by Tammy Salyer
Mylla’s hopes hit the bottom of her spirit and dissolved into nothing, like the last drops of rain on the desert floor. “So it’s gone then, the Scrylle. And Balavad was victorious in Ærd, so there’s no one here who can help us or Vinnr.” She looked beside her to the older Knight. “I’m sorry for dragging you into this, Griggory. But it looks like we’re stuck here.”
“Come closer, Mylla Evernal,” the vessel said, the tone of its crackling voice stinging like sparks against Mylla’s eardrums.
She couldn’t very well refuse, though she had no idea what the Verity wanted from her. For some reason, she grasped her pocketful of klinkí stones, as if they would help her, then stepped forward until she had to crane her head back to see Fimm’s eye-lights.
“What do you hope to find in the Scrylle?”
“A way to stop Balavad and save Vinnr from becoming slaves to his will,” she said simply. “Maybe other realms as well.”
“You wish to stop a Verity.” The Verity’s tone was hard to read, but Mylla couldn’t imagine it was anything but affronted. Did Verity’s feel insulted? Did they even feel? She had no idea. Vaka Aster had gone into a state of stillness almost immediately after ordaining Mylla, and few of the Knights ever spoke of their exchanges between them and the Verity before Vaka Aster went silent completely.
“I wish to do whatever I can to stop my adopted home from falling to ruin like Ærd. Maybe the Scrylle can’t stop Balavad, but it can be used to—”
Stop! Griggory yelled through the Mentalios so loudly that Mylla nearly put her hands to her ears. Shocked at his outburst, she turned and discovered he’d come up beside her. Do you think it’s wise to tell one of the Five that you mean to put another of them in a cage? he asked, his tone as dry as the time walkers’.
He was right, of course. She was being incredibly foolish. She cleared her throat, but before she tried to walk back what she’d been about to say, several tendrils shot out from up and down the core of the Verity and wrapped her like a spider wraps a fly.
Mylla’s mouth flew open to protest, or beg, whatever it would take to keep herself from being torn to pieces by an angry Verity. Cringing inside, she expected to feel that dreadful cold agony that had seeped into her when Balavad had immersed her in his toxic miasma. “Forgive me, I…”
Her voice trailed away as a strange sensation beat through her, something like Balavad’s poison in that it came from the Verity, but nothing like it in that it wasn’t, thank the moon and stars, painful. Something flared inside her, like a stoked ember, then it was gone. She felt nothing more besides the grip of Fimm’s hard fibrous tendrils. A moment later, they released her and she dropped back to the ground only a foot or two below. She landed comfortably on her feet but nearly toppled anyway, half expecting to have been rendered infirm. Yet she felt… fine.
Fimm spoke again, voice unchanged. “The Scrylle will show you what you seek.”
She was caught flat-footed again. Suddenly the Verity was being helpful? She wanted to chide herself for being suspicious. “It can tell us how to save Vinnr?”
“It can put an end to Balavad’s deeds.” At these words, Mylla’s mouth fell open. “Find the Ærden Scrylle, Warden Evernal, and bring it back to me, if this is truly what you want.”
“F-find it?” How was she supposed to do that? Her father could have taken it anywhere, and she didn’t have a Scrylle of her own to travel the starpaths. “I want to, My Creator, more than anything. I would gladly do as you require, but I have no idea where to look. My father, Greven, was a traitor to you, even to his family, and it’s been centuries. He could be anywhere in the Cosmos. Is there another way, anything I can do besides that? If you can help me save Vinnr, why do you need the Scrylle?”
The inferno eye-lights of the vessel blazed on, but the chamber settled into a charged quiet. Mylla waited, hoping Fimm was simply considering her words and would at any moment give her another option, any option. But the vessel didn’t stir.
That rage Mylla remembered she’d had even as a little child suddenly reared. “Your own realm is all but dead because of Balavad. Don’t you care? Don’t you want to—to get even? I’m the one who lost everything! You can remake this world or a new one anytime you like, but you just sit there. Why should I do anything for you when you’ve done almost nothing for us?”
As her fire burned itself out, she took several deep breaths. From the corner of her eye, she could see Griggory shaking his head like a disappointed schoolteacher. She was still too enraged to care. And, damn the Verities, she was right to be angry. “What does it matter anyway? I can’t even leave Ærd now without a way to open the starpath.”
“Mylla Evernal,” a tessalope wisped from behind her, and she turned to face it. “Greven Evernal never left Vinnr. He died—”
The creature suddenly did a most peculiar thing. All the lights along its tendrils shot toward its peak and burst from it, flying up toward the ceiling and dispersing like flickering fireflies, or like Vaka Aster’s dragørflies. They spread out in every direction, then winked from existence. As they did, the tessalope’s form grew harder to see, and then, like the lights, it disappeared too.
“What just happened…” Mylla whispered. Her eyes caught on something gleaming on the floor where the creature had stood. She took a step forward.
A crystalline sphere, filled with swirling fire. It looked like—no, it undoubtedly was—a Fenestros.
Needing confirmation that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, she turned back to Griggory to see his reaction. He looked… glum, like he’d bid farewell to a friend. “Griggory, is it… dead?”
“It walks no more,” he confirmed.
“Why? What caused it?” Nothing was making sense. Her father was dead? The tessalope was dead? Was everything coming to an end before her eyes?
Griggory didn’t answer before the Verity spoke again. “Now you know where to look, Warden Evernal. Return with the Scrylle and you will see an end to Vinnr’s trials.”
A pinprick-sharp tingling began dancing along the skin of Mylla’s arms and neck, a familiar sensation. A starpath was forming. “Fimm, wait!” she cried. “I have more questions!”
She realized she needn’t have bothered asking the Verity for any favors, as her body began to change, to diffuse. She lunged for the Fenestros, wanting to take at least something of her one-time home with her, then she was space dust shifting ephemerally through the Cosmos once again.
Chapter Sixteen
“Shite on all this!” Mylla yelled, kicking a rock hard enough to bruise her right toes. So she kicked another one, using her left foot, and cursed again when it hurt as badly.
She spun on Griggory, who was gazing around the flanks of Mount Omina as if he’d never seen it, or any mountain, in his life. I’m home, she thought. Well, at least the Verity had done them that favor. They could have just as easily ended up somewhere else, given what little help they’d gotten in Ærd.
Immediately, she realized the season had changed. But of course it had. She’d been floating like a corpse in the depths of Himmingaze’s Never Sea for something like a thirty-night while Vinnr had slid closer to early summer. The mountaintop air was still crisp, though, and piles of snow still lay in the shadows. But the real question was, how long had they been in Ærd? It only felt like a couple of days, but those days, spent first trudging under the gloomy, changeless sky, then within the unfathomably vast cavern of a once-living fortress, felt different. The time felt different, incalculable. Had they been gone just two Vinnric days, or more? Certainly not fewer. Having lost her bearings on time only added to her frustration.
Glancing at her traveling companion, she said, “So, we’re back in Vinnr.” She sighed. “Lucky us.”
She’d hoped she would find a receptive audience for her frustrations with him, but it didn’t take knowing him more than the short time she had to see he was anything but. The man lived in his own world. Unsurprising, she supposed, given how many worlds he’d seen. Then
it occurred to her: Might only be one more than you at this point. She chuckled wearily at that thought. It didn’t make a difference how many worlds she’d been to, how many she’d seen, if she only ended up back in Vinnr with no more answers but many more questions than when she’d left.
Considering their next move, she said aloud, but mostly to herself, “If I never cross paths with another Verity or wystic creature full of riddles, it will be too soon.”
Something about that statement seemed to catch the old Knight’s attention. “Wystic creature? How do you define that, hmm?”
He was peering at her as if expecting a deeply thought-out, possibly academic, answer. All she had was, “I don’t know. Anything besides a human who’s working in cahoots with a damned Verity.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “A dragør, for instance.” His eyebrows were raised, giving her the impression this was some kind of trick question.
No idea where this is going and don’t care. “Yeah, sure, whatever. Look, we need to get out of here and find the rest of the Knights. We don’t have time for any more of this trogghopping rubbish, and quite frankly, I’m sorry we even went to Ærd in the first place. Especially when all we have to show for it some more cryptic Verity nonsense and an impossible task that hardly seems worth the bother.”
He looked pointedly at her hand, which still held the fiery Fenestros.
“All right, yes, and this. But what good will it do us?” Her toes throbbed, and her companion made her head throb right along with them, and she was utterly sick to death of these games.
“You don’t believe Fimm spoke the truth, then?”
“What, about stopping Balavad if we bring the Scrylle back to… it? I know you’re more of an expert on the topic of Verities than I’m likely to ever be, but what does it matter if Fimm spoke the truth or not? Something strange is going on there, no doubt, and I’m sure Fimm would like to have its trinkets back. But I’m not a messenger for a Verity. Not anymore. And I don’t trust them either. Not after what I’ve seen.” She thought of Balavad’s toxic miasma. “And felt.”
Griggory had caught sight of the half-ruined cave where the Knights had taken refuge for hundreds of turns and was staring at it wistfully. Without looking at her, he said, “So you’re renouncing your oath, are you? The one to serve Vaka Aster.”
When he put it like that, she felt more than slightly seditious. Was that what she was doing? “I… I mean, renouncing it is a bit extreme. I’m simply… what I’m doing is deciding exactly what the parameters of that oath are as I go along.”
“Well, it’s good then that your ordination by the other came as a matter of course. One cannot break an oath one has not taken.” He stepped over to her and, for some odd reason, tapped her meaningfully right in the center of her throat.
She took a step back. “What are you—”
A memory flashed. Her father standing before a mirror with a razor in his hand. He’d been shaving, his chin tilted upward as he brought a straight razor over the bottom of his jaw. She’d been watching from near the hearth and saw the red circle in the center of his throat, right over the top of his prominent Adam’s apple, with five jagged red lines radiating from it. The mark of the Wardens Temporalis. Fimm’s mark.
Her hand flew to her throat. The skin felt normal, no different, but then, so did the skin on her chin where her indigo nine-pointed star was. When Fimm had wrapped her in its tendrils—that was when it happened. Now she realized why the Verity had called her Warden Evernal. “You’re joking,” she groaned.
“It’s been many turns since I made a joke. It took me so long to understand humor, you know, the formula and the timing, but then it hardly took any time at all to forget. Funny. But not funny like a joke,” he said.
She stared at him disbelievingly, mouth slightly open. Was Griggory incapable of normal reactions to anything?
“But now you’ll have something unique to discuss with your new companion, Jaemus, won’t you? You’re now the closest in rank, even higher-ranked than the rest of us. Though, I’m not sure if rank has anything to do with anything.” He looked toward the sky thoughtfully. “Except for Ulfric, of course. Being a vessel, he still has seniority. The seniorest seniority.”
That was that, then. She was ordained now not only by Vaka Aster but by her true maker. “Twice ordained,” she mused, unsure of her own feelings about it, and Griggory gave her his odd smile.
“I do so hope we learn what you’re now capable of,” he said. “Unlike Bardgrim, I don’t believe you’ll have the power of lightning at your… power.” With a blink that seemed more flummoxed than embarrassed, he looked back toward the sanctuary.
She gave short derisive grunt of laughter. “Well, you’re right about one thing. I didn’t ask for this and didn’t consent to it. And sure as a gimgree sloth smells like it’s been thirty nights dead, I didn’t take an oath to Fimm. Which means I owe the Verity nothing, and I have no obligation to find that Scrylle—as if it would even be possible. How big is the Weald anyway? And my father could have gone anywhere in Vinnr in the last three hundred odd turns. No, forget it. We’re done with that quest, now with so much else at stake.”
“Hmm,” was all he said. “Night’s falling. Let’s get inside and rest awhile, shall we? Halla light often brings clarity to more than the land.”
She replayed her words to herself as they walked toward the sanctuary, wrestling with her own impetuousness. She knew she should find that Scrylle. Not only because it could still aid them in their war against Balavad but now for more personal reasons. Knowing what happened to it might help her learn what had happened to Greven. And, though she felt justified in her disdain for him, she now had questions that weren’t so easily answered by a simple “because he was a coward.” The tessalope had said he’d died. Here in Vinnr. Which made her wonder, how had he died? When had he died? The last she’d seen of him, she’d been running away to try to get back to her mother, and there had been a bright light behind her. She’d assumed it was the starpath and he’d simply jumped away, leaving her behind. But what if it was something else?
What if she was wrong about him?
And now, because the possibility had been raised, and because she didn’t want to feel this dread that her past was a maelstrom of shame and betrayal, she knew she would not rest peacefully until she knew Greven’s fate, which was tied to the Scrylle’s.
They passed through the splintering supports of the sanctuary’s doorway. The interior was nearly full dark as Halla set outside. Mylla walked to the far wall where the keyhole to the interrealm well was. Restored, as her companions had assured her it would be. She reached out to run a finger over the fresh ruins carved there, preparing to discuss the options of where to go with Griggory.
At that moment, out of nowhere, a wave of exhaustion slammed into her. So much had happened so quickly. Not least of which was returning from the near-dead, followed by realm-hopping, and all her memories resurfacing. How could she be anything but tired? Turning, she put her back to the wall and slid down to a seat, not realizing she sat in the exact spot Eisa had just a few weeks prior.
“Griggory, before we figure out our next step, I just need a short nap. Can you take first watch?”
Before he answered, her eyes had shut and her haggard thoughts had given way to silence.
When she opened her eyes again, Griggory had built a small fire and was now sitting at it, poking it lazily with a stick. The billions of lights of Vinnr’s sky blazed through the rent in the cave’s ceiling, and only a few hours had passed. She watched his gaunt face before saying anything, wondering what was going on behind his light-brown eyes. The little gold flecks in them picked up the firelight and glittered brightly, as if his eyes had stars of their own. The flickering reminded her a little of the time walkers, how the lights danced along their forms. He knew them, she thought. When had he even been in Ærd, if he’d been in Himmingaze for over seven hundred turns? His years serving as a Knight went on even longer tha
n the Stallari’s, something like two millennia. A man with so much history, so much knowledge. Yet he knew little of Vinnr anymore, he’d been gone from his own realm for so long…
As if hearing her thoughts, he spoke. “Seven hundred turns, and yet it hardly seems a day has passed since I last saw home.”
She cleared her throat and sat up straighter, pulling her light tunic tighter. The cold that had seeped into her bones from Himmingaze’s sea had been resummoned by the chill of Mount Omina. “You must be anxious to see everything, and see what’s changed,” she said.
“No, I’m not.” He paused, deep in thought. “Though there is one whom I’d like to meet again.”
“A Knight?” There wouldn’t be anyone else left that had been alive in his time. The last few Knights, besides her present companions, had left the Order not long before she’d joined. She realized he must be speaking of Eisa.
“Of a sort,” he said and circled a coal with his stick.
Mylla rose and moved closer to the fire, warming her hands over it. “Griggory, when the tessalope told me that my father had died and never left Vinnr, what happened to the creature? I know you know. I saw your face.”
He tilted his head up and smiled at her, his big teeth glistening. “Timepaths, yes?”
“Are—are you asking me?” She didn’t know what else to say except to agree with him and hope he fumbled into clarity somewhere along the way. “Um, yes?”
He nodded, as if that was the right answer. “Time walkers? Um-hmm,” he answered for her. “And… time seers. You understand?”
No, she did not.
“They see time, My Evernal. They are time, therefore they know everything. The past, the future. The now.”
She dropped her eyes to the coals, giving herself a moment to take in what he was saying. “So you’re telling me they know the fate of everything and everyone?”
