Queen Sigyn fragment

Fragment

    

    In replendant Velathra, ‘neath lapis vaults and diaphanous shrouds, Queen Sigyn slumbered, and slumbering, dreamt.

    Within her dream, she gazed with a child’s eyes upon glacial walls of ice, before which anthropomorphic troglodytes covorted in perverse exultation. They capered and pranced obscenely, frolicking with bits of human detritus as children might revel with new playthings. They further stained their yellow, filthy pelts with blood and other drippings, and their emerald green eyes blazed with bestial lunacy.

    She was encircled by protective arms in a maternal embrace. Turning, she beheld the face of the woman that held her. Within the dreamscape, Sigyn knew this woman to be her mother, though she had never beheld her in waking hours. It was a haggard face, drawn by fear and deprivation, framed by filthy, matted yellow hair. But the woman's steely blue eyes were clear and held a fierce determination. She was resigned to her fate, but would not see her child share it.

    Sigyn’s next impressions were of blinding whiteness and frigid winds. The sound of her mother’s ragged breath as she fled across the snow. The inhuman wails and howls of the tawny-furred brutes who pursued them melded with the shrieking winds. Closer and closer grew the caterwauling. There would be no escape, her mother was too weak, too tired to continue. Soon they would be caught.

    They came to the edge of a glacier. It would be impossible for the pair to climb down ere the ravening troglodytes were upon them, but a small child might slide down the smooth surface and reach the bottom unharmed. Better to freeze in the teeth of a blizzard than spend a life at the tender mercies of those shaggy, ferine brutes.

    Then there was the vision of her mother carried farther and farther away by sinewy, hirsute arms before all was obscured by roiling whiteness.

    The Queen of resplendent Velathra gasped and bolted upright in her luxurious bed of ebony and camphorwood. Her shift of purple silk and her blankets of ermine and red linen were soden with her sweat. Her long tawny locks hung wetly about her face.Though the bedchamber was warm, her skin was as gooseflesh, and her face burned as if stung by arctic winds.

    Rising, she stumbled to the golden washbasin nearby. There she laved herself in cool water and sought to drive the strange nightmare fantasies from her mind. What folly! True, she had never known her true parents, her adoptive father discovering her wandering the frigid wastes of Asgard when she was barely old enough to walk. She had scarcely given thought to her true origins. Why should she now be troubled by these dreams of a “Mother” she had never known?

    Idly she glanced at her own image reflected in the silver mirror that stood beside the basin. 

    Sigyn stifled a cry of horror, for she saw hideous familiarity in the emerald green eyes that glared bestially at her from the silvered glass