Upgrade Solo - Hills to Climb - 2,794 words - Backdated to 12/5/2014
The night air was bitterly cold in early December. In the daytime, the temperature hovered in the mid-forties some days, making it tolerable to go outside nicely bundled up, but at night, the mercury dropped without the sun’s warming influence. And Hvergelmir’s dress was not cut for warmth. She kept her vigils as often as she could for as long as she dared, hunched over in a parka that didn’t quite cover enough, but nothing helped. Winter was bound to put a dent in her work.
She filled the time with other things. Since the memories, the future-memories, had started, she’d initially stayed in most of the time, struggling to reestablish trust with her parents. The thought of them had haunted her — the memory of their rejection, when she’d needed them most — and she’d forgotten, for a while, what it was that she’d been looking for when she’d woken up from her coma and first started looking at the world with new eyes. She’d thought, only, that maybe it still wasn’t too late to keep from losing them. Maybe if she really, really tried one more time.
The trouble was, trying left her with huge gaps in her schedule she couldn’t manage to fill. Her parents were rarely home, which meant long hours of dusting, vacuuming, reading on her Kindle, and generally staying out of trouble, but didn’t pay off much in terms of parental approval. In the meantime, she was haunted by frightening, confusing nightmares of her future and assaulted by more memories throughout the day. Stress-fatigue made it hard to function. The autumn days grew shorter and shorter. Leaves fell away from the trees and left the world bare and gray.
And every two weeks, when she could, she told her parents she was spending the night with a friend and went to her Wonder to weave.
It was slow work, and lonely, giving her more time to think. In the first days, she’d had too much on her mind, the new memories still too fresh — all she’d been able to focus on were her fears about her parents, her desire to change the future by stepping off the beaten path. It had been enough to settle her down initially, but it didn’t ease her mind. Each new person she ran into weighed on her, reminding her that her choices — her life — had changed now.
Kerberos. Kairatos. Ida.
Maybe most eerily of all, Prudence. Just a human. I don’t want to be a small person, she’d said.
Neither do I, Hvergelmir thought. And she wondered if she was.
The people she hadn’t seen weighed on her, too. Babylon and Avalon, long gone far away. Bischofite and Titan, absent since she and Kairatos had gone to warn them about Castor and Pollux. Aquarius, still and always missing. Thraen, quiet since their meeting. Mistral, Mimisbrunnr, Sarras, Niflhel, Zee, Camelot — all of them silent.
She wondered if they were well. She wondered if they were avoiding her. She wondered what they would think, what they were thinking of her, what they wanted her to do —
It was always that. It was always what people thought of her, what they wanted from her, even as she muddled through trying to do what she wanted. That was the pattern she couldn’t break out of. That was what haunted her, sitting at her loom at the emptiest part of the universe she could find: what other people would think.
While her hands moved ryhthmically over the huge machine, easing warp and weft together in repetition, her world occasionally swam away from what she was doing. Memories — from a thousand years past, rather than five years on — spun up around her like holograms, altering the landscape and placing her in the slippers of the Hvergelmir that had gone before. She remembered things — places she’d visited, people she’d met — and she remembered, for the first time, not just details that had happened in that lifetime, but what it had felt like to live in it. She began to understand, little by little, what it had felt like to be someone else. Not just the girl without a tongue, but this girl, too — the one who’d started running as a child and never stopped. The one who hadn’t been abandoned by her family, but had abandoned them instead, and never formed any attachments with anyone else that she couldn’t run from just as easily. The one who’d come here, just as Laney did, to get away from what other people would think.
She hadn’t understood that other woman, so free and wild and independent, not initially. Now she thought she understood her all too well.
There was no weaving to be done this time. Hvergelmir had finished it all weeks ago, fingers red and raw from unfamiliar toil. She’d puzzled over what to do with the cloth she’d made, and finally set it to soak in the well, weighed down to the stone steps by hewn bricks, alongside a few smaller ribbons she’d done to start out. Two weeks ago, she’d dredged it all back out of the water and stretched it out to dry. Now there was nothing left but to see what all her hard work had come to.
She landed near the well this time, feet flat on the marble. Immediately in front of her was the high marble pedestal with strange letters carved into its border, the one inset with the little notch that matched her signet ring. She’d figured out then how to connect the two, unlocking the pedestal to give way to a stairwell into the depths of the island. There she’d found her island’s piece of the Code, and it had shown her an image of a book representing the knights that had come before her, with an oath that they’d sworn.
I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.
I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
I will follow no order blindly.
This I swear by my Code of Honor.
“What did those words mean to you?” she asked aloud. “What did they mean to this place?”
Her past self wasn’t here to answer.
* * * *
The girl in the cell was about fourteen. The boy, maybe twelve. He was younger, to be sure, and their faces marked them as siblings. They looked tired, and the new manacles weighed heavily on their bony arms, but they wore the weight with the ease of old experience: they were children who’d been in shackles before. They were young and frightened and caught, and Hvergelmir supposed she was all they had left. She shuddered to think she might’ve completed her voyage without ever knowing they were on the ship.
“The law is the law, starsister,” the squire with the quilted cloak said. “A knight of Mars has a duty of keeping it, but it is not ours to write.”
Hvergelmir almost hadn’t known they were there. For her, this was going to be a short voyage — passage to the outer rings of Harikor since the transport ship outbound from Mars was already heading that way. If she hadn’t gone wandering on the lower levels of the ship, drawn by rumors of an old friend on board in one of the cells, she might never have seen the two of them, curled up together in a corner of one sparse cell.
She drew herself up to her full height, putting her best knight manners to the fore. “With all due respect, red brother,” she said coolly, “Angaria is a slave planet. No law is that sacred.”
“All laws are that sacred. The law is no law if we uphold it selectively.” He gave her a look that said, ‘This is why Martian prison starliners are not normally used as passenger vessels,’ and made it clear that he found her interference bothersome.
“Then it is no law,” she said angrily. “If you are keepers of justice, as I understand your order to be, you may hold their government to account. These children cannot be guilty of any crime — a person cannot steal himself.”
“Your concern is — admirable,” the Mars knight said with obvious, exasperated difficulty, “but your . . . friendships with several of our order do not grant you membership or understanding. You are a passenger on this vessel, no more — and neither you nor I are above the law.”
“Then transport me to Angaria.”
“Sister — ”
She put out her wrists, trying to keep her throat from closing before she could speak. “I was born on Angaria. I too fled its fields and factories. Uphold your sacred law, centurion.”
* * * *
Hvergelmir swam through the old memory until it passed. When it did, she found herself still standing before the marble pedestal, hands braced against it. I am a being of free will, she thought, dizzily trying to compose herself. It was long minutes before she felt like herself again.
What kind of person had she been five years ago? She wished she could remember. The life she’d lost, when she’d gone into her coma, had been a lonely one — but she’d been desperate to win over her parents’ attention, anxious to make friends . . . she would’ve done anything to hold on to a connection to someone who’d give her the time of day. Waking up from that long sleep, she hadn’t felt different, not really, just — like she’d wasted some undefinable amount of time she could never get back. Like she’d gone down a road that hadn’t led her anywhere worthwhile and wanted to backtrack. But change, real change — it was hard. She’d struggled with the desire to forge her own path without, somehow, displeasing anyone around her.
Then she’d become a knight, and her whole world had changed.
She had a past now that she’d never known. A whole life she’d lived — traveling the stars, meeting people, trying to make the galaxy a better place for her part in it — making friends and leaving them behind, running from their care and their concern, hiding away in this remote place or behind a shallow smile — a whole other person she’d once been. And she had a future, too, however brief. She had people she loved, people who loved her. Successes, failures. She had a host of regrets, set alongside the memory of things she wouldn’t have taken back for all the world.
In the face of that, she’d initially rejected it all, as much as she could. She fought the idea of that future as though it were her choices that had led to it — all the choices she feared, all the ones that haunted her at night when she was sitting on her bench alone. The ones she’d made in isolation, that few people had ever supported her for. If she’d lost her parents, she’d feared it was because she hadn’t been the child they wanted. If she’d lost her voice, her vocation, that was her fault, too, for ever taking on such a fool’s errand in the first place. If she’d lost all the people she loved — if she’d lost Tara, lost Xanthus and Herger and Orah, lost Alois, Tony and Finn and Arkady and Zia — her fearful mind had told her that somehow, it had all been another one of her selfish gestures that had led her there somehow.
The longer she went on, the more people she spoke to, the less that felt right. Talking with Kairatos, and then Ida, had been so strange — being right next to them, listening to them elaborate the very same fears she’d been feeling, but directed at themselves. None of them had any desire to see that future come to pass, hopeless as it was — but they couldn’t possibly all be the sole person responsible. And Hvergelmir couldn’t keep making all her choices with one eye on the idea of what other people thought she ought to do.
Ultimately, if she wanted to have the power to change the future all on her own, she couldn’t do it if she spent so much time wishing she could give her decisions over to other people.
She was not the Hvergelmir of a thousand years ago — but she was, too. She had lived that life. And though she had the benefit of her memories, she wasn’t the Hvergelmir of the future, either. She was both of them, neither of them. She could, she decided, be a person who’d lived both of their lives, once — but she had the chance, in that, to be her own person. To understand the lessons those lives had to offer her without repeating their unhappy fates. She couldn’t spend her life running from her past or her future.
She could run toward the things she wanted instead — and if she did, she wanted to run toward them with her whole heart.
Steadier feet brought her away from the pedestal where she’d arrived and toward the big open space between the well and the temple, where she’d stretched out her cloth and her ribbons to dry. There they were, her first experiment with the thread she’d been spinning all this time. Her first question posed to the universe: what other magic can you do? What good existed in this world that wasn’t bought with blood and tears shed in suffering?
The bright cloth stretched before her. Weeks soaking in the well had certainly changed it — it glimmered now, sheer pastel, catching rainbow irridescent in the light, soaked with the sparkle of stars. She reached out testingly to touch it: energy, warm and sure, thrummed beneath her hands.
Magic exists in this world for more than just killing, she thought to herself, excited and a little terrified as she started to pick the long stretch of fabric she’d woven. That had been her mantra that she’d repeated to herself while she’d been spinning thread, the thing she’d told herself over and over, sitting at her loom, or carefully weighing her fabric down in the well to soak. Magic exists in this world for more than just killing.
Hvergelmir pulled the cloth around her shoulders, a makeshift shawl. It was light, but warm — if nothing else, it would be nice to have in the winter, sitting on her bench in the small hours of the morning . . . but she didn’t think there would be nothing else. There was power here. She could feel it.
Distracted by the smooth feel of the fabric on her skin, as light and smooth as crepe, as silk, it was some time before she noticed that her own uniform had changed. She felt lighter again, faster, stronger, more energetic. A knight. A knight of Hvergelmir, not just in name, but in being.
“I am a knight of Hvergelmir,” she whispered. “I am a being of free will.”
She held the shawl close around her, a reminder of the new path she was forging for herself.
The rest of the words came readily, comfortably. For the first time, they felt like they meant something to her, too. For the first time, she believed them. “I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.
“I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
“I will follow no order blindly.
“This I swear by my Code of Honor.”
There was no flash of light this time. There was no high wind, no seal on her skin to mark the promise she’d made. She felt it in her, all the same — though there was no threat on her life for this particular vow, nothing hanging in the balance. On the contrary, it was as though — rather than making some extraordinary promise — she had finally settled into a part of herself that had always been there.
The future stretched out ahead, as full of hope and promise as it had ever been.
The night air was bitterly cold in early December. In the daytime, the temperature hovered in the mid-forties some days, making it tolerable to go outside nicely bundled up, but at night, the mercury dropped without the sun’s warming influence. And Hvergelmir’s dress was not cut for warmth. She kept her vigils as often as she could for as long as she dared, hunched over in a parka that didn’t quite cover enough, but nothing helped. Winter was bound to put a dent in her work.
She filled the time with other things. Since the memories, the future-memories, had started, she’d initially stayed in most of the time, struggling to reestablish trust with her parents. The thought of them had haunted her — the memory of their rejection, when she’d needed them most — and she’d forgotten, for a while, what it was that she’d been looking for when she’d woken up from her coma and first started looking at the world with new eyes. She’d thought, only, that maybe it still wasn’t too late to keep from losing them. Maybe if she really, really tried one more time.
The trouble was, trying left her with huge gaps in her schedule she couldn’t manage to fill. Her parents were rarely home, which meant long hours of dusting, vacuuming, reading on her Kindle, and generally staying out of trouble, but didn’t pay off much in terms of parental approval. In the meantime, she was haunted by frightening, confusing nightmares of her future and assaulted by more memories throughout the day. Stress-fatigue made it hard to function. The autumn days grew shorter and shorter. Leaves fell away from the trees and left the world bare and gray.
And every two weeks, when she could, she told her parents she was spending the night with a friend and went to her Wonder to weave.
It was slow work, and lonely, giving her more time to think. In the first days, she’d had too much on her mind, the new memories still too fresh — all she’d been able to focus on were her fears about her parents, her desire to change the future by stepping off the beaten path. It had been enough to settle her down initially, but it didn’t ease her mind. Each new person she ran into weighed on her, reminding her that her choices — her life — had changed now.
Kerberos. Kairatos. Ida.
Maybe most eerily of all, Prudence. Just a human. I don’t want to be a small person, she’d said.
Neither do I, Hvergelmir thought. And she wondered if she was.
The people she hadn’t seen weighed on her, too. Babylon and Avalon, long gone far away. Bischofite and Titan, absent since she and Kairatos had gone to warn them about Castor and Pollux. Aquarius, still and always missing. Thraen, quiet since their meeting. Mistral, Mimisbrunnr, Sarras, Niflhel, Zee, Camelot — all of them silent.
She wondered if they were well. She wondered if they were avoiding her. She wondered what they would think, what they were thinking of her, what they wanted her to do —
It was always that. It was always what people thought of her, what they wanted from her, even as she muddled through trying to do what she wanted. That was the pattern she couldn’t break out of. That was what haunted her, sitting at her loom at the emptiest part of the universe she could find: what other people would think.
While her hands moved ryhthmically over the huge machine, easing warp and weft together in repetition, her world occasionally swam away from what she was doing. Memories — from a thousand years past, rather than five years on — spun up around her like holograms, altering the landscape and placing her in the slippers of the Hvergelmir that had gone before. She remembered things — places she’d visited, people she’d met — and she remembered, for the first time, not just details that had happened in that lifetime, but what it had felt like to live in it. She began to understand, little by little, what it had felt like to be someone else. Not just the girl without a tongue, but this girl, too — the one who’d started running as a child and never stopped. The one who hadn’t been abandoned by her family, but had abandoned them instead, and never formed any attachments with anyone else that she couldn’t run from just as easily. The one who’d come here, just as Laney did, to get away from what other people would think.
She hadn’t understood that other woman, so free and wild and independent, not initially. Now she thought she understood her all too well.
There was no weaving to be done this time. Hvergelmir had finished it all weeks ago, fingers red and raw from unfamiliar toil. She’d puzzled over what to do with the cloth she’d made, and finally set it to soak in the well, weighed down to the stone steps by hewn bricks, alongside a few smaller ribbons she’d done to start out. Two weeks ago, she’d dredged it all back out of the water and stretched it out to dry. Now there was nothing left but to see what all her hard work had come to.
She landed near the well this time, feet flat on the marble. Immediately in front of her was the high marble pedestal with strange letters carved into its border, the one inset with the little notch that matched her signet ring. She’d figured out then how to connect the two, unlocking the pedestal to give way to a stairwell into the depths of the island. There she’d found her island’s piece of the Code, and it had shown her an image of a book representing the knights that had come before her, with an oath that they’d sworn.
I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.
I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
I will follow no order blindly.
This I swear by my Code of Honor.
“What did those words mean to you?” she asked aloud. “What did they mean to this place?”
Her past self wasn’t here to answer.
* * * *
The girl in the cell was about fourteen. The boy, maybe twelve. He was younger, to be sure, and their faces marked them as siblings. They looked tired, and the new manacles weighed heavily on their bony arms, but they wore the weight with the ease of old experience: they were children who’d been in shackles before. They were young and frightened and caught, and Hvergelmir supposed she was all they had left. She shuddered to think she might’ve completed her voyage without ever knowing they were on the ship.
“The law is the law, starsister,” the squire with the quilted cloak said. “A knight of Mars has a duty of keeping it, but it is not ours to write.”
Hvergelmir almost hadn’t known they were there. For her, this was going to be a short voyage — passage to the outer rings of Harikor since the transport ship outbound from Mars was already heading that way. If she hadn’t gone wandering on the lower levels of the ship, drawn by rumors of an old friend on board in one of the cells, she might never have seen the two of them, curled up together in a corner of one sparse cell.
She drew herself up to her full height, putting her best knight manners to the fore. “With all due respect, red brother,” she said coolly, “Angaria is a slave planet. No law is that sacred.”
“All laws are that sacred. The law is no law if we uphold it selectively.” He gave her a look that said, ‘This is why Martian prison starliners are not normally used as passenger vessels,’ and made it clear that he found her interference bothersome.
“Then it is no law,” she said angrily. “If you are keepers of justice, as I understand your order to be, you may hold their government to account. These children cannot be guilty of any crime — a person cannot steal himself.”
“Your concern is — admirable,” the Mars knight said with obvious, exasperated difficulty, “but your . . . friendships with several of our order do not grant you membership or understanding. You are a passenger on this vessel, no more — and neither you nor I are above the law.”
“Then transport me to Angaria.”
“Sister — ”
She put out her wrists, trying to keep her throat from closing before she could speak. “I was born on Angaria. I too fled its fields and factories. Uphold your sacred law, centurion.”
* * * *
Hvergelmir swam through the old memory until it passed. When it did, she found herself still standing before the marble pedestal, hands braced against it. I am a being of free will, she thought, dizzily trying to compose herself. It was long minutes before she felt like herself again.
What kind of person had she been five years ago? She wished she could remember. The life she’d lost, when she’d gone into her coma, had been a lonely one — but she’d been desperate to win over her parents’ attention, anxious to make friends . . . she would’ve done anything to hold on to a connection to someone who’d give her the time of day. Waking up from that long sleep, she hadn’t felt different, not really, just — like she’d wasted some undefinable amount of time she could never get back. Like she’d gone down a road that hadn’t led her anywhere worthwhile and wanted to backtrack. But change, real change — it was hard. She’d struggled with the desire to forge her own path without, somehow, displeasing anyone around her.
Then she’d become a knight, and her whole world had changed.
She had a past now that she’d never known. A whole life she’d lived — traveling the stars, meeting people, trying to make the galaxy a better place for her part in it — making friends and leaving them behind, running from their care and their concern, hiding away in this remote place or behind a shallow smile — a whole other person she’d once been. And she had a future, too, however brief. She had people she loved, people who loved her. Successes, failures. She had a host of regrets, set alongside the memory of things she wouldn’t have taken back for all the world.
In the face of that, she’d initially rejected it all, as much as she could. She fought the idea of that future as though it were her choices that had led to it — all the choices she feared, all the ones that haunted her at night when she was sitting on her bench alone. The ones she’d made in isolation, that few people had ever supported her for. If she’d lost her parents, she’d feared it was because she hadn’t been the child they wanted. If she’d lost her voice, her vocation, that was her fault, too, for ever taking on such a fool’s errand in the first place. If she’d lost all the people she loved — if she’d lost Tara, lost Xanthus and Herger and Orah, lost Alois, Tony and Finn and Arkady and Zia — her fearful mind had told her that somehow, it had all been another one of her selfish gestures that had led her there somehow.
The longer she went on, the more people she spoke to, the less that felt right. Talking with Kairatos, and then Ida, had been so strange — being right next to them, listening to them elaborate the very same fears she’d been feeling, but directed at themselves. None of them had any desire to see that future come to pass, hopeless as it was — but they couldn’t possibly all be the sole person responsible. And Hvergelmir couldn’t keep making all her choices with one eye on the idea of what other people thought she ought to do.
Ultimately, if she wanted to have the power to change the future all on her own, she couldn’t do it if she spent so much time wishing she could give her decisions over to other people.
She was not the Hvergelmir of a thousand years ago — but she was, too. She had lived that life. And though she had the benefit of her memories, she wasn’t the Hvergelmir of the future, either. She was both of them, neither of them. She could, she decided, be a person who’d lived both of their lives, once — but she had the chance, in that, to be her own person. To understand the lessons those lives had to offer her without repeating their unhappy fates. She couldn’t spend her life running from her past or her future.
She could run toward the things she wanted instead — and if she did, she wanted to run toward them with her whole heart.
Steadier feet brought her away from the pedestal where she’d arrived and toward the big open space between the well and the temple, where she’d stretched out her cloth and her ribbons to dry. There they were, her first experiment with the thread she’d been spinning all this time. Her first question posed to the universe: what other magic can you do? What good existed in this world that wasn’t bought with blood and tears shed in suffering?
The bright cloth stretched before her. Weeks soaking in the well had certainly changed it — it glimmered now, sheer pastel, catching rainbow irridescent in the light, soaked with the sparkle of stars. She reached out testingly to touch it: energy, warm and sure, thrummed beneath her hands.
Magic exists in this world for more than just killing, she thought to herself, excited and a little terrified as she started to pick the long stretch of fabric she’d woven. That had been her mantra that she’d repeated to herself while she’d been spinning thread, the thing she’d told herself over and over, sitting at her loom, or carefully weighing her fabric down in the well to soak. Magic exists in this world for more than just killing.
Hvergelmir pulled the cloth around her shoulders, a makeshift shawl. It was light, but warm — if nothing else, it would be nice to have in the winter, sitting on her bench in the small hours of the morning . . . but she didn’t think there would be nothing else. There was power here. She could feel it.
Distracted by the smooth feel of the fabric on her skin, as light and smooth as crepe, as silk, it was some time before she noticed that her own uniform had changed. She felt lighter again, faster, stronger, more energetic. A knight. A knight of Hvergelmir, not just in name, but in being.
“I am a knight of Hvergelmir,” she whispered. “I am a being of free will.”
She held the shawl close around her, a reminder of the new path she was forging for herself.
The rest of the words came readily, comfortably. For the first time, they felt like they meant something to her, too. For the first time, she believed them. “I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.
“I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.
“I will follow no order blindly.
“This I swear by my Code of Honor.”
There was no flash of light this time. There was no high wind, no seal on her skin to mark the promise she’d made. She felt it in her, all the same — though there was no threat on her life for this particular vow, nothing hanging in the balance. On the contrary, it was as though — rather than making some extraordinary promise — she had finally settled into a part of herself that had always been there.
The future stretched out ahead, as full of hope and promise as it had ever been.
