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nothingofvaluewaslost · 2 years ago

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STORY: The Firedrake’s Heart

A fantasy/romance novella. In a distant future ice age, long after the demise of humans, an ice nymph forms a friendship with a fire elemental.

The closest to straight-up romance that I will write.

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The Firedrake’s Heart, by Christina Nordlander

Astris liked to watch the fire-spirits dance from the outskirts of the lava field, where she couldn’t enter. The air scorched there, and none of her sisters came with her, so that she sometimes worried that they would break camp before she returned. Yet she came there, halting on the bare ground, too far for the spirits to see her against the walls of ice that were the same shades of blue and translucent white.

Was it their beauty that drew her? They were beautiful, with veils as transparent and light as the skirts of the sky-fire, but beauty was everywhere you looked in the Ice. They were different. They whirled with such security, swifter than she could run, and perhaps swifter than her fleetest sister. When they were within sight on the field, they used to circle in something she didn’t know whether it was dance or arms-training. The first time she saw them, she thought it was a battle to the death, but she returned the next evening and saw no signs of mourning. They had colours you rarely saw in the Ice, except in the sun and sometimes in the sky-fire.

It was night now, the long blackness where the clouds mirrored the sheen of the snow. She stood at the edge of the bare ground. Moisture pooled around her feet, but she was not close enough to feel the heat. They danced there like gnats over melt-water, in those hours when gnats glinted in the sun. Their skin was as black as the hardened lava; all the light came from their coverings. They might have been hair or wings or garments, and they streamed from their bodies and sometimes budded off into little flames. Sometimes their gazes flew across her, but they could hardly have seen her. She did not shine.

Then the wind turned, slapping her with a gust that scorched her face and made her eyes water as if some damage had begun inside them. Once Astris had wiped her eyes with her arm, one of the dancers had stopped, at the edge of their circles. It was impossible to tell whether she was looking at her, but the spirit did not move again. Astris had to flee to safer parts.

A day later, during the time when the sisters went their separate ways to work the land, she returned to the bare ground. It was mostly a challenge, to prove to herself that she was not afraid. The fire-spirits weren’t there. They seemed to prefer daylight; perhaps the sun was their ally, or their mother. The light of the lava pulsed so far off it was no bigger than the stars, but the sterile heat was already making her skin dry out and her eyes itch, and there was nothing here to keep her. She was about to turn back when she noticed the object.

To the eye it was no different from a little lava rock, the kind you would find at the edge of the lava and certainly in a thousand places within it: dull of surface, knotty and not particularly beautiful. It lay just within the wall of ice, and the ice had begun to melt around it to a niche whose sides were misty with rivulets.

Astris bent, brushed against it, and picked it up. It was no bigger than that she might carry it in one hand, and didn’t burn, though it was too warm to be comfortable. Now it was no longer a danger to the ice. She could have thrown it far inside the lava field, but something that didn’t arise from any physical sense told her that the rock was more important than that. She walked back across the plain of ice, slower than she used to, and sometimes changed hands to relieve the other. First, she realised that the rock was doing her no harm. Then it occurred to her that the damage might be too slow to perceive.

She thought of leaving it in the middle of a glacier, where all the layers of white snow and blue ice might neutralise it – but perhaps it was as likely that it would have the opposite result, that it would gradually melt the ice, and perhaps do more, boil the glacier around itself. Finally she left it in the fork of a tough rowan, high above the snow and where it would not be able to burn anything except wood.

Most of the sisters slept, deep in their silent and shady depressions in the glacier, in daytime when the glaring sun made it more difficult to think. In the red dawn, she and Chalybis were the only ones awake in the camp: Chalybis because she preferred daylight for her art.

“I’m leaving for a while,” Astris told her.

Chalybis’ black hair moved as she let out a “m-hmm.” She was fixed on the glacier where she was working out an image sequence, like she had done in their previous site: something from history, sisters in the forest, chasing goat-footed and goat-tailed brethren who weren’t running to escape. Her thumb drew a speckled frost over the trunks, and with a chewed twig in her other hand she shaped it into vernal leafage. (Astris must have been born by the time they broke up from the forest, and yet she remembered none of the things Chalybis drew.)

First, she went to the tree where she had left the rock. There were no signs of thaw around its foot, and the bark had suffered no damage that she could see. The sun was a little disc of red above the smoothed horizon, and somewhere a bird had started twittering. She might as well walk past the lava field before turning back.

When she reached the edge of the ice, someone was there. In the light of dawn it took her a moment to see the fire veils.

Astris hesitated, but it was alone. For that matter, she had never heard of one of them harming a sister, or the opposite. It was the hot grounds that harmed one, not they. It hadn’t moved. If it was friendly, she might never get this chance again, and if it was hostile, they might be evenly matched.

The fire-spirit reacted when she approached, but didn’t move. She stood on the driven and molten ground, close to the bare soil – the way Astris had used to stand on the other side, as close as she could get without hurting. Of course she couldn’t cross the border any more than herself or her sisters. Astris’ last few steps to the wall of hot air were quicker.

“Where is it?” the fire-spirit called out when she saw her. “My core, where is it?”

Her voice was both raspy and tuneful, different from all voices Astris had heard, but it spoke the sisters’ language.

She stopped, feet set a bit apart. It was not difficult to guess what the fire-spirit spoke of, but perhaps it was best to put it off.

“How would I know what you mean?” she said, hearing her own voice as though out of a dream.

“It looks like a rock, no larger than this,” the fire-spirit said. She showed with her hands. “Like a piece of lava. I know it is in this direction.”

Her body, matte black and not so different from Astris’ in shape, stretched out in a step onto the bare ground, then another, as though she were tethered to the lava. Astris was about to call to her not to go further. The spirit bent and started fumbling across the soil like a large spider.

Astris took a step towards her. If she came closer she would feel the slow heat from the soil, the air that would dry the surface of her eyes. Perhaps the fire-spirit had difficulty seeing, perhaps that was why she was feeling her way.

“Don’t search any more,” she said. Her voice sounded loud. “I have it.”

The fire-spirit peered at her. Her eyes didn’t seem to have irises or pupils; they were no eyes at all, mere slits of fire. It was beautiful, if you were distant enough that fire was just light.

“Give it to me!”

But just as quickly her veils sank and she put out her hands, faltering a little.

“I cannot make you do it,” she continued, “and I would be ashamed to lie to you. Bring me the core, and I will reward you in whatever way I can.”

“How long can you live without it?”

Astris let her feet move to a more relaxed position. Even now she could hardly believe that she was standing here speaking to her.

The fire-spirit seemed to hesitate.

“I can manage... a long time,” she said. “You don’t have cores, do you? They are not the kind of thing you die without. But it makes it harder.”

Astris opened and closed her mouth. She didn’t know what the fire-spirit could do for her, but was that a reason to say no and lose this opportunity?

She glanced down at the bare ground. This close to the burning plain it was warm, like a large section of flesh: things grew in it. A little yellow herb poked out of the naked soil, not close enough to her foot to take damage.

“Are you our enemies?” she asked.

It was not possible to follow their gazes, the way you could with creatures who had pupils, but it felt as though the intensity of the fire-spirit’s look had shifted.

“And if I say ‘yes’,” she said, “will you refuse to bring it?”

She took another step, but just one. Her shoulders sank: slim, segmented shoulders in some substance that most resembled black lake-ice. Perhaps Astris had done wrong to think “she.” Perhaps it was a brother; perhaps the fire-spirits still had brethren.

“If you see me as an enemy, I cannot ask of you to give it to me,” he went on, sounding sensible, the way one might do when in pain. “But to help an... an enemy in distress... is reasonable even in war.”

Astris clicked her tongue. He spoke to her as if she hadn’t been able to realise that herself, and then there was the heat, making stinging sweat run into her eyes and dimming her thoughts like a disease. She had a mind not to get it at all – she wouldn’t. She couldn’t leave him to his death, but she might have threatened to.

She shook her head until straight sea-dark hair whipped around her shoulders.

“My name is Astris,” she said, to get those words out of the air.

The fire-spirit made a little acquiescent sound, as if tasting the name. She’d always liked it: to be named after the starry sky. Had she expected him to say that it was beautiful?

“Thank you,” he said. “My name is Lang.”

It sounded like no name in her language, and she didn’t even know whether she had caught it right – but how had she felt when he didn’t react to hers?

“That is a beautiful name,” she said and fancied that she believed it.

Lang sat down on the black ground on his own side. His veil brushed and licked across the ground. Did the rock get hotter there? Would it melt?

“So, have you thought about what I can do in return?” he said.

She had to ask him to repeat it once, because it was harder to hear when he was seated. They couldn’t stand as close as when she talked with the sisters. Lang curled up stiffly as if from anger, but she couldn’t see whether his features changed.

“This will hardly do,” she said with a chuckle.

She took a step closer, but dry warmth breathed on her legs and torso and made her feel that something in her body had started to break down.

“Come back when darkness falls, and tell me about yourself,” she said. “I will tell you about myself, too, if you want. When it is done, I will give you... the core?”

Did he smile? Perhaps it was the way you smiled when you were in pain, and she had no option to do anything for him. If he had been one of hers, she could have put her arm around his shoulders or touched his arm.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

Now when it came to it, she had no questions, and perhaps she would prefer not to know anything. She must have wanted to know things, whether they had a steady settlement – maybe cells and tunnels of lava – or roamed the land like the sisters, whether they could sleep. Not like this.

“It is all right,” she said, jolting to her feet. “I’ll give it to you.”

When Lang raised his head, she had to go on:

“You can tell me once you’ve had it back, if you want to.”

She hurried off up the shade-grey slope where the chill immediately gave her new strength, like a fish swimming into deep waters after having panted near the air.

She got to the tree, and the heart was there, but she didn’t get it to Lang that day. First she happened upon Chione, always uncertain and easy to think of as much younger, who had found a warmer spring and wanted to know whether they should chill it or could leave it. Astris stood with her in the muddied heat until the yellowish haze thinned over the water.

By the time they were done, she was exhausted. The glacier with the sleeping-cells was within sight, closer than the bare ground, and the thought of her cell drew her like something physical, but Lang had waited enough – more than enough. He had said that he wouldn’t die in that time, but she didn’t know whether he was in pain. The image of him fumbling along the ground as far as he could go was in front of her the entire time as she went.

She had turned towards the lava plain, but by then there was blue dusk across the snow and more of the sisters were abroad. If she allowed herself some sleep, all would be awake by the time she left. She walked with the heart dangling by her side. If anyone asked what it was, she could say it was only a strange rock she had found. She had nowhere to hide it.

When she reached the dark ground, no-one had said anything. She had started to wonder what she would do if he wasn’t there, if the heart would be all right if she threw it as far as she could – but one of the sun-red flames down there was Lang.

He got to his feet when he saw her. She tried to go to him with the heart as if she did not feel the heat. Even as the slag clung to the soles of her feet and the heart itself flashed into heat between her fingers, she tried to reach him, even though he must have seen how it distorted her face. Finally she was forced to toss it to him. Even that was clumsy; the pain made her muscles sluggish.

Lang took it and stuck it under his arm where she couldn’t see it any more. When he looked up at her, the flames in his eyes and mouth might have been more yellow. She hadn’t been close enough to see it until now, how his light sprang from inside.

“Thank you, Astris,” he said. “It was starting to get hard.”

She couldn’t bear any more and hopped back to where the ground was supportable. A few moments went by without the pain decreasing notably, and she bent one leg at a time and looked at her soles to see whether some substance stuck to it.

“You must excuse me,” she called to him, “but if you came this way you would certainly do the same.”

“I’m sure I would,” Lang replied.

But something bubbled up beneath his words, changing his voice. From his tone she guessed that it was a laugh. It sounded different from the nymphs’, though their voices were so similar.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get it to you earlier,” she said, to get the sound out of the air. “Believe me when I say I came here as quickly as I could. Did it cause you pain?”

Lang grinned at her.

“Nothing so bad,” he said. “It has already got better.”

She wanted to apologise to him again, but that wasn’t what he would want. The heart was secure now, within him.

She sat down on a boulder whose surface was no warmer than she could stand. Lang saw it and stretched out in a more relaxed position. His movements were stiff when he wasn’t dancing. Was that because he was close to the cold?

“Where do you think I should start?”

“Your people,” Astris said. “Are they all like you, or do you have sisters, too?”

“We have females,” Lang said and sounded amused. “Maybe not as many as the males.”

For a moment it disturbed her. She shook her head and a veil of hair floated before her face, a lighter blue now that the sky was darkening.

“Now it is your turn to ask, if you want,” she said. “What do you wish to know?”

She had to remember the forest time, because she dreamt of it. In the dream she rose through a chimney of steamy water, towards a green sun and a network of leaves. Her ascent was slow, the world above grew sharper as if veils were pulled away.

She breached the surface in a spray of white and saw Lang standing on the grassy bank of the spring. His tail lay curled against one of his white-dappled thighs. A long pennant of black hair fell over his shoulder and partly covered his chest. She flashed him a smile, then rushed stumbling up across the sands, running and clambering and pulling him along as though on a string, because the leafage behind him was lacy-white with frost, and the sun was dull behind a sudden scud of cloud.

When she woke in the row of glass coffins, her cheeks were stiff with tears, and it felt as though she’d been so close to saying something that she could feel the hoarseness of the words.

She had slept too long; most of the coffins were empty. Chalybis was working on a new segment of her frieze outside, facing the entrance. Her back was towards Astris, but she must have heard her, because she turned her head. Astris met her gaze. It was all she could do.

“You have gone to the lava field often recently, Astris,” she said.

Astris let her head hang forward and kept her gaze down. It was better than talking back; it would make the brow-beating pass quicker.

“No, don’t worry,” Chalybis said, her tone more mild.

That made her look up. Chalybis went on:

“It’s nothing wrong... but I worry that you are being a bit foolhardy.”“Give it to me!”

“Because of the fire-spirits?” Astris said, and her voice sounded as if someone had pierced an ice sheet.

“Oh, them as well,” Chalybis said, her gaze vague. “But the greater danger, I believe, is of you over-exerting yourself. One doesn’t always feel when one has exhausted one’s strength. We can tire ourselves out on a task, go away, and then dissolve a few nights later, or become like Galatea who is Selenis’ beloved. We don’t want to see that happen to more sisters.”

She turned from Astris to focus her attention on a shot, with white bark and not yet tall enough to reach their knees, that had sprung up close to the ice wall.

“Don’t have too great trust in your strength,” she said, putting more emotion into her voice when she didn’t have her eyes on Astris. “If you needs must take on that ground, bring a couple of sisters with you. Then you can at least watch one another.”

“Sure, I promise,” Astris said.

It sounded as hollow as nothing at all.

Chalybis’ fingers let go of the sapling. Outwardly it hadn’t changed much, but the cold had penetrated into its roots, and the next snowy wind would snap it.

Lang no longer went to the dances, except when they expected it of him. Aftab said that he danced as well as everyone else, every time he asked, though it was clear that his body didn’t obey like the others’. He couldn’t even get angry, because they said it to raise his spirits. He had danced until he was exhausted, then gone to sit with the older firedrakes who rarely spent many words on him.

Now he had something else. When he sat facing the ice-woman with her colourless skin and hair that often shifted through glassy streaks of blue or green, he didn’t need to feel how frail he was, how his one leg was more brittle. Perhaps she thought that he too was beautiful – he didn’t want to ask –, but she didn’t care whether he danced well or not. It wasn’t part of her world.

Dusk fell, then night. The light from his flames grew stronger around him. They carried some heat, but here he felt little tinkling crystals hanging immobile in the cold outside his circle of heat. She hadn’t said that she was going to come; he had taken it for granted. Did he look like a fool waiting here? He couldn’t leave their meeting-spot either, not if she would come.

She came, she was a white twirling flake on the crest, then a pale twig before him. She glanced over her shoulder, and it was as if all the eternal winter landscape came with her: the white grace of the birches, the dusk that was tinted blue with the snow. Gathering his veils, Lang strode towards her. Frost turned transparent and steamed in a circle around him, until he had gone far enough that he started to feel the cold. She had seen him. She smiled, and the stiffness of her neck softened.

“I apologise for being late,” she said.

“You’re not late,” he said, before he had time to think about whether it was the truth. “What do you want to know tonight?”

He had much to ask, about her sisters and how like or unlike her they were, about the world outside the band of slag that he had sometimes wondered whether his ill-made body would tolerate better than those of his brethren, but it was always he who started telling, and she didn’t seem to have noticed.

“How many are you?” she said, seating herself with one leg over the other on her boulder.

“Here?” Lang asked. “Three companies... my company is about eighty heads, I think the others are smaller.”

After a moment he went on:

“I expect you see more people than that every day.”

His gaze went from her to the horizon. It was close with darkness now, but he knew that the plain beyond was large as the starry sky.

Astris let out the spasmodic tinkling sound that was their laugh.

“We are not even twenty-five in my troop,” she said.

“Are there other troops, then?”

He had difficulty taking in what she was saying. So much surface, regions where you could race for days and nights, and they were scattered across it like the stars that had given her her name.

“There are, for sure,” Astris replied. “But it has been many years since we met one.”

But she winced and glanced away as if she had seen a reflection of his thoughts: the memories of the crowds of the Underground, the throng, the patrols where he himself had participated to clear more space.

“There are thousands of us, tens of thousands,” he said, making a gesture towards the reddening cast of light from the lava. “But they are down there. There was a war... not like in the old days, for glory...” His voice died down. “Do you know what war is?”

Astris nodded.

“We have also had wars. But I guess none like yours.”

Lang shook his head. The memories were in the way.

“That was how we were driven up here. Some of my comrades still talk about how we must prepare ourselves to be able to return one day... a coup... but I don’t think it’s possible. At least up here we have open land where we can live in peace.”

Astris looked as if she was going to speak, but it took a while before she managed it.

“I need to ask your forgiveness,” she said, extending her palms in a gesture that made her look younger.

“Hm, Astris, what do you mean?”

“I didn’t know whether you were my enemy,” Astris said. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I didn’t know.” Her eyes were just darkness in her face, he couldn’t see them. “Now I know that I no longer need to distrust you. Do you forgive me?”

He didn’t get a reply out until he realised that she waited and thought that he was hesitating.

After a while she said:

“Do you miss your land under ground?”

Then he was forced to think about it.

“They says that it was very beautiful, before the Throng and the war. There were burning rivers, gardens of burst glass and fire...”

Now he didn’t know whether any of those stories had described real things, or if they had just been symbolic. He tried to tell it in a way as if he had seen it himself, as if he would have seen it if he painted sufficiently well with his words, and the description of the river made him shudder.

“I miss the heat.”

It took a moment before she replied:

“It sounds very beautiful.”

Lang shook his mane and managed a laugh.

“Say how you feel, Astris. You don’t have to be nice to me.”

Astris laughed, herself:

“It sounds terrible. I suppose you would feel the same way about the lands where I live.”

Lang shook his head again. His gaze slipped beyond her.

“I would like to visit them.”

The next time, Astris was at the meeting-place before he arrived. Her hair hid her face before she heard him, and for a moment he was aware of how alien she was, no more similar to him than a cliff that long winds had cut into the shape of a spirit.

When she looked up, her gaze was distant, and for a moment he wanted to stop her from speaking. He wasn’t close enough to put his hand over her mouth, he could only reach her with words.

“Lang?” she said. “I have something to say...”

She hesitated, as if it took physical strength to get the words out. It wouldn’t be quicker because he asked, but he still needed to.

She went on:

“I could have waited to say it, so that we got to talk a bit about other things first. But if... it disturbs you... I don’t want to put it off.”

“Astris, say what you want to say.”

He tried to press as much warmth and strength into his voice as he could. If she had been one of his people, he could have embraced her.

She managed a smile, so he must have sounded anxious.

“It’s nothing horrible,” she said. “I have been thinking... there is no way to prove it... many ages ago, my people had brethren, too. They left us. But I wonder whether they passed under ground and became your people. They had cloven hooves and were fleet-footed.”

She was waiting for him to reply and confirm her belief. All he could remember of his earliest years was the warmth.

“Perhaps it’s true,” he said.

From the way she carried herself, it looked like it came too late.

“I no longer know whether I believe it or not,” she said, voice growing stronger. “But I want to test... I want us to try to conceive a child. Do you want to, Lang?”

It took ludicrously long for him to realise what she was asking, as if his thought-processes had stopped.

“You want me to become your lover,” he said. His voice sounded flat and lost.

Astris looked away, so that he saw her constellation-fine profile. Shadows moved under her skin, over her cheekbones.

“I... am ashamed to say it, Lang,” she began. “But you feel the same about me, don’t you?”

Once more he couldn’t speak, and she took a few steps towards him, as if to force him – but her voice was pleading:

“We haven’t had any brethren... since the forest time, no children. Your people does not need to be related to mine, perhaps we are still fertile with each other.”

Then he had it all laid open to him: the smooth skin of her thighs, the gleam of her lower lip that resembled a blue and dark jewel, and more, those of her riches that he could not see.

She wanted him to make her with child – but he could have everything he wanted, all he needed was to give her what she wanted. For a moment he was so close, he didn’t know why he didn’t choose it.

“I am not going to do that,” he said, standing.

He glanced at her, as if to challenge himself. Astris still sat there, almost in the same position, as if he had struck her.

“That is not what I meant to...” she began. She didn’t try to step towards him or hold him back. “Do you want to keep the child? In that case, that is fine too.”

Here he could have been satisfied, but the anger was a mirror-bright wall against her words.

“I don’t want to speak more about this,” he said, turning around.

As he walked, he listened for her. The world was mute blackness behind his field of sight. Maybe she had already left.

During the following days, something drew her every now and then to their old meeting-spot, but if she went, he might not be there. Their friendship had been a brief deviation; she should have understood that it was not going to last. (But it would have lasted if she hadn’t offended him.)

She went there again.

When she came rushing across the snow, Lang could barely react. So many times he had imagined her form there.

He rose, and Astris sprinted as if she needed to make it before he went.

“Have you forgiven me?” she managed.

Lang straightened up. The chill out here made his bad leg creak like stone against stone, or like the ice itself. He didn’t look up at her.

“I have nothing to forgive,” he said and heard her sparkle in a little laugh. “I am the one who should ask forgiveness... I shouldn’t have walked away from you like that.”

He raised his eyes. Astris had sat down. Was she sitting closer to the edge? Her one hand was stretched out in an odd gesture, as if she would have wanted to stroke his veils to comfort him.

“I want to do it now,” he went on.

For a moment it felt like she hadn’t heard. Her gaze jolted away.

“Only if you want it,” she said.

He started towards her, and saw that she was heading towards him. He would at least get to stop before he reached the outermost cold. He pulled his veils close about himself, until they were just little flames that leapt across his skin like on the surface of oil. He still felt the cold grinding outside.

She was the one who found a low long rock that shielded them from the lava field. It gave no cover in her direction, but he guessed it was less likely that one of her kinsfolk would come near. He sat down on the ground, and it radiated cold, the rock radiated cold, his flames gave so little protection that it would have made no difference if they hadn’t been there. Astris dawdled. She was as doubtful as he; that gave him a little strength. He glanced now and then at her moonstone body and tried to bribe himself with glimpses of the firelight inland where it was warm, of the geysers where he would let himself sink to the chin.

She touched his thigh and he couldn’t hold back a gasp. All he could do was sit stiff until she pulled her hand away. He looked at his dark coating, but the cold had not left a visible mark.

They began. He embraced her as if he were able to warm her and get warmth back, but the effect was the opposite; she and the ground sucked out his heat. Something within him flickered and was about to suffer damage. He felt long scratches of pain in his side where he had returned his heart, the heart that she had held in her fingers. Now he loved her as if that were the only way to have this done and get out on the other side.

After a while he felt on her breath that she was suffering. He looked at her face. She looked upwards, without meeting his eyes.

He slowed and stopped his movements.

“You are in pain.”

“It’s not bad,” Astris hissed, forcing out the words as if his weight was close to putting her out. “Go on, for Spring’s sake!”

The last part turned into a shriek, so loud his siblings might have heard. Lang let go of her and sat down on the slag that was flesh-warm. His body hurt so much he didn’t want to look at it, but it had already started to heal, as he soaked up the heat.

He kept his eyes on her until she got up to sitting, one arm around her knees. She had an ugly flush, almost striped, up her front. He had done that. Maybe she was trying to hide it from him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and sounded as if she were about to burst into tears or already crying.

He couldn’t tell her that she hadn’t done anything.

“You didn’t do it intentionally,” he said instead.

But the pain made his voice faint and craggy. She sat uneasy, at a bit of a distance from him, and never rested her weight long on the same leg.

“It would never have worked out,” he continued. “You couldn’t even tolerate that long... my child would have burnt you from inside your womb. You wouldn’t have survived, and neither would the child.”

Astris’ head twitched to the side. He knew now that he would never have a child, because none of the firedrakes compared to her.

“May I go?” she said.

She sounded so young, a mere girl. She ran almost before Lang had time to speak.

She tried to avoid her sisters as much as she could while the burnt shadow on her chest soaked up new cold and healed, but Chalybis asked.

“I stumbled and fell on the slag,” Astris said, pulling her hands to her front as if she could hold them there until it had healed.

After a moment, Chalybis smiled a little.

“I did warn you not to go that way,” she said, stroking Astris’ hair away from the afflicted skin. “It will heal soon enough.”

She had averted it. Then she wondered whether Lang had had the same questions.

When she went to the meeting-place she didn’t know whether he would be there, and the doubt grew during her journey until she was almost certain. She was the one who had fled from him without saying goodbye. Both of them had hurt each other. She clung to that thought as if it had been a heart-rock.

As she crested the ridge, she saw his flickering light. She kept her eyes on him during her descent, like a huntress, but saw no signs that his light had faded, no injuries. He looked up when she arrived.

She sat down in her usual spot. They never spoke about the attempt.

A few nights later Selenis, their leader, called them as though to a singing contest or a festival, but it was to tell them that the land lay struck in lasting ice, and that it was time to move south to leave space for other settlers. Astris listened among the others, head held high, as if she might find some chink where the words would mean something else.

If she went to the meeting-place now, Lang would not be there. She could wait, they were not going to depart yet. She would at least get one more meeting.

She lay down in her glass coffin, because she would achieve nothing by staying awake, but going to sleep was an ordeal. She saw Lang sit on the black slag, draped in his flames, and in some floating, falling moment of loss of awareness, she had the notion that she had abandoned him there and was already voyaging on.

Lang was late for their meeting. He had bathed in one of the streams to renew his fire and numb the pain in his leg, and when he looked down at his abdomen he couldn’t see the marks of the cold. Perhaps the ice nymphs scarred more easily than his people.

The warmth left him as he went to the meeting-place beneath the fading sky. The slender white figure was already there. She stood up, and perhaps he should have known then that something was wrong.

“Lang,” she said. “Our leader has spoken... we have to set out.”

His hand sank towards the ground.

When he couldn’t say anything, she went on:

“We are travelling south... I know that your lands don’t stretch that far, but is there any way you might be able to follow us? If you could go below the earth, in the blowholes in the lava...”

She made vague gestures that mimed a dive and a swim below the surface. Lang jolted.

“You know I can’t do it.”

If she had got angry and answered back, they might have been able to quarrel. Instead she stared fixedly past him, and her eyes were small and flat.

He had to try again. At least she was still listening to him.

“It’s not that bad, Astris. You will survive... we will survive. With time maybe... maybe it will...”

Was that then the best consolation he could give, that they would forget?

Astris shook her head, and small flat ice crystals sparkled in the air above her hair. She still did not look straight at him. He took a few steps out on the frozen ground.

His veils pulled tight around him until they were just something like a dense fire-coloured down on his skin. Like this – he could manage like this. Only the soles of his feet felt the bitter cold.

“I can follow you,” he said. “I will find something...”

But his voice broke so that he could barely speak further. This was what he had dreamt of, wandering through the starlit wastes with Astris, and now he knew that his body would not stand it.

“Lang, don’t do it. What would you do... you would have to wander through the cold. You would only have more cold to look forward to....”

Every part of him wanted to obey and return to the heated slag, but she hadn’t taken a step towards him.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said, forcing a smile. “There might be a lava field where you are headed...” He knew that it wasn’t true. “... A hot spring, at least.”

Astris’ expression softened and hardened again.

“We cannot do this... do you want to live the rest of your span by a hot spring? You wouldn’t be able to take more than a few steps from it. I... I can’t let you do it!”

Lang was silent, maybe for a long time. His flames had faded somewhat. The pain had started to vanish, leaving numbness behind. Perhaps that was how he would be able to walk; you reached the point where the body stopped feeling and became invincible.

“Then I will follow after you anyway,” he said. “Rather that than live alone.”

“Don’t do that!”

Astris ran to him. Her side touched him, and then he could still feel the cold, like the shadow of death, the shadow of something so alien to him that it could only be death. She tried to wrestle him back across the border, and he heard the hiss of her breath each time her flesh connected with his.

Lang didn’t fight: she could only bring him onto the slag, she wouldn’t be able to prevent him from going where he wanted as soon as she had let go. (If she stopped him, he wouldn’t have to do it.) But now she stepped onto the lumped and needled ground, and she couldn’t stop herself from gasping every time she set her feet down.

“Then I’ll stay with you,” she managed.

“Don’t do that. For my sake...”

He looked at her, at her face that was regular as a mask, and wondered whether he could hit her, burn her the way he had to make her leave him. He wouldn’t do it.

Now she replied:

“Why not? You wanted to do the same.”

They sat on the bare ground, outside the fires, as close to the tundra as he could get. When he looked at Astris, she smiled, but perhaps it was like his own smile: to convince him that she wasn’t in pain. He didn’t look at her when her eyes grew cloudy with tears and her skin flushed in little pin-pricks. He didn’t look at her when his fingers and feet were drawn over by a floury white film and the pain deep in his side grew worse than what he could hide from her. Yet he stayed, and so did Astris.

But Lang woke. It was the pain that made him realise that he would not be destroyed, it was too strong to let him go. He crawled up as best he could, averting his glance from what lay next to him. He couldn’t even stand to take the few steps back to the lava; he had to crawl, and it was a long time before he was able to fall prostrate on the warm ground. His body was a ruin, he didn’t want to look at it either, but the damage had halted. Time, and heat, and half-gentle jabs from Aftab and the others. One day he would be as strong and limber as he had been before he had heard Astris’ name.

He crouched up, looking down at his torso, which had escaped the worst of the cold. His core was lit, living magma that expanded and sometimes shifted beneath the layer of translucent flesh. Hearts did not break, not for another being.

Now he needed to return to the fires. Another moment’s rest, then he would have the strength to walk.

He was going to lose it again. When he was younger, after the first time, he had thought that he could do it again and that it would end better. He didn’t believe that any more, but it was better than living without a story.

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#fantasy #tragedy #romance #unhappyromance #tragic romance #ice nymph #fire elemental #ice #fire #novellette #novella #long reads

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