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etherati · 10 months ago

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Taproot - (1/25)

To celebrate finally finishing this monster of a fic after 4 goddamned years, I'm going to be posting the full chapters here on Tumblr, serialized like in the olden days, to make it easier to digest a bit at a time. Expect an installment once a week. This is a sequel to Wellspring, and is a post-S2 AU with, at this point, established Trephacard--plus some historical flashbacks, family drama, bloody showdowns, and a lot of secrets waiting in the wings. And feels. All the feels. If you like those things--or, for reasons I cannot disclose at this time, dear old Leon Belmont--consider giving this one a spin.

Summary from Ao3:

Taproot (n): The oldest, most central root; that from which all else arises.

Every family has its roots, diving down into the shadowy, secretive earth--and there's no such thing as a bloodless inheritance.

🎵 Music pairing: The Old Ways - Loreena McKennitt

Next -- >

Sunrise over the Black Sea—golden light spilling into the water like its own sort of glowing, glittering liquid, diffusing through the brine and illuminating it in hues of orange and amber and violet-pink—is one of the most beautiful sights the natural world has to offer. There are other striking sunrises to be had, and other bodies of water prone to making a person feel overwhelmingly small, but nowhere else do the two combine into such a spectacle, delighting the eyes even as it harrows the soul.

At least, nowhere else that Sypha has been, and she has been a lot of places.

She twists the end of her walking stick into the damp sand and gravel. This means that she’s close; she can tell by the particular mineral-laden smell of the salt and the angle of the light that she’s still a bit north of Enisala, but not by very far. There’s no shame in having arrived at the sea slightly off from her target. The only truly accurate navigation is by the stars—and the lingering presence of the night creatures and the winter’s bitter chill have had her travelling mostly with the sun.

Overhead, the keening cries of shorebirds as they dip and weave, coming in low to gather at the waterline, to pick over the tide pools and sandbars. The breakers beat the rocky shore, relentless. There’s a stark beauty to the place, to the way life struggles forward despite its days being filled only with further struggle. Tenacity. Tenacity, she understands, and all the spoils it brings.

This would be a lovely place to bring Adrian and Trevor to, she thinks; let them see this dawn, let the three of them roughhouse in the waves and drink sweet fruit wine in the sun and make love in the cool, damp sand once twilight settles in, all softness and blue-black shadows and the murmur of the tide. When the weather is warmer. When the sea is greener than it is grey, and the wind coming off of it doesn’t threaten to peel the skin from her face and hands. When they feel safe, leaving the castle unguarded for a while.

That time is, with certainty, not yet now. But she’s working on it. She’s still not gotten used to travelling alone, honestly hopes she won’t ever have to, but sometimes needs must. And that’s the entire point of this, of having to be away from them for so long.

She misses them—misses her family, too, but that’s an old ache that she’s grown accustomed to. Missing Adrian and Trevor is a different kind of hurt, sharp and fresh, made worse by knowing how badly they’re missing her in return. When she was growing up, travelling constantly on journeys measured in seasons, a month had felt like nothing. Now, it feels like an eternity.

There’s no snow and ice out here, this close to the water; there never is, in her experience, until you get to the deep, deep north. The sand is wet and the coarse stone crushed into it grinds under her staff. It’s blunt and thick, as writing implements go, and there’s no way to get any detail—and anyway, she’s no artist.

She still leaves a chunky, lopsided heart in the sand, as if marking the spot to return to later—as if the waves won’t wash it away mere hours after she’s left this place.

The sun is high overhead by the time the crumbling stone fortress of Enisala comes into view on the horizon. It feels wonderful, even if winter sun never warms one through the same way summer sun does; she drops her hood to bask in it, shifting her pack on her shoulders.

The ruins themselves are all beige-grey rock, the sky even more devoid of color, stormy and brooding. As she gets closer, though, she can see little pops of color all around the perimeter of the old fortress—blanket-draped caravans, colorful paper lanterns, artifacts of every culture the trains have come into contact with over the past year. Anything to make the space lively.

This place has always felt oddly significant to her—with its ruins that no one will claim ownership over, that seem to belong only to themselves, like slumbering giants from the birth of the world. Really, anywhere on the eastern edge of a landmass would do, for the Speakers’ winter solstice celebrations. But this is where her family group has always come, and so she knows she will find them here. For a week on either side of the solstice, many trains gather here in the sprawl of the mysterious ruins, and they eat and dance and share stories, all the stories of the year before, and Sypha knows she has a few that will make even the elders jealous.

She smiles to herself, framing the narrative in her head as she sets off down the narrow, meandering path to the gathering below.

“Sypha!” a familiar voice calls out, along with the clatter of scattered and dropped firewood; she’s barely made the edge of camp, is still lost in thought, but that voice would snap her out of just about anything.

“Kiri,” she oofs out, as the woman barrels into her, catching her up in a crushing embrace that’s more robes than anything else—layers and layers of them, to keep out the damp chill. Sypha hugs back just as hard; she’d been expecting her family and the others, the ones she’d watched leave Greşit all those months ago and then had to say farewell to again late in the spring. She hadn’t been expecting Kiri, Kiri who knows all her secrets and remembers what she looked like when she was young enough to go about with her hair unshorn, who she spent more time with growing up than she did her own family—throwing rocks into rivers and climbing trees and playing rough games with the boys. Testing every limit, challenging every rule, pushing for every wild dream.

Kiri, who’d been away from their clan for at least three years now, off studying the healing arts with the Ottoman scholars in the east when their own collective knowledge had proved insufficient for her. Three years that now feel like nothing—and isn’t it odd, how the friends of childhood are so often forgotten when the demands of adult life catch up, but the body never forgets what it’s like to hold them?

“I’m so glad you made it,” Kiri says, her face buried in Sypha’s hair. “My first Solstice back with our people and you weren’t here! I was getting worried.”

“What, did you think I would miss it?” Sypha asks, faux indignation through her own laughter. “Never.”

“Well, I’ve been told that you have your hunter, now,” Kiri says, pulling away, a sudden swell of distance blooming between them. No wonder—too often, Speakers who marry outside the tribe never quite find their way back. She and Trevor hadn’t been that to each other the last time she’d seen her family, had just been circling ever closer without quite making contact, but fair assumptions could be, and often were, made. “And your sleeping soldier?”

“Mm, yes,” Sypha says; it’s been a long time since she’s thought of Adrian that way, though he’s never stopped fighting for them. “But this is important, being here. And seeing everyone again! How have your studies been?”

Kiri’s eyes flash with excitement, bright against the wind-bitten redness of her cheeks; her skittishness evaporates in an instant. “It is incredible, Sypha! The things they know, in the south—the things they’ve kept track of, that others have forgotten. There is a book one man there has written on how to repair a person as if they were a torn garment or a broken wagon. It’s remarkable.” Adrian probably has a copy of that, somewhere in his mother’s medical library—if not, she’ll have to remember to track one down. “I understand why we do not record our stories, but after three years there, I wonder if we are foolish to not record knowledge itself? Raw knowledge I mean, the kind that is hard to frame in the context of a story.”

My people are idiots, she remembers saying, during that

interminable stay in the Belmont hold; she’s usually more inclined to be generous, but there’d been an infectious kind of frustration and cynicism they’d all been fighting, after a certain point.

“I’ve wondered that, too,” she says now, far more diplomatic; the journey has done her outlook a lot of good. “About an entirely different body of knowledge! Not something that would be as useful as the medicine you’re learning, but yes—if having something written down can save a life, how can that be wrong?”

“Don’t let the elders hear you say that!” Kiri admonishes, laughing.

Sypha blows a dismissive breath through her nose. “I am sure they already think I’m a terrible member of our tribe, just for raising a hand against the enemies of humanity. I cannot imagine their opinion of me can get much worse.”

Kiri throws an arm over her shoulder, pulls her in. “It’s not that bad,” she says, trying to be encouraging, but there's a tension there. “Our Sypha, the warrior of Wallachia. But I always knew you were destined for something special.”

Sypha frowns in thought, takes a few steps in silence. Did you? She wants to ask, and she wants to ask, Why?

Destined. Destiny is too large an idea, is the sort of thing that hovers around other people, people with remarkable families, with mysterious pasts. Sypha is a magician like any other Speaker magician; her father was the same, and his mother before him, and there is nothing unusual about any of it. These things run in families, and magic users are common, and sure, she'd gotten herself sucked up into an epic story because of it, but it could as easily have been another.

Couldn't it have?

Would another scholar of magic have done just as good a job? Would another magician have melded into the team as well as she did, have communicated in battle so effortlessly, have picked up the slack the other two dropped and protected them when they needed it? Could just any magician have snatched Dracula’s castle out of the aether like it was a feather on the breeze?

Would another Speaker have tossed aside the principles of a lifetime to stand up and fight, or is there really something dark and burning in her that sets her aside?

If there is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that even the question to be asking?

“...how does it feel, to fulfill a prophecy?” Kiri asks, as they start to make their way toward the rest of the camp. It’s clear from the suddenly uncomfortable undercurrent in her voice that she’s not talking about the whole killing Dracula part; that story, her family has already heard, and it’s surely made the rounds. No—she’s talking about the rest of the prophecy. The part that’d had Sypha so uneasy clambering down into the catacombs and so defensive when she awoke there in the face of a hunter; the part that she’d like to believe any random magician would not have been able to fulfill.

“Strangely?” Sypha says, pitching her voice low. “Like I did have a choice in the matter.”

“Truly? You did not feel fate’s hand pushing the issue?” A pause, a few scuffing steps in the snow. Then, carefully: “Or another hand entirely?”

And oh, Sypha understands why her old friend is concerned, understands all too well given the way the world has sometimes treated their people. How non-Speaker men have often regarded them—worldly and experienced and incapable of ever saying no, as if rejection of the church’s self-loathing, oppressive morality somehow made them into succubi. But the implication is so absurd in context that she still laughs, conspiratorial. “No. My God. I had to push them. I thought I was going to go crazy.”

A smile then, more genuine. The tension drains out of the arm across Sypha’s shoulders. “What kind of heroic warriors are they, if they’re not fighting for the hand of maiden fair?”

“In what world, I wonder, would I be considered a fair maiden?” Sypha asks, smiling despite herself. Her robes are ragged with wear, her hair recently chopped short again, her feet swathed in cloth bandages beneath her sandals to keep out the cold. Fair indeed. But she knows that society outside of their caravans frames the world in certain ways. “And they were fighting with me, not for me.”

“Still. Most would expect some sort of reward for saving the world—even if only from fate.”

Sypha shakes her head, remembering that sunrise through the castle doors, the way they’d all started drifting apart before she’d pulled them back together. Those first few hours of having no idea what to even do with themselves, in this tomorrow that they hadn’t expected to see. “We were all shocked to still be alive, in the end. I imagine that would be reward enough for anyone.”

Kiri looks to her feet, swallows. They walk in silence for a moment. It had, perhaps, been unfair to go into such dark territory—to invoke how close they’d all come to dying that night. But these are the stakes Sypha has gotten used to, the way she’s become accustomed to thinking of the world. Speakers don’t fight; they are always in danger from those who don’t understand them, but that is a danger that brings itself to one’s door. The memory of choosing to walk across an enemy’s threshold, certain she would not ever cross it again, is uniquely hers.

“If you met them,” she says, gently bringing the topic back around, “you would understand. They honestly are good men. They understand what trust and respect are.” And they have enough baggage to fill an entire wagon, between them both, but that’s not for her to say. She’s not so dense as to think that they’d been dragging their feet just to frustrate her. “They do respect me, and I had to do nothing extraordinary to earn it—only what I’m truly capable of. We are equals.”

“Enough so that they trusted you to make this journey alone,” says a voice from her other side, mild and gentle, and Sypha turns without thinking, throwing herself into her grandfather’s arms.

“My angel,” he says, stroking her hair, and as it always does, the endearment makes her heart clench up a little around something—something hard and painful, like a rock in her chest, that she has never understood.

She huffs a laugh against his robes, pushes through it. “It was more a matter of whether I trusted them to survive a month without me.” Kiri laughs then, and her grandfather does too, and it warms her to know, with this kind of certainty, just how lucky she really is.

“…and it was in this way that the houses were joined, the scorched land of one family and the usurped fortress of their oldest enemy, and from the ashes of tragedy and loss and centuries of discord arose the hope of an unexpected and brilliant future.”

A long silence, broken up by the crackle of logs in the fire, by the quiet rustle of voices from elsewhere in the camp. There’s no need to pronounce the end of a story here, not if one is half decent at telling it; Sypha knows that they are just letting it sink in.

“A remarkable story, more so even than the first telling, which we have all heard,” one of the elders says, one she isn’t familiar with. In front of the old woman’s feet, a pair of young children are still staring raptly at Sypha. The elder’s voice is warm, pleased. “It will be quite a thing to add to our memory stores. And quite a thing to know that one of our own played a role, in such a difficult time for our country.”

“One of ours, one of Dracula’s, and one of their own that they threw out,” says a young man a few places to Sypha’s left; his voice carries the twist of a smile. “I wonder how the church must feel, in the face of such irony.”

And oh, that’s a thought that has given Sypha much satisfaction over the last year—to be a fly on the wall when the heads of the church met to discuss what had happened!—but the old woman frowns. “I imagine they feel as though they nearly caused the extinction of all human life in Wallachia,” she says, a touch sharp. “Perhaps that is enough?”

One of the children at her feet giggles, a Look who’s in trouble kind of sound, and the man ducks his head. But he’s not in trouble. That isn’t how they do things. “Pardon me, Elder,” he says, “but I disagree. That they made a horrible mistake is knowledge that can fade or be downplayed over time. That they were saved by the very people they ostracized and cast out—that carries weight that cannot so easily be shrugged off. Even if we cannot share this with the rest of the people of Wallachia, that lesson should at least be preserved.”

Because it is about hubris as much as it is about blame, she can remember saying, after that first meeting they’d had with Acasă’s strange new church. Blame can be washed away with a convincing enough apology, and hubris will make the same mistakes over and over again. Both must be undermined if any progress is to be made.

It had been a hard sell. Adrian tends to want to place blame if only to have something to aim all of his anger and sadness at, now that he’s allowed himself to start navigating them; Trevor only wants the world to feel more just than it is. But in the end she’d brought them around: more needs to be done than to just rub the church’s nose in the mess it’d made.

Which is why they’d agreed, in the end, for her to finally tell the story in its entirety—nothing masked or obfuscated, no details left aside. Only for her people’s ears; a closed telling, a rarely invoked practice used when the full story needs preserving but would put the participants in danger, should it get out into the general populace. The people of Acasă are just now starting to truly accept Trevor for who he is; tolerating a witch and a vampire is a bit much to expect of them, just yet.

“For whatever it’s worth,” she says now, “as a participant in the story? I agree. How this was ended, and by who, is just as important as who started it in the first place. There are lessons in both of those things."

The elder regards her for a long moment, thoughtful. Then nods, just a tiny dip of her face into the firelight. “Very well. This story will sit alongside the previous version. The nature of Wallachia’s saviors is to be preserved, as a means of emphasizing the church’s shortsightedness and the need for it to not repeat that mistake.”

Sypha nods deeply, a long and slow dip of her head nearly to her knees. “My thanks, Elder. May your tribe live happily and well, in the coming year.”

“And yours.”

The crowd disperses, some going to hear or tell other stories, some retiring to their caravans for the evening meal. One figure stays nearby, hunched over a nearby fire, close enough to have heard her telling but not actually part of the group receiving it. In the fading light, the shape is just that: a shape, a silhouette, blue-black against the blue-white of the snow, limned in the cold violet light of sunset. They have a branch in their hands, are stripping it of its side-shoots methodically, tossing them one by one into the fire.

It’s a silhouette Sypha would know anywhere.

“What stories have you to tell,” Sypha asks, settling down alongside her, the ritualistic question feeling strange in her mouth, “since this time last year?”

Kiri huffs a laugh. “None as exciting as yours. You’re a hard act to follow, Sypha.”

“You seemed excited about all the knowledge you’d gained, earlier.”

Twist, pull, snap. “That’s nothing, compared to having a grand destiny.”

“I still say that destiny is too strong a word. We basically fell down a hole.”

“Directly into the vault of Greşit’s sleeping soldier. At precisely the time the three of you were most needed. That sounds like kismet to me.”

Sypha can’t help but laugh, remembering. “It felt more like incredible clumsiness, from where I was standing.”

“Falling.”

“From where I was falling, yes.”

A stretch of quiet, then, broken only by the crackling of the fire.

“So,” Kiri says after a while, tossing an entire handful of twigs into the flames. There’s a smile on her face but the firelight has turned it bitter, all shadows and edges. “Your soldier is a vampire.”

“Dhampir, really,” Sypha corrects, kneejerk. For so long, it’d been Trevor she was correcting, then after a while, Adrian himself; she’s used to being quick on the draw with it, because either of them saying vampire had generally been a sign of badness brewing.

Kiri breaks another few twigs free from the branch, twists them in her fingers. “I don’t know what that means.”

Right. Of course she doesn’t. “It means his mother was human.”

“Oh,” Kiri says, seemingly still not sure what to do with this information. “I knew that, I guess. From the story itself. I didn’t realize the distinction mattered.”

“Yes, it… it matters. A great deal. I do not think a true vampire would have ever sided with humanity.”

"Still. I wonder if I would have been able to guess, had we met in the summer instead of the winter."

Sypha plucks at the scarf around her neck, the wool scratchy but warm, dyed in a hundred vibrant colors. It’d come from the market in Acasă, knitted by an old blind woman, and had been a gift—gratitude for the work they’d done securing the town against the demon attacks. They had saved her son’s entire family, and gone home that night and celebrated it, a battle with no casualties save the demons themselves. She’s wearing it because of the cold, but she knows what Kiri is asking. "Perhaps."

A huff of breath. “So much for your gentle warriors.”

“You would probably be surprised,” Sypha says with a shrug, not even bothering to take offense on Adrian’s behalf, because she can tell this isn’t what Kiri’s actually upset about. Some people compare words to weapons, and it’s truer than they know; you can dodge and feint and mislead with them as well as you can with steel. “But that isn’t—Kiri. What’s going on?”

For a long moment, no reply. The fire cracks and pops, splitting the wood apart in a spattering of sparks. Kiri throws the whole branch into it like a spear, a hard burst of frustration.

“Taerna married, this summer,” she finally says, the words quiet.

That stops Sypha cold, her fingers poised in mid-reach for a branch of her own. She curls them back up around the empty air, feels the nails bite into her palm. “She always said she would wait for you.”

“Why should she have bothered? We were only friends.”

“You were more than that.”

“She married,” Kiri repeats, short, face tightening as if to hold something inside. “Like all of my friends and sisters did. Marriage and children and… it’s all anyone does. We had plans. We were going to, to travel, and she was going to hunt our food and I was going to heal people and we were going to see the world together. But this is the only life anyone seems to care about.”

And even you’re going down that path, Sypha can hear, unsaid. You and your prophecy, your exiled hunter and your inhuman soldier.

Sypha closes her eyes, takes a breath. “She cares about you.”

“She also cares about her hound.”

“She loves you,” Sypha says, insistent.

Kiri laughs, bitter, tears threatening. It’s like watching an old dam crumble, flawless limestone threading through with cracks and stress fractures, and then: an outrushing of things held back for far too long. “Not enough,” she says, curling forward over herself, arms tight around her belly. “Not more than she loved the idea of having a child. Not enough to be with me.”

“Oh, Kiri. I’m sorry,” Sypha says, threading an arm over her shoulders, pulling her in. “I’m sorry.”

“Do yours love you?” Kiri asks after a moment, muffled by the layers of robes. “Enough to change the world, to defy everything for you?”

Sypha thinks about Trevor punching Dracula in a ridiculous, suicidal attempt to keep him away from her, thinks about Adrian in her garden, enduring the sun to make her happy—about a castle and a watchtower and the ending of the story she’d told, and her grasp on her friend tightens. “They do. And each other.”

A laugh into her shoulder, rough and wet. “I’ve always thought it would be terrible, to be involved in a prophecy,” she says, barely audible. “I never thought I’d be so jealous.”

There’s a stream that runs past the ruins, a narrow but swift-moving current that cuts through the ground here like a knife. It leads into the tough, gnarled pines and firs that grow this close to the sea, into these dark and uninviting woods that are nevertheless filled with a thousand secret places.

Sypha follows it, as she always has, year after year.

Things are different, this year.

She finds them by the water, bundled up and talking quietly. There’s a fire burning, but it’s been banked and allowed to subside down to embers, giving off heat but very little light. In the heavily filtered winter moonlight, they look like faery folk—Arn with his delicate, dignified features, Lily with the luminescent white bone beads threaded into hair the color of pitch, both of them beautiful and earnest.

They look up when she steps closer, their faces dark, shadowed. Painfully anxious.

She sits down on the ground, near to them, facing them. She is just as filled with anxiety. She has never done this, has no idea how to approach it—she knows they are not being blindsided like Kiri was, knows they have had time to adjust to the idea of this, but all she can see is her old friend’s face, broken up in grief over a friend-love she—and everyone else—had thought was something more. For once in her life, Sypha cannot find the words.

Then Lily smiles, the brilliant, passionate smile Sypha remembers, and holds out her hands, and Sypha lets herself fall into the woman’s arms, nearabout crushing her in the embrace.

“It’s all right,” she whispers, against Sypha’s ear. “You’ve found your loves. It was always bound to happen to one of us.”

Sypha nods against her, feeling the tears welling up. Turns to embrace Arn, the familiarity of his touch painful in this context, in knowing what she has to do.

“Are you set to marry?” Arn asks, quiet, solemn.

Sypha shakes her head. “I haven’t brought up the subject yet. There are a lot of complications—no human establishment would ever welcome us. But...”

“But you would like to.”

“Yes.”

“Will you come back to us then, for the ceremony?” Lily asks, and her voice sounds like the fear of paths diverging, not knowing if they will ever converge again. “Or even just to visit? You know there are none here who wouldn’t welcome all of you—or if there are…”

“Lily will convince them to change their minds,” Arn finishes for her, a small smile at the corner of his mouth.

Sypha closes her eyes, takes Lily’s hand. “Of course. I could not stay away for long. And you can always visit us—we’ll have a lot of space, once we rebuild.”

Visiting, seeing old friends: it’s not the same, won’t ever be the same. And sometimes things change, and people change and what they are to each other changes. But these two were always dear friends first and foremost, and that will never—can never—be any different. She gathers them both into her arms, and it’s a sweet, comfortable place to be.

“Please tell me,” Arn whispers into her hair after another long moment, “that Belmont at least bathes regularly, now?”

And like that, the seriousness of the night vanishes, goes up like a twist of smoke into the black. Sypha laughs, and keeps laughing, until it turns to tears again and she can’t sort out which she’s feeling more of.

“Yes,” she says, with a little hiccup of sob-laughter. “He does. He fights the darkness and protects the innocent—like he was born for. And washes the monster blood off, after.”

“Good,” Arn says, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “We could tell from the beginning, that he was capable of being more than he was pretending to be.”

A long measure of silence, only the water rushing past, too swift to freeze even in the heart of winter.

“Will you let us give you a proper farewell?” Lily asks, hesitant. “Do they know—”

“They know,” Sypha says, biting her lip. “I talked with them about it before I left. They don’t mind.” As long as it’s a farewell, she hears Trevor saying, laughter in his voice even as he’d tried to be serious about this. And not a ‘till next time’.

Adrian had just been quiet, and had smiled softly in that way that is always disarming to her, and had simply said that traditions, and closure, are important. For everyone involved.

“Do you want this from us?” Lily asks. “Whether they mind is not the only question.”

It’s secluded in the little copse of trees, even the starlight blocked by the arching branches thick with green needles, and warm from the banked fire. Sypha nods, and reaches out with both hands, palms up in invitation. They each press a kiss to her open hands, and they hold her and she holds them, all of them swathed in the shadows of this secret place. She lets them say goodbye to this part of their collective lives, lets them put their hands and their mouths on her and push her to giddy exhaustion—one last gift from her youth, and one that will have to hold her over through the winter chill until these two weeks are out and she can begin to make her way home.

When they wander back to camp late that night, appetites sated and tension shaken away, things are different between them, always will be different, now—but that’s all right, in the end. Change, like liquor in a wound, can sting, but it is sometimes the only thing that makes the blood run truly clean.

The next day passes quickly and well. She gives her grandfather the gifts that Adrian and Trevor had sent along with her; scouring the castle library, Adrian had found a rare volume of supposedly true stories from the far east that he thought the tribe would appreciate having to add to their memory stores, and Trevor, feeling some cabin fever in all of the early season snow they’ve gotten, has taken up carving—which is to say, he isn’t very good at it yet, may never really be. But the two simplistic figures he’s sent are easily recognizable as rough caricatures of priests, one missing a finger and one missing an eye. In memory of the day we all met! he’d said, performative, trying to disguise the sentimentality as tactless humor.

Her grandfather laughs to himself as he holds the figures up, and she can tell he’s trying hard to mask how entertained he is; violence is so anathema to their people and yet, somehow, this particular act of violence never seems to have unsettled him. Context, she supposes; Trevor had been acting specifically to save his life, and he could have done far worse.

She wanders the camp, looks at all of the lovely exotic decorations, and plays with the children, an odd pang in her heart as she watches their innocent games. She helps prepare lunch, lighting the fires for the ones doing the cooking, chopping vegetables and kneading dough for flatbread, and she goes into the woods with Kiri to gather more firewood—they will need a lot of it, tonight.

They don’t talk, while they gather. It’s not awkward, just an understanding that the space between them needs some quiet, needs time to breathe.

She visits with the others in her family, with the surrogate aunts and uncles that are not actually related to her by blood, with the childhood playmates and the mentors, and with Taerna and her husband, a man from another tribe who’d chosen to join hers

instead of the other way around, had chosen to take her name. He seems sweet enough, and Taerna seems happy, if a little haunted around the edges of her eyes. Everyone she asks says that yes, of course they will be there, tonight.

Last night had been for stories, and tomorrow will be as well. But tonight is for celebration. All things in equal measure.

Hours in, Sypha drops onto one of the logs around the edges of the clearing; she slumps forward with a happy groan, reaching to rub the knots and strings out of her calves. Her walking muscles are conditioned like no others, but dancing muscles are a different story. It’s a good ache, though, like that burn in the cheeks that comes from too much smiling, too much laughter. She feels overheated from the exertion and the fire, no matter the chill in the air, and she unwinds the scarf, loosens the top layer of her robes to let the air move through.

Between where she sits and where the fire burns, silhouettes move, a chaotic display of human joy and beauty. They have no structured dances, really, though longtime partners often grow into each other’s steps. She can smell warm food nearby, bread and stew and hot mead, sees all of her family and friends and the strangers that come here as well, all her people, all dressed as she is, and wonders again: could any of them, the ones with magic at least, have done what she did?

She stares into the fire, remembers the feel of the castle’s engine between her fingers, the way she’d felt reality bending and brittle fracturing around her, so much more power at her disposal in that moment than she’d ever brought to bear conjuring fire or ice—and she thinks that no, maybe not. She’s met other magicians; she’s not sure any of them have ever trapped an eldritch monstrosity or blown apart an Enochian ward or—or done the things she’s come here to learn how to do. The things her father and her grandmother could do.

Later. Later, when the Nasaii tribe arrives. They should be here by morning. She will learn what she needs to, and she will go home, and she will be able to protect that home more thoroughly than she ever has before.

In the meantime, she watches the dancers, contemplates getting some stew, contemplates whether her legs will fall off if she tries—watches Arn and Lily together on the far side of the clearing, twisting in a tight curl that makes Lily’s hair lift, the fire lighting up her bone beads and glinting in Arn’s eyes. Watches the children imitating the adults, the youngest pairing off with their siblings, stumbling all over each other. Watches strong, tough Taerna with her husband, insisting on leading him, as much as anyone can lead in this sort of dance.

Watches the elder she’d told her story to last night, sitting across the fire from her, watching Sypha right back with a gentle smile that says Don’t worry, that says You will be with them soon.

And there’s nothing inherently romantic about these dances on the solstice—friends dance with friends, parents with children, and many dance alone—but she remembers being young and everything being about those early, tentative relationships, remembers that there was a thrill in getting the chance to dance with those people she called heart-mates, or to be asked to dance by someone she wished to be that close to.

So she can’t help but smile when she sees Taerna whisper something to her husband and break away from him, sidling hesitantly up to where Kiri sits. She’s poking at the dirt with a crooked, bare stick, and her sandals haven’t touched the dance ring—are clean of the dust and soot that coats the ground here, the

remains of a hundred years of bonfires.

Taerna holds out a hand, uncertain.

It won’t solve all of the problems, won’t make Kiri’s love hurt less or magically mend things between them. But there’s something of healing in Kiri’s eyes as she reaches up to take that hand, leaves the stick behind in the dirt, lets herself be pulled up and into the ring of dancers, the two of them falling into each other’s space with an ease that says We belong here, that says Even if we must change, there is still us, that says You will never be a stranger in these arms.

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