A Real Remembrance
The ground trembles in time with Euphemia’s pounding heart.
This isn’t the revelation she planned for.
She had thought remembering himself would make everything right again. That he would be liberated. Overjoyed. Grateful, even.
She had not anticipated suspicion.
Of course he would be, though. This poor man—her poor husband—has been trapped inside a nightmare for nearly a year. He’s had to fight monsters and survive all on his own. It’s no wonder his reaction to uncovering the truth would also involve a healthy amount of wariness.
Euphemia only curses herself for not anticipating it.
But, she spins the cogs in her mind quickly.
She cannot tell him everything yet, not unless she wants the dream to end. And she doesn’t. Not yet. Not with him looking at her with so much distrust.
She can earn it back though.
Tell him something true. If only part of it.
“I believe I’m helping your mother.”
“My mother?” A flash of remembrance sparks in his eyes. But it’s overgrown by a bramble of confusion. “How do you know her?”
Euphemia worries at the inside of her mouth. “She hired me. I’ve been helping her tend to the manor.”
“I thought you said you ran a tavern.”
“I-I did. It wasn’t enough though. My family needed more. And now that my father…” Euphemia swallows the lump that always rises to her throat when she mentions him.
Dagfinn holds her gaze with no sympathy though. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know until tonight. After the first tremor, the manor started to look familiar, and then it struck me. This is the manor where I—” She chokes back the word live. “—where I work. And then everything sort of came to me. She has an ill son. You have been trapped here.”
“I’m ill?”
The question burrows into her like vermin, clawing in her belly and leaving her raw.
She thought he knew. Thought that knowing his name meant the full shape of who he was had returned to him. Thought that now he could her what happened and how she might save him in the waking world.
But the confusion etched into his sharp features fills her with dread.
“You…don’t remember?”
Slowly, he shakes his head. His gaze drifts down to his hands. “I only remember that Dagfinn is my name. That this room—” his gaze shifts to the doorway. “This room is mine. And this castle, I recognize it. Not as my own, but as something familiar. Like I’ve walked these halls hundreds of times.”
“You have,” Euphemia says with urgency. Whatever thoughts are forming, whatever memories are shimmering just beneath the surface, she needs him to reach for them. Needs to push him, if necessary. “You’ve lived here your whole life. With your mother. Your father. An advisor.”
Slowly, the crinkle in his brow deepens.
Euphemia gestures to the door. “I think the answers you’re seeking are in that chamber. All you need to do is enter.”
Dagfinn stares into the empty doorway, the door laying in splinters around them, the metal rings scattered at his feet.
He bends and retrieves one. Examines the etched surface. Runs his fingers over the fragments of an image. And for one fleeting moment, Euphemia thinks she’s finally going to know what’s beyond the mysterious door.
Until Dagfinn’s head snaps up.
Understanding makes his pupils contract.
He drops the metal ring and runs down the hallway in the opposite direction.
Down shifting hallways that tremble at his presence.
Through stone archways that yawn wider for him to pass.
Sconces burst with flame, lighting his path as Euphemia races after him.
Finally, they stop at the end of a plain passage, one with no windows and no runners. A single door stands at the end.
Instead of shoving it open, Dagfinn’s hand rests upon the dark wood. His chest rises and falls in deep, shaking swells of rhythm.
Euphemia steps beside him, hoping to be a calming presence.
Dagfinn glances down at her. He offers her a shaky smile. “I am starting to remember what I’ll find on the other side of this door.”
Euphemia frowns, looking at the simple wood frame. She’s certain she’s passed by this room during her exploration of Thorfell, but nothing about it is striking or memorable, it’s hard to imagine everything he’s been searching for might be on the other side.
But she laces her fingers with his and gives him a confident nod anyway.
Hands intertwined, Dagfinn pushes the door wide.
They enter a room thick with smoke and dim light. Juniper burns in metal pans throughout the room. Fresh rushes cover the floor beneath the bed like thatching, with meadowsweet and lavender scattered atop them.
But even with all the smoke, herbs, flowers, even with the window swung ajar to let in fresh air, the acrid stench of sickness and death clings to the room.
In the bed by the wall is a man tucked beneath heavy grey wolf pelts.
His face is anything but serene. A sheen of sweat glistens across his brow, and he winces as if in silent, perpetual pain.
And even though most of his hair has gone white, Euphemia can see the streaks of red that have resisted the change.
She knows without a doubt that this is Dagfinn’s father.
This is Otho’s deathbed.
Sitting on the bed, Kelda’s head is bowed, her forehead pressed against the back of her husband’s hand. Another version of Dagfinn stands beside her, this one seeming far younger, even though Euphemia knows this was only a year ago.
Her Dagfinn stands frozen in the room, watching what she suspects is his worst memory unfold before him.
Four words escape his father’s cracked lips. “Take care…of her.”
And then the man’s head slumps.
A father gone.
A husband unmade.
A region without their lord.
Euphemia’s vision swirls as the room becomes a kaleidoscope of warm browns and muted greys.
Days blur by. The old Dagfinn hunches over wine and vials of strange, bubbling liquids.
Stacks of parchment litter his desk, illuminated by flickering candles.
Euphemia can see the man Kelda told her about, the one obsessed with his studies, losing sleep over his each experiment, chasing solutions to problems no one else could understand.
The old Dagfinn slams his fists on the desk, knocking everything to the ground in a shattering of glass and smoking liquid.
Another swirl of color.
Another room.
Euphemia sees Kelda begging the old Dagfinn to sit with her—in the great hall, in the sitting room, on a horse while they go for a ride. All of her pleas are met with silence and a cold shoulder. Until eventually, Kelda gives up. She stops asking.
More days pass and the old Dagfinn spirals deeper.
His cheeks become gaunt. His eyes hazy with delirium.
Euphemia knows this madness.
The magnitude of the grief it takes to consume a person.
But it’s more than that. She sees herself in the way this man loses himself in his work the same way she can with her brews. He spends hours every day examining every mixture, every formula, every failed attempt, tinkering and trying again until he gets it right.
But perfect for what? She cannot yet understand what it is he’s so focused on.
Perhaps this was simply the way he knew to survive, throwing himself into his work the same way she threw herself into serving her family and filling the void her father left behind.
She never realized how tragic it was before now.
The room shifts around them one final time, bringing them to the last day in old Dagfinn’s life.
The day the curse took him.
Only, it is not a curse. Not in the way Kelda believes.
It is Dagfinn’s own creation.
A brew that hits him harder than all the wine and mead she’s witnessed him drink until this point.
The old Dagfinn staggers out of his study—but even in this state, he has the forethought to lock the chamber behind him. Out of habit? Out of fear that someone else might stumble upon it?
He barely makes it another three steps before the concoction seizes him and the old Dagfinn falls like a tree.
Then the memory fades.
The sickroom returns around them, only this time Kelda, Otho, and the old Dagfinn are gone.
Euphemia checks Dagfinn with a worried glance.
He’s still standing by some small miracle. But he looks as though he might crumble at any moment, as though the memories are still beating him from all sides, the weight of the revelations devastating.
When Dagfinn finally talks, his voice is so raspy it sounds as though he is speaking through fire. “I remember. I remember it all.”
Slowly, Euphemia approaches, a heaviness in her heart drawing her closer.
She’d known they had both lost their fathers, but she hadn’t realized until now how similar their grief was.
Not identical.
No one can share the same pain.
But something similar.
Something that binds them.
Something they can both understand.
“Our entire household fell ill that autumn,” Dagfinn says, though Euphemia gets the sense he’s telling himself more than her, the memory actively returning to him. “Spiking fevers. Muscle pains and spasms. My mother and I recovered quickly though, so we thought at first it was a simple cold.”
Dagfinn’s gaze wanders to the bed.
“My father was not so lucky. He became so feverish, he would shake uncontrollably. Most days, he hardly ate. When he did, he couldn’t keep anything down. And just kept getting worse. His fingers and toes started to blacken. And all I wanted to do was to help.”
Dagfinn drags a hand through the long, auburn hair that has returned to him. He sighs as if he still can’t believe the sensation is real. Both grateful and regretful.
A shuddering breath escapes him as his gaze falls to the bedside table and an empty vial knocked onto on its side. “Nothing I tried worked. And my father grew weaker and weaker, until he finally left us.”
Euphemia shifts closer until she can place a hand on his shoulder. “He is lucky he had someone like you trying everything you could to help him. You know that, don’t you?”
A slow nod.
Suddenly, a gauzy shimmer ripples over the bed.
It’s nearly translucent at first, but slowly the haze thickens until a body takes shape.
Dagfinn’s father reappears before them much like Euphemia’s had.
No longer sick nor weary.