The Cold North

A New Understanding of Life

He was so small, she observed, five tiny fingers curled around her pinky. The rash that wound its way around his chest like a band was angry and red, but it was far less severe than it had been just a few hours previous. Had she more time to devote to him alone, maybe she could have cured him without Victoria returning with the ingredients she desperately needed.

But then another mother had arrived with a coughing infant. And another, and another yet. Now she sat amidst a makeshift nursery, rocking one tiny little human life while others slept soundly in the mostly-quiet. For their illness, they were surprisingly calm, and that worried her.

Enambris Rosen-Ash sighed heavily. The baby she cradled gasped a tiny, almost inaudible yawn, and she finds herself smiling. But he closes his eyes again and drifts away to sleep, leaving her alone to wonder: what has she missed?

It’s not with fondness she recalled the wailing and screams that pocked the dark winter nights of Ereden’s south ward, the incurably, terminally ill and the woefully displaced. Sobbing children robbed of their parents, screaming victims robbed of their dignity, all while men and women too high-born to care and too terrified to let through the supplies desperately needed by an all-but-decimated population watched from their lofty towers as the poor suffered and died. Even then, there had been some medicines that had reduced the symptoms, made the passing of the victim a little easier, but there was no cure. Even then, she had read books and scrolls and tomes of every shape and size, looking for something the ancient city and its impossibly magical walls held secret that would deliver them from such hell.

There had been nothing then. But now, now was different. Victoria had come back with the ingredients, and she put her to work crushing the Terse Moss into a fine powder. It had to be exactly perfect, she surmised. The aloe had been expertly crushed and milked of its healing liquid, and the King’s Weed had already been set to be turned into a fine paste. Time was going to tell if this would work. Still though, she felt something was amiss. She had overlooked… something.

The paste, then finished, was hauled back in by Victoria, her explosive enthusiasm a welcome change to Enambris, who despite her initial dislike of the woman, had started to grow fond of her. That Victoria had any drive at all, especially to help children, only helped that along. She took the stone mortar, filled near to full with the pungent paste. She could tell the babe in her lap wasn’t enjoying it, because he scrunched up his face. He didn’t cry though, so she went about her work, carefully dabbing the paste over the rash, around his glands, and on his forehead. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and she worked patiently and diligently, the occasional presence of Victoria peering over her shoulder the only minor distraction. The mothers had been ushered away, the doors locked; Lavi and her curiously-wounded pirate subordinate had been banished to another room, a problem she would have to resolve later. The rash began to fade, and so she set Victoria to work dabbing what was left of the paste on the cloth over the babe’s forehead.

Enambris picked up the next child, a tiny little girl that was worse off than she had originally understood. She set to work, steadily spreading the paste, cooing and soothing the baby girl with soft humming and little songs as she went. Beginning with the uppermost flash, the rays of the sun in her Caste mark ignited, and the light of Dawn illuminated the room. Whether or not Victoria had taken notice she didn’t know, so wholly wrapped in her work as she was. The second child done, she moves to the next.

As she picked up the yawning, swaddled bundle, a thought occurred to her. The light of her Caste mark cast a soft glow on the babe’s tiny face, illuminated it by the essence of her dawn’s light.

“I think I can…” she muttered softly, picked up the rag, and set to work. Her fingertips began to tingle, where tiny motes of essence had pooled there. Under those tips, she could feel something. A little current, just a stream, yet to become a river, but she could feel it. She felt the ebbs and flows, the curves in the stream, and where the stream had been dammed, its flow stopped. That was it.

A flash of light filled the room; Enambris pressed her forehead, and the glowing symbol of the dawn’s light, against the babe’s forehead, and, still singing softly, lifted something from her, tiny and inky. It dissolved, the light dimming with it, but by then she had already captured that moment, held it in her hands. With a wide grin she turned to Victoria. “I can finish this right now,” she said. With that the bonfire erupted and the rising nova cracked; her wings split from it, spread wide, molten gold made to form, and she set to work.

 

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