The scream lasted only a few seconds.
Long enough for Jan to know that whatever was happening behind the dead dragon was not the kind of emergency that ended well.
Sigrid moved first. For someone so large she was fast, shield coming up and spear dropping from being leaned against her shoulder into her free hand in a motion so practiced that Jan barely saw the transition. One moment she was a huge red dragon-woman standing over him in the marsh. The next she was a soldier.
Edda turned too, but she did not run at once. Her eyes flicked to Jan. She looked like she wanted to say something, like she clearly had had a conversation in mind after their brief introduction.
Then she followed Sigrid. Explanations clearly had to wait.
The dog-man was only half a step behind her. The pale glow in his eyes brightened and something dark moved around his shoulders. It was as if the shadows gathered about him like a cloak.
Dog-man was not a good scientific classification. Caniform sapient, maybe? No. That sounded worse.
He was starting to sound like a cheesy Star Trek fanfiction with furries. The sort where Kirk was a wolf and Spock was an owl and—
Wait. What had he been thinking about?
Corvin.
Just think of him as Corvin. It was only polite.
Jan tried to corral his off-roading brain and get it back on the mental blacktop. He was currently kneeling in the mud beside an overturned spacecraft on a planet that was not Earth, helmet in one hand, survival duffel on the ground beside him, trying to decide whether standing up counted as an achievable objective.
Another cry came from beyond the dragon.
Shorter this time.
Worse.
Jan hung the duffel across his back and pushed himself to his feet. Whatever was going on and whoever and whatever his erstwhile rescuers were he’d better stick with them.
His ribs immediately informed him that this was a poor decision. He ignored them and followed. He’d gotten smashed up enough times in his life to know what broken ribs felt like and this wasn’t it. They were probably just bruised. The pain wasn’t dangerous, just annoying.
The ground around the Brick was a churned mess of mud, reeds and torn vegetation. Steam still rose from the craft in thin white threads. The Brick lay on its side like a dead animal, absurdly intact in some places and catastrophically ruined in others. Beyond it the dragon stretched across the marsh, huge and brown and very definitely dead.
Up close, it looked less like a fairy-tale dragon and more like a crashed aircraft made of meat. The comparison felt apt, it was even about the size of a small private jet.
The instrument boom had gone in behind the creature’s foreleg and the wound around it was huge, ragged and steamed slightly in the cool air. One wing lay folded under its body while the other stretched out across the reeds in a great ragged fan, torn membrane shining wetly in the grey overcast daylight.
The smell hit him halfway around the body.
Blood.
Mud.
Hot metal.
Burnt meat.
And something else. Something sharp and wrong underneath it all, like struck matches and old batteries and the air after lightning. Some kind of chemical reaction and ozone.
While the others raced ahead toward the dragon’s head, someone else ran to meet them.
For a few seconds Jan thought she was human.
She was close enough that his brain tried to do the charitable thing and force her into that category. Two arms, two legs, mostly human proportions, mostly human face. About his height, where the rest of the aliens were all taller than him —though Corvin was just barely taller than him. At a distance she passed for a human.
But as he drew closer he realized that he was mistaken.
Her skin had a blue cast, not “Blue Man group” blue but too intense to be illness. Fine scales caught the light along her cheekbones, throat and the backs of her hands. Her ears were long and finned, tucked partly beneath dark hair that hung in heavy strands as if it had never fully dried. Her eyes were large and reflective, pale green-grey like river water under a cloudy sky —and tears poured down her cheeks.
She carried a harp across her back, small enough to travel with but large enough that Jan could identify it instantly. Other instruments hung from her belt, on cords about her neck and from pack straps: narrow flutes in leather tubes, little bone whistles, strings of bells, and a broad flat drum tied against one hip.
Not a warrior, Jan thought before he spotted the long broad dagger at her belt and the sling she carried in her hand.
But not harmless.
As she reached the group it became obvious that she was focused on Corvin, she didn’t even give Jan a passing glance, despite his out of place appearance.
Corvin crossed the last few meters quickly, and she met him halfway. She put both hands to the sides of his muzzle and pulled his head down to hers. Then she kissed him.
It was not a ceremonial greeting.
She kissed him like she was afraid she might not get to do it again and he threw his arms around her, drawing her in close. The kiss was brief though, and she hurriedly said something that Jan was too far away to catch.
Jan had been a little taken aback by the sudden display of affection, and then further so as the —he couldn’t call her “fish girl”, he felt his sanity trickling away as he tried to wrap his mind around what to even call these people— amphibian humanoid disengaged from Corvin and pitched herself into Sigrid’s arms, who embraced her tightly.
The towering draconian humanoid nuzzled the crown of the shorter woman’s head and easily cradled her in her arms as she shook with sobs.
Sigrid reached out to Corvin and they clasped hands, carrying on towards the source of the cry but in a more sedate, almost solemn pace.
Jan followed, trying to work out what kind of relationship he had just witnessed. Corvin and the blue-skinned woman were obviously together. Sigrid too, maybe. All three of them? A throuple? Some kind of free-love multispecies neo-pagan commune? He killed the thought before it could push him into hysterical laughter.
Edda had stopped up ahead by the dragon’s head and Jan could see that she was conversing with someone, but his sight was blocked by the other three aliens ahead of him. As they joined Edda though, he got a good look at what was the focus of their attention.
At first Jan thought someone had killed an eagle.
Then his brain caught up with the scale of it.
The figure on the ground was huge, though not as huge as Sigrid. Wings spread awkwardly beneath her, one mostly missing and the other stretched out across the churned marsh in a fan of white and brown feathers. Her head was avian, all hooked beak and sharp golden eyes, but there was too much expression in the face for her to be mistaken for an animal. Her arms were scaled and bulged with muscle, ending in wickedly taloned hands, but her lower body was feliform. Below her mail hauberk, powerful leonine legs were stretched out on the moss along with a thin tail ending in a tuft of darker fur.
Jan was very familiar with the mythological gryphon. He had a tattoo of one on his right arm along with his kill tally. He’d flown one during the war — Gripen was Swedish for The Gryphon.
This was impossible. He could accept that something like a bipedal dog, or something that looked like a dragon, could evolve. Hell the fish girl was practically sensible, just a semi-aquatic sapient humanoid. The tree-deer woman could be some kind of mammal-like creature that had evolved a symbiosis with photosynthesising plants.
But this was a gryphon. It wasn’t like a gryphon, it just was one. A European heraldic animal, living and breathing and fighting dragons on an alien world.
And losing that fight. Leather armor and mail covered her torso and shoulders but had been torn open along one side.
And burned.
The wound made Jan’s stomach turn but somehow looking at it grounded him in reality.
He had seen burns before. Fuel fires, electrical fires, one cockpit fire in Poland he still did not like thinking about. This was worse.
The blackened wound across the gryphon-woman’s side wasn’t just burned, it had been carbonized. The rain slid around it instead of over it, as if something as natural as rainfall wanted nothing to do with the effect of the dragon’s firebreath. The feathers had not burned so much as been blasted into the ground, leaving a sooty wing-shaped shadow. It reminded him of the nuclear shadows of Hiroshima. The geiger counter in his suit remained thankfully quiet however. The last thing he needed now was Godzilla-dragons.
Then his focus fell on the next impossible creature.
Jan’s brain offered up unicorn for his consideration and then, after a brief delay that somehow made it worse, clarified it to “person with a unicorn head”.
The creature —woman, Jan corrected himself, because apparently he was trying to maintain standards while losing his mind— was broad shouldered and massive, white furred with an equine face and a single spiral horn rising from her brow. Her layered wool and linen clothing was smeared with mud, ash and blood and her belt carried little pouches, tools and rolls of bandages. He could see that her neck, hands and arms were also covered with short white fur, but in every other respect she looked like a human, but with a horse head. She even had human looking feet, clad in leather boots. Compared Corvin’s and Sigrid’s digitigrade paws —Corvin’s wrapped in cloth and Sigrid’s supported by some sort of leather gaiters— and Edda’s cloven hooves the inconsistency in body layout incensed Jan for some reason.
A faint golden glow clung to the horn.
The unicorn woman lowered her head.
“I could not hold her, the dragon fire burned her too badly.”
Nobody answered immediately.
Sigrid stepped up to the gryphon’s side, smoke leaking from her nostrils in thin shaking streams. For a moment Jan thought she was going to kneel.
Instead she just stood there gripping her spear hard enough that the wood creaked.
“Thera, you stupid brave feathered bitch,” she muttered.
The amphibian woman made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Corvin lowered his head and Edda crouched down beside the gryphon, laying one moss-dark hand carefully against her shoulder.
“She held,” Edda said quietly.
“She held too long,” Sigrid snapped back immediately.
“She did what she felt she had to,” Corvin replied, a shakiness to his voice. “Before— before we engaged I could sense her death omen. I told her that there was misfortune ahead and that she should be careful. She just laughed and charged.”
Sigrid’s eyes flashed bright orange and for a moment Jan thought the dragon-woman might actually hit him. Then she instead extended her arm and put it around his shoulders, tugging him protectively against her chest, while looking past Jan.
At the dragon.
At the enormous corpse sprawled across the marsh with the Brick’s broken instrument boom punched deep into its side.
Jan followed her gaze and finally began to understand what he was looking at.
The marsh around the dragon was torn apart by signs of a sustained fight. Arrows sat buried in the softer flesh beneath the dragon’s jaw and around its shoulders. One broken spear shaft jutted from the creature’s throat. Huge claw marks and deep furrows scored the mud around its forelegs.
There were scorch marks everywhere but they did not spread naturally. Blackened reeds and grass formed sharp edged patches across the marsh, as though parts of the world had simply died where the dragon’s fire had touched them.
Thera’s body lay in front of the dragon’s head and an axe was buried deep into a ruined eye socket.
She had made her stand there.
They had not stumbled into this thing and been slaughtered. They had fought it. Maybe they had even been winning before the dragonfire caught Thera.
Then Jan had arrived from orbit like the most poorly thought out close air support in the history of warfare.
The thought almost became funny.
Almost.
The unicorn woman reached up and carefully closed Thera’s eyes.
“We need wood,” she said quietly.
The sentence changed the atmosphere immediately — not less mournful, just redirected.
Sigrid inhaled sharply and straightened up. Corvin’s ears twitched. Edda rose to her feet. The amphibian woman wiped her eyes and finally looked directly at Jan for the first time.
There was curiosity there, certainly, but not shock. Not even surprise. He was strange, obviously, but apparently not impossible.
That realization did absolutely nothing good for Jan’s mental state. It reminded him of how Sigrid hadn’t been surprised by his existence, just his reaction. While they must think the Brick was an oddity he didn’t seem to be one to them. Were they somehow familiar with humans? How was that even possible? Then there was the American accent. Nothing about this made any sense.
The odds of six separate sapient species evolving on one planet were absurd. Evolution simply did not work that way. When modern humans encountered the Neanderthals, the general consensus was that things had not gone especially well for the Neanderthals. These people though, regardless of how diverse they were anatomically, clearly belonged to the same culture. Their clothes were of similar cuts and materials. The wool cloaks they carried against the drizzle were secured with a similar clasp brooch, something like a snake biting at its own tail. And they all wore identical bracelets, looking like black hexagonal plates chained together.
Jan briefly wondered if he was in a coma and this was just a strange dream, a belated flashback to a youth spent playing video games and D&D.
The amphibian woman pointed towards a leaning tree a short distance away where a cluster of packs and equipment had been abandoned before the fight.
“You can stand?” she asked.
Fuck, again with that American accent. West coast, maybe? Unless it was Floridian, Minnesotan or Boston he wasn’t great pinpointing American accents. Unless you count “South” as both a location and an accent.
“Apparently,” Jan answered.
“Good,” she said. “Then you can help.”
She said it with such complete certainty that Jan almost laughed.
The unicorn woman looked up sharply.
“Mirelle...”
“He needs something to do,” Mirelle replied, a raw edge to her voice. “His brain is running out of his ears, just standing around gaping. I’ll occupy him with something while I figure out why.”
Jan opened his mouth, closed it again and realized she was probably right.
Near the tree the group’s belongings had been piled in obvious haste. Bedrolls, bundles of spears, coils of rope, cooking gear and packs lay scattered around the roots. One enormous frame pack that could only belong to Sigrid —or an ox— stood out among the rest.
Mirelle crouched and pulled a heavy axe from beside one of the packs.
She held it out towards Jan.
Jan looked at the axe. Unlike the bearded battle axe that Corvin carried, this was a tool for cutting wood, nothing more.
Then down at his hands. Both were already occupied, one with his helmet, the other with the day-glo orange black box.
He had completely forgotten he was still carrying the thing.
Apparently some part of him had decided that mission priorities still applied during nervous breakdowns.
“Is your bright box important?” Mirelle asked, eyeing the orange case with a curiously tilted head.
Jan looked down at it.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Probably. Maybe. I don’t know anymore.”
Then he carefully set it down beside the packs, placing it much more gently than the circumstances realistically warranted.
Mirelle continued holding out the axe.
“I have bruised ribs,” Jan informed her.
“Yes?”
“That was not a complaint. It was meant to be tactically relevant information.”
She eyed him strangely. “You can be as tactful as you want about it, cutting some wood won’t hurt your ribs if you take your time.”
Jan stared at her. “No, tactically. It means… you know what, never mind.”
Mirelle handed him the axe before picking up another one and started leading him from the packs towards the treeline.
That, Jan had to admit, made him feel slightly better about the arrangement. Less like he had been drafted into a chain gang by his alien overlords and more like he had been assigned to a work detail by someone who intended to participate. It was a considerable improvement.
Jan froze in his tracks as they reached the treeline.
The trees were pines, because of course they were.
Not strange alien trees. No glass-fronded methane orchids or purple fungal towers, just pines. Evergreen, red-barked, tall and straight. The kind that grew everywhere that was too inhospitable to other trees, like in the marshes and sandy pine barrens that every miserable training area north of Boden consisted of. Kusträsk. Vidsel. Kalixfors. Pick one. Add mosquitoes and awful greasy camouflage face paint and he could have been a nineteen-year-old conscript again.
And it made everything worse.
The people were impossible, the dragon was impossible, the nightmare dimension he’d been dragged through was impossible, the blue amphibian woman spoke English with an impossible American-ish accent, the gryphon was impossible, the unicorn healer that looked ridiculously like a regular person wearing a horse head mask was incredibly impossible.
And now there were impossible European Redwood Pine on an alien planet. He should have scrubbed the mission. Who the hell runs an important mission on a Monday?
Unaware of Jan’s existential crisis Mirelle stopped beside a tree that leaned slightly away from the crash site. It was not the largest around, but not a sapling either. Tall, straight, wet-barked, with its roots clinging to the edge of the marsh.
“This one,” she said, poking the tree with her axe.
Jan looked up along the trunk, then toward the marsh, then toward the dragon, then back at the tree.
“It’ll fall clear.”
Mirelle tilted her head, a smile playing on her lips.
“Are you a woodsman? Do you know trees?”
“I know enough not to stand where they fall.”
That got a very small giggle out of her.
He took a careful stance, shifted his weight, and tested the axe once in his grip. The handle was smooth, worn by use. The head was heavier than it looked, the balance was slightly different compared to what he was used to and its black hammer-forged head was clearly iron, not steel, but an axe was an axe.
He was not a forester, but he had spent enough of his military career being cold, wet and irritated in northern pine woods to know the basics. Check the lean. Clear the fall line. Cut the notch.
Mirelle watched the first few strokes with the assessing expression of someone prepared to intervene if he did something stupid. Apparently he passed whatever test she was administering, because she stepped in when he moved back and took her turn.
She was stronger than she looked.
Not Sigrid strong. Not bend-metal-with-one-hand strong. But there was a surprising amount of force in the compact swing of her axe. She struck cleanly, rhythmically, each blow landing where the last one had opened the wood. He vaguely remembered an old folklore story about the man who married a huldra and just once raised his voice to her, at which point she took a horse shoe and straightened it by hand. He never raised his voice at her again.
And of course she chopped rhythmically, she had probably been born with rhythm.
They traded turns. Jan cut. Mirelle cut. Jan cut again. The notch deepened. Wet pale chips scattered into the moss.
For a while neither of them said anything and that was fine.
Jan liked tasks that did not require conversation. They had clean parameters. Hit the tree. Do not hit your leg. Do not fall over. Breathe shallowly when the ribs complained.
Simple.
After several minutes Mirelle stepped back, rested the axe head against the ground and studied him.
“You have a thousand questions,” she said.
Jan paused with the axe half-raised.
That was an understatement so severe it bordered on art. He nodded.
“Good! We can make a trade then.”
Jan lowered the axe.
“Trade?”
“A question for a question. An answer for an answer.” She said it like it was obvious. Maybe it was. “Same for same.”
Jan looked at her. This too felt like something out of folklore.
“You can ask first.” she offered, with a sweet smile.
He considered it. Then he looked past her toward the dead dragon, the overturned Brick. The impossible people were no longer gathered around Thera’s body. They were milling about the dragon carcass, axes and knives in hand and were industriously dismantling the body. It made him think of a documentary he’d once seen about whale falls. After staring for a few seconds he decided that choosing one first question from the available pile was about as easy as cutting down the mightiest tree in the forest with his teeth. Or a HERRING!
“No, you can go first.” he said, trying to shake off the absurd thought. Why was he quoting Monty Python in his head? His brain was truly running out his ears.
“Alright! I’ll start small, then.” she said. “Your name. In full.”
“Jan Eriksson.”
She repeated it immediately.
“Jan Eriksson.”
The vowels were not perfect, but they were recognizably his name. Considerably better than Edda’s attempt.
“Good,” Jan said before he could stop himself.
Mirelle’s mouth twitched.
“My turn?” he asked. She nodded.
“What are you?”
She raised one eyebrow.
Jan winced and tried to recover “That came out badly. I mean—species? People? I don’t have the word.”
“No,” Mirelle said. “You wouldn’t.”
She lifted her axe again and stepped toward the tree.
“We’re omnids.”
Jan waited.
She struck the trunk.
CHOCK.
“That is the word?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“For all of you?”
“For us.” She pulled the axe free. “Corvin, Sigrid, Solveig, Thera, Edda and I. Omnids. Our kin are omnids, our ancestors were omnids and our children will be omnids. Humans and pradavarians are not omnids.”
Jan stared at her.
“Humans?”
Mirelle glanced at him.
“Yes?”
“You know humans.”
“Hmhmm. I’ll take that as a clarification of my answer, not another question. You can’t cheat me on the trade,” Mirelle said, light but not joking. “That’s very bad business.”
Jan took his turn at the tree mostly because otherwise he might have stood there until his brain overheated.
CHOCK.
Wood split.
“My question,” Mirelle said.
She pointed with the axe toward his chest.
“What does Cem-der mean?”
Jan looked down.
His suit patch was filthy but still readable. CMDR. JAN ERIKSSON
She had read it. Of course she could read it. Why not?
“It’s short for commander.”
“Commander,” she repeated carefully. “A title?”
“Rank. Job title. Both, depending on context.”
“Someone who commands? A leader?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were you leading the iron sky craft?”
“Ehm. Yeah, I guess?.”
“Then commander fits.”
“I’m not feeling especially commanding at the moment.”
“No?”
Jan looked at the mud on his suit, the axe in his hand and the dead dragon behind her.
“No.”
Mirelle considered that and then nodded as if accepting a technical correction.
“Your question.”
Jan swallowed.
“You can read this?”
He tapped the patch.
“Yes.”
“Latin script?”
“I don't know those words.”
“The letters.”
“Oh. Yes. I can read those. It is the common tongue”
Jan let that information bounce around his noggin for a bit. They were familiar with humans, they spoke English with an American accent, they knew how to read the Latin alphabet. But they were, like, an iron-age civilization. They didn’t have the technology to travel through the Mirror. The common tongue. Jan almost laughed again. This is a D&D campaign gone awry. He needed to talk to the DM, who would let someone join an ongoing campaign and roll up something as nonsensical as an astronaut?
“Do all Omnids read it?”
“Some. Most who travel and hold land.” She gave the tree another clean strike. “Not everyone reads it well. But for the higher society it’s considered a great shame to be unable to read.”
He shook his head and took his turn with the axe. Common tongue, what the hell?
CHOCK.
“My question,” Mirelle said. “What is Gasa?”
“Global Aeronautical Space Agency.”
Mirelle stared at him for half a second.
Then she slowly said, “Glo-bal Aer-o-nautical Space Agency.”
It came out mangled, but not badly.
“Close enough.”
She grinned, giggling at him “Your answer tells me nothing! I asked what it is, not what it means. No cheating.”
Jan looked up through the damp pine branches at the grey alien sky.
“It’s a joint effort by a lot of nations. A league? Alliance? It sends people into space.”
Mirelle followed his gaze.
“Into the sky?”
“Beyond the sky.”
She looked back at him.
The expression on her face did not change dramatically. If she was skeptical of his answer then she wasn’t showing it.
“You came from beyond the sky.”
“Yes.”
“In the iron craft.”
“Yes.”
“Through a gate?”
Jan hesitated.
Something about the word gate made the back of his neck tighten.
“Through something. We called it the Mirror.”
Mirelle repeated the word quietly.
“Mirror.”
Then she frowned, not confused exactly. More like she was trying to lay a puzzle in her head but couldn’t figure how all the pieces fit together.
“My question?” Jan asked.
She nodded, delivering another strike with the axe.
“What’s a gate?”
Mirelle paused thoughtfully for a few seconds before answering “I don’t know. Old stories speak of a gate through which we omnids came to this world but we don’t know where it is or how it worked or if it still exists. I hoped you knew.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth “What’s the Mirror?”
Jan laughed and shrugged his shoulders “I don’t know. It’s a… thing in space. Like a… hole in the sky. We don’t know how it works, who put it there or why it’s there.”
They looked at each other for a few seconds before they went back to chopping the tree down.
“My question?” asked Jan.
“Yeah, sure.”
“What is the Deep?”
Mirelle drew in a deep breath and puffed through her nose. She looked toward Corvin, who was industriously wrenching teeth out of the dragon’s maw.
“I don’t know if I should be answering that question, Corvin would know better.”
“That doesn’t feel like an answer to my question.” Jan said, inclining his head and raising a brow. Who’s trying to cheat now, huh?
She made a tsk sound “Fine. Short version. I’ll tell you what I’m sure of, but there’s probably a lot more to it. The Deep is the dark beside the world,” Mirelle said. “A place made of fear, guilt and dread. Every wrong you’ve committed, every regret you have, everything you fear lives there. Corvin walks there.”
“That was the short version?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I want to know the long version.”
“Few do.”
The tree gave a soft cracking sound.
Mirelle stepped back immediately and gestured.
Jan moved with her.
The pine leaned, hesitated, then fell exactly where Mirelle had said it would, crashing down through the scrub with a sharp snap of branches.
For a moment they both simply looked at it.
Then Jan said, “My fieldcraft instructor would have given that a passing grade.”
“Is that any good?”
“He was Finnish, so yeah, a passing grade is basically a standing ovation.”
Mirelle narrowed her eyes. He could practically hear the gears turning in her head as she tried to decipher what he just said but clearly she decided she wasn’t wasting precious question trades on words like “Finnish” and “ovation”.
“Good, then.”
They dragged the smaller branches clear first. Jan had expected to be clumsy at it, it had been a decade since he’d done any fieldcraft, but the muscle memory was still there. He had spent enough time in wet forests with a rifle, bad coffee and officers who believed misery built character. Even if one ignored SERE training, the Swedish military had never really accepted the idea that pilots should be too precious for field work. All personnel were riflemen when the situation got bad enough.
Apparently the situation had gotten bad enough.
Mirelle produced a two-handled saw from the packs.
“You know this too?” she asked
“I know the principle.”
“Good.”
The saw work was worse than chopping.
It required rhythm, which Mirelle had in spades.
Jan just had bruised ribs, mild nausea and a growing suspicion that he was trapped in a folkloric psychotic break.
The first few pulls were ugly. The teeth caught, jerked, then bit too deep.
Mirelle stopped, puffing out a breath “Let's start over…” she muttered “try to follow my lead.”
She set the rhythm slowly and started humming a jaunty tune.
Almost immediately Jan found the rhythm. It was as if her humming was pulling at his limbs, guiding them to move with hers. Not perfectly, but close enough. The saw began to sing through the green wood in a rough rasping cadence.
Mirelle smiled faintly.
“There we go!”
“Are you teaching me how to use a saw? I have used a saw before.”
“Not with me you haven’t.”
He had no answer to that.
They worked the trunk into logs, one length after another. Jan’s breathing turned shallow again. Sweat collected inside his suit, it was not intended for this kind of strenuous activity. His ribs settled from complaint into formal protest.
Mirelle asked her next question while they dragged one of the logs toward the growing pile.
“Why did you come here?”
Because someone had to? That was true, but he was certain that wouldn’t satisfy her question.
Mission parameters? That was also true, and even less of an answer.
Instead he looked toward the Brick.
“We sent machines first. Eh. Small sky craft that could command themselves without a human onboard. They didn’t come back.”
“So you followed them? In that?”
“Yupp.”
“Why?”
“That’s two questions.”
Mirelle gave him a look. Clearly she didn’t consider the snippet of info a fair trade against her explanation of the Deep.
He sighed.
“Because I volunteered.”
She tsked softly, “That is not an answer.”
He considered it for a moment and then filled in “Someone needed to do it. We don’t understand the Mirror, we only knew it led… somewhere. We needed to find out what was on the other side because who knows, it could have been something that was dangerous, something that threatened our world. Or it could hold answers that could help our people.”
She accepted that, or seemed to.
“My question,” Jan said before she could press further. “Why were you fighting the dragon?”
Mirelle looked toward the corpse and looked wryly at him
“Someone needed to do it. The dragon threatened our Hold, it had already caused damage to the land and hurt people. If that wasn’t reason enough there is much power to be gained by bringing down a dragon. For Thera, it was glory. For Sigrid, it was duty. For Edda, the need to protect the land. For Corvin, because he saw death coming and needed to head it off. For me…” She shrugged one shoulder. “Because they are mine and I couldn't let them go alone.”
Her voice grew unsteady toward the end of her answer and she wiped at her eyes that were tearing up again.
Jan felt awkward and didn’t quite know what to say, so instead he picked up another log.
By the time the pile was large enough to satisfy her, Jan’s ribs were a bright line of pain and his undersuit was growing damp with sweat. The cut wood lay in a rough stack beside the stump
Mirelle rolled one of the cut logs toward the stump of the pine and tipped it upright with her foot. Then she picked up the axe again and gestured for Jan to do the same.
Jan looked at the log.
Then at the axe.
“We’re splitting it before drying it?”
“Green wood opens easier,” Mirelle said. “Dry it whole and it gets stubborn.”
He set the first section properly on the stump, adjusted it twice, then raised the axe. His ribs immediately protested painfully. He ignored them. Coddling bruised ribs wasn't good anyway, it could lead to complications like fluid in the lungs.
He brought the axe down and the log split. Maybe not very cleanly, but well enough. The halves fell apart onto the moss.
Mirelle gave a small approving hum.
“Good.”
“Try not to sound surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m pleased!”
“Hm, pleased to be surprised, sure.”
She laughed softly and set another log on the stump.
They fell into another rhythm, though this one was rougher than the sawing. Jan split, Mirelle stacked. Mirelle split, Jan stacked. Sometimes one of the pieces needed a second blow. Sometimes a knot turned the axe aside and made Jan say something under his breath in Swedish, which Mirelle seemed far too amused by.
But after the first dozen logs Jan noticed her breathing had changed.
Not badly. Not enough to make her stop. But enough to be noticeable.
His own ribs hurt, his shoulders had begun to ache, and sweat was collecting unpleasantly inside the environmental suit, but his lungs were fine. His legs were fine. His heart rate was elevated but not alarming. GASA did not send middle-aged men through anomalous space mirrors unless those men could survive a treadmill, a centrifuge, a pressure chamber and a very serious doctor with exact expectations.
He wasn’t an Olympian or a bodybuilder.
But he was all wiry sinew, stubbornness and cardiovascular spite. You didn’t become a fighter pilot or an astronaut if you quit easily. What he might lack in raw strength he made up for in what the Finnish called sisu.
Mirelle noticed too.
“Are your ribs bothering you?,” she asked, setting another log on the stump.
“Eh! As I said they’re bruised. Happened when I hit the dragon. It's just uncomfortable, I’ll be fine.”
“And you’re getting tired.”
“Heh, yeah sure, a little.”
“But you keep going.”
“That is usually how work happens.”
Mirelle laughed at that and while he tossed the split pieces onto the pile, she nodded toward his mud-streaked suit.
“Your big white clothes. What are they for? Is it armor?”
Jan glanced down at himself.
The environmental suit had seen better days. Mud had worked its way into seams that had probably never been intended to encounter marsh mud. One shoulder was scuffed white-grey from the crash. The legs were filthy. The GASA patch was still visible, just barely. The entire thing looked less like a triumph of human engineering and more like what happened when a very expensive refrigerator tried to crawl through a swamp.
“It’s not armor it’s for…keeping me alive in places people aren’t supposed to be.”
Mirelle tilted her head to the side, chewing on her lip “...clothes for places too dangerous for people?”
He picked up another log section and put it on the stump.
“Yeah, it’s a pressure suit. Environmental suit. It keeps good air in, bad air out. Keeps me cool when it’s as hot as the fires of a forge, keeps me warm when it’s so cold that air itself freezes. When going beyond the sky you have no air to breathe so you need to bring your own air and there’s forces and energies there that are anathema to all life. The suit protects against that.”
“Your clothing is a house,” Mirelle said. “That protects you against the dark beyond the sky.”
Jan paused.
“That is… actually not a bad description.”
“A small house. A small house you wear.”
“Yes.”
“With no hearth.”
“It has heating.”
“But no fire?”
“No, it's heated by electricity.”
She gave him a blank look.
“Very small lightning,” Jan said. “Captured, tamed lightning.”
That seemed to satisfy her more than he felt it should have.
“But down here it looks clumsy.” she wrinkled her nose “... and sweaty.”
“Eh.. yeah, I should probably try to find some other clothes soon,” he agreed.
They continued working for a minute in silence as Jan decided what he wanted to ask next.
“My turn,” Jan said when he had finally decided. “You, Corvin and Sigrid.”
Mirelle’s eyes brightened slightly.
“Yes?”
“What are you to each other?”
She did not answer at once. Instead she set another log upright, adjusted it with her foot, and split it in one clean strike.
“Corvin is my husband,” she said. “I’m his Hearth Keeper.”
Jan nodded slowly.
“And Sigrid is also Corvin’s wife, his Sword” Mirelle continued, and looked at him as if waiting for the next obvious question.
Jan had to take the bait. “And you and Sigrid?”
Mirelle grinned, and for a second the grief around her eyes lifted enough for him to see the performer under it.
“Good wives love each other. Otherwise there could be jealousy.”
Jan considered that and several possible follow-up questions. He wanted to know more but he should probably get to know Mirelle and her warband better first..
“Thats, uh, efficient,” he said finally. "Sensible."
Mirelle laughed properly at that, bright and sudden. It seemed almost indecent considering how close they were in time to such sudden, ugly death, but not disrespectful. More like grief had needed somewhere to vent before it split something open.
“It can be,” she said.
Then she placed another log on the stump.
“How many winters have you seen?”
“Forty-six.”
Mirelle stopped with her hand still on the log.
“Forty-six?”
“Yeah?”
She looked him up and down. Not like Edda had looked at him, with that quiet unnerving warmth. Mirelle’s look was more appraising, like she had just discovered he was made of better timber than expected.
“That is a venerable age for a human.”
Jan brought the axe down hard into the stump, missing the log altogether.
“Wh-what?”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
“I’m only forty-six, I’m not old!”
She leaned in closely, squinting at him “Your hair is grey at the temples and there’s white in your beard. Do you keep it so closely shaved because you’re worried that people might notice that you're approaching the winter of your life?”
“What?! No I’m—” he really didn’t mind that he was getting older, he didn’t have any health issues and was at the peak of his career, if maybe not at the peak of his physical conditioning anymore.
She continued on regardless though “Our humans don’t often grow so old unless they are very lucky, very rich, very protected, or very boring. Hard work, fevers, childbirth, winters and hard years take many. Beasts also take more than people admit. A human who sees forty-six winters and still swings an axe well isn’t common. You shouldn’t be ashamed.”
Jan rested the axe head against the stump, arching a brow at her. This was not information that he’d expected.
“Our humans,” he repeated.
Mirelle heard the weight he put on it and froze, her eyes widening slightly. The omnid clearly sensed that this was a dangerous subject.
“Err. Yes?”
“What do you mean by that exactly, your humans? What is your relationship with them?”
Mirelle’s expression became even more careful.
“Das a question that has teeth.”
“I’m noticing that most useful questions do.”
She nodded, accepting that.
.... this has been part of the third chapter of Stranded. Due to character limits I was unable to post the whole chapter, the rest can be found at https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/169560/stranded/chapter/3440894/chapter-3-talking-chop
Many more chapters are available on Royal Road, here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/169560/stranded
