Alt POV | C1:S2 | Svetlodyn | Valdricht (Patreon)

Valdricht lies across his mother's body, staring down at where their toes

intertwine. Only a summer ago, with his head tucked beneath her chin, the

tips of his toes had reached but halfway down her shin. That night he had

prayed to the gods to make him grow faster. In this, they were obliging.

"Svetlodyn," his mother says. Her voice, with its strange, sing-song accent,

draws his attention upwards.

"What?"

"You asked me what it means," she reminds him. She runs delicate fingers

through his thick, midnight hair. "Your thoughts are scattered tonight,

eri'na vyrnok."

The term of endearment makes him bristle. He is not her "little one." How

can he be when they are nearly the same size?

And it's more than that. Fewer than two decades separate them in age. But

while his palate has grown refined, his mother still fills his plate with

sweet cakes and honeyed fruits. While he was quick to sleep once the sun

began its ascent, his mother would scurry into his chamber, candle in hand,

asking if he called out to her. This, he now knew, was all a pretense.

No matter what he said, she still crawled into his bed, informing him that

he must have had a nightmare and that she'd remain with him until he fell

back asleep.

It was his mother who fell asleep first, clutching him fiercely as if he

were one of the yarn-spun dolls she hid in the hole in her goose-feather

pallet. He would spend his mornings stroking her hair and whispering soft

words to her as she wept for a mother she could only find in dreams.

"What is it?" she asks, reacting at once to his tension. She tightens her

hold on him, her scent spiking with fear as she looks to the door.

Instantly, he is ashamed. He's frightened her. He wills his body to go lax,

then reaches up to pat her shoulder.

"Nothing, maraja. Only a chill."

"Ah," she says, smacking herself lightly on the face. "How foolish of me.

You must be freezing."

He pulls his blankets up to cover them both. "That's better. Now, back to

svetlodyn."

His mother tells him the story of her betrothal, a tale she's recounted many

times. It's the tale of how she was to be wed to a god; a marriage of duty,

meant to bind her people to a powerful forest spirit who in turn would

protect her ancestral lands from the encroaching southerners.

However, the night before she was meant to depart her lands and be wed, she

dreamed that a great star fell from the sky, into her lap. It was an egg, but

one she knew could never hatch in the arctic cold of her lands. In the

strange way of dreams, she understood that she would need to travel south,

to where the egg would be able to hatch.

"And when I woke, I saw it. The tailed star in the sky, the color of

firelight."

The comet had been a sign to her. With a small group of trusted confidants,

she'd stolen away into the night, southward bound…

Valdricht listens to the story with half an ear, as she speaks of how

ashamed she felt when she was captured and forced to wed his sire. She tells

him of coming to the Summerlands, of the searing heat of the sun and the

sticky air that clung to her skin. She laughs as she describes how strange

it was to learn to eat with forks and spoons, and smiles as she recounts

riding her first horse.

She doesn't speak of how her new husband leveraged her captivity to bring

her people to negotiate. How it was all pretense, and he promptly

slaughtered them one by one in front of her.

She never speaks of how Valdricht came to be in her belly. She acts as if he

arrived there by magic, a falling star that landed in her womb.

He was the star in her dream. The reason she fled the safety of her tribe

and broke her engagement with the forest spirit. He is the reason she hides

beneath the ground at night's end, in fear of a celestial body that could

render her naught but ash and bone.

His mother falls asleep shortly after finishing her tale. Valdricht lies

awake. Once, he prayed that the gods would unweave time. That they would

unmake him, take back their dream, and allow his mother to live as she was

meant to. But they hadn't granted that prayer. Now, all he could do was

continue to grow, until he was big enough to take her back where she

belonged, back to the life she had before divine meddling.

His landing back into the present is jarring. Lately, the drift has been

more immersive, more all-consuming. For several seconds, Valdricht feels

certain that he is still a boy of eight summers, curled up on his mother's chest.

That he'll soon wake to find that the cold, barren wasteland before him is

nothing but one of his nightmares.

Then, time catches up to him. A trickle of years, a stream of decades, and

then a torrent of centuries.

When it began more than a century ago, he had found the drifts to be amusing

curiosities. Brief glimpses into a world he'd thought lost to time.

Their meaning hadn't alarmed him. His life had grown monotonous in the

latter centuries. For a time, he'd attributed his descent into apathy to the

death of his mate, but the more he was forced to reflect on it, the more he

recognized that his time with Nefuri had been nothing but a brief respite in

a life that had otherwise run its course.

As a boy, he'd often wished that he'd been born the son of a pauper or a

maid, if only to have a taste of freedom, both from the weight of his titles

and the wrath of his sire. Now, he still wished the same, though it was a

desire tempered by experience. Had he not been born a prince or with a deep

well of innate power, perhaps there would have been more to strive for, more

challenges to keep him engaged with what this world had to offer.

"Why here?" Serax whispers, drawing Valdricht's attention. His progeny sits

beside him, face partially obscured by his fur-rimmed hood. His gaze is fixed

on the path ahead, his posture tense.

Valdricht finds himself mirroring that tension as he turns to follow Serax's

gaze. He relaxes almost at once, noting the shadowed edifices dotting the

horizon with a sigh of resignation.

He knew it would be here, even before they set out just before moonrise, the

pull of svetlodyn urging him forward.

Kalat.

It was not the first time he'd been lured here. The last time had been a

century ago, and that time, he'd resisted the call for several nights. At

the time, he'd believed himself to be in the final days of his life, and had

even booked passage in Heza to sail to the isles of his birth and watch the

summer sun rise over the western sea one final time. He had no interest in

being the plaything of a bored god.

The morning he was due to set out, the buzzing in the back of his mind had

metastasized into something he couldn't ignore. It was as if his

aevyrvenath was chiseling the word "svetlodyn" into the inside of his skull.

And so, he heeded the call, all the while convinced that it would make no

difference. Nothing could divert him from his plan.

By the time he had reached Kalat, the call had been silent for several

moondays. Nights later, when he came across Serax, Valdricht told himself

that he had been the reason he'd been pulled eastward. That for some reason,

the gods had meant for him to liberate the nyrvehn from his imprisonment.

When Serax survived the change, a rarity for his kind in this era, it only

solidified his conviction that Serax was special, an essential element to the

machinations of the gods. And perhaps, he would be Valdricht's legacy.

How--well, that remained to be seen.

His latest and final progeny had been in the spring of his manhood when

Valdricht had found him, yet already the world had left Serax broken and

embittered. He'd been on the verge of death when Valdricht had given Serax

his blood, having been lashed so many times that there was little skin on his

back and his flesh had begun to rot. For good measure, he'd been starved, his

cage placed near to the camp's cookfire so that he could watch as his captors

feasted.

In his lifetime, he'd seen wretches more miserable than Serax, though even

now he struggled to remember when. That night, as he'd taken Serax from his

cage and carried him through the camp of corpses, he believed for certain

that he'd come too late. Had he heeded the call sooner, he might have been

able to save him, but now the end of his life would be marred by one final

failure.

Later, he thought that perhaps this was another trick of the gods. By the

time Serax survived the change, Valdricht was bound to him by more than just

blood. During the sleepless nights spent tending to his body as his soul

fought its way back, Serax became Valdricht's obsession. He needed Serax to

live, perhaps more than he'd ever needed anything. In his mind, he equated

the young man's survival to his own redemption. As if the entire sum of his

life hinged on whether Serax would open his eyes.

By the time Serax woke, Valdricht had forgotten about the isles and the

summer sun. He had a new purpose, one that would drag him through life in the

decades to come, even as the weight of time continued to bear down on him

with steadily increasing pressure.

During the early days, it was easy for him to see the seeds of greatness in

Serax. He recovered quickly, not only in body but in spirit. He took the

change in stride and he was a fast learner, executing his first song before

the end of winter. Valdricht could also see parts of himself in his progeny,

traits he valued, such as Serax's pragmatic nature and his dark wit. Above

all, he appreciated that Serax did not solely rely on his new abilities and

was a competent fighter, with combat instincts of a nyrkavenath many times

his age.

And yet, it wasn't long before doubts started to creep in. For all the things

he appreciated about Serax, his progeny had many glaring flaws that became

more difficult to overlook with each year that passed.

Serax was vain, and not in a manner that befitted his station. Serax's vanity

came not from confidence in his abilities, but was instead an external

display, like the tailored silks and fine leathers he was so fond of.

Quickly, he adopted an air of smug superiority, even going so far as to speak

down to nyrkavenath centuries his senior. By the end of his first year, he

was even turning his chin up to Valdricht, something that would have gotten

him relieved of his head were he any other man. His pride, however, was a

trait Valdricht found amusing more often than not. Perhaps he was simply

growing lax in his old age, but he often found himself fighting a smile

during the fledgling's antics.

A trait he was none too fond of, however, and one that clashed utterly with

Valdricht's own nature, was Serax's impetuousness. Restraint is seldom in the

nature of a young nyrkavenath, but after five decades of Serax drawing his

blade in the center of town and pushing compulsions on lords and magistrates

at dinner parties, it became clear to Valdricht that it would take more than

time to temper his rash nature.

Yet what bothered him most was something he'd only recently begun to notice,

though he could now see it had been there from the first.

Serax had no interest in taking charge of his own destiny. Despite his claims of being a

new man and having put his past behind him, he still carried the mentality

that had led him into the cage he'd been in when Valdricht found him. In over

a century, he'd given no thought to leading a life independent of Valdricht,

save for the times he stormed off in a tantrum, which Valdricht knew was

simply a bid for him to give chase. Even now, when Valdricht had made it clear

that his life was at its end, Serax had no plan for what was to come next, and

spoke of following Valdricht into the next life.

And knowing Serax as he did, he had no doubt that this would be the outcome

following Valdricht's departure. He suspected that his progeny wouldn't follow

him quite so directly. He'd return to the cities that dotted the Nazralti

coast and pass a winter or two binging on blood and pouring his inheritance

into brothels and gambling dens. If he didn't conveniently overstay the winter

and meet the sun, he'd inevitably provoke the wrath of a local lord and his

life would end once more flayed in a cage, or perhaps on a pyre.

And so, for all that he had come to care for Serax, for as profoundly as he

was attached to him, Valdricht had begun to reflect on that last call.

The lure of svetlodyn, that he'd spent a century convincing himself had been

calling him to Serax.

Yet...

Nights before he'd found Serax, he'd stood atop a dune overlooking this

valley, overlooking this village, or what remained of it. The village had

been freshly sacked, smoke still curling from the remains of razed

domiciles. The half-dozen survivors, men who'd been away hunting during the

raid, had already gathered the bodies into the remnants of their shrine,

where they became burnt offerings.

Never before or since had the scent of burning flesh so disturbed him. His

stomach, which had not taken human food for centuries, had turned violently

in response, prompting him to retch as he'd stumbled away, his mind spinning

with an anguish he couldn't place.

Now, as they descend into Kalat, Valdricht has no choice but to reckon with

what part of him has always known to be true. A century ago, he had consoled

himself with a lie. He took his fury with himself and turned it outward,

following the tracks of the raiders who had sacked Kalat, and he enacted what

he'd believed to be vengeance. Then he'd clung to Serax to mask his shame, to

convince himself that his continued existence served a purpose. That in

Serax, he could have redemption before he departed this long and wretched

existence.

But it was never about him, was it?

He was meant to be here on the night this village burned. With a whisper, he

could have had the raiders turning their spears against one another, or simply

gouging out their own eyes. But he had dragged his feet, and whatever had

been waiting for him here, it had burned.

Svetlodyn.

A century ago, Valdricht put this place behind him, but Kalat, it would seem,

was not finished with him.

Author's Note

In the previous Svetlodyn alt POV scene, we didn't dive too deep into what it's actually like when Valdricht drifts into memories. I worry it's a bit too indulgent, but at the same time I thought this brief dive into Valdricht's youth said more than the previous glimpses I've written. I also like seeing Serax through Valdricht's eyes, it gives a side of him that the MC doesn't come to know for a while.

Hopefully the excerpt formatting isn't choppy, I wrote it in Scrivener and for some reason the italics went poof and the paragraphs didn't separate when I copied it over to Patreon. Also, I started doing the coding for the additional menu to access the alt POV scene, but the code was being temperamental and I decided to wait until I'm doing the final coding edit on Classic to update it, so as not to get distracted from writing.

On that note, Classic Night VI is coming along quite nicely, I'm around 20,000 words in right now, I project it'll be around 40-45,000 words in total with some interesting branches that will allow you to begin defining your preferred partner and, in turn, nudge your romantic story toward him. I'll be posting an extended excerpt this weekend which will show you how to tilt your MC more towards Serax or Valdricht as the Classic prelude is coming to a close.

-Mortish