I: Brann, The Drinker Of Souls

Jal Virri in the Myk-tat Tukery Brann and Settsimaksimin

In the tenth year of their habitation within the Tukery, they are restless.

The wide bed creaked as Brann rolled onto her side. Maksim muttered a few shapeless sounds without waking enough to know what he was protesting. She finished her turn and lay on her back, staring at a ceiling swimming in green-tinted light. The sun was barely above the horizon, shining directly in through the tight profusion of vines Maksim had coaxed across the windows. Given his choice he would come grudging out of bed sometime past noon and would have hung thick black curtains over the windows, but Brann needed a free flow of air and a feeling that the outside penetrated the room, that she wasn’t shut into something she couldn’t escape from. The vines were a compromise. She smiled at the shifting leaf-shadows; the light that came through in the very early morning was such a lovely green.

Maksim was sleeping soundly again now the nights were cooler and Brann was once more sharing the bed with him. Solid, meaty, comforting to sleep against once he settled down, he was a furnace that got hotter as the night went on, a blessing-in winter but impossible when the nights heated up. When the hot season arrived, Brann moved into the other bedroom and Maksim was once again tormented by the bad dreams that wracked his sleep when she wasn’t there to chase them off; he’d lived a long time and done things he refused to remember; he had reasons he considered adequate at the moment but they didn’t ease his mind when he looked back at them. During the day he pottered contentedly enough about Jal Virri, reading, working in the many gardens beside the sprites who tended the place, but when night came, he dreamed.