There was a slip of paper that had been pushed under the door.
It wasn’t a particularly special looking piece of paper, slightly crumpled, folded over at an awkward angle, and a little yellow. It was however, the start of something, and it was the most important notice the girl had ever read.
It was, of course, the first thing the girl leapt on, when she spotted it sticking through the door. She had never, ever had anything pushed under the door, not from friends, not from strangers. Not from gods either. Settling onto the warm covers of the bed, she tucked her feet under her, her hair behind her ear and gently pulled the sheet open. As if this was just a fairytale, from an innocent world. Her eyes met the paper. And she read.
Her hands trembled when she had finished, and the girl read again, not sure whether she had understood it properly, with her poor Common.
After the second time, it was her whole body that trembled, and she read it again, not sure whether to believe it.
By the third, she knew she couldn’t believe it. Priskil had never agreed to this. Priskil couldn’t have. Priskil wouldn’t have. No. No-no-nonononono. With a furious movement, she pressed the paper beneath her hands, watching the words distort as she crushed it into a tight ball, before throwing it across the room and watching it hit a wall and fall to the ground. There it lay, words she couldn’t comprehend, reduced to nothingness.
In the next few ticks, she had run over to it, scooped it up, pressed it flat against the ground and read it a final time. She said each word aloud, letting them fall off her lips as if they was poison. Because what else were they?
They were crazy. The gods were crazy. All of them. Bala and Tavasi and Sivah. Morwen. Priskil. All the rest. What if it was their people being hunted? They never would have accepted then. Most of them wouldn’t have accepted now. Or so she had believed. She didn’t know what to believe any more.
Leaving the paper a crumpled mess on the ground, she moved back to her bed, pressing her head against the pillow and pulling her covers over her. Like when she was little, hiding from the monsters that she now saw everywhere, protected and in a whole new world with a blanket as a barrier.
She cried there, just a little, before she let herself bring her fist up, let herself pry it open, let herself feel Priskil’s light on her.
Priskil had never accepted this. She didn’t understand why the other gods had claimed it, but she knew the slaughter of every one of Morwen’s child would never be something the goddess would have accepted. She knew it through her logic, she knew it with her brain and her mind. She knew it as well as she knew the goddess. More than that, she could feel it - in her heart, and in her mark. Priskil would never agree.
Then a more important question fell on her mind: would Ionu?
Winter didn’t exist in Alvadas. Surely Morwen’s disappearance wouldn’t matter to him. But he was so unpredictable. She couldn’t guess - she could only know what she hoped for. Yet the seasons had claimed they all agreed. Did that mean to some extent the god of Alvadas had?
The girl began to panic, wrapping herself in the covers even tighter. If they could do this to Morwen, they could do it to anyone. To Priskil and to her. She wanted to tell herself that Priskil would never abandon her, but she doubted that the Vantha had been expecting Morwen to disappear either. And she knew if Priskil left she’d support her anyway she could, because she must have left for a reason.
It took her half a bell to calm herself to the point where she felt ready to leave her room. She couldn’t just let this happen. She had to find the Vantha, find out whether Ionu would protect them, and find the best way to help them. Morwen, maybe, she deserved to be punished. But the Vantha had done nothing wrong. They needed hope more than anything.
Everyone did.
