The October Diaries XV | Grekkel’s Song Pt. 1

Meige understood how lucky she was. She was just too curious, too bold, and too young not to question the boundaries of her fortune. Her mother had taken charge of her understanding in basic spell theory around the same time that her father had instilled in her a healthy respect and knowledge of words. As soon as her and her younger brother Lock were old enough to walk, her parents took them on frequent sojourns to cities both neighboring and far away, impressing in each of them the necessary perspective to grasp the weight of their benign placement amongst the world’s often callous sense of humor.

Of course, this sort of education was not always effective, especially with their father’s more disciplined manner casting an unappealing shadow on moderation. In tandem with their mother’s frequent reminders to indulge in life’s ‘little graces’ which, to most other, were rather large graces, this created clashing philosophies that made Meige and Lock, inevitably, grow into their own individuals far more varied than their parents’ expectations—for better or worse.

At home in the Lunar District of Qalmoria’s capital, Symillia, Meige tended to her mother’s gardens while she rested for the afternoon, every fistful of soil making her question why she had not accepted her father’s proposition to join him for a day at Faber’s, the scribe’s emporium which he helped manage. It took only a few moments for her to recall the numerous days she had spent drumming her hands on the ink-stained desks that she mostly pretended to work at, daydreaming, instead, about the simplicity of the gardens behind their apothecary shop.

“Are the plants treating the earthworm well?” somebody asked after the hinges of the glasshouse door declared a new entrant.

His voice could have been altered by a costly spell, but Meige still wouldn’t need to so much as glance behind her to know who was standing there. There were simply no boys her age that had the courage to tease her. None, of course, except Lock … or her father, whose age hadn’t had an increasing effect on his growing maturity—quite the opposite.

“Careful what you say to the earthworm,” Meige grunted as she dug out a bulb of twisting ire to place into a fresh pot, the writhing tendrils of the toxic plant nearly grasping hold of her face as she did. She pretended that her heart had not leapt from her chest and placed it into the pot, grateful that her brother could not see her expression, for it was rather a perilously stupid thing, to grasp hold of a twisting ire’s roots without a pair of gloves. Its leaves are highly poisonous. The stifled gasp of her name that came from the same body behind her was evidence for as much.

“Don’t worry. Mother has been teaching me natural manipulation recently, and I appear to have a somewhat … natural propensity for it. I would be careful, if I were you.”

“I will pretend that I understand what ‘propensity’ means and take that as a suggestion that you will command one of these vines to twist my neck off. Right?”

“As always, dear brother. Why aren’t you at your training grounds playing with wooden swords like the tough soldier you promised to be?” In truth, she wasn’t always so combative with him. But when it came to his unforeseen aspiration for the Crimson Corps, one that the rest of his family believed to be a poor decision, she had a tendency to replace all her common remarks with daggers.

Lock did his best to deflate into a flat stool that hurt his backside as he crumpled onto it with a sigh, too exhausted to retaliate, as he had come to expect as much about inquiries into his training. “The arm’s master is ill again, had us running basic drills through his apprentice instead. I left at the second hour. I just can’t take him seriously, what with that high, cracking voice of his. Shit of my heels, he’s fresh as spring. I can’t see why the arm’s master appointed him to drill us, in any case; nobody can take him seriously with his ears bobbing around like that.”

“Well. You can’t blame a purebred elf for those ears, Lock. For gods’ sakes. And he’s his apprentice because Tammen is a prodigy. Your arm’s master knows that. You, my brother, are just a footman. Not even! A recruit, green as grass. Shit of my heels, brother, you’re just like him!”

“I never said I was anything different,” Lock replied, his voice not revealing an iota of the hurt he felt, which only challenged his sister more. “But it’s not all true, what you said. Tammen is a prodigy, I’ll give you that … a prodigy at browning his nose. He can scarcely lift a broadsword! How are we supposed to respect somebody who couldn’t duel the majority of his trainees? I’ve bested him in combat, three times now.”

“Because knowledge isn’t about who can lift the heaviest sword. Tammen studies his pages more than any of you train, which is saying something.”

“Granted. But experience isn’t about who has read the most books, either. Being able to recite a thousand pages of blade theory is nothing in the face of a growling, blood-frenzied opponent. Fear, adrenaline, nerves, stamina. There’s no writer alive who writes academy books on stifling the instinct to piss your pants and run when your enemy is two heads taller, wielding a battle axe and a kite shield. You learn that lesson by dying, or wising up and fleeing like the coward that war makes of everyone.”

“Lock?”

“Yes?” he asked with an audible hiss, his temper evidently flared.

“How’s about we take a walk in the market?”

Meige turned to look at him. His hardened expression immediately softened, and he managed a grin despite his flared temper.

“I’ll grab your coat,” he offered. “I apologize. You don’t deserve to hear any of that.”

As he moved for the rack with her coat, a tendril of ivy from the plant that wrapped around the doorframe of the glasshouse reached out and beat him to it. Its thin vine wrapped around the bulk of the fabric until it provided support enough to lift the coat off the rack, and nearly startle Lock into a tipping over a few pots of mistress’ envy.

“Gods grant me strength,” he cursed, though he was grinning. “You’ve really got something for that, don’t you?”

Meige slipped into her coat and wiped away the sweat that had beaded on her forehead, all the while suppressing her urge to gulp in air madly. “I don’t know what you are talking about. These sort of spells don’t phase me anymore.”

After securing a walking basket of candied ginger, Meige’s nose crinkled at the smell of manure, letting the scent lead her to the sight of two younger girls, likely sisters, splashing each other with water from the fountain at the heart of the courtyard they walked in. Bordered by tradesmen with their stands and shopkeepers leaning out their windows, more than a few people watched them with mixed expressions of ambivalence, disapproval, and nostalgia, as it was one of the more lively events in the Luminous Square that morning, despite the harvest season.

For a spell, Lock and Meige were captivated by them, too, as they begin the part-game, part-song of Grekkel the Undying, accompanied by the short, choreographed dance that only children have the patience to memorize and practice. Together, the two farm girls began reciting the aged verses.

One, two, three, four


Grekkel, Grekkel, Grekkel snores

Then five passes and night arrives

Grekkel, Grekkel, Grekkel sighs

’For the Undying comes alive

“That song still gives me nightmares,” Lock admitted, in spite of his uniform which, although he was merely a recruit, lent him the look of a confident, valiant, diligent young man with a clear head and a pure heart. Of which, he possessed none of those things. He shook his head and continued nibbling the long strips of candied ginger. The shade from the balcony that they sat under shielded them from the surprisingly harsh sun that had blossomed that day, leaving them in the graces of the sweetened air breathing through the parted windows of the confectioner’s shop. “It’s one of those stories that you realize is horrifying … only after you’re old enough to know what the cursed words mean.”

“Words have a way of slipping in like that, unnoticed, then suddenly powerful once you found out why they sunk their teeth in so deep.” Watching the two farm girls reminded Meige that the boredom she often had in the gardens, or indeed in her father’s emporium, was a luxury. Smelling of earth and long, laborious hours, Meige didn’t have to sniff or stare long to feel guilty for the morning she had squandered with wistful thoughts of being swept away to a more exciting life. In fact, the guilt quickly turned to shame, as it often did.

Lock, at least, had saved himself from that moral quandary. With his newfound devotion to the Crimson Corps as a swordsman, his stubbornness thrived behind a misguided sense of duty that served him little except in believing in an identity that he wasn’t all too certain was real. Perhaps it was because his parents had been so free-spirited with his upbringing after Meige’s more stern childhood, but lately, Lock had a tendency to defer to any authority whatsoever, as long as it did not first stem from his parents. For a few weeks even, he had become intensely passionate about the priests in Siflos’ Order, speaking highly of their rigorous periods of intermittent fasting, their willingness to forsake all wealth and titles, and their long vows of silence which lasted years.

He tried their vow of silence for a day. Meige broke it by calling him a ‘halfwit’ when he struggled to find his training sword, the one she hid specifically from him that very afternoon.

Meige didn’t have to heed the quiet pleas her parents often gave her to talk some reason into him, since this whim of joining the Qalmorian Army had utterly replaced all of his other interests. She never thought it suited him well, either. He’d always had a fondness for bladework, certainly, but it was almost spitting directly at his blood’s graces, how he refused to embrace his screaming talent for destruction spells, his proclivity for conjuration tricks, his clearly gifted grasp of the runic alphabet that most scholars spend years tearing their hair out for.

Then by then there comes the end

Grekkel, Grekkel, Grekkel wins again


Before dawn arrives he casts his bones


Grekkel, Grekkel, Grekkel, gambles no more

For he always wins, the game is rigged

Lock suddenly found it important to tend to straightening the collar on his maroon uniform. “This walk in the market was not a bad decision,” he stated with an amiable but otherwise empty tone, as he often did, when he was avoiding ignorable topics.

“Are you having doubts yet?”

“I think we could have done better than candied ginger, what with those caramel apricot tarts, but you were the one with the coin, so …”

“Not the treats, numskull. This whole whim of you marching out to catch a few arrows on behalf of a country that you owe nothing to. We aren’t natives, remember? Our family earned our passage by our trades.”

“As if I didn’t already know that. But what have I done? What use am I? We are all born owing the world something. The moment you discover what you can offer is the same moment that you have an obligation to share it.”

“And that is a beautiful, admirable, if a little bit naive and foolishly romantic idea, Lock.”

“Thank you?”

“But what good are your talents when you charge out into a noble’s war, defending a man you’ll never meet, dying for a territory that is being fought over because its soil is a profitable prospect for Addorian winemakers and farmers? They say it’s for honor, for glory, even for power, but even if these things were truly what you were fighting for, would it be worth your life’s efforts?”

Lock didn’t like to hear her weighted questions, no more than Meige liked the idea that she had found no direction in the years that she had spent juggling a vague commitments between her father and mother’s separate lines of work. She had a considerable amount of knowledge, now, in both crafts, but was left without a dependable passion for either. It wasn’t that her efforts lacked a home. Her heart had a home, it was simply missing a path to follow beyond it.

“I want to be useful,” Lock mumbled, no longer interested in the candied ginger. He pursed his lips as the girls finished their song, only to continue again. The breeze caught the longer locks of his hair, the sunlight igniting the highlights of his dark, oak hair with bright streaks of dirtied gold.

“You don’t do well with authority, brother, you just got sick of listening to mother and father’s advice. I am, too. We’re both itching for something new. But just take today, a fine example. Imagine years of that. Years of having to obey orders from those you don’t respect, or worse, finding yourself committed to orders you hate because of the respect you can’t ignore. After you initiation, after your vows, there won’t be an easy opportunity to turn your heels on those training grounds. You’ll be stuck, and we’ll all be waiting like sad dogs for your courier crows to send us word from Addoran, the letters frosted over from the unbearable winters there—which you’ll hate, you’re shivering in your mantle right now and it’s scarcely autumn.”

He nodded, though he didn’t like swallowing all these facts, particularly because they had coaxed him to fantasize about surrendering his uniform to his arm’s master by the week’s end. It made him dread how that man would glare at him from beneath that gigantic ridge that he called a forehead. As much as Lock enjoyed his sense of purpose in the Crimson Corps, Meige’s depictions of dying for a wealthy merchant conveyed such liberating irony that he had an urge to splash in the fountain with those two girls, so guiltless was he beginning to feel as he imagined fleeing any potential vows he might’ve sworn just days before.

“You do look handsome in that uniform, though. It would be a shame to be rid of it. Any of those mages from the Sapphire Academy taking a liking, yet?”

“Ugh. Mages. You know how they are. Wouldn’t approach a man if he saved their life.” Lock wagged his face as if the notion was making him ill, only to stick out his tongue and fake gagging. “They are all so prissy and privileged. Haven’t you noticed? That’s why you didn’t join, remember?”

“Well, we’re not much better, you know. Which is why this business with the Crimson Corps makes as much sense as a fine destruction mage forsaking his talent to instead don the uniform of a footman. Gods, Lock. It’d make more sense if you became a priest! The only reason most folks join is because their stomachs would go empty if they didn’t. Let the poor fight; they need it to live. You don’t.”

“Gods, what have I signed my name for?” He rubbed his eyes and then closed them as he groaned. “I am a fool.”

“Yes, Lock, and I have steered you from your foolishness since I changed the shit from your breeches for you. Don’t lose faith in me, now.”

“Let’s not get sentimental here, what with this shit talking.”

“Truly, though!” Meige laughed, delighted to see him won over, if at all a bit guilty to pull his newfound masculinity from under his feet. “If you’ve a passion for the sword, father and mother will supply a duelist to train you. An inclination towards blacksmithing? They’ll nudge you towards a craftsman. You want to be a servant in a caffek lounge? We’ll help you get a tailor for the uniform. But to die for the sake of an army’s callous intentions? None of us will help you with that. There’s no sense in it. There hasn’t been a war for reasonable causes in centuries.”

“So what, I go bury my head in some books while the rest of the world scrapes by the skin of their teeth?

“You think our parents never struggled? Haven’t you listened to a word of their story? Our blood is dirt, Lock.”

“Yes … I know,” he mumbled. “But where is our struggle? What right do I have?”

The tune of the two girls stopped, replaced instead by an alarming outburst, a series of panicked cries for help. A merchant who had seen one of the girls fall into the fountain had knocked over a bucket of apples, stomping one of them into the cobblestone in the process of rushing over to lift her up out of the water. While the other girl began to cry, he cradled her limp body, her thin and small body make to look even more frail by the way her neck and limbs fell back from his arms with a rag doll’s strength.

“Somebody call for Calan’s aid!” the tradesmen commanded to the befuddled lot of onlookers. He was waist-deep in the fountain, the dark stains left by the water inched up his vest, turning the light beige color into that of mud. “A healer, quickly! She is ill with something … something foul,” he continued, a look of regret starting on his eyes as his volume faltered, as he watched the water around his waist darken like his clothes, turning from a clear, crystalline color, to a hue not unlike Lock’s uniform. Only, the young girl was not a wounded.

There wasn’t a single cut on her.

Yet the water was thick as blood. And there was no mistaking the air, now tainted by its scent.

Lock was the first to run, not getting far without feeling Meige’s hand latch onto his arm as she kept up. Yet, he wasn’t running towards the nearest Chapel of Calan from a sense of virtue; there was something deeply wrong.

And he always hated Grekkel’s song.