by Tom Hansen
How many had been burned alive?
Her whole body twitched. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Part of her wanted to scream, another part wanted to cry, and yet another wanted to lash out in anger. Ynya remembered back to the lessons her mama had taught her about stress.
Calm your mind, take in data, process it one by one.
Above all, remove emotion and assess the situation as objectively as possible.
Ynya took in a shuddering breath, the cold air burning her lungs from the inside. She stood, straddling her boat and paddled forward.
With every stroke, Ynya focused her mind, focused her energy on a single spot in the village. Northern section, the mid-sized house with the glass structure behind it. Her mother’s greenhouse, the only one in the village.
The glass was broken, scattered across the ground. Behind the broken glass the various green plants stood frozen in their growth.
Rage smoldered under Ynya’s skin as she rowed closer and closer to Marsfjord. Occasionally, a body bumped against her boat, and she glanced down to ensure it wasn’t someone she knew.
Isn’t someone I know?
She laughed out loud, a psychotic, maniacal laugh. Of course, it was. Ynya knew everyone here. Surnames and given names for every last person cycled through her head.
The only ones she cared about, were the five at the top.
Mama, Papa, Synol, Finny, Meki.
Mama, Papa, Synol, Finny, Meki.
Mama, Papa, Synol, Finny, Meki.
The boat hit the wharf and Ynya stepped off like she’d done a thousand times before, she even grabbed the tie off rope and tossed it around the baluster.
Ynya paused, realizing what she had done. She’d just wasted time by tying off her boat.
She shook her head, trying to clear the haze.
Mama, Papa, Synol, Finny, Meki.
Ynya glanced into every home as she walked through the village, counting the people she knew, looking at their faces, steeling herself for when she came across the place she dreaded, the one place she didn’t want to go.
But she had to go. She had to know. Ynya couldn’t turn away, she couldn’t abandon them.
Regrets and what-ifs pummeled her thoughts, but she shoved them out. No time for those now.
Then she was there. She stood in the doorway and took in the horror.
Mama and Papa were dead.
Mama was just outside their family home. She lay on the ground, her dress pulled up above her head.
Papa lay just inside the house, his hand reaching out the door, his woodchopping axe buried deep in his back.
His axe, the one he chopped wood to warm his family, used to kill him?
Ynya stared at the horrifying scene, unable to process it, unable to move.
Then she heard a voice.
Chapter Three
“Ynya, my love.”
It was her mother’s voice. Ynya looked down, her emotions threatening to explode. There was no way her mother was still alive.
Ynya knelt, flattening down her mother’s frozen dress to cover her exposed legs.
Tears welled in Ynya’s eyes as she looked at her mother’s still face. Her face was overly pale, and her matted red hair frozen to the snow, holding her in place. Blood splatters marred her perfect skin.
Numerous stab wounds to her mama’s bare chest were simply too much to process.
“Mama?”
How is she still alive?
“Ynya.”
She is alive!
Talia Oblique’s white face looked back at her daughter. Pain sparked in her eyes, and Ynya knew she was not long for this world. How she had managed to survive out here in the cold for so long by herself, Ynya couldn’t fathom.
Ynya fell to her knees and cupped her mother’s face in her hands, pouring a gentle heat into them to warm her mother’s cheeks.
“Mama, I’m here. Papa is dead–”
“I know.” Talia’s voice was weak and distant. It was small, like a flickering candle about to be snuffed out by an incoming gale.
“But Mama, where are the others, where are Finny and Meki?”
Talia’s face winced at the mention of her daughters.
Ynya took the terror coursing through her head and focused it into a ball. She had no time for terror, she needed to somehow save her mother.
“I will warm you, Mama. I will get you to a cave so you can heal.”
Ynya knew how to save her. Body heat, and if there was one thing Ynya was good at, it was body heat. She shrugged off her thin dress and built up heat under her skin.
“No, Ynya. Listen.”
“But Mama–”
“They took your sisters. Finny and Meki, they are gone. Your father is dead, he had to watch, but he bled out two days ago.”
Tears welled up in Ynya’s eyes once again at the travesty of the whole situation. Two days? She’s been lying here for two days?
“I can heal you Mama, then we can go find Finny and Meki.”
Her mother coughed, a rough wheezing sound. Her lungs had collapsed, and for the first time Ynya focused on the numerous stab wounds on her mother’s chest.
Ynya needed to find a way to heal her dying mother.
Talia grunted, grabbing onto her daughter’s arm and squeezing. “It’s too late for me, my love. I waited, I held onto hope you would return. I must give you my power.”
She coughed again, pink foamy blood bubbling from her mouth and oozing down her cheek.
Ynya used her dress to clean it off.
Her mother’s magic had always been a mystery to everyone living in the village. Despite the mystery, no one could ignore all the good she did over the years. Talia healed ailments and mended broken bones. She tended crops, and even divined the best time for the fishing boats to leave and come home.
Some thought her able to control the weather when she needed to, to keep the fog at bay long enough for her husband’s fishing vessel to make it home safe.
The Gods Above listened when Talia Oblique spoke, but she had never spoken about her powers before to Ynya.
“I’m here, Mama. What do you mean?”
“I held on long enough to see you one last time, so I can gift my power to you.”
Her eyes glazed over as she looked past Ynya into the Void. They focused again and planted their blue gaze on Ynya’s emerald eyes.
“Ynya, you must use this power to rescue your sisters. Promise me you will never stop. Promise me you will not leave anyone behind. You are all in danger. I should have prepared you better, I should have known this storm would darken our sky eventually.”
Talia stared off at the Void again, her eyes glowing with a dark and sinister light. Power built behind those eyes and Ynya felt the magic eddies surge around her mother’s nearly-frozen body.
“Promise me you will rescue them all, don’t leave any behind. Meki will be blooming soon and you need to be there before it happens. Keep them safe.”
She looked off into the Void once again.
Questions on questions pulsed through Ynya’s mind. What magic did her mother have? How would she transfer it? How was she still alive? How would Ynya use the magic? Where were her sisters?
Talia grunted, pulling her other arm from the frozen ground with a sickening icy crack.
Ynya’s stomach flipped at the sound, imagining how painful that had to be for her mother. She should have been melting the ground around her mother. She should have gotten her somewhere safe. Talia was delirious, but she was still alive.
Talia grabbed Ynya’s head, her rough hands surprisingly strong for a woman inches from death.
Power coursed through her mother’s eyes. Only, they weren’t her mother’s eyes anymore. The blue was gone, replaced with a grey churning cloud. Shadow ringed her face and every contour of her thin, bony visage filled with twilight.
She was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
“I’m so sorry, my little Ynya. You were never meant to have this burden.
I never wished you to have to grow up. The Gods Below come for me, but the Gods Above look out for you.”
Talia’s eyes went wide.
Ynya’s mind exploded with energy as power poured from her mother’s outstretched hands. Time seemed to stop all around them as her body filled with a new power. A dull, cold, throbbing heartbeat locked itself to hers. The magic thumped deep inside her chest, keeping a steady pace her heart struggled to match.
Her mother, now devoid of magic, crumpled to the ground, her lifeless arms flopping to the ground and her final breath exiting her lungs.
“Protect them.”
The words were barely audible from her Mama’s lips, but Ynya heard them as if she shouted.
Her mother passed on, all life leaving her eyes and face. Ynya knelt in the snow as an amalgamation of dread and rage pulsed inside her.
Chapter Four
Ynya didn’t move for the longest time.
Her mother’s lifeless corpse lay before her, her father’s mere feet away, the blood from the axe wound in his back frozen like the rest of the village around her.
Her sisters had been taken.
Who has taken them? Where have they gone? Who is behind this?
She didn’t have any answers, only more questions.
Ynya stood. Her mind still reeled from the events of the morning. She couldn’t process that her mother had just given her magic. She was numb, confused, but mostly knew if she allowed herself to try to process those thoughts and emotions, she would become an emotional wreck.
Ynya needed to distract herself. She needed to take her mind off the trauma and focus on something productive.
Over the next few hours, she carefully melted her mother and father from their respective tombs and put them back into their own bed.
Ynya fell into the rote chores she always did. Before long, she had all the fish from her haul brought in and stored safely in the icebox behind their home. They would be safe in there for months, but she hauled in some floating ice just to make sure.
For all she knew, her sisters would come over the rise from the road arm in arm singing with a handful of wildflowers in their hands.
At least she hoped.
At one point, Ynya sat in their main room and cried. It was the only place in the entire town she felt she could finally allow her emotions to get the best of her. If she didn’t release them now, in controlled outbursts, they would bottle up and come out at worse times.
Hot tears left painful marks across her face, a reminder of her duality in the frozen north. She was born of fire, but raised in frost. She had never belonged here, but Ynya had loved it. Her mother had made sure the skinny girl with red hair that melted ice with her feet fit in with the stoic northern fishing village.
When Talia married Ynya’s father and moved here, she knew she had to earn the trust of the villagers, many who had never left the town their entire lives. Talia had done it by tending to everyone in the village.
Ynya had made the rounds hundreds of times with her mother.
She planted bulbs for the blind woman at the end of the row, the one who always smelled like day-old tobacco. They all called her Old Mam.
Ynya had never learned her real name, and now she never would.
Old Mam died in bed, her throat slit while she slept. At least she hadn’t had the indignity of being raped by the monsters who had killed everyone.
A shudder went through Ynya once again as she thought about her mother. How she had held on to life for days, waiting, hoping her daughter would come back home.
The thought led to dark place in Ynya’s mind. Thoughts swirled through her head.
What if I had come home a day later, or a day earlier? What if I had never left at all?
She wished she hadn’t left, at least she wouldn’t be left here suffering while everyone else was dead.
No!
Those thoughts had no room here. This was a somber day in a remorseful town. This was now a place where the dead would rest. They deserved it.
Ynya followed her mother’s example and served her people the only way she could. She went through the entire town placing people back in their beds, thawing them enough to get their bodies into peaceful positions.
She unmoored the boat and took it out into the bay, collecting the dozen bodies floating there.
She matched babies with mothers, sons with fathers, husbands with wives, and laid everyone to rest back in their own homes, where they would be safe.
It was warm where they lay. Warm and safe and with each other and the Gods Above and Gods Below.
And when Ynya was done, she sat in her family’s home once again, covering up her parents with their furs and blankets.
Ynya listened once again to the cold heartbeat inside her. That hard, frigid place had lived inside of her mother for all these years. She supposed for anyone but her, cold was a way of life.
Ynya barely knew the cold, even though she had grown up in it, she had never fully experienced it like those dead around her, like her sisters had.
She carried a steady reminder of how the rest of her family lived, strumming inside her chest.
For a while, she searched within her, unable to understand how her mother’s magic worked, but she soon abandoned the quest.
It was too soon. It was too soon to make the magic her own. The power was too much like her mother, caring and thoughtful; always planning.
Eventually, the cold thump became colder, icy, and her own heart beat faster, filling her chest with an intense heat.
Anger stirred within her.
No, it was fury. Someone had come, and in one brutal swipe, taken everything from her. Ynya was now alone with a shard of ice deep within her fiery heart.
The heat grew and grew, stoking the fires of rage and revenge.
Her mother asked Ynya to find her sisters, and she would.
For a moment, she wondered if Synol had been taken, but Synol was with new her husband, in a town to the south.
It was Finny and little Meki, her two younger sisters, who Mama had asked her to find.
“I will find them.”
Ynya balled her fists as she stood over her mother. “I will find your daughters and I will keep them safe for you, Mama. I will make those that have harmed you pay for what they have done.”
Rage continued to build inside her. Ynya shook with the immense heat in her head. The roots of her hair glowed, bathing the small room in a brilliant white light as the sun set behind her.
Inside her, the heat and cold warred, each attempting to win an unseen battle, but heat and rage won. She would figure out her mother’s magic another day. She pulled out a dozen frozen fish from the icebox and cooked four. She lost an entire day here at the village. She wondered if she should have left immediately to hunt down her sisters, but in her heart, she knew respect for the dead in her village would grant her protection for what was to come.
She prayed to the Gods Above and the Gods Below to grant her strength in her quest. She prayed for her sister’s safety and swift resolution to the nightmare that tore her family apart.
“I am coming Finny. I am coming Meki. Synol, I will come for you too, for Mama told me to collect all my sisters and keep you safe.”
Chapter Five
As the moon came up behind her, Ynya left the village heading east.
Marsfjord was a small coastal village nestled along a rocky beach of the Razorclaws, but there was not a main road leading through it. Instead, the road sat atop a small rise overlooking the whole area, like the ground had shifted upwards as you went more inland.
Ynya turned once she reached the road, looking for a time over her birth place. It might be the last time she saw it and she wanted to set it to memory.
It was peaceful now, with only couple smoldering fires Ynya extinguished. The town slept. Now, Gods willing, they would all find rest from the violence that had beset them.
She turned and found herself on the ruts of the Hyndalskyr road. It
ran north and south through the entire district. It was at this point Ynya realized she had never taken this road anywhere in her life.
It was early spring here in the far north, which meant rain, mud, and the occasional snow flurry. There were also no fresh tracks leading south other than the occasional solo mule with boot prints from a fisherman going to Holmslatr to sell his catch.
Those tracks leading south weren’t the issue. The tracks leading east to Lyraville however, were deep and wide, meaning a larger contingent of people came through here not long ago.
Ynya turned south and looked out over the endless white and brown. When Synol got married six months ago, she had to travel this road. She had left her safe family town in the dead of winter during a blizzard in order to reach her groom’s family in a harbor town to the south.
It was the last time anyone saw Synol.
Ynya’s mother had waited patiently for spring to come so she could go visit her daughter. She was supposed to head south in a few days’ time.
As soon as I got back from my fishing trip.
Ynya almost lost herself to her emotions once again, but she steeled herself from the overwhelming emotions and dug her fingernails into the fleshy part of her hands. The pain reminded her why she was here. It reminded her of her commitment. She wouldn’t just run away this time.
“You can’t just run away when you have responsibilities, Ynya.” Echoes of Synol’s arguments bounced inside her mind.
“But you ran away from our family, Synol. You are not here right now. I’m here, and I have to clean up the mess.”
Steam rose from below her, and she looked down at her fingernails, beginning to glow red hot from the anger welling up inside her.
A wicked smile crossed Ynya’s lips. “I will clean it all up.”
She headed north, following the most recent tracks leading into Marsfjord.
Half a mile up the road, she turned to face east. This was the furthest she’d ever been away from Marsfjord on the east side. She’d been all over the fjords, ice caves, and inlets to the west. Ynya knew more about the Razorclaw Fjords than anyone else in town, but she’d never come farther east than the road.
