Sirin Bloom

“I offered the river whatever she wished to take,” Vesna said simply. “My humanity. My connection to the mortal world. My past and future. In that moment of terror, with dawn approaching, I would have given anything to escape the Jarl.”

“And Glinka accepted?”

“She did more than accept.” Vesna’s voice took on a bitter edge. “She granted my wish. The tower’s foundation cracked as the river washed it away, smashed it from below. The tower toppled into the river and I… drowned.”

“And?”

“And I woke up on a small, rocky island in the middle of her waters, far away from town… Where my magic grew stronger by the day without needing celesteel tattoos. No one could reach me there against my will. I was utterly safe.” Her wings spread slightly in emphasis. “And utterly… alone.”

She sniffed.

“Your own prison,” I murmured.

“Yes. I was free from the Jarl, unplottable… impossible to find. I could not leave the island. Pain would lace my body if I got too far into the icy water, forcing me to crawl back to the rocks binding me. The Jarl undoubtedly spent a fortune hiring scryers and hunters to find me, but he never did.”

Her golden eyes grew distant. “Years passed. I heard from a passing boatman that the Jarl eventually died, though not before adding twelve more fingers to his collection. Svalbard lived in the distance, ships coming and going from its great harbor, and I watched it all from my island, growing older but never aging.”

“Then Lisabella found you?” I asked.

“Yes.” Vesna’s expression softened. “By then, I had been alone for perhaps a century. The city had changed, contracted as winters got worse. The old Jarl’s bloodline had died out entirely. I had watched generations live and die from my island, performing small magics for those few brave enough to seek me out, slowly becoming a legend of a spooky island witch rather than a person.”

“Did you ever make a familiar?” I wondered, glancing at Stormy who had relocated back atop of the Codex book that I left open.

“No,” she shook her head. “I wasn’t ever big on keeping pets… desired human companionship. Alas, such wasn’t granted to me as people were afraid of me.”

She paused, her golden eyes gleaming. “The ice had begun its advance by then in earnest. The northern ports had already been abandoned. And then… she came to me.”

I tried to push stormy off my book but the kitten refused to budge, biting my fingers.

“Lisabella,” The word emerged as a soft caress from her lips. “She was magnificent—a full, arcane Sirin. Her feathers were red and gold like sunrise, her song more beautiful than anything I’d heard in my winters of isolation.”

“She came to your island?”

“No,” Vesna shook her head. “She would perch on a large tree on another island nearby and sing to me. Songs of flight, of freedom, of the sky.”

“And you fell in love,” I guessed.

“Desperately,” she admitted, her voice breaking on the word. “For seven seasons she came, each time lingering longer. In all my years of isolation, no one had ever returned so faithfully, had ever seen me as something more than a magical curiosity or a tool to be used. We sang to each other about many things. She promised freedom, promised flight, promised that we would be sisters of the sky together.”

Her wings trembled slightly. “In the autumn of the eighth season, she sang to me the truth—the ice was advancing. Soon, Svalbard would fall. My island would freeze solid, trapping me forever in a prison of ice, likely dragging me away from my domain regardless of what I did.”

“What did you do?” I asked, captivated by her tale.

“I made my choice,” she said simply. “I abandoned my domain, swimming through Glinka’s waters toward Lisabella’s waiting arms.”

“You broke your pact with the river?”

“Yes.” Vesna’s voice dropped. “The pain was… indescribable. Glinka’s waters turned to liquid fire around me. I felt my gifts being scoured from my body, felt portions of my memory as a domain-bound witch dissolving away. The river demanded her due in full for breaking her pact.”

Her golden eyes closed in remembered agony. “I was drowning, burning, fracturing all at once. But Lisabella caught me before I fully sunk under. Lissy saved me… she carried me to her oak tree, singing a transformation song that rewove the broken shards of my being into something new.”

“And you became a Sirin,” I concluded.

“I awoke reborn,” she nodded. “No longer a witch, but something in between—not fully Sirin by birth, but shaped by Lisabella’s power and Glinka’s curse. My wings were black and green where hers were gold and red, as if the river’s rejection or perhaps my reliance on Dagaz rune had stained me forever. She lived during the day while I existed at night. Whatever the river had done to me, it cursed me… made me a denizen of the night. Lizabella and I mostly interacted at twilight, since she gained her power from the sun while I… I was dead twice and was thus bound to goddess Nox as is the fate of all undead things.”

Minnow nodded along.

“What happened to Lisabella?” I asked.

Vesna’s feathers drooped. “For a time, we were happy. We flew together above the dying city, hunted together in the forests that still remained, sang and hunted together in twilight. She taught me to use my new form, to navigate the Astral, to feel and wield the currents of magic.”

“But something went wrong,” I guessed.

“The White Blight came,” she whispered. “It infected the forest. Lisabella tried to heal it with her song, spending days and nights pouring her power into all nearby trees. She spent less time with me and more time flying further and further out, tiring herself out, falling asleep before evening, bringing dead monsters and men back, feeding them to our tree.”

Her voice grew hollow. “I tried to exist during the day to speak to her… It hurt… but I tried regardless. It was then that she looked at me with eyes I no longer recognized. I didn’t understand it then, but she no longer saw me as her beloved, but as a night servant to the tree, just as she had become its day servant. When I tried to convince her that something was wrong, tried to use my song to fix her… she attacked me.”

“You fought with her?” I asked.

“I couldn’t,” Vesna shook her head. “I loved her too much and was too weak during the day. I flew across the forests that night, searching for something to help her. When I returned later with healing mushrooms and crystals from the mountains, she wasn’t in the tree anymore. Eventually, I found a trail of her blood and feathers…” She swallowed hard. “The trail led to Chernobog. I… I tried to find her in the fog. What I found wasn’t her. It was a Jotun. The abomination had her eyes, yes… but her body was turned inside out. She chased me across the midnight sky and tried to drag me into the swamps too, but I fought her back with my magic, retreated back to our mother tree and wept there… all alone.”

“The Mother-tree kept a shadow of her,” Vesna continued with a sob. “An Astral echo. Enough to sing to me at night, to call me back, to order me to feed the Mother tree, night after night. I knew it wasn’t truly her anymore, but I couldn’t leave. I told myself I was guarding that echo, praying that someday I might find a way to free her soul… To get her back somehow, as long as the tree remained alive.”

She laughed bitterly. “Instead, I became what Lisabella had—a servant to the tree’s hunger. As the decades passed, I forgot why I had stayed. Forgot everything except the hunt and the song. Until you burned it all away.”

I nodded, letting the weight of her story settle between us. “What did they teach you at the Academy of Harmonics?”

“All sorts of things… although the details are vague to me now,” she replied, seeming relieved at the change of subject. “The principles of voice-carried magic, the foundations of harmonic resonance, the connections between runes, musical tones and elemental forces. I was training to be a Chord-Weaver—a specialist in using sung spells to reshape physical matter.”

“That’s why you can shape crystals,” I realized.

“Yes.” She nodded. “It was one of the few skills that remained after my transformation. The Academic district was a grand place. Each magical discipline had its own tower, its own methods, its own arcane tools, tattoos and magical language.”

“There were multiple magical academies in Svalbard?”

“Five major ones,” Vesna confirmed. “The Academy of Harmonics where I studied, the Magisterium of Material Transmutation, the Tower of Astral Navigation, the Circle of Vital Essences, and the Sanctuary of Boundary Magics. Together they formed the greatest center of magical learning of the North Sea.”

“And they were located in what’s now the village center?”

“No,” she said. “The Academy district stood on the central hill behind this pub, five grand, gleaming white towers arranged in a perfect pentagram, visible from leagues away. It’s all rubble now… those rough limestone cliffs are all that remains.”

“How was it destroyed?” The thought of such knowledge lost pained me.

“Much was lost over time,” she sighed. “Though not all at once. Many fled south over the centuries. The city had a few peasant revolutions that devastated the mage and highborn districts, invasions too… When the defence wards fell, dragon and leviathan attacks blasted and flattened the towers. Giant beasts came seeking to feast on the magic crystals and celesteel buried within the stone. After all that… a group of Nordstaii refugees came from the North-East and settled in the ruins, and built the village of Svalbard.”

“Why did they even stay here?”

“Magical power,” the Sirin shrugged. “Glinka’s megalith… creates a natural ley line of sorts here, helps people survive longer even in winter. The South isn’t a safe place anymore… not since the Arcanix came into power. From what I heard they hunt the Nordstaii people, kill the women and capture the men.”

I considered that I spent enough of the day being lectured by Vesna about the past.

I rummaged through a pile of furs I’d collected from various homes, selecting the thickest and most enveloping pieces. “Put these on,” I told Vesna, throwing the furs onto the edge of the long table she was occupying.

She looked at the furs dubiously. “Why?”

“Because I want to see if you can function in daylight if properly covered. These should shield you from direct sunlight.”

Vesna took the furs reluctantly. “I still don’t understand your fixation with making me endure daylight. Night is my domain.”

“Easier to see during the day,” I shrugged.

With a sigh, she began to don the furs, folding her wings tightly to her back and layering them over her feathered form. 

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, her talons slicing through and sticking out from the gloves. “I look like a hibernating bear… and my claws and feet are still exposed to daylight.”

“Better than smoking like bacon,” I countered. “Sit down. I’ll wrap up your talons.”

As she sat on a bench, I moved closer to her and she went rigid, her golden eyes glazing over, my domain paralyzing her senses.

I rapidly wrapped her feet and talons in thick cloth, binding it all with cloth strips.

I added a dark, slightly transparent shawl as the final touch, draping it over her head to shield her face. 

She gasped as I retreated, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Ugh. Being close to your domain is quite unnerving.” Minnow, who had been watching our preparations with curiosity, fluttered beneath her hood.

“There,” I said, stepping back to examine my handiwork. “A perfect disguise. No one would suspect there’s a feathery murder-menace under all that fur.”

“Your sense of humor leaves much to be desired,” Vesna grumbled.

“Right. Let’s test it,” I urged, moving toward the door. “A quick step outside to see if you start smoking.”

I opened the pub door, letting in a gust of cold air and winter sunlight. Vesna hesitated at the threshold, apprehension evident in her stance.

“Go on,” I said. “If it hurts, you can retreat immediately.”

With visible reluctance, she extended one fabric-wrapped talon into the path of the sunlight. When nothing catastrophic happened, she took a tentative step forward, then another, until she stood fully in the daylight.

“Well?” I asked after a moment. “How does it feel? Are you melting? Any pain?”

“Uncomfortable,” she admitted. “The sun is still… loud. But I’m not burning. The wrappings… help.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Let’s go check on the rest of your victims.”

She sighed, following me.

We walked to the shed where I’d stored all of the corpses procured from the Mother tree—the ones I hadn’t buried in the domain soil barrels. I wanted to compare their decomposition rate to my magically accelerated versions.

The shed door creaked open, revealing the dimly lit interior. The corpses lay where I’d left them, but something was looking very wrong.

“What in the hell?” I breathed, stepping closer.

The semi-crystallized, wrapped bodies weren’t simply decomposing—they were transforming. Delicate filaments of emerald crystal grew from them, branching out like fungal mycelium moving from corpse to corpse. The growths sliced through the cloth and formed intricate, geometric patterns, reminiscent of the crystalline structures I’d observed in Vesna’s blood.

I crouched to examine the phenomenon more closely.

Vesna remained at the doorway, her golden eyes wide with shock. “By her night everlasting,” she whispered. “It’s… growing a new Sirin tree!”

“Is that how Sirin trees reproduce then?” I turned back to her.

“I… I don’t know,” she replied. “It… it smells and feels like home. Like Mother tree used to feel… but there’s no voice of Lisabella there, no Astral ghost of my lost beloved, no hunger. Lisabella spoke of planting a new tree in the South… but we’ve never gotten around to it since the Mother tree didn’t let us go.”

I stared at the emerald filaments. It felt like I was witnessing the early stages of a magical parasite colonizing dead tissue.

“We can’t allow these to bloom here,” I said.

“W-why not?” Vesna cried, hands outstretched, but still keeping out of my domain-pack’s affect radius. “It… the tree that will grow from these bodies will make me stronger!”

“Stronger and also bound to this shed,” I pointed out. “Where it will become infected by the White Blight again and possibly influence your decisions.”

“Oh.” Vesna said, lowering her hands, gold eyes glowing under the dark shawl. “It… it’s not as old as the Mother tree, not as strong. It’s not singing anything… It won’t be able to command me! Please let me keep it!”