Why I Live: Part One - Grief

[JediMaestro 240]

Spoiler

A couple days ago, Solveig had a very visceral reaction to a death in the family that resulted in her demanding that her and her fiance Bronadron Callaghan leave Idunia. A friend of theirs talked Sol down, which resulted in them staying in Idunia after all and caused a good deal of embarrassment and chagrin for Bron. This is my first post of her reacting to and dealing with the trauma that prompted this reaction. The quote below is from the response I left under Bron's post quitting Idunia. Now that she is forced to stay in Idunia, she must reckon with these four emotions and how they present themselves in lingering trauma. Hopefully this post will help others to get to know Solveig more (as I understand most people only know her as Bron's fiancee) and will be a good way of getting some character growth out of this whole abortive incident, as well as set up where her character is headed. Hope you enjoy, and stay tuned for Part 2!

 

"Of all the many emotions that spun through Solveig's head, hope was by far the worst. Grief, guilt, and despair were old friends, ones she had weathered before and thought she might weather again or at least die trying. But hope - hope was new to her, and she could not bear the thought of it being dashed..."

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Spoiler

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pXR2jd8z0vI&si=KtcSZn7MCu0NGULT

 

 

Ash and smoke swirled around Solveig as she walked her usual path from shattered Alduun to blood-stained Tir'Glas. Night had fallen many hours ago, but there was no peace to be found where Solveig walked.  Where once the Autumn Isle had greeted her in between, she now walked through a scorching hellscape.

 

Bright orange winked all around her. No more was it a tunnel of fall-colored leaves but instead a roaring fire beside and above and all around her, her only safety the thin cobbled path stretching before her. Crinkly objects whisked past her, but they were not dried leaves borne on the breeze; they were crumbs of rubble born of the inferno, spat out blazing with heat that would surely sear and melt her skin should they find purchase there. White flakes drifted lazily around her, dusting the path before her and coating her arms and hair. Not snow, of course, but ash and the flaky remnants of what had once been human, the detritus of death.

 

Past this monstrous landscape, through gouts of flame mounting overhead, Solveig could just catch a glimpse of a distant snow-capped city composed of contrasts: here a gothic tower; there a craggy fortification. Smoke billowed from every crenellated parapet, like a dragon’s flame breathed through its teeth. The fire roared again, and now even the trees became indistinct, an amalgamate of squat yellow deciduouses and pines looming all about her like great torches marking the way to some unholy ritual. Wind whined in Solveig's ears with the voices of a thousand screams. Indistinct as of yet. But with each step she took, the cacophony grew, and its voices became ever more familiar.

 

On she trudged through the deepening slough of snow and ash. Beneath the murky grey mire, Solveig could feel that she trod on something dreadfully supple, a malleable mangle whose origin she dared not guess. The miasma of voices reached fever pitch as flaming trees closed in around her.

 

All at once, she had reached a plateau, with not a tree in sight, save one. Silence reigned supreme. Ahead, an icy chasm stretched deeper than Solveig’s gaze could penetrate. But her eyes did not linger in its inky depths, for beyond that canyon, Solveig now saw the smoking city fully. Her home was engulfed in flame, every home she had ever lived in all at once: the village hut, the Norland capital, Numenost, Garenbrig, Duncoed, Tir’glas . . . even the mountain cabin from the isle between worlds. She opened her mouth to cry out, but silence lashed out like a tendril from the burning city. It plunged down her throat, suffocating all sound, as the city itself rushed closer with frightening speed until it stood all around her.

 

There before her was the sole burning tree left from the earlier blaze. A massive deciduous tree spread its empty branches to the sky, burning and yet never burnt: the Ashwood tree. The familiar sight transfixed Solveig for just a moment before her attention was arrested by the man standing at its foot.

 

“Papa?”

 

The word escaped Solveig’s lips, mercifully unscathed, and she chased after it desperately, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste until she fell at last with a disbelieving cry into the arms of her beaming father. Wrapping her arms around him tightly, she felt the old familiar shift of his muscles as his own arms tightened around her: the rough comfort of his well-worn tunic, the smell of fish and pinewood on him, the feel of his scruffy beard grazing against her hair as he kissed her head. His chest was warm against her cheek, Solveig’s first and most precious pillow.

 

“My little firefly,” her father murmured, his voice just as gravelly and hoarse as she remembered. He had always been a man of few words, spending most of each day out fishing alone, breaking his silence for the first time each day only when his daughters came spilling out of the house to greet him when the sun was low.

 

“I . . . I missed you,” she mumbled, suddenly shy. Her eyes screwed up. How long had it been since she had last seen him? Had it been a day, a week? Surely it could be no more than that, could it? Warmth seemed to spread from her father’s chest to his arms, wrapping her up like a hot blanket.

 

“Aye, ye did, sunshine,” came a soft voice from behind Solveig, and Solveig turned slowly, comfortably, in her father’s arms. There stood her mama in her apron dusted with flour, hair tied up in a severe pony-tail, arms crossed. She wore the patient smile that always appeared on her face before a gentle rebuke, followed by a joke to break the tension and a big laugh. How long since she had last scolded Solveig?

 

“Ye did miss us,” her mother gently admonished. “Far too late, too.”

 

Her papa’s arms tightened further around her, now hot against her chest, and Solveig’s smile wilted slightly, “What do you mean, mama? I’m here now, aren’t I?” She looked up at the night sky, “Did I miss suppertime?”

 

“Ye missed far more than that, me darling,” her mother said, shaking her head, and flames licked up at Solveig, sprouting just below her field of vision. She squeezed her eyes closed, flinching away from the heat, but her head jerked back into scalding heat. Her eyes popped open once more with a gasp, and she managed to glance down for just a moment in sheer confusion.

 

Pure-white bone met her eyes, accompanied by an acrid, overpowering stench. Solveig gagged, doubling over, the movement breaking her father’s hold on her. She stumbled forward, nearly bowling over her mother. Straightening, she immediately turned back the other way and just as soon regretted it.

 

The flames of the Ashwood tree had spread, creeping down the trunk and along its gnarled roots until it had reached her father. It had burnt his flesh away to nothing, a skeleton standing before her in unforgiving detail, his clothes smoking and tearing away at the seams. He stood there, smiling, or Solveig assumed the blank rictus of the skull whose eyes now bored into her must once have been her father’s sly grin. 

 

“You missed who we really are, my dear,” the thing that had once been her father said, its jaw working up and down, although no tongue could be seen inside, only inky blackness.

 

Solveig let out a shriek as white-hot flame leapt from father to mother, consuming her. The town square sharpened, and memories flooded into her mind, populating the city around her. Norlandic guards lay on top of glassy-eyed children in bloody heaps. The air was thick with smoke and the stench of blood and decay. Lights bobbed up and down in surrounding alleys: the torches and lanterns of imperial soldiers hell-bent on destruction.

 

All stood frozen in time, trapped in one singular moment--one dreadfully familiar to her. Solveig’s eyes widened, and as if in answer to her recognition, a general store formed around the trio, the fur-lined clothes on its shelves smoking, its rafters beginning to collapse from the flames. Against her will, Solveig slowly turned to peer out the window facing out onto the square.

 

There, past the chaos of soldiers caught in the paroxysms of death, stood a girl. Her arms hung limply at her sides as she stared at the burning structure in stricken disbelief. The intense orange and red of the surrounding fire washed out her red hair, rendering it as pale as her fearful face.

 

Though Solveig closed her eyes, the image did not disappear, as though it had been burned into her retinas. In reality, it had been burned into her memory that fateful day, forever flickering in the backdrop of her mind, no matter how much she might try to extinguish it.

 

“We are grief.”

 

The phrase had groaned itself out of the bony jaw of her father, who had come up just behind her, hand-in-hand with the skeletal remains of her mother. The initial shock of their gruesome transformation gone, Solveig felt her wits starting to coalesce.

 

“You’re a dream, aren’t you?” she asked the pair sadly, unable to tear her eyes away from the girl in the square.

 

“Grief. Guilt. Despair. Hope.”

 

This time the words had come from her mother, listed out slowly as she used to do when reading a picture book to Solveig and her brother. Her mama continued, her voice resuming the gentle reproof from earlier: “Ye claimed that the first three ye had overcome, and that the fourth might prove your undoing, me lass. And yet this is not so, is it? Ye have never faced any of them, but only run away! From your problems, your past, your very self!”

 

“Well, no more, girl,” her father rejoined sternly. “Today you meet your demons.” This last word was enunciated with unusual care, and the flames around appeared to brighten for a moment. “And you either face them or fall to them.”

 

“I grieve you every moment of every day,” Solveig shot back, indignant. “My life is defined by your absence. I do not run away from my grief but must bear it constantly!”

 

Her father advanced to stand alongside her, “You have spent your entire life running from us.” His arm shot out to point towards the forlorn girl outside. “That girl took one look at the flaming figures of her parents and ran out of the square, out of the city, out of the nation.”

 

“As opposed to what?” Solveig returned hotly, “Plunging into the fire to die alongside you? What good would that have done anybody?”

 

“None at all!” His voice softened, “But she did not stop running when she reached Idunia. She has not stopped running since. She tries desperately to find things to distract herself so that she does not have to come to terms with her own grief and find peace.”

 

Solveig felt tears coming to her eyes, as much of anger as grief, “How? How am I meant to ever find peace in the fact that the final image of my parents that I see whenever I think of them is not your  wonderful laugh, papa, or your smile, mama, but instead the two of you wrapped in flames and screaming in agony?”

 

“By facing us now.” Her mother’s voice issued from behind her. “See the ash and the ruin. Ye are running to escape a fire that has long since been put out. Turn around and ye shall find only what fire leaves. Things to lay to rest and things to rebuild.”

 

Slowly, Solveig turned from the scene in the square, shivering as her eyes once again met her father’s empty eye sockets before facing her mother. Just as her mama had said, there was no more fire. They stood in the burnt-out husk of the store, which stood as if left abandoned for decades.

 

“See what rot ye have wrought,” her mother stated, spreading her arms to highlight both the wreck surrounding them and her own undead body. “Ye never returned to the Norland of your youth before traveling across the ocean, so here it has remained in your mind’s eye in all its ruin, never rebuilt.”

 

“And we too have remained here,” Papa added, now coming alongside Mama and placing a skeletal arm around his wife, “Specters of your mind imprisoned here. Every time you have witnessed death, you have been brought back here, to the fire and the blood. Now that you see us true, you must lay us to rest and be no more haunted by what you think you see.”

 

Despite Solveig’s desperate wish to the contrary, he was exactly right. The deaths of Zinzolin and Morwen had brought her right back to the same scene frozen in time that she now had just weathered, the same fire, the same snowfall. And each time, she had fled, whether lashing out in violence or literally running for the hills. This most recent flight had nearly ended in disaster for both her and Bron.

 

Solveig took a long hard look at the pair standing before her. They were horrifying to look at, and yet the longer she looked at them, the more they once more resembled her long-lost parents. They did not regrow skin or hair, and yet they became more recognizable despite their cadaverous appearance. The way the taller skeleton stood, leaning in a lanky kind of way on her mama, who stood with her hands clasped in front of her . . . a posture that Solveig still unconsciously fell into when lost in thought, the result of years of admiring and seeking to mirror her mother.

 

“Papa! Mama!” she cried and fell into their arms, tears spilling onto the blackened floor. They were cold to the touch, and yet the way her mother stroked her hair and her father pat her back could not have been more familiar.

 

“How can I lay you to rest now, when I’ve only just found you again?” Solveig sobbed. She clung to her mother with the urgency of a lost child who has been found. “Are you a dream or are you real?” she began to babble. “You- you can visit again some other night when Bron is here with me, you can meet him, you-”

 

“Child, child,” her mama said softly. “Ye know that is impossible. Our ashes drift upon the open sea ten thousand miles from here. Our spirits have gone where ye cannot yet follow. We are as ye remember us, both dream and reality. Ye must let the dead rest. Only then can ye dwell in the land of the living with your own family.”

 

“Or what is left of it,” Solveig replied sadly. “Even my newfound family is joining you, one by one.”

 

“And so they shall continue to do,” her mama replied. “But I speak of your family that is to come. If you carry us with you while you carry your child, ye shall collapse.”

 

“Child?” Solveig breathed, but a large hand rested on her shoulder, one Solveig knew to be her father’s. “It is time,” he said.

 

Slowly, Solveig became aware that the scene around them had once again changed. They stood on the docks at the edge of the ruined city. Wrecks of ships great and small dotted the harbor, but a single small boat loaded with tinder was moored carefully to the pier where they stood.

 

Solveig frowned as her father handed her a bow and set a standing torch next to her. “I’ve only just put out the fire,” she protested. “Would you have me light another?”

 

“Fire is sacred to we Norlanders . . . and has been for the Adunians as well,” he replied. “But we do not set our cities alight. It protects us, keeps us warm, keeps out the darkness. The fire you ran from, it was out of your control, rampant. By lighting this fire, you take control when next you witness death. By letting us go, you do not magically heal of the wounds that have been left in you. But when you begin to see fire all around you, it shall be the fire of renewal and rebirth that you light now, not the fire of destruction.”

 

In a flash, the two were on board the rafts, and the rafts were halfway out to sea. Solveig’s grasp on the bow weakened. She had so many more questions, longed to tell her parents all about her Bron and how wonderful he was.

 

“Shoot and strike true before it is too late,” her father called, standing in the boat with one foot up on the stern as he always did.

 

“Remember that we are only grief,” her mother chimed in, seated comfortably amidships. “Ye still have guilt, despair, and hope to come this night. But as ye have faced us, so can ye face them. We love ye, Solveig!”

 

Tears threatened to obscure Solveig’s vision, but she acted as instructed without thinking, just as she had been trained to do as a child, to obey her father without question. Raising the tip of a strung arrow to the flame, she let it begin to consume the wax that wreathed it. Drawing back the string, she lifted the bow towards the night sky before letting loose. Her eyes followed the arc of the arrow as it plummeted from the sky, landing amidst the dry tinder.

 

Immediately the boat, now distant on the horizon, was set alight, and Solveig could just barely make out her father taking the hand of her mother before they disappeared from view, lying down together in their final voyage.

 

All was still, and in that silence came dread. Solveig felt no sense of immediate peace or release. She came to no profound realization, did not gain a fresh new perspective. Instead, her mind dwelt on the embrace of her parents and how much she longed to be in their arms again. She sank to her knees once more, the bow clattering from her nerveless fingertips to the floor, and sobs began to choke her again. Was this some final taunt by a demon sent to haunt her? Had he played tricks on her mind, let her think she was on a journey of healing when all she had done was kill the last fragments of memory of her parents?

 

 

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She awoke.

 

Solveig lay in her bed in the Dunceod keep, the sheets knotted and twisted. Absolute stillness pervaded the room. It might have been before midnight, or it might have been deep into the night for all Solveig knew. She reached for Bron’s hand for comfort, knew the touch would not wake him. Her hand touched empty bed, and she turned, found herself completely alone.

 

Disoriented, haunted by her dream, and despairing at its abrupt ending, the thought of going back to sleep chilled Solveig. She sat upright, swung her legs out of bed. Immediately nausea crept in, and she felt strangely heavy and fatigued.

 

Water.

 

Wincing as her feet touched the cold stone floor, Solveig made her way to the door, peered out into the dark corridor outside. This floor was completely empty, she knew; the nearest person living in the keep was one or two floors below. She would only need to make her way to the end of the hall, however, where the ice was kept.

 

A distant bell chimed, accompanied by a short clicking sound, and Solveig froze in place. At the end of the hall, the door to the stairwell began to slowly creak open, and a voice drifted from somewhere out of sight.

 

“Oh, butler!~”

 

To be continued in Part 2 - Guilt . . . 

Edited December 31, 2025 by JediMaestro

[Two2the 365]

Kinda a fire song

 

[ChainedDragons 1374]

Spoiler

Not oh butler hahaha 😆 

Such a delightful read. It really let me see what she is going through in detail. So hype for part two

 

[Two2the 365]

@ChainedDragonswhats wrong with butlers

[ChainedDragons 1374]

On 12/31/2025 at 11:51 AM, Stinthad said:

@ChainedDragonswhats wrong with butlers

Only one man says butler with such enthusiasm lol I am excited to see part two of this forum