Vidar
The old man is still sleeping when dawn steals over the horizon and his adventuresome grandson has not yet arrived. I am grateful on both counts as I steal up to the cage, my heart pounding with excitement as the mayflies begin to gather.
They descend in a silken cloud, iridescent wings brushing my face, my hands, my hair. They swirl as they gather in the center of the cage and then, in the middle of their cloud she emerges, and I feel like I can breathe for the first time in decades.
It’s only because she can tell the future I need to see. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.
And yet the feeling is overwhelming. It weakens my knees so that I nearly stumble.
To my surprise, she walks towards me immediately, but she does not take the hands I hold out to her. Perhaps even her hands may not leave the cage. Or perhaps she fears my touch as I fear hers – terrified it might shatter me with her deep knowing.
“I have a gift for you, Mayfly Seer,” I say with a taunting smirk. Even now, devastated by her, I can’t help but guard myself with teasing. “Would you like to see it?”
She gives me a suspicious look. Of my last two gifts, one she has liked and kept, and the other she has discarded. What will she do with this one?
I find I am so full of anticipation that I am desperately eager to taste every flicker of her reaction to my gift. I lick my lips and reach into my pocket, eyes locked on every flicker of her expression.
It’s hard to see the nuance. She’s shrouded in mayflies as always, but her silver eyes glimmer as she watches me.
When I produce the ouroboros – the snake biting his own tail – her eyes go wide, and she recoils.
I laugh.
“He’s alive but he sleeps a deep sleep, and he will dream for a century unless some poor fool kills him with neglect or my magic fails me,” I say, watching her face carefully. “He is not caged. He is not dead. He is merely waiting until the time when his life will begin again.”
Her eyes go bright, almost as if she might cry and then they dart to my face with piercing intelligence. She knows what I am saying. The snake is like her. Dreaming for a century – vulnerable – helpless. And I’m offering her the chance to care for it.
“He doesn’t need much,” I say with care. “Just a dry place in the shade. His kind requires this. Without a sleep like this one, he cannot grow and molt.” I hesitate, fearing she will see this as another prisoner. “It’s not an imprisonment. It’s a form of their magic. My own magic only keeps him safe from magical shocks that might wake him before he’s ready.”
I offer the ouroboros through the bars to her and she takes it carefully and a little fearfully, turning it over in her hands.
I wonder at how she does not speak. Is it that she cannot or will not?
Her fingers dance over the golden skin of the snake and she meets my eyes again. I lift a brow.
“He will bite, of course. No gift comes without its sting. But he’s far too sleepy to bite until he wakes again.”
She seems to be considering, deep in thought. I don’t know if she’s thinking about the snake or the fact it’s a gift or something else entirely. I glance over my shoulder and see a boat on the horizon. I must make this fast.
“Do me a favor,” I say with my best wink. “Don’t marry anyone while I’m dreaming.”
I kneel before her and wait as the visions come.
If she shows me more deep things while I am drifting, I do not remember them when I return to myself, but I do bring back with me a feeling that is something like deep longing mixed with a contentment I’ve never felt before. It stains through me like ink in water.
I’m surprised by how quickly the vision I need arrives just as the staining has run its course. I do not have to sift or fight this time. It comes to me easily and immediately – perhaps that is her gift to me. I must hurry to the Court of Delights. They have what I need to forge an alliance against the Court of Madness, but I may already be too late. Our kind balances on the brink these days with wars in every court and the unfettered ambition of the Court of Madness plowing us under like furrows of earth.
I’m anxious to leave before I even emerge from the dream. So anxious, that I nearly miss the tableau before me when I stumble back to my feet.
The mortal grandson is there. He’s kneeling just a few paces away from me, his forehead against the bars, one hand reaching into the cage where he clasps the hand of the Mayfly Seer.
A spike of heat stabs through me.
She has let him take her hand. She has let him touch her. Has he heard her speak, too?
I am overwhelmed by a cloying envy I can’t shake. It seems to infect what I know I must do and eat away at my resolve. But no. I must not let it. I must hurry to act before all I have built is lost forever.
I step backward, but my eyes are fixed on the mortal holding the Mayfly Seer’s hand. He is beautiful in the way of mortals – temporary with the stink of death already clinging to him. But he is also holding out a golden ring and the Mayfly Seer is reaching for it with the very wrist adorned by the snake I gave her.
Whatever this searing despair is, I do not like it.
I rip my eyes away from the tableau and hurry to my boat, but not quickly enough to miss the glint in the old man’s eye as he watches me. I don’t want to know what he thinks. I don’t want to know that he pities me for a fool like he pities his grandson.
And even as I hurry to the Court of Delights and find what I saw in my vision and offer it to the queen in a way long forgotten – a way that binds her as my ally and binds us both to fight against the Court of Madness – even in the middle of all of that I am troubled. And I wonder if the mortal prince succeeded in winning for himself an enchanted bride. I curse him if he did – for reaching into her immortality and making her mortal again. And I curse him because he has felt her touch and I have not. He has seen her favor and I have not.
And I am a fool to want any of it. And more of a fool to be so unable to give it up.
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