Brother Of The Dark Places

by Miranda Bailey

  “Forgive the intrusion, Endre, but I come, after all of these years of your self-enforced solitude, to intrude. There has been a great calamity in my world, an earthquake that has wreaked absolute havoc. I come to ask for shelter for my people until we can make repairs to our own world.”

  I shifted back to human form as I looked my brother over. He had barely aged at all, still the handsome devil he’d always been, but now I could see the weight of worry bowed his shoulders. The woman in my arms distracted me as she began to move around, but she soon settled down.

  “Of course, Taka. Please, make yourselves at home.” Any other time I’d have told them all to leave me to my solitude, but I had Thyra to care for and, truly, I could not turn my brother away. Not when he needed me.

  I heard footsteps follow me inside, but I ignored them, taking the burden in my arms to my bedroom as they all began to explore the rest of my home. I took Thyra to my bed, a creation of my own, designed from driftwood gathered three centuries before, when wooden tall ships made a habit of becoming ship-wrecked off the coast of South America and sprinkled the ocean surface with shattered planks of wood.

  I put her down on the mattress made from linen and stuffed with dried moss from the green fields outside. The fields weren’t really grass, more a lichen than anything, but the dried plants were useful for making cushions and fires, when needed. The linen on the bed came from my travels through the magical world, solitary trips I would take when my heart could bear no more quiet and I’d seek out the hustle and bustle to be found within the anonymity of a busy, but magical city.

  I stood over Thyra for a moment, gazing down at the woman that had been haunting my dreams for years now. She was here at last, and for the life of me I was terrified. I’d often fantasized about what the day would be like, how I’d explain who I was, who she was to me, and then, life would go back to my version of normal, with the addition of a companion. Looking at the face that was brave, even during her unconscious state, I suspected I might be in trouble.

  I heard something break outside; some bit of pottery fell to the floor and shattered from the sounds of it, and winced. One of the reasons I’d remained alone, people often broke things with their carelessness. Best not to think about that, though.

  I glanced at a very damp Thyra and realized what I needed to do. I started with her top, pulling away the soft white cable-knit sweater she’d been wearing, and then I removed her water-laden shoes and her pants. The denim jeans wanted to cling to her skin, but they peeled away slowly as I pulled them from the top. Tan skin, pebbled with gooseflesh, met my gaze, and I couldn’t help but stare.

  She was resting on her back now, her head turned away from me so that I could not see her features, but I could see her long neck and had to stop myself from running my fingers down its length. She wasn’t overweight, but she wasn’t overly thin either, and her collar bones were only just visible. From there, her golden skin covered breasts large enough to fill my hands, and then some. I’d left her underwear on, a functional gray cotton bra and gray panties, so I did not see anything that she would not have shown in a bikini, yet I still felt like I was intruding.

  That didn’t stop my gaze from traveling down her ribs, over her flat stomach, to stop at the very top of the pink lace at the top of her gray panties. Was that a tattoo? I bent over her and looked closer. Around her hips she wore the evidence of her travels, tattoos of state coins from Louisiana and Virginia, and images of the coins from the other countries she had traveled in. I knew she’d done some research because they were images of old coins, not the Euro coins now used in several of the places she’d visited. The coins were placed to form a belt, low on her hips, with space in between each for a new coin. The places she’d hoped to travel, I guessed.

  She moved, drawing long, shapely legs up to her chest as she turned on her side and began to shiver. I took a thick blanket from the end of the bed and put it over her, removing her wet undergarments once she was hidden by the blanket. She soon grew quiet once more and I settled in a chair beside the bed, another of my creations, and waited for her to wake up. She was in a dreamless sleep now, likely the result of exhaustion and shock, and I wished for a moment that I could rest beside of her. It had been a long day, one filled with anxiety for both of us, and now that I had her here safe with me, exhaustion pulled at me hard.

  Something else shattered outside and I closed my eyes as I remembered Thyra wasn’t my only guest. I inhaled deeply in the hopes of calming myself, but then raised voices came, and I knew they’d wake Thyra if I didn’t act now. She needed to rest and I needed to deal with those outside of my bedroom. I could no longer put it off.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt,” I said to the two young people arguing over a pot of honey I’d bought in a Mayan market, “but could you please keep it down? My other guest has had a very violent shock less than an hour ago and needs to rest.”

  “I’m very sorry, Endre.” Taka came out of the great room and into the kitchen where I’d found the two arguing teens. “Hata and Ingrid, apologize at once.”

  Both teens looked down at their toes as their king spoke, though I noticed the boy’s, Hata’s, lips pursed tightly as he did so, and I waved away the apology. “It’s nothing. I suppose you all need to eat, don’t you? Have you brought anything with you?”

  I waited for Taka to answer, and inspected him more closely. I hadn’t seen him in at least two hundred years, but little had changed. He didn’t look that different from me, though his hair was blacker, where my light brownish color was tipped in gold. We both had the same strong faces and Nordic features, but Taka’s eyes were the color of the ocean, changing from gray to blue, while mine was the color of lush grass fed a constant diet of water.

  “We’ve brought what we could. If you will allow it, more will come, and bring just as much with them. We can have our engineers come in and set up a camp within hours. We won’t be here long, maybe only a few weeks as the rest of the engineers work to rebuild what has been destroyed.” Taka looked aloof, distant, and I knew that was my own doing, but there was little I could do about it now except give him the aid he asked for.

  “Of course, brother, please, sit, and tell me more about what has happened.” I waved him to a chair as I went about my larder, finding cheese, bread, and a couple of bottles of beer I’d found in a market in the Far East. I thought I’d had them all but was glad to have found them there.

  I placed the simple food in front of my brother and sat down with him. He took the beer but left the food, I noticed, and began to speak.

  “It started yesterday, the earth started to shake, and the protective shield over us started to crack. Luckily, our engineers are good at what they do, and they managed to keep the shield up, but there are cracks that need to be repaired. Most of our structures were damaged, we have people still...” he paused, as though he felt great pain and had to regroup before he carried on, “trapped in some of the buildings. Even for magicals, this is devastating.”

  “No dead?” I asked, hoping for the best.

  “Not that I know of. I’ve not had any reports of that yet.” Taka looked away to hide the pain in his eyes. He sighed before he turned back to me, his face clear once more, his jawline a ridge of concrete. “Thank you, brother, for taking us in.”

  “What else would I do, Taka? You are my brother, after all. They are all our people out there.” I indicated the people in my great room, and undoubtedly more were filling up the land outside of my house as well. I could hear the sound of wheels turning and metal clanging out there already.

  “Wruin has taken some of the people, but he can’t take them all, obviously. We all have such limited space.” Taka looked away again, he knew hearing my brother’s name would not make me happy.

  Wruin, the reason I’d left my world behind, the reason I’d left my real kingdom, the sunken land along the coastline of Greenland, behind thousands of years ago. It didn’t sting so much to think about him now, but
I still could not say his name without bitterness.

  “It’s nice to know Wruin is helping out as well.” It was all I could say, my flat tone all the emotion I could muster. Wruin had killed that within me long ago.

  “I should let you check your woman. What is wrong with her? Can our healers help?”

  “She was caught in a storm, on a small yacht that capsized. I got her out in time. She just needs...to rest.” I stood, appreciating Taka’s consideration. “If you need anything, I’ll be in there. Have the other beer if you like. I’ll come and check in with you later.”

  “Thank you, again, brother. Just having a place to sleep that isn’t shaking will be enough for my people and I. We can provide the rest ourselves.” He clasped at my forearm, an old tradition that I hadn’t practiced in a long time. I’d left the Viking world, the Nordic world, behind when Wruin destroyed my life.

  I gave Taka a shake of my head and left abruptly, I had nothing else to say.

  Inside me, deep inside where only Thyra might eventually be able to get into, there burned in me two warring emotions; happiness that Thyra was here, and pain because Taka had come bearing heartache and memories of why I’d left the world behind. I wanted to take Thyra up in my arms once more and fly away. This was my home and I would not run from my home ever again. Not for anyone. Not even Wruin.

  2

  Thyra

  A loud clanging woke me up, driving the drill piercing my brain even deeper, until I felt nauseous. Was that a blacksmith banging on metal? It was a sound I’d only ever heard once before, at a living history museum in Virginia, but that once was enough to make the noise unforgettable. I must be dreaming, I realized, there was no way there could be a blacksmith on my boat. Only the boat wasn’t moving.

  I sat up, a move that earned me even more pain and heaving stomach as soon as my head was vertical. I put my hand to my mouth and somehow managed to hold back the urge to be sick, but still had to keep my eyes clamped shut as pain coursed through me. My other hand began searching for the cause of the pain and I soon found a very large, hard knot at the back of my head.

  “Holy hell! What happened?” The act of speaking just made my head hurt more and I growled low in my throat about the pain from a soft bed that I knew wasn’t mine even before I opened my eyes. There was no swaying, gentle rolling, or movement of any kind from the bed that should have been little more than a sheet covered cushion but was somehow a soft mattress I never wanted to leave. The world was still, stationary. Something was wrong.

  I cracked one eye open, afraid of a piercing ray of light from one of the boat’s portholes, but found darkness lit only by flames too far away to make a difference. Fire, that’s not a good sign, especially not on a boat. I wasn’t so convinced I was on my boat, though. I scrambled from the tall bed and down to the floor, the wood gave me the final clue that this was not my boat. I was on land.

  When you’ve lived on a small yacht for any length of time you know that even the slightest movement will make the boat sway and your body comes to naturally adjust to that, to even anticipate that movement and when it doesn’t happen you notice it. When the world didn’t shift around I knew I was either on a huge vessel, or on land. I don’t think many ships have wood floors and fires nowadays, so I had to choose the latter option, right?

  I heard a whimper of confusion and fear escape my throat before I could squelch it and grimaced. I am not a wimp, I’m not a crybaby, the last few years of my life had crushed any weakness within me, but in that moment I was terrified. I tried to see into the darkness the fire did little to illuminate, but couldn’t make anything out. There was no window in the room, no lamp that my seeking hands could find; there wasn’t even a lantern for crying out loud.

  I felt another whimper threatening to escape and stood up straight instead. I’ve divorced my husband and dealt with his stalker-games, I’ve sailed across the Atlantic alone; I’ve faced down a storm that would make grown man wet their pants...oh, the storm. Bits and pieces of memories started to play in my head, and I felt my knees go weak as the memory of the world turning upside down returned.

  Had I died? Is that what this was? My hands sought out the wall on the side of the bed I was standing on as I tried to make sense of my current reality. Maybe I had died, I wasn’t a religious person, not by any measure, but maybe this was the afterlife I’d come to doubt existed. I looked around, my eyes searching out the darkness.

  This can’t be heaven, there were no clouds or angels playing harps. I didn’t see clumps of reunited family members in white robes doing...whatever people were supposed to do in heaven. Surely heaven wouldn’t be this dark either?

  I swayed towards the fire, the only source of light in the room. Maybe this was...the other place? I gulped as I looked down into the flames, my head throbbing fiercely at the brightness of the flames. I closed my aching eyes and turned away from the warmth.

  I headed back to the bed. Despite the fire, I didn’t think this was hell either. Maybe I hadn’t been a total saint in my lifetime, but I couldn’t smell brimstone and sulfur, there was no devil poking me in the ass with a stick, and I couldn’t see a lake of fire where damned souls screamed out their eternal agony. Nope, I should be dead, and perhaps I was, but this place I now inhabited was not my culture’s concept of the afterlife.

  Cold air streamed in from somewhere, a piercingly cold draft, and I clasped my arms over my chest just as I found the bed again. Had I somehow managed to survive the deadly freezing water and washed up on land somewhere? That’s when I realized I was naked and grabbed at the blanket on the bed. Nope, there was no way this was heaven, not if you wake up naked with no idea of where you were.

  Memories of a movie flashed in my head, but I knew I wasn’t a college kid so maybe there wouldn’t be raving murderers of any kind outside hoping to murder me for betraying our kind. Hopefully.

  I moved away from the bed, my hands held out to find the walls as my feet shuffled slowly away from the fire. If I could find a wall, perhaps I could find a door.

  Voices joined the clanging sound I could hear, and I knew I must be on land. The only question now was where was I? I found a wall at last and started to move along it, until I felt the surface change and knew I must have found a door. I found a handle and twisted it, a relieved sigh escaped me as I pushed the door open.

  Chaos, total, utter chaos met me when I opened the door. People, men, women, and children, bustled by and talked amongst themselves as I stood there, the blanket from the bed clasped around my shoulders. I could only stand there, my mouth hanging open, as the most beautiful people I’d ever seen went about their lives before me.

  Dark haired and light, the tall people all had the fine features of the Nordic people, not the Hispanic or indigenous beauty of the people of South America that I had expected. For a moment I reconsidered whether I was dead or not. The people all wore leather and furs in styles I’d only ever seen in movies or pictures, never in real life. Not outside of costumes anyway. Time travel? Had I hit a weird Bermuda Triangle of shifty time in that storm?

  I’d heard odd tales on my travels so the idea was as logical as the sight I saw before me, I thought as I scoffed at myself quietly. Where the hell am I?

  “Ah, Thyra, you’re awake.” A very tall, very beautiful man came out of the crowd to join me. “Here, let’s go back inside where it’s quiet.”

  I gaped at him and it was only my shock that had my feet moving as he took my elbow and guided me back into the dark of the room I’d only just escaped from. “You’re...”

  “Yes, I’m Endre, come now, get back in bed.” He guided me gently to the bed, helping me to climb back up the tall frame and onto the mattress that welcomed me softly.

  “You’re...” I could only stare at him, taking in the reality of him. He really was...

  “Endre, yes. And you’re Thyra. Are you thirsty?” He didn’t look at me, only rearranged the blanket around me before he moved to take up a fur of some animal I couldn�
�t identify and placed it around my body.

  “No, you’re...” But he interrupted me again.

  “Hungry at all? I can fetch you something, gladly.” He went to the door and shouted for something in a language I couldn’t understand.

  My headache returned with a fierce piercing pain and I moaned in agony as I turned on my side. The world began to spin and all I could do was hang on with my fingers clutched into the strange but incredibly soft fur.

  “I told you that you needed to rest. Now you’ve made yourself ill again.” He soothed a hand down my head, softly, gently, and somehow the pain started to ease.

  “Oh, that’s nice.” I murmured as the pain went away altogether and exhaustion took over. “Thank you, Dream Man.”

  3

  Endre

  I helped refugees carry loads of supplies through a portal from their world to mine for hours as Thyra slept. A large round thing that appeared to be little more than silver metal surrounded in a haze of green fog with a purple center allowed the passage of people and goods without the worry of trying to transport over a great distance. Some would see it as magic created by the elven engineers; I knew it was purely science. Ancient science, but still science.

  I went to check on her just as the families started their evening meals, each one had already expressed their happiness to me about finding somewhere safe to sleep for the night. I’d hated the noise created by all of the activity, I’d cringed at the invasion of my privacy, but most of all, I’d resented the time they’d kept me away from Thyra. Still, I could not turn them away and it was not their fault I’d rejected the world a long time ago.