[22 years ago]
The first night she is exhausted and cold from having trudged through deep snow in a storm to get here. They dare not light any fire, so he spoons her in the dark in their individual bedrolls resewn together. Morgan cautions that he should remain in his armour in case the treacherous and ever-present sniverfbalen guards decide to kill them in their sleep, but she quashes his argument quickly.
“No,” she says, and then waits for him to join her. Eventually he does.
“If their intentions change I will sense it,” she tells him to soothe him.
“And you don’t sleep anyway.”
Soon she is breathing the soft rhythms of sleep. Morgan wishes Norman Gilead could see him now.
—————
In the morning, for the first time in over a hundred years, a flower began to poke out of the floor of the great stone cavern. Alandra got down on her belly and spoke to the tiny flower. She welcomed it to the world and encouraged it to grow. She told it how pretty it is and how this place would be a good home for it.
The sniverfbalen guards changed every twelve hours around sunrise and again well after the sun had gone down. The days were short up north. When standing there, the guards moved very little, although their eyes clearly followed Alandra and Morgan. When replacements came, they arrived silently from tunnels by the outside entrance, marched up to the guards already standing there, switched positions, and then the previous guards walked away following the same path. The side tunnels became too narrow and winding for Alandra and Morgan to use.
Alandra thought that over time these creatures had taken on characteristics of the stones around them. Their faces, for one, showed very little movement or expression. You had to read their eyes.
When Morgan and Alandra scanned outside the cavern they saw that the storm had subsided and that before them was an endless sea of perfectly smooth snow. They saw no movement against the white, which was good. Still, they did not linger near the entrance.
After a simple breakfast of trail rations, Alandra began to direct Morgan with the construction of a fountain. She identified stones for him to carry and place in an ever heightening semi-circle against the east wall. They enjoyed this time together and conversed about many things. It was, in fact, the first time in a long time they were not in immediate mortal danger.
The construction was crude but Alandra fixed it with her magic. She sang beautiful words and the stones jiggled themselves into place. She poured earth on the stones and it became mortar. She smoothed stones with a pass of her hand. When they were done, the fountain was lovely, but dry.
“I bless this thing we have made together,” she says, taking Morgan’s hand. “This shall be a fountain of life.” And suddenly water began to pour from the spout they had crafted, filling but not overfilling the basin they had built, with no water leaking from the fountain they had made.
In the evening they ate trail rations again and slept together as one.
—————
By the second morning, the flower in the floor had grown to full flourish, like a tulip in the spring. Alandra spoke to it all the time now, finding Morgan to be even less of a conversationalist than the flower. She told it that now that the fountain was here it would never run out of water and could really start to grow.
She spent that afternoon taking water from the fountain and pouring it over the stones in the cavern, all the while humming a throaty tune.
In the evening she turned pebbles into a feast of meat, cheese and wine. More miracle than that, she made Morgan laugh. She felt happy.
—————
By the third morning, flower sprouts poked out from every crevice between every moss covered rock in the place. The cavern was hot now and Morgan had long since forgone his fur cloak and pieces of his armour were starting to drop off. He smiled but it looked menacing on him because of how old scars cut his face. Still, he smiled.
In the afternoon she asked Morgan to spend time on her self-defense training. She enjoyed his closeness and it allowed him to be dominant and confident in his strongest suit. In her mind, the densest and coldest rock in the room was Morgan’s heart. She wanted very badly to thaw it, as she had wanted very much to thaw it since she first felt it in him when she was six years old.
But just then the great sniverfbalen door began to open.