Chapter Text
Silna is nine years old when she begins to remember her past life.
She is dreaming of pleasant, familiar cold and soft fur when the ice around her suddenly shifts, morphing and mutating into a cramped, dimly lit room. It's too hot, and it's too full, and her dad is lying on a table, his parka- no, his qullituq cut open.
There is a hole in his chest, and he is covered in blood.
Silna tries to take him away from this terrible place and back to the safety of the ice, but there are arms locked tight around her holding her still, and no matter how much she screams they will not let her go. Somehow she knows that this is a first in a series of moments that ruin her life for good.
Her dad dies, locked away in this dark room, away from the sky, and the arms let her go, and Silna runs to him, begs him not to leave her, and-
She wakes up screaming, tears streaming down her face.
Her dad [breathing, moving, alive] is in her room in the space of a heartbeat, turning on the lamp and gathering Silna into his arms, making soothing nonsense sounds meant to calm but that only make her sob harder. She buries her face into the folds of his shirt as she cries, inhales the smell of snow and leather and tobacco, and tries to erase the nightmare from her mind.
"Feel better?" Her dad signs. She shakes her head. Something about the dream sticks in her brain like a burr to fabric and won't leave her be. "Want to talk about it?"
Silna sniffles. "We were in a dark room, and something bad happened to you, and I couldn't do anything to stop it." Her little hands shake as she signs. He sits back suddenly, his hands on her shoulders.
Usually, when Silna has a bad dream, her dad comforts her by reminding her that none of it is real and that she's safe, but now he looks at her with a frightening intensity in his normally soft eyes.
"Silna, look at me. Were we wearing fur? Was I bleeding?" When she nods, very slowly and carefully, he shuts his eyes and sighs, suddenly sounding utterly exhausted. Something is very, very wrong. When Silna tugs on his sleeve to get his attention, to ask why he's acting so strange, he just presses a kunik to her cheek and wraps her up in his arms again, squeezing her tightly. Tightly, like the strange men in her dream.
This is the night that Silna's life, her new life, changes for the worse.
***
She's already aware that she's different. Most kids aren't born without tongues, after all. Most kids aren't here for their second round of life. As more memories of her past come back to her, however, and as her dad helps her understand who and what she is and was, Silna quickly resolves to show no weakness.
She remembers the way her fear, her accursed compassion for men who didn't deserve it ate her alive and eventually caused her greatest failure, and as she gets older she decides that the best way to avoid it happening again is to make sure nobody can get too close.
She is the scourge of the playground, the girl who fights back against the bullies who call her stupid and the white kids who treat her like dirt. Silna is a regular in detention, someone the other parents discuss in open distaste and who the teachers, useless at best, have given up on trying to fix.
["This isn't who you are." Her dad tells her, once, after a particularly unpleasant meeting with the headmaster of her middle school. Silna frowns at him.
"I lived for another thirty years all alone because I was too soft." She signs, matter-of-factly. "It's better if I'm alone on my own terms this time."]
The only thing that Silna considers her friend, aside from her father, is the natural world. Crisp snow, cold air, wild animals being wild animals - whether that be silly or terrifying- she relishes it all. Nature is the only thing that can't hurt her, because nature is indifferent. Silna dreams fondly of her birthplace in Nunavut, of the rare camping trips she's gone on with her dad, and she misses the Arctic so fiercely it aches.
And even then, people, because they prove themselves to be the worst time and time again, try to take this away from her. Temperatures rise, animals die, habitats are ruined for the sake of shitty buildings and tourist hotspots and sport hunting, and it's her fault, because she failed to protect Tuunbaq and in doing so let the Arctic, her darling, her world, begin to rot.
People are a plague. Silna has been telling herself this since that first nightmare, all those years ago. This is why it's better that she isolates herself. She doesn't need anyone except her dad and the Arctic. She tells herself this again and again and again, and over the years, she begins to believe it.