Chapter 3: Lisera
Colour pencil drawing of Lisera by Chaiga T. Cheska
In the shadow-lace nebula of Tiorial, where the stars gathered like watchful eyes and the winds whispered secrets of origin, the planet of Tioria spun into being. Far from MirMarnia, and yet kin to its realms, Tioria was born of a yew seedling, a fragment of ancient wisdom, curling deep into herself, longing for genesis. The nebula became both cradle and cocoon, shaping this seedling into a pulsing planet, its surface alive with promise. Tioria gazed across the cosmic gulf, yearning to emulate her elder sister, Ysildras, who wove worlds from the tendrils of her roots and birthed multitudes from the breath of her leaves.
From her first revolution in the dark velvet of the void, Tioria sought purpose. She bore fruit, not in the manner of trees, but in the flowering of consciousness. Her will shaped the lands: forests with trunks streaked in sapphire light, oceans so deep their hearts throbbed with planetary rhythm, and meadows that glimmered beneath twin moons. Into this wild landscape, Tioria, in her solitude, crafted the beings who would know her embrace, the Lightweavers.
They arose, beautiful and terrible by design, paradox stitched into their bones. Tall and long-limbed, they moved like dancers in twilight, their blue-tinged skin patterned as the yew, veins of green, umber, and gold swirling in bark-like intricacy. Their hair tumbled in mossy cascades, alive with the scent of old forests and the shimmer of dew. Many wove ribbons of Starflax into their tresses: a fibre spun from the remnants of fallen stars, delicate yet holding the memory of cosmic wanderings. Starflax hummed faintly with the echoes of galaxies and dreams, and those who wore its ribbons glimpsed fragments of the universe’s past.
This revelation awakened the Lightweavers. They saw, in snatches of radiance, that life had existed long before their own becoming, in places distant and unknown. Curiosity flared. They reached out, stretching their senses to the heavens, and discovered that Tioria herself was the sibling of an ancient being who held millions of worlds in her embrace: Ysildras.
Yet in all her crafting, Tioria did not know the love that her sister, Ysildras, understood. As a result, her children were born without its understanding. She granted them the power to heal with a word and to kill with a glance, to shape beauty from ruin and to summon terror from light. Her Lightweavers wandered her forests and explored her oceans, seeking meaning beyond the gifts she had given, struggling with the mystery of longing without a name.
The First Journey: Lisera
Among these beings, Lisera stood apart. She was fashioned with wings that glowed, luminous and shifting with constellations, each feather a map of wandering stars. She was the brightest, her presence causing the tall yew trees to bow, the moss to shimmer in reverent emerald. Lisera’s curiosity burned hotter than the suns, and her Starflax ribbons sang the histories of worlds she had never seen.
When the Lightweavers gathered beneath the twin moons, pondering what lay beyond, Lisera stepped forward, her wings unfurling into the night. She was chosen, not for gentleness, nor for wisdom, but for the intensity of her longing. Tioria watched as Lisera ascended, each beat of her wings drawing her closer to the uncharted reaches of space. The emptiness between planets did not frighten her; it beckoned.
Lisera’s journey was slow at first, her wings pulsing with a rhythm not yet in harmony with the deep silence. But as she neared the heart of Ysildras, the constellations on her wings shifted and glowed, brighter and brighter, until she was a beacon against the void.
She entered the realms of MirMarnia, where the sky itself throbbed with sentience and the winds tasted of magic. The inhabitants were creatures of leaf and river, stone and song and looked up in wonder at this new visitor from the stars, her wings trailing the memory of distant constellations. Lisera soared, circling above valleys drenched in sunrise, peering down at the marvel of a world both strange and familiar.
MirMarnia had never seen a being like Lisera. She was a paradox incarnate, woven from the longing of a planet who had not understood love, and the curiosity of a soul who sought it. The sentient skies shimmered in response to her presence; the river sang a new note of welcome. Wonder filled the air as Lisera, the first Lightweaver to leave Tioria, hovered at the threshold of revelation, awaiting her story’s unfolding.
And so, as the morning light of Winter faded in the valley of Emaris, Lisera traced her first arc above MirMarnia’s breathless lands, carrying with her the mystery of what it meant to be born of yearning, to wander where the cosmos called, and to seek, in all her bright and terrible glory, the meaning of love at last.
The Sentinel Oak at our story’s unfolding.
Lisera now sat in the crook where two ancient branches of the Sentinel Oak forked and cradled her body, high above the rustle of MirMarnia’s forest floor, with the nearby clan farmsteads scattered like jewels in an arboreal sea. The world was silent, muffled by a gentle snowfall so fine it seemed woven from wind. Snow silvered her mossy hair, dappling the midnight blue of her ever-changing skin. She inhaled slowly, each flake’s descent nudged her hearing wide open, so that every delicate impact resonated: a glimmer, a sigh, a thousand faint percussion notes painted her solitude.
She closed her eyes and let the snow’s music carry her back in time, four hundred years or more, before the coming of the fierce Vikings who would one day sail longboats down the Emaris and raise their voices in the valley. Before the world was mapped, named, and fought over, Lisera remembered her first entrance into MirMarnia, a flicker of awe and delight tumbling through her still-young self. She had been so innocent, then, so unknowing, drifting on the wings of curiosity alone, a child of longing utterly untutored in its cost.
Her thoughts grew treacherous, thick with the ache of recent parting. Nix, her son, was no longer by her side. The space he left was keen; a wound shaped like hope and regret together. Lisera’s senses, sharpened by loss and the cold, tingled with the old warning: she was not alone. The silence of snow was too profound, the shadows below too restless. She knew the legends: in these forests, Mirage Wraiths wandered, semi-transparent, dreamlike, their bodies stitched from mist and memory, able to slip between moments and masquerade as the flicker of an old fear or the echo of a desire.
She had seen such a being only once, decades ago, whilst wading through a strand of winter-bare birches at dusk. The Mirage Wraith had shimmered into sight, its body half-shadow, half-moonlight, casting visions onto the very air: a cascade of lifetimes, loves lost and found, the heartbeats of ancestors and strangers alike. They came to those who reflected, offering guidance or stirring the lost with glimpses of forgotten truths.
But now, Lisera was not in the mood to be haunted. Her lips curled, and she hissed, low and menacing, the sound more felt than heard, a ripple of magic that shivered the branches. She felt the presence, tentative and ancient, shrink back from her, dissolving into the snow-heavy gloom, leaving her once more in blessed solitude. She exhaled, the tension unwinding, and turned her gaze downward.
Far below, beyond the deep forest where she perched, four figures moved in slow procession through the winter wood towards the distant settlement of Drakkensund. Her son was amongst them, slight and pale blue against the dark trunks, his steps unsteady but his will unbent. The others walked close, their boots crunching through crusted snow, their breath drifting white in the biting air. Between the muffled thud of their tread came only the dry whisper of branches and the deep, restless pulse of the Emaris somewhere ahead.
From her high seat in the crook of the sentinel oak, Lisera watched, still as a carved guardian, the white snow settling on her hair and wings until she was half-veiled in it. The height gave her the river’s scent, cold stone and distant ice, mingled with the copper tang of snow on the tongue. Her gaze lingered on her youngest. The cold clung to him like frost, yet there was a spark beneath, a stubborn light that pressed him forward, step after determined step, into the teeth of winter’s wind.
Lisera’s mind wandered, as it often did, to the old rumours of the Root Guardians, beings whose essence must taste of earth’s deep centuries, of root-bitter and sap-sweet, of loam rich by the fall of ages. The thought curled her lips in a private smile, a flash of fang in the half-light. Memory rose unbidden of her first decades in this realm, when she had roamed MirMarnia without anchor or design, intent on returning to her birth-world after only a fleeting glance. Yet the Caelvarae and their floating halls had sung to her, tempest-bright, and she had lingered… until tempest became home.
Sometimes she wondered, with the idle ache of what-if, how her path might have wound had she never left those halls; had she remained amongst cloud-song and wind-feast, never catching the names of mortals on her tongue, never bearing children whose lives were knotted with prophecy and peril.
The snow thickened, swathing her shoulders in white until she shifted, scattering snowflakes from her feathers.
Simi
Below, at the base of her tree, movement caught Lisera’s attention. Her eldest, Simi, a pale-blue shadow sliding between the roots at the oak’s base, his eyes glinting with a hunter’s search.
Simi crouched low, nostrils flaring as he drew in the tangled scents. The musk of pig farm clung to the trail. Oren and his brothers raised swine, and the smell never quite left them. Beneath that, sharper notes: Tavik’s blade oil, the medicinal tang of whatever poultice Bran carried in his healer’s pouch. And then something else, something that made Simi’s lip curl back from his teeth. Magic. Bright and new, like spring sap bleeding from cut bark, overlaying a scent he knew but couldn’t quite place.
His half-brother. That runt Nix, who’d always been too small, too soft, too bloody precious in their mother’s eyes. But this smell was wrong. Different. Simi inhaled again, deeper, trying to unpick what had changed. The magic signature reminded him of Lisera, his mother, which was clear enough, making his spine prickle with the old, familiar unease, but there was something raw about it, unformed, like a wound still weeping.
What had the little bastard got himself into?
Simi’s hands flexed, and he felt the resistance of dried blood pulling at his skin, Ulfgar’s blood, crusted dark beneath his fingernails, stiffening the fabric of his tunic where it had sprayed across his chest before dawn. The weight of what he’d done sat in his belly like a stone, but it was a weight he refused to examine. Not yet. Not whilst the forest still rang with the echo of his mother’s roar, that terrible, world-splitting sound she’d made when the transformation took her, when Ulfgar’s death had shattered whatever binding had kept her trapped in human form.
Simi had run. He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d run berserker blood and all, because that sound had reached inside him and shaken something loose, something that understood prey when it heard a true predator’s voice. He’d fled into the forest whilst his mother became what she truly was, and he’d been circling ever since, half-tracking Nix out of habit and spite, half-tracking her out of curiosity he couldn’t quite name.
What was she now? What had she been, all those years Ulfgar kept her bound? And what would she do, seeing him again, knowing what he’d done?
His berserker blood sang beneath his skin, wanting violence, wanting answers, wanting to sink teeth into the mystery and shake it until it made sense. Twenty-three years he’d walked this land, and still his mother had looked at him with that careful distance, as though he might shatter if she glanced at him wrong. Or perhaps she feared he’d shatter her instead. He didn’t know which insulted him more.
He had her skin, midnight blue shot through with patterns that almost, almost mimicked the swirling bark-marks of her kind. But his back was bare. No wings. No constellation map of his own. Just the copper hair and brute strength of his father, Ulfgar, amplified until he could crack skulls between his palms if the rage took him properly.
Ulfgar, dead now. Whose blood still flaked from Simi’s knuckles.
The clans called him legend. Whispered his name like a curse or a blessing, depending on which side of his temper they’d seen. But Lisera? She called him nothing. Watched him the way you’d watch a fire: wary of what it might consume, respectful of its heat, but never warm beside it.
And now this. Nix’s scent carried through the forest like a taunt, wrapped in magic Simi couldn’t interpret, moving towards Drakkensund with three farm boys as escort. His jaw tightened. The runt was fourteen. Barely able to lift a decent blade. What magic could he possibly…
The forest had gone quiet. Simi noticed it belatedly, his attention too fixed on the trail to register the absence of birdsong, the unnatural stillness. He frowned, straightening slightly, trying to read what the silence meant. Predator? Storm coming? His mother had tried to teach him to interpret these signs, but he’d never quite mastered the subtlety of it. He was better with direct threats, things he could see coming, things he could hit.
He turned slowly, scanning the trees, and found nothing. Just snow and shadow and the muffled weight of winter pressing down. And somewhere above him, he sensed rather than heard a presence. His mother’s magic, close and getting closer, carrying that same bright, terrible signature he’d felt when she’d roared, and the world had changed.
His heart kicked against his ribs, not quite fear, not quite excitement, but something uglier that lived between them. Would she be angry? Would she thank him? Would she even recognise him as her son, now that she wore her true form again?
Simi didn’t know. But he stood his ground, blood-stained and waiting, because running twice in one day would be more shame than even he could swallow.
The Hollow Walker
Far above in the sentinel oak’s high cradle, Lisera’s entire body had gone rigid.
The snow had begun to fall with a new intent, thick and sodden, transforming each needle, leaf, and branch into a muffled shadow. Her attention snapped towards the forest’s deepening stillness behind them, towards the ancient heart of the wood where the oldest trees grew and the snow lay deepest. She felt the change not with her eyes, but with the animal cording of her nerves, with the way each feather along her wings bristled. Silence was never truly empty here; always, something moved beneath its skin.
In this moment, the lull was a warning. Lisera listened intently, heart pounding, senses extending like tendrils through the encircling gloom. She tasted the air, wet, mineral, laced with the sour tang of dread, and knew, immediately, that a presence every bit as ancient and menacing as herself was stirring beneath the snow-heavy branches.
Her body tensed. She recognised the threat in the marrow of her bones. The local clans named it so simply, their words thin and inadequate for the shadow that prowled their nightmares: Hollow Walker. A wolf-like creature, broad as a stallion at the shoulder, with an oily black mane rippling across its flanks, gliding over snow as if weightless. Its mane, so dark it seemed to swallow the grey morning light, made a sound she imagined not with her ears but with her blood, a faint, oily whisper, impossible to catch even for one as sharp as Lisera.
It was a silent stalker, feeding not on flesh alone but on the scent of fear and the bright lure of newly kindled power. Lisera’s mind raced. Her youngest, Nix, and his companions were ahead on the path to Drakkensund, their nervous passage through the woods doubtless leaving a trail of trembling scent. The Hollow Walker was hunting, and today, it hunted her own.
And Simi, her eldest, blood-stained and tentative, stood directly at the base of her tree, oblivious to what approached from the forest’s heart.
She had sensed him there for some time, tracking both her and Nix with that clumsy determination that marked him as Ulfgar’s son. She had smelt the blood on him from her perch, recognised its signature, and understood what it meant. The relief that her captor, Ulfgar, was dead. The binding was broken at last. And Simi, who had killed his father to free her, now stood below waiting to see what she would do.
But there was no time for reckoning between mother and son. Not whilst the Hollow Walker stalked closer, drawn by the bright flare of Nix’s newly awakened magic.
Without hesitation, Lisera dropped from her perch, wings half-furled. She fell fast, a shadow amongst shadows, and flared her wings at the last possible instant, so that she touched the snowy forest floor without a sound, her landing unnoticed even by the trees themselves.
Simi shot straight up, startled, nearly a foot off the ground. His mouth opened, the beginnings of a yelp poised on his tongue.
Lisera moved quicker than panic, a hand clamped over his mouth, fingers cool and firm, eyes wide and blazing as they met his own. She poured her urgency into that gaze, wordless and fierce: Be silent, a predator approaches.
Simi froze, breath caught, the familiar thrum of terror and awe reverberating through his body. He felt the old song of fear, and beneath it, the rising tide of his inherited rage, the berserker fury that was his birthright, threatening to blaze out uncontrolled.
But Lisera saw it, as she always did. She turned, fixing him with a look that snuffed the fire before it could ignite. Her gaze was flinty, commanding, brooking no argument, and Simi’s fury guttered out, leaving only the cold readiness of a hunter.
They crouched together, mother and son, in the shadow of the ancient oak. Simi strained to see what had provoked such alarm in her, senses sharp as a wolf’s, but saw nothing. The forest looked empty, with snow-laden branches and grey light, the muffled quiet of winter. Yet Lisera’s gaze tracked something he couldn’t perceive, and that alone struck a deeper fear into his chest. His mother, who was never afraid, who had weathered storms and beasts and the fury of men, braced herself as if before a great wave.
What was she seeing that he couldn’t?
The forest behind them, deeper into the ancient wood, away from where the four figures travelled towards Drakkensund, had gone utterly still. Lisera’s wings lifted slightly, positioning herself between Simi and whatever stalked from the forest’s heart. The gesture was unmistakable: she was a barrier. Between the threat and her youngest son, somewhere ahead on the path to the river settlement.
Simi felt the familiar bitter taste rise in his throat. Even now, even crouched beside him, her protection stretched past him towards Nix. Always Nix. He’d killed his own father to free her, stood here blood-stained and waiting for acknowledgement, and still her first concern was for the runt who’d done nothing to deserve it.
Lisera stood slowly, drawing herself to her full height, wings unfurling in a sudden stretch that rendered her a shadowy titan, a figure that towered above Simi. He watched, heart thudding, as her gaze remained fixed on something in the deep forest, something moving through the old trees where the snow lay thickest.
Then, in a movement so deliberate it felt ritualistic, Lisera swept her wings forward and began to move her longest feathers in intricate, fluid arcs. The tips traced patterns into the snow, shapes Simi did not know, angular and curling, drawn so precisely they could only be runes. They reminded him of the Peaceweavers’ glyphs, those ancient symbols pressed into river stones during sacred rites, but these were older, rawer, and far more potent.
He watched, transfixed, as the runes shimmered. Iridescent blues and golds pulsed through the snow, colours rising in curling threads that wound together between them, forming a gate, a living boundary of light, a portal through which the world itself seemed to hold its breath.
Simi blinked, and through that shimmering frame, he saw it, the thing his mother faced: the Hollow Walker, its mane roiling, its eyes limned in shadow, stalking closer on silent paws from the forest’s heart. It moved between the ancient trees, darker than the darkness, not prowling but sliding, as though it belonged to the world beneath the snow and bark, as though the land itself made way for its passage.
The beast was vast, easily the size of a horse at the shoulder, and Simi’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t sensed it. Hadn’t smelt it, hadn’t heard it, hadn’t felt the warning prickle that should have told him something ancient and deadly prowled nearby. His mother had detected it whilst he’d stood there like a fool, fixating on Nix’s trail, reading nothing but the forest’s ordinary silence.
Shame burned hot beneath his ribs, mixing with the primal terror of seeing the Hollow Walker made visible through his mother’s magic. The legends were real, then. The nightmare that stalked the clans’ stories walked here, now, and he’d been utterly blind to it.
The beast’s attention was fixed not on them, but on the trail ahead. On the path the four figures had taken towards Drakkensund. On Nix.
Simi’s hands curled into fists, dried blood cracking across his knuckles. Of course, it hunted Nix. Of course, the runt drew predators without even knowing it, leaving Simi to stand useless whilst his mother did what she always did, protected her precious youngest. He’d committed patricide for her freedom, and still she looked past him towards the son who mattered more.
Lisera did not falter. She was a stronghold. In a sweeping arc, she struck the nearest snowdrift with her wings, sending a spray of ice and powder into the air. Her hands wove deftly through the pale light, gathering the drifting snow and coaxing from it a surface smooth as glass, a mirror of ice. She tilted the mirror towards the approaching beast.
The Hollow Walker halted, as if caught by an invisible tether. Its reflection flickered uncertainly on the glass, mane rippling, tail lowered, eyes wide with a dawning confusion, and for the briefest heartbeat, the forest seemed to freeze.
Then the Hollow Walker shrieked, a high, piercing sound that split the stillness and sent a hundred birds bursting skyward, frantic and wild. Simi clamped his hands over his ears, the cry reverberating through his skull, whilst Lisera winced, jaw clenched against the pain.
Simi understood, in that moment, that the legend was true: the Hollow Walker could be halted only by showing it its own reflection, not for the sake of vanity, but because it was a creature forged from broken oaths, from the ruins of a guardian’s betrayal. To face its own image was to fracture its myth, its anonymity stripped away, leaving only memory, only the wound that made it what it was.
Lisera’s voice rang through the swirling snow, clear and unyielding: “I see you. I name you. You are not myth. You are memory.”
The runes flared, the mirror shimmered, and the Hollow Walker’s form seemed to crack along invisible lines. Its mane bristled and hissed, its eyes flickered with ancient grief. The beast faltered, its shape wavering, and with a final mournful howl, the sound less of rage than of loss, the spell shattered.
Snow drifted gently down, the gloom of the late winter morning dissolving into quiet clarity. Lisera exhaled, her wings folding softly around her, relief etched deep in her posture.
Simi’s tension melted, his breath coming slow and steady as the woodland noises crept back into the air: the twitter of birds, the whisper of wind. The threat was gone, for now, driven back by memory and the power of naming.
Mother and son stood together, ringed by the remnants of light, as the snow continued its silent descent. Ahead, somewhere along the path to Drakkensund, four figures walked on, unaware of how close the hunt had come.
And Simi, standing in his mother’s shadow with his father’s blood still dark on his hands, felt the bitter confirmation of what he’d always known. He wasn’t hunter enough to sense what stalked these woods. Wasn’t gifted enough to wield the magic that would make him her equal. He was berserker-strong and clan-feared, patricide-marked and free of his father’s tyranny. Still, beside his transformed mother, beside her wings, her power, her terrible grace, he remained what he’d always been: the son who wasn’t quite enough, standing guard over a brother he resented, in a forest that held secrets he could never read.
