Camilla

After The Asphodel closes, the lights over the bar rarely go out with it. In their soft glow, Camilla stays behind the bar while all sorts linger at the counter. For Camilla, the night is when the work truly starts.

She leaves the restocking to her staff and keeps her appointments at the counter. Now and then, a few words slip through the hush, "over the border" among them.

In Icelake, everyone knows the name Camilla Scarlet.

Some swear by the drinks she mixes. Others marvel at her way with people. And for many, it is the secrets around her that keep them coming back. Camilla is a woman shrouded in mystery. Even those closest to her can tease apart every thread, watching, listening, prying, and still catch only a sliver of who she really is. To most, she remains an enigma. Best, perhaps, to think of her simply as the proprietress of The Asphodel.

Camilla was born in Icelake, but her origins lie elsewhere.

Even on her rare days off, Camilla never truly relaxes. More often than not, she is bent over her ledger, tallying every coin that comes in. She likes to say money is water: keep it moving and it keeps coming; hoard it, and it goes stagnant, seeping away a little at a time. When asked when she first understood the importance of money, she gives a faint, unreadable smile. "At an early age," she says. "Hunger teaches fast. So does a mother you wouldn't wish on anyone."

Among Icelake's Charons, a quiet rumour makes the rounds: pay enough, and you may be able to buy "freedom" from Camilla. Her price depends entirely on her mood, anything from a king's ransom to a single, simple embrace. Naturally, there is no guarantee you will make it out safely. Camilla does not make promises, and she will not answer for whatever happens on the road. Even so, many are willing to gamble, placing their hopes of leaving Hyperborea in her hands.

Camilla draws a strict line between business and personal ties. Even so, when an old regular falls on hard times, she still sets their usual in front of them, on the house, just enough to take the edge off for a while.

The wind carried a faint tang of blood. Camilla stepped out of the carriage and stared into the distance. She knew what lay beyond the horizon. She knew the name of that place.

"Home."

It was no good land. Barren and desolate, colder even than Icelake, it seemed to exist only to prove that people could survive in a climate this harsh. That was why no one cared to fight over it: not the Askard tribes, keeping to their fjords and cut off from the world; not the Khemet, who had long since built their lives around oases; not even the Hyperborean Empire, for all its appetite for new territory. But with no one in charge, the place could open its arms to the unwanted. Over time, it drew people in: the poor ground down by taxes, Charons trying to get out from under Hyperborea's boot, and the usual runaways, vagrants, criminals, smugglers. Where order is absent, people make their own rules. Crude rules. Survival rules.

The wind combed through her hair like an old friend, welcoming her back for a visit. She'd skirted that grey borderland more than once. She just never crossed it.

Why not? Part of her wanted to see for herself what kind of place could shape its people into that: a mother hysterical, a father cold and heartless.

And yet she hesitated.

Everything she knew about that home, and the people in it, came from her mother's complaints, like an old letter she was never meant to read. She could almost sense the danger in it. If she ever opened it, she feared everything she had now might be as fragile as yellowed paper, ready to crumble at a touch.

Camilla's personal vault holds no real valuables. There is nothing but a few old keepsakes and two yellowed letters. One is older, worn and thumbed through from countless readings. The envelope reads: "To my dearest Bertha". The other is newer, in the same hand, and packed with venomous abuse.

Camilla says both were written by her father, addressed to her mother. Set side by side, the tenderness of the first turns bitterly ironic, like wine sweetened to hide the poison, meant to draw Bertha close, only to hurt her all the more. Camilla recounts it without a flicker of emotion, as if it were an old story that happened to someone else entirely. Only her eyes betray anything at all: a faint ripple in their lake-dark depths, there and gone again.

On hushed winter nights, even a bottle striking the floor rang out sharp and clear. Tavern regulars' breath fogged the air, thick with the bite of spirits. Even on the quietest nights, Bertha, Camilla's mother, was there.

It was the same story every time. Little Camilla would come to haul her mother home once Bertha had drunk herself into a stupor. She was not tall enough, so she had to wedge her shoulder under Bertha's armpit, her fist knotted in the fabric of Bertha's coat. The half-finished bottle was tucked into the crook of her elbow; her free hand locked around Bertha's forearm. She inched them along, one step at a time, terrified they would go down together. By the time they reached the door, she was utterly spent. Then came the sounds from within: a bottle shattering, slurred curses, and the hard crack of a slap. No one ever heard the child's voice. All anyone saw was her silhouette, kneeling before Bertha in the dim amber light.

In her early years, Camilla despised alcohol. Its smell did nothing but remind her of her mother's abuse. By the time her mother sobered up, Camilla was already bruised all over. Tearful apologies would follow, but they never made any difference. It was not until serving drinks finally put food on the table that she began to make her peace with it. In time, she even developed a taste for it.

Camilla still remembers the evening the first letter arrived, and the moment she took it from the courier. She was a teenager then. She hugged it to her chest and ran home as fast as her legs would carry her. She could not stop thinking about what it said: that her father missed her mother dearly, and that he had only just learnt he had a daughter. He could not have been happier. Her heart raced so hard it hurt. So the "home" her mother had spoken of for years was real after all, not just something she had invented in desperation.

In Bertha's telling, that "home" was a place of rival factions, forever mired in chaos and clashes: lawless ground where violence and crime had taken root. Compared with Hyperborea, it sounded like a different kind of curse. And yet Bertha was obsessed with it for some reason. Perhaps because she had not left of her own will. She had been driven out by Camilla's father. Desperate, she drifted until she reached Icelake, and there, with humiliation and bitterness coiled inside her, she gave birth to Camilla.

The man's letter told a different story. He had had no choice. Family. Feuds. Rules. Camilla could read the words, but she did not understand the weight they carried. Even so, she could feel them cutting into her mother, leaving wounds that would not close. Still, the letter made it sound as if the worst was over.

That night Bertha did not drink. But her hands shook as she unfolded the page, harder than they ever had on a bottle. She cried, then laughed, then cried again, lost and helpless as a child. She wrote back through the night, and at dawn, in the mist, she slipped an envelope heavy with hope into the post box.

Nothing came back.

She told herself the postman must have lost it somewhere on the road, so she wrote again, and again. Whenever Camilla asked, her mother would stroke her cheek and murmur the same reassurance: her father was an important man with too much on his plate. Once he had dealt with the family business, he would come for them.

For a while, she even stopped drinking. She took work as a maid in a wealthy household. And whenever she had a spare moment, she would wander to the city gates and stare down the road beyond the walls, certain that one day a familiar figure would emerge from wind and snow.

It felt like things were finally turning around. Then the second letter arrived, the day before Camilla came of age.

In the no-man's-land of Anarchos, everyone wants to be a Patriarch.

A single frown can send his men scrambling. A few quiet words can decide who eats and who bleeds. In lawless Anarchos, a Patriarch runs things like the head of a household, laying down the rules the whole place lives by.

Camilla's father was a Patriarch.

He was not born into the title. No one ever is. In his younger days, he was the one out front, heavy steel in his hands, his brothers-in-arms at his heels.

And for all his hard edges, he did love someone. His fiancée, Camilla's mother.

What is a young man? Fire that catches fast and burns on.

What is a young woman? Ice that seals desire beneath a still surface.

What began honey-sweet curdled into something bitter enough to burn.

At a sit-down that was already one wrong word from turning bloody, love-drunk and reckless, she shot the man who had insulted her fiancé.

That single shot lit the fuse. Two factions burdened with old grudges erupted into a war no one had planned. The other side eventually broke in fear and blood, but Camilla's father's faction paid dearly too. They lost friends, brothers, mothers, and their Patriarch.

So, before Camilla was even born, her father took the title for himself. With gunpowder still hanging in the air, he decreed her mother's fate. To bring a bitter victory to an end, she was sent away.

Camilla's scar came from her mother, who slashed her with the metal edge of the family crest badge. Camilla was too young to understand what it meant. All she remembered was how it glittered in the light, cold and almost beautiful.

The day before Camilla's eighteenth birthday, she and her mother finally received another letter from the place they called "home". It was from her father, the man her mother had missed until it hurt. She almost burst with joy. Waving the letter above her head, she hurried along the muddy track with her arms spread wide, spinning as she went, light-headed with happiness.

Camilla called after her to slow down, to watch her step. Her mother did not hear. She just kept talking, about what had been, and, more than anything, what would be. They would have everything. Money to spare. Love enough to drown in. Under the dim streetlamps, her shadow stretched long across the ground, like a girl caught mid-dance. Camilla smiled and let out a quiet breath. For a moment, the roles felt reversed: she the parent, her mother the besotted teenager.

When they finally made it home, her mother lit a candle, then opened the envelope with careful hands and unfolded the letter.

Her voice cut off mid-sentence. The flame gave a small, nervous flutter, throwing harsh light across her eyes. Her mouth fell open. The smile froze in place. Camilla could not see the page, but she knew at once: this was not a letter written in love.

For a heartbeat there was silence. Then her mother made a sound Camilla had never heard before, hoarse and raw, like the howl of a wounded beast.

A chair toppled as the woman kicked it over. A plate hit the wall. Then a bowl of soup. One dish after another smashed and splattered, bursting into stains that clung to the plaster. Camilla sighed and started cleaning. She had been doing it since she was little. When the broomhead nudged the letter on the floor, she glanced down.

It was the same familiar hand, the one they had seen in the first letter. Only now there was no warmth in it at all. The lines were cold, shot through with obscenities. He told them to rot in Hyperborea and never write to him again. Their letters were nothing but a nuisance, and he was finished with them. Back home he already had a wife and a son. Even after his wife died, he still wanted nothing to do with them. That first letter, he said, was drunken rambling. He had not meant a word of it. Bertha was a stain on the family name, and he would not drag that stain into the light again.

Yes. Their very existence was the disgrace.

Camilla looked at her mother slumped over the table, sobbing herself hollow. She went back to her room without a word. She never expected the warmth of a hug from her mother. She only wished her mother would not lash out at her when pain soured into rage.

The next morning, the house was too quiet. Camilla went to wake her mother as usual. She touched her shoulder, only to find her cold as the snow falling over Icelake. Empty bottles littered the floor around her bed.

Camilla was not surprised. She had watched this moment play out in her nightmares for years. She bit her lower lip, but no tears came. After a long while, she sat down beside her mother and held her gently, as if she might fall apart.

When she finally forced herself to her feet and began to think about what had to be done next, her eyes caught on the table she had scrubbed clean the night before. There, sitting quietly, was a birthday cake, something she had always longed for and never once tasted.

That was how Camilla Scarlet came of age.

Jeff Ethan was a courier. In Icelake, people used to say he was the most reliable of the lot. Because he was the only one willing to cross the snowfields year after year, carrying letters between the cold streets of Icelake and the even colder wasteland of Anarchos. The road out there was vicious, the cold biting to the bone, and the Filthoids that prowled it were worse. Even for a Charon, it was punishing work.

Whenever Jeff brought letters from the "other side" back into Icelake, word ran through Mist Aken that he was back. Within minutes, people would be two or three rows deep around him. At the centre of it all, Jeff was hemmed in by laughter, by tears, by long-held breaths finally let go. Some at last learned that their family who had slipped across the border were safe and had managed to make a life there, and they turned in circles, giddy with relief. Some learnt a friend, or a brother, had been killed in a clash between rival factions, and a raw, ragged cry tore out of them. Most, though, received no word at all, and left with nothing but a long, hollow sigh.

Now Jeff no longer had to listen to any of it. After twenty years of hard work, he had finally saved enough for three seats on the southbound express, enough to take him, his wife, and his daughter somewhere warm. He would never have to haul that battered old cart across the snowfields again.

In all those years, the biggest payment he ever received came from a noblewoman in Anarchos. She had the air of someone who could decide whether you lived or died without ever raising her voice. She pressed a heavy pouch of gold into Jeff's hands and named her price. She meant to punish her unfaithful husband. Jeff was to intercept every letter he carried between the husband and a woman in Icelake named Bertha, hand the originals over to her, and deliver, in their place, the letters she had prepared. The money was enough to buy him ten years off the road.

In carrying letters between the three of them, Jeff learnt more than they ever meant him to know, and slowly pieced the story together. At night he lay awake in his cart, staring into the dark, wondering whether he ought to tell those star-crossed lovers the truth. But the snow came down hard that night. It piled up until its weight bowed the cart's canvas roof and collapsed it. Jeff muttered a curse at the storm, turning the same thoughts over and over. Could he still reach Icelake with the cart half-broken? How much would repairs cost? And then, as always, his mind slid back to his wife and little girl at home. Were they asleep? Or lying awake too, cold in their bones?

In the end, he kept his mouth shut. The one deceiving both sides was that spiteful noblewoman, and her husband had brought it on himself. And Bertha, that madwoman, always took it out on her poor daughter. None of them deserved happiness. And what was it to Jeff, really? He was only a courier. He delivered letters. That was all he could do, and all he needed to do.

"Darling," his wife said, wrapping her arms around his waist and looking up at him. "The place we're going to... it's much warmer there, isn't it?"

For some reason, the quiet longing in her smile made a name flicker through his mind. Bertha. The madwoman who had died years ago. Jeff gave a sharp, sudden shudder, as though the cold had found a way under his skin. His wife watched him, worry tightening her face.

He patted her shoulder reassuringly and tightened his grip on the tickets. They read: Icelake, Bloomfield Station, Aurora Express.

"Yes," he said. "From now on, you and me, and our daughter, we'll never be cold again." As he spoke, he seemed to see it: Sunlight somewhere far away, warm on his face, and fields alive with flowers.

Camilla once came close to ending her own life, and her mother's with it, to put a stop to the misery. At the last moment, she changed her mind. Years later, when her mother died, no one mourned her more deeply than Camilla. And no one felt more relieved.

In Icelake, the long nights were bitter enough to make anyone shiver. The wind bit at little Camilla's ears until they burned red. Her lips were so stiff she could barely form words, and every breath filled her lungs with air so cold it made her dizzy. She was close to breaking.

If her mother drank less, maybe they would have a decent coat between them. Maybe her mother would not hit her so often. Maybe they would not have to live on credit, wondering where the next meal would come from.

But would giving up drink be enough? Camilla could only manage a bitter half-smile. Alcohol was only part of their misery. The real weight was the pain her mother could neither live with nor escape. Tonight, it was a literal weight: the slumped body Camilla had to half-carry home, her mother dead drunk in her arms. The wind only grew sharper. Her fingers went numb around her mother's arm. The strap of the half-empty bottle cut into her wrist with every step, reopening old wounds her mother had left there years ago. And her mother, half-asleep, sagged against her as if none of it had anything to do with her.

Camilla could not live like this any longer.

She steered her mother towards the lake. The ice had thinned in places, thin enough to give way under two bony women.

She found herself moving fast, almost eager, as if what waited ahead was not an abyss but salvation.

At the water's edge, her mother stirred, briefly awake.

"...Are you cold?" Her eyes were half-lidded as she fumbled for her coat and, swaying, draped it over Camilla's head. "Let's go home. I'll make a fire." She mumbled, and slipped back into sleep.

She was right. The lake would be too cold on a night like this.

Maybe they should go home. Make a fire. Warm their numb fingers first. Then she could think again.

The wind eased. The snow softened, wrapping them up, as if ushering them back towards home.