#grismara

Part One of Elenia’s side adventures on her return to Grismara. The Setting: A Little Summer Home Beyond the Enclave, Pallasova. Some time in the early evening. The house smelled of mildew. It smelled of rain. It smelled profoundly of death.

Elenia didn’t know what she was expecting, really, on opening the doors. Her key still worked, of course, and perhaps she expected some relief from the rain and the cold when she took the first steps into the formerly beautiful summer home. They had moved permanently when Elenia was a child. She had been in school at the time, and instead of returning to the stone townhouse on holiday, they had come out here to the summer home. 

Father had upset someone in his capacity as a Prosecutor. They had retreated from the Enclave. But that was fine. She hadn’t minded the dacha. Previously, the entryway might have had a fire and the kind housekeeper to take a coat and offer tea. It lay empty now. To the right was the conservatory, once glass enclosed but now torn apart by wind. In front of her, there were stairs up to the second story and down to the cellar. To the left, a twisting hallway with rooms added sporadically. The kitchen was down there, the sitting room and dining room, Father’s study… the music room.

Her boots echoed on the dingy tile floor, which had once colorfully depicted birds in flight. They were covered with dust and grime now, forgotten. The ceiling had once been painted like the sky, and that did remain, though water had gotten in and bubbled the paint. Still, Father’s study was nearly clean, the shutters pulled. She ran her fingers over the ancient books that populated its shelves, opened drawers in the desk that held a long-defunct computer and a box of cigars that had acquired a foul smell.

She locked it behind her, and her mother’s music room, though not before she had tried to extract a few sour notes from the piano keys. They echoed through the hallways on the still, humid air. On the way out, she collected a few pieces of sheet music without realizing it, and eventually set them down on the kitchen counter where Maritska, the cook, used to bake bread and tell stories of wolves and ghosts and hooded crows. 

It was in the kitchen where she first heard the noises, the ones that confirmed her suspicions. Shuffling, footsteps, and a shaking doorway. The doors here were thick wood. She expected that, once the news stories had worked through, they had locked themselves away for safety. Only they hadn’t been safe. 

The rattling was coming from the bedroom. Had they begun to feel sick and gone to lie down, locking the door behind them for safety’s sake? Had Maritska fled, or would she be in there, too? They hadn’t eaten in decades. They would nearly be dust now, dry and weak. If she moved fast, she could get them easily. She extracted the syringes from her boot, checked them over, and balanced them both in one hand as she turned the key in the lock.

Opening the door sent Mother flying back. She struggled to get up, one leg shattered. Father was there, the tattered remains of a tailcoat hanging loose and wretched over his bony arms and shoulders. She dealt with him first. The needle went in his neck, and in a moment he was ash and dust. For Mother, she took her arm, wrenched it out of reach and away from biting teeth. And then, like father, she was gone, too. 

The house was silent and she was alone. 

She sat on the tilework floor in silence, staring at the scraps of cloth that had adorned narrow, dead bodies. An hour passed, a second hour passed, on her wrist a watch ticked slow beats.

Finally, she raised her head and looked around her parents’ room. They had torn it up in their attempts to escape. The furniture was tattered and scratched, the carefully laid jewelry scattered. She gathered some up and pocketed it, all gold--Mother’s funeral jewelry. Each one the alchemically repurposed ashes of some family member, turned to gold and then cast into some lovely piece. She sighed and locked the door of the bedroom behind her. One final stop.

An excerpt from a traditional Grismaran fairy tale.

…

But Vasilisa’s mother was not in the glade, or by the river, or in the fields and that left only the forest to find her. The beasts begged Vasilisa not to go to the woods. “I must go and find my mother. I am braver than the others and will look for her.”

So Vasilisa took her cloak and went out into the woods. Between the trees she saw the lights flit and sparkle; they lead the way through and Vasilisa followed them.

Finally she came to a clearing where the lights hovered like stars, and found there the scene of a battle where one troop had come upon the other. In the midst of it she found her mother, bloody and clutching her gun.

“My darling Vasilisa,” said her mother and held her arm out to the girl. “I am going where the lights will take me. But I will watch you from there.” “But Mother,” said Vasilisa. “Won’t the lights let you stay? They have already taken all the dead of the field, of our Enclave and the other. Won’t they spare you now?”