GRP Chapter 11

She gasped awake.

The dream evaporated, leaving only the sensation of being chased. She lay there breathing fast, and as her breathing steadied and her focus returned, she became aware that everything around her was wrong.

Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar bed. Unfamiliar face.

A man was sleeping directly in front of her. She stared at him blankly for a few seconds before she remembered who he was.

Last night. Mariaeks had entered the human settlement to rescue Ullri and Baen. She had waited for evening. Avoided the building where the gathering was taking place. Pulled herself up the outer wall, hand over hand, abandoning her only coat in the process as dead weight she couldn't carry. She had managed—barely—to get through the window of a room that appeared to be dark and empty.

The relief didn't last.

From the darkness of that room, dissolving into it almost completely, a man had been sitting in silence. She had known immediately. She didn't need to test it. The power radiating outward from him pressed against the room like something intending to swallow it whole, filling every corner with a force that matched or exceeded anything she'd encountered among Heimdrykze's gods. He was Rhaevydie's hero.

It felt like watching a whirlpool spinning violently beneath a calm surface. He carried a violence in him that you couldn't feel even from the most unhinged monsters she'd encountered. But he did nothing. He sat there, with all of that barely contained beneath the surface, and simply watched her.

She couldn't flee. Turning her back would get her killed. She couldn't stay frozen. Time was running out, and the moment his thinking caught up with itself, the power differential would decide everything.

She had to move before he reached a conclusion.

She started toward him, watching his eyes. He didn't react. She got closer. Still nothing.

It occurred to her that even this hero might be operating within the ordinary constraints of his species. She had seen strong humans prostrate themselves before gods far weaker than she knew herself to be—not for power, but because of what she was: a god, regardless of degree. If that instinct was what was holding him back, it was worth pressing. Acting like a god. She had a rough idea what that looked like, more or less.

So she had reached out, rigid with tension, and brought the dagger to his throat.

She felt the error the moment he smiled.

'Your eyes are pretty.'

The saccharine words came while the dagger was still buried in his chest. The memory was still in her hand—the resistance of muscle, the moment of bone, the strong beating heart on the other side of both. The smell of blood, hot and sticky against her palm, the expression on his face. A man watching something as if it were happening to a stranger.

And then—nothing.

The memory stopped there.

Yet here he was. Lying beside her. Looking better than yesterday, if anything. The blood seemed like something she had imagined.

Frost giants died when their cores were shattered. Gods died when their hearts were torn—ordinarily. Even creatures with no capacity for reasoning feared death. This man had done none of those things. She wasn't sure "human" was still the right word.

Mariaeks let the thought go. Dawn was beginning to fill the room. Once it was full light, people in the settlement would begin to move. Every moment she remained here, the time available to reach Ullri and Baen was shrinking.

She began working at the blankets wound around her, trying to free herself—and felt the quality of the air change. She looked up.

He was watching her. His eyes had been open for some time—like fog on a rainy day, or a single well-honed sword. No fatigue in them.

He hadn't been asleep at all.

He sat up slowly. The sheet fell away from him as he pushed himself upright on one arm. He looked down at her. There was nothing hurried about it. He was examining her in earnest.

"Mm…."

The sound came low and flat. His hand closed around her throat—not squeezing, just enclosing—and the blood left her face immediately regardless. His hand was large and hot and hard. She registered it not as a hand but as a weapon pressed to her throat. The tension in her body went to stone.

"What is this thing, really…."

Then, directly:

"What are you?"

The question aimed at her precisely, for the first time. She wet the back of her throat with what little remained there and tried to think.

What am I. She pushed aside the first answers that surfaced—the half-thing, the failed-to-become thing—and searched for something more impressive. Commanding. Something that might make him hesitate before harming something that stood above him in the order of things.

The god of Heimdrykze. The one who brings forth bloom. The great and beautiful and merciful god of the northern spirits.

She looked into his eyes for information—which framing would serve her best, which would land with the most weight. This was something she could usually do—reading emotion and calculation in others was a skill only the weak could develop, and she'd had a hundred years.

His eyes gave her nothing. The gray irises reflected exactly one thing: her own face.

The silence stretched. The anxiety of it climbed her throat. She had been mistaking it, this whole time, for the pressure of his hand.

It broke before she meant it to.

"…Mariaeks."

She hadn't expected that to be the answer that came out. He hadn't been asking for her name.

While she was still working out how to breathe around this, something moved in his eyes—cold and expressionless until this moment, the one thing that had moved there since she’d arrived. He raised one brow and let the edge of a smile reach his face.

"Is that so. Mariaeks…."

He drew it out. Let each syllable find its own weight.

Mariaeks stared at him.

Hearing her name from a stranger's mouth was a strange thing. Stranger than she could immediately account for.

The one who had said her name most had been sleeping now for over a hundred years—

Rhaevydie called her the half-thing, or simply you. Ullri and Baen had never presumed—she had been Master to them for decades, as long as she could remember; the full construction, when they were feeling particularly sincere, was the most beautiful and great Master in all the world, but her name was a boundary they didn’t cross. Gradually, over the course of a hundred-odd years, the name had become something abstract. Something that had belonged to a time when someone was awake who knew it.

She had not predicted that a human would one day be the one to say it.

But nothing that had happened since she crossed the frozen river had been predictable. She could not sketch the shape of what came next, or whether he intended to kill her, or what it meant that she had already spent one night beside him without either event resolving into certainty.

They looked at each other without speaking, each for their own reasons.

Time passed.

The darkness that had lain over the room lifted, gradually, as the sun continued to rise. The same dawn that had always found her in her small shrine had arrived here. Mariaeks turned her head toward the window, not thinking about it.

Sunlight fell across her eyelashes. She blinked. A morning she had never seen before was there.

Beyond the glass: snow-covered mountains, brilliantly white, greeting the morning in silence.

Garthe pushed the door open and offered a good morning.

"Good morning, Samthyeon."

Samthyeon let it pour straight back into his cup.

"So graceless." Garthe said it pleasantly and extended a handkerchief. The offer was received with the contempt it deserved. Samthyeon held Garthe's gaze while wiping his face on his own sleeve. The handkerchief, having failed its purpose, returned to Garthe's pocket with complete equanimity.

Samthyeon looked him over. Garthe's state was never good—that was axiomatic—but today's variety of wrong was pointing in an unexpected direction. Garthe had settled into Samthyeon's chair without being invited, was drinking from a new cup with Samthyeon's own tea in it, and was doing both with the unhurried ease of a man who had nowhere in particular he needed to be. Samthyeon's eyes narrowed.

The curse that had taken up residence inside Garthe was exceptionally foul. It had arrived at the moment of its own emergence and hadn’t left since, growing without any upper limit or visible sign of aging. The sheer fact of its constant presence was close to unbearable on its own—but it also roused itself at irregular intervals, delivering pain that was qualitatively different from the baseline. Like a venomous bite delivered into whatever happened to be nearest—different each time, and then sustained.

Yesterday had been one of those days. When the irregular cycle came—every few days at best, up to ten at worst—Garthe cleared the entire building. Without the expression he usually kept assembled over everything else, he was indistinguishable from something that had lost its mind: cutting, killing, breaking, burning whatever produced the wrong kind of sensation.

So this was strange. Yesterday, Samthyeon had felt Garthe's divine power fluctuating erratically. Barely ten hours had passed since then. And Garthe sat across from him now with a relaxed face that suited the warm morning sunlight perfectly.

Samthyeon's eyes narrowed further.