Page 6 of Overexposed

“Don’t be rhetorical. Tell me. I want to hear that story.”

Auris chuckled. “Not all of the story, perhaps, but some of it. It doesn’t start with me, but with my mother.”

Chapter Two

Auris

My mother was born of the north, what you would call a Dane today. Her family had not been raiding for a long time, nor had she. They lived in what is still Denmark, where they had their own hall, land, and people.

Mother was worldly to a point, a practical woman who did not value false shyness nor prayers and devotion where a potion would do. Her real interest was magic, and her prophetic skill called to her early.

I don’t know the details, but she ended up as the student to a seiðkona -- a wise woman, you might call her. From there, what I was told was that Mother learned all the things she could from the woman’s teachings, but wanted more. There was a rumor of magicks in the south, word magic that the people there kept in treasure chests, in their books.

Mother knew the runes and knew to read the runes. She also knew to read the sky and work out its turnings from winter to summer and back again. Still, she wanted more.

The next bit isn’t that important. There are a few stories I could tell you sometime about her travels, but what is more important than those tales is where she ended up after all her traveling was done. My mother found herself in a house on a wind-beaten island, and her teacher was the one who would make me.

Much later, he told me there had been a negotiation. There were never many of my kind -- his kind, then -- and the human fear combined with our weakness during daylight hours rendered simply existing tedious if not outright dangerous.

When my mother asked for magic, he said he would teach her if she gave him a child to be raised in his care and eventually made like him.

And this is what happened. It is the reason for my existence in a nutshell. No, my sweet. Don’t look at me as if this were a sad story. It’s not. His desire is the reason I was wanted. And I was. I am grateful to have been born into both my mother’s care and his. I called him Tove. My mother cared for me and about me, and Tove was not a father, perhaps, but someone who had guidance to offer when it was needed.

When I was in my teenage years, Tove carried me into the night without telling me where we were going.

He had the gift of flight, you see, and I clung to him the first time he carried me away, desperate and afraid, the wind beating against my face and making my eyes water.

We landed in a forest. Forests then were not what they are now. The trees ruled there, and the beasts. Bears roamed along with wolves and lynx. You could have walked for days and not see the greenery thin. Not see another human.

“There we are,” Tove said.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, thinking it was going to be a game where there were new things to learn and adventures to be had.

“We? Nothing, child. You, however, will show me that you are capable enough to assure your own survival.”

I gaped. My jaw must have dropped, surely. I thought he was joking. He was not. Tove put a bag into my hands, a heavy, rough-spun thing.

“Tove? No, wait,” I said when I felt him let go of me. He didn’t wait. And he didn’t come back for me for thirteen days.

Thirteen days, alone in the woods. I was cold, but it was a kindness that he had picked fall rather than winter. I sheltered under branches while insects tried to shelter under my clothes. I very nearly ate a deathcap mushroom. But one day, I found a lake in the forest, its surface a mirror where the algae hadn’t covered it, moss thick around it, and I smiled even though I was hungry, smiled because it was beautiful. I spent hours sitting by that lake, watching dragonflies skim the water and small animals drink.

On the thirteenth night, Tove found me huddled in the crook of a tree root.

“Auris,” he said softly.

“You left me,” I said, crying.

Tove, who was generally a practical man, sat down cross-legged next to me. “I did, didn’t I? And you did what I demanded of you. You survived. You did well. I am proud.”

“But you left me!” I said. I was full of a child’s anger. I probably shook my fist at him. It was dark, so I cannot say what there was to be seen in his black eyes, but it was a long time before he spoke again.

“Everyone will leave you, Auris, everyone,” he told me. “You are to become as I am, and nothing lasts. Which is why you must learn the shifting tides of time and how to survive them. You learned much beneath these trees these past two weeks.”

I believe there was some more angry shouting on my part, all of which Tove accepted.

“Are you quite done?” he asked me when my throat was too raw to hurl more angry words at him.

I nodded and let him pull me to my feet. He grabbed me in the way he did when flying with me, but just before he lifted off, he looked down.

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