Sound Your Name (Oh, My Darling)

4. Journey Through Ice

Aleksander grew up always on the run.

No matter where he and his mother went he always felt ice cold. He could find no warmth underneath a hot sun or before a warm fire. 

It wasn’t until many decades past that the Grisha began to discover that their ‘symptoms’ led them to their compliments, their soulmates. Even in a time of being hunted, the Grisha were able to find those who made their hearts warm. 

Aleksander did not find his match. 

His mother would not speak of it, however he saw a deep pain in her eyes when someone would ask after her soulmate. He would wonder over the years who could have been his mother’s soulmate of her many lovers she had over the centuries. However, he would never know. 

He would never ask if it had been his father. 

He tried to love others in his many years alive but none set his heart aflame like a soulmate could. The closest that came was Luda. A healer who sought to bring warmth into his life in other ways. Her love for their people, her passion to make a better world for them ignited a flame within his soul that burned bright and yet...her bright light of life was extinguished in one wretched moment. One cruel moment. 

Aleksander had tried to work with the non-Grisha to make a better world for his kind and it had not worked. He was tired and angry, so angry. So he would use what he had, he would use the anger and the grief, the passion to create an army to protect what was left of his people. 

He created the Fold instead. 

~~~

The years passed and he served many kings and faked many deaths and created many new identities. His heart remained the same; so very, very cold. The walls around it were so thick that grief could barely penetrate it anymore. 

Then one day more than four hundred years after his creation was born, he woke to feeling as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He would not know what it was for many days, until sitting by a fire with his men he realized he could at last feel the warmth from the flames soaking into his bones. He would continue to speak with his men and nod to their conversations but inside his heart would begin to beat steadily. His personal Heartrender would catch his eye and he would shake his head briefly. 

It would be several years before Aleksander would have his first dream of his little soulmate. 

Four years had passed since he realized he at last was not alone in the world, that his compliment was born. However, the world kept turning and he had no way of knowing who they may be. 

He had come back to the Little Palace after a particularly discouraging visit to the borders close to Fjerda. The reports that met him back in his war room were no better, several of his operatives had gone missing when investigating the borders of Shu Han. 

That night he dreamed of a little cottage and a little girl. She was thin and wiry, her skin pale and nearly translucent in the low light of the darkness. It would seem it was night where she was as well. She awoke to screams, from the fear in her eyes it wasn’t the first time, as she slipped from her bed. Aleksander could feel her anxiousness as she looked around the corner of the partition that separated her bed from her parents’. 

She jumped back though as flames burst from the fingertips of her mother’s hand as she flailed in bed, shouting in Shu. The little girl’s eyes flashed in the brief flame a dark amber. 

The little one watched as her father cradled her mother in his arms humming beneath his breath, even as his nightclothes simmered from the mother’s Inferni flames. The father rocked the woman reassuring her that she was safe and sound.