The true golden age of the world was a sight to see; a science-based system mixed with the world of magic to infuse even the most basic tasks with a little extra joy. The poaching of magic creatures and monsters had been outlawed long ago, so long even, that now there were history books that reported the monster’s side of the story. With the inclusion of magic in the everyday world, science evolved in leaps and bounds. Using the tech from a monster girl from centuries before, the formula for real time travel was created, and in the vast desert of the Australian outback, a community of indigenous people unveiled their cure for most known, non-magic diseases.
Not that anyone in the tiny cursed town of Úrgangurinn, Iceland would know any of this.
Like a perpetually frozen retirement home, the tiny town was stuck in a magic-induced blizzard and housed about ten well-aged, to ancient men and women. Only two children had ever been born within the borders of the decrepit village. Most blame for this went to the fact that despite looking like it was rotting from the inside out, the village wasn’t much more than twenty years old when the first child – Tamrat – had been born (followed closely by the second, whose name – Mauerbauertraurigkeit – is far too long to be called anything but Mauer.) The rest of the blame can easily be shifted to the fact that nearly everyone was queer of some sort.
Mauer’s mother Valdís – a hulking woman of godly descent – had barely been a resident of the town for a month before having him; as she had traveled for so long during her pregnancy to find a magic-rich land. So what if it meant she had to walk eight-months pregnant through a harsh, unyielding forest seemingly set on confusing her path. She was the daughter of a Valkyrie and would do anything for her unborn son. Years later, when he was born and causing a ruckus around the village, her stance on this matter would not waiver.
**
Mauer, at age eight, seemed bound to Tamrat’s hip. The slightly older boy was his partner in crime, and being the only kids in town, all they had for real fun was each other, and the twins’ sled dogs. Considering that the dogs were often in use, that left the kids alone with nothing but their imaginations and a landscape of snow.
It never mattered that Tamrat, born with defects wrought on by the ancient malicious magic of the land, had no hands, couldn’t speak, and had poor lungs. The kids just created a language made up of the soft hums and squeaks that Tamrat could manage, and Mauer handled any work that required the delicate intricacies of fingers. Meanwhile, Tamrat managed with the heavy lifting. He had to lug around an oxygen tank for his bad lungs, so he built up muscles from an early age – unlike the scrawny, autistic Mauer, who never inherited his mother’s strong blood.
They spent every waking moment together, and even most sleeping ones as well. Tamrat’s grandfather – Mulogo – ran the village, and was often too busy to take care of his last living relative, so Valdís would take him in more often than not. The only time that separated them was when one of the twins (and the local weather witch), Seinhe, deigned it time to tell fairytales.
Tamrat loved the stories. They spun tales of the elves that lived in the forests surrounding the town, and the strange circumstances of the children’s birth. Much of Tamrat’s body had been taken from him before his birth, and the stories Seinhe spun explained why.
The elves, unhappy with his parent’s visit, had cursed the couple. It had not meant to manifest in the child his mother had yet to deliver, but magic was willful, and even the best users couldn’t always control where it wound up. The curse ate at the parts of his unborn body it knew the mother would love the most – his voice, which she was sure would have sung sirens out of the sea; his hands, which would have created the most delicate of creations; a small little chemical in his brain that would not be evident until years after his birth, but without it, would cause his mother’s world to shift; his lungs, which would have allowed him to breathe regularly and achieve all of this, even without the elements she thought were key.
His parents may have left him the day he was born, but the town took him in, and the elves had let him live on. Mulogo often said the elves were fickle, greedy creatures (making sure to say such things only behind closed doors) and that they could and would have easily killed him just as he entered the world, but they were merciful, that they must have seen something in him that needed to live. Tamrat loved the stories, because he wanted to know the creatures that wanted him to live so badly.
Mauer, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. Not that he didn’t believe in the elves, of course, doing that would only lead to trouble down the road. But the elves had not taken anything from him or his mother, thanks to her powerful heritage. The elves, to him, were no mysterious savior; instead they were only troublesome (and dangerous) folk who lived in the harsh parts of the forest and occasionally stole from his mother’s flock of sheep up on the mountain.
So, while Seinhe told Tamrat ancient tales of magic, Mauer read and re-read the medical books she kept on her bookshelf. Before she lived in Úrgangurinn, Seinhe had studied medicine while her twin brother became an engineer. It was his brain disease that brought them to such a place, because no medicine could cure his ailment. Only the strange elven magic that was steeped within this land could slow the rate at which his memory declined. She had kept the books in hope that she could help, but nothing ever made sense; so, she let Mauer study diagrams of the nervous system and learn what blood was made of. Had it been anywhere else, with any other child, she would have thought it strange, how he gave up fairytales for a book he could barely understand, but in a place like Úrgangurinn, things very rarely acted as they should.
When he was twelve, four years later, Mauer took a kitchen knife to a mouse and dissected it on the kitchen table. Years of absorbing college-level medical texts had taught him that people tested new drugs on mice and rats to discover their would-be effects on real human (and non-human) people. Of course, what he found in the mouse was nothing like what he saw in textbooks that only showed human and the occasional primate diagrams. But watching how the body worked amazed him. Any varmints he caught in their pantry were met with a similar fate, though Valdís got him his own work table so that he didn’t have to smear squirrel gore across her kitchen. The more he watched, the more similarities in the bodies he found, and the more intrigued he became.
During the winter of Mauer and Tamrat’s fifteenth year, when the cold was at its worst, two of the twin’s sled dogs died. They were old – the oldest of the pack – and had carried the sled for years, even before Mauer was born. The ground was too frozen to give them a burial, and it was far too cold for anyone to stand around a hole in the ground anyways, so Seinhe threw the bodies in a snow drift and let them freeze. She figured the elves would take them, but it was Mauer, who had never worked on anything larger than the very fat mink that had wandered into their oat supply, who dragged the bodies out of the drift and cut them open.
Tamrat, who had, quite ironically, grown into a voice of reason to Mauer, had been absolutely aghast with his actions, and demanded him to let the dead die in peace. Mauer, ever the smartass, responded that they had been dead for days, and had “surely left to the land of dog-elves-or-wherever-it-is-they-go” so he could do what he wanted. Tamrat, though still disgusted, was also a confused teenager and figured that was good enough reason to let Mauer do what he wanted. Neither of them had seen the inside of a dog before, and Mauer had a plan in mind.
A week of constant work later – since in the dead of winter in an awful Icelandic town didn’t give much for a teenage boy to do – Mauer had combined the dog bodies. Tamrat was grossed out, but at this point, putting the corpses back where he had found them would be more disturbing. The new dog was about a foot taller at the shoulder, and he had used electricity to keep the muscles from deteriorating completely. By all means, they should have had one big dog at that point. But it had taken too long to put it together, and the brains – the one muscle that he hadn’t figured out how to keep from fading – had both gone past the point of no return. He should have gotten to them sooner, because now his experiment had basically died a second time on his lab table, and he didn’t have the results for what he most wanted.
He kept the body, of course, because what else would he do with a mish-mashed corpse that could almost be alive, if only he had a working brain.
His prayers were answered a week later, when the third dog died, from a bad case of unchecked bloat. The ruptured stomach made most of the organs unusable, but the brain – though a little oxygen deprived – was in good enough shape that when Mauer took the corpse off of Seinhe’s hands before she could even think to toss it to the snow drifts, he was able to bring it back to life in the new body. A little electricity and forced blood flow, and the dog that was actually three dogs in one was up and figuring out how to re-learn how to walk.
When Mauer gave the dog back to the twins, Seinhe thought he had personally gone to the afterlife to bring her dogs back.
From then on, Mauer began experimenting on larger things. Sheep, elk, bears that his mother fought with her bare hands; and, eventually, even himself. When he got a case of frostbite on his toes while lugging the body of some poor lost hiker who died out in the blizzard, he replaced his toes for the preserved ones on the hiker. Sure, he could have used his own, but where was the fun in that? He was so wrapped up in his experiments, though, that he barely noticed Tamrat growing distant. Tamrat worked with the local fisherman more often, and when he didn’t do that, he was trying to help his grandfather with his alcoholism. A year after the first dog incident (Seinhe had promised that she would hand any dead dogs over to Mauer in the future so that he could bring them back) Tamrat was no longer at Mauer’s side every minute of every day. Everyone in town noticed this, except for Mauer, as he worked to replace his blood with a thicker substance that worked the same but kept him warmer to prevent any more frostbite.
In fact, he didn’t realize that Mulogo had a problem until the man couldn’t get out of bed. Mauer was seventeen, now with fingers that weren’t originally his, and Tamrat was staying at Mulogo’s side almost every moment. It came as a shock, when he asked Tamrat to help him with something, and to not get a response. It was like he had been in his workshop for years and had only stopped working in those strange moments when he realized he was alone. His mother gave him a pitying look when he asked about his best friend, she knew how he could lose track of things his brain would occasionally dub “unimportant” no matter how important they actually were, so she carefully explained how Mulogo had been depressed long before the two of them were born, and how it so easily had become a drinking problem.
It had been a surprise to him, at first, but then he remembered how often Tamrat stayed with him when they were younger, and how they barely stayed at the other’s house. An alcoholic household was no place for a child, and everyone in town knew that. What had once been playful sleepovers as kids, suddenly became a safe way for Tamrat to avoid a dangerous habit.
For the first time in his life, Mauer was nervous about visiting his friend. Not out of fear of Mulogo, but because he worried that Tamrat would be angry with him for forgetting about his best friend. It had never been a problem before, Tamrat had never had to take care of his grandfather like this.
But when Mauer hesitantly walked into the small stone house and saw Tamrat sitting beside Mulogo as he slept on the couch, Tamrat smiled sadly and, in the soft squeaking language they had created as kids, complimented his handiwork on his new fingers. Neither of them made a fuss. Tamrat had been there as an important presence for Mauer as he worked on bodies that the other had thought was gross; it only made sense that Mauer should be there for his only friend as his grandfather systematically killed off his own body.
It was here, in the small living room of this place Tamrat could barely call a “childhood home” next to the sleeping Mulogo, a few weeks before Tamrat’s eighteenth birthday, that she came out. Mauer didn’t know what to say, besides a tentative question about names. She just smiled broad and told him to call her Vervain from now on; that it was a name of a plant that she liked, and she had grown fond of botany while he was entranced with bodies. He could have kicked himself for not noticing, but she told him not to worry, that she had grown distant with worry when she realized that she wasn’t what she had thought she was. It wasn’t that she thought Mauer would hate her, she knew that he would always be by her side. But she worried about Mulogo, because even if he was a depressed gay man, his actions still confused her, and she said he was a wild card when it came to opinions.
Mauer stayed at Vervain’s place that night, to show he wasn’t going to forget her for another year, but he didn’t sleep. Even if her coming out had been short and sweet, no one else in town was trans, so he knew she had no one to relate to, considering the body she had. He wanted her to feel right, and to not feel like she had to avoid others to do so.
**
Mulogo had been in bad shape for months. it honestly surprised everyone that he lived for as long as he had. The weeks leading up to Vervain’s birthday were rough, and when he finally passed, it was more of a relief, because at least then he wasn’t suffering. They didn’t have to worry about his organs shutting down, or him passing out in the shower anymore. Now he was in the hands of the elves who he had worshipped so much. They could only hope that he was happy with where he was now.
Mauer was never the best with reading emotions, so it didn’t come as a surprise to Vervain when he was in a celebrating mood only two days after her grandfather died. It was her birthday, after all. Valdís made her the stew she had always loved, though she was a bit more solemn about it than Mauer, as he seemed to vibrate with excitement. She wasn’t bitter about Mauer, though. Sometimes she appreciated his ability to focus on the good things, instead of the bad. It was like his work – killing things, turning them into something slightly different, then giving them new life. The twins’ sled dogs were a testament to how well he worked.
All day, she thought it was her birthday he was so excited about, and in a way, she was right, but it wasn’t the full story. For years, she had watched him get so excited he had to flap his hands to get rid of his excess of energy. She had gotten a bit of a crush on him years before, when she watched his eyes light up at the sight of a new discovery, but he had never turned that look to her until now. It made her flustered to be the one under that strong stare. maybe if he wasn’t taller than her it wouldn’t affect her as much.
When Mauer took her back to his workspace at the end of the day, she barely thought anything of the frozen bodies of people in his workspace. She knew he added parts to himself, it was evident from the patches of skin scattered across his body that were nowhere near his skin tone. They weren’t people she recognized, so they must have been missing hikers, who had never learned how to traverse the blizzard that kept Úrgangurinn separate from the rest of the world. When people went missing out here, rescue missions only ended in failure, thanks to the elves. Who knew how long those frozen bodies had been dead.
So no, Vervain didn’t think twice about human bodies in her best friend’s lab. She did, however, think twice about the next words out of his mouth.
“What kind of body do you want?”
He hadn’t said anything about her being trans besides asking about her name. She thought that was that, and he wouldn’t make a fuss. She should have known better. She glanced at the bodies again, and he went on to explain that a new body, one that wouldn’t shut down quickly would take a few years to make, but that he wanted her to be comfortable in her own skin, and if that meant making her the body she wanted most of all, he would go to the elves themselves to get the supplies himself. he was looking at her with that intense stare again as his words sunk in. he added that he could give her hands and teach her how to use them when it was all said and done, as long as it made her happy.
The little crush she had developed years ago didn’t hold a candle to the amount of love for him she suddenly felt in that moment.
Instead of saying anything about these strong feelings, though, all she could manage to say under his elated stare was a broken squeak that meant only “I want to be taller than you.”
End.
Wheeler Graye 