Chapter 42: As Old as Ysildras

(I painted this in Procreate using the oil paint and turpentine brushes. -Chaiga T. Cheska)

“What is it?” Oren was already between his brothers and the tree line, his voice pitched low.

Nix didn’t answer straight away. His eyes had narrowed, his pupils drawn to thin vertical slits, and a low growl building in his chest was not one he seemed able to stop.

Then Olis exhaled and straightened, relaxed, and something in him let go all at once, his shoulders dropping, the tension sliding out of him as though a hand had reached in and simply removed it.

“Just an elf,” he breathed, and there was warmth in his voice that made the others look at him wonderingly. “Watching us from the trees. She recognises me.”

Tavik focused on the scribe, frowning and trying to make sense of what Olis was saying. “How can you know her? You said so yourself that we’re four hundred years in the past. I don’t understand.”

“I am known here, in this time and others,” Olis smiled at Tavik, “I am also a lot older than I look, Tavik.”

Oren, Tavik and Bran found themselves transfixed on Olis’s calm expression and all three exchanged a look and murmured, “Crystalsong Elf.” Finally, they were in the one place where their half-elvish nature might be recognised, which sparked curiosity rather than fear.

Nix’s fangs, however, had not receded, and his ears stayed flat. Olis was watching Nix and spoke softly looked between Nix and only what he and Nix could see deeper into the forest.

“She doesn’t know you, Nix, which is rather the trouble. She’s never seen anything like you before, and a stranger of an unfamiliar kind, in her forest, is exactly the sort of thing a warrior watches closely.” He said it gently, no judgement in it at all. “She isn’t hunting you. She’s simply working out what you are.”

Nix’s eyes hadn’t left the trees. “She has magical sparks around her hands. She looks ready to attack.”

“She is readying herself,” Olis said. “But I believe she will calm soon, once she sees you are not a threat.”

Tavik reached out to Nix and set a hand on his shoulder, feeling the coiled tension there, and said nothing for a moment, only breathed, slow and deliberate, until he felt the faintest answering shift in his cousin’s own breath.

“Crystalsong elf,” Oren said, half to himself, working it through. “We’re in her forest.”

“You are,” said Olis. “Which is precisely why I’d rather we found our shelter before dark and let her go on watching from a comfortable distance. She won’t follow. This isn’t her quarrel.”

Tavik looked to Nix before he moved, the habit too old to break. “Well, can you move without being on the alert?”

Nix held still another moment, his fangs slow to ease, his ears slow to lift, and then he shook himself and straightened, looking around at Olis and his cousins. “Yes, let’s go.”

Tavik nodded, satisfied, and turned to Olis. “Are we close to the shelter you mentioned? What does it look like?”

Olis blinked, pulling himself back from wherever his attention had briefly gone. “A stream,” he said, with the focused brevity of someone reorganising themselves quickly. “A small one, at the valley floor. On the eastern bank above it, an outcropping of stone. A shallow cave. We cross the water and go up the bank. It’s not far from here.”

Tavik looked at Nix. Nix was already moving.

They went down the slope in a loose, stumbling line, Nix and Tavik ahead, Olis behind them, Oren and Bran bringing up the rear with considerably less elegance than anyone else. The gradient was steep and the ground untrustworthy, soft loamy earth beneath a deceiving skin of moss that offered no grip whatsoever when weight was applied to it suddenly. The crystal formations jutted between the trees at odd angles, some of them at knee height and sharp-edged, and the tree roots crossed the slope like the fingers of something buried, catching boots without warning. Tavik went over one root and caught himself on a trunk, bark biting into his palm. Olis navigated the slope with the unhurried calm of someone who had done this before, which was quietly maddening.

Behind them, Oren and Bran were not faring well.

Bran had been managing perfectly until he reached a half-fallen log lying across the slope, its bark encrusted with crystal growths that caught the fractured light and looked deceptively smooth. He put his hand flat on it to steady himself as he climbed over, and the crystal edge opened a clean line across his palm. He hissed through his teeth.

“You alright?” Oren asked as they navigated the mossy slope.

“Cut myself on a crystal,” muttered Bran, rubbing his palm on his britches that left a streak of blood. Oren rolled his eyes.

“Well done, great way to get an infected wound!”

“Oh, honestly, Oren, it’s just a little cut!” said Bran, making a weary face at his older brother, then came to an abrupt halt in front of a huge log across his path, his eyes darting right and left, trying to see an easy way over the fallen tree that was completely encrusted with indigo and purple crystals.

Oren looked at the log before them, and then, since the others were getting further ahead, he took hold of Bran by his upper arms and moved him over the log with the brisk efficiency of someone relocating a piece of furniture. Bran’s feet left the ground briefly. He landed on the other side with a look that suggested he was working very hard at his patience levels.

“I didn’t actually ask for your help, you know!” Bran retorted as Oren nudged him along.

They heard the stream before they reached it. The sound of it filtered up through the trees as something far larger than a stream had any right to be, the crystal formations on every side catching the trickle of water and throwing it back and forth between them until it rang through the valley like a river in full spate. It was disorienting in a specific way, the kind that made the ears argue with the eyes, so that when the stream finally came into view it was almost a disappointment, a thin bright thing threading between rocks and crystal clusters, shallow enough to see the bottom clearly.

A line of stepping stones crossed it, flat and evenly spaced, with the particular quality of stones that had been placed rather than simply fallen into place.

Bran discovered his water skin had gone light in his hand, and before anyone thought to remark on it, he had crouched at the edge and was tipping it beneath the clear rush of the stream, filling it without ceremony. Nobody paid him much mind. It was, after all, exactly what one did when a water skin ran dry, and his brothers waited without complaint while he took a mouthful, found it cold and faintly mineral on the tongue, and stoppered the rest away, looking a good deal more refreshed for it by the time he straightened.

The outcropping was where Olis had said it would be. A shelf of great flat stones set into the hillside above the bank, the kind that had come down the slope at some point before memory and settled into a shape that was not quite a cave and more than a hollow, open at the front, backed by solid rock, with a floor smoothed by time and weather. The smell of old ash met them when they ducked inside, faint and familiar, the ghost of fires that other travellers had made in this place and let go cold. A ring of stones near the entrance held the remnants of past hearths, the charcoal gone grey and soft. It was the particular comfort of a place that had sheltered people before and knew how.

Nix moved through it ahead of the others, unhurried, his ears shifting in their small arcs as he read the space. He checked the back of the overhang, tested the air at the entrance, looked out at the tree line across the stream. After a moment, he came back and stood beside Tavik and said nothing, but something in the set of his shoulders had eased by a fraction.

The brothers made camp the way they always did, falling into their familiar work without discussion. Tavik went looking for dry wood along the base of the slope, pulling dead branches from beneath crystal-heavy undergrowth. Oren brought extra stones from the stream bank to reinforce the circle. Bran unpacked the cooking pot and the provisions with his usual careful order, and it was only once everything was laid out to his satisfaction that he turned his attention to his own palm, wiping the last of the blood away with a scrap of cloth and studying the cut with a healer’s detachment rather than any complaint. He worked a smear of yarrow salve from his own supplies into the wound, pressed it closed, and bound it with a neat strip of linen, all without breaking off from what he was doing.

It was as Oren came back with the last of the stones for the ring that he caught it, a small snag of surprise before he’d worked out its cause. Bran was crouched over the provisions, quite ordinary in every way, and yet something about him sat oddly against what Oren remembered: his youngest brother’s shoulders a touch broader, his head coming up further than it should when he glanced round for the pot. Oren set the stones down slowly, saying nothing, and let the thought sit half-finished while he went back to building the ring of stones.

Olis settled against the back wall of the overhang and watched them all with an expression of quiet, private amusement. He produced his water skin, took a measured sip, and then turned his attention to the treeline across the stream. Nix sat near the entrance, cross-legged, forearms on his knees, and watched the same darkness. His fangs had not fully receded, small and bright still in the firelight, and Tavik noticed and said nothing, but kept his cousin in his peripheral sight.

The fire took hold, throwing its warmth against the stone behind them, and the crystal formations across the stream caught the fading light and scattered it in small, shifting fragments across the valley floor. They ate, the cooking pot passed between them with the ease of long habit, and for a while the only sounds were the fire and the amplified trickle of the stream and the faint mineral singing of the forest around them, the sun’s light fully fading and then a thin, trembling pale blue moon beginning to rise through the branches and crystals.

Oren had been watching Nix for some time. He watched the small tight points of Nix’s fangs, the way his cousin’s attention never fully left the treeline, the quality of stillness in him that was not peace but restraint. Nix took a moment, and his eyes moved briefly to Oren, then back to the treeline.

“Is she still there?” Oren asked eventually, nodding towards the trees and studying his cousin.

“Still there,” Nix confirmed quietly, his eyes flicking up to the distant treeline beyond the stream. “Her magic sparks have died down a bit.” A pause. “She’s watching me only now.”

Bran, working a thread loose from the hem of his sleeve, said dryly, without looking up, “Bit much, though, isn’t it? Sparking away at someone for just existing.”

He hadn’t said it loudly. He hadn’t meant it to travel further than the fire. But Nix’s ears twitched towards the trees a moment later, and something shifted in his face.

“She heard that,” Nix murmured, and then added with a small smile, “She thought it was funny.”

“Did she?” Oren said, his eyes lighting up as he tried to see what Nix was seeing, but could only see deep shadows.

“Seems she found Bran amusing,” said Nix, smiling between his cousin and the elf who watched him from the shadows.

Tavik snorted and dodged a swipe from Bran, who looked faintly pleased with himself, and went back to his sleeve.

It was in that same moment that Tavik, glancing sideways at his younger brother, studying him, said, “Bran. Why is it you look taller?”

Bran looked up properly this time. “What do you mean?”

“Did you do something? You were so small earlier. Have you done some sort of strange magic without telling us?” Tavik was scrutinising his brother as the others looked at Bran and realised he did, somehow, look as if he’d grown slightly.

Bran set his spoon down and sat straighter, drawing himself upright, and something in his face changed as he took stock of it, the way he might weigh up a plant he’d found and was working out the name of.

“I haven’t done anything. Do I really look taller?” He got to his feet, unhurried, and looked down at Tavik, giving his brother a pointed look and gesturing for Tavik to stand up. “Tav, stand up. I want to see how tall I am!”

“I’m eating; why do I have to stand up? Measure yourself against Oren,” grumbled Tavik, ignoring Bran trying to haul him up.

“Oren’s a giant, Tav; he doesn’t count!”

Oren gave a mock-insulted sigh and retorted, “Oh, that’s nice!”

Grumbling, Tavik got to his feet, crossed his arms, and glared down as he endured his brother’s comparison. Bran measured the distance from the top of his head to his brother’s shoulder with a flat palm, in a businesslike manner. “Finally. Back to where I was.”

“Still shorter than Nix,” remarked Oren, watching his brothers.

“I’ll take it. Better than the damage my magic did to me,” said Bran as he sat back down.

Tavik looked at Olis, who had been watching all of this with the same expression he had worn since they made camp, calm and faintly entertained and thoroughly at ease. “You said we could ask questions.”

“I did,” Olis agreed, watching them carefully.

“Then here is mine. Every being we have met of significance on this journey, in the Eldertree Forest, with the Burrowbacks, and now you, all of them have known something before we did. Known something about us. We have been walking in the dark from the beginning. Why?”

Olis looked at him for a moment, then at each of them in turn. “It is not with any intention to deceive you,” he said quietly. “Those of us in MirMarnia who care about certain travellers crossing our paths are careful about how much we share and when. You have been spoken of, all of you, in ways that mean something to those who know how to listen.” He paused. “I cannot give you everything at once. Not because I wish to keep it from you, but because some knowledge changes the choices you make as you move forward, and those choices need to be yours. I can guide, but I cannot map every step.”

Tavik absorbed this. “That is an extremely vague answer.”

“Yes,” Olis agreed pleasantly. “It is.”

Bran had been gathering himself. “How did you know about the Færlom?” he said. “How did you know there were only two made? And how did you know to save my life force when I was unconscious, and how did Timatticus send you a message, and what did the message look like, and where were you when you got it, and why did you call me a little wizard? Am I a wizard?”

Oren sighed audibly, and Bran shot him a look to be quiet.

Olis smiled. He waited a moment, then said, “I was passing nearby when Timatticus reached me, using a spell. The Burrowbacks have ways of reaching those they trust. The rest is a matter of knowing what life threads to look for when I arrived.” He looked at Bran. “And little wizard is simply what I call certain people with certain attributes. You have them. What those attributes become is not yet decided.” He held Bran’s gaze. “What I can tell you is that tomorrow, in the daylight, I will show all of you something about how to anchor your magic so that it does not feed on your own life force when instinct takes over. That is not a lesson for tonight.”

Bran nodded, accepting it for what it was, and did not press further, though his other questions plainly still sat waiting behind his eyes.

Nix, who had been listening with his attention still divided, leaned forward on his knees at the word threads, something quickening in him. “You know about threads,” he said to Olis, not quite a question. “Can you see them? Between everything?”

Olis looked at him. “Every being with a working knowledge of magic in MirMarnia can learn to see them,” he said. “Your heritage helps you see all threads with a greater capacity than most, which I believe will be an asset to you as you go forward in this life, Nix.”

Nix thought about this for a moment. Then he sat back, and the last of the tension went out of his shoulders. Tavik noticed and almost felt that he was now able to relax too, which he found a relief. Nix then turned his head to look at Olis and studied the scribe’s profile for a moment before he spoke, “Why does the elf know you?”

His voice was quiet, carrying just far enough. Oren, Tavik and Bran looked up at once, the ease of the exchange between them broken cleanly by the question, the way a stone dropped into still water breaks a reflection.

Olis looked at Nix with an expression that suggested he had been expecting this question and had found himself no more ready for it when it arrived. He considered for a moment, then said, “I am a scribe. My work brings me to this forest as I’ve told you.”

“You said that before,” Nix said. He had not moved, still facing the dark, but his attention had shifted entirely to the old man at his back. “I’m asking why she specifically knows you.”

“Because I have been coming here for a very long time,” Olis said. “The scribes of MirMarnia use the crystals of this forest. We have been coming here to source them for longer than most of MirMarnia has had language to record it. She has seen me before. More than once.”

Oren sat forward as something had caught at the edge of what Olis had just said and refused to let go. “But we’re four hundred years in the past,” he said slowly. “You told us that after Timatticus brought us to a place of safety.” He looked at Olis steadily. “How old exactly are you? How has this elf seen you this far back in time? I find this hard to comprehend.”

Olis looked at Oren for a long moment as if weighing what he should respond with, then he looked at Nix, whose ears had shifted forward, angled and attentive, and whose expression had settled into something that was not quite surprise.

“As I mentioned earlier,” began Olis, “I am older than I appear.”

He looked at each of them in turn, Oren, Tavik, Bran and then back to Nix, who was watching him with that unreadable stillness that meant he was listening to more than words.

“You have heard of Ysildras,” Olis said.

It was not quite a question. Oren nodded. Tavik said, “Everyone has. The great tree. MirMarnia is at its heart. The one who dreamed the world into being.” He said it with the cadence of something learned young and carried since, worn smooth by the telling.

“Yes,” Olis said. “That is the shape of it.” He looked down at his stained hands, turning them over once, then back at the fire. “I am as old as Ysildras.”

The silence that followed pressed differently to the silences before it.

Oren’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked at Olis, then rubbed his head as if trying to reorganise a great deal of information very rapidly, only to find that none of it quite fit the space it had occupied before.

Tavik stared at him. “But how…. that’s not possible,” he said. “Ysildras isn’t a person. She’s a story. She’s the story. She’s the beginning of everything.”

“Yes,” Olis said pleasantly. “She is.”

“So you’re saying you’re as old as the beginning of everything.”

“I am saying,” Olis said, with the measured patience of someone who has explained difficult things to many people across a very long span of time, “that I have been here since before your language existed. Since before the Earth Vikings crossed the ley lines and set their boots on MirMarnian soil. Since before the Caelvarae built their floating halls. I have been here, in one form or another, for the full length of what MirMarnia is. I am the first scribe, and I will also be the last.”

Author’s Note:

This chapter felt very clunky to write, as if it fought to get out, so I expect there will be more editing battles with this one in the future! I hope it was a fun read and that you enjoyed learning a little more about Olis. Thank you for supporting MirMarnia!
-Chaiga T. Cheska