Bitfrost by Sam Farren

Author:Sam Farren [Farren, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

You’d think such a story would come with interruptions. More questions arose than answers, yet no one uttered a word. Everyone listened as though my mother had stolen their voices to tell the tale. Once she finished, she held us captive with her gaze.

Eventually, we remembered to breathe. I expected Oran to overflow with questions, having always loved stories, but they sat in silence and clung to Faier’s hand.

Fawkes leapt to his feet and said, “You killed a god?”

“Nah,” my mother said. Her grin did away with any modesty. “I killed a bear. A bear’s a bear. When a god takes a particular form, that’s what they are. If Otava went back to being a mountain, she’d have always been it. She would’ve been part of it when it was at the bottom of the ocean and she’d remember every rock that’d come loose, every avalanche, every tree that’d grown upon it. It’s becoming human that made things tricky. Those golden eyes of hers never stopped glowing. She is what she is. There’s no playing pretend.”

“Gods,” Faier murmured. “And Zaun shrugged the whole killing-a-bear thing off like it was nothing.”

Setra put an arm around Fawkes, too awed to speak. Feros didn’t reject the story in its entirety, no matter how outrageous it was. After bleeding our way into Bitfrost, why not believe my mother had known a god?

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard myself ask.

“You weren’t around, Zaun. I returned to Undal a little less than a year before you were born, and you know how things went. I got busy. Being a mother, being a Spearmaster. Otava was only one part of my life,” my mother said.

“Not just that. Why didn’t you tell me and Setra about the rot. About the wolf?” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “We could’ve helped. You didn’t have to run away. You didn’t have to be trapped here.”

“Did you tell anyone, Zaun? Did you go straight to Set and Fawkes?” she asked. “Or did you run away?”

I looked away.

My head throbbed.

My mother. A god. Bitfrost.

Too much. It was all too much.

“See?” she murmured. “You’ve got my stubborn blood in your veins, and then some.”

I sat with my arms around my knees. Everyone looked away, knowing it wasn’t for them to overhear. What did I feel, at that moment? Humiliated? Perhaps. The truth has been known to sting. I almost wish I could hate her.

That would be easy.

She’d be more than a stranger to me, then.

But it’s never that simple. She was nothing to me. Nothing. Nothing! A gap. A void! Another hole in my head.

She cleared her throat, demanding the mood stop sinking.

“Well, that’s enough sitting around. Don’t you want to see it?” my mother asked.

“See what?” Fawkes beat everyone to asking.

“Arcus,” my mother said, springing to her feet. She held out a hand and Fawkes took it, letting her pull him up. “I came here for a reason, all those years ago. I’ve been waiting more than a decade for this.

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