Shakoom’s Dream – The River Remembers


12/2/4722

The dream alway started the same with the ancestor-fire called him down into the stone. Not gently. Orc dreaming was a summons — a fist closed around the spine, a downward pull into ember and basalt and a hearth fire that would never go out, because the dead do not permit their fires to die.

The orc-shaman sat across from him. Scarred hands sorting bones. Jaw like a blade. Eye sockets holding only ember-glow — a spirit who had burned too hot in life and never cooled.

“You touched it the fetch doll,” she said.

“I put it in iron. I asked the crew for a vessel and sealed it—”

“With your hands, boy.” Flat, final. “Your skin against her weave, her knot work, the water that is not water but her. You could have used cloth or tongs. But you are orc, and orcs do not ask others to carry what they can carry themselves.”

He had not been reckless. He had been responsible — and responsibility had required contact, and contact was all a fey tether needed.

“And you — who already carry one fey’s mark like a second heartbeat — and you were touched by Autumn when you fought there errand runners and let them smell what you carry. Three doors now, boy. All opened inward.”

She threw the bones. They clattered, then kept moving — pulled by a current with no business existing underground. Three shapes: a snowflake. A reaching hand. Thorn-patterned bones between. At the center, one bone on its end. Trembling.

“That is you. Winter in your blood. Autumn on your skin. The river in your dreaming. Where three courts converge on a mortal, the mortal is either a prize or a meal.”

Water seeped through the stones — dark, rising between embers without extinguishing them. Rotting autumn leaves drifted in, orbiting the fire. Fey blood remembers who spilled it.

The ancestors’ voices warped: —three hooks— and —courts contesting a mortal— and —the mortal does not survive—

“Stay” then said a voice softer than any orc voice should be.

The chamber dissolved.

He stood waist-deep in the Moutray. Winter’s sky above — blue-black, ice seen from underneath. Wrong stars. Along the treeline, reddish constellations pulsed in thorn-spirals. Autumn’s eye. And in the river, something older than both — wild fey, unaligned, owing nothing.

He reached for the snowflake. It was silent. Cold, yes — always cold — but the attentive cold that meant Eis was listening was absent. The fetch doll’s tether had slipped beneath Winter’s notice like water under a locked door. The rusalka hadn’t forced anything — she’d walked through the door he opened with his bare hands. Winter watched the snowflake. The snowflake watched his heart. Nobody had been watching his palms.

He was alone in this.

Miroslava stood ten feet distant. Dark hair on the water like ink. Eyes the color of river-bottom stone. Beautiful the way a winter flood is beautiful — the kind that drowns fields and feels nothing.
Her gaze found his snowflake, his thorn-scarred knuckles, his palms where the doll’s weave had pressed its pattern into flesh. She smiled — not cruel, pleased — the way a woman smiles when a guest arrives she has been expecting.

“Winter’s mark,” she said, touching her own sternum. “Autumn’s touch.” She gestured at her knuckles. “But your hands —” Her laugh was water over gravel. “Your hands are mine. Iron keeps the doll still. It does not erase what the doll learned.”

She leaned closer. The river leaned with her.

“And your patron does not know I’m here.” Not a question. “Her snowflake sleeps while the river works. Winter watches from above. Water comes in from below.” She tilted her head, birdlike, ancient. “I wonder what she owes for the last time she sent someone up my river.”

The water reached his throat. Warm. That was the worst — warm as the lie that if you stopped fighting, the debts would dissolve and nothing would ever be owed.

The ancestors erupted: WAKE — she is in your dreaming and Winter does not know — WAKE—
But between their voices was the rusalka’s song. Not a lure. The sound she made alone with the things she’d kept. And orc that he was — blunt, scarred, honest as iron — even he understood why a person might stop swimming.

He woke gasping on the Cestus. The snowflake lay against his sternum — cold, steady, oblivious. Whatever the rusalka had done, she had done it beneath Winter’s notice.

His shirt was soaked with river water. On his palms, faint as watermarks: the doll’s knot work. On his knuckles, piksie thorn-cuts reopened, weeping amber sap.

The shaman’s voice, fading: That is the cruelest thing about fey. They do not need you to be foolish. They only need you to be brave at the wrong moment.

The fetch doll — sealed in Wasserman’s chamber pot — was weeping. Drop after drop, like a clock.
And somewhere in the dark, a woman singing to the things she refused to let go.