On the journey back to the Beauty
11 Summer 218
Vanja and Athelia
Athelia
The journey through the near lifeless forest is chilled by the ever-present rain. While Athelia doesn’t mind being wet, slippery mud as they trekked downhill makes for an uneven path. Even Athelia catches herself, to stop from sliding, by grabbing hold of Avarian’s shoulder. He is often her strength, without even trying, and she is thankful to have him for this adventure. He squeezes her hand and looks to the back of the line. Behind them follows Warbler, and Sav, but far to the back is Vanja.
It is no wonder that Vanja trails behind, she still seems weak from her months in captivity. Athelia slows her pace, until she is walking alongside the healer. She is aware, assuredly of all the troubles that seem to haunt the young woman, even some apparition. Some of the others have their own suspicions, or even knowledge of what was going on. But Athelia’s instinct is always to offer some help, some kindness, to ease a burden. And, if she is being honest, she feels protective of her newest crew member.
“For those who follow the River, what becomes of their souls … after?” She starts, knowing that the conversation is almost controversial. “For my people, there is the Song. Which, if I think of it, is kind of like a river. It flows through us and moves us, for some it even guides them. We sing to keep it alive and when we pass we become a part of the song and our memory is carried on in those who still sing. I wondered, when I saw the girl, if maybe there is something more than that?”
Vanja
Vanja looks up at Athelia’s approach, then down to her feet. She is no longer as surefooted as she once was, in the woods. She’s laced her boots as tight as they can go, crossing the laces under the arch for extra support, but they are still too large. Like the rest of her gear, her boots aren’t her own. Not really. Stolen from the feet of a dead man but warm and dry. Well-oiled and water-tight even in the ongoing rain. She steps carefully around a moss-slick rock and plants her foot on the other side, twisting her heel into the mud to secure her step.
Vanja offers a small, noncommittal ‘pah’ sound at first, then curses softly, low under her breath. It’s not directed at Athelia, but at the River, and its brutal, sweeping current.
“Hm,” she says, at last, “I can tell you what I believe and I can tell you what I’ve seen. They aren’t as…aligned as they should be.” She shakes her head, “it used to be easy to reconcile. The River is life. It is magic. It’s the source of power for all runemakers.”
There is a laugh from further up the traveling column, and Vanja looks up, her brow furrowing at the familiar sound of Bax’s voice.
** * Sylas’ voice. Bax is gone. * **
Sylas’ voice. The familiar sound of Sylas’ voice.
“When I met Bax I realized that there are other…witches…than runemakers. I’d never met someone else with those skills before, and his magic should have come from the River, too, but it didn’t.” She narrows her eyes at the back of Sylas’ head, keeping her voice low. It wouldn’t be fair for her voice to carry, still mourning Bax when Sylas was alive and breathing not fifty feet from her.
“So I thought maybe there was River magic and Star magic. Or maybe the River grants magic only to some. Those that grow up with that trust in them…” she stops, realizing she’s picked the wrong word, “Belief, I mean. That a runemaker is chosen only from those that believe they can become a runemaker…”
She takes another careful step, across a rivulet of rainwater. A small stream pushing its way through the mud.
“My father taught me the River flows to many places. That it was how the giants came to our world, that it was our connection to our ancestors, and to the very flow of time and place.” She sighs, “Some of that is true, I suppose. It seems to be the path to the land of the dead at least.”
“I thought that…” Vanja turns her face up, letting the rain wet her skin and disguise the tears already welling in her eyes. “I thought that after life was over, I’d be reunited with those that went before. That across the River was a different, peaceful place of celebration and feasting and toasting to well-lived lives.
“But that’s not what’s there. I crossed the River, once, with Astarael and Bax. And there was…there was nothing. No people. Just these two silent women and bare trees and black birds.” Vanja’s voice catches, and she scoffs at herself. “It’s why I don’t want to die, anymore. Because there’s no one there.”
Vanja takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with the heavy, wet air. She looks up, scanning for Talith now, but she doesn’t see him. “The girl you mentioned, Vivian, Talith’s sister - she would appear sometimes, to help him in battle. I always assumed it was some spell. That she wasn’t real and it was the way his magic…” she waves her hand, “…manifested.” She shrugs, “Sometimes I can pull an axe from the air itself, and I’ve seen Ethan and Sav disappear altogether, and Roux pass into shadow… the idea that Talith’s magic sometimes looked like his sister didn’t seem any stranger than the rest of it.
“But then after we fought Talith at the Swan Fort, after he was dragged somewhere else, pulled down into a sea of blood…Vivian was still there. And I realized she wasn’t just a part of his magic. She is her own person. A girl years dead, who didn’t cross the River.”
Athelia
Athelia listens quietly, working her way along the winding path with Vanja. Vanja explains her experiences and beliefs. What she expected and what she saw. When she talks about crossing the River, seeing into an afterlife, Athelia pauses for a moment. Listening, but commuting that to memory to consider later in private.
“Was ‘crossing the river’ anything like the path to the Feywild?” She asks, considering the nature of reality and these fantastical places just out of reach. “That it’s a place like here, but just beyond a veil?”
Athelia shivers with cold dark thoughts, what was real and what was forever. Would a piece of her carry on long after she was gone, would her deeds matter, would there be anyone left to sing her melody. Or would her soul slip through a veil, and find another reality waiting for her. She shakes her head, clearing the spiraling worries and wonders that had no true answers. Even someone who had surely seen something was questioning it still.
“Life is worth living for more reasons than fear of death,” she says finally. She looks up, holding out a hand to Vanja as they climb over a halfway rotting fallen tree. She looks so miserable in the rain, whereas Athelia always felt better when she was drenched.
“Well, maybe more worth living with less rain on you,” Athelia smiles at Vanja. Around them, just a small radius, the rain becomes a drizzle and then not at all. It’s still raining, just not on them for the moment. With a bit of effort, Athelia keeps the water at bay. Avarian, not too far ahead, having fallen back as well, glances at her, he too is close enough to no longer be rained on.
“I feel that no one has perfect answers for these questions,” she pauses momentarily. “Even my people had more faith than explanations. I think what we see and experience gives us more questions than if we just believed blindly. I prefer to know more and make up my mind for myself.”
“If the River is not exactly as you believed, the way you were told by people as fallible as you and me,” she admits. “What if it’s something greater? And, what if what you saw with those women and those birds is just one place a soul might go?”
Vanja
For the first time in what feels like a season, the rain stops. Vanja looks gratefully over to her captain before answering her questions.
“There’s a thing I used to be able to do, while we were traveling through Jorung.” She sighs. “I called it following the River, but the others called it Riverwalking. As if it was a path we could follow. As if was something we could stop if we wanted. And sometimes I thought I could control it. I could send my prayers up to the River, the words I knew by rote before truly realizing there was any power behind them and pull it down to us, to carry us along in the current.
“When the fog came through camp the other day and we slipped through that ‘veil’ - you called it - I thought for a moment that’s what was happening. That the fog would suddenly be shot through with green light and we’d be moved somewhere else.” She smiles a little. “And I suppose we were, just an… overlapping place, instead of a different one. Like a ship on the water and the fish swimming below it. The same place but different…” she searches for a word again, “depths. Different depths.”
“But that’s not what the Pale Land was,” she shakes her head, sending droplets of captured rain over her shoulder. “That feeling…” she takes a handful of her gambeson where it is uncovered by her breastplate and twists the cloth in her hand until water runs from it.
“Maybe there are different places,” Vanja says, the words soft and weak. Then, louder, with the conviction of a true thing: “Roux was dead. He had no breath in his lungs and no pulse in his wrists. And that place… that’s no place for a warrior. He should have been feasting with his lost friends, celebrating his bravery…he died fighting a dragon, Athelia! And he’s so…” Vanja stops, her cheeks suddenly warm without the rainfall. “He’s a good man and he deserves a good ending. And now that I know we left Bax there…that he never came back, that the blank boy in his body was just a…just a remnant…”
: You didn’t leave Bax…He left you. You begged him to come with you and he stayed anyway. He’d rather be dead than be with you. :
Vanja stops walking, her vision smeared and unhelpful. She kicks the ground around her and finds a low stump - the last evidence that there had once been something huge and living here. She sits on the stump, her body shaking. Suddenly cold.
“I…I hope there is another place. But Vivian still living, even in the shadowed way she does, and even Sylas forming out of pieces of people who didn’t cross the River. Who were trapped in Bax’s body…”
Vanja stops fighting and lets the tears come, no longer hidden by the rain.
“If Sylas exists, if Vivian exists, that means a person can live on without their body. That they don’t have to cross the River. And seeing what’s there, beyond…who would choose to spend eternity in that nothing place?” Her words are interrupted by a sudden sob. “But my… my father and mother…my good brave brothers…”
Vanja presses the heel of her hand into her good eye, and smells the scent of blood on her wrist. The wet air has kept the blood sticky and flowing. The wound still open from the day before.
She speaks quickly, quietly under her breath. “If I knew a way…but Talith said he had the same hopes for his own mother and he was never able to…” Vanja swears, a string of low curses.
Vanja takes a breath. Composes herself. Climbs to her feet. “Tell me more about the Song of your people. Is it only for those of your own culture, or with powers like yourself,” at this Vanja waves her hand through the air like a fish cutting through the water, “or do you sing for everyone you have loved and lost?”
Athelia
Athelia kneels nearby while Vanja voices her anguish. The pain is still fresh in the young woman, and Athelia understands loss and failure well enough to know that only time can make that grief smaller. She nods in understanding, she too wishes that her loved ones had found peace.
“The Song is sung by more than my people, it would be strange to call it a religion. In that respect, my people, well, they followed a prophet,” Athelia shakes her head. “The prophet was wrong, in the end.”
She continues, her voice melodic and lively, “The Song is more like a belief. My grandparents taught me, when I was very young, that the Song is kept alive by its singers. And that it has been sung continuously by at least one voice somewhere in the world, since the very beginning of it all. And that if its singers all stopped singing, even for a moment, the Song would die.”
Athelia sings softly, the notes a small prayer, sacrament to a greater whole, and she smiles.
“When I sing, I can feel every singer, as though they are just through the fog and I know I’m not alone. Sometimes I hear the voices of those I knew before. And sometimes I hear the voices of those I’m yet to meet. Not every singer even knows that the Song weaves through their lives. I hope that it is always sung, long after I am gone as well.”
Athelia follows a trickling rivulet, as they make their way downhill. Her steps in time to the song on her lips.
“I carry many many melodies, individual songs, and not just of my people. But it is my burden and privilege to carry theirs. Other than my own family, and all our family line, those who were lost among my tribe, most recently the kelp herder, a brownie, a crew mate, and others…” Athelia looks into the far distance, where the rain and fog still linger.
“This knowledge is a way to remember them by, to recognize their presence when you hear them in the Song. And by singing, I keep a piece of them alive and close to me.”
They walk together in a companionable silence that isn’t quiet, as Vanja notes the quiet hum of Athelia’s voice, as if she’s considering her next question.
“You asked me, once before, whether I’d want to be brought back from the dead. Vanja, would you want to come back?” Athelia continues, “I love everything about this world, despite the tragedies. Maybe the time we have is just this brief spark and then we are gone. I don’t want to go before my song is finished, I have a lot I’d still like to do.”
Gently she squeezes Vanja’s good shoulder, “I hope we can find more that makes life worth living for you as well.”
Vanja
“I like that,” says Vanja. “Your description of the Song. Something that connects you to the other Singers no matter where you are, or even when. It would be something to hear, those Singers all together.” She smiles at Athelia, “Not that it isn’t beautiful, just you and Roux, singing us through the evenings.”
There is a soft throat clearing. Avarian only a few steps away, quietly shadowing Athelia. Adjusting his position to hers like partners in a dance.
Vanja looks away, suddenly feeling like she has intruded on an intimate, private thing.
Vanja takes a moment to adjust her gear, shifting the longsword so it crosses under the shield strapped to her back and is no longer pressing against her leg.
She checks the makeshift strap of her warhammer as she answers Athelia’s question. “I used to think that death was peaceful. Not something to look forward to, but certainly not something to fear. And… and even after we saw the Pale Land… when I saw my brothers hanging in the gallows and felt that…” she pauses, pursing her lips, and then decides to continue. Athelia had asked, and Vanja would answer honestly, “In that moment I thought that even the nothing of death would be better than the pain I felt. It felt like I’d been torn apart, that I was already somewhere above my body, watching another girl panicking, running, frantically checking faces… in that moment I thought even death was better than that suffering.
“But then…when I was arrested…when I thought I was truly going to die, to be burned like my mother… I realized how desperately I wanted to live. And then in the box…” she wipes her face with her sleeve. The padding here has lost most of its original color - the blue turning deep mulberry wine with the dark of her blood.
“And in the box…I fought. I fought to stay alive, each day. Starving and…in pain and keeping track of days by the buckets of water poured over my face and soaking through the gag and I was terrified.
“But I wanted to live. So badly.”
She looks at Athelia, making eye contact with the one eye that still could. “I’m alive,” she says. She lets out a small, dry laugh, “And it may be a misery but it’s something. And I would do just about anything to stay alive.
“As for being brought back…well it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the materials anymore and even so…” she shrugs, shifting the weight of her shield again, “As far as I know I’m the only one who’s done it, and I can’t very well save myself.”
Athelia
Athelia smiles, sadly, at Vanja, “I’m glad you’re alive. I’m also glad that you want to live.”
Her thoughts turn unintentionally to that of the Swan woman. And what it might take for her to lose her own will to live. What would this world have to destroy so she would not wish to see the next day rise? So quickly her heart and eyes are drawn towards Avarian. His silhouette against the fog, she can tell he is keeping pace with her. How can he do that without even looking behind him?
Her expression warms considerably just before she confides in Vanja, “I suppose we will have to see about getting you the necessary supplies.”
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