Echoes of Memory

by A. R. Kahler

  There was a memory, a vision . . . me, on a battlefield, surrounded by the dead. And Chris, standing opposite me, his body glowing, wings curled from his back like an angel of death.

  Is that what we were? Angels and demons? Fighting the eternal, clichéd war?

  Freyja laughed.

  “Not quite,” she said.

  Right. I forgot she could read my thoughts. I tried to make my brain silent. But honestly, I was horrible at it. Big reason why I preferred painting over meditation—only one of those made my thoughts cease, and it didn’t have to do with chanting.

  We continued walking, the air getting deeper and heavier, the walls smooth and occasionally encrusted with diamonds or amethysts. I reached out and touched the gems. They glowed brilliantly under my touch.

  “It’s all real, isn’t it?” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Everything.”

  She shrugged. Answer enough. We kept walking while I tried to keep my brain still. I had to find Chris. I had to bring him back. If only things in life were that easy. And in death, I suppose.

  “Much of what you have read or been told is a lie,” she said after a while. “Or a truth that humans twisted over the years. But the root is there: The gods are real. The gods are hungry. And you are the one they chose to supply them with what they desire.”

  My gut twisted.

  “What’s that?”

  “What you’ve already given,” she replied. She made sure to pause and look at me. Her smile was probably the first godlike expression she’d worn since coming down here: It was at once detached and cruel, impossible to understand and terrifying in its nuances. I could have tried painting it a thousand times and never once captured every meaning.

  “The gods demand blood,” she said, and it was then an old dream filtered into my brain. A man in a cloak. Jonathan. With the ravens Hugin and Munin on his shoulders—Odin’s messengers. “The gods have always demanded blood. To speak with divinity, you must pay in pain.”

  I shuddered when she finished quoting my dream, like my body was trying to flush her words from my system. But I was still left feeling tainted.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Why else would the gods demand war, Shadechild? The Tree must be nourished. And since mankind has moved away from making sacrifices, you will do it for them. Our war with the Aesir will make the mortal world rich with blood, and Yggdrasil will flourish.”

  “I’m not killing anyone,” I said for what felt like the millionth time. And, like all times, it felt futile.

  “You already have. You swore yourself to me and to this task the moment you asked for your ex-lover’s death. Brad died at your hands, and in his blood, you became ours.” Her expression became stoic, but I could tell she was hiding something. “We aren’t here to save Chris, Shadechild. We are here to bring him back to Midgard, so you may sacrifice him properly. The World Tree demands it.”

  Then she turned down a side tunnel I hadn’t seen before, vanishing into the shadows.

  I didn’t follow right away. I stared at the space she had left, at the hole she had punched through my heart.

  This wasn’t a rescue mission after all. We were just here to gather the pigs for the slaughter.

  No.

  No, I wasn’t going to let them use me. Just as I wasn’t going to let them use Chris.

  Maybe Freyja was right: Maybe humans had gotten their myths wrong over the years. But if there was one thing I’d learned in my studies, it was that gods thought they were omnipotent. They were proud. Cocky.

  And they could be fooled.

  I locked the thought deep down inside, where I’d hidden Brad and the thousand terrible things I’d experienced in my life. It was the one note of light in the darkness, the one balm against all that pain. It was stronger. I was stronger.

  And if she thought she could control me, she—and the rest of this fucked-up Underworld—had another think coming.

  • • •

  The tunnel she’d vanished into wasn’t a tunnel at all, but an opening to a view that made me stop in my tracks, all thoughts of anger or revenge vanishing in an instant. The Underworld was vast and quiet and glittering like a galaxy. I could only stare and blink at the edge of everything, trying to take it all in. Trying to make it make sense.

  I couldn’t tell if there was a ceiling or a floor—the shadows were too thick, the darkness too deep—and above and below me was nothing but space. But the space wasn’t empty. Even through the darkness I could see them. I could feel them. The pulse I’d felt since entering here amplified by a thousand. It shimmered over my skin like electricity, tugged at my veins, dared my heart to come closer, closer. I knew its power. I felt its need. Just as I knew the Underworld in the marrow of my bones, I knew what waited before and around me. And yet, my lips still formed the question.

  “Are those . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her own voice tinged with the barest hint of awe. And spite. “The roots of the World Tree itself. Behold, the pillars of Creation.”

  We stood there for a moment, looking out into the darkness. The roots were impossibly large, twisting and twining down through the cavern like shadowed cursive. Some were as thick as skyscrapers or houses; others so wide, I couldn’t see anything past them. One spiraled down toward us, various tubers jutting from the bent-angled shape, looking for all the world like some Tim Burton creation. I reached up, went on tiptoes. The pull was too strong. I had to touch it. I had to feel. I stretched up, and it felt like the root stretched back down.

  My fingers touched treeflesh. I barely had time to register that it was warm, pulsing.

  Blood leaked across my vision—blood and starlight—and everything was swirling, swirling and sparkling like fireflies on a lake, a lake of blood, a lake of power, and there at the lake’s edge was a wolf, and under the lake roiled a dragon, and in the stars the gods waited and wept as the worlds spun and glittered, as oceans churned galaxies to life, as waves curled those galaxies back under, as the Tree stretched and groaned in its growth and branches fell and roots stretched. A lake of worlds and blood and starlight spiraled at its base and—in the distance—other Trees with tangled roots, and at the heart of that web, a spark, a fire, a serpent lined with teeth, and in those roots, in the shadow of feathers and shattered bones, I heard a heartbeat. Her heartbeat.

  My heartbeat.

  Pain flashed as something smacked against my wrist. The vision shattered, and suddenly I was back. Back and cold and covered in sweat, my breath panting and my eyes dripping tears.

  Freyja’s grip was tight on my wrist. She stared at me for a long, long time.

  “You would do well not to touch the face of God without permission,” she whispered.

  Then she let go of my hand and turned. I glanced up, my heart racing. The root still dangled there, just within reach.

  What the hell was that? But I couldn’t ask, because part of me knew I couldn’t know. There were some things mortals just weren’t meant to understand. The longer I was down here, the more I believed it.

  Thankfully, Freyja didn’t let me stand around and wonder. She walked forward, off the ledge, and for the briefest moment I thought she was stepping to her death. Then I realized there was a staircase jutting out from the earth, slabs of stone stretching from the cliffside and leading down into darkness.

  “I thought Yggdrasil was a metaphor,” I muttered as I followed her down. Because if there really was a big tree stretching between the realms, why didn’t it exist in the real world? I mean, my world.

  “It exists,” she replied. “Though most do not see it. The Tree is what holds the cosmos together. The axis on which our realms spin.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” I whispered. And I didn’t even mean the vision. The farther down we went, the more accustomed I grew to the light, the more I noticed the details: the crystals that studded a few roots, as though the sap had turned to amethysts. Or the pulse that hummed like music in my
veins and ears, telling me this was perfect, that everything was okay. My fingers itched to paint this—to create a landscape of twisting shadows and silver-leafed stars. I wonder if I’ll ever actually paint again.

  “Beauty is a weapon,” Freyja said, pulling me from my thoughts. “Do not be lulled by it.”

  “Is it dangerous here?”

  “Of course. It is dangerous everywhere.”

  “But you were born here,” I said.

  “And you were born on earth. Did you feel safe there?”

  A hundred other memories should have surfaced—walking home alone at night, watching school shootings on the news, or the thousands of angry, violent protests against abortions or gay rights or anything remotely liberal—but the thought that cemented itself in the front of my mind was Brad. His beauty had been a weapon, and he had used it to cut me deep. I hadn’t felt safe since then. At least, not around guys. Save, perhaps, for Chris.

  “Exactly,” Freyja said, confirming that she could read my thoughts.

  But I couldn’t see what could be dangerous down here. I mean, sure, the Underworld was always seen as treacherous, but this place was quiet. Just the sound of our muted footsteps on stone, even our words somehow swallowed up in the darkness like we were covered by blankets. It was too quiet. Too slow. Chris was trapped somewhere, being tortured—because wasn’t that what Hell was? Eternal torture? And the longer we slowly meandered, the longer he suffered.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Down.”

  “No shit.”

  She glanced back at me; I couldn’t tell through the shadows if she was grinning or pissed.

  “Your lover sent himself to the deepest bowels of the Underworld,” she said, before turning and continuing on. “A place I have never been, and a place from which few ever return. So I do not know where we are going, precisely. I do not know what we will find. I only know that we must go down. Down to the places where the damned are kept. From there, it is anyone’s guess.”

  “And after I bring him back. After I save him. What’s this war? You know, the one I refuse to be part of?”

  “There has always been a war, Shadechild,” she whispered, her pale eyes fixed on mine. “Between Heaven and Hell, the Aesir and Vanir, the light and the dark. And the human world has ever been the battleground and the prize.”

  She sighed, ran her hand along the earthen wall. Crystals glimmered into light at her touch, tracing constellations that raced out into the night. More roots twined through the earth, one as large as my torso twisting into and out of the wall like an obsidian worm, its skin smooth and giving off a heat I could feel even from here.

  “The mortal world is the crux on which our entire existence, this entire cosmic system, rests. Perhaps it would be best for you to see, to understand. To know why you must fight. To know why there must be blood.”

  She knelt then, facing the wall, and pulled a thin dagger from the belt at her waist. I heard her mutter something, a prayer, perhaps. The hum I’d grown used to changed pitch, became almost a murmur, and maybe it was a trick of the light or maybe it was truth, but I swear the root in front of her moved. Toward her. Like a cat arching its back to be pet.

  Freyja reached out, still whispering her prayer, and sliced a slight, thin line against the root.

  There was no denying it this time: The root twisted slightly, and rather than amber, sap poured out, a glimmering, bluish-purple light filtering through the slash.

  “Come,” Freyja said, holding her hand out to me. I took it. Why was my hand shaking? Why did this feel like some strange form of Communion?

  She guided me down to kneeling. The slash was at eye level. Had it been that height, or had the Tree moved to accommodate?

  “It is time you understood your role in all this,” she said. “As it has been before, it shall be again.”

  I barely heard her over the pulse in my veins, the pulse in the Tree. My hands reached out on their own, pressed against the root, as my neck craned closer and I peered inside the core of the universe.

  I floated above a field. It spread before me, but I was not part of it. I floated above. Behind. And even though I could smell the air, the lightning waiting in the clouds, I knew it was a memory. Not mine. One I had been born with and had been born to forget.

  The air was heavy with anticipated rain, the clouds gray and thick and churning, but the rain wouldn’t come. Just as the fields below—once filled with wheat and cattle—would fail to yield food. The knowledge was deep—it seared through the core of me: The world was dying.

  I turned, or perhaps the world turned, and I saw the Tree. I could only see the trunk of it, and barely a glimpse at that. It rose from the earth like a monument, as wide as the horizon and stretching farther into the heavens than the eye could see, its roots digging deeper than the earth ever went. I saw the Tree. And I wept.

  I could feel its pain. I could feel the hunger. It echoed in my own stomach, twisted itself through my heart. I felt it call out. It didn’t demand blood. It begged for blood. For sacrifice.

  It begged to be seen so it might do its work.

  “Without worship or sacrifice, the Tree withers,” came Freyja’s voice. I didn’t see her, but I felt her there, beside me, a shade of ice. “To sacrifice willingly is the greatest power. But it can be offered. It can be taken. The races of old knew this—they offered their captives, their priests, their maidens. They gave the greatest gift back to the Creator: their own lives, so others might live. But as time seeps forward, many forget the power of sacrifice. The debt they owe to Creation. Humans believed that life was simply theirs to live, a gift freely given. They forgot that all things come with a cost, and those who refuse to pay not only suffer but damn the rest.

  “Without worship, Yggdrasil dies. And as the Tree dies, so too do the worlds it supports. That is why the War was created, why the godchildren are born. We are made to remind humanity of their mortality, of their rightful place: kneeling, reverent. Fearful. We are made to take what should have been given.”

  Shadows swirled in the field, lightning flashed through the clouds, and between one heartbeat and the next, the scene was no longer empty.

  A boy stood in the field, naked as the moon, hair as dark as midnight, while a dark-skinned girl with glowing hair and luminescent wings floated in the sky.

  “May our sacrifice nourish the Tree,” they said as one. His voice, cold diamonds; hers, a brilliant lotus.

  The girl floated down, her feet just barely alighting on the starved grass.

  A circle burned itself into the ground between them. They each held out a hand.

  “To the Tree, we give our lives,” they said. “May this be the first of the blood given. May all blood spilled nourish Yggdrasil. May the gods feast, and the Great God thrive.”

  Then they cut their palms, spilling their blood into the earth. Two armies appeared on the horizons the moment they did so. There was a shudder. A vibration ringing low in the air like a gong. A hunger. A thirst. The first taste of blood. The need for more.

  The Tree accepted the offering. And the Tree would accept many more.

  I blinked, and the godchildren were locked in battle, and around them the armies crashed and bled, their cries a hymn, their blood a blessing.

  This world had seen bloodshed so many times. But rarely had it experienced war like this. A war dedicated to serving the gods. A war waged only to make the ground rich with offered blood.

  I wanted to feel disgusted. I wanted to think this was wrong. So many people dying. So much blood. So much agony.

  But all I felt was the elation of the power, the flood of ecstasy that dripped through the soil; the roots of the World Tree soaking it up hungrily. I felt the Tree pulse with pleasure, felt it grow stronger.

  Day tripped into night, and night flashed to day, and weeks passed in a matter of moments. Soon, there were only the godchildren, standing amid the dead, locked in their eternal battle. They were wounded, panting, the girl
wielding a sword with bloodied hands while the boy fought back with a spear carved from the Tree itself. I watched them battle, and felt the fear rise in my chest. The boy was faltering—I could see it in his missed swings, in the way the girl’s blows came a little too close to his body.

  And then she struck.

  In movies, deaths are beautiful. Scripted and choreographed and artistically rendered.

  This was nothing like the movies.

  She hacked into his shoulder, her blade becoming lodged in his bones. He screamed as he dropped the spear, as she pulled out the blade with a terrible wrench, blood and bone grinding against the glowing steel. She struck again, this time low, cutting into his calves. He fell to the ground with another scream. His blood was red and smoked with shadows.

  Around them, a new circle formed. This of his blood as he fell to the ground and convulsed, the red liquid oozing against the saturated ground, curling around his body in an arc, carving a trail through the fledgling blades of grass.

  The girl stood over him. She raised her sword high.

  “To the Tree do I offer this sacrifice. May the Aesir forever reign in Heaven.”

  “To the Tree,” the boy choked.

  Then she stabbed down, straight through his heart, and he said no more.

  I expected something more. Something beautiful. Perhaps for his body to dissolve into the ground, or vines to pull him under, or for shadows to seep in and swallow him whole. None of that happened.

  “For the Aesir,” the girl whispered.

  “For the Aesir,” Freyja muttered bitterly. I blinked, and was back in the cavern, kneeling at her side. My skin was covered in goose bumps, and tears ran down my cheeks. Why had I been crying?

  “Always for the Aesir,” she continued. “Every battle has been won by them, and so the Underworld grows restless. The battle is made by the Tree to nourish the Tree, but we—the servants—have our own desires. The gods of the Underworld wish to rise up, to live amid the sunlight in the branches of Yggdrasil. The victor of the war is worshipped by mankind, to live eternal in the hearts of men, under whatever guise they choose. The Vanir have lain outside the memory of men for too long. They want victory for more selfish reasons. But in the end, our desires are unimportant. Just as your desires are unimportant. We must all set aside our personal wants for the needs of the Tree.”