Shazari
Hvergelmir reached out a hand to cup Teide's cheek in her palm. She shook her head in a very slow, very gentle
no, and favored her with a smile that was slow and certain. "There is nothing wrong with you," she said with absoluteness. "Not one single thing. You had Chaos in your heart before, and it asked the worst of you -- but you said no in the end, didn't you? And that's incredibly hard for anyone."
She moved her hand from Teide's cheek down to her shoulder, giving it a light squeeze.
For strength, she thought.
Till the day you realize you don't need it.It was a hard road, she imagined, for any of the Negaverse's deserters who were trying to start over. With Teide, though, Hvergelmir was having a new experience with that: Jenna lived with her. They shared the journey. She could see how much work, how much self-doubt, how much pain went into every small step. How complicated it must all feel. How unfair.
"Goodness isn't a personality trait," she promised. "It's a choice we make, and it only lasts in the moment we make it. But so is badness. You have to know that. We all think dark things sometimes. You're as good as you choose to be. Chaos can't control you anymore."
Teide looked down and nodded, but she still had a bad taste in her mouth. “I’m trying really hard,” she said, and hoped desperately that Hvergelmir was right and Chaos no longer had any claim to her soul. Still, if there’d been some light in her when she was dark, who was to say there wasn’t any darkness in her, even now? If there was an element of choice to it, then what was to stop her from making bad decisions, even if she really didn’t want to? It was dangerously easy to fall to negative thinking. She’d been angry with Hyperborea without even trying to be.
“She hugged me without my permission,” said Teide, trying to reason her way through the events of that night. “And she made me drop my crystal ball and it rolled away under an air conditioner and I had to crawl around on my knees to get it and she didn’t help and she didn’t apologize, so why am I the one who feels bad for being angry at her?”
It didn’t make sense, but all realizing that did was make her feel even
worse.
“I can’t just stop feeling things, can I?” she asked, taking a tiny step back. “Because then I’d be dead. But it’s still… it’s not good, Hver. I don’t like it. It makes me scared - like there’s something inside me and it’s going to try to claw its way back out and I wish there was something that would let me know for sure that I was okay?” Even if it was normal. Even if goodness was a choice - how could she be certain that she was always going to make that choice?
Teide sighed. “Why did
Hyperborea get to start out already a knight, but I had to suffer for it? And on top of everything else. Her whole life is easy and Gemma had it hard.” Not that she remembered, but she’d gathered enough. “How does everything wind up so uneven like that?”
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Hyperborea. Hvergelmir sighed. Somehow, despite their mutual sunny dispositions, the idea of Hyperborea and Teide meeting had always struck her as a potentially bad match. Still, it was a sad thing to hear it said.
“It sounds like she wasn’t too polite,” Hvergelmir agreed. “A little resentment can be normal in situations like that — when we know people aren’t obligated to help us, but we don’t see any reason why they won’t. There are worse sins.”
She held out a hand, reaching across the space between them to brush her thumb over Teide’s cheek. Teide was family, and Gemma before her had been a true friend, one who’d known and liked Laney just for herself. The desire to protect her, to validate her — to tell her how wonderful she was — was overpoweringly strong. Gemma had always been Laney’s kindred spirit. It was true, too, what she said: Gemma had had it hard. Laney was determined that Jenna would have it better. That she wouldn’t have to think such harsh things about herself anymore. “Gemma had to struggle very hard for everything she was,” she agreed. “But because of that, Gemma also proved herself. Gemma was unimpeachable, and the butterfly that came out of her cocoon has all the gifts that Gemma left her: Nobility. Strength. Courage. Kindness. You’ll always understand those things better because they weren’t just handed to you. The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest,” she quoted, “And most beautiful of all.”
Hvergelmir lowered her hand, but not entirely to her side: just out in the air between them, loosely held open.
“I want . . . “ Hvergelmir bit her lip, thinking. “I want to tell you a story. Will you come on a little field trip with me?”
Teide regarded Hvergelmir a bit guardedly, but her words hit the right place. She blushed. "Thank you," she said. (She had not yet seen
Mulan.) If Hvergelmir didn't think she was terrible for being angry with Hyperborea, she decided, then it was probably okay that she was.
Besides, it was really nice to have so many complimentary things said about her when she had so much trouble thinking those things about herself! Hvergelmir was right, thought Teide. Gemma had fought super hard for a lot of things, she'd fought Bischofite just to
live, and it probably wasn't doing Gemma's fight any good to stand around feeling sorry for herself.
That fear still gnawed at her, though.
"Are we going to Hvergelmir?" she asked, taking the other knight's hand lightly with her gloved fingers. "I bet it's beautiful there."
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Hvergelmir grinned. With mock modesty, she leaned her head to one side and said, “Well, it’s not bad.” Then, after a wink, she shook out her shoulders, closed her eyes, and wished them both away to the center of the galaxy.
It was temperate on her Wonder. It was always temperate there; there was no real weather. Even the long-dead garden — which was where they appeared, when the two of them arrived — had been carefully irrigated with water from her Well to sustain it. There was no rain. Few of the rooms at the top of the temple even had ceilings.
There was only the sky. Only the stars.
“Take a minute,” she said. “Have a peek around.”
Teide did as she was told, looking first at the garden. Her Wonder had a garden, too, she thought, and took comfort at the fact that she and Hvergelmir had this much in common - her garden was in just as much disarray, choked with weeds. Hvergelmir had been coming to her wonder for much longer than Teide had been going to hers - did that mean there was no way to make the flowers bloom? Or just that no work had been done on it?
She glanced towards the temple - it was too far away to really tell much about it, what the building’s purpose might have been. Better to look towards the sky. “The stars are so much closer together than at Teide,” she said softly, tightening her grip on Hvergelmir’s fingers. They must have been closer to the center of the galaxy, she thought, remembering the astronomy textbook she’d picked up at the library’s clearance sale. (Her wonder was an observatory. She wanted to be prepared.)
“It’s beautiful,” she added, stepping closer to the older knight. Hvergelmir had told her to look around, but she was too timid to move too far from her side. “My wonder is a little bit like it… an island in space, with a garden and an observatory. Knights of Teide are astronomers, I guess. You…” Her gaze fell across a bench in front of them. It was draped in fabric, gossamer like Hvergelmir’s cloak. “You weave?” she asked.
Of course Hver wove, she thought, feeling foolish. The distaff and spindle certainly weren’t just for
show.
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Hvergelmir smiled her approval. “I do now,” she acknowledged. “I didn’t always. It was actually more of an experiment . . . I had this feeling that magic probably wasn’t limited to just killing monsters. I mean, it’s
magic! We have to have the potential for wondrous things in peacetime, too. We’re not just reactions to the dark things in the world. What we have — what we can do — is special and beautiful in its own right. So,” Hvergelmir shrugged, smiling, “I learned to weave because I thought I probably could. And eventually I was right.”
She led Teide over toward the Well, ascending the steps at a leisurely pace. “But you know — in my last life, I wasn’t born a knight or anything like that. I was born on a . . . on what you’d call a
work planet, I guess. On Angaria, you were born in servitude and you died in servitude, whatever you did. There was no bettering yourself — you lived and you worked, whether it was in the fields or in the factories. When I was a little girl, that was all there was: the work. Then one day, an island appeared in the sky and a man came down from it. A knight.”
She paused, looking into the sky as though she might see Dionysia’s Wonder floating there again. Only the glow of millions of stars winked back.
“I left my family and friends behind and snuck onto his island when he left. I was young and — very angry . . . and very sad. And when he found me stowing away, I thought he’d send me back to Angaria again. But he didn’t. He took me to the Knights’ Academy. I didn’t even know how to read when I got there.”
Teide nodded, following the story with rapt attention.
The Academy she thought, and though she’d never heard those words before, they sounded right to her.
That must be where I had just arrived from, she thought. “There was a woman on my wonder,” she said quietly in response, following Hvergelmir up the stairs. “Looking at her was like looking backwards in time. I - inside my head, I knew her name was the Dowager. She wasn’t - she wasn’t the knight. She was someone else.”
She trailed off. It would surely take another trip to her wonder before any more secrets were revealed to her, and for now, Teide was more interested in Hvergelmir’s story - one day, would she also be able to recite the details of her past life? It was comforting to think that there was more to her than just poor, miserable Gemma, Gemma who everyone else seemed to remember but she only knew from the sad, sad letters she’d written to her future self.
So, she nodded. “You were brave,” she said, reaching forward to place a hand gently on Hvergelmir’s bicep. “It would have been cruel to punish you for that. Knights aren’t cruel.”
“You were taking control of your life. You were making it better,” she said.
Like I did for Gemma. “That made you brave.”
Teide looked down at the well. “How deep is it?” she asked. “I can’t swim very well.”
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Hvergelmir gave Teide a little, confidential smile. “In the middle, there is no bottom,” she answered, reaching down to trail her fingers through the undulating liquid energy. “Or else the bottom is full of dragons, if you believe the stories. Or maybe it’s only six feet deep, and I just can’t see it — but you’re very safe. There are steps that lead down into the water just there, and they run all along the rim. It’s not slippery.” Hvergelmir sat down sideways on the rim of the well, one leg outside it, the other shoeless and dangling in the water.
“The person I was was named Nephthys,” she said. “And she didn’t think she had any of the qualities people look for in a knight. She wasn’t strong or pretty, and she didn’t come from a good family — she didn’t have any education to speak of — she couldn’t fight, and she didn’t know how to talk to people . . . and on top of all that, she was a wanted fugitive who’d run away from a planet most people didn’t even want to mention in polite conversation. She was angry and selfish, and she thought the people at the Academy were probably going to send her away at any moment — so she wasn’t very kind to them.
“But she was wrong. She was wrong about herself. What they saw — and what it can be hard to see about yourself, sometimes — is how far you can go if you just get the right opportunities in life. If you don’t have to be scared and angry because you have a place where you can start to feel safe.” She cast her gaze around the island. “This place is a sanctuary. A temple. You can cast off your burdens here, and be renewed.”
Teide leaned down and undid the buckles on her shoes. She toed the flats off and stepped over the edge of the well, sticking her feet into the water. “It’s…” she said, and paused, trying to think of the word for the temperature. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm, either. “It’s like stepping into nothing,” she said, turning to reach for Hvergelmir’s hand. Her supposition that the well was bottomless had made her nervous.
“Will you go with me?” asked Teide. “I - I trust you, and I know that it’s safe here, but that doesn’t make me less scared.”
What if my skirt gets heavy and drags me under and I drown on account of soggy petticoats? “Do you think I can be like Nephthys?” she asked.
Like you, since that was how past lives and reincarnation worked. Teide looked up to Laney, anyway - she seemed so cool and mature and independent. Jenna was always clinging to people, whether it was her or Avalon or Camlann, and she knew she was young and she was allowed to be a little needy, but,
really, she wasn’t that young.
“If Nephthys could do it and be a great knight, I should be able to, too,” she said with a nod. “I mean. She started with so much less than me even.” Teide had friends. Teide had support. Teide had the good fortune of forgetting the family that, from what she had gleaned, did not care all that much for her. And no one was going to sell her back to the Negaverse. She felt certain of that.
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Hvergelmir toed off her other shoe and slid all the way into the water. Her dress took on moisture and swung out into a loose billowy trail, catching the faint rise and fall of the current with a liquid grace. She stood, there on the descending steps, reaching out for Teide with both hands. “I won’t let you fall,” she promised.
There were so many things that people needed to hear, in life. Hvergelmir wasn’t entirely certain she was the person to say them — she had so little experience, in that regard — and she would probably make a terrible mother. But what she knew, in that moment, was that Teide deserved to be told she was wonderful and special, and that she had a great big chance and tremendous potential ahead of her.
“Chaos was all that ever limited you,” she said softly. “It’s behind you now. I think you could be a greater knight than you can even imagine — a star that twinkles so brightly that people stare at it in awe, wondering how in the world it has such a glow. You’re one of the warmest, most caring people I’ve ever met. You inspire me every day. You don’t know how much I love and believe in you.”
Teide stepped carefully in Hvergelmir’s footsteps, reaching out to take her hands. Her skirt puffed up as it hit the water, bunching around her hips - not nearly so graceful as Hvergelmir’s, whose dress was almost certainly designed to look beautiful when wet. “I don’t think anyone ever meant for me to take a bath in this,” she said, breaking her hold briefly to push it down into the water.
“That’s a little better,” she said sheepishly, taking Hvergelmir’s hands again. She tilted her head gently to the side, trying to breathe in Hvergelmir’s words and really
embody them. Make them part of her until no one could take them away, not ever.
“You think so?” she asked. “If you think so, it must be true.” She trusted Hvergelmir, probably more than anyone else she’d ever met. Gemma, she thought, hadn’t really had
anyone she could trust. But Teide had lots of people, and she was going to be okay.
She looked down at the water. “I should put my head under, right?” she asked. “And you’ll make sure I come back up?”
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Hvergelmir knelt, leading Teide down with her, hands clasped. “Yes,” she said fiercely, her throat constricted with feeling. “Yes, I always, always will.”
The current seemed to swell more energetically around them, as though her Wonder could sense the momentousness of this interaction — though it was difficult to tell, with the Well. It was always burbling, always churning. To Hvergelmir, the vibrance of its energy always felt like a silent roar. She probably imagined it. It didn’t matter. The Well accepted them both.
You were always clean, she thought. Y
ou were always good. You should feel that way on the outside, too. Let this be a symbol of it, of the person you’ve chosen to be.Teide felt it, too, a surge of energy like a wave about to break, rising up from the depths. Still holding Hvergelmir’s hands tight in hers, she slipped down another step, the water rising to her chest. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to do it now.”
Taking a deep breath, she dropped to her knees and dunked her head under the water. The well’s roar was louder here - deafening, even, the water churning into the unseen depths. How deep did a well with no bottom go? Out the bottom of the wonder? To the edge of space and time? Could you be sucked down and thrown out into space? The opening must not have been big, or the current would have been stronger. They would have been swept away by now.
Teide shuddered at the thought, and tightened her grip on Hver’s hands. She opened her eyes, expecting it to sting, expecting to see only dark water-- but instead, she saw light. All of her skin was aglow, as if to reflect the stars above.
Cautiously, Teide lifted her head from the water and stood back up. The light began to slowly fade, like the heat from a piece of blown glass. “It’s loud under the water,” she said softly. “It’s so quiet up here, but under the water, it’s so loud.”
She looked down at her sodden dress, and then up at Hvergelmir in surprise. “I changed!”
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There were tears in Hvergelmir’s eyes. In her short time as a knight, she had seen many beautiful, wondrous things: people shaking off Chaos’s yoke, people coming into new relationships with their worlds, people awakening to new heights of their own power. It never failed to amaze her, to take her breath away. Each one was precious, a perfect, important memory to hold in her heart.
This one, too, was special. It reminded her of her own rise into full knighthood: a coming-to of peace with herself. A moment of clarity, of self-understanding. Many people, she was told, awoke their power in battle, when they could no longer do without it. Teide was like Hvergelmir — her power released itself of its bonds because it was hers to claim. Because some part of her had become ready for what she was capable of.
Hvergelmir glanced to the symbol marked so indelibly on her left shoulder. The rising star. She felt proud of this place, and a little proud of herself, too: she had brought people here to offer them welcome, safety, peace and solace — any many of them had received it, if in some small measure. Maybe Hvergelmir wasn’t doing so badly, as a knight.
“You did,” she agreed with a broad smile. “You’re beautiful!”
Teide blushed, cheeks burning red. “Th-thank you,” she stammered. She wasn’t in the habit of thinking of herself as beautiful, what with her knobby knees and her too-big front teeth and her blown-wide eyes, but Hvergelmir wouldn’t lie to her.
Turning carefully in place, Teide watched her dress spin in the water, the gold embroidery thread catching the light. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a flash of gold fabric.
“I have a cape!” Teide exclaimed, pulling it forward. “I have a cape!”
Gradually, it dawned on her what that meant. Teide looked uncertainly over at Hvergelmir. “I’m a Knight, aren’t I? Capital K. The rank. A Knight. Like you.” Her lower lip wobbled precariously. Of all the things Teide had thought a dip in the well might lead to, she hadn’t expected
this outcome.
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“You are
entirely a Knight,” Hvergelmir confirmed with an absurdly wide grin. “I can feel it, too. It’s a genuine fact now.”
Then, because she wanted to so badly, she reached forward and pulled Teide into a big bear hug. Friends who had good things happen to them always deserved hugs. In fact, hugs were sort of a big thing in Laney and Jenna’s apartment in general. Hugs and wallpaper and cooking things on the hot plate.
“I’m so, so proud of you.
To be perfectly honest, Teide hadn’t been sure she would ever be a Knight,
ever. Like maybe her Wonder would be angry with her and withhold her full power. It was such a relief to hear Hvergelmir confirm it - if someone else could tell, too, then for sure it was real!
She leaned into the hug, burying her grin against Hvergelmir’s shoulders. Hugs were good! Teide was almost certain that Gemma hadn’t gotten hugged enough - she didn’t have to wonder about Astrophyllite. Her memory of embraces prior to her purification was incredibly scant… but she had plenty of time to make up for all that.
“I’ve come really far, haven’t I,” she said into Hvergelmir’s shoulder.
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Hvergelmir squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that threatened her composure. “
So very far,” she said with conviction. “You’ve got the brightest future in the world ahead of you now. Let’s go see it together, Teide Knight.” She tightened her hug briefly. “But first, let’s celebrate with ice cream.”
Teide’s eyes lit up. “Yes,” she said fiercely. She was
always in the mood for ice cream. “Let’s.”
