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“I pledge my life and loyalty to the cosmos, and to Hvergelmir. I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine.”

There were words on her lips, and Laney hadn’t put them there. She’d been curled up in the window seat of a coffee shop, nursing a chai latte between both hands and contemplating the steam curling off her drink when it came to her — and the moment she thought the words, the urge to speak them aloud was so powerful that she had to concentrate to keep them in. It was like having a very juicy, very important secret that she absolutely couldn't tell — and though she wasn't the sort of person to casually betray a confidence, the temptation was only human, and that was a little bit like what it felt to have these words in her head.

She forced herself to finish her latte. Laney tried to give herself these kinds of exercises, sometimes, because her counselor had suggested it: set goals for yourself so you learn what you're capable of. Pacing herself was, she'd learned, something she was capable of, with the right focus and effort. So she paced herself, she finished her chai latte — only burning her tongue a few times — and when she was done, Laney let herself go home to try out the pledge and see what had made it feel so urgent.

For a pledge, for something which was, on its face, pretty benign, its effects turned out to be rather more remarkable than she'd expected. One moment, she was standing in her bedroom in her page uniform, clasped hands around her distaff, saying the words, and the next —

— She was at the Surrounding. Well, it was like that, anyway, like the time when Aquarius had taken her there after they'd defeated several youma. This was different, though. It wasn't Aquarius Outpost. This place was smaller, and it floated in space all on its own, connected by no rainbow roads. It looked desolate, like no one had been there in a very, very long time, and dust had settled everywhere so thickly that the world around her looked like it had all been wrapped in gray fleece.

This was her place. Her Wonder, as they were called. Hvergelmir, that was the name of hers — a name she wore as her own, as though Wonder and Page were one and the same, a unit of two beings — an inanimate and an animate counterpart. She'd always understood that she could come here in some way, but now that she was here, it was... odd. It seemed unreal, to have a place in the universe that was really and truly all her own, where she didn't pay taxes or owe any tithe. A place she could visit at her leisure.

She looked around, taking in the landscape of space beyond her little Wonder: two bright stars, equidistant to her, one to either side of the little landmass, and off in the distance, a speck of something that she could just barely make out was there. The sky glittered here, with not much ambient light to interrupt it, showing a cascade of littler stars all across the sky. They were so thick amongst each other that it was almost unbearable to look at — but she looked anyway.

No one else in the world, she thought, has ever seen this sky in their lifetime. No one living has stood here but me. The way the stars look from right here, from right in this very spot — that belongs to me. No one else can ever take it away.

She was home.

* * * *

It only took a few seconds and a slight shifting of her weight before Hvergelmir started sneezing. The dust was so copious, any movement she made unsettled it — and given the volume of her dress and the way the fabric pooled against the ground at the bottom, pretty much anything she did that resettled her mass in any way counted as ‘movement.’

Determined not to be scared off from her apparent ancestral home by an army of dust bunnies, though, Hvergelmir covered her nose with her free hand and began to wander a bit so she could explore.

At the far end of the floating island was a long pier, stretching off into empty space, where it seemed that ships of all kinds could be docked. A soft breeze blew through here, and — unlike the area where Hvergelmir had arrived — it seemed to have met with at least some use in the centuries since Hvergelmir had been away, its long, golden planks largely dust-free. Perhaps, she decided, there were parts of the island which outsiders could access, and parts that were barred to anyone else — like the shields around many of the Surrounding’s outposts, or the smaller ones that protected many of the books in Aquarius’s library and some of the personal rooms. That would make sense, if this was some kind of an interstellar waystation, or a temple or something. It seemed like only one person had probably lived here, and maybe the shields were a way of locking the door when they went out.

Hvergelmir stood there for a while, at the end of the dock, with space dangling empty out in front of her. What would happen if she fell, or tried to jump off, she wondered? Would the island catch her, or would she fall through eternity, freezing or suffocating to death once she left the safer atmosphere of the island? L’appel du vide, the French called it. The call of the void. She took a step back.

Farther inland, Hvergelmir discovered a few points of interest, back where the dust was thick and she had to cover her nose to walk again. Oxygen, she thought, trying to remember what she knew about astronomy and geology and general... planet stuff. There shouldn't be oxgen or gravity on something this small, right?

There was obviously a lot of magic involved in making a place like this work, much like there was with Aquarius Outpost — even if it wasn't as visible.

Wading her way inward through the carpeting of dust — which was now cresting up around the hem of her dress in thick piles as though she were wandering through a shallow bubble bath — Hvergelmir approached the peristyle which seemed to be the centerpiece of her small island. She mounted the long, shallow steps that led her up to the circular colonnade, and there she paused to see what had been put on such reverent and ostentatious display.

There were benches to the outer edges, near the great Doric columns that towered high overhead, and other decorative elements, but most things looked to be in states of severe disrepair beneath their dust, or their finer furnishings had been put away somewhere or looted. All that remained to say what the peristyle was so majestically framing was a huge marble well set into the floor, seemingly bottomless, ringed with marble benches and a pedestal where presumably one could sit and write, or eat, or something of that nature.

The well — the wellspring — still churned softly with activity, but the bubbling water seemed to Hvergelmir to be mysteriously silent. Its bottomless depth left the liquid — water? — within it a clear, reflective black, to the end result that it reflected back a dizzying portrait of the night sky above, encrusted with stars that seemed to bulge and shift and recede all along its shifting surface: a reflection not properly contained.

There was a building, farther on, that she hadn't yet explored, but this, Hvergelmir had to assume — this great churning pool of starlight — was her Wonder in its essence.

She sat along the bench by its edge and watched it awhile, just for the novelty of it, the movement of the stars on the water mesmerizing. Gradually, though, it strained her eyes or her brain too badly to keep staring thoughtlessly at it, and she had to give it up before she developed a splitting headache.

Well, she supposed, there are other things to explore.

.Adjusting to her sneezing fits, Hvergelmir skirted the edge of the well. She stepped over a narrow aqueduct on her way, leading in the opposite direction, carrying a a steady flow of the glimmering water out in the direction of the pier where she'd been earlier. The steps descended again on the far side of the colonnade, and she found herself in a ruined little patch of land that, she thought, had probably once been a garden. Dust was settled over the thick, thorny detritus of what she guessed were weeds, and here and there were the petrified old trunks of long-fallen trees. It saddened her, somehow, to see it — this dead thing. Marble columns hundreds of feet high could survive the long ages, she supposed — but living things were fragile and needy, and they ran their course all too soon.

Beyond the garden stood a single building, not terribly large — maybe half the size of Aquarius's damaged ancestral home. Like the peristyle and the well it encircled, it was cut and assembled from dusty white marble, decorated in places with some sort of metal that had rusted to a soft, sea green. Hvergelmir supposed, by process of elimination, that if she'd ever lived anywhere in this place, it would have to be here.

The front of the building was open, a two-story portico admitting entrance to a long, public-looking area furnished mainly with tiered seats that receded into the ground like an amphitheater. A receiving area, maybe? A place for guests, or to entertain? It wasn't very large — but on an island this size, it was unlikely the well of Hvergelmir had ever seen very many guests at once.

Beyond this was a doorway, hung across with what had once been cloth, and was now little more than rotted scraps on the floor. How the cloth had been decorated, she couldn't make out; it was obscured entirely by dust.

Within the room was a place where someone had once lived — a small dwelling which was either messy because it had been ransacked somehow, or because the previous resident had been remiss about tidiness. If, indeed, Hvergelmir had lived here, she wasn't sure she could put the latter past herself.

She wandered the small rooms and up the spiral stairs, wiping dust curiously off of a few things where they weren't shielded from time and strangers. There was a writing desk, dustless, and stacks of books on it, and there were also a few packages, unopened, that were wrapped with paper and tied with brown string. Some of the things she didn't recognize at all, beautiful curiosities from somewhere far from the history of Earth. The person who lived here, for all that here was in the middle of interstellar nowhere, had apparently not done too shabbily in the department of personal wealth.

One small room, its windows long and open, boasted a spinning wheel and, against the near wall, a
huge vertical loom with a chair stationed beside it. Considering her distaff, Hvergelmir supposed that made sense. And in a place like this, a person probably had to have something tedious to do to pass the time.

At the back of the building, opening to the far side, was some kind of a stable, Hvergelmir thought — which indicated some kind of a ... pet? Something had lived here with her, or been kept here sometimes.

The upper floor housed a bedroom. The bed was large, feather-stuffed, but seemed to have collapsed under the weight of its own age at some point, and had probably been more comfortable, oh, say, hundreds of years ago. It might still serve its intended purpose — the upper bedroom seemed to have been spared the centuries of dust — but just now, Laney had travelled halfway across the universe (probably) and was exploring a strange new space island that was as abandoned as Myst. She wasn't, to say the least, in the mood for a nap.

There was a standing mirror in one corner, and along the wall next to it, a small, attractive cabinet set with mosaic tiles of hand-painted ceramic. It was colorful and festive, and she decided to take a peek within, drawn by its artistic beauty.

This turned out to be a jewelry cabinet; inside were several heavy filigree pieces in rose gold, yellow gold, and copper, only barely tarnished. One item stood out.

It wasn't quite in keeping with the rest. Where most of the other jewelry was delicate, with organic French curves curled into the interior areas, the rose gold ring she picked up was heavy and thick. It was engraved, the image of a well with a large star cresting from its mouth carved in the inverse into the ring's flat, ovular top face, its sides only lightly filigreed. The cut of it, cookie-cutter hollowed to show its image, reminded her of a cake pan or a wax seal stamp, something meant to shape its opposite number.

An image of just that came into her head, ever-so-briefly — a woman in her dress, a little older, dripping hot wax onto a folded letter and then pressing her ring down into the wax to seal it — then it was gone again, just as quickly as it had come, leaving her slightly spooked in its wake.

There are ghosts here, she thought, frightened and a little fanciful. I should've considered that.

She slipped the ring onto her finger and left, making her way down the stairs and back out of the building. Her little reverie was over, and suddenly she felt anxious and a little shy about being here, altogether less confident that she should.

It was enough for now, she decided. She'd go home, and wait to tell Tara what she'd seen.