Andarin: The Mountains: mom. --

How did you survive?
Didn't. Got killed.

“Vater,” he asked, “why?”

The world was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. He saw it in his mother’s eyes when he curled closer to her, in Ixtab’s fur when the cat stretched awake for her hunt, in his father’s mangled sorrow and pride when he stared unseeing at everything around him -- thinking, dreaming, waiting.

His father had taken to stay close to his older sibling now, watching the world spin, singing things like enchantments or blessings under his breath. The Phoenix burned under his mother’s skin like an earthen parasite -- or something very much like it. Sometimes he watched as she left him asleep -- or so she thought -- in Ixtab’s fur, to meet with the black one he knew as a wind and as a father both; born as -- and where -- he was, he would have never understood that this was not the norm or that, to others, it was even wrong.

“Schön,” he hummed contently as he trotted, kicking up his heels as he did -- he was, after all, a loved child, a happy child, and he could kick up his heels and dance if he wanted to, even if his body tethered at the edge of exhaustion. “Schön, schön, schön…” he sang, and tumbled.

“Mater!” he squee’d, brushing against her heels, quite unaware of anyone else his mother might be talking to. Truth be told, he wouldn’t have cared; she was his first, after all, in the way all mothers belong to their boy children until they grow. “Mater! Schön!” he laughed, alien words rolling through his tongue with ease; that he could barely string sentences together was irrelevant. The matter, as it was, is that he was happy, and alive, and the world was full of beauty and mischief he couldn’t wait to brave, but was too weak to pursue --

-- if the way he promptly fell against his mother’s knees was any indication. For a moment he frowned, dismayed, and something like darkness slid in his ecliptic eyes; but he forgot it all as he stared up at her, content, alive, and loved.

“Mater,” he muttered against her knees, closer and warm, “völva?”

She would see the question in his mind.

-- l o k i
united we stand;
divided, i prevail.