#dredda

Blinky, as Elder of New Trollmarket, had claimed the largest dwelling for himself, and its main room was plenty big enough to accommodate everyone. He, Aaarrrggghh, Dredda, Jim, and Claire had spent the better part of the last year converting the Merlin-shrine into a home symbolic of the hard-won hope they carried and the future they wanted to pull from the wreckage of Arcadia.

“To a new future,” Blinky proclaimed, raising his cup of glug. “A future where all people-- troll, human, changeling, and any other who wishes-- can help each other, be stronger together, and face their oncoming destinies with valor.”

They all sent up a hearty cheer, troll clinking cups with human, human with changeling, changeling with troll. All smiles, except one.

So, Angor thought to himself, his back against the wall furthest from the heartstone and his glug undrunk, why did they bring me?

The party orbited around him, a dark, done-in sun. Blinky approached him once and beckoned him into a conversation between him and the Trollhunter's human mate and the brute he'd knifed with Creeper's Sun, but he growled and stepped forward, bearing down on the shorter troll. “Aren't you worried I have a Creeper's Sun dagger hidden on me and I'll take vengeance on my lost eye by stabbing out five of yours?”

Blinky retreated, more of pity on his face and less of fear than Angor would have liked. He snarled at nobody in particular and downed his glug in one gulp. He still had both his ears, so he'd heard every word that had passed between the brute-troll and the fleshbag Toby, back in Arcadia.

“Why should we invite him to the reunion?” Toby had asked. He and the brute-troll had been raking debris from the front lawn of the house that Toby and his old fleshbag relative were to take once it was repaired. Angor had been enchanting more golems to help with the heavy lifting, since the town apparently needed more forklifts and backhoes than the surrounding three counties could supply, according to the Nunez fleshbag. “I mean, technically, does using golems and magic and stuff to help clean up even really count? I feel like it's cheating. He gets to just go about his business while I feel like my arms are going to fall off every night.”

The fleshbag had thought himself furtive, but Angor heard his pitiful attempt at whispering from across the yard. The brute-troll was more subtle; he couldn't quite catch his rumbled half-words. But he did catch one that sent an arrow-quick pang through him: “sacrifice”.

Stricklander, by the malevolent yellow glare in his eyes, shared the fleshbag's opinion, or near enough to it to put Angor's chance—which he didn't even want anyway-- in jeopardy. But in the end, nobility or idiocy had won out and he had been dragged across the country. For two weeks. In a motorcar caravan transporting six humans, a changeling, and one very large troll.

Dragged, through too many close calls with sunrises and sunsets, through the uncertain glances of the fleshbags and the watchful rancor of the changeling he still very much wanted to see impaled on a poisoned spike, and through the old-moss-old-stone reek of the brute-troll, to this foolish, superficial gathering, meant to be a gesture of inclusion, of brotherhood.

Of something he would never have again.

Dredda's ears caught the sharp sound of stone shattering on stone. She turned in time to see the tail of Angor's loincloth flit out of the room. “'Scuse me for a sec, Barbara?” She smiled at Jim's mother and went to the place by Blinky's apothecary where the fragments of Angor's cup had landed. Scooping them up, she crossed to the glug bowl and filled two new cups. She followed his peaty, dark, rainforesty scent out of their dwelling, through the thronged alleys of their new Trollmarket, and up, out into the crisp night.

Despite New Jersey being a shithole of a caliber for which she had not been prepared, California had made her miss winter. She filled her lungs with snow-heavy air, closed her eyes, and let the moonlight smooth itself onto her face. For once, it outshone the horrible orange glare of the arc-sodium streetlights.

Angor's scent trail led her to a narrow, soggy alley between two great shoulders of brick. She found him around the other side of a particularly fragrant Dumpster, his arms crossed and his head dipped to his jeweled chest. The bonewhite light from his lone eye illuminated his mottled, scarred hide. Dredda held a cup of glug out to him. “It gets better when you're drunk, I promise.”

Angor neither moved nor spoke.

Okay, change tack.

She sipped her own glug and leaned on the wall beside him. “I don't know exactly what's going on in your head, but I imagine it has something to do with how out of place you feel.” She sipped glug. “If anybody knows what it's like to not feel like you belong anywhere, it's a changeling. S--”

Angor scoffed. “You know nothing of  me, changeling.” His voice ground against itself like a fault line.

“I know that you did some bad things. Because you had bad things done to you. I know that somewhere along the way you figured out just how big of an asshole you were being, and you decided to make it right. And now you're doing good things.”

Angor glared at the green-skinned changeling, sipping her glug, awash in her own sense of false wisdom and serenity. The annoying Elder, her mate, was rubbing off on her.

“Deep down, you think you may not ever be able to make it all right, because there's so much bad. You hurt-- killed-- so many people, and the people you have to be around every day remind you ever day of how badly you treated them, whether they do it on purpose or not. And it kills you inside. It kills you, because you're trying so hard to do good, and deep down you realize it may never be enough. So you resent yourself for even trying, for keeping on chewing this unchewable bone. You don't know why you're doing it, but you don't know why you can't quit either.”

He rolled his eye, irritation gusting through him. “As... illuminating as this glimpse into your psyche has been, changeling, I told you. You know nothing.” He lay a hand over his chest. It was cool. Cool and dim and silent in there. “I can't feel bad about what I did. Because I can't feel anything. My soul is gone forever. Lady Morgana couldn't even call it back when she resurrected me.”

The changeling sipped glug and regarded him with inscrutable yellow eyes. Angor held her gaze for as long as it took her to look away, which was longer than he liked. “Yeah, that'd make for a hard day,” she said.

Like a striking snake he snatched the cup of glug out of her hand and pitched it at the opposite wall of the alley. It hit and shattered into smaller pieces than the first one had. “A hard day?!” He bellowed, hands curling into fists. “I came to her seeking help in my darkest hour. My entire tribe was massacred and I was alone, with nothing but my flesh and my spirit! I gave of one, and she took the other! And cursed me with millennia of bondage, all in the name of a cause she knew to be a failing one! And finally, when my soul-- when freedom-- floated right before my eyes, the Trollhunter took it away!”

The changeling sipped glug.

“I care not about good or bad, changeling, because both sides have never been on mine!” He hammered his fist into the Dumpster. It skidded backward toward the mouth of the alley with a grinding shriek of metal on asphalt. The changeling glanced over his shoulder, her ears perked toward the sounds of  fleshbag voices. Their owners staggered drunkenly past the alley, leaning heavily on each other. She refocused on him.

“But...you are free, are you not?”

Whitehot anger lit up Angor's skull. He moved close to the changeling, inches from her, towering over her. “Go back inside, Impure. Now,” he rumbled.

The changeling sipped her glug, her yellow eyes flashing. Angor snarled a grin. Got her.

“Answer me one question first,” she said, her voice level and calm. “What does freedom mean to you?”

Angor stepped back, his eyebrows arching up his face. “What?”

“What does fre--”

“I heard you!”

“Answer that, and I'll leave you alone.”

Angor opened his mouth. Closed it. Bared his teeth. Bafflement had doused his anger; now his head swum. “I...”

A motorcar roared by the alley, the fleshbags inside whooping high-pitched warcries. The changeling sipped the last of her glug and tossed the earthen cup into the Dumpster.

“I'm not free,” he finally said, because that was the only thought he could snag.

“You're not beholden to Morgana anymore. You're not locked in battle with the Trollhunter anymore. No one wants you dead; you have no more revenge to seek. You've settled all your scores. You said yourself; you're not on any side but your own. Hell, you're not even beholden to your own soul anymore.” She opened her arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “Angor, you are eminently free.”

His confusion deepened into consternation.

“You can leave. Walk away from this place. Do whatever you want to do. Find a new tribe. Kill at will. Eat as many humans as you like. Finish what you started when you came to Morgana, and protect the tribe that's opening its arms to you.”

Angor's knees unhinged and he slid slowly down the side of the Dumpster until he sat on the icy-oil-puddled asphalt. He screwed his eye shut and clutched his head, willing it to stop whirling. “None of it matters,” he groaned. “My soul is gone. I'm... empty inside, and I'll never be the same again. I could kill every day for the rest of my life, or spend the rest of my life in service to a tribe, but it won't fill this...this pit in me.” he struck his chest with a fist. “I can't hate the people I kill or love the tribe I serve. I can't...don't you understand, changeling? I can't ever be like I was.”

“Nobody ever is after they suffer something monstrous,” the changeling said, her voice softening. She squatted in front of him and the warmth in her smile made him want to haul back and knock her teeth down her throat. “Plus, I'm not entirely convinced your soul is gone forever.”

“Huh?”

“In my experience, once's soul is nourished when one nourishes other souls. I know I feel all warm and wiggly inside when I do something that's good for other people. Even better: when it's good for other people and me. Like helping get Arcadia back on its feet. That could be your home too, you know.”

Angor stared at her.

“You're free, Angor. The only decision you have to make is what you'll use your freedom to accomplish.” she hooked a thumb back toward Trollmarket. “I know some people who could help you figure it out. And some souls you could help nourish.”

Angor's mind slowly began to settle. He felt himself standing at the edge of a great water of unknown depth and distance, the full moon beaming a stripe of its own light from the horizon all the way to where the gentle tiny waves broke over his toes: a beckoning to a destiny that was not simply oncoming; one he could hold and shape. Across the water lay moonlight and things he'd never had before. Behind him were things he'd never have again.

The changeling stood and opened a hand to him. “Yours too, I bet.”

She heard the Pale Lady’s poisonous smile in her voice. “Tell me your name.”

“Greta Dreiss.”

Dredda felt the cave yawning ever back from her, the Pale Lady’s voice growing to fill it.

“Tell me your name.”

Like camera flashes, dark images laced with sickly green and glowing eyes shutterclicked through her mind: her sisters in the Darklands. Their name for her: “Ravga.”

The Pale Lady’s voice flowed like smoke. “Tell me your name.”

Dredda gritted her teeth. Dictatious’ name for her: “Greenhorn.” She spat the word.

“Tell me your name.” Singsong. Lilting. Relentless.

Further back in her mind lived a blackness as total as the one in front of her, so she sent her mind forward to light, to Aion the Fae Queen’s name for her: “Young One.”

“Tell me your name.”

Dredda sent her mind forward again, grasping. “Gregory Dreiss.”

“Tell me your name.” There was no pause or lag between the Pale Lady’s words and the lazy bursts of her catacomb breath.

The darkness in front of her, a dead totality, filled her with senseless rage. Through curled lip and around snapping fang, Dredda spoke her favorite names. Alexa’s, which closed a clawed fist around her heart: “Beloved.” Blinky’s, and the urge to glance back so strong it made her drunk: “Jade beauty.” Moina’s, which tightened the fist and squeezed her heart into her trembling throat: “Kitten-nose.”

And the last of her names, which she spoke against the thick, belligerent dark and the malignant source within it like a talisman, a fae-light, like a flag planted in the ground at her feet: “Mama.”

Pale yellow light flickered and pulsed in the darkness. “No.” The wailing echo behind her voice nearly overtook the word. “What name did you have before you had any other? Before you had anything else at all?”

The names lined up behind her like soldiers fell like them before the Pale Lady’s words, each of them a named bullet. And Dredda’s anger diminished to the fear that had been its seed. In her words, a declaration. In her tone, a begging: “I will not say that name.”

“You will,” the Pale Lady said.

Then the shutterclick of memory began again. Slowly at first, speeding up: Trollmarket trolls casting suspicious glances at her. The blank contempt in Dictatious’ gaze. Lofoten trolls peppering her with human garbage through the bars of her cell. The wild fury leaving Sigrid’s eyes as Dredda twisted the knife in her heart —the images came more quickly now-- Bular’s hand around her throat, his hulking shape above her, his tusks shiny with drool.  A Janus Order agent stopping her at the door of a meeting and telling her her security clearance had been revoked; the blue beam of Gunmar’s eye looking past her, through her, as she jammed herself down on his knot—she watched her life flick past faster like the view from a speeding train-- the Fair Folk cringing from her, even after a year; Moina cringing from her even after three; Ismar’s gleeful hateful grin, which Dredda could only see through one single blood-glazed eye; more blood, gushing out of her, her guts gripping themselves and deathrolling her newly planted pebble out of her; her last look at Alexa’s beautiful freckled face: screwed down in anger, anger at her; Blinky’s gaze which was the inverse of his brother’s but still, still, if she happened to catch him unguarded, carried the exact copy of the quality she could not name other than he looks at me like a zoo animal he’s only seen in pictures and Dredda clapped her hands over her ears and screwed her eyes shut, unaware of the wordless pleading whine escaping her. She opened her mouth to say the name the Pale Lady wanted her to say. Opened her mouth to say anything, anything the Pale Lady wanted, if only to stop this, oh stop, stop STOP

(mama)

Then the spinning shutterclick of memory stopped on a last image: a declaration

(“Mama?”)

written in mottled blue-green flesh, a flag on the ground that walked on two unsteady legs, a four-eyed, four-armed little fae-light that faltered and flickered and shone, and shone, and shone.

Dredda uncurled and turned from the darkness to her daughter. Knelt to her daughter, held out her arms. But Breyona tangled one stubby toddler leg on the other and smacked the hard cave floor face first.

“Oh, Brey,” Dredda lunged forward to scoop her daughter up but her muscles locked. Panic lit up the space behind her eyes like lightning.

Behind her, behind the screaming white fear for her crying daughter and her tightening lungs, the Pale Lady laughed. It was the sound of a landslide. “I’ll ask one more time. Tell me. Your name.”

The Pale Lady had immobilized her head, but she shook it without moving it an inch, shook it madly as she watched her daughter cry alone on the ground. Her tiny strange daughter, who couldn’t walk as well as other pebbles her age, wasn’t as big as other pebbles her age, couldn’t eat well, couldn’t breathe well, had strange, sensitive skin, her weak runty little daughter, the accidental, troubled child of a troll and the purposeful pollution of a troll, something that was once pure but was no longer.

Guilt drifted in her lungs and in her mind like ash and made them both burn; she screamed but the Pale Lady had stopped that too. Breyona’s cries had quieted to sobs and she regained her wobbly feet, gazing at her mother through watery eyes which said why didn’t you come pick me up when I fell, Mama? You always pick me back up when I fall down.

Because I’m Impure and I’ll always be Impure because I’m polluted and contaminated and unclean because I was made not born because I’m Impure I’m an abomination I never should have existed never should have mated bred created you because now you are too you’re Impure too just like your mama because I’m Impure I’m Impure IMPURE IMPURE IM—

“--PURE! IMPURE! IMPURE! THERE, YOU BITCH! I SAID MY NAME! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?”

Dredda, her paralysis broken, and fury returned, shrieked at the Pale Lady’s guard-darkness.  

The Pale Lady smiled again, and Dredda heard it rather than saw it. “There. Was that so hard?”