InsaneJournal

Lunar Elegy [Edda of Burdens, Muire, G]
Title: Lunar Elegy
Fandom: Edda of Burdens trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
Rating: G
Genre: Vignette
Words: 289
Notes/Warnings: Done for 31_days, prompt: tears cannot be forgotten as long as there is song. I also now want to do a longer story about Muire's trip to the moon, which was just mentioned in a sentence in All the Windwracked Stars. Obscure fanfic is go!
Summary: The last of the Valkyrie visits the moon.
Disclaimer: The Edda of Burdens copyright Elizabeth Bear and this derivative work was created without permission.


The Moon was different than the North. The tundra always had the seeds of life, and beneath the ice thrummed the whalesong. This place had known life but for an instant, and what now clung to the steel and glass and runes was but a breath on an airless expanse.

She wondered what Strifbjorn would have made of it. Or any of them. It wasn't a familiar place at all, but it had its own beauty. Or so Muire thought, who had traveled the world using all the time the last wælcyrge had. Whether her brothers and sisters would have seen this at all, if mortal men would have dared to climb to the heavens if the Choosers and the Chosen had lived, she couldn't answer.

She opened the case she carried, removing the violin that had cost her extra to buy weight allowance on a fiery rocket for which every ounce came out ten times in fuel. The strings needed tuning in the strange air pressure and gravity, which she quickly did. Standing in front of the wide picture window cut into the crater-side, she began to play the Moon, putting the mountains and lava seas into note and rest, Sun and Earth into unaccented flourishes.

This drew a crowd, as the spot was one of the only places inside the base that showed the outside without the need for a suit armored against the vacuum. As Muire drew to a close, she heard scattered applause, and hoped that the passerby assumed the tears were for the beauty of the piece and not of the memory of the people she had been playing for.