A collab between myself and Necro.
A look into Vorell’s past, long before he came to Cadell’s side.

Art by myself, written work by Necro

The universe was a haiku of dreams. They circled and spun. They wove through the deep places. Vorell saw them all. The dreams of the maid and the magpie, the jittering clock and the rusted hinges on doors, doublets, dogs, dreary days of rain and drowning – they wafted like smell, but they stung.

And those were the good dreams.

Vorell sifted through them, kept it all behind his eyes. Little treasures. Miniscule songs and flowers whistled in brightness and color. Faces and petals all looked the same in the ether where the past, present, and future knotted. The life of the fly could be as long as an oak’s if you rewound it again, and again, and again. First kisses could become lasts. Deaths and births pranced over and under one another like the feet of dancer thralled to a reel. In and out. In and out. The rhythm of love and tides and the slick swords of warriors claiming victories. In and out. Between the ribs. Out the back. Through the eyes, the eyes, the eyes.

Blood and wine were not so different when both men and grapes screamed.

The inconstancy of it all was maddening. There was no sense to holding onto any flicker, however colorful, however witty or gay. Gods and stars imploded eternally over the lives of mortals, little more than perennial flowers blooming and withering into nothingness. No single blossom was worthwhile, but the bunches and bundles were cheery and of good stock. They grew in the most fertile soils. Built the strongest vines. And then winds and witches blew through, razed them to seeds, and they began again.

But sometimes, for no reason at all, some flowers grew up taller than others, stronger. The same soil nourished them, the same air and water and suffocating drafts of pollen and mortality. But they were better, and the other blossoms reacted like envious toddlers: clung to them, clawed up them, weighted them down until entire colonies would be resting upon the strong stem of a single lone bloom.

That bloom always died early. Its corpse hardened. The thicket thrived over its brittle bones.

And that was the first time Vorell learned what injustice was. This lone, blond bloom. No, not a bloom, a man. It was so hard to tell. This man, in a hundred crisscrossing paths of futures and presents, held up nations. He fell. They grew over him.

Suddenly this single bloom mattered.

Vorell chased the roots of this man through his youth, down the strings of his bracers to his first clumsily tied boot-laces. He watched this blossom grow, the first he’d cared to narrate in his own mind without impartiality. The more he knew, the more godlike this man became, marking his face in the ink of his clan, taking up their sword, and then becoming the sword of others. He eyed gain and gold for a heart-stopping span, but that desire faded in the presence of an unquiet conscience. He marched to war – he turned the wheels forward, and though he died crushed beneath them, they kept turning.

Even if Vorell turned the story a little sideways, this blossom turned the wheels the same direction. To war, to war. To death. The faces and petals he met along the way changed from time to time, but always to war. To death. To hardness. A sacrifice that the universe chose to nourish a colony of fat red blooms that would have collapsed without him, and yet never knew how they had choked the life from him – how his death preserved them.

And in that moment, Vorell knew something raw – something that did not belong to the ocean of dreams. Something branding their ribs from the inside. This sensation was their own, a feeling. A sensing. An infection. This is how Vorell came to define hate. And they hated the blossoms that grew atop the corpse of the blond warrior.

And in that moment, that singular moment, which they could have picked out of all of time and space, something fixed, unmoving, Vorell decided to change something.

It was against the laws of nature. Against the laws of time, death, life, everything that created and destroyed, everything that kept the bones alive beneath layers of skin. But Vorell changed it anyway. The arrow that pierced the warrior’s side – they moved it.

Vorell held their breath, watched the pattern of the universe loosen. Their hands hovered near it, ready to grab it, to pinch off the edges if all the world decided to unravel.

It didn’t.

The warrior lived. The warrior turned the wheels. He marched to war, to war, and then to the point of a spear nary a month later. The pattern snapped back into place. The blond blossom died. The red blossoms grew. Vorell nearly crushed the weave in their hands in the surge of hate.

Meddling became an obsession. Skew the spear. Turn the wheel. Block the sword. Turn the wheel. Miss the betrayal, the trap, the death. The wheel turned. The red flowers grew. They started over.

And there came a time when the pattern resisted the meddling altogether. When there was simply not enough leverage and ply to force it to obey. Vorell redefined hate to include the stubbornness of this world and its will. Something was missing. The pattern accepted changes from within itself so easily, so why could Vorell not coax out happiness for this single, lone blossom. This one beautiful, cosmically unwanted creature?

Oh. Oh.

There was no one to turn the wheel.

And Vorell did something in that pattern that they’d never thought to do before. They woke up. They opened their all-seeing eyes to the darkness of the cavern they’d been dedicated to at their birth. Vorell would turn the wheel.

Someone was waiting there, in the cave. A person Vorell had seen in the pattern in passing, in flickers. A woman dark and strong, and in her hand sat a single shard that glowed like a backward sun. She spoke words of fire and pain, and the shard bit through Vorell’s chest. The shard bit to the place the heart lay.

Vorell closed their eyes again. What was that event? What was that fear they felt still, fluttering through them like agony and sores? Vorell chose a different day to wake. She was there. Vorell chose again and again, and the further from that first day they chose, the woman came anyway. Waking by force, woken by the shard burrowing between ribs, pricking, stabbing, slipping through the blood. Whenever Vorell woke, she was there. And if Vorell would not wake, she would be there anyway.

No. They couldn’t do this. There was another way. There had to be because waking was too frightening, too red and bleeding and screaming. Vorell only ever watched the world go by, had never seen it or crawled upon it, delved into it like a worm for its sustenance. It was too crude. No. Surely there was some angle to the pattern where this woman never found them.

There wasn’t. In that moment Vorell decided to wake, she too stirred. She too came. Waking would come, and it would turn everything black. It would turn the flowers and the skies. It would turn the dreams and the nightmares. She would change the pattern and change Vorell, and they would change everything.

Vorell turned to the warrior for comfort, searched for the path that he had walked over and over again, to death, to ruin, and there it stood, still emblazoned upon the heart of the world itself. The sacrificial stem. Could the thing Vorell loved most hold up one more life? Could they turn the wheel if the warrior stemmed the pain?

And the first time Vorell burst from the forest, ragged and bleeding, running on feet that had never walked, the warrior caught them. Salved the cuts. Mended the bones. Touched the shard.

Vorell died.

The pattern recoiled and snapped back to the beginning. Vorell did not let him touch the shard. They traveled together, turned the first wheel, to war, to war. Vorell missed the arrow. They started over. Vorell blocked the arrow and the spear but forgot the betrayal. The red flowers grew.

It all bulged in their brain, like diseases trying to sprout, a thousand deaths, a hundred pitfalls. Vorell had to remember them all. The universe ran its courses through their skull for what felt like an eternity. What harm could one lifetime taken in its entirety do? It had to be taken – it would be taken! Vorell started again. Again. They dug the trenches, they avoided the dangerous path. They defeated the monster.

They kissed. Vorell defined love in the storm of the warrior’s eyes.

Variables came and went, used and discarded to create the perfect line – the perfect life for this single blossom. Vorell was too weak to protect the warrior, and so they became strong before they found him. They were beset by magic, and so Vorell became a sorcerer. And the further it went, the more the pattern chimed in pain, rang chords of torment between Vorell’s hands, but they did not stop twisting.

And all the while, the shard worked deeper in their chest. One day, a day that was the same no matter how many angles it was turned, the shard always found their heart. And Vorell bled dark. They died again and again, to the dark sun under their skin.

But that was it – the last variable.

Beyond the burrowing of the shard, the red flowers grew, but they grew around a pillar of bloom, radiant and golden. And that bloom lived and was known, shed light, lived long, and when it lived its last, to the final raggedy ticks of a fly’s wings, it died. It died and the red flowers knew it had lived. Knew that they were built upon its strength.

Vorell defined this outcome as happiness. They defined this lifeline as good. They put down the pattern. They opened their eyes.

The woman was there. In her hand, the shard of icefire jumped to her words of suffering and struck Vorell’s chest.

Vorell wept as they fell, as they changed. The woman smiled to see what she thought was misery. She stayed to watch over them as the light of the universe flooded out of their mind, whisked away. Became haikus and sonnets to the stars. She smiled, for she no doubt thought she was witnessing fear.

But Vorell had already defined happiness. The warrior waited.