Edgelanders (Serpent of Time)

by Jennifer Melzer

  “Roggi,” Logren scolded. He leaned over to gather the boy and hoisted him into his lap even as he squirmed. “I think you’ve asked enough questions for one night.”

  “But Da…”

  Viina leaned into her husband’s shoulder, a lazy hand lifting to tuck a curl of her son’s hair behind his ear. “Maybe I should take him home and put him to bed.”

  “But Mama, I’m not tired,” he stifled a yawn and swatted her gentle hand away from his face, evoking a hard, serious look from his mother.

  “Those are words you say even in your sleep, little one,” she chuckled. “Come on, into your mother’s arms so she can carry you home to your bed.”

  He writhed away from her, crawling across Logren’s lap and into Lorelei’s to escape his mother’s reach. He settled with a hard drop that nearly knocked the wind out of her. “I want Auntie to take me home.”

  “Your auntie doesn’t even know where you live.” His father reached for him, but he scrambled away with a piercing whine of protest that made Lorelei’s ears ring. Logren tilted his head apologetically, and pushed away from the table to stand and grab for him.

  “It’s all right.” She shook her head and brought her arms up around him to cradle him close. His little body was so warm and soft, and when he snuggled in against her as if he’d known her his entire life she felt her throat tighten with emotion. She caught Bren’s eye when he leaned out to see what the all the fuss was about. He smiled at her and wiggled his fingers at the boy, his stare lingering with a strange sense of peaceful longing. “He can sit here with me until he falls asleep.”

  “At that rate you’ll be holding him in your lap for three days straight,” Viina said, moving into Lorelei’s line of vision and blocking Bren from view. “I swear that boy has more energy than an entire pack of wild dogs on the hunt.” Redirecting her attention to her son, she pinned him with a very serious look. “You sit still, do you hear me?”

  He didn’t sit still though, but Lorelei didn’t mind. She shifted to accommodate him every time he moved until Hodon finally rose from his chair and banged his cup on the tabletop calling, “Could I have everyone’s attention?”

  Roggi stretched and pushed himself upright as he leaned forward for a better look, his little boots digging painfully into the tops of her thighs.

  Within in a matter of seconds everyone in the hall grew silent. Even the children seemed to stop squirming as all eyes turned toward the main table in anticipation.

  “Thank you,” he conceded, clearing his throat. “We don’t generally gather this late in the day because a lot of our families have small blessings who enjoy sharing in our celebrations just as much as the rest of us. However, this night is a special night. A night many of us have waited nearly a lifetime to see. Those small blessings among us have literally waited their entire lives to finally witness the coming of her light, so let us take a moment to welcome and rejoice in her presence among us.”

  Every body in the hall turned toward her, their cups raised in her honor and for a moment Lorelei felt like she might be sick with nervous tension.

  “All hail, the coming of the Light of Madra.” Yovenna lifted her cup beside Hodon’s and everyone in the hall chimed in unison, “All hail.”

  She couldn’t even make eye contact with any of them, but when she caught the shadow of Finn’s movement beside her she turned her eyes to him. He held his cup out to honor her, and her eyes stung with unshed tears. She didn’t understand how such a thing could even be happening, not to her. All those people looking to her for guidance, answers, hope.

  What if she let them all down?

  “And now,” Yovenna spoke after lowering her cup to the table and scanning her old, serious eyes throughout the room, “a story for all the little blessings in the hall, so they might never forget where our people came from.”

  The hall grew quiet, and the old woman stood so that all who sat in the hall could hear her voice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  He kept losing track of the number of days that passed since they’d been exiled from the Edgelands. Was it five, or was it six? Had it been longer, or had some strange vortex in time rushed them across the border into the frigid wasteland only to leave them for dead on the other side. For surely, he was dead, or on the verge of dying at the very least. It was the only way he could explain that strange, utopian city where they now sat warmly tucked into benches, feasting, laughing and telling stories as though they hadn’t just been tossed out of the Edgelands on their backsides with a pack of hunters sent after to kill them once they got where they were going. .

  Vilnjar pushed his plate away and leaned forward, resting his elbows across the table in front of him. The oddest part about it was that he actually felt comfortable there in Dunvarak—for the moment, anyway—and that was the thing that bothered him. They’d been exiled, sent off into the unforgiving tundra under the pretense that if the hunters who tracked them didn’t kill them, the insufferable, frigid terrain would see the job done.

  Dunvarak reminded him of his childhood. The warmth of so many bodies crowded together in the hall, the constant hum and murmur of voices circulating through the room, it made him feel strangely safe and even a little content. After the council signed the proclamation, there had been no more gatherings in the great hall in Drekne, only council meetings and worship in the temple as the community drew away from itself.

  Glancing down the length of the table, past his brother and Lorelei, his gaze rested on Logren and Hodon. He remembered Hodon, only vaguely, and when the man’s boisterous laughter rumbled down the length of the table Vilnjar could almost see a clear memory from his youth. The image of a much younger man sitting among the warriors, Rognar sitting at the head of the table telling one of his famous stories while the men shared laughs, food and drink. His gaze flitted over Logren again, the man so like his father now that he was grown, and it was almost enough to distort his memory. For a moment he felt the muscles in his stomach tremble as a wave of nausea moved through him.

  He shouldn’t have felt comfortable there; it was unnatural. And there were people in that hall, people he remembered, people who should have been dead. Their faces weathered with age, he could almost convince himself he was imagining the familiarity, but in his gut he knew better. Somehow, all of those people survived, and nearly every one of them was half-blooded, like Lorelei.

  It didn’t make sense, and being a man who’d always prided himself on neatness and order, such disorder was a difficult thing to swallow. There were too many unexplained things all around him, too much chaos. He felt like his head might explode with it all. Scanning the sea of bodies and faces beyond the table again, he wanted so desperately to feel at home again, but that feeling had been lost with his mother... No, it had died with his father.

  The chattering voices silenced when the old woman they called Yovenna the Voice cleared her throat and spoke, but Vilnjar’s wandering gaze did not falter. He watched the children settle in around the woman to enjoy the story she was about to tell, their eyes wide with wonder and excitement.

  “Since the dawn of time the great scholars have told the story of creation, and every child knows this tale by heart,” she began, scanning the crowd until each and every child in the hall smiled for her. When next she spoke, a chorus of tiny voices joined her, filling the hall with their joyful celebration of the greatest story ever told.

  “In the beginning there was only Heidr, whose light stretched to the endless corners of the void in the sky in search of others like him to share his existence with.” Their voices died down after those words were said, yielding the remainder of the story to the greatest of tellers to finish. “But after searching and searching, Heidr deemed the universe was vast and empty, and he was alone. He gathered the cold stars in his hands, and from them he crafted a loom upon which he wove the strands of his own light into his firstborn daughter.”

  Yovenna paused to allow the children a moment to shout out the name of the elve
n creatress, the mother of the light elves. Their tiny voices lifted in celebration of, “Alvariin!”

  “Yes, children, her name was Alvariin, and because she was his firstborn Heidr promised to always hold her nearest to his heart, and that is why we can never see her in the sky. Not wanting his beloved daughter to ever feel the vast loneliness he’d experienced, he gathered the strings of Alvariin’s shadow and wove for her a dark twin whom he called Ninvariin. For an age the twins and their father filled the dark void of the sky with their beauty.”

  When Vilnjar was studying to take the required testing to apprentice with a member of the Council of the Nine, he spent endless hours poring over the history of not just his people, but all the people of Vennakrand. He could recite every store in the lore as well as any living skald, but the story told by Yovenna the Voice that night quickly took a turn down a pathway he’d never heard before.

  “Reveling in the joy of their love, Heidr gathered his daughters close to his warm breast and told them, ‘That which I have crafted from the light of my love shall follow in my footsteps and bear fruit,’ and from the inspiration of his whispers the first elves were born. The Alvarii, like their mother, were children of light, woven from the strands of Heidr’s warmth and love until they shone bright and fair and made their grandsire proud. But Ninvariin had only shadows to weave from, and so her children, the Ninvarii, were born of darkness and spite, and though Heidr loved them all equally he knew the children of his children would always long for that which they could never have. The Alvarii honored the night and the Ninvarii scorned the light, and so the first rift between the gods was born. That rivalry followed the elves through the ages, and pits them against one another to this day.”

  Every man, woman and child in the hall was transfixed by a story they had all surely heard hundreds of times. Even Vilnjar felt the strange tingling of excitement warming in the center of his being as the old woman’s voice carried in echoes through the vast space to reach them all. Again he was reminded of the rare simplicity he’d experienced as a child, those strange moments when the U’lfer gathered beyond the threat of war as a community to preserve their history by passing those stories on to their children.

  Finn had never experienced such a thing when he was a child. The time to gather as a people had been shattered by war long before he’d been born, and though their mother had done everything in her power to preserve their history through all three of her children, Finn was experiencing a true sense of community for the first time in his life. The council’s idea of community was a mockery in the face of what he was witnessing in that hall. That realization made Vilnjar feel emotions he hadn’t endured in a long time, particularly an almost childish longing for his mother, for his father and the simpler times that existed before they died.

  Shaking off the chills that moved through him, he glanced over at his brother and wondered if he felt it too. Finn was almost as mesmerized as the children in the room. He leaned into Lorelei’s shoulder and she rested comfortably against him, the child in her lap relaxed against her. They reminded him of his parents, the closeness Deken and Eornlaith had always shared, and as he watched them together while the old women went on with her story he could almost see his parents sitting together that way before Finn was born, Rue curled up on Deken’s lap, him resting in Eornlaith’s arms listening to one of the skalds spin their history into a colorful story they’d never forget. For a moment the warmth Viln felt just looking at them made his longing for simpler times that much harder to endure.

  “From his loom Heidr wove a beautiful world for the children of his children to share, but they were not long for this world before tension and war broke out among the elves. Because they were light and fair and believed they radiated with the purity of the great creator Alvariin’s children thought it best that they rule, but Ninvariin’s sons and daughters disagreed.

  “When they were not making war, they were making children of their own and Heidr studied them from afar. He watched as they formed families, bonded pairs of husbands and wives who raised strong children.

  “His daughters were not just following in his footsteps, but forging their own way. For an age he watched them blossom and grow, while they fought one another for dominion over the world he made them. It saddened him that they did not understand the merits of peace, and there are those who say he walked among them, disguising himself in their skin and living full lifetimes so he might better understand the children of his children. He took wives, fathered mortal children and through this he finally came to understand what Alvarii and Ninvarii were missing. The love that only the bond of two matched souls could provide.

  “He returned to his loom of stars and from the strands of his own light he wove three sons and for each of those sons he crafted a wife.

  “For Llorveth he spun a beautiful goddess with hair the color of sunlight and the heart of a wolf. She was called Brisvyn, and Llorveth loved her well. For Dvergen he created Hexel, whose hair was the color of night and whose heart was made from the pure gold of the mountains. Brisvyn and Hexel were both so beautiful to behold that when the youngest of his sons, Foreln, saw his brother’s wives he begged his father to make him three wives to match their beauty. Because Foreln was youngest, and still closest to his father’s heart, Heidr could not refuse him, so he turned to his loom and wove Foreln three beautiful brides. Their names were Friegla of the Golden-Hair, Kierda Daughter of Fire and Madra the White Light.

  “‘Go forth, my sons and with these wives I have given you, fill the emptiness in your hearts with their love. Fill the world with children, and may a mother’s love give to them a softness of heart that will steer them away from darkness and war.’

  “It was Dvergen who first complained about the unfairness of his father’s favoritism. While his wife was easy on the eyes, she was nowhere near as fair as the wives of his brothers. Dvergen claimed that Hexel’s heart was cold as stone, but Madra who was the fairest of the five wives Heidr crafted for his sons, was everything warm and wonderful. Hair the color of silver, she had, and eyes like golden gemstones, her skin was smooth and white as milk and of all three of his wives it is said Foreln loved Madra best because she was his first and from her womb his first children were born: the race of men.”

  The little boy in Lorelei’s lap was drifting, his slack arm tumbling over the edge of the chair to dangle. Finn reached down and gently lifted it back to rest upon the child’s leg. The gesture stirred him just enough that he snuggled in closer to the woman who held him. It seemed almost a natural thing for her to be holding a child, for his brother to be sitting beside her watching over his family, but with the unknown challenges that lay ahead of them both he couldn’t imagine they would ever get to the family stage of their relationship. They’d be lucky enough for Lorelei to recognize the bond between them and accept it.

  The way Rhiorna made it sound before she’d left their plane of existence, life had more important things in store for the two of them. It almost made Vilnjar jealous.

  He was of no importance, and he was still young enough to have a family of his own, but finding a mate had never felt more discouraging to him since he’d learned his younger brother had discovered his. Ten years past the age his mother and father had been when Vilnjar himself was born, he couldn’t imagine finding someone now. Scanning through the crowd of faces in the hall, he saw so many families, parents holding dozing children in their laps, and that twinge of longing was like a shock in his chest. He’d never thought much about it before, having a family, and he supposed that was because he tucked the longing away, into the darkest part of him where he knew it would never be found. But there it was, and it made him ache for the first time in his life as the realization set in: he was alone in the world. His only family was a brother that didn’t want him around and a sister he’d stubbornly left behind. But what would come of him when it was time for Finn to embrace his destiny?

  “From across the skies her silver light shone like a be
acon, tugging on the heartstrings of all who saw her.”

  And that was when he saw her. It was like the storyteller’s words wove her into existence, a fair-haired maiden sitting bored beside her mother and father, leaning across the table and twirling the golden braid of her hair around her finger as if there were a thousand places she would much rather be. It was impossible to tell from first glance how old she was, Lorelei’s age, maybe a little older. Nevertheless, she was quite possibly the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. Something inside him willed her to see him, to look up from her state of dreadful boredom and meet his eyes, but she seemed more concerned with the split ends of her hair than anything else going on in the hall.

  “Hexel scorned Madra and refused to even look upon her, but her husband couldn’t keep his eyes off of his brother’s wife. He talked about her constantly, lamenting her beauty with sighs that made Hexel’s cold heart break.

  “By day Dvergen worked his forge, crafting elegant jewels he planned to give to Madra in order to win her heart, and by night he stared dreamily across the sky while Hexel danced and sang in an effort to get his attention.

  “One morning he piled all of the jewelry he crafted into a wagon and made his way across the sky to meet his brother’s bride. He believed that when she saw all the shiny, beautiful things he’d brought her she would turn her back on Foreln and follow him home, but Madra was pure of heart and virtue. When Dvergen arrived she sent him away and swore her heart and her affections belonged only to her husband.

  “Heartbroken by her rejection, he left the wagon of jewels behind, telling her that none in all of creation were fair enough to have them but her. When Hexel learned of her husband’s betrayal, she was so distraught she gathered all of their female children to her breast to shelter them from the pain of their husband’s wandering hearts. She cursed her sons so that they might never know love without immense suffering. Then she turned her back on Dvergen and never spoke to him again. And so it has been said that this is the reason the Dvergr are gone from this world now, for there were no women to give them sons and daughters to carry on their line.