Novel
Palace in Utgarð, Ýmirheim
Earth’s time unknown; Ýmirheim’s time unknown
Being treated decently was new to me, started when the Dursleys enrolled me into the local school alongside Dudley because they were forced by the law, and also by fear of the neighbours gossipping about a child forbidden to enjoy a free education, although this treatment has always been rather intermittent, even when I went to Hogwarts and afterwards. Being treated with deference, started at more or less the same time, by scattered folks in odd dresses that passed by me in my rare outings alongside Aunt Petunia and Dudley, and has been somewhat of a norm with the various holdings I have been taking care of lately, especially these last three years. Being treated with reverence, though, and by people who don’t look and behave as humbly as the house-elves, at that–!
I don’t know how long has passed since that disaster out in the broken icy ice plains along that horrible, hazardous ruin of a road outside of that sad, hair-raising ghost town. I have been transferred into a huge, odd metal transportation then a hut then a huge hall then a healing ward then a bedroom (Amma’s bedroom, to be exact), since that moment, all the while attached to my mother in mutual reluctance to let go, and I’ve seen only glimpses of the sky reflected on the ground or on a courtyard out of the window all this time. Still, all that aside, wherever I go, whenever my presence is spotted, at least one or two of the giants happening to share the point in space and time will treat me as though I were a monarch myself, or the child of a monarch (which I’m trying not to think about!), and, almost without exception, all of them will execute the odd kind of kneeling bow that my former captor and their cohorts gave my mother that long time ago in that abandoned house.
It’s horribly awkward; well, and, not that I want to sound ungrateful or crass, because I’m not either of those, truly, I get tired of the obeisance pretty quickly, having to tideously dismiss them before they will get up and go on with whatever they’ve done before my presence has interrupted them.
And, to be even more truthful with myself, if not to others (not just yet, maybe?), Amma’s explanation (and it’s so much easier to acknowledge her as my mum, when I don’t have to call her “Mum,” which I’ve long reserved for Lily Evans-Potter) explained to me, somewhere, somewhen while moving between the various resting places we briefly occupied, that the kneeling and the bow signify getting oneself lower than the monarch and/or her children (and it’s only for the ‘inner cyrcle’ of the Royal Family, indeed), and the bared throat and vulnerable hand position signify the trust put on the latter(s).
It stinks too much of what the Death Eaters did in the presence of Voldemort. I don’t know what I’ll do if any of them try to kiss the hem of my nonexistent robes!
Well, and, speaking of clothing, it’s yet another thing that I must adapt to, in a culture where clothing itself is optional, especially for the so-called children while indoors. A loincloth suffices for outdoor and/or vigorous activities for children and adults alike, and I’ve seen anybody wear anything approaching a top only when young giants – up to a head shorter than I am – are training with wooden staffs in yet another huge hall, each wearing a laced, sleeveless, high-collared leather shirt that matches the leather goggled helmet each also wears. It’s taken me a ridiculous amount of time and effort arguing with my mother just so that I can wear marginally proper clothes – according to my own sense of sensibility – when I’m in public places! Quite recently, I even had to argue about wearing the said garments – a gauzy, flowingly loose, sleeveless T-shirt with suspiciously skin-coloured tones, paired with one of the ever-present white, fluffy loincloth – when I’m meeting with my friends!
It’s the universe in reverse, it feels, when the child has to insist about wearing clothes and the mum argues about not wearing them – since it’ll be comfier, at that.
And the limited time I can spend with Neville and Luna is yet another point that I often argue with Amma, although I can’t say that those two are treated unkindly or restrictively – aside from seldom seeing me, that is. (They aren’t even on the verge of hypothermia now, and that’s without the aid of overpowered Warming Charms, at that, which makes Luna’s comment about an antidote to the cold climate sound like a seer’s prediction than what I’ve been assuming as her usual quirky rambling.) I can’t deny my mother’s argument, though, nor her stipulation: that I must get to know the world I’ll be inheriting including the people, language and culture in it as well as the places, that my insistence to meet more often with my friends will cut the time I can spend learning about Ýmirheim and everything in it, therefore making it a longer while before I can visit Earth (Her word, not mine – and that’s something I protest strongly, too! I don’t want to just visit the world I’ve been regarding as where I am supposed to be all my life.), and that I can only… go back to Earth… when she regards that I have grown sufficient roots in Ýmirheim. Fortunately, Ýmirheim’s time runs much, much faster – or, alternatively, much, much slower – than Earth’s, considering that a year in it is equal to eleven-point-nine years on Earth according to the established measurement I know and have verified with Amma, although, somehow, a year here is supposed to be a year there. But still!
Even more fortunately, to my on-going guilty feeling whenever I think about it (Well, this makes somebody else get put above the friends who have been sticking out here for me, doesn’t it?), the baby – more of a toddler, according to Amma, which brings me back to the horrible déjà vu and parallelism with my own tragic end of toddlerhood – is always there with me and my mother, almost wherever we are. In fact, Amma has blood-adopted them into the family, upon my request (or rather, plea), after finding out that they’ve got no other family that could and would take them in.
I’ve got a little sibling! And Amma often lets me help take care of them, and the three of us sometimes play together, and everybody else treats them as my family indeed….
It would be complete if only my elder siblings – Amma’s mostly dead, violently mad, cunningly traitorous (according to her) spouse’s womb-children, which technically makes us kin-siblings and therefore not really siblings in the law of this land and in the most isoteric meaning of “sibling” in most of Earth’s cultures, but to hell with it! – were here with us. But Amma giving them a cold, cold shoulder after they’d spirited me and my twin right from between her legs – her (rather heated, rather bitter, rather haunted, rather stark) words, not mine – until pretty recently has made a bad, bad impact on her relationship with those two, who are still her children regardless of any stupid law or a linguistic lexicologist’s definition – as I often insist. To her credit, though, she apparently doesn’t hesitate to pester and – I suspect, from her increasingly desperate, increasingly sour reports to me – beg them to at least join us when eating and sleeping, although she’s never let me join her in one of those missions.
Well, there’s still time, and I still hope.
And I do have a plan, which has just been hatched, during my latest lesson in the healing room, after I’ve managed to successfully snuck into the ice-walled, out-of-the-way, triply guarded (with wards, strong and opaque physical barrier, and a boredom-exuding guard) nook where Amma keeps her comatose spouse’s insensate form. (I have a strong suspicion that the Chief Healer let me in, surreptitiously and indirectly, but I’d rather not look the gift horse in the mouth.) I’ll need the help of my friends – and perhaps my new little sibling, too – for this, but that’s no matter to me.
I’ve at last got a family of my own – a real, living family – and I shan’t let anything get in the way of it; not old hurts, not stubborn pride, and not a possibly curable situation, either.