Struck Final Truth

The dawn was rising the way Stoifan had imagined it would, gold and slow over the ancestral stones. The firelight still held against the morning. Aric stood by the archway. Everything was ready, and Stoifan was supposed to be joyful, and he was not. He paced the damp grass, worry on his face.

"Axel," he said suddenly, turning to the ancient wyld fae busy laying out a slab of stone. "Will this work? Honestly? Our laws, human laws, don't allow Aric and I to marry."

Axel's turquoise smile held equal measures of something like both pity and contempt, an alien emotion from another time and place. "Hmph. 'Laws'? Foolishness," he sneered, and Stoifan's mind insisted that the fae actually rolled his eyes, human-style. "Your 'laws' are bragr trash, nothing more than fickle agreements, easily broken or altered. They are worse than the garbage that Oberon peddles. No. I will strike Final Truth, and you and my Contract-brother will be wed, writ into the bones of my Realm and yours."

"What does that mean? 'Writ into the bones'?" Stoifan asked. "I don't understand."

"Your human laws are pitiful things with no meaning beyond the moment. When I strike, you will have been bonded for all time. It will be true." Axel spoke the words simply, as if it were an obvious thing, that rewriting reality were a given.

"I still don't understand," admitted Stoifan. "I thought Contracts required agreement? Human lawmakers will never agree."

Axel chuckled darkly. "Aye. Agreement I have, proffered long ago by Arcadia to strike Final Truth when needed. That is sufficient. Trust me, boy. I am Contracted to love and care for Aric and his family, and soon for you as well, when you are bonded with him. I will do the strike properly."

"And what about human law?"

"If you wish, I will strike to nudge human law as well, though it is unnecessary. You worry too much of the thoughts of others." Axel growled. Once, that growl had filled Stoifan with unease, but he felt he knew the irascible old fae well enough to see the care below the canker.

Stoifan looked at his fiancé in the flickering firelight, as dawn winked in the distance. Aric's tall, well-muscled-but not-bulky body filling the stone archway at which all his ancestors had been wed. His dark blond hair, almost red in the firelight, was braided into elegant designs, framing a human face more beautiful than fae or goddess. His dark green tunic was lined with real silver threading, Forged to resist arrow, fang, or dagger, but soft enough to be comfortable cloth. His wedding ring sat on his calloused hand, easily half again the size of Stoifan's.

"How could anyone look at him and think seid is a woman's art?" Stoifan asked himself in amusement. He caught a glimpse of his own handsome face in the waters flowing around the wedding arch, and smiled.

Axel's lavender blush over his usually turquoise skin, a hint that maybe something of human emotion had rubbed off on him. The ancient wyld fae finished carving the runes into the stone with a flourish of his chisel. As Stoifan understood it, the stone was unnecessary, more of a receipt than a medium for Contract, but he loved the idea of a monument to himself and Aric and their new life together.

"There!" Axel said proudly, pointing at an alien Contract no fey lord in Oberon's court would even recognize. "This last clause honors your love, boys, cementing it into a Final Truth! Let your foolish mortal laws squawk at this and crumble. Let them bow to tru."

Stoifan strode up to the archway and took Aric's hand, heart hammering in his chest. "I've never been more sure," he murmured, in response to Aric's smiling question about being ready.

The sorcerer-goddess Heidr took her place between Stoifan and Aric. "Drink the mead. Be joined as two mortals never were, blessed by Vanaheim and Irkkin'ann both," she pronounced, nodding to Axel.

Stoifan and Aric looked at each other. "I love you," both said simply, in the same moment. And they drank deeply.

"Sign!" cried Axel in joy. And together Aric and Stoifan chiseled runes into the stone, one for each of them.

"Your vows to each other," the goddess croaked.

Aric looked at Stoifan. "You are all that matters. I will teach you seid; I will show you the universe."

Stoifan replied, "You are all that matters. I will walk with you wherever you go. I will strike at monsters beside you."

And they kissed in the rising sun.

"Blessed be," cried Heidr, shimmering with light of her own that had nothing to do with the rising sun. The blessing of a goddess in the rising sun was a power in its own right, and the words warmed Stoifan down to the deepest part of his heart.

"Struck, and done!" Axel called, his face now fully flushed, human joy written on wyld features.

Stoifan felt nothing, except the utter certainty that he had always been meant for Aric, that they had always been destined to find each other and face down dragons together. Human laws were catching up, would eventually catch up. But he and Aric were together. He felt the tug of Axel's Contract for the family, which he had never known before. He felt the weight of the Stand oaths to stand against the dragon, as if he had made them himself.

And below all that, he felt the joy that he was with Aric.