A/N: Fair warning, this is dark. It contains an ambiguous sex scene that could be read either as a violent rape or as rough consensual sex. It also contains an act of non-sexual violence against an infant and references to stillbirth.
An unexpurgated MA version can be found on AO3, where I have the same username: StopTalkingAtMe.
All comments are hugely appreciated, including constructive criticism.
The Remanada Retold
Another day and the baby would have died. It's a squalling scrap of a thing, half-buried in the dirt. Sed-Yenna drops to her knees beside it, her bare feet bloodied from the walk up the hill.
Her milk has come in, and her breasts are swollen and sore, full while her arms and belly lie empty. Her nipples prickle at the baby's cries and a warm wetness trickles down the underside of her breasts as she tugs the baby from the earth and cradles it to her chest. The baby's head bobs, already searching, mouth gaping like a baby bird's, all hungry little beak and probing tongue.
It demands. And how can Sed-Yenna do anything but obey?
She scoops out her heavy breast, sticky with milk. The baby's mouth gapes wide and fastens on her nipple. It is a boy, she sees, numbly, with a shock of dark hair. Her own child was born with the cord knotted tight around its neck: a girl and almost bald. An earthy scent clings to him, as if this sacred place isn't ready to give up its own quite yet. There is a moment of searing pain, and with it surging fury: that her own little one should be snatched away, and this unnatural little brat, this cuckoo, put in her place, but the pain is gone as quickly as it came, and with it the resentment is swept away.
She loves him at once. She has no choice. And while he feeds, she tells him the tale of how he came to be.
~0~
The army of the dead is waiting for them.
Nearly fifty corpses have been dragged from the devastated village and strung along the length of the hedge of thorn bushes that marks out the boundary of the field where cattle once grazed. Chief among the bodies is a young woman, as yet untouched by rot, her once-golden hair light enough that she might have hailed from the north. She's slight as a child and no doubt was lovely once, her hair woven through with thorns as an unmarried girl might weave her hair with wild flowers. Her chest has been hacked open, and there is a wound in her forehead where a weapon, a pick-axe perhaps, has pierced her skull, half-hidden behind her tangle of matted hair. The man strung beside her wears the carcass of a butchered bull like a cloak. It was been lashed to him, but still scavengers have worked the horns askew.
Stumbling and sluggish from the unnatural heat of the day, they cut the corpses down. Thorns cling to skin and hair, reluctant to relinquish their prizes. Hrol cuts the woman down himself, cradles her in his arms like a child. Her head lolls, and the white glint of splintered bone winks at him through her hair.
After that, the dreams are worse.
They're all dreaming now, even the ones who claim otherwise. Even Hrol's shield-thane and uncle, stoic and stolid as a boulder, rarely sleeps now, but sits by the fire and stares at the stars as if the answers he seeks might be written there. As if he even knows the answers he is seeking for.
The boy of fourteen summers continues to wake them all with his weeping. At first they laughed at him, mocked him relentlessly as men will do to the youngest of their number, but one by one, they have succumbed to the dreams, and one by one they have ceased to laugh.
When night falls they miss the heat of the day, and never mind how unnatural it is, how it leaves their skin drenched with sweat that pools in the smalls of their backs, and plasters their hair close to their skulls. The heat leaves them weak and stumbling as newborn lambs, enfeebles their thoughts and tangles their tongues. It dries up the waterways, and what water they do find is brackish and bitter-tasting, poisoned by the sickness in the land and protected by cursed spirits which claw at them from the depths, all jealous eyes and serrated teeth.
And still they miss the heat of the day. Because when the sun sets the cold descends and the world itself recedes, until there seems nothing but the fire and the ever-shrinking patch of land around it, and the cold needling its way into their bones so they'll never feel warm again.
By day they sweat, and by night they freeze, and all the while his men watch him, the sickness in the land bleeding into their hearts and minds, and Hrol pretends he doesn't see how they have started to whisper amongst themselves. How the playful rivalries between them have begun to turn sour.
Two of his men discover a spring where the water flows red and clotted, fight over whether they should risk drinking it. They have to be hauled apart before they butcher each other and their blood spills down to poison the spring still further. Hrol sees in the depths of the spring a sly unblinking little eye, a clawed little hand, tiny as a child's and tipped with talons. Scales flash in the sunlight, a ripple spreads out across the tainted water, and then there might have been nothing there at all.
She visits him in his dreams, the unmarried girl. Except for the wound in her skull which drips rubies she has been healed and made whole again, although she still wears the thorns knotted into her hair. Her bare feet leave little impression on the heather and her legs are dampened with dew. And she shows him what they did and what was done to her. She shows him the ragged army that swept down upon the village like a storm cloud, like a flood. She shows him the screams of the families trapped inside their cottages as they burned alive, and he clutches her hand tight while she turns her gaze up to his.
Do you see?
He sees. He has no choice.
Even closing his eyes is not enough to break the vision. He can smell it too, the smoke, the charring meat, the shit and piss and metallic heat of blood that taints the air.
When he opens his eyes she's no longer whole. The gash opens up in her chest as she opens her mouth, wider, wider, her jaw unhinging, and deep in her throat and the hollow behind her ribs he sees the writhing mass of serpents. Her hand closes tight around his.
Rough calloused fingers dig into meat, teeth scrape against skin. A bunched fist slams into the side of a skull. Through teeth and terror and pain, she teaches him what it means to be reduced to naught but flesh and meat. To be made a thing. He feels what she feels, and the knowledge is a thorn working its way beneath his skin.
When he wakes up, he is weeping almost as badly as the boy. He catches himself, shame stemming the tide of his terror, and in its wake follows rising fury, a blind all-consuming rage like the dragonfires of old. The thorn is still in place.
He is not the only one awake. His shield-thane sits by the fire, and the boy is awake too. Neither of them looks at him. Both of them are lost in their own thoughts, but as Hrol rises, pushing himself from the sweat-dampened comfortless confines of his bedroll, his shield-thane wordlessly holds out the skin of wine. Hrol takes it and settles by the fire. There are scant traces of comfort to be found in the heat of the flames, and a little more in the sour wine. Not nearly enough.
Clouds shroud the stars and the moons from view, thunderheads promising rain that never comes. A far off growl of thunder breaks the silence, and Hrol drops back his head, parting his lips as if expecting rain.
They are all fearful and anxious, now, these men he believed to be the bravest, and who now flinch at shadows, and listen to the murmurings of jealous spirits. They whisper that this is a fool's errand, that they are fools for following him, when they once swore they would follow him into death itself. In this world there is no loyalty.
They are broken, he thinks. This land is breaking them, just as it is breaking him. And he longs for home.
~0~
The next time he sees her it's different. In the deep crevice of a valley, they stumble along the track of cracked earth where a river once flowed, the air hot and dense and muggy. Overhead the unbroken thunderheads are sundered like torn curtains and the sun comes streaming though. It is the first true glimpse of the sun any of them have seen since they left their homes, and for a moment every one of them is struck blind, squinting in the molten light. When their vision clears, she's there, appearing this time not only to Hrol, but to everyone. They see her as she truly is, not a peasant marking her life in the cycles of the year, but as El-Estia, the slave queen, with the wound in her forehead spilling rubies into her right hand and serpents of dragonfire coiled around her left.
The storm breaks. His men fall to their knees and pray and beg and weep, but it is to Hrol that she speaks, and her voice is the thunder that rips the world open to reveal the void. Although she stands on the far bank of the dried-up river he feels her hand nestled tight in his.
When she flees he takes chase. He pursues her through hills and forests, and of his broken weakened men, only his shield-thane is able to keep pace.
When he catches her he tumbles her onto the ground, scattering leaf litter and raising a cloud of dust from the cracked earth. Her bare foot collides with his chest, and she scrabbles at his eyes with her nails as he seizes her waist and drags her back, pins her down. Inside his skull her voice sings of teeth and terror and pain.
Her hair coils around his hand like a snake, and he leans close, so close she can hear his whisper above the sound of thunder, above the pulsing sound that might be his heart or the blood rushing in his ears or the world cracking like an egg. He tells her how he loves her, how through this act they will make the world whole again, and she opens herself to him, jewels spilling on the earth.
His unclean flesh presses against hers, and dragon-fire scorches them both clean. He finds the blood-hot heart of her, and she gasps at his touch. He kisses her, swallowing up her cries with his mouth, while his fingers hook inside her as a thorn might hook in flesh.
His eyes are closed, but he can feel the gash in her chest, can feel himself falling forwards, slipping into it, and he shifts position, plants his free hand on the ground by her head. The wet earth sucks at his fingers.
He jerks his hand free of her, feels how she shudders, before he slides himself inside her to the hilt.
They sink into the mud, with no pretence at gentleness now from either one of them. He gasps and drives himself towards his pleasure, towards hers, while she whispers in his ear, Do you see?
What he sees are rubies red as blood spilling onto the wet earth. A mouth filled with snakes. He smells the rising scent of seed and wet soil.
Inch by inch she sinks backwards into the ground, until he feels the chill of the cold earth on his dragon-fire scorched skin. The rain pounds on his back, pressing them deeper into the earth, until it seems no longer a woman that he's fucking but the ground itself.
Her tongue works its way into his mouth like a serpent, past his lips and teeth and tongue, to the back of his throat and down his gullet. There seems no end to it, no more than there is to the storm or to the thunder or to the rain turning the earth to mud around them. It chokes him, penetrating him as he penetrates her, and when he tries to fight it, she tightens her limbs around him, closing tight like a trap. Her muscles flutter, rapid as the heartbeat of a bird. She's almost submerged now, only her face visible, the tips of her breasts.
The earth closes around him like a fist, and a surging tide of pleasure floods him, and it sweeps the world away.
And up through the earth come brambles, tangling like snakes around his wrists and ankles. He realises too late, weak from his spending, tugs against them as the thorns hook through his skin. The snake in his throat and gullet choke off his screams as the brambles hold him fast and drag him down to join her in the earth.
~0~
All this and more the shepherdess Sed-Yenna whispers to the baby while it suckles, nestled in her arms. What memories she has of her own little girl are already slipping. Another day or so and Sed-Yenna will have forgotten she ever had another little one at all. She tells the child how unwillingly the earth gave up its prize, as resentfully as the thorn bushes gave up theirs. How when his men dragged him free Hrol's eyes were unseeing, and his mouth and throat choked up with mud.
But his seed had taken root. Her sagging belly twinges as she tells the baby how the world swelled, and the mound became a mountain.
Her nipple slips from the baby's mouth. The ache in her breasts has eased, and the baby's head lolls, milk-drunk. She brushes back his shock of hair, crusted with dried earth, runs her thumb over his forehead, tracing his brow. She can feel it beneath the skin, beneath the bone, crying out to her.
Her nails press into his skin, like thorns. The baby stirs, wriggling in her lap as she presses harder. His cry is the ragged relentless scream of the newborn, the rage and heartache of something too young to understand, but she has seen how ancient his eyes are and she knows he lies.
The baby twists as she lays him on the ground, his mouth a void, half-moon dents in his forehead. Her breath comes in wrenching gasps, as she tells him how sorry she is, how sorry, but she has no choice. She pins him down, a knee on one tiny little hand, her palm against the top of his head, fingers nestling in the pulsing hollow of his fontanelle, while her other hand closes around a rock.
It takes two sharp blows to split open the baby's skull, a third to crack it open enough that she can claw her way past skin, past bone, while the baby's outraged screams die away to whimpers. She wrenches her hand away, sees a glimmer of red in the pulped mess she's made of the baby's skull. The rock slips from nerveless fingers.
It's there, the Chim-el Adabal, sign of the covenant with Akatosh, nestled within the child's skull like a pearl within an oyster. The baby gives a wretched shuddering cough, and begins to cry again, not from fear or pain, but in outrage. Sed-Yenna laughs, presses the back of her hand to her mouth, and feels the dampness of tears on her cheeks, before she scoops the child up once more and sets him to her other breast.