The Shards of My Soul

The Fire of a Soul

Belladonna

Two guards took me underground.

I don't know how long it took us to go down all the flights of stairs that delved deep into the ground beneath the pavilion.

I lost track, at some point.

It wound through narrow corridors lined with damp, humidity-covered walls and descended flights of stairs that seemed to lead deeper and deeper into the earth. The smell of rust and decay lingered in the air, assaulting my nostrils and making me want to cover my nose with my hand. Beside me, the wolf made a sound that resembled a sneeze, clearly sharing my distaste for the pungent odor. As we made our way further down, the sound of our footsteps and the wolf's nails clipping the floor echoed through the corridors, raising the hairs on my arms. The wolf's ears pricked up at the sounds as if he too felt the eeriness of the silence like a blanket over a candle, smothering and stifling.

I wanted to be gone from here with every step I took further down.

At the very last landing of the stairs, an oval room stretched before my eyes, with a door on each side of us. Everything in the room was ivory-white. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all of it. But as my eyes scanned the walls of the room carefully, I realized I recognized the symbols carved into the stone of the walls all around me, from a time before the torment, before the nightmares, and before my entire world was torn apart. I recognized them because I'd seen them carved into the longhouse back at Thorneval, painted across Serket's hands and face, and sewn over banners shaking in the wind.

They were the reminders of another life.

Mementos. Remembrances. Memories.

Serket used to call them runes.

She used to tell me how each of them held power. Seid-weavers such as herself would most often use them to draw power from the Gods, calling into the mortal realm the magic that tied them to our realm, feeding it into the runes with a detailed purpose. Usually, they were always used in patterns, linked to a single God for one single purpose. She'd always reminded me that, despite looking harmless, rune-wielding was extremely dangerous if the wielder was inexperienced or too greedy with the power, for 'what the Gods see fit to give, they can take in tenfold'. She always thought that runes were a resource meant to be used with care, mostly because they dealt in magic powerful enough to drive chaos into the world if it was disturbed in any way. She used to tell me that all things lived in balance and using such magic without the proper care could disrupt the balance by aiming at wyrds not meant to occur, so one needed to always be careful of what he asked when using runes, so the price of the request wouldn't be much too high.

The use of runes was never meaningless.

And the price she paid for using them wasn't either.

Back at Thorneval, she'd drawn them all over the longhouse and the small houses of the people, mostly for protection, stringing together a few in reverence to Njord, seeking guardianship from him for our people, as he was known as the patron of seafarers, coasts, inland waters and wealth. I'd see her sometimes occasionally carve others when a recently married couple meant to get pregnant or when someone was battling a illness.

I'd never forget those symbols.

Or her warnings.

I'd seen her draw runes so many times it'd become a game to me, to memorize all the lines and all the indentations of each of them, to the point I could almost recite them all by name, and I'd fallen asleep about twice as many nights with her soft voice slowly declaiming what each of them did and running the pattern of each of them across my skin to ease me into sleep.