Edmund wakes in his hospital bed. He clutches at the sheets and blankets. He pulls them over him.<\/p>\n
He remembers.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d tried to kill his father, he thinks. Had been killing him. He had been eating<\/em> him. He\u2019d gotten so very close to it and it wasn\u2019t his conscience that had stopped him cold.<\/p>\n Fenris had howled, and the wind had blown, and the walls around Edmund\u2019s heart had broken down \u2014<\/p>\n The world had poured into him. In, and in, and in; it was an overpowering chaos, formless, incomprehensible, too strong, too real, and too wild for him to shape it into sense.<\/p>\n It must have been hours ago. Days.<\/p>\n He remembers lights, and sounds. They were not parseable. He remembers trying to hide from the awful, mind-breaking sound of his own screams.<\/p>\n His arms and legs are pasty, thin, and weak. They are covered in goosebumps. This puzzles him.<\/p>\n It had been summer, hadn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Hadn\u2019t it been warm?<\/p>\n He sits up.<\/p>\n He wobbles.<\/p>\n He has a distant, swimming memory of his father\u2019s face.<\/p>\n He frowns.<\/p>\n There is a stone box on a table beside him; that, and flowers, and a card. He picks up the box. It looks like his old wooden heart-box, but he can\u2019t feel his heart inside it. He rattles it; his vision whitens, and he can almost then feel the dizzying stutter of a pulse.<\/p>\n He nods. It is his heart.<\/p>\n He can hardly feel anything at all. He is numb and dispassionate all through him, he with his heart in a box of stone. Even the hunger for human flesh inside him is distant, now, and weak.<\/p>\n He reads the card. He puts it aside. He sighs.<\/p>\n \u201cSome son you are,\u201d he mutters to himself.<\/p>\n It is really embarrassing. He remembers assuring his father that he was not a wayward child. But who has had the last laugh now?<\/p>\n . . . possibly it was still Edmund.<\/p>\n His father\u2019s shoulder had been extremely good eating. He flutters his eyes closed for a moment, overcome by joyful memory, and then he pushes the gift and treasure of that memory down into his heart\u2019s stone box.<\/p>\n He unplugs his IV and walks over to the door. There are a selection of white hats and coats hanging there. He takes his favorite hat, puts it on, adjusts it. He stares at the coats for a while.<\/p>\n \u201cI wonder if it\u2019s cold,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He stares at his skin.<\/p>\n \u201cI am fairly sure that I am really, really cold,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He puts on a coat. He puts his heart in his pocket.<\/p>\n \u201cI wonder if you can set people free,\u201d Edmund says, \u201cwithout killing and eating them.\u201d<\/p>\n He is a god of freedom. He is also a cannibal. These things happen.<\/p>\n He scratches at his hair.<\/p>\n He wanders out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Edmund wakes in his hospital bed. He clutches at the sheets and blankets. He pulls them over him. He remembers. He\u2019d tried to kill his father, he thinks. Had been killing him. He had been eating him. He\u2019d gotten so very close to it and it wasn\u2019t his conscience that had stopped him cold. Fenris […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-1","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Hat_4_nobg.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6100,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519\/revisions\/6100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5519"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}