 Thyri stirred amongst the soil, her eyelids fluttering as she slipped reluctantly into consciousness. She did not know how long she had lain there. Her head throbbed and her fingers skimmed her hairline as she pushed herself into a sitting position. As her left hand pressed against the ground Thyri knew something was wrong, she inhaled sharply as a pain shot through her hand, stinging her pale skin. She blinked in an attempt to bring clarity to the world around her, but the blurred outlines of her surroundings were not the result of concussion. The mist lingered still, though it was thinner so far down. Thyri looked down at her injured hand, and the sight that met her eyes caused her chest to constrict in horror and alarm. Her usually soft pale skin was blemished, tendrils of red burned skin snaked their way from the tips of her fingers up her arm to her elbow. Thyri had always been vain, and she had always been beautiful. It was who and what she was, and it had defined her existence so utterly that she reacted to its ruination as another may have responded to a severed appendage.
Rhaeger would be able to fix it! The truth reached out to her from the darkness, bringing light to the edges of her thoughts. A voice of doubt cut through just as quickly, like a snuffer brought to a candle flame to smother the desperation of hope. Magic could heal wounds...but did scars not linger? She had never asked him. Would he still want her if she wasn’t perfect? He who was eternally beautiful? Feeling sick, Thyri tried to swallow back the lump in her throat. It was in that silence that she heard it, the musical sound of running water, sweet enough to offer welcome distraction. It was not far away. There was nothing near to offer support as she climbed uncertainly to her feet. Thyri could feel her knees shaking, but she gritted her teeth and forced them to bend, and stumbled forwards to be enveloped once more by the fog.
The closer she got to the sound, the more the land around her changed. Plants, spindly and sparsely furnished with withered leaves twisted up out of the ground and cast long shadows despite the absence of light. Thyri cradled her arm against her chest, as if by holding it close she might somehow return it to its former brilliance. It was not long before she found the brook, the dark water, which seemed almost black, interspersed with great white rocks. Feeling almost as if she had found salvation Thyri’s knees gave way and she crumpled to the ground on the riverbank. The water was clear, devoid of weeds, insects and fish, and coolness radiated from its surface. She took a steadying breath before shuffling forwards a little further so as to submerge her arm in the water, and almost instantly the liquid took to soothing the damaged skin.
Catching sight of her reflection in the water Thyri gasped, withdrawing her arm from the river so quickly that she sent splashes of water up into the air. She shook her head. She was hallucinating, surely? Cautiously, Thyri approached the brook again and leaned over the bank, her reflection rippling into focus as the disturbed water began to settle; at least, she assumed it was her reflection. The woman who looked back at her out of the water had thin white hair, the wrinkled skin of her head visible through the silver strands peppered with liver spots. Time had withered her lips into a thin line, and age had set her eyes more deeply into her skull so that they almost seemed too large for her face; like a child again. Her green eyes had filmed over, the colour so pale that they almost seemed grey. She was not old, she was ancient. Thyri had never seen a woman so old, her vitality withered almost to the bone, a skeleton draped in too much skin. A tear dripped from the end of her sharp nose and fell into the water, disturbing the haggard portrait.
“Yfengel,” a voice said from the other side of the bank. It was a smooth voice, almost impossibly so, any harshness or roughness worn away like a pebble washed up on a beach. Thyri looked up, batting away a second tear with the fingers of her uninjured hand. The creature was about the size of a dog, but it put Thyri instantly in mind of a hare. It had the same long face and long ears, and its body followed the same slender curves. The thing was devoid of fur, and impossibly black, almost as if it had been weaved out of the shadows themselves. Its skin looked rubbery, almost as if it had stolen it from a whale. The creature’s eyes were white, the pupil indicated only by a slight darkening in shade; it was quite beautiful, she reflected, in an eyrie kind of way. Tilting its head to one side the hare-creature sat back on its haunches to consider her before it tried again.
“Truth water,” it explained in the same smooth voice, rocking back onto all fours and stretching out its neck in order to peer into the water again, “it strips away magic and shows us for what we really are; in all our ugly glory.” Thyri flinched involuntarily, as if the creature had struck her as it spoke. “Deceit is in the air,” the hare-creature pressed, looking up at the fog, its head pivoting around on its neck as if its eyes followed some unseen insect, “and the water is infallible.”
Struck by a sudden thought Thyri looked around, deliberately avoiding catching sight of herself in the water again. Where had the creature come from and why had she not seen it approach? There was no undergrowth to conceal it, and it was too big to have been entirely concealed by the thinning mist. “What are you?” she managed at last, cradling her arm again, her fingers skimming absently over the burn lines. The creature tilted its head in the other direction and did not reply right away.
“I am Frithkin,” it told her, the voice genderless, “I am Khyer-kind, as you are Fae-kind. There have been no Fae here in so long; I had almost forgotten what you looked like.” It paused. “What is your ptirin?” it asked, before seeing her frown and correct itself, “name?”
“Thyri,” she managed, her voice lacking much of her usual bravado. Frithkin nodded; a series of jerky movements as it bobbed its head up and down several times in quick succession.
“There are things the water doesn’t know,” he explained merrily, starting to groom its ears, “and names are one of them. There is no truth in a name, they are little more than words, and words are foolish things.”
Frithkin froze as he caught sight of Thyri’s arm, and he looked rather comical for a moment, with his head bowed and his long ear clutched between his small front feet.
“You’re a fire mage!” he breathed excitedly, releasing his ear so that it returned to its usual upright position. He hopped around in a circle in his delight before coming to a stop again and wiggling the toes of his big back feet, “me too! Me too!” he enthused. His lips, more mobile than the lips of any hare Thyri had ever seen, formed an o-shape, and he exhaled slowly as if blowing a bubble. An orb of silver flame inflated slowly, before breaking loose from Frithkin and floating in the air above his head. It too pulsed as Thyri’s flames had done, although his natural heart rate was apparently slower. Frithkin watched it for a while as it rose up into the air, before standing up on his back legs in order to nudge it with his nose. Thyri said nothing; her lover had given her fire so that she might protect herself, but it had betrayed her. She had no desire to call on it again.
“I am supposed to find my way home,” she explained to Frithkin, “do you know of anywhere that may lead me there?”
The Khyer seemed to consider this before he shook his head, his ears flapping. “I don’t...” he confessed, and Thyri began to feel the constrictive grasp of despair closing around her mind, “but I know someone who might! You need to seek an audience with Recerrin Xandyrit...The King of Verisimilitude. He is one with the water, he knows all!” Encouraged, Thyri scrambled to her feet, and Frithkin watched her, apparently bemused by her sudden activity.
“Can you show me the way?” she asked him, and received another head-tilt in return.
After a long wait, he nodded his strange little nod again, “you will need your fire, Thyri,” he explained, turning her heart to lead again. Biting her lip, Thyri shook her head. Frithkin sighed, clicking his tongue sympathetically. “Control it with your heart, not your mind,” he told her, “with feelings, not thoughts. That was why it burned you, and why it was ikeli...orange. Try, go on, try. We cannot see the King without it, how else will we keep the fog-wraiths at bay? They are the agents of lies, the water reveals and the air conceals, so it has always been.”
What did her heart want? It wanted to go home, it wanted her to fall into a strong-armed embrace, and it wanted what it always wanted. It wanted power, it wanted sex and it yearned for her to be touched. If it was the only way, then it was the way she would take...what more damage could it do now? She was damaged already. Closing her eyes Thyri concentrated on the bounding of her heart against her ribs, she cleared her mind and let the steady thumping fill her head. It seemed to swell and expand, filling her chest until she felt her pulse ticking in her fingertips.
“You’re doing it!” Frithkin enthused, prompting her to open her eyes in time to see him dance around again in one of his little circles. Thyri looked down at her injured hand. There, hovering just above her palm was a globe of purple flames, a hue so familiar that it brought a smile to her lips – she should have known. The flames of her heart were the colour of her lover’s eyes.
“Let’s go!” Frithkin said, pausing to scratch the side of his head with one large back foot, “we have far to go, Fae, through honesty and lies until the ending of the world; for that is where the truth always lies!” He hopped on a few paces before pausing and glancing back over his shoulder whilst he waited for her to jump the narrow stretch of the brook. When she was safely on the other side, he hopped off again, leading the way through the fog.
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