with her at the thrill of a natural ride upon dragon back. Down arcing over the surface of the lapping waves of the wild Northern Sea. Just in time for a gargantuan True Dragon to breach the waves. It cleared the fog with a beat of its titanic wings, and you curled up along its great scale and seaweed covered back, fingers gliding against the smooth scales the size of three of you. Up you climbed and curved until you reached its colossal skull, maw opening to let steam roll from its kilometers long lungs.
Amber slit eyes the size of full grown wyverns took in your form and billowing hair as Segrusa stared up in awe.
"Hello!" You shouted over the wind and creak of its joints.
Hello sister. It roared, filling all the sky with its acknowledgement of your twin concepts in the true language of the the threads of reality. May this plane give you plenty. Then it dove once more out of site and you were streaming through time.
Roars of beasts climbing high in the crags and crevices as you pressed into Segrusa’s back and whooped with all your heart.
Riding on Kelpies and Nuggles through great grassy fields and plains in the heartland of Europa’s craggy and sandy shores, wind in your hair. You howled with the thundering breeze, feeling so unbound and free underneath the rolling blue skies. She howled with you and so did all her little growing band of former warriors. You must have been twenty by then, and those few scholars who stuck with you fell deeply in love on their own.
Riding on strange, humped beasts with three toes through shifting sands and craggy canyons under the searing light of Sowilō's burning rays. Sipping from reed fashioned tubes and water canisters. Screeching winds kicking up dust storms so fierce you couldn’t see three steps ahead. Kemet traders warmly greeting with you wares in sprawling cities of crafted stone.
Galloping through the thick grass steppes of the great interior with nomadic nalka of the west and east warmly hunting at your sides in the summer breezes. Teaching you archery and great contests of fleshy feat you’d never seen.
Rowing on boats of reed and cedar wood down great rolling rivers into the heart of human civilization. There you met Beasts of the Old World, tall and proud and with softened eyes of familiarity from beneath the nights in the Orcadian seals.
Climbed steep craggy mountains in the far east, snow caps higher than any world you have ever seen with chill biting at your cheeks. There you found Eastern Orthodox Mekhanite practitioners of a strange sect called Maxwellism. What wonderful perspectives that had on life on what meaning lays within.
Cutting through dense jungle in the great southern spines and bays, heat simmering against the humid air and against your skin. You both swatted at bugs in the archipelago’s wafting highlands. Laying in the brush and watching fuzzy tall beasts nurse their young while you drew their shapes. Eating warily at first great meals of plant and meat in tree-cities of the elf-eared Southern Daevae and finding them much less the slavers of their northern cousins. It was there you met old friends, that huntress and sorceress of your Mother's influence who'd been there. What a lovely reunion before you were on your separate ways.
Sitting under the firelight of deep ocean night, leaning against Segrusa’s strong and warm arms. The lingering smell of her sweat from a day of propelling your boats along the current and battling against a distant storm. The face of a person who no longer knew their name, filled with all the fire of love and that sacred friend of your mother's made so very long ago.
And through the storm of memory and vision you felt something physical now.
Someone was pulling you through the oil and fire, dragging you up to the touch of some distant warm sun.
“Freydis!”
Then you were trekking strange mountains far to the west. Speaking to natives who had never seen your kind before. They stared from atop their mounds and stone and wood cities of dyed paint and color with eyes wide and full of wonder. Then you were laying in bundles of twigs and bush gazing upon hatching eggs producing birds wrapped in thunder.
Riding through great thundering winds and howling rainstorms across grass seas you’d thought would never end. Fully grown hatchlings flapping great unending wings in brushstrokes of consumptive booming noise above your heads.
And finally, a simple marriage underneath that softly rolling Orcadian Night, wishing all the while your modirs were there to meet the love of your life. The woman who'd made all your dreams come true. Who'd cast away the dark and forlorn lonesome night that sat heavy on your heart with her brilliant Astral Pyres.
What a lovely way to fall in love.
If only that unburdened life could have lasted forever.
Again, you fell, through bubbling, darkening water, brushes arising all around you. Ink streaked along the canvas, the tiny marks of power bringing the feeling to the flush of your skin. There you were, floating down into that dream once more. Something tingled at the back of your mind, unease that faded rapidly into the effervescent dream as the sky and currents whirled all around you.
You found yourself next to a glowing lantern, painted into existence with soft and warm orange and yellow pigments. The metal of the small abode, deep in the western wilderness of the world, glistened like oil from the brushstroke rays of luminescence that washed off it. Your partner sat next to you on the grass, leaning on your shoulder.
A piece of sea-scroll was unwrapped and nestled against your fingers, as your inky eyes focused on the contents contained within, the messaging resolved itself.
To Freydis Aquailian, Ex-Queen of the Great Finnfolk Kingdoms.
Good tidings, Mother. I hope this decree finds you well. If it finds you in any reasonable amount of time at all. My understanding is that you have gone extremely far west, away from our settlers on the eastern coast and past the Great Light Bringers seal. While I would much prefer you had not done that, given the dangers of the unknown, that is not why I am writing to you.
There is a growing sense of unease both here in the North, and in the South in the Great Basin. The governor of Finnfelheim has vanished from their post, and with them went a Kraken. There are rumblings of unrest that have reached me from the priestesses there. Missives of missing resources, numbers not adding up where they should. Whilst in a perfect realm I could rule both the might of the North and the plenty of the South, this is far from a perfect realm. Thus, I write this message to call upon you to return to a seat of authority, loathe as I know you are to do.
Upon reception of this missive, you will be officially designated the Governor of Finnfelheim, to which I expect you will immediately return to. This is not, as you are likely to write me about, an attempt to shackle you.
PS: Please tell Segrusa I said hello. I hope you have both found happiness.
PSS: Will you at least consider, in all of your wisdom, returning home at least once every two decades? Mither help us, all you're sense of passing time is atrocious, but we do wish to see you.
-Frida the Glamourous, Third Queen of the Finnfolk.
You felt the sigh leave your lungs, and your partner's lips press into the gills of your neck, watercolor texture dragging across the sensitive membranes. It tinged across your flesh like hot embers from a forge showering from hammering metal.
It was time. That long foreseen day, aria unanswered, its beg for refrain was at your doorstep. Yet, you were so afraid of that loneliness and isolation such a role would bring once again. Afraid of the shackles of role you’d be bound in once more.
Yet there was mystery in the air, and strangeness that unsettled your stomach.
"Well, I guess that's that," she said softly, cooing at you in the twilight.
"Missing resources, I wonder what she meant?" you pondered. "To Finnfelheim we go." Your voice wafted with tinges of excitement mixed in with a sinking drip of worry, voice slurring with an exhaustion that only just now raised its head as you slunk back into your wife's arms.
And as your eyes slid down with the strokes of the brush, the thrashing waves rose again, and that pit in your gut whirred back.
And This Great Happiness Would Last For A Time.
[[/div]]