Chapter 4

Airani: Ice Wisps

Tatki: Mother

Tatkan: Grandfather

~TX~

She names him Jeremie.

He's a tiny, little thing who gives her gummy smiles and bright eyes when she cradles him in her arms. He seldom cries and doesn't make a fuss when she feeds him.

He is hers.

Her Jeremie.

He doesn't belong to those humans who discarded him just because of conjoined toes in his right feet. They left him in her forest, expecting him to die. She swathed him in her furry cloak and picked him up instead, carried him back to the human settlement to buy some milk.

The thought of returning him never once crossed her mind.

After all, the things left behind in the woodlands belong to her.

She holds him carefully, making sure her hands don't touch his soft, pale skin. And when she blows raspberries on his stomach, her lips are lighter than butterfly wings.

He fills her silence with the noises he makes and late in nights when she points out the stars and sings, he coos in pleasure.

He rarely cries and likes sleeping in her arms, fidgeting only when she puts him down in the nest of soft pelts she has made on one side of her bed.

She tells him stories, half forgotten ones that she once heard from her father, and makes new ones when he opens his mouth and scrunches his face on her second retelling of the same story.

She forgets the mad goddess and Elijah who had tried sharing her solitude. She forgets the glint of goddess's sword when she tore apart Elijah.

She forgets that her godhood is her punishment.

Jeremie delights in little snow sparrows chasing butterflies made of ice lattices. He laughs when frost jaguars open their maw and roar, shaking the garden of ice flowers she created for his pleasure.

For the first time, the cold in her veins and her bones doesn't hurt. His incoherent rambling coaxes ice readily from her palms, and the little shapes rising around her don't feel like betrayal.

She is going to teach him everything she knows, and also the things that she doesn't.

One day, she is going to walk with him to the valley of flowers in the South and show him the vibrant colors that bloom on delicate branches. They are going to eat delicacies and laugh at plays humans put for entertainment. She is going to teach him about stars and constellations, about gods, demons and dragons.

Every day, she mixes a drop or two of her blood in his milk to make him impervious from common human injuries and maladies.

And after a month, her hands hold him without his blanket of fur, and he doesn't flinch from her touch.

She kisses his forehead in delight, laughter comes bubbling past her lips, it's tone stilted and awkward.

He gurgles in response to her sound and she twirls in a circle, holding him protectively in her arms, sunlight shining like diamonds atop hard ice that stretches outside her door.

Her Jeremie.

One day he will ask her all the questions she annoyed her father with. And she is going to stand beneath the tree to catch him in case he falls as he climbs it.

They are going to touch wide, ancient trunk of oaks and guess their age, and she's never going to tell him that someone abandoned him, nor that she is a goddess because she stole some peaches while she was hungry.

~TX~

Jeremie is six and loves climbing trees and chasing butterflies. He flits through woods like fae and dances on snow like Airani.

And he has questions.

Many questions.

"Why is your hair white, Tatki?"

"Why do stars shine in the sky?"

"Do you know how flowers bloom?"

"Have you seen a bear fight a python?"

He is miniature her. From his manners and the white locks threaded with brown of his hair to his footfalls and the turn of his palm when he tries to make it snow, he is hers.

She might not have laboured, bled and pushed him from her womb, but her heart loves him the same.

Her son, she thinks fondly as she stands ready to catch him lest his grip fail on the branches of the deodar.

"Tatki, you need to come up. The snow looks the prettiest!"

She's never been able to refuse him anything, just as her father had been unable when it came to her. She tells him about her father, the man who painstakingly carved bones into flutes, reeds and lyres, who was godly enough to receive the ambrosia of immortality once every year.

"God's suck," He says at the end of the tale he has heard so many times. "But you don't, Tatki."

She scales the sturdy trunk and soon she's in a branch beneath his body. They are almost near the top of the tree.

Snow really does look pretty from here, she thinks as she carefully maneuvers Jeremie in her arms, and her independent son for once doesn't protest.

"Tatkan missed us, Tatki," He says softly. "See, he came to us as snow again."

She starts to cry softly in his hair, hands clutching him close to her body.

She told him once, she remembers, when he was five and he had asked in his earnestness, "where is your Tatko, Tatki?"

She had kissed his head and told him that her father visited them in the form of snow when he missed her.

She will not let the shadow of death fall over him. He will not know what death entails, what it brings in its wake.

He will not know the suffering this world delights in pouring on people. One day when he is grown, she will attend the Council of Gods with him by her side, and when the time comes, she will win him a kingdom for she can't pass hers to him.

Won't pass it to him.

Being an ice goddess is a curse, and what mother curses their child?

And so, perched high like birds on the branches of Deodaar, they watch the snow fall on top of the trees.