Vissa

Year 56

Vissa was never frightened of rivers when she was immortal, but now, as a Priestess, she can’t persuade her feet to approach the shore.

She clutches the ivory pitcher to her chest. The sound of her unsteady inhale is lost under the rage of the river’s downhill crash, and it would also be lost under her heartbeat if she had one. Vissa feels solid, real, alive enough, but the Deus Ira told her that this isn’t her body. This is a projection of her. Her body and her heartbeat are in a temple on Imitia below, and whatever’s left of her is here in the Reverie.

So maybe I can’t drown at all.

That comforting thought is a new avenue to the same well-worn location: Do it. Gather the water. You have to. And if you gather a lot, you won’t have to come here again so soon.

Vissa inches closer. Whether this is a real body or not, the noise of the water thunders against her long, pointed ears. If she stares long enough, she feels like the river between the black rocks will pull her in.

She was born from a river. She’s Astaera, creature of the earth, creature of the wilds, creature of magic. Because of her stringy, dripping black hair and pale, blueish skin, her Astaera sisters said that she came from the thick river muck just before the winter of the war that changed it all. Vissa clawed her way out, already grown, a muddy-winged fledgling with no knowledge of Imitia except the freezing water and the greedy want for the cold, grey-tinged air above. She didn’t care about how the current sucked her under with each lunge for the surface. She was immortal and so she knew better than anything how to survive.

And now she’s shaking as she gets to her knees and dips the pitcher in.

There’s a brush of something soft on her cheek. A powdery grey moth, wingspan wider than her palm, flutters past. On its wings stare two silvery eyes. It twirls in the air, as if dancing in the river’s mist, before flying into the dense forest.

Some of Vissa’s stinging anxiety lets up.

She needn’t worry. She’s being watched. If she slips, the Deus Ira will help her.

The other Priestesses before her weren’t helped. They died. But that’s because they didn’t simply make a mistake, they did something wrong. They were angry, because Astaera are so often angry, but the Deus Ira chose Vissa this time because she was different, she was special, wasn’t she? Not any girl can be a Priestess.

Fewer can be a Priestess and survive more than a handful of years.

Vissa’s hands go numb with cold where they dip in the river. The current nearly wrenches the pitcher out of her grip. But finally, after Vissa closes her eyes and counts, the pitcher is full and she can yank it out, nearly toppling backwards off the slippery slope as she does so.

Vissa darts away—but not too fast. She can’t spill any of this.

She scurries through the forest. Where did she last run out of water? She can hear the river’s wailing no matter where she goes in the Reverie, so that doesn’t help her judge the distance. Maybe distance doesn’t matter at all. It seems like every time she turns around, the forest changes.

Vissa heads towards where the canopy breaks for the sun she has imagined, but so often forgets to move.

As she goes, she finds little patches of earth and gives them drips of water—not too much, not too little. She darkens the earth beneath patches of yellow flowers that turn with her like she’s their sun. She makes parched geodes and stones shiny and smooth. She uncurls sprigs of leaves that have rolled up tight to preserve what moisture they can. The moth is the only other creature with Vissa besides the plants.

The Deus Ira—Nineira, she told Vissa to call her—had explained that every Astaera girl makes a different Reverie and controls the magic in a different way.

“The magic appeared to Rosirin as an endless symphony of which she was the only musician. Merilee knit the magic into an infinite scarf, its stability depending on if she could resist letting a stitch slip.”

Vissa thought of Merilee, who, in her death throes, caused the southernmost coast to fall into the sea in shreds and tangles, like when a pulled thread unravels a dress.

The Deus Ira asked, “What will yours be?”

Hers is a forest with no borders. It’s not like home, like the Culhain Se—in many ways, but mostly in the way that she is always alone. She is used to being surrounded by her sisters.

She wishes she could make the Reverie into something simple like her sisters before her. Shrink it into a small garden like the ones humans keep behind their cottages. Like that, maybe she could see which rocks and which plants correspond to which parts of Imitia. Maybe then the river of magic, coming in from wherever in the galaxy it flows, won’t be so frightening. She could find every island and every town with ease and never worry that she was abandoning one to starve without magic, and disappointing the Deus Ira.

Nineira.

Vissa wants to find home. The Culhain Se, the court of the Astaera and all her sisters.

They didn’t celebrate when she left. Instead they wept. In the way she supposes animals would weep—senseless and deaf and like sadness is physical pain. And eventually turning to anger.

They knew all Priestesses die, when all Astaera live forever.

But Vissa is different. She has to be.

Vissa continues through the forest, delicately dripping water on everything she sees that feels to her like it’s a part of Imitia rather than just a part of the Reverie. She can still hear the river, so loud like any moment she’ll step through a patch of spindly trees and her foot will land right in it and she’ll be swept away. She focuses on her pitcher and on her feet so she won’t think of it.

And so she stops herself only inches away from the wall of black.

Vissa stumbles back. Water spills off the lip of the pitcher and spatters the ground, too much of it, even as she tries to catch it, but she is afraid of accidentally brushing a hand past the invisible barrier that separates her part of the Reverie from theirs.

Where the living things are. Snarling wolves, yellow-eyed; starved skeletal ravens; snakes and monsters bigger than anything she saw in the Culhain Se. Things she wouldn’t fear when she was immortal, but now she thinks of them and wants to cry. She stares into the dark and feels them staring back. There is a part of Imitia that was swallowed up in the war, ate away into blackness and nothing. This is that. This, she cannot touch.

She turns away. The moth brushes past her face. And the water rages.

And roars. And rushes. It’s closer now, she knows it, and she starts to run without looking.

The water in the pitcher sloshes, soaking her down the front and making mud that her bare feet splash in. Ruining something in Imitia. Filling somewhere with wild magic—with a plague, a tornado, an earthquake. Here, the Reverie is ruinous with a flood.

She runs and runs and runs. The water is behind her, massive as any storm. She throws the pitcher aside, needing her arms to race, uncaring of whatever damage she’s caused on Imitia. The moth is here—the Deus Ira sees what’s happening. She won’t blame her. The Deus Ira with her upper face obscured by a giant shining moth, her hands made of gold. She knows everything. She knows which Priestesses will survive, and Vissa will survive.

Nineira promised.

And so she keeps running.

But the world is not hers—the Reverie never felt like hers, really—and so when it tips beneath her, it’s hardly a surprise. She pitches onto her elbows and whirls onto her back. Never leave herself exposed. Never be caught unaware. Her instincts rush back into her, as simple and effective as an animal’s. She is Astaera, and so she turns on her back with claws ready and teeth bared.

Once she was made of magic. This water would move when she wanted it to. Now she only serves it.

The river rears up before her, white with foam and black with anger, throwing her in its cold shadow. And in the dark weaves the Deus Ira’s white moth. Those silvery eyes take her in, impassive, blinking into the dark. Astaera instinct urges her to swipe at it.

The instant Vissa’s fist closes over the powdery wings, the river of magic washes her away.