Andarin: The Mountains: do not go gentle into that good night ;

“I want to find him, brother,” she says simply, a shrug rolling across the sloped hill of her shoulder; her mouth is drawn in a firm but sympathetic line, and her dark eyes are hard, unyielding. Away from them, where the wind weaves its sad songs between the trees, they hear the remnants of their father’s stories. They both remember the guilt he’d felt when he had killed the gray mare, and the hate he’d experienced from her lover, who was his father’s friend. Asher trembles with the memory of learning that his father had killed, not once or twice but three times, in fact, twice his own blood and one a perfect stranger. To this day the colt and the mare together can’t decide which of the crimes was the worst, or for which their father was most guilty. They do remember, though, Nicodemus who burned and burned and sent his strangled pain through the night.

“Well,” she says to the silence that is her brother, “I burn, too,” and, as if that is enough, she turns and makes her way to the mountains.

They travel at a brisk pace. The journeys are never hard for her, Kairi, but they tax the child – the child who is not so much a child now, but has just touched upon two years, old enough to fight or die for his country (his father’s country, rather) if he so chooses.

He does not choose. Nor does his sister. But they could - they both could - and that realization frightens them both; they know what these mountains did to Him, how their ice and their earth wrapped long fingers around His head and held him there, and broke him when he broke free.

Away from the bustle of a country so quiet and serene that it must know it is about to die, they find him. Rather, Kairi finds him, her dark eyes sharp and scanning the horizon; Asher lingers away from the stallion, not out of fear but of shame. It is a burden all his own. Only he shares the blood of their father, the murderer; only he has to answer to the crimes he hates; only he must wear the cloak of blood and shame across the musculature of his back. Kairi is ambivalent; she is sorrowful for her father who lived beneath the burdens and for her brother who lives beneath them, too, and for Nicodemus who should not have been fated as he was – but, alas, such is fate; such is the yoke they wear around their necks and sink their teeth into in times of lust and fight against in times of fear. She is certainly not afraid – not when she finds him, burning softly in the forest, or after when her own fire flares up again across the ridge of her back and ash flows like serendipitous rain from her crest and her lips like a chain smoker, and she smiles serenely.

“Hello there,” she says, nearly purring, one dark eye fluttering up to the red creature. She is red, too, but not like him; she is a motley of colors, dark in places, with black striping her mane and a dorsal stripe and a face marked with the black of nature as well as the silver of her wolverine scars. “Nicodemus?” She knows his name - it’s not hard to tell that this is The One, the one they had heard of and had together feared and embraced and loved, while never knowing him.

(What of his daughter? They think together; for He had loved her as he had loved the others, and they wondered what she was like, if she was as beautiful as he had said or if she was Fenrisulfr, who was strange and not at all what Kairi expected, and more than Asher had ever thought.)

She moves smoothly to his side, her fire reaching out to embrace his. She feels, though they have never met, as if she had known him for a lifetime, and is more comfortable with him than she has been with any of the others. “I was wondering,” she carries on, her voice soft, child-like, eerily sweet, “why it is you burn.”