silver for monsters (elder scrolls online | freiwen & old mjolen, freiwen/maxten)

[fiachairecht]

silver for monsters. elder scrolls online, freiwen & old mjolen, freiwen/maxten. mjolen watches freiwen's recovery, or something like it. 888w, rated t. for kartaylir in writingrainbowexchange silver.

Presumes completion of the events of 'Long Journey Home' before any of the events in 'Of Ice and Death', including the Silver Cormorant becoming icelocked.

Mulled wine, lvl 30, increase health recovery by 322 for 35 minutes; Hare in garlic sauce, lvl 30, increase max health by 3221 for 35 minutes

Freiwen comes back from the ice a cold thing, and a changed one. Her bones crack with every movement, treacherous as icicles at the beginning of first thaw and just as dangerous.

Mjolen knows this even before the rumours make their way back to her hut, carried on the hushed breaths of townsfolk who appreciate what she did for the Jarl's daughter, truly, but wasn't there some way to make her stop standing there on the steps on the inn, still pale as a ghost and nearly as quiet —?

Time, Mjolen tells those who come to her, time cures heartsickness for the young as surely as it can heal old wraiths, and they know her well enough — and she has charms enough — that they leave comforted. But Mjolen is beyond comforting herself, as she sits on her bed with the pile of furs that grow more inadequate every night. There's ice wheeling underneath the threat of another Harrowstorm, and it lingers further into the morning every day.

**

It's weeks before Freiwen comes to her, fingers twisting, snapping, creaking back into place as she twists them through the fabric of her too-thin skirt.

"I think I am half a wraith, still," she says, before Mjolen can usher her inside. Her lips are a bluish white, her skin translucent in patches where the pale sunlight catches it wrong — or right. Her wrist is solid, though, when Mjolen grasps it: colder than it should be, but she has not slipped sideways again into Maxten's world.

Later, safely inside by the fire with her gnarled hands cupping a hot mug of mulled wine, she sits in silence. Mjolen watches, half-wondering if the girl is about to melt away before her eyes, but that danger ebbs the longer they sit. There is a girl under the ice, and blood in this world, and the rest, Mjolen thinks, the rest will be up to her.

The moons are beginning to set by the time Freiwen admits, "I think I'll be half a wraith as long as I love her."

Love, Mjolen wants to say, has nothing to do with it, but she doesn't have the heart for lies. So all she says is, "You should stay the night."

Freiwen does, curled on the bearskin rug with tears frozen like hailstones on her cheeks.

**

In the night, Maxten's voice on the wind whispers, tell her I would have saved her.

Tell her how close I am.

It's hard to tell lies from truths in the bog. Mjolen keeps her quiet.

Freiwen looks no less haunted when she wakes. Perhaps she heard Maxten's voice as well, her lover's words reaching past whatever shadows made her dreams their own. Perhaps she didn't, but her eyes are so black, and so deep Mjolen has a canny guess.

Once upon a time, she would have been brave enough to ask outright. But she knows her own magics better than breathing, knows enough about Maxten's to know the two should never meet, and she knows, though she wishes she didn't, which one Freiwen would choose.

Freiwen's bones are standing out under skin, clear as rocks under a still spring lake, and her veins coil round them in a shock of red. Mjolen heats more wine, smothers roast hare in garlic sauce. It won't be enough.

**

She sends Freiwen back to town with a bundle of cinnamon sticks wrapped around a dakeipa runestone and watches her disappear past the riverbend. The cloud cover is thick, the air too warm for a real threat of snow but not warm enough to stop Mjolen from shivering as she returns to her fire and casts in jasmine, rose, and wormwood.

"Mother Wolf," she says as the flames rise grey and green. "Mother Wolf, show me what young Freiwen seeks." Show me how I can help her, she does not say, because there is no greater danger than asking the gods for help.

In the body of a hare Mjolen bounds northwards as the clouds darken above her. As she runs towards the Sea of Ghosts the wind through her fur becomes more and more like knives: unbearable, except for Mother Wolf's paw on her back soothing their sting. Snow begins to fall, thick and unnatural, and underneath, even to the hare's ears, Maxten's voice, the saddest laughter she's ever heard.

The ground under her feet is slick, ice freezing so quickly she can feel it nipping at the soles of her feet. The planes of the frozen coast stretch out before her, bitter and flat from her lowered perspective, until, in the space of a blink, she skids to a halt against the rough hull of a ship. The wood rests against her, still as a held breath, and in the east, light spills from a ruined hollow.

A shadow falls over the hare, and Mjolen looks up into the rime-covered eyes of a dead blue thing, skin cracking over frozen rock. The hare's heatbeat quickens.

Mjolen returns to her body shaking. The fire is ashes before her, early twilight falling. Time always did pass differently in the forms of Mother Wolf's other creatures.

In the north, there is a shipwreck. In the north, there is Maxten. 

Dread curls in Mjolen's heart as she realises what she will say the next time Freiwen visits.