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~Auris

My mother was born of the north, what you would call a Dane today. Her family had not been raiding for a long time, and nor had she. They lived in what is still Denmark today, where they had their own hall, land, and people.

Mother was worldly to a point, a practical woman who did not value false shyness nor prayers and devotion where a potion would do. Her real interest was in magic, and her prophetic skill called to her early.

I don’t know the details, but she ended up as the student to a seiðkona—a wise woman, you might call her. From there, what I was told was that Mother learned all she could from the woman’s teachings, but wanted more. There was tell of magics in the south; word magic that the people there kept in treasure chests, their books.

Mother knew the runes and knew how to read them. She also knew to read the sky and work out its turnings from winter to summer and back again. Still, she wanted more.

The next bit isn’t that important. There are a few stories I could tell you about her travels, but what is more important than those tales is where she ended up after all her traveling was done. My mother found herself in a house on a wind-beaten island, and her new teacher was the one who would make me.

Much later, he told me there had been a negotiation. There were never many of my kind—his kind, then—and human fear combined with our weakness during daylight hours made simply existing tedious, if not outright dangerous.

When my mother asked for magic, he said he would teach her if she gave him a child to be raised in his care and eventually made like him.

She agreed. It is the reason for my existence in a nutshell. No, my sweet. Don’t look at me as if this were a sad story. It’s not. His desire is the reason I was wanted. And I was. More than that, I was loved by two parents. I am grateful to have been born into both my mother’s care and his. I called him Tove. My mother cared for me and about me, and Tove was a father in every sense but the traditional.

When I was in my teenage years, Tove carried me into the night without telling me where we were going.

He had the gift of flight, you see, and I clung to him the first time he carried me away, desperate and afraid, the wind beating against my face and making my eyes water.

We landed in a forest, and forests then were not what they are now. The trees ruled there, and the beasts. Bears roamed, along with wolves and lynx. You could have walked for days and not seen the greenery thin. Not seen another human.

“There we are,” Tove said.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, thinking it was going to be a game where there were new things to learn and adventures to be had. That was what I was used to.

“We? Nothing, child. You, however, will show me that you are capable enough to guard your own survival.”

I gaped. My jaw must have dropped, surely. I thought he was joking. He was not.

Tove put a bag into my hands, a heavy, roughspun thing. To this day I remember the weight of it and the way it felt in my hands.

“Tove? No, wait,” I said when I felt him let go of me. He didn’t wait. And he didn’t come back for me for thirteen days.

Thirteen days, alone in the woods. I was cold, but it was a kindness that he had picked fall rather than winter. I sheltered under branches while insects tried to shelter under my clothes. I very nearly ate a death cap mushroom. But one day, I found a lake in the forest, its surface a mirror where the algae hadn’t covered it, moss thick around it, and I smiled even though I was hungry, smiled because it was beautiful. I spent hours sitting by that lake, watching dragonflies skim the water and small animals drink.

On the thirteenth night, Tove found me huddled in the crook of a tree root.

“Auris,” he said softly.

I started crying. “You left me. You left me all alone!”

Tove, who was generally a practical man, sat down cross-legged next to me. “I did, didn’t I. And you did what I demanded of you. You survived. You did well. I am proud.”

“But you left me!” I was full of a child’s anger. I probably shook my fist at him.

It was dark, so I cannot say what there was to be seen in his black eyes, but it was a long time before he spoke again.

“Everyone will leave you, Auris. Everyone. You are to become as I am, and nothing lasts except for us. That is why you must learn the shifting tides of time and how to survive them. You have learned much beneath these trees these past two weeks.”

I believe there was some more angry shouting on my part, all of which Tove accepted.

“Are you quite done?” he asked me when my throat was too raw to hurl more at him.

I nodded and let him pull me to my feet. He held on to me in the way he did when flying with me, but just before he lifted off, he looked down.