Airel: The Awakening (Airel Saga Book One)

Chapter X

HE STOOD OUT AGAINST a brilliant morning sunrise at graveside, under the now-dormant oak, desperate and ruined, overrun with grief. He had been digging most of the night, and his thoughts hovered over concern for how he could save his daughter’s life now. His anger was beginning to stir. The tears that fell from his eyes took hold of red-orange sunlight and sparkled like crystal. Dreams of a life under the sun were now gone—too soon. His beloved, for whom he had sacrificed all, was dead. He looked down at the bundle in his arms and pulled the smooth wool-skin blanket back, gazing into his daughter’s eyes. She was perfect. Her skin, smooth and pure, reminded him of his beloved bride.

His grief came in a fresh and powerful wave again. Now his wife had her place amongst the stars. The heavens he had abandoned for her, the position he had despised, which he had abdicated to make his habitation under the sun with love—all now wrecked. She had gone to the one place he could not reach. The place he once had called home. He was now bound to the burdens he had gladly accepted for love’s sake: time, consequence, the caprice of mankind. And these burdens, even a fallen angel could not shake.

He knew there was no one to help, nowhere he could turn for the faintest hope of empathy. Even in his own village, he was an outsider. He remembered with bitterness how he and his kind had begun their own peaceful civilization, had thrived under the sun with their loved ones. The Brotherhood had come, attacking under pretense in the night, scattering them, and then all had become enshrouded in surreptitious myth. Deepest darkness.

The Brotherhood. Those El had cast down under the sun as punishment for their insurrection. They traded on fear and loathing, insistent that lies were truth and dark was light. And the fact was that man had made his own abdications, surrendering his divine right to these petty usurpers.

“Kreios, you are a fool,” the godman said to himself. “You believed, and too easily, that life under the sun would not bring its consequences to bear upon your decisions. You believed you were immune.” The cold, dead wind tore at him, mocking his loss. He felt the outrageous cruelty of the cold; the helpless frustration that of course they would conceive a daughter at such a time as to require the child to be born in the depths of the worst winter he could ever remember.

He had dug a meager grave in rock-hard frozen earth under the very oak tree where they proclaimed their love for one another only five cycles of the sun ago. He could still feel her heart in his memory, fluttering with anticipation. He had knelt before her, poured out his soul, had finally won her, and vowed to love only her into eternity. 

Now he poured out his soul once again, drowning it in her grave—and he felt the unjust spitefulness of a life lived in subjection to fallen reality. He had placed her cold body into the colder ground, had wept as he covered her empty body with shards of frozen earth. Now he was finished, and the snow blew in and covered over the scar he had made, making everything look clean and fresh, marking off a bitter contrast to what was the last thing he could do for her. He sobbed, an expression of confusion, frustration, anger, and hurt.

The baby cried and wriggled in his arms. Kreios turned and went back inside his hut, shutting the cold out with a thud. He wrapped his daughter tighter in the soft mink pelts that had warmed his wife only last night, nestling his baby girl in his own bed. He snuggled in with her.

When she had fallen asleep, he rose again, restless. She needed a mother’s milk if she were to survive, and he knew where he had to go to get it. A two-day journey from his small village was the town of Gratzipt. His brother lived there with his wife, and Kreios knew she was surely very large with child by now; the birth would be imminent, if it hadn’t happened already. His brother’s wife would be able to nurse his newborn daughter. 

But could the child endure starvation for two days?

Crouching down, poking at the fire in the center of the small hut, he tried to think. No matter how he approached the problem, the solution was always taking her there. Milk was the only life source for a newborn child—nothing else would do. In his village, there wasn’t one mother who would give suckle to his little girl. Not in the winter, and certainly not for someone like Kreios.

His village had written him off long ago. There were rumors. His name, if it was spoken at all, was only ever uttered in fear or hatred. The villagers were scared of him and his odd pale skin, the strange things he was able to build, his fey antisocial ways. Even under scorching sun in summer, his skin always kept its paleness, never burning, never darkening. Local mythology made him into a wizard. Or worse. 

My kinsman will take us in or I shall die trying to get to him. I will not let my sweet girl starve to death.

With the deliberate and steady hands of a warrior, he pulled on his heavy cloak. He gathered scraps of dried meat, putting them, along with a few valuables, in a large leather pack. Then he carefully slid a long object, wrapped in a shroud, inside the pack and lashed the flap down tight. He took a sling and placed his slumbering child into it, then slung it carefully around his neck, tucking her close to his chest under the thick fur of his cloak.

He tightened his belt about his waist in preparation for his journey, and walked out the door into the harsh winter air. The howling wind had subsided a little, and he reflected on the permanence of the change now undeniable in both his life and that of his little girl.

But he felt an abiding peace beneath his circumstances—if even for a moment—and thought of smiling, but did not allow it. He looked at his child and felt the most severe fusion of intense pain and love. It is just you and me from now on. 

He thought about the long walk that lay ahead. He thought of the likelihood that the Brotherhood could have stationed a guard to watch the crossroads, ready to make a report.

He finally allowed his mind to give form to a very bold idea that had been smoldering within him and then said, “I must,” into the thinning winds. In this statement, the future, with all its potential for good or evil, was encapsulated. It will draw out the Brotherhood. It will violate the treaty—I cannot.

Kreios shook his head and padded silently through deep, drifted snow toward the road, the village at his back. In about a hundred paces, he would be in the woods, under cover. They will know—they have eyes everywhere. He did not bother to argue with himself further. There was no use fighting it. He knew that the world would do what it would do; why not anticipate and prepare for the worst? For his beautiful child, he would risk his life as well as the treaty, if that was what was required.

Kreios reached the tree line. The Whispering Wood had been named for the isolated village it guarded, the place he had called home for ten cycles of the sun now. The Storytellers had said that God, El, would whisper truth to travelers there if they had a pure heart. But the voice of El was not something for which many listened now. There were no pure hearts in this world.

He glanced around like a predator, turning from the crude road and trudging off. The snow was deeper in the dormant undergrowth, but as he made his way farther in, under the canopy of the forest, the going became easier.

He could feel his baby girl breathing softly as she slept next to his skin. He knew she would be warm. The cold would not reach her there. Do not do it, his inner voice screamed at him, warning him not to provoke the Brotherhood.

He stepped into a clearing.

Kreios shut his eyes, calmed his nerves, and chose to be at peace. He listened carefully for watchers, reading with his senses the bleakness of the wood for the pungent contrast of a lone inhabitant. After a moment of this, he satisfied himself and was certain that he was indeed alone. 

He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. He began to glow, his birthmarks casting shadows deep under his skin, bright against the snow all around. Turning his eyes upward, he bent into a crouch.

Kreios leaped into the sky, a bolt, turning west, speeding across the heavens like a shooting star. The air parted around him in waves of light, forming the appearance of wings. There was no way to unmake this choice.