The Fall of Hope

Once, the soundscape of the city would have been punctuated with bombs as they shrieked through the air, preceded by sirens that wailed in the early hours of the morning. The night was a place of many terrors – the darkness never went uninterrupted too long before a flash and a bang would echo out over the city, white light burning through drapes. But the people of Mount Neau were used to it – Freyja herself knew nothing but the War.

           It was when the bombs stopped banging and the bullets stopped whizzing that the trouble sleeping began. The War ended, not in an increased length of drawn-out peace talks, but all at once, like it had never happened in the first place. The soldiers withdrew overnight, and the next day, Mount Neau was under the control of the Central Empire. Like they had never objected to their reign in the first place.

           The average citizen never knew what happened, what changed – all they knew was that their king was gone, missing, declared dead, and the Empire had taken over. That was when everything fell apart.

           On this night, the city was quiet. Freyja picked her way through the Old District, hidden in a trough in the hillside, a streak of grey rubble against green grass. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The moon sat on a blanket of navy blue in the sky, and lit the way for Freyja, white light on broken cobbles.

           She was fast – if you blinked, you might miss her. The footfalls and cracking pavement underfoot never threw her off rhythm, not as she hopped over broken walls and slid under tree boughs, swinging in the wind. The Old District had returned to nature, as it once had come.

There were few people in the streets, only homeless people that the Central Empire had rejected from the main city. As Freyja hopped through though, she deposited small loafs of bread, filled with meat or vegetables from her family’s farm, at the feet of the homeless. They sang their thanks behind her, but she never stopped, not until she had ducked underneath the old stable doors at the end of the street and was in the safety of the Burrow.

Yellow replaced white as she dropped away from the safe watch of the moon into the candlelit cellar. Her breath tumbled out of her mouth as she sighed, sinking to the floor in the shadows. There were no footsteps behind her, but she could never be sure if someone was tailing her. The Empire had eyes everywhere.

That was why she didn’t pull her mask away from her face until the door was sealed shut behind her and she had checked every nook and cranny for peeping eyes. Her space was designed, after last time, for nobody to be able to hide anywhere. The biggest space was in the closet, but it was filled with clothes and took her only a few seconds to ruffle through. As much as she was anxious, she knew enough about the Empire that she knew they didn’t have the brain capacity or technology to track her constantly. Not while the simmering of the rebellion was rearing its head again.

Freyja was a small part of that rebellion; she had been from the start. Her job was to engage with the lower downs, feed them and keep them happy so that they would support the new government. She notified the higher ups that they likely would support the new government anyway, because the Empire treated them like dirt, but they didn’t care. She just did her job, like everybody else.

Cold air rushed to her as she peeled the mask away; it clung to the sweat that beaded on her cheeks from the unbreathing fabric that smothered her features into darkness. She pushed her hood away from her face and her hair sprung out from under it, two knotted buns falling against her scalp. In the dim orange candlelight, she sunk down to the ashen firepit, kicking up embers to start the fire again. As the flames struggled to catch light, she huffed through her nose. Her breath crystallised into vapour in front of her.

A floorboard creaked, and she jerked upwards, her hood over her head and her knife in her hand. The blade pointed into the dark corner, caught the light of the fire on its sharp edge, and she stared to the end of it as her brother stepped out into the light. He held his hands in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She grunted and touched her free finger to her lips. Sol was not a man who believed in discretion, or silence, but she needed him to shut up. She had a close call only a week ago, and her patrols ceased for the week so that she might throw them off her scent.

“Why are you here?” she whispered. Again, she pulled her hood back, and she knotted her fingers under the ribbon in her hair. She tugged at the string and her hair tumbled over her shoulders and tickled the nape of her neck.

“Mama told me you’d be here,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”

She looked up at him and arched an eyebrow. The last time she had seen Sol was when he sold out a small group of rebels to the government. In exchange, he became chancellor of the Basin District, a small town at the peak of the Mount Neau. It was a big role, a hefty responsibility, and all he had to do was jeopardise the life of those he cared most about. Freyja didn’t care for politics, and she cared even less for the man standing in front of her.

“Little old me?” she said, slicing her blade through the thin layer of wrapping. The sandwich was cold and brimming with leaves, and she set it atop the fire to char for a few minutes. As she balled up the tissue paper, she threw it towards the bin by Sol’s side – the wrapper bounced off his hand, and Freyja bit back a smirk.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I wanted to apologise for last time,” he said, “and I wanted to give you a gift.”

She peered up from the fire. Since the Empire had taken over, most people didn’t have disposable income to spend on such trivial things like gifts, and she stared at Sol like he was speaking a different language, like she couldn’t understand what he was saying. And yet, in his hands, he held a poorly wrapped parcel, covered in intricate paper with gold leaf designs on its front. She blinked.

“Happy birthday, Frey,” he said. Frey. It had been some time since she had heard someone call her that. Their mother didn’t bother with trivialities like that – it was always Freyja, her “god-given” name.

“Why should I call you a nickname when I chose to call you Freyja? It is a beautiful name.”

Something felt wrong hearing the pet name on his tongue, but she said nothing, cautious not to irritate him. She reached over the fire pit and took the present from his hand. It was leaden in her grasp and her shaky fingers were careful not to drop it in the flames, which picked up as she drew her arm back.

There was something nice about her birthday being recognised – they had eaten a special meal to commemorate, but they didn’t have the kind of money for gifts, or the time to spend celebrating her existence. It was a waste of resources that they couldn’t afford. But she was only eighteen, and she stared at the gift with childlike wonder, if only fleeting.

Her deft fingers picked at the sealed edges of the paper, and she flicked the layer open. The glue gave way under the pressure of her hands, and she revealed the present underneath – a music box. Freyja blinked once, twice, and then lifted the lid. Soft music played from the box – her favourite nursery rhyme, a song their mother crooned to them as they were falling asleep. Her heart swelled and she looked up at him, unsure of what to say.

“Thank you, Sol,” she breathed. She shut the lid and set it to the side, putting the wrapping paper on the fire as kindling.

“Do you like it?” he asked. There was an edge of sincerity in his tone that she hadn’t heard in many years. Certainly not when he revealed himself after trading their friends for his position. All she heard then was lies, and he was the potent liar.

“I do,” she said. “Where did you find this?”

“The market sells odd little trinkets,” he said. “The sort of thing Mama would buy.”

Freyja’s jaw twitched as she looked down at the box. How could you possibly know what Mama would buy? Their mother was leaving the middle of her life now, and age clung to every crevice of her body like a leaden weight. But she was graceful as ever, and her white hair fell around her wrinkled face and wizening shoulders. The old woman was wiser with her years, and Freyja thanked her for it. Wisdom was what Freyja needed to be anchored to the ground.

“Mama would not waste her tokens on this stuff,” Freyja said, rather than keeping her mouth shut. Tokens – that was a sore topic. People from lower down the mountain were gifted tokens by the Empire, rather than coins, to ration the goods after the war. It was part of their punishment.

“You sound ungrateful, Freyja,” he said. At that point, she heard the man he had become, and her skin crawled.

“I’m not,” she said. As soon as she realised the shift, her tone changed, and she looked down at the music box.

“I want to see Mama again,” he said. “Will you help me?”

His words were strong, confident – he was the Chancellor that the Basin District needed since it had made up much of the front lines of the war. But there was a sensitivity in his brown eyes, glowing copper in the firelight, that made her heart twist.

“Why are you asking me?” she said.

“She wouldn’t listen to me,” he replied. “She doesn’t trust me.”

Freyja wondered, only briefly, if perhaps he had done what he did because he thought that it was the right thing to do. She wondered how ignorant he would have to be to believe that.

And yet, she thought he was sincere. She stared at him and saw the boy that had picked her up when she skinned her knee. The boy who hugged her close when tears wet his face during bombings. The boy who told her that one day, he would make them pay. She saw hope in his face, and her heart lifted. Maybe he truly meant this.

“Do you understand why she doesn’t trust you?” she asked. Her heart ached as she thought about sending him away, cutting him off completely. There had been a few situations when he had arrived at the bunker during her night shift, and she thought about the fact that he had continued to let her do this, even though he knew that what she was doing went against Empire law.

He bowed his head and her eyes caught on the pin badge that every Chancellor was given – it read their full name and title, engraved. The pin was worth more than Freyja’s entire home. Nausea rolled over her.

“Of course,” he said, “and I will regret what I did my whole life, Frey. You have to understand that.”

He sighed and sank down in front of the fire, his eyes hard on hers. Gold light bathed over their shared features, the bump in his nose, the high cheekbones, and narrow faces. He had freckles where she didn’t, and a scar in his throat, a battle wound that he shouldn’t have survived. She wondered how he could forget where he came from, what the Empire had done to him.

“How am I supposed to fix things from the outside?” he asked. “I had to hand them in because it meant that I’d be trusted by them. This is all part of the plan.”

He had referenced the plan before, and she still didn’t wholly believe him. Never had the rebellion associated themselves with him, even after his betrayal. Moreover, if this was part of a plan, then their mama should not be so angry. She shook her head and buried her face into her hands.

“I don’t believe you, Sol,” she exhaled.

He was silent when she said that, and then huffed. When she opened her eyes, he had peeled the sandwich off the top of the fire and took a bite out of it. It crunched between his teeth and warm meat and sauce squelched in his mouth. He passed it back to her, and she remembered nights where they had hidden under the city here, eaten food like this, huddled around the fire and waited for the rain of hellfire to stop.

“I know you don’t,” he said, “and it is my biggest regret that I can’t prove it to you.”

She bit into the sandwich, relished in the taste of homegrown chicken and stock washed together between soft white bread. Her mother always knew how to make delicious sandwiches – if they were going to feed the hungry, they might as well eat a good meal, her mother always said. And she was right. It wasn’t their fault that they had been stuck like this. It was the fault of people like her brother.

“Don’t do it for yourself,” he said. “Do it for Mama. You can’t play god, Freyja.”

She looked at him over the fire and her stomach flipped. Mama deserved the chance to see her son again; she was in the throes of illness, and they didn’t have the money to fix it. Maybe Sol wanted to do something kind. Maybe his money could help her get better.

“Okay,” she said. If there was someone she cared more about than herself, it was her mother. Money would change everything for them. “If you promise to get her medical help.”

“Of course,” he said. “I care about her.”

And for that moment, her heart was light. They fell into easy conversation as she finished her sandwich, and it felt like home. Like he had never done what he did. Of course, reality was always crueller than the past. Because while they talked to each other about their mother, the past, their prospects, Imperial troops were making their way through the Old District on horseback – four troops equipped to take out a group of rebels. All for Freyja. And she had no idea. She truly believed her brother might have changed.

She stood up and brushed herself down. The fire was dying, and the sun would be rising above ground.

“Thank you for coming, Sol,” she said. “I really mean it.”

He smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling, and said, “Thank you for complying.”

And that was how the fire of hope died in Mount Neau. Not in a spectacular explosion, not in a big battle between one group and another, but in a silent betrayal of a sister.