9. Over the Edge
Over the Edge
Darien
“W ake up, son,” said a gruff voice.
Staggeringly cold water splashed against Darien’s face.
His eyes snapped open. A man towered over him with an empty bucket in his hand, the falling sun at his back outlining his large frame.
The falling sun? It had only been noon when Darien followed his hallucinations deeper into the trees. How had he lost so many hours?
A voice echoed in his mind, calling his name. How did his hallucinations know his name? The fuzziness of sleep befuddled Darien’s thoughts as he regarded the massive figure standing before him, blinking through the droplets clinging to his eyelashes. “Aagen?”
“Who else?”
Darien shook the water from his hair, then took the hand that his adoptive father offered. With the sun setting behind him, Aagen’s red hair appeared to be on fire. It burned and curled at the edges as if alive. Another hallucination.
Sensing his confusion, Aagen gripped his shoulder. “Are you alright, son?”
“I don’t know.” Darien watched the flames sizzle out, while tendrils of smoke settled into the streaks of gray in Aagen’s beard. “What was I just doing?”
“Snoring loud enough to wake the dead in Hel.” Aagen snorted. “Jon came in, said you were seeing things. When you didn’t come back to the barn, I started to wonder where you’d gotten to.” Aagen’s eyes never left Darien’s. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
Darien shrugged as his brain struggled to catch up. “I don’t know. I didn’t think I was asleep, but if I was, I had the strangest dream.” Darien rubbed the back of his neck. “Aagen, I need to tell you something.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something else happened at the Wall, didn’t it? Let’s go inside and have a chat, you and I.”
Walking with a slight limp, Aagen headed toward the house, leaving Darien no choice but to follow.
The limp was an old injury—courtesy of a bad fall years before that had never healed properly—but it never slowed Aagen down.
Darien rushed to keep up. Once inside, Aagen flicked on one of the lamps seldom used during the summer evenings, closing the door firmly behind him.
It bathed the room in a dim yellow as Aagen settled on their old couch with his bad leg straightened out before him. “Alright, son, talk.”
Darien could not have stopped the words if he wanted to.
He told Aagen the truth about meeting Anara—how he was paralyzed when she touched his skin, how she transformed from girl to woman, and how the hallucinations began shortly after.
Darien paced the short length of the room as he described Anara’s latest visit and his most recent hallucination.
When he finished, Darien waited for a response. Aagen took his time, twisting a braided section of his long beard between his fingers.
At last, he asked, “You said her name was Anara?”
“Yes.”
“And she first appeared to you as a child?”
“Yes.”
“But later appeared to you as a woman?”
Darien resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Yes, Aagen, I’ve already said this.”
“Did she ever take another form?”
Darien scoffed, “No, I would’ve remembered that.”
Aagen stroked his beard. “I didn’t think there were any left of the undiluted Ancestral Bloodline. Age manipulation is a complex form of Rubinian galdr .”
“What’s galdr ?”
Ignoring the question, Aagen leaned forward on the couch, his hands folded under his chin. “These hallucinations, as you call them. What can you recall from them?”
Darien fought the headache forming in his temples. “They feel so vivid when they happen, but afterwards, they’re a blur. I can’t remember them.”
“Or you don’t want to.”
“What do you mean?”
“In any of these dreams, did anyone seem to recognize you?”
A chill settled on the back of Darien’s neck. How did Aagen know that?
Taking his silence as a confirmation, Aagen nodded.
“It sounds to me as though these are not hallucinations at all; they are visions of your past. Memories, even. Perhaps there is something that you don’t want to remember, and so you war with yourself.
The part of you that tries to remember against the part of you that wants to forget. ”
Darien waited for the loud, horse-like bray that Aagen would expel after a good joke. It did not come. The understanding that his adoptive father was deadly serious settled in his stomach like the flu, threatening to expel itself from Darien’s body one way or another.
“You can’t be serious.” Darien could hear the disbelief in his own voice. “I’ve lived on your orchard my whole life.”
Aagen stomped his good foot against the ground, a sure sign of his growing agitation. “You have lived here only a little more than a year.”
The ground seemed to tilt almost as if Darien were back in that tree, his foundation cracking beneath him. “What are you talking about?”
“Look, son.” Aagen paused to shift his bad leg out in front of him. When he looked up, there was steel in his eyes. “Darien, for the past year I’ve treated you like a son. But even before today, we both knew that wasn’t true.”
Darien ignored the pang in his heart. In Darien’s mind, it was true. He was Aagen’s son in every sense of the word that mattered. He had no memories of the time before he’d been dropped off on Aagen’s front porch. He’d been too young. Hadn’t he?
Oblivious to Darien’s inner turmoil, Aagen continued, “I wish you were my blood. Ever since you’ve been in my care, you’ve asked me questions about your origin, but I never knew when was the right time to give you the answers. I suppose that time is now.”
Darien didn’t respond. After asking for so long, now that Aagen was ready to answer, Darien was afraid.
His eyes darted to the floor, tracing the runes that Aagen had carved into the wooden boards.
Soothed by their familiar lines, Darien squared his shoulders, forcing himself to look into Aagen’s face. “Tell me.”
“When the rulers of Safír still belonged to the Royal Blood, I was just a boy working in my father’s orchard.
I was thirteen when a woman appeared on our porch.
” Aagen’s eyes misted over as though he were lost in that moment.
“Even I, the young and naive boy that I was, could feel the galdr, the power of the gods, radiating from her. She foretold the fall of Safír, telling us that she would be bringing someone to us. We were to protect this person with our lives. I didn’t believe her.
I’d only ever known a time of peace; it seemed impossible that our kingdom could fall.
My father must have known something because he never hesitated.
He swore that he would protect whoever it was she sent to us, but I was surprised when she required the same oath from me.
“I thought it a grand story at the time, and you know how I like stories.” Aagen shook his head at his own youthfulness.
“Then came the Great Hrun , the fall of our King and Queen. You never know fear until you can taste it, Darien, and I knew fear by the taste of copper in my mouth. We expected the woman to return any day, but she did not. The Empress won, my father died in the war, and the Wall was erected. At fifteen, I took over the orchard. I kept my head down, figuring that whoever the woman meant to send to us had died during the war.”
Questions piled on top of one another in his mind, but Darien bit his tongue. As Aagen spoke, images like hallucinations crossed Darien’s mind. He could see the woman, but the vision was blurry. When he tried to bring it into focus, the image shattered and disappeared.
“A year ago,” Aagen continued, “the woman appeared again, this time with a companion. You.”
“You were a tall, lanky boy on the edge of manhood with a glazed look in your eyes. You walked straight to this couch and passed out. She told me your name and that in the morning, you would remember growing up on this farm, and the rest of the field hands would remember it too. I’ll admit, I didn’t ask questions; I think I momentarily forgot how to speak.
I’ll never forget what she said to me before she departed.
‘Remember your oath, Aagen Oginson. Protect him. Many search for him as we speak. Among them is a friend who will awaken him when he is ready. Until then, he is your responsibility.’
“Then she vanished. I mean, she disappeared from before my eyes like one of the AEsir . Freed from my reverie, I carried you to the spare bedroom and stayed awake by your bed, flinching at every noise, convinced that the sentries would come. I didn’t know how to explain your presence to the rest of the farm hands; I didn’t trust the woman’s promise.
“I must have dozed off. I awoke to Jon barging right into your room and waking you. He knew your name, called you lazy, and told you to help him in the orchards. If I was amazed then, I was far more perplexed when you woke up, told him you were on the way, and said good morning to me as if you’d known me all your life.
I was overwhelmed with memories that I knew were not my own.
I remembered finding you on my doorstep as a young child, raising you as my own, teaching you how to walk out on tree branches, and telling you the stories of the Norn and AEsir around bright fires during the dead of winter.
I remembered nursing you back to health when you caught the fever as a child.
Yet, at the same time, I knew the reality in which you were not a part.