3. Rumors
Astra digs down into her library, looking for clues...
Escape from Ice Mountain marks the start of an epic tale, one where a middle-aged fish-out-of-water librarian (and necromancer!) navigates love, betrayal, and the complexities of power as she struggles to embrace her destiny and uncover the mysteries of her own origins. Yes, there are dragons too! And also magical dogs. It’s gonna be awesome!
Astra wandered back to Zochur's kitchen by instinct. It was not, of course, Zochur's kitchen, as such things belonged to no single nun at the monastery, but given that the sibling-nun spent most of their not-praying time there it had become Zochur's by default over the years.
“Back already?” Zochur asked in genuine surprise, letting Astra in again.
Astra whipped her skirts around herself and climbed down the ladder. “I have an impossible task, and I missed dinner. Sixth bell rang while Naboch was giving me my orders, and she and her dogs ate the all the sweet dumplings.” Her attempt to not whine about it like a child was wholly unsuccessful.
“Of course she did.” Zochur looked smug before waving at her to sit at a cutting block. “Are you to march at dawn, then?”
“Ha. Ha.” Astra sat down on a stool and started peeling pea pods. “It is not worth talking about, specifically, but it has to do with some unrest of the snow dragons, and possibly the Yosoi too.”
As always, Zochur became quiet at the mention of the Yosoi, and Astra wondered yet again what made the nun join the monastery later in life. It was clear to everyone that Zochur had been a fine chef, once, possibly even for a lord's manor in the lowlands, given their general trend towards certain spices and herbs. Sometimes the lowlands got raided by the Yosoi, and refugees fleeing to Qordashi were not uncommon, but Zochur never talked about their life before pledging to the gods of the Four Winds.
“Aiya, I know you will find the answer. You’ve been a librarian your whole life. If you can’t find a book, it does not exist.”
Astra nodded gratefully at the support, even as she privately doubted it.
“What do we know of the snow dragons, anyway?” Zochur asked philosophically, because everyone knew the answer was “not very much.”
“Not enough,” Astra confirmed anyway.
Zochur paused in their efforts over the stove. “Was I right? About the dragons acting strange?”
“Yes. This has something to do with that. The dragons are indeed acting strange, and it has perked the interest of both Naboch and Dzrezor.”
“The doyen superior is trusting you, again, but I fear some intrigue is in the mix,” Zochur said casually, although the act would fool no one, least of all Astra.
“You are not off the mark. I do not answer directly to Naboch or Dzrezor yet I keep getting dragged into their little games. I’m sure this has to do with the seat of the Supreme Superior, but I will do my best to keep my nose out of it.”
Zochur glared at the soup as they added some herbs and stirred it. “Your nose has never been out of it, not since the day you dropped out of the sky.”
Astra shrugged again. She had never fit in well, and in her youth had wasted too much time worrying about it. Even as a child she had the distinctly gray hair that made her stand out like a Yosoi in crimson clover amidst the black, brown and red hair of the peoples of the Balashilar mountain ranges. She had sometimes spoken with the clipped accent of her mother tongue (which no one had understood, even the linguists) until she was old enough to train herself out of it. But after decades on Ice Mountain and so many years of being a nun, she knew she would also be a true foreigner in the land where she had been born. She was uncertain she belonged anywhere, but being a stranger in a place she called home was at least safe.
They both worked quietly while Zochur finished the soup. When they put the lid on it to simmer, they fried up bean curd slices and set them on plates to share, along with some fresh water chestnuts that were a bit of a luxury. Astra did not ask how they got them.
“We are taking this outside. I need fresh, cool air,” Zochur announced.
Astra nodded, grateful to be included. She really did not visit Zochur often anymore since they had sworn to different gods and so lived in different wards, but after the unsettling conversation with Naboch, it felt good to relax around someone Astra considered family. They both managed up the ladder, navigating their cumbersome dresses and plates of food, then crossed the roof to climb onto a patio garden that someone had set a brazier out in, whether for the plants or for people to enjoy was unknown and immaterial. Sitting on a low ledge, they shared the plates between them.
Astra chewed a chestnut and looked out over the roofs around them while Zochur pitted a date. The monastery spread majestically down the side of the mountain, spilling like multi-colored boxes set against snow and rock. Gold-covered temple steeples glistened in the late afternoon light, and the sun was bright as steel near the horizon. There was chanting in a prayer room a couple of buildings over and up, joined by the sounds of the monastery as it wound down for the coming night. The laundries were pulling clothes in off the lines so they did not freeze, and herders were prodding the milk goats back into stalls from their small grazing yards, yelling fruitlessly at ones who bounced up a wall to temporary freedom.
Zochur asked random questions about new book arrivals in the Tiered Library, or any good stories Astra had read recently. As the sun dipped lower in the sky, Zochur peered at her.
“Your head wrap is dirty.”
“Ugh,” Astra grumbled. “It wouldn’t get dirty if people just left me alone in my library.”
Zochur laughed. “You’ve been saying that since we first wrapped you, yet here we are.”
“I’ll switch it out when I get home.”
“Home, your barracks? Or home, your library?” Zochur continued, giggling like a teenager.
“Meh. Either or.” Astra sighed and leaned back on her hands. “Stop being so undignified,” she said with a pretentious sniff.
“Oh! Oh, of course, Senior Nun! Forgive this lowly one—”
Astra threw a date at them, but Zochur’s fast reflexes snatched them out of the air easily.
“I wouldn’t say this to any of my brethren in Bu, but I feel like there is something big brewing,” Astra said softly, nibbling on some cheese.
“Aside from the vote for a new Supreme Superior?”
Astra nodded. “That is part of it. Since Mazcot died things have felt very,” she paused and wavered her hand in the air.
“Ahhh, he was such a good Supreme Superior,” Zochur said wistfully. “He kept a thumb on Dzrezor, too. I fear if he is instated as the next Supreme, things will get a lot more political, not less as it should.”
Astra hummed her agreement. For as much as Doyen Superior Dzrezor was disliked, he was powerful. It was down to a contest between him and Naboch for the position, and neither was known to play nice or fair if the occasion called for it. The death of Mazcot, while not unexpected given his great age, had thrown Qordashi internal politics into a tailspin.
“I hate all of this, and I hate being dragged into it,” Astra said mulishly.
“I know.” Zochur sighed and nabbed the last water chestnut, chomping on it just as thirteenth bell rang out. “Ah. Time for me to go to temple for evening prayers. Go. Go! Find out something useful about dragons for the Doyen Superior of West Ward, like the obedient and filial nun you are!”
Astra grumbled unhappily in return, but attempted just that when she returned to her library, never having made it up to the retreats for a period of meditation as she had looked forward to earlier that day. As a head librarian and having just marked her fortieth year, she had the freedom to stay awake past fourteenth bell, but the drawback was that she would still have to rise at fifth bell in the heinous pre-dawn hours, along with every other nun. No one escaped fifth bell unless they were on their deathbed in one of the Houses of Transcendence.
It was a fruitless search, though, and she knew it. As sentient as the dragons were—and everyone knew they were, it was not a secret or a mystery that the dragons were smart and clever and possessed some semblance of a “civilization”—they were not literate and tragically not bilingual. Astra's role as scholar librarian meant she read many languages fluently and many others passably, and could even read Ancient Kundish and a little bit of the strange, upside-down, mysterious writing known as Episeshe. That her quick ability with languages was also linked to darker reasons she, and those who knew, chose to overlook.
In any case, whatever passed for a language among the dragons was not on her list of languages. Dragons were mostly written about by other peoples who did not really know anything of importance that wasn't already known. Snow dragons kept to themselves in the eternally frozen south, among the mountains and glaciers where humans could not survive for long. It was rumored there were ice castles on a land mass off the southern-most coast where they lived, but dragons did not build things any more than they dug for things, so Astra did not believe it.
The juveniles were the primary source for most of the information to be had, and that was only because at a certain age (which humans did not know but was clearly fairly young based on the size of the beasts) dragons went adventuring, which had come to be called by humans their time of galespring. There was speculation that it was an old mating instinct and they were flying out to look for a partner in the lands beyond their family holdings, but it could be simply that they were flying around having fun stealing livestock and harassing travelers along the trade routes.
One city, long ago, had shot down a young dragon with arrows and lances. They slaughtered it and dismembered its body for treasures like teeth and skin. No one knew exactly where that city had stood, as the murdered dragon's elder (and bigger) kin razed it to the ground, leaving no survivors other than those who managed to flee and tell the tale as a warning for posterity (had the dragons let them live for that very reason? The debate had raged among scholars for centuries).
So the juveniles flew around doing no one knew what, for reasons no one knew why, unmolested and unchallenged. After a few years, they disappeared back into the southlands, their galespring at an end.
The northern dragons of Firestate did the same, but they never traveled past the southern edge of the Gilded Plateau. Were the two kinds of dragons naturally opposed? Were they at war? Speculation ran rampant in everything Astra read, no matter how old or how recent.
Her eyes gritty and her brain finally bending to the late hour, she carefully set aside the codices and scrolls and letters she had been reviewing before locking the library behind her and trudging to her cadre's barracks. As a senior nun, she had her own cell, meaning nothing much more than a small room with a narrow bed, a small brazier, a trunk for her clothes, and a prayer mat. The novitiates were charged with keeping the braziers in the personal cells warm, and as much as Astra hated the job when she was a mere novitiate, she was grateful for their hard work now that she was the one benefiting from it. Such, she supposed, was the turn of the winds in life.
There was a narrow window that looked out over an interior courtyard which was always lit by moon stones, the statue of Bu in the middle twinkling brightly from the reflection off her blue marble skin and her silver adornments. Her white, mother-of-pearl eyes looked up to the sky, directed at the North Star. Astra gazed down on Her as she removed her cloak, hanging it carefully. Next she removed her habit, folding up the dress, petticoat, and smock carefully into the trunk, stashing sachets filled with aromatic herbs to help drive away insects and foul odors. Only after putting on her night gown did she pull off her woolen boots, although the wool socks she kept on. Thankfully, there were no rules against wearing socks to bed.
As she untied and unrolled her head wrap to set it on top of her clothes in the trunk, she took a moment to toy with the old bracelet hanging from a small nail she had put inside the trunk. It was heavy because it was made of large gold links fitted with dark black beads and amber gemstones in a clunky, bulky fashion, entirely unlike any other piece of jewelry in the monastery. While it was something Astra herself could never even contemplate wearing in public, even if the rules allowed such ostentation, it was all she had left of her life before coming to the remote monastery on Ice Mountain.
It once belonged to her mother, and Astra had been wearing it to stave off her grief the night the red dragon came to steal her away.
She picked it up and held it over her wrist, not daring to put it on. She had not worn it since she had dedicated her vows to the Four Winds, and it felt too heavy in her hand to wear easily, anyway.
Feeling nostalgic, she put it on the stool next to her bed that served as a table, and watched the moonlight play through the sparkling amber for a time before dousing the candle and falling into a restless sleep.
So good! Love the description of the statue of Bu!