Sometimes he stirs and cannot lift his arms to wrap them around Lor’s body. The boy is here, lying alongside him, safe, shedding flowers from his skin, but Iohmar wishes to crush him close, to cuddle him until they are safe and his son forgets all caves and shadows and ripplings. But he cannot reach him. Cannot reach.
Other times, he wishes Rúnda were here, then shudders at the thought of her seeing him in such a way.
Iohmar dreams of his parents.
It was cold the last day.
Rarely are the twilight lands not warm and fair, but a storm turned, as it did every so often. His father and mother were king and queen beneath the earth. Even they did not fully understand the ways of their world. Their mountains are pure magic. Beyond them.
Iohmar is not certain how the war started. It may not have been called war if not for the last onslaught. Perhaps they were waiting for no one to expect them. Always, he remembers being a boy, watching the ripplings swallow his father’s finger and spit back a lifeless husk. Later, they slithered into Látwill, first dissolving crowds of trees and plots of fertile land. Their shimmering bodies swallowed mountains dead until Daidí and Máthair stood between them.
They withdrew into their lands.
They retreated.
They came back.
Enveloping bodies within their voided forms.
Iohmar remembers one of his father’s kingsguard who used to slip him plums and grapes and sugared nuts as he escorted the royal family throughout their mountains. He rarely spoke and could call the littlest creatures in their lands to him with simple thoughts.
Iohmar can no longer recall the fae’s face, simply his name—Aoshor—and the twisted vines and shriveled leaves left when the ripplings finished.
They were gentle folk—those dwelling within the mountain. They stitched clothes or fabricated jewelry and pretty knives made for carving. Crafted music and sculpted the Fair Halls. Played tricks on the human lands and one another. Feasted and sang and made love. Iohmar knew the feeling of a sword when sparring with his father. Knew the ways magic drained life or cursed or caused eternal despair. Knew the strength and magnitude of his own given talents. Much as his parents, he used them to aid his folk. Or to play.
His parents stood with Rúnda and her mother, with their small folk barricading themselves within their tower. Iohmar pushed them back. He darkened the sky and pierced them with sunlight and brought trees to drive them back.
He forced them back and forced them back.
From the tip of his mountaintop, when the mist cleared, he watched them break the barriers of Rúnda’s land in a shower of mirrors and emptiness.
Rúnda didn’t ask how he gained the scars littering his body—not when they first shared a bed or the times afterward. She approached the topic when they were centuries older, swimming in the bruised waves near her tower. It was twilight, and she could see the pale lines crossing his torso better than in the shadowed halls hidden by covers and midnight.
“Mirrors,” he told her, and she understood.
She pointed to a single long scar up her spine and across her right shoulder. Iohmar knew it was there, had seen it in the firelight, felt it under his fingers and considered the few ways a queen over the sky could have gained such an injury.
“When?” he asked.
“When they shattered.”
So, it was his fault, if only a little. She’d been there, close enough the aftershocks had reached her body. Shame nagged at him. He drifted up behind her in the waves and kissed the long, thin mark. “Forgive me.”
“Forgive you,” she mumbled. “You saved us all.”
They did not speak of it again for many centuries to come.
When Iohmar called to sunlight and snapped himself away—from his lands to Rúnda’s in a step—the remnants of the kingsguard surrounded his father. He knew the shape of him, the dark of his hair, the gentle curve of his shoulder. From a distance, he knew him between the bodies of his protectors.
He called to the magic bonding them and felt none.
Air distorted the borders between the rippling lands and those soon to be Rúnda’s. Her mother was nearby, though he couldn’t find her shape. The bright sunlit coast opposite the great tower drifted with clinking shards of glass. They’d stung Iohmar’s bare skin. His wrist burned from the cut of one of the monsters he’d chased back.
Some of his folk were there. He recognized the remaining husks of their bodies. Others drifted away in the stale winds. Rúnda’s folk.
Unburying his father from the exhausted kingsguard, he touched his cheek, laid his face against his as he hadn’t done since he was a child. Ropes of vines and tendrils sprouted from his skin, already seeking to tether him to the earth. Each curled away from the foul ground.
“Athair?” he asked and knew there was no one to speak to.
He heard them close by, their rippling bodies clinking and writhing, returning from the border. Iohmar didn’t much care.
“Daidí,” he said, then kissed him. He tried to remember the last time they’d spoken, days ago before they’d left to assist Rúnda’s mother, and exactly what words had been said. It was nothing important. They’d shared a meal and left with a touch of the hands. Nothing important. Nothing at all.
One of the kingsguard gripped his shoulders. He didn’t look to see which face was gazing at him, grieved and terrified.
“Iohmar,” the voice said. He recognized it vaguely.
“Where is my mother?” he asked, and no words reached his ears. “Where is she? Máthair!”
She should’ve heard him if she was close. She should’ve been close.
Casting out his magic, he crashed into the rippling monsters so near it buried him in ice. The air left his lungs. He curled over his father’s body until the sensation passed. Living things did not exist there. He felt his own heartbeat, the thrum of his magic, and the lives of his parents’ kingsguard—his kingsguard—and a few stragglers. There were others farther off, but he tasted his mother’s magic in the air and knew she must’ve been there.
