by Scott Hale
But this was different. This concerned her and the ones she loved, and she didn’t have the benefit of history to make of the tragedy a rousing tale. Of course she was to blame, and blamed she would be, because she had opened the door, and the Witch had walked through.
“Why did I think they were dead?” Vrana muttered to herself as she looked upon the mountain. “It only makes sense…”
“I would not worry over the spellweavers,” said a gentle voice.
Vrana stiffened as a shape appeared before her. She had her ax but hadn’t the strength to swing it. The shape took a step forward and then another, until the blue mist parted at its approach. The light of the moon left nothing to uncertainty: it was the man from outside the hospital, with the bat skull and bow. He was neither large nor small in stature, nor did he present an air of hostility, and but for the white markings on his body, he was utterly average in every respect.
“Why did you rush the bandits?” he asked. “There is nothing dishonorable in knowing your limits.”
Vrana remembered the archer and the flood of blood pouring out his neck. “It was you,” she said, moving her eyes from the man’s mask to his bow. “I… I don’t know if I would have survived if you hadn’t…”
The Bat stepped closer; not only was his mask discolored, but it was also covered in hundreds of hairline cracks. “It’s hard to say. He was a poor shot.”
“Th-thank you,” Vrana stuttered. “Really, thank you.”
She caught herself staring as a child would in fearful admiration of the oddity of bone that sat upon his head. Sensing the man’s gaze, she then continued. “I don’t know what my limits are.”
The man ignored Vrana and decided to address the object of her attention. “I have no family. I cannot remember where I am from, and I do not care enough to find out. Your elders took me in when I was very young and very nearly dead.”
He cleared his throat. His gentle tone became unenthused, as though the story he was about to tell was one he had told many times before. “For my first trial, I decided I would take the head of a bat. I found no bats large enough to take a head from, but there were bats in the area no larger than small children, which had, coincidentally, developed a taste for small children. I found their cave and killed them all. I crushed their skulls and, from the fragments, made my own. Where there is white on my body, there is no feeling, only a reminder of the diseases they carried. And now that you know my tale, and nothing is left to mystery, we can talk.”
CHAPTER VIII
The man was called Deimos, a name he had given to himself as a child. He roamed the midland beyond the mountain belt, keeping watch over the human settlements and, occasionally, taking on the role of messenger between the villages in the area. His reasons for being near the hospital and at Caldera that night concerned a city in the North that Vrana knew naught of, a city whose existence alone caused her to question all that she knew about the Corrupted.
“Geharra is a vast city divided by great walls. It sits between two rivers that empty into the sea,” he told Vrana as he walked her home. “Its population is no less than ten thousand. Yes, ten thousand. They are fairly self-sufficient and have waged no wars on us or others.”
Suddenly, Vrana felt very cold, and her hand began to shake. She tried to remember her schooling, what she may have misinterpreted or missed altogether. It seemed even the Archive’s map, which she had studied so carefully in her youth, had been misleading, for it had said nothing of Geharra. “How is that possible? Why did no one stop them from building it?”
Deimos shook his head. “Because they did not build it. It had survived through the changes of the world, and they made what was left of it a home. The presence of our people in the north was little then, and the humans reproduce quickly. They are very fond of that, reproducing. It is not the only Corrupted city, Vrana. There are two more, Penance and Eldrus, farther North. They are even larger.”
He stopped as bewilderment spread across Vrana’s face: her eyes down and to the right; her brow wrinkled; her mouth quivering. She felt naïve for thinking the Corrupted had lived in groups no larger than a few hundred at a time. She felt betrayed for having been led by the elders and adults of the village to believe that their efforts maintained the balance. She wanted to ask Deimos how many remained of their people, because she doubted that number as well.
“The North is not like the South, Vrana,” he said, stopping as they reached her house. “The humans are not interested in the South. It is known as the Cradle of Death to them because of the beasts who call it home. They have these great cities in the North, but they are isolated from one another, because of us. I am telling you nothing more than what you’ll learn in the next few days.”
Vrana felt naïve once more, not for her ignorance of the lands beyond, but for so hastily assuming the elders were nothing more than well-respected deceivers. “Then why did you tell me?”
“Because our people in the midland are missing: Alluvia, our village, is empty. And the city of ten thousand is ten thousand no more. I scaled Geharra’s walls and followed its streets. There is nothing, no one. Geharra and Alluvia have vanished.
“That is how I happened upon the hospital and you, on my return to tell the elders. They will send me back to learn more, though with a smaller party than I had hoped…” He gestured to the destruction around them. “I followed you closely after the hospital. I was impressed with what I saw.”
It took Vrana a moment to realize what was being asked of her, and when she did, Deimos said nothing more. He looked down on her from behind the patchwork of bones, nodded, and walked away into the mist, which closed around him like a hundred ghostly arms.
She knew he wanted her to think on what had been said tonight, for he could have waited until the ceremony to tell her, but that would be impossible in her state. She entered her house, saw that Adelyn had not yet returned from the Archive, ripped the raven’s head from her body, and threw herself into bed.
Vrana slept away an entire day, and not because the Witch had somehow willed it. When she awoke at dawn, she remembered all that had been told to her by Adelyn, Aeson, and Deimos, and almost convinced herself that it had been a fabrication of the Black Hour. The elders would be expecting her, Vrana thought as she forced herself out of bed, but she had no intention of seeing them and completing the rite today. After the second trial, she had expressed to her mother a need for time alone, and now that she felt too guilty to be among her people—she might’ve told on herself just to let the secret out—it seemed that time had come.
Bjørn was passed out over his anvil, his knuckles raw from where he’d punched the Witch. Twice he stirred as Vrana skirted around him, looking through his creations for a bow and quiver of arrows. He had a tendency to overproduce weapons and armor, which had the unintended effect of increasing the likelihood that the youth would destroy them in training. He didn’t mind, he’d told Vrana once, but she didn’t believe him, as she remembered more instances than she could count in which Bjørn had threatened strangulation and dismemberment after being presented with a cracked breastplate or shattered spear. She felt confident that he would not mind her, of all people, borrowing his wares without permission; however, seeing no reason to test this theory, she took the first bow she found, grabbed a handful of arrows and an empty quiver, and stole away into the forest.
Droplets of dew leapt from the grass as she walked between the trees. An ocelot stared at her from atop a boulder and scampered off, puzzled by the imposter raven. Hundreds of birds called to one another from the canopy above, while spider monkeys scaled and swung from the branches below. Vrana nocked an arrow and loosed it at one of the primates, but it came nowhere close to hitting it. And to make matters worse, one of the monkeys returned, ripped the arrow from the tree, howled hysterically, and threw it back at her.
Archery had never been her strong suit, so she decided to clear her thoughts before being embarrassed by the animals of the forest again. There w
as a stream to the southwest that Vrana visited on occasions such as these, and this is where she sat now, not on the edge of the water but in it, straight-faced, if one could see her face, and completely relaxed. The stream had been one of the last few places she and Aeson had played as children, before the Inner Sanctum had taken him away from her. She had also kissed him here, but that was another matter entirely.
Too much has happened too quickly. Vrana pulled her mask off, pulled her knees to her chest. A fish nibbled at her back; a bug buzzed in her ear. The boy, the Skeleton, the homunculi… the Witch… Geharra. She wrapped her arms around her knees and buried her face against them. Twenty-two. Who had they been? I don’t even know. Somewhere, something made a splash in the water. I should be helping them, not giving them a reason to suspect me. She looked up at nothing in particular. These trials were supposed to give something back to Caldera, but all she’d given them was death. Sure, they would move on, but they wouldn’t, not really, no one ever does, not from something like this. Maybe she should’ve told them. They’d have found out anyway. A secret is never a secret here.
Vrana studied her mask, the dead thing she wore that kept her alive. Twenty-two. Why did that seem so much worse than ten thousand? She leaned over and lifted the mask. It felt much lighter than it had been weeks ago, before she’d cut and cleaned the life out of it. I’ve always wanted to leave, and here’s the perfect opportunity. But they’ll find out, and they’ll say I ran away. She set the mask down on the embankment once more. I don’t run away. I’m not running away. I fucked up. I’ll fix this. If the Witch wants anything, it’s to do this to me, to make me suffer. Of course she wants this. That’s why I’m still alive. Bitch. Fucking bitch. I’m not Corrupted. I’m not falling for it.
Craning her neck, Vrana looked back at Kistvaen, which no longer inspired a small smile and a faint curiosity, but dread. She was confident that the spellweavers were only mentioned in discussions of the past, while dialogues of the disappearing mountain never moved far from the realm of speculation. Why then, Vrana wondered as she turned away, would a task so important go without acknowledgement? She understood the need to ensure the spellweavers’ safety, but there was something amiss about one of the privileged and the protected suddenly taking it upon himself to attack an enemy about which nothing was known. She could not help but feel their situation bore some similarity to Aeson’s, who swore to her he separated himself from society out of need and heritage. They lied to us about the northern cities. They lied to us about the spellweavers. Adelyn was always the first to tell her daughter she came to conclusions too quickly, but in this case, no others seemed to exist: the elders could not be trusted, because they’d become the revisionists they swore they despised.
The fingerlike rays of the rising sun crept over the horizon. The heat of summer washed over the land and seeped into the stream where Vrana sat. She could stay here, she thought, and she would be happy, undoubtedly happy and contented, and like her mother, she would regret every day spent not doing what she’d wanted to do all her life. The little boy didn’t matter—she was certain others would’ve done the same—and the Skeleton mattered even less. He probably never even existed outside that fleeting hour. The homunculi, well, how were they any different from any other unexplainable monstrosity that roamed the land? No, the Witch and Geharra, that’s what mattered. Vrana would be running, yes, but only so that the woman of her nightmares would follow.
She wrung out what she could of the water in her clothes, took up the bow and quiver, and started back towards the village. Along the way, she fired seven arrows, only one of which managed to meet its target, and that had been a frog so bloated escape was physically impossible. The kill was a mixture of both triumph and mild depression, but that didn’t change the fact the frog would taste good for dinner.
At the midpoint of her journey home, Vrana thought of the Den of the Unkindness and decided to see how they had fared without their Cruel Mother. It was easy enough finding the way: All one needed to do was follow the dying trees, until one could look in any direction and see nothing but the color of ash. When Vrana asked Aeson why the land had never healed here, he’d scoffed and scolded her on the importance of knowing history and then proceeded to tell her the tale of how zealots had drained the land of life during their makeshift siege on Caldera. She found it curious that the elders never made an effort to reconcile that part of the forest, but apparently Aeson didn’t.
The ground shifted and sloped beneath her feet, becoming a bed of all things dead. Clouds of dust coughed into the air from wheezing vents, while broken bones rolled lazily on their sides. When she’d first approached the Den weeks ago, the ravens’ sounds were overpowering, so much so that she considered turning back out of fear the noise itself would leave her deaf. Now, however, there was nothing to be heard but the sounds of dried leaves crumbling underfoot and the thirsty moans of the twisting trees from which they’d fallen.
Has the Unkindness left? She squinted, trying to pierce the dim darkness that surrounded the Den. She moved closer and saw that it had not. At the center of the hollowed-out tree, amid a flurry of feathers, an engorged raven of at least three hundred pounds sat, mouth agape, its beak stained by its gluttony. Overhead, birds flew through the gaps in the branches of the massive tree, bearing bloody gifts of squirming animals. One by one, they dropped their tributes into the wretched maw. The fat raven’s eyes rolled in its sockets, and its tongue licked the air uncontrollably. For those whose gifts were not sufficient, the bloated beast extended its neck, snapped down on them, and forced their twitching bodies down its gullet, to settle the balance owed.
The feeding stopped as soon as the Greedy Father saw Vrana. I’ve made a mistake, she thought as she went for the ax she’d left in her room. She had five arrows left, barely enough to kill the beast, and that was only if she managed to hit its vital organs. The Unkindness had seemed so thankful to be rid of the Cruel Mother. How had a successor so much worse risen to power so quickly?
She considered running, but feared that by doing so, she would provoke the Unkindness and be torn to shreds and hauled off to be fed to the Greedy Father in partially digested chunks. She gazed at the Unkindness, as though appealing to them for sanctuary, and saw that they gazed back not with hate but with a kind of reluctant reverence. It was the mask, her trophy from the first trial, she realized, that kept the birds’ talons clutched to the branches and boughs.
“I haven’t found my limits yet,” Vrana whispered as she stepped farther into the Den, ignoring Deimos’ words, which were repeating over and over in her head. “And if I don’t know them, Bat, neither do they.”
The Greedy Father went into a spasm of rage, belching into the air its noxious breath. It screamed and shrieked and snapped at the ravens, spraying chunks of rotted flesh and dripping bone against the sides of the Den. Eventually, the ravens returned to their duty; they took their eyes off Vrana and continued to drop carrion into their Father’s gore-stained mouth. Like a hungry infant begging for the breast, it ate hungrily, sloppily, and then fell into slumber.
Vrana covered her nose; the Den smelled of shit and decay. She looked at the bloated Father with an even greater disgust than before. How many do I have to kill until they get it right? The fat raven shivered in its sleep, causing the blood that had dried on its feathers to crack off in scabby sheets. The Unkindness watched as Vrana trained the bow on the fat raven’s neck. “You’re not going to stop me,” she said, speaking to the ravens. She laughed and lowered her bow. “You don’t care anymore.”
Few took notice of Vrana as she passed through Caldera’s gates. All attentions and efforts were focused on restoring what the Witch had undone. Vrana took a seat at Bjørn’s anvil and returned what she had taken. From there, she watched as builders and their apprentices, some hardly heavier than the tools they carried, repaired the buildings touched by fire. Those harvesters that the fields could spare mended the earth where the Witch had turned it black, cutting awa
y the blight as a doctor would a tumor. Farther on, cooks danced beside their fires, pirouetting around one another, handing off ingredients to be chopped, ground, stuffed, and made edible for the workers. Much to Vrana’s surprise, even the elders were helping, taking the bloody sheets from Adelyn’s hospital in the Archive and washing them in the purifying waters of their garden.
I should be among them, Vrana thought. They’re cleaning up my mess.
It was amazing how much progress Vrana’s people had made in such a short period of time. Another day or two and none would be the wiser that anything had happened here. But no hand could lift the unease that blanketed the village or heal the scars its people would have throughout the years to come. In comparison to Alluvia and Geharra, Caldera had gotten off lightly from its brush with Death. But that may not be the case the next time, Vrana thought, and if a village of hundreds and a city of thousands can go missing without anyone realizing it, what’s to stop the same thing from happening here? And if she had the chance to change this outcome, shouldn’t she take it?
CHAPTER IX
It is the darkest corners of the world that she calls home. It is from the deepest depths of the mind that she is inspired. None shall gaze upon her and think her fair or kind, for she is neither, and has never known these words to be said of her. They are foreign to her, painful to conceive. There is no place for her in our world or the worlds beyond; she exists in the space between, where she pledges allegiance to neither God nor Satan but only herself. Her acts of cruelty are beyond measure, for it is seldom realized that it was her hand that guided the knife to the back, the child to the cliff, the lover to the liar, the poison to the well. Of her sculptures of flesh, which merge life and death into one torturous state of being, little can be said by the pen which could rival the sight seen by the eyes. She is horror if horror should ever take upon a form. She is death and despair. She is the Maiden of Pain.
