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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | With Siamus gone for the night, Avrenne experiences her first real, vivid nightmare. There are some consequences. 2100-ish words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Chain: Siarenne
The draft has wormed its way back in again, and Avrenne rises to a stand with a sigh, hand out for the edge of the tapestry. It always does this in winter, the wind strong enough from the west to untuck it from its proper place behind the heavy desk of the office. Someday, surely, they will finally seal up the whole room properly, but until then the tapestry with the fleur-de-lis must serve. Perhaps she can convince her father to add something to the desk along the wall that might better hold it in place. Or perhaps she should simply buy it, and let it stand, so he might see for himself that it works, the proof in action rather than hypothetical. No. No, she shouldn’t. He will be so angry. He’s always so angry when she does so.
Avrenne tucks the tapestry back, the material damp and heavy beneath her fingers, the crevice between the fabric and the wall a painfully tight place in between. The wind fights it, like a fractious child, and she says to it, “Shhh, shh shh.” The wind goes quiet and calm, like the sea after a song. The cold should fade.
But it doesn’t.
The cold remains, lingers and twists in the air around her, blowing her hair around her waist, and she turns to look for the source. Why is it so cold? The Great House is always cold in the winter, but there should be the fires in the hearths to hold it back. Why haven’t they been lit?
The hallway outside her father’s office is strange and dark, with none of the light of day streaming in from the narrow archer slits, because it is night – it must be night – and the sconces barren, only ashes and rotting wood. The cold is worse there, brittle and biting, and Avrenne pulls her arms close to her body, the hair on her bare arms sticking up in delicate prickles of goosebumps over the smooth skin.
It’s so quiet, the stone so perfectly still, without the hum of the Great House, and Avrenne can hear her own breath, can see the white of it in the air now. She walks faster. She needs to find Mr. Boutille, to tell him that the fires are out, and the house is getting too cold, the children need the warmth. The hallway is so long – has it always been this long – and she wants to run, but she cannot make herself go any faster, her dress is restricting her, winding through her legs, tangling around them, the embroidery of the provence roses distorted and warped. She should cut it off, but she can’t; she doesn’t have the ivory-handed folding knife, she doesn’t have anything at all in her hands.
The rock shouldn’t be there. When her foot finds it on the ground in the hallway, there is only the sense of something halting her, and she falls and falls, hitting the stone as light as a feather. But it is not the smoothness of the Great House, the stone worn down from centuries of walking; it is rubble, broken pieces everywhere, collapsed in itself holding nothing but the barest resemblance to its former self like a shattered bottle on the beach.
Avrenne’s hands push against the debris, her dress trapped beneath the stone of the house, her legs churning slowly and uselessly as though treading water in a winter lake. The cold rushes around her, the wind screaming and howling, throwing her hair wildly around her face, stinging like branches catching against her skin, clawing along her cheeks and neck. She can’t see, she can’t hear anything but this screaming – a woman keening in agony – and she closes her mouth, as if it’s from her, but it doesn’t stop. The children will be frightened, and Avrenne must get to them, she must stop this.
The sharpness of the rocks bite into her skin, and she finds herself reaching out and up, as if for a hand that she is sure should be there, waiting for hands at her waist to lift her up over this part of a scramble, but there’s nothing at all but the empty air, the wind and ice, and she forces herself up, out of the collapse, her arms quivering with the exertion. Her legs feel unsteady, the ground beneath her shifting like a rowboat on uneven sand and water.
She can see the door, the nursery, a crest of a blue-and-silver kraken on it, frost scratching like a disease at the wood, and the pain of her body is nothing to that knowledge. The frost almost has the children. They must be inside, frightened and growing cold.
The fire. She has to call it, she must.
It’s right there, in her veins, the heat of it, and it illuminates her from within her very bones, always there inside her waiting for her call, for fear or rage, for that willing pull to start burning.
But what should be that candle of her power, hot and small and held in place by her will, rushes out in a roar of an inferno, sweeping through her and around her, the scream of the wind buried beneath the din of the flames. There is no control, no tether to it at all, she cannot feel the connection, as if she has summoned something else – a demon of fire – ripping through the world from her body.
“No. No, please! Don’t!”
Her words are lost, useless things consumed by the heat, her begging pleas fuel for it, as it explodes outward from her hands.
She cannot stop it. She has never been able to hold all of it back, and now at last it has freed itself from her control. The nursery door blackens, and Avrenne’s fingers scrape down the wood, splinters dragging along her path, trying to grab the flames with her bare hands.
“Take me! Not the children!”
Her own fire has always obeyed her call, accepted her choice of sacrifice for power when it came to pay the cost, and has always ceased when she demanded. It should halt, her voice filled with power.
But it doesn’t.
It doesn’t stop. The fire burns everything but her, her body a writhing mass of blue and white, the center of this storm of red and gold, and she cannot even scream.
Warm, larger hands close over hers, his skin sun-browned and beautiful over a masculine strength, and the relief that pours through her is an ocean wave that buckles her legs. He’s here. He’s here, and she can feel his arms around her, steady and sure as the tides. He brings her hands to his lips, kissing them through the fire, and her eyes are pulled like a compass to his, to the sweet darkness of them.
“Ye would never hurt me. Fire cannot touch ye so long as I am.”
Yes. Yes. This was always the solution. The fire must recede, banished by this tidesage’s power over her, willingly given.
But it doesn’t.
It grows, a plague of flame from her hands to his skin, it crashes against the shore of him in waves of fire. Now the screaming returns, and she knows it is from her, a siren’s piercing shriek of a desperate song. She pulls at her hands, ready to rip her bones from her sockets, anything to get away from him, to stop this, but he holds fast, a fixed point. He watches her so calmly, so sure, a boyish trust in his eyes, faith in her love and power. And he believes it until the very last moment, as the flames cover his face, burrow down his throat to silence that voice forever, and finally turn those eyes that contain Avrenne’s center to faded cinders as they speak their last message: She won’t let this happen. She would never burn him, never let this fire destroy something so precious.
But it does.
He’s nothing but dark ash on the wind, the house around her fallen in full, the door to the children open and the fire raging and raging through them all until there is nothing left.
Nothing left but her.
And at long last, it turns on her. One final thing to burn. She surrenders to it, the pain of it welcome to cleanse her of this despair that grips her in piercing ice, and she screams at it in rage and pain to let it take her. Let it take her.
And it does.
Avrenne wakes to pain, not only in her chest, but her hands, her arms, her face – everything is hot and bright, and smoke has filled her lungs with the choking scent of burning fabric.
Fire.
There is a moment of confusion – brief – of where she is, what is happening, and a strange desire to let the fire go on. It is swept back as reality reasserts itself. She’s in bed – at home, at Fallon House, alone – she is pregnant, and she is on fire.
There is a correct order of operations in such a situation. The first step is to halt the source. It is her fire, and she can feel it, the connection between her and it an unbreakable bond. The fire of her hands snuffs out like a blown candle. That is done.
She is still on fire, and so is the bed.
Through the pain is the memory of the correct cast of a Fire Ward to absorb the fire. Of all the wards, this has always come easiest to her. It does now, surrounding her. The fire caught on her nightgown, and the bedclothes, is pulled into it as surely as it must be according to the laws of magic, extinguished suddenly and completely, plunging the room into darkness.
Here is another moment. The sudden cold rushes in, and she can feel a break coming, a shiver that will be agony across her burned skin. She forces the blanket – stinking of burning things and acrid smoke – around her to forestall it, the movement threatening a dizzying wave of pain, but she knows it will be worse when it truly hits. She has to stay warm, before the shock hits her.
Fear is an easy lighter, and she reaches out to the wick of the lamp, and lets fear bloom the fire in it, to assess what her mind has already told her in quick snaps of information.
She set the bed on fire in her sleep. It has burned her face, hands, and arms. She is in pain, and soon it is very likely she will go into some form of shock. There’s enough smoke in the room to be uncomfortable, and cause a visible haze in the air. It hurts her lungs to breathe it, and must be dealt with.
The arcane is difficult, but she forces it through, the quick flick to open the window, for the smoke to escape, and she braces for the snap back, like a crack of a hand across the face of her spirit, a brief pain that fades slowly.
A shiver starts, and she pulls the blanket tighter around her, forms herself into a protective ball around the baby, her hands shaking with adrenaline and the pain of blisters forming as she sets them over her belly. “It’s alright,” she tells the child. “It’s alright. We’re alright.” Soothing. Low. Calm. She tries not to think that the child might know the lie, might be able to feel how Avrenne’s heart is racing, her blood hot and cold in fear and shock, but this is all she has to offer and so she must.
There’s no movement.
No kicking, no turning at all, and Avrenne’s world goes briefly dark and gray, her body feeling strangely light and heavy at once. She doesn’t remember how she came to a stand. There’s time lost, but there she is, standing, the burned blanket around her. Help. She needs help. What can she possibly do? She starts singing, a wordless humming lullaby of Siamus, her throat scratching her voice on the way out, and her breath desperate gasps. She doesn’t know what else to do, how to reach the child. She’s not a –
A healer. She needs a healer. She could go to Stormwind, could – no. No, too far, the teleporting, and the journey from the tower to the Cathedral, too long. What is the shortest distance to what she requires?
The priest of the Light. Casker John. He will be able to call the Light, save the child. He is mere minutes away, fewer if she blinks, and if she runs.
So she does.
Flower Dictionary:
- Fleur-de-Lis: Flame, burning, fire.
- Provence Rose: My heart is in flames.