"The Dawn that Rose from Fire"

Day 25 of Novel November- In which Alenyah and Berin find solace in each other.

Chapter 14

Alenyah found herself in a bedroom upstairs quickly after that. Tavren and Althea went with her, and Sera brought hot water and bandages. She stripped out of her grey tunic, leather bracers, and unbuckled her sword belt from her waist. They clattered to the ground. Without them she felt oddly hollow, as if she’d shed the last proofs that she still belonged to a life she recognized. She sat on the straw mattress as Tavren guided her back on her elbows, and Althea hissed in sympathy. Alenyah felt nothing but the slow, distant throb of a body she no longer quite inhabited.



She did not react much. The most significant bruising was Alenyah’s midsection, although her face and hands had also been brutalized by their repeated contact with the ice. Her face felt tender and bruised, and her stomach was a sea of splotched indigo. She winced as Tavren wiped and cleaned her wounds, prodding at her muscles.

“She’ll be okay?” Althea asked anxiously.

“She is right here,” Alenyah said automatically. Three pairs of eyes settled on her, a mixture of curiosity and sorrow. She shifted on the bed as Tavren hemmed and hawwed for a few moments.

Finally, the Stoneborn sat back and ran bronze veined fingers through their red hair.

“I don’t think you’re bleeding internally,” they told me softly. Delicately as though Alenyah were fragile and breaking. “But I think you shouldn’t move much for a few days. Just in case you have broken ribs. They could puncture a lung.”

Good, was Alenyah’s first thought. Then, a wave of shame flooded her. Valka had died so she could survive, maybe so that she could change the past, better the future. She didn’t know. Dying now would insult her memory. Alenyah had lost herself in those few moments on the Lake, but she knew she would have to live now, however difficult the task may be. She tilted her chin up and met Tavren’s eyes.

“Is there anything else?” she asked, monotone. Tavren’s eyes searched her own, and whatever those yellow eyes found was not comforting. They frowned as Sera wrung out towels in a bowl at their back.

“No,” they replied slowly. “But…is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you?”

Dredge the Lake. She needed Valka. Sacrifice someone else in her place. Carry her home, and let her sleep for another century.

Alenyah said none of those things. She shook her head, and they all sat in silence as Tavren wrapped bandages and a poultice around the Fey’ri’s midsection. As soon as the Stoneborn finished, she laid back, staring at the dingy ceiling mutely.

“Do you need anything?” Althea asked. “I can stay with you.”

Alenyah shook her head. If Althea stayed, she would have to hold herself together. And she needed desperately to fall apart. Only by breaking fully could she imagine assembling whatever remained of herself.

Sera muttered something about seeing to the others and slipped out. Tavren followed. For a moment Alenya felt Althea’s eyes lingering on her bruised face—compassion she couldn’t bear. She curled onto her side, turning her back to the world, pulling her knees up carefully until her ribs protested.

Dismissing reality until she could fully understand how to live again. The door snicked shut, and she was finally, blessedly alone. First time in weeks. While she would have welcomed privacy before, this felt like penance.

Evening bled slowly across the mountains, the dying light turning the windowpanes to sheets of dull gold. Alenyah had not moved from the straw-stuffed mattress since dawn. The ceiling above her had become a map of cracks she did not bother to read. Her body ached; her ribs throbbed; grief dragged at her bones like the deep.

Footsteps creaked in the hallway, soft, unassertive.

Then a gentle knock.

She did not rise to answer, but the door creaked open all the same. The footsteps were too quiet to be Stoneborn, the weight dipping the mattress too light. A hand gently swept her hair off her shoulder before speaking.

“Alenyah, you awake?” Berin whispered. She shrugged one shoulder, still not turning. He exhaled softly.

“You know,” he murmured. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you. I would share in your grief, in the same way we have shared in each other’s perils.” Her pointed ear twitched, showing she was listening.

“I remember the first time I saw Laila.” His voice softened in memory. “She was, gods, she was beautiful. We were children, picking blackberries growing along the paths. Juice stained her mouth, and she was laughing. We were both so small then, and I felt struck dumb, as though the Maker had thrown a new song in my heart. She was a riot of dark curls, hair that never behaved, no matter how she braided it. Skin pale as winter moonlight. Lips always a little pouty, like she was about to argue even when she was happy.”

He shifted, kicking off his boots and tucking his feet under him. Berin leaned back against the headboard. The air was heavy, and as much as Alenyah didn’t want to hear it, she could hear a woman’s voice, high and bright, singing. Maybe it was Laila, returned from the Song and the Maker, to bring light again.

“I was so distracted I didn’t notice she stole my basket. My momma was waiting for those berries! I chased her all the way to the edge of your Ironwoods.”

Alenyah’s voice was small and hoarse, but she spoke, “I remember.”

“You scolded us. Then you pulled both of us atop Valka and took us home. I was just as excited to be atop a Fylgja as I was to be close to Laila.”

The Fey’ri shuddered into a sob, covering her face with a hand. She remembered the feel of the two small children, reaching around them to guide Valka deep into The Vale, where worried parents awaited. Valka’s tongue swallowed their faces as she licked them in farewell. The hound always had a weakness for children. Berin patted her back, shushing her tears.

“I know,” his own sorrow thickened his voice. He rubbed a hand over his face, swallowing hard. “When she looked at me, I saw our whole future. A house near the river. Children, maybe. A life that felt…simple. Gentle.”

Berin inhaled sharply, bracing himself. “I lost her three winters ago now. It started small, a cough that eventually brought blood and fever. You brought over a few Fey’ri healers.”

She had, pacing out in the hallway as Althea made tea. The healers had emerged grim faced, shaking their heads, and she had to tell Berin. A week had passed, she and Althea cycling in and out alternating between her responsibilities to her people and her love for the Rhea. Till the day came, and Laila passed with the coming sun. Berin’s cries had haunted her because they reminded her of her own losses, of crumbling towers and bodies of ash.

Berin continued, voice trembling. “And for weeks afterward, I woke up reaching for her. I couldn’t understand how the world kept going. How it asked me to walk and eat and breathe when she wasn’t there to do it with me.”

His eyes shone, and he blinked hard.

“That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it?” he asked softly. “Like the world should have stopped. Like everything should have shattered with her.”

He didn’t move to touch her. Didn’t lean closer. Didn’t crowd the space.

He simply sat beside her, steady and quiet, letting grief recognize grief.

“If you want silence, I’ll sit in silence,” Berin murmured. “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. If you want someone who remembers what it feels like to stand in the ashes of everything you were… I’m here.”

Alenyah found the shred of calm inside. She rolled over towards Berin, whose face was warm with love and understanding. A flicker of light, the woman’s voice splitting into a soft chorus of voices, children and men and many lives.

Her voice was faint with humor, “Aren’t I supposed to be the old and wise one?”

“We all become young again, when we experience loss.”

That, she knew only too well. She swallowed, “I want someone else to carry my burdens for a while. Someone to hold the pain so I can rest.”

“We can’t carry it for you,” Berin replied. “But we can share it? I tell you about Laila, you tell me about Valka, your people, your mother. And maybe it’ll one day get a little lighter, that burden.”

Her breath huffed out. Gingerly, she pushed herself up, leaning weakly against the headboard beside Berin. Her throat was dry, and her head was pounding from the crying, from the breaking. She rubbed her gritty eyes. For a moment, she simply sat there, shaking. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder.

Someone’s weight creaked on the landing, just as Althea shouted up from the lower floors, calling the others to supper. Both of their gazes drifted to the cracked door. A shadow shifted beyond it.

Berin straightened, the warmth between them breaking like a snapped thread. “Kaelen?” he called.

Silence. Then the faintest exhale.

The floorboard creaked again, retreating this time. A pause. Then the soft, steady tread of someone walking away down the hall. The pair relaxed as the heavy steps pounded down the stairs.

Berin threw his arm around her shoulders and shook her gently. “Althea will come up swinging a ladle if I don’t head downstairs. Do you want us to bring something up or…”

Alenyah could hear clear in his voice how badly he wanted her to head downstairs, to rejoin the light and the hearthfire. And maybe she could tell them about Valka and her mother. She looked at their wool covered feet and asked, “Do we have to put on shoes?”

Berin laughed, unfurling his arm from her shoulders. “If the angry innkeeper can walk around her barefoot, so can we.” He rose, snagging his boots in one hand and turning towards her, palm outstretched.

“Berin?”

His dark eyebrows rose. “Hm?”

“I can still hear her sometimes. Laila.” He stiffened.

Alenyah continued. “I hear her Song around you. She sings to you, and I know one day she’ll return to the Maker’s symphony. But…I wanted you to know. She loved you more than life.”

He cleared his throat, eyes too bright and lined with silver. “Thank you.” And it seemed for a moment as though his head tilted, listening. The Fey’ri hoped more than anything he could hear the humming. She took his hand, head swimming as he pulled her to her feet for the first time in almost a day. Her abdomen protested the movement, and he wrapped an arm around her upper rib cage to support her as the pair limped onto the landing.