#niseag

She was a tiny little thing, squealing and splashing in the shallows near Sròine where anyone could see her. Niseag watched her from the deep water, barely a shimmer against the opaque water.

“Niseag.” Both the foal and the serpent beyond startled at their name. On the shore, a white mare flickered in and out of existence, bright and brief as glancing sunlight on the loch.

Niseag slipped into the shallows and a stallion rose from the surf, dark as peat. The foal squealed and dashed away, all knees and flying hooves, long limbed and new. She hid behind her mother as he approached. The mare moved to greet him.

“You called, Llamrei,” he murmured, touching his nose to hers. They shared the sharp-sweet air between them.

“I knew you were listening,” she whickered, brushing her muzzle along his neck to scratch his withers. He reached to do the same for her as the dusky foal wriggled into the space between them, fear forgotten as she demanded their attention. Reluctantly, he withdrew and stood patiently as she reared, knobby knees against his chest as she stretched to touch his muzzle. Seemingly satisfied, she dropped back to all four hooves and turned a circle on the spot.

“Energetic, isn’t she,” he said as the little one pranced back to the water’s edge, chasing the lapping water.

“She has that of her father,” Llamrei replied, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, watching her little one play.

“I hear you keep strange company these days.”

“That is a word for it.”

“Where are you heading to?”

“Who said I was not stopping here, with you?”

He ducked his head, and tucked the private wish that that were true back into the tide-beat of his heart.

“If you were stopping here, you would have come to me below, not waited for me at Sròine, no matter how often I travel by here.”

He watched her eyes turn westward, and sighed. “You are for the sea.”

“Only for her.”

“For her?” He looked at the tiny foal, incredulous. “Would you feed her to the Cailleach? She’ll never survive the first storm.”

“Never!” Llamrei snapped at him, lashing out with a forehoof. “She goes to her father, as she should! The safest place in the world for her is with him, or I would never let her go!”

He backed down before her hooves and flashing teeth, rightly cowed.

“I should not have said it. I’m sorry.”

The little foal squealed and ran back from the water, dancing around the both of them, coaxing them to play with her. The muffled sunlight glinted off her coat like shards of stars through cloud cover.

“Whose is she?”

Llamrei kissed her little one on the nose and sent her off again. She didn’t answer him, but looked out west where the salt scent of the ocean drifted upstream.

“Llamrei?”

“She belongs to the deep.”

He watched the tiny foal and tried to see the touch of Lir in her. She looked more a creature of air than water, but weren’t the two entwined in all of them? It was less than a breath of thought for Niseag to wear wings instead of fins or hooves. Perhaps the little one would breathe away her form as easily when she grew. She had a Trickster touch about her.

“She seems no deeper than us,” he said, testing.

“Illusions are a skill in her blood.”

“Blood is less than water for us.”

“Not for her.”

“Who is he, Llamrei?” he asked again, turning to face her. “The way you talk I fear you’ve brought a godling to my doorstep. The gods don’t sow their oats in the North as they do in the Cradle Sea. Divinity touches very few.”

The silence stretched between them, broken only by the gentle murmurs of the loch and splash of horseplay in the shallows.

“I knew him as Léttfeti,” she finally answered him, “but in the sunlight he casts a shadow big enough to engulf the world.”

“A God indeed,” he said, and shook away the jealousy that bit at him like flies at his nose and ears. “How will you find him, with only an untrue name and a vague direction? Surely, if he is a god he must know of his child. If he has not come for her by now, why should he if you cry for him on the shore?”

He probably deserved to be bitten for that, but Llamrei stood beside him in silence while she pondered that. The only movement in her was the twitch of her tail, and her eyes as they followed her foal.

“What if he doesn’t come?” she whispered, and it worried him that it didn’t seem to have occurred to her until now. What kind of desperate love would give her so much faith in this absent god to recognise his child? Gods were hardly known for owning up to their crops.

“You could stay here,” he offered. “Stay with me like you did before. The loch is surely big enough to hold the three of us.” He nodded at her foal where she danced in the shallows. “Your little one is already well at home.”

Quieter, he added. “And I see she is named for someone dear. Or have you chosen to curse your own with an ill favoured name?”

“Never ill favoured,” Llamrei said, “and always dear, but perhaps not as you would have me. Not in this time.”

He sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

They stood again in silence, burdened by questions and the weight of their shared history, looking for answers that simply were not there.

“What if...” he ventured, and paused to gain the courage to be audacious a final time. “What if you left her with me while you venture to find your Léttfeti? The loch is safe, as I have said, and though we may not love as we once did, there is love enough between us for you to trust me with what is yours.”

“You know that such an offer will do you no good in changing that,” Llamrei said, sharp as a prow.

He had to laugh. “You think I’d offer to look after your child while you chase your Léttfeti so you would love me like you used to? That would be a very poor way of achieving such an end.”

“Besides,” he nudged her nose with his, and whickered because there had never been a horse capable of a wistful smile, “I have your love already, though it has changed its shape since last time. It would be pure greed to ask for more.”

Niseag the younger took that moment to run back over to them again, prancing about their feet and screeching her enthusiasm in shattering notes.

“You’re quite the talker, little one,” Hengroen said, dipping his head to her level and huffing at her. “I’m sure you don’t have that of your mother either. Your father must be chattier than me.”

“Unlikely,” Llamrei muttered beside him.

Little Niseag whickered like she was laughing, and trotted off along the bank to explore the range within her mother’s sight.

“So...” Hengroen said as they watched. “Will you be going together to the sea?”

Hati + Sköll- Angrboða

It is a rare day in a year that Hati and Sköll can spend together.

The twins are hardly ever together now that they spend their lives chasing opposite ends of the day. When they were pups, every minute was shared, but no longer. Hati cannot stand the sunlight anymore than Sköll can stand the moon, so they only come together in the twilight, passing an hour in the grey light where Sol is too weak to harm, and Mani has not yet risen.

In the Iron Wood, it is always twilight.

They walk together, shoulder to shoulder, down paths worn only by wolf feet. A wealth of wolf children live in these woods, but they are princes, gold and silver shod, those rare days they can return.

An age of the Tree has passed since they were pups, but they remember the road home.

Angrboða waits for them in the deepwood, where the trollwives wove the trees together and grew a palace for themselves. The wolf halls cradle their occupants as Yggdrasil holds the worlds within its branches.

They turn the corner and home unfolds before them. Angrboða sees them from her seat at the door and smiles, waves. They are puppies again as they sprint the final stretch and into her open arms.

“Welcome home,” she whispers to them as they all scramble to be closer.

Little Nis- Llamrei

Nis lived her youngest years with her father in the ocean, but she was never a creature born for the open water. She pined for the flow of a river, the still depth of the lochs, in a way Jörmungandr could not understand.

So he let her go. She never loved him more.

Now she lives in the loch that was Hengroen’s before he outgrew it and fled to the northern sea. He gave guardianship of his beloved home willingly to his not-daughter.

She does not see him often. Her blood-father not at all.

Llamrei visits Nis every year, though it has been centuries since they lived together. Nis remembers Llamrei as a soft muzzle and the sweet taste of milk, but brief, barely a whisper of memory in the years of her life that have passed since those few early days.

They make up for it now, in small doses. They are strangers, so they take the days they share to know each other again. It is slow- Llamrei and Nis are very different creatures- but they work at it.

Today, something like a century after they met again, Nis is the one to travel the miles on hoof to her mother’s river. She watches the white mare raises herself from the water, bright as sunlight, and wonders if she might be as beautiful when she is grown.

“I heard today is a day for mothers,” Nis says as greeting, and laughs in delight when her mother smiles. 

Leviathan- Aglaope

Leviathan thinks it’s a poor excuse for an idea, but he has never been able to say no to his tiny sister. Nis thinks it will help, visiting again after so long. It worked for her after all.

He never told her, but she knows his childhood was less than pleasant. She sees the scars that carve him up, nose to tail, stretched with age and growth. She sees the way he flinches away from the hunting boats, calls the storm in vindictive fury. She hears his silence, because he never learned to control the mesmer laced into his voice.

Nis tells him to try going home. Leviathan promises to try, nothing more. 

It takes him centuries to find the courage.

The Siren’s Rock is still there, though it has been devoid of life for longer than the new world around it has existed. Leviathan hauls himself out of the water in his golden form as he had done ages past, now full grown and the grief of then now dull with age. From the highest point of the rock, where his mother sat long ago, he looks out over the water and wonders what he might say to her if she was here with him now.

He has no words. They were never his strong point.

Here though, he thinks he can catch the last whispers of her song where it clings to the rock. He listens, tries to recall how she sounded before the Argo stole them all away.

Horse forms are as natural as water to kelpies. He doesn’t need to teach her that.

For their first outing, he chooses a similar form so that familiarity can help bring it together. He steps out of the water near Drumnadrochit on cloven hooves, a red backed king with a fourteen point crown. Little Nis masters her long legs and bounds ahead, the spots flowing over her back like the first snowflakes of the year.

They run with the wild herds from the woods of Delshangie all the way through to Lochletter before little Nis begins to tire. Niseag leads her to the banks of Meiklie to rest: the tiny loch is the most peaceful area he knows. Little Nis dozes while Niseag wanders the south bank. He knew Meiklie once, the little merrow child that named the loch. A rare half-breed, her father dead, her mother returned to the sea. She is long gone, but her touch remains in the quietude of the still water.

They sleep the night beneath Meiklie’s trees and start the next day on velvet feet, hunting shadows beneath the pines of Lochletter. Nis struggles with the lynx shape, and Niseag can’t help laughing at her long legged, maned kitten. It’s an admirable effort for a foal regardless and he praises her for it once he has apologised for laughing.

By the end of the day, it is impossible to tell Nis from any other tuft eared kitten. Niseag is astonished.

Trickster blood. He knew it would show through.

He ups the ante the next day, to see if she can keep up. They climb to the top of the tallest pine as red squirrels (though Nis still has lynx ears in minature) and he shows her how to take wings and feathers as her own and break the bonds of gravity. They start as blackbirds, flitting between the trees, and ride the evening thermal as a falcon and his fledge, rising to heaven then folding into a bullet and diving for earth.

They run the next day as deer again, though Niseag indulges herself and runs as a hind with her fawn. She doesn’t comment that the fawn at her side begins the day as a doe and ends it as a buck. It isn’t a trick for capall uisge: she hadn’t even considered trying to teach Nis. Nis shouldn’t have been able to do it.

Trickster blood.

Godlings aren’t common in the North. The Southern pantheons might have seeded heirs like they seeded fields, but the North guarded its blood more jealously. Niseag herself was likely the closest to a god the Northern lore came near to anymore.

She tries not to let it bother her. Niseag is an old creature, the eldest of the each uisge. It takes a lot to spook her. She knows that anomalies occur among those with a touch of God in their veins, but if Nis is already so capable-