Heart's Fortress

A/N: Written in tandem with my fellow player/author Brin Londo5. I love my barbarian! Standard disclaimer applies, I don't own Exalted, please don't sue. Grimnyr is Brin's, Virtuous Guardian is mine.

As Sarie limped away to her quarters and Jirish stomped away to find Shadow, Grimnyr was left seething over the perceived insult to his mate. Thinking of Virtuous Guardian, the Haltan barbarian looked around the courtyard, but found she had left during the argument.

He found her in one of the Imperial Palace's many gardens. This was a tame place, of carefully tended trees and flowers, of paths of flagstones and crushed shell, where not so much as an unapproved insect was allowed to spoil the effect. Grimnyr didn't particularly care for such places, but they were the closest he could get to the forests of his birth. Apparently Virtuous Guardian felt the same way; she was sitting beneath a tree that would be laden with blossoms in a few months but for now was only a dark gray tracery against a paler sky. She wore the leather trousers that were her only concession to winter, with a woolen cape shrouding her bare shoulders and breasts. Her head was bent so that her short chestnut hair hid her face.

She stiffened slightly as Grimnyr sat next to her, a subtle signal that he ignored. He had learned long ago that when Guardian was troubled, he had to pry the details out of her. Essence shimmered, and Grimnyr's grimcleaver Icefire lay across his lap.

"The last time I interrogated someone, I used this axe," he said. A quick motion of his hand sent the blade Elsewhere again. "Since I happen to be fond of all of your limbs, I'll just ask: What's wrong?"

She was silent for a moment. "Many things," she replied quietly. "I—Grimnyr, I am desperately unhappy, and I do not know what to do."

"Tell me," he said.

She lifted her head now, though she still did not look at him. "I hate this place", she said, and there was more passion in that simple phrase than he had ever heard in her voice before. "It's been more than two hundred years since I left, and in that two centuries nothing has changed! Generation after generation raised to be nothing more than cogs in the machine of state, useful only so far as they can further an abstract ideal, where the most one can hope for is an occupation that suits you and a spouse you do not hate. Only the faces are different, and those not so much as you would think. Iescaped this place, this life, and I never wanted to go back. And I love you Grimnyr, and I thought being with you would be enough, but it isn't. I want to go back home, to the life I had before you came, and the urge to run is almost more than I can resist."

Grimnyr resisted the urge to reach out to her. "If that were all, you wouldn't still be here," he observed.

"No," she agreed after a moment. "I wouldn't." She stood, drawing the cape closer about her slender body, and began to pace with slow measured steps.

"It's also you, and me. I look at Shadow and Jirish, and I remember what we had before, and I want that again. And yet…I also remember how that promise was broken. I remember how I cut your heart out and you could not or would not raise your axe to me. And I remember how it felt after, that I had cut out my own heart, and Grimnyr—" Her voice broke on a long shuddering breath. "Grimnyr, I could not survive that sort of pain again."

"I think not," he told her. "You are stronger than that. No, hear me out." He paused. "You remember that you had slain me, but I remember why… the Curse. It affects all of us, Solar and Lunar alike. And, I think, the dragon-bloods, as well, but that is just my guess. What you did (or your other self did, mayhap) was justified. That is truth." He summoned Icefire once more, and looked at the polished, reflective orichalcum. "The gods made such as I to be their weapons, like the artificers made this axe. Made them too well, I think. Weapons are what we are, and what we will always be, and woe to the day we run out of enemies, as we did so long ago, lest we turn on one another again." He sent the blade away once more, as his caste mark began to sear his brow with the glow of spent essence. "Do you think the Primordials just cursed the Solars? Hah! The gods themselves, just like us, are caught up in their worst excesses of their natures, trapped within the thrall of the Games of Divinity. The Solars burn in their own passions, whether those of battle, those of artifice, or those of control. The Lunars? Woman, I'm a Haltan, and I've seen the curse and its effects on the Lunars, their shifting forms mirrored in their shifting moods and passions, and thinking that their tattoos stave off the entirety of their curse, just as it staves off the curse's effects on their outward bodies. Or the Wyld's, as it may be. The Sidereals? Do you think that they looked upon our rule of Creation and were satisfied with being merely the advisors of creation's rulers, and that they did not lust after power of their own? Or that the Dragon-blooded did not do the same, or were they content to forever be no more than our foot-soldiers?"

He looked long and hard at her. "I am, and am not, Wanlei Fu, the Axe of Ten Thousand Thunders, just as you once were Shezeal, his mate. History repeats itself, true, but never the same way, or by the same people. There are no certainties, good or ill,
I-Chung She. To think that what happened to our past selves will happen to us is not just foolishness, it is vanity. While we labor under the curse, we are also men, not monkeys in the garden, and we can learn. The past cannot repeat, if we do not let it, and I care too much for you to just give up." He stood. "Come. The night is falling, and there is no need to burn essence when there is a warm room where we can be alone as easily as sit in this chill air."

She stood still for a moment, her back slim and straight as a sword blade. Then he saw her shoulders relax, and she turned to him with a look of wonder on her face.

"How is it that you are the warrior and I the scholar, when such wisdom can flow from you, unlooked for?"

He embraced her, and she did not fight as he kissed her soundly. "Because," he told her when he finally released her, "I am a barbarian, and before I was Exalted I was a mortal. In Halta, we live less than a handful of decades. We do not live long enough to tell ourselves such foolish lies."