The Eastern Gates of Dawnhaven
Never before had Nesna strayed so far from home. It had been some days’ worth of journey from her home near the eastern shores—how long precisely, Nesna realized she had entirely failed to keep track. Thinking of it, after all these years, she had never anticipated that she would again need any real account for the passage of time beyond a rough guess of when the daylight would show. But since the sun’s disappearance, what real matter was it whether she had flown six, eight, ten, or more hours at once? At varying points, Nesna had been utterly certain that she had somehow overshot something. It seemed so sensible back when she had first made the decision to abandon her home. Once it had become apparent that everything she held in any regard could be packed and carried without too much difficulty, there was little more thinking to be done. If she only flew directly west until she reached the mountains, transverse them, and then followed the southern side of the range, she would eventually arrive that way, if it truly was the case that Dawnhaven sat on the northern shores of the great Frostmoon Lake.
But perhaps she had oversimplified the trip. Rarely had she flown so high as she did to keep alongside the mountains and away from any eyes that might see a blightborn such as her and trouble themselves to rid the world of her. Constant winds and sudden gusts threatened to push her off course, while blasts of snow threatened her ability to even see where she was headed. Whenever it seemed like she had found a decent path through the skies that she could follow the entire way to Dawnhaven, it seemed the fickleties of the weather sought to strike her down for having the utter gall to imagine that travelling through the Lunarian wilderness would by any stretch of the imagination be easy, manageable, or even reasonably possible. Fortunately, if Seluna indeed might have had any regard left for Nesna, if Nesna indeed could feel she had any respectable and tangible virtue left within her, her patience seemed to see her through time and time again. There had been close calls—plenty of them—but so long as Nesna landed in the forests along the foothills of the mountains, found herself something to drink, and made no attempt to spite nature by attempting to do anything more but pull her bundles tighter and find a ditch protected from the wind to rest in.
In these times, between her best attempts at diligently following the landscape and pushing forward, and passing out like an undignified, abandoned corpse in some miserable ditch, Nesna thought, as she often did. It was not altogether rare that she imagined herself speaking to someone else—most often, it was a question or musing on something she’d read, seen, or spontaneously thought of, which she liked to imagine in a better world she might have asked of a mentor or posed to a peer—but this time, she faced an unprecedented circumstance. At some point, if she ever did arrive at Dawnhaven, she would for the first time in ages actually have to speak the words she imagined. In her ditches, before her sleep, Nesna experimented, on some lonely occasions, speaking to herself again. She had long fallen out of even the habit of talking to herself, much less to others. After all, there was no-one to talk to, nothing to say, and to speak in a normal voice was to invite someone unwanted to notice her presence. To speak again at any length or volume felt strange. The muscles in her tongue and her lips had their strength still, for she often mouthed things to feel as if she could at least, if she ever had the opportunity, still speak like a real person. And of course, she still breathed.
No single motion—no single gesture—of the greater act felt at all strange. But the feeling of words actually passing her lips, rather than simply chewing on them and imitating the motions of talking, felt entirely alien. Recalling her voice, before she had changed, Nesna had been told that it was nasally and rather high. If anything, it had been a bit grating on the ears. This notion had not been difficult to believe, for the voice she used to hear when she spoke sounded not altogether dissimilar from how it had been described. As Nesna worked up the courage to experimentally recite passages and then to spontaneously speak to herself again, she found that her old voice, too, had died with age and mutation. This new voice of hers, to her own ear, had lost its youth. For how a normal, reasonable effort to speak produced a quiet, hoarse burbling, Nesna could not help but imagine she sounded like someone struggling against death. For a time, she resigned herself to introducing herself as a haggard creature barely-clinging to life. That if she ever, in fact, made it to Dawnhaven, or if she should mistakenly find another place and plead mercy, she would sound as if the blight were already finishing the job of her execution.
Mercifully, her resignation proved temporary. After reaching the ultimate conclusion that her voice would sound as it did, Nesna encountered a new bout of inspiration as the wind dried her lips. Nesna swallowed, cleared her throat, and then held her mouth open for a time. At a certain point, her mouth felt normal. And then she felt her mouth become dry and cold. Impatiently, Nesna dropped from the sky and sat in a snowbank. After a moment of pensive anticipation, she pushed herself to
“Just speak.”“Blessed Moon, may it be—”Nesna knelt, began in a spontaneous prayer, and interrupted herself for just a moment as she heard herself.
“May it be that in Your divine guidance, You cast Your gentle light upon one so unworthy as I, that I may be led towards providence. I pray that You might bless me with safety and passage this day and tomorrow, that I may be rightly-guided in my travels, and that I might in some way be able to contribute to the spread of good in this world. Thank You, Oh Pale Lady of the Night, for what I have and for what I may come to experience. In all this I pray. Verily, may it be so.”Nesna sat back in the snow and traced her fingers along the bottom of her jaw, and then her throat. With a pensive smile, she let out a quiet sigh and closed her eyes. She nodded and then stood still for a moment, as if thinking for a moment longer. Slowly, she stood, and spoke again.
“Thank You, Seluna,” she murmured. Nesna could not help but to sigh again and listen to the sound that reverberated through her throat. It sounded…decent. Nesna could not imagine she might herald divinity or contribute much in the way of song to the world, but for all of this, her voice did not grate on her. With a throat that had perhaps never been properly cleared since it became confined at last cleared, her voice indeed still felt different, but not altogether foreign to her. Her voice had sunk and settled from that high-pitched nasality from before she had changed. But it had not tumbled into the mud, rather, it had settled into something which felt, as Nesna tried to describe it to herself, only proper for her current station. It still held some vestiges of the crackle she had worried about, but it wasn’t so much a sickle crackle as the crackle of effort. It felt, perhaps, kindly and experienced more so than ill. And it seemed to erode as she spoke more and with more confidence, as if it were less so a permanent affliction than it was a sort of sediment that needed to be shaken off from her vocal cords.
Looking past that feature she noticed the most, Nesna found herself almost pleased with how her voice had changed as she’d grown up. It wasn’t melodic, per se, but it had a sensible weight to it, and a certain pleasantry that she had not specifically intended to infuse in it. It felt only proper, that her voice leaned towards being acoustically understated and timid-sounding; after all, what right did a monster have to be anything but timid? Perhaps it was in fact Seluna herself who had seen fit to bless her with some small kindness: a voice that would not grate but rather disarm—a voice that suggested neither intelligence, ambition, nor even eagerness—a voice befitting someone entirely cowed and with no expectations beyond being, in some minor way, of use to someone more worthy.
Nesna had often thought like this. It was not, she imagined as she took off once more, fair to demand of herself that she think this way about herself. No, the question of “worthiness” could not be relevant here. Rather, a voice implying a gentle spirit was a necessity here. For a monster to appear ambitious or excessively bright would surely come off as dangerous, and to be dangerous was the last thing Nesna hoped to be considered. So it was, that this sound of hers, was not so much her accurate sound as it was a blessing that she could sound in such a way—a small mercy that might evoke for her some measure of sympathy or kindness from whoever she could venture to encounter at the end of her journey. It wasn’t as if there was anything better to be expected; blightborn were at best unfortunate products of a bad situation. There was no world, so Nesna imagined, where she might be anything other than a monster or a tragically-afflicted innocent.
But the idea that she might have a decent shot at seeing herself considered the latter was comfort enough. With the weather turning for the better, Nesna found herself entertaining an odd sort of relief—a sentiment she had not enjoyed for longer than she had any care to recall. And as if the day could not be filled with any more momentous developments, Nesna had scarcely enjoyed this long-dormant feeling when she saw, in the distance, the vague appearance of guard towards and the shores of a great lake. Squinting and straining to see as hard as she could, Nesna suddenly felt inclined to drop and land. If this was not Dawnhaven, if the apparent bustle was not suggesting a new city, if that was not, indeed, a temple to Aelos—the Sun Goddess of the south—then what else could it be? Nesna landed behind the mountain and resolved to walk the remainder of the way towards the gates.
She pulled out her mirror from her bag, and worked eagerly to groom herself. Or, rather, do the best she could. Thinking of it, there was irritatingly little to be done, in truth. Nesna had not seen fit to try and alter any of her nicer gowns to contend with her wings. Nesna kicked herself as she realized that she would, in all likelihood, meet the resident royals in the loose, drab, poorly-fitted gown that was still the nicest thing she could actually wear, thoroughly battered by the weather as it was. Just as soon as she looked at herself, Nesna shoved her mirror back into her back with frustration. There was no reason to bother fixing her hair or doing anything more than make sure her face was clean and her clothes were brushed off. After she forced herself from tinkering with her hair any longer, Nesna held her hands down by her sides and sighed. Her very first interaction with another person in years, and she would look like she had been sleeping in ditches. The fact that she had, in fact, been doing so was not at all soothing her disdain for her own grooming. All the same, trying her best to avoid making it too obvious how displeased she was with her appearance, Nesna clamped her cloak shut, carefully made her way towards the path, and began to follow it. At long last, she saw the gates in the distance.
Nesna pushed her hands past the cloak and held them in front of her chest before she imagined she’d even been properly noticed. It was only sensible, especially out here and looking as she did, she imagined, that she ought to make clear that she was fully unarmed. Stopping some distance from the gate, Nesna looked to one of the guards and took a breath.
“Begging your pardon!” she exclaimed. Nesna winced suddenly as she felt herself straining to project, but quickly pushed past it,
“Is this Dawnhaven?”
