Elena.
I have to think her name twice before it comes into focus. The last time I saw her—did I? At the lake? Before the lake? Everything from that day comes back in splinters.
Odin thinks she is dead. Ra thinks she is moving through the dark in ways I cannot yet see.
I think I don’t know enough. Neither god has an answer for that one. There’s a reason it’s the one thing they agree to disagree on.
One of them speaks. The language is pre-linguistic, more vibration than words, but Rhea understands it the way bone understands gravity.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum.” Old magic, even here. A nursery rhyme that won’t be written for ten thousand years, already encoded in their DNA. “I smell the blood of a god-born one.”
Rhea laughs. It comes out broken, half-sob, but it’s still a laugh.
She spreads her arms — blood on her hands, the stones pulsing brighter behind her.
“So,” she says, voice raw and terrible and utterly, devastatingly Elena. “Who wants to get pounded on the head with a stone?”
Some men declare themselves. Mikhail never did. His job and dedication kept him in place – in Zurich, in St. Petersburg, on a mountainside in Iran, Yerevan, at the edge of a lake with a python god in it – until “his place” stopped being a task and started being an emotion. The Man Who…
THE MEMORY CARTOGRAPHER — BOOK 0.1 My Law at Their Borders Etymology, origins, and the before-files I.Ph. de Lange Before the memories, there is the woman who carries them. Book 0.1 — My Law at Their Borders — is the foundation file for The Memory Cartographer series: three fragments from Elena’s life before the fieldwork…
The Memory Cartographer 