Amor Fabula Ep. 03

"The doings of the gods are beyond the comprehension of men." Galmann studied some of the other runes. "Your father's petition for a son was answered, but not by the god whom he petitioned. Another god answered it. This god has been tormenting you ever since, by giving you and your father what you both wanted, but in such a way that you'd never be able to truly have it."

"Why would a god do this to me?" Misty cried out.

Galmann separated yet another rune. "This is the life you are presently in."

Misty stared at it. She saw herself as a child. She saw her mother and father proud with joy, and she saw herself growing up and bounding around as a little girl.

"Look closely." Galmann directed her. "Look at the man who you call father."

She did. It came to her suddenly. Her father was Josurr, who had been her lover all those ages ago. He'd been reincarnated twenty years earlier than her and she'd been born from his seed. "What god would do this? Tell me their name, so that I may curse it from this day forth."

Galmann showed her a stone with a twisted and ugly shape on it. "The god of chaos. The only god who can easily keep people from going to the underworld, because the underworld is ruled by this god's daughter."

"Loki." Misty said.

Galmann nodded.

Misty turned her eyes away from that diabolical rune, and went back to gazing at her first, true life. "My name was Mist back then. In this life, it was my father, who had once been named Josurr, it was he who named me Misty." She looked back at the fortune-teller. "He knows who I am, doesn't he?"

Galmann quietly answered. "According to the runes, it would seem so. I am sorry, but yours is not the first tragedy that the gods have inflicted upon mortals."

Misty sat there, quietly, as she considered what she would do next.

Misty returned to her longhouse late in the afternoon, when the sun was starting to set and cast dwindling rays onto the land. She stared at the doorway to her home, with its thick covering of old, wind-beaten leather, at the walls made of old wood packed with clay and mud, and at the roof, which her family was too poor to have tiled, on which was settled a thick covering of dirt and grass that helped insulate the residence nearly all year round.

Her mother startled her when she popped out of the house. She had a basket of small, weaved items under her arm. "What are you doing there, Misty?"

"I'm only taking in the sunset." She replied. "I'm watching the colors it makes over the house, as if the day is dying all around us."

"That's what the old folk would say, that the sun died each night and was reborn every morning." Her mother told her.

I know, Misty thought to herself. I was one of the old people.

"I'll be heading down the road a bit, to see if I can trade for some spices with old Luta. She'll drive a tough bargain, I know, but we're out of 'em and we need 'em. Perhaps I can relieve her out of a handful of mulberries as well. We'll make some mead out of them, once we get the rest of the ingredients. You can come along if you'd like."

"Oh, no." Misty shook her head. "I have to ask father a few things."

"Well, he's in there." She half-glanced at the longhouse as she waddled by her. "I'll be back before it gets too dark, I hope."

Misty tried to grin at the woman, but it was a meaningless gesture. She watched her mother step away, down the narrow path that would take her to Luta's. She waited, in case the woman would turn back, but her mother didn't. The woman merely kept ambling down the road, until her form could be seen getting smaller and smaller. Finally, her mother disappeared around a bend.

Misty walked into the longhouse.

Her father sat on a short stool, his brow furrowed and his attention on the loom that had been getting so much use lately, as the family's supply of precious coin dwindled.

"Hello there, Misty." He called out when he saw her.

She watched her father, as he carefully scanned the loom, and grimaced when he found a crack in it. The man had a haggard face from years of hard living, yet his eyes were always kind, always kind.

"This loom will break if your mother and you keep using it as often as you have. I can't rig something up to keep it whole until..." The man paused, as he often did when considering the family's pitiful fortunes. "Until we have enough coin to purchase a worthy loom from an artisan." He noticed that she was watching him. "So, what have you been up to?"

"Oh, I've been walking with my friends, here and there." She replied. "We went to the fortune-teller who has set up shop on the edge of town. Drott asked to know her fortune."

Her father chuckled. "I'd wager she wanted to know about some boy or another."

"She did." Misty said. "The fortune-teller had me stay after the others had gone. He read my fortune as well with his magic rune-stones."

"Oh?" Her father paused from his inspection of the loom. "Well, you can't always believe what a fortune-teller will tell you. The only fortune you can count on is that your pockets will be a little lighter of coin once you've left him."

Misty stared at her father. "How long have you known? How long have you known who I am?"

Her father chuckled, but it was a nervous laugh. "I've known you ever since you've been born, I suppose."

"Why did you name me Misty?"

This time, the man lowered his arms, to where they almost dragged on the ground because of the short stool he sat on. He stared back at her. "It is only a name."

"No, it isn't."

"What do you mean?"

"I've always been Mist, or Misty, or Cloud, or something similar." She revealed. "And you, you've been my lover, my son, my brother, my uncle, and now you are my father."

"I don't know what you're talking about, girl." Her father shook his head.

"You are my Josurr from long, long ago."

The name seemed to have struck a chord. She saw this on the man's face. Instead of shaking his head, he bowed it and brought his long arms up on his lap. "That was my name, then? I'd always suspected it was something like that, but I was never sure."

"How long have you known?" She repeated.

Her father shrugged. "It comes as a dream, sometimes. It came the night before you were born. I knew then to give you the name that I did. The rest of it didn't make sense, not at first, not until you started to grow up. That's when your face started to look more like the face in my dreams."

"Tell me the dream."

The man turned away, as if he were wishing the subject had never been broached. He cleared his throat, when there was no real need for him to. "I see myself in another man's body. I am running, running through a copse. I am angry at something that has been done to you, but I don't know what that is. I see a man, an old warrior, at about the same age that I am now, stepping out from the shadows. I feel that he is heading to that same grove where I found you. Somehow, I know that this is the man that has wronged you. I shout at him. He pulls a small axe from his waist and a moment later I am no more." Her father paused for some time. "I always thought that these memories belonged to someone else, until your face started changing as you grew. The girl that I see in my dreams, and you, Misty, both have the same face but different bodies. We were lovers, then, sometime in the past?"

"We were." Misty admitted. "The brute you saw in your dream, that was my father. He forced himself upon me, intending for me to have his son, and I... I loved you."

Her current father gaped back at her. "But what does it all mean, then?"

"It is a cruel joke of the gods." Misty replied. "That you and I are destined to be born near one another, repeatedly, and that we will always be reminded of who we once were."

"But why?" Her father asked. "You would suspect that the gods would have grander schemes to attend to."

"The fortune-teller's explanation was that sometimes the gods become bored. We serve as their playthings, whether we agree to it or not."

"And so, we've been born like this many times before? Always an arm's length away from one another and always remembering the past?"

"Yes."

The man who was once Josurr stood up and walked further away from the woman who might have once been his lover. He retreated to the longhouse wall, where he kept his back to Misty. After leaning an arm against the wall, he placed his worried head on it.

Misty gave him his peace for a few minutes, before she spoke again. "In all of the lifetimes where we've been close to one another, there is one thing that we have not done. That one thing may be powerful enough to break the bind which the gods have cursed us with."

Her father's head darted back to her. He turned his body to face her. "What? What must be done?"

"In all of our lifetimes," Misty said, as carefully as she could. "We have never slept together."

Beyond description was the look of shock that surfaced on her father's face. Finally, he recovered enough to direct words at her. "You don't know what you ask!"

"But I do, father." Misty replied. "I ask for a release from this living hell that the gods have mischievously created for us!"

The young girl lifted her over-dress and tossed it aside, as if it were as cursed as she was. Her under-dress she quickly discarded as well. After she stepped from her wooden shoes, she was entirely nude.

Compared with the woman from her visions, she knew that she'd make for a pathetic lover. While the former Mist was prominent in the places a woman should be, the present Misty was small in the chest, with narrow hips, skin that clung to the ribs, scrawny legs and knobby knees. In regret, she bowed her head at the disappointing sight she must have made.

"I will not!" Her father screamed, so loud that Misty wondered if he wasn't screaming so much at her as he was at the gods in the heavens above.

Her father's form rushed through the longhouse, keeping close to the walls and far from her. He exited the dwelling without so much as looking back.

Having no real choice, in this life or any other, Misty quietly gathered her clothing and got dressed. She took a look around the longhouse, her home of the last eighteen years, but she no longer recognized it as such. Her home, her real home, had vanished eons ago. As always, she was left with nothing.

Perhaps she intended on leaving her village and going off to die somewhere far away. The dejected girl soon exited the longhouse and started drifting down the path that stretched out before her like an eternity. Perhaps she wished to become a leaf, that the wind would scatter her out to somewhere where nobody knew who she was, where nobody knew her name.

She was surprised, when in the twilight of the evening, she saw Galmann's robed form hurrying toward her.

"Quickly, girl, come with me." Galmann said. "I've done another reading."

"What did it say?" She asked, as if she could allow herself to have a glimmer of hope.

"It said you must follow me." Galmann turned. Without waiting to see if she would follow, he stalked off. "I have something I must show you. It is from the gods and it is urgent."

Wondering what it could be, Misty went along. They were walking in a direction further away from the village. There was a great distance of nothing between Rahl-Thorpe and the next village. With the darkness settling about all around them, being far away from Rahl-Thorpe could be a very dangerous place to be.

"What is it that is so important?" Misty called out, once they'd gone on for the better part of half an hour.

Galmann turned, and in the dying light the man shuddered. "I have petitioned Odin regarding your plight. He has given me an answer."

"Odin?" Misty asked in awe. "What did he answer?"

In response, Galmann dropped to one knee and pulled his small dagger out from his boot.

Misty turned to run, but the fortune-teller could be quick when he chose to be. The girl's death was painful, but it was quick.

After, Galmann's breaths came out ragged. He very nearly became disoriented and lost, before some divine influence pointed him back toward the village. He hurried in that direction. He knew it would be a short time before the girl would be missed, before men would be out searching for her. He had to be away from that short wretch of a town before this happened. Before her body was found.

As Galmann skulked through the brush and made it back onto the walking path, in his thoughts he cursed the folly of the gods, and the helplessness of old men and young girls standing before it.