After Ever, Happily by Elis Montgomery
2200 words, ~11 minutes reading time
Issue 9 (Winter 2025)
Ettin sits at the tower window, waiting. They watch the striated clouds scroll across the sky like tapestry unfurling. They lift one flowering hand to the glass and think of Azoya, and they wonder: if they described how they saw the clouds with every word they had in every language, could they still get her to see the weft?
A dozen years ago, they reminded themself that for all Azoya’s distance, they both shared the same sky. But change is the beloved bosom friend of time, and the two walk hand in hand.
Ettin rises from the cool panes and goes to put the kettle on. Done, for the moment, with waiting.
In this fairy tale, they fought for each other.
The questing letters came by red raven, bearing signatures from older, sager immortals. There were runes and riddles to decipher. Cruel kings, babes in snow, monsters in the skins of men. And when Ettin and Azoya each came upon their journey’s end, they found that they had met in the middle.
Ettin arrived first.
The forest was the selective kind, but for Ettin it opened itself like a moonflower at dusk. If the questing letters were to be believed, the clearing they sought would hold a deep stream and a promise.
And now a sliver of water winked at Ettin through the trees.
They wafted into the clearing toward it, fallen leaves in boysenberry hues brushing the undersides of their hovering feet. The stream coiled like smoke off a campfire, babbled like birdsong. When they knelt against its stony edge, tiny daffodils sprung up around their knee. Ettin peered into the water: beneath floating lilies, silvery minnows chased each other through spiralling roots, racing away only to circle back again. Across the bank, a round frog like a breathing pebble hopped closer, dove in.
Ettin watched it all, looking for the promise. Wondering about the kinds of immortals that gifted quests without guidance.
Hoofbeats echoed in the distance, the sound twisted directionless by the curving trees. Ettin stood and turned, lifted their feet from the earth. The tips of their twigged fingers tingled with the possibility of vines, and they prayed this would not be another fight.
A skeletal horse tore into the clearing.
Atop it was Azoya, gallant under a mantle of ancestral bones. She was like carrion picked clean, nothing like Ettin but just as far from being human. Ettin knew her as a knight by her mantle, the blade at her hip, her bearing—even as she contorted protectively over her side.
She and Ettin tried to hail each other, to show they both meant the other no harm, but their first hello dissolved half-said as Azoya shuddered in pain and pitched over off her horse, collapsing into the fallen leaves.
Ettin closed the distance between them, letting their feet hit the earth so they could run, pale anemone petals trailing in their wake.
Their first touch came as Azoya, hands fluttering, tried to help Ettin find her injury. Fingers made of bones and twigs connected and revealed the wound: a vicious gash through the chainmail covering Azoya’s side, already blistering with the taste of cursed steel.
Ettin scooped Azoya into their arms. Soft viscera swathed her strong frame, and she was lighter than she looked. They carried her to the stream, laid her upon the pebbles and daffodils, and began their work. They asked the earth that made them for steady hands and swift blooms, prayed they could cleanse the wound before it could render the undead knight truly dead.
Ettin reached purifying fingers into the flow, sprouting hornwort and witch hazel between the lilies. They cupped handfuls of cool-steeped stream water and showered Azoya’s side until the blistering gave ground. Azoya watched them through fluttering lids. Thanked them, when she had the strength.
The quests had been long. Ettin had thought that the worst riddle was the reason for it all. But the treasure was what bloomed between them, there in that deep wood under a darkening sky.
The two of them grew together like sunflowers, seeds to towering stalks. They weathered storms, withered, and grew back with all the strength of bones climbing from the earth. And when they clasped their palms together before a sybil, the rain was featherlight, like the clouds, too, were brought to blissful tears.
Before a barrow of the ancients, in a small glade cradled on one side by a teeming olive grove, their sybil guided them through the ceremony. She was younger than they were, but old, in her way: stout and grey and sure, carrying with her all the wisdom of a woman without lives to spare.
She wreathed their hands with dried grasses and strands of trailing lobelia. Her fingers were wrinkled and warm on theirs as she chanted, and Ettin and Azoya repeated, line by line:
in ice and in fire
from the depths of oceans to the peaks of mountains
from my heart to yours
from your heart to mine
let us be united
let us love
let us grow—
They found an old tower on a hill. They swept out the cobwebs but left the spiders. Around their tower were valleys, then more hills, and deep forests—and beyond those forests, there was a world that wanted different things from them.
But Ettin and Azoya made a home. They rolled down their hill like children. They plucked the burrs from their bodies until they got distracted by discovering each other, finding new mysteries in the way tendrils and tendons could move together. They held little picnics in the grass beyond their front door, and when Azoya planted all the fruit pits on a whim, just to prove that bone thumbs could be green too, she accidentally grew a thousand peaches.
Ettin always had the kettle on and calendula at their fingertips. When Azoya brought home any sick or injured thing, Ettin sprouted herbs and crafted poultices and, with the care offered by them both, the dying lived. The valleys around their hill teemed with life. The birds remembered them, and there were always squirrels scrambling beneath the peach trees.
When they were ready, they visited the orphanages. They found the babes they’d once rescued from the snow and took them in as their own.
Over the years, they raised many mortal children. They were flesh and blood but something else too, with roses in their eyes and backbones like steel. They always grew up. They grew until they had the wisdom of those who would one day know death.
The grief was not bearable, but it fell faithfully as shadow.
The world was not as kind as their tower on the hill. When it asked things from them, sometimes it screamed.
Azoya stood on an algaed dock, waiting.
An ocean gale whipped at her armor, sending her sheathed blade juddering against her skeleton. Her tendons ached, and every wisp of tissue encircling her bones held the soreness of true muscle, torn and torn again. The world was at war, and she’d fought for weeks without rest.
She was a Gallant of the Gloaming. Her vow to protect the living was what had drawn her body together from a thousand lost bones and sent her up out of the earth, an eon ago. She’d known she could only keep her blade sheathed for so long.
Through her pain now, her eyes were bright, lit by exertion and purpose. She squinted at the repatriating ships on the horizon, waiting for one with silvery sails carrying healers from another front.
Across the water, Ettin imagined standing on the prow of their ship, watching for home and waiting to lock eyes with a gaze as red as theirs was green. But Ettin was deep in the innards of their vessel with a child in their arms, stitching a wide wound closed.
The healers’ silver-sailed medical ship had been scuttled, but they’d found passage instead on a brig choked with civilians. They were needed everywhere they turned.
On the front, Ettin had spun pine sap between their fingertips and snared cuts closed. They’d grown so many healing herbs that when they’d walked in the dirt, they’d trailed aloe, and when they’d slept, yarrow had crept from the earth to blanket the floor of their tent.
The brig docked, and when Ettin and Azoya found each other in the tumult, in the crush of bodies, they both forgot about the blood on their hands.
Traveling home, they were quiet; there was too much to say to know where to begin.
When they reached their hill, they stood silently, taking in the sight. Without anyone to stop it, a blight had moved into their orchard. The few peaches still dangling hung heavy with rot.
The tower was cold, and just like when they left, there were no children.
They were used to starting again.
This time, it was pears, and Ettin was an artist.
Azoya strolled the streets of a distant mountain city, patrolling after a recent campaign. The cobbles, freshly scoured of grey blood, shone in the winter light. She walked between buildings of every color, helped the locals rebuild their fortifications against the dead. She was there when the city’s famed string ensemble started back up and played from dusk to dawn, dulcimer and clavichord dancing between the snowcapped peaks.
She lost time to violetta lullabies and psaltery praise-songs, and when her leave day came and went, she did not notice.
When she finally journeyed home, the valley air was heady with petrichor and lightning smoke. Ettin was away, as they always were when the rains came, having rooted themself in a wood so they could whisper to the trees.
Ettin and Azoya left their worlds and returned to the tower.
They raised their love back up between them like another mortal child. There were bouts of laughter, growing pains, broken bones. There was the misplaced rage of youth, the malaise of a regretful midlife.
In the end, there were the fond, foggy reflections of very old age.
Now, at the tower window, Ettin feels that time and change are holding hands.
When they and Azoya had last separated, there’d been a feeling between them—not the snipping of a tether, but the gentle unraveling of two joined palms. This time, Ettin does not expect Azoya to return.
Ettin remains at the window, not waiting, but sitting with it. They sit with the feeling of separation like a traveller at the graveside of someone it no longer hurts to remember.
Then, on the next hill over, a rider appears.
It’s Azoya, reigning in her bright-boned horse before the valley. She’s as gallant as the day they met, but she is other things too, just as Ettin is now.
Ettin can just make out Azoya’s smile. They imagine the details they aren’t close enough to witness: sweat beading on her brow bone, the well-earned heaviness of her breathing.
Behind Ettin, the kettle begins to whistle. For whatever else might change in their life, tea would remain.
Across the valley, Azoya raises a hand in a gesture somewhere between a wave, a salute, and the way you’d place a palm on a cheek. Ettin mirrors her with flowering fingers, also smiling, knowing that they were what the other needed, once. Both of them ready for what will happen next.
Azoya grabs the reins, turns her horse around, and trots away, toward something different.
Ettin breathes in. Out. Rises from the window. Starts moving. And moving on.
The wind shifted, and over the glade between the barrow and the olive grove, the clouds released another perfect gust of featherlight rain.
The sybil removed her mortal fingers from the couple’s wrapped hands, letting them repeat the rest of their vows with only each other’s touch.
With their palms pressed together, bones and twigs entwined, Ettin and Azoya each felt the pulse of the other. Azoya had never felt so far from death. Ettin was more thankful than ever to have lived so long; if they had died when humans died, they wouldn’t have had time to find this.
The sybil stepped away while continuing to chant, and the couple spoke after her:
—let us love
let us grow
for as long as we both draw strength from our union
let us remain
With their vows complete, Ettin and Azoya came together. They kissed, and Azoya’s body was crisp and cool, and Ettin’s felt like sunshine.
The sybil watched the two embrace. Fresh wildflowers blossomed in the grasses around their feet, and somewhere behind her, a skeletal horse nickered.
for as long as we both draw strength from our union
The sybil was satisfied. She’d picked their joining vows carefully, for she was very old, in her way.
In this fairy tale, they let each other go.
Their last goodbye was across the valley. Their first hello to their new lives was spoken in the same breath.
