Protected
Outside an abandoned town, Ýmirheim
26th September 2003
Chaos breaks as chaos does: without warning, like a bludgeon to the head, devastating to order and peace – and sometimes health, too – and leaves everything in scattered pieces in its wake.
Physical pieces, sometimes.
And sometimes, too, the experience is… unforgetable.
Including what has just happened.
Past my unexpected, rather unwanted naptime, my ever-present cuddler let me squirm and scramble my way to one of her broad, muscled if otherwise thin shoulders and look round from that vantage point. In this way, I found out that, surprisingly, we hadn’t moved far from the abandoned town, which looked and felt even more devastating from afar like this.
She told me it was because she daren’t yet introduce me, my friends and our baby foundling to anything that would require much elða to do, such as teleportation and levitation, for various reasons. She had contacted Anga – the person who had tried to calm her down when she’d first felt my presence, and prevented her from rushing to me and being the first to gate-crash my party, or so she’d told me earlier – and that other… woman?… was going to fetch us all using an airskiff, which would also contain additional troops to secure our journey to the Capital – wherever it is.
And then, as I happened to look back, I noted aloud that there was suddenly much fog the way we had come, and it’s getting closer, eating the distance, fast.
Panic ensued, although the scramble was rather… organised, and it was quickly decided that someone was going to keep the sleepers – Neville, Luna and the foundling – safe in a tower of ice. I fought with all my might not to be included in that, and, probably as a matter of expedience, they – especially my exasperated mother (I’m still trying to convince myself of that, even now!) – capitulated to my… request… to stay. I was cocooned from head to toe in both the mum’s – my mum’s – elða and a thick sheet of ice, though, with her breaking her earlier resolve not to bathe me with too much elða, and I was tethered by both to her shoulder – like a gas balloon – with an identification ward added that would move my bubble somewhere else when anything physical approached me unless it’s cancelled by her, or so she hastily explained without being asked. (Apparently, an emergency trumps everything, as usual. And probably I ought to have expected that she wouldn’t have let me be in the fight without any kind of protection. Hell, I was sort of surprised that I was permited to stay, to begin with, although I dearly hoped – still do – that the feeling didn’t leak to her mind. If I were with teddy, I wouldn’t have let him stay, as hypocritical as it sounds.)
And then danger blared in my mind, and in everyone else’s too – the natives, I mean – if looking at how suddenly ready they were and how there’s suddenly a very high, smooth, dully gleaming construction made of ice not so far away with none of the bundles in sight. And my yelp of fright on finally seeing what had pursued us was apparently the – very, very, very mortifyingly embarrassing – trumpet of battle, or there was just some convenient coincidence to it, because the group of four underlings attacked the danger right afterwards, in unison, from different areas.
The… creature… was bipedal, with elongated body that seemed to be all head and no actual body, with about a dozen hook-clawed arms framing the very, very toothy maw on each side and extended to the back like Medusa’s snaky hair, with at least a dozen sharp, beady eyes ringing the top of its head like the red jewels of a macabre circlet, and it seemed to glide above the ground instead of touching it. Fog was ever-present round it, making it hard to know where the arms were going to strike next, or where the body was for that matter, and it did strike fast, tearing gashes on the thick, blue skin of its opponents… who, from the way it looked for us, would have been its meal if they’d lost the battle. And it certainly could eat giants, given how it’s taller and broader than the tallest giant in the company, who coincidentally had been my captor.
And it liked to target my mother very, very much, somehow.
She fought valiantly, very efficiently, very decisively, and she was surprisingly very, very agile for her size, but she was just one person, and she kept trying to defend my bubble before she tried to defend herself. I’d never regreted something this much, as I regreted insisting to be present.
And then, very, very familiar spellcasting rained down on the creature, which told me that Neville and Luna were awake and not heeding the instruction their keeper must have given them about not attracting attention to themselves. It had little effect but for making it madder, and it managed to incapacitate two of the four combatants before its three friends joined the fray and knocked the ice tower down.
The only upside to that horror was that two of the newcomers got pinned under the fallen tower, and was thus easy prey for Luna’s alarmingly enthusiastic hacking with her conjured machete. Neville dealt with the remaining newcomer while their keeper was frantically weaving a similar bubble to mine for the still-sleeping foundling; but the hide of these nightmarish creatures was apparently rather spell-proof, and he managed only to distract that particular creature – thankfully of a smaller, less experienced built from the first one – before he fell down exhausted on the uneven ground and the keeper took up the fight.
And then I returned my attention to the fight I admitedly was the most invested in,
And found out that my mother, the cocoon, my home, had just been knocked breathlessly flat down on an unfortunately very, very jagged patch of the broken former road we’d been travelling on, with five large gashes – two on her belly, one on her chest (and, absurdly, I noticed that she now had nipples), one along her right arm, and the last one peeking out from her left shoulder – oozing a rather thick, dark-silvery-blue liquid that might be milaðen blood.
And the first creature was there, yanking her up by kicking up one of her legs and grabbing it while in the air with its lowest arm, as though she’s just a chicken drumstick one would eat for lunch.
A screaming chicken drumstick – maybe in pain, maybe in fear, maybe in anger, maybe… well, to hel with it! – that was my mother.
My throat vibrated. Maybe I screamed. Maybe I yelled… something…. Still, all that I knew was that the bubble suddenly wasn’t there, and I plopped onto the uneven, blood-slicked ground incongruously gently.
Well, my mokeskin pouch was still round my neck despite all the changes, and nobody had sought to separate me from it, so then I reached a trembling hand in it – rather by automaton than conscious thinking – and out came one of the Basilisk fangs I had liberated from Hogwarts a few years ago, in one of my secret visits to my old alma mater.
I sank the fang into one of the creatures foot just as it sort of leant down towards its would-be meal.
One of its many free arms, no longer occupied with combatants since the lone standing fighter from before was now preoccupied with desperately attempting to defend two incapacitated giants, two magical humans and a sleeping baby alongside the former keeper of the latters, swiped at me in retaliation. So out I sailed through the air that had grown increasingly cold and windy, with a deep gash on my own chest, with the accompaniment of my mother’s howling, which was somehow more pained and devastated than when she had faced the prospect of being eaten alive.
And, unbelievably, up she got, painfully stumblingly like an injured drunkard, before continuing the fight as if she hadn’t been bathing in her own blood with five big wounds gaping like macabre grins on her now-alarmingly-pale body.
If she had fought gracefully like a warrior or a professional dueller, now she fought like a thing possessed, like a tongue of flame greedily snapping at everything: sharp and unexpected and deadly and all-consuming.
And, by herself alone, perhaps aided a little by the years-out-of-freshness Basilisk venom jabbed into its leg, the creature was down in pieces not too long after. She was onto the other one, next, and it took even a shorter time for that creature, too, to lie in pieces, although – I suspect – it helped that one of the fighters had managed to trip this one, before she hacked into it with the ice swords that extended right from her hands with her new, renewed vigor.
And then she returned to where a woozy and wincing me was still scrambling out of the jabby hole I had fallen into, fished me out as if plucking a plum out of a bowl, cuddled me in her bloody arms against her bloody chest, then fell kneeling, swaying where she was, before sitting just as hard on the same spot with a pitiful whimper squeaking deep in her throat.
And even now, a long moment later, she is still seated where she sort of fell, with me in her weakened, shaky arms and bathed by both her blood and mine, in a dazed stupour but still stubbornly conscious.
But now, I am no longer just a shocked observer.
“HELP!!!”
Why, oh why did my mind choose this time to act like a bloody Slytherin? My mother’s life – my mother, my cocoon, my home – was in the line and I acted in self-preservation mode instead.
Worse, I don’t know any healing spell. I’ve been practising with any willing partner for offensive and defensive spells, and goofing off with various driving licenses as well as my moulding knack, yet I don’t know any healing spell but Episky. And now I’m going to lose yet another mother because of that stupidity. – How many mothers one can spend in one lifetime?
“Don’t go,” I whisper at last, matching the pitiful whimper she uttered in what feels like ages ago, just as various sets of feet stumble and scramble towards us. “Don’t go, please, Amma.”
And for the first time since she introduced herself to me, the word has meaning in my tongue.
“Amma, please….”
“Loí,” she whispers back, after a handful of harsh, laboured breaths; so different from any of her voices and tones before, so pathetic compared to the deep, rumbly voice she has in this form, and all because of me.
“Why?” My own voice is wet; but to hell with dignity, I just want to know, “Why, Amma?”
I don’t think she has the strength and presence of mind to talk at length, or even to give anybody a smile as some sort of explanation, with how her all-too-trembly arms now have to be supplemented with her legs to help keep me against her chest; but her red eyes, which have been rather clouded moments ago, now sharpen and focus on me, and there is a gentle-but-fierce regard in it that I have never received from anybody else, not even Andy or Mrs. Weasley, although sometimes those women gave some approximation of it when they were being both fussy and proud towards me.
I want to say “I could fight.” I want to say “No need to bother yourself with a freak like me.” I want to say “You should have searched for my cocoon-mate and cuddle that one instead of this useless instigator to this disaster.” But before all the words that are crowding my tongue can be unleashed, she whispers, stuttering under her increasingly loud, increasingly laboured breath, “You… are my… child: Loki… Laufey-childe. I… protect….”
And then the swarm of panicked non-wounded engulfs us, and the two remaining milaðen get busy casting the healing spells that I am so inept about.
But my mother refuses to let me go, and I refuse to let her go.
And, quite out of the figurative blue, with the scene of her desperate self hacking at the creature which had so casually slashsed and tossed me away flashing across the fore of my mind, I have just realised that she – my mother – is the person portrayed in that image cast on crystal that I restored some time ago, the one that I identified with my twelve-year-old self in the Chamber of Secrets, with little help from anybody else and with an unconscious eleven-year-old to protect.
Well, go figure: Even in this other life, my reckless mother-bear mode has apparently been genetically inherited.