by A. R. Kahler
“No . . . I won’t let them.”
His voice was cold, so cold, even against the silent snow. I tried to hide my eyes and look away from him, from Elisa, but then I saw Oliver. Or what was left of Oliver. Hanging from a tree by a slimy red noose that wasn’t a rope . . .
I retched and closed my eyes. Felt his frozen hands curl over my neck.
“Don’t worry, Shadechild. You will be with them soon enough.”
Hands on my neck, on my arm, and I tried to push them off even as something heavy thudded against my back. Tried to scream, but something filled my lungs. And then the hands moved to my chest, pressed hard. Water burst from my mouth. I gagged, kept vomiting up the cold, putrid water. My eyes shot open. Freyja knelt over me, her hands still on my chest, her eyes intent on mine.
“I threw you into the River Styx to bring you down here. I did not intend for you to try to drink all of it.”
“What was that?” I asked. It felt like my throat was made of salt and sandpaper and something metallic. Almost like blood. Very old blood.
“What was what?”
I didn’t try to move. I didn’t want to roll over. I didn’t want to start moving again. The images I’d been shown burned so brightly in my mind. Not like visions. Not like magic. Like truth. I smelled the decaying bodies at Islington, tasted the death in the air.
“What I saw,” I said, gasping.
“I don’t know what you saw.” She leaned in closer, her eyes tightening. “How strange. I can normally read you like a book. But I cannot see anything from the river.”
“I saw . . .” I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want any of it to be real. It was probably all some magic of the Underworld anyway, some ancient Greek torture—see the people you loved. And then see them taken away.
So why did I see Brad?
It didn’t make any sense and, honestly, I didn’t want it to make any sense. I was done with this place. I wanted to be back in my room in my world, curled up with Elisa or Ethan, worrying about art.
“Remember where we are,” she said. “Remember your goal. Focus on that, and nothing else.”
But could I even have my goal? That return to normalcy? Or whatever my version of normal was. Hanging out with Elisa. Painting my heart out. Complaining with Ethan. Hell, even flirting with Chris . . . It all seemed impossible. If what the waters had shown was true, it wouldn’t matter anyway. They were all doomed to die.
“What did you see?” she asked. Her hand went to my shoulder.
I wanted to shake her off. Instead, I forced myself to sitting and looked around, letting her hand linger. We sat on the sandy banks of the river, everything bathed in a grayish light. The waters were as still as satin, a faint glint on the surface making it look like liquid steel. No bodies screaming for eternity. No shadowed figures trying to drag me under. Behind us—away from the river—the sand turned to cobblestone, the horizon paved and gray and fading into fog. It was like being in an overturned bowl, everything obscured at the domed edges. Even the sky was the same gray haze, with black roots breaking from the cloud cover like alien tendrils.
“The end,” I whispered. I tried to force out the images that crowded in my mind.
“You saw the war?”
I shook my head.
No. No, I hadn’t seen the war. I’d seen those images before, the fire and chaos, the fields running red. This was different. This hadn’t been war. This had been cold and calculated bloodshed. This had been personal. This had been malicious.
“That is impossible,” she whispered, and I realized my thoughts had been trailing, and that she had once more followed them like bread crumbs.
“What?”
But our relationship was far from a two-way street. She shook her head, and whatever thoughts she had, she kept to herself.
“What? What is it?”
“It is none of our concern. Not now.” She took a deep breath, as though trying to center herself, which just made me feel more off-balance. She was keeping something from me, and no matter how hard she tried to compose her face, I knew that it wasn’t good. “We must stay focused. This place will try to deter us. You.”
“Then where is he? Where’s Chris?” I hated to admit that there was a note of panic in my voice. Because he certainly wasn’t nearby, on the river, and I couldn’t stay here any longer. I needed out before I lost my mind. Before I lost my way. I wasn’t made to fight harpies and travel the Underworld or fight a war. I was made to drink tea and paint and spend my nights dreaming up a normal future: traveling the world and displaying my pieces in exotic galleries, drinking fancy drinks in mismatched ceramics at bourgie house parties, wearing strange dresses and fierce makeup, and making small talk about annoying artistic trends while Ethan cracked jokes at my side.
This wasn’t supposed to be my life.
None of this was supposed to be my life.
My thoughts spun. I sniffed, tried to turn the panic into something I could use: anger or frustration or at least some sort of resilience. I needed one of those if I was going to find Chris and kill the god that wanted to overtake him. If I was going to ignore the weight of what was left unsaid between him and me—if I was going to ignore that my visions had meant something. And that that something was too terrible for her to mention.
Freyja didn’t answer. She stood instead and helped me to my feet. Her silence set my nerves on edge.
“Freyja, where is he?”
She nodded to the cobbled expanse. “He is there, among the other suicides who thought they deserved punishment for ending their lives.” She bit her lip, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked tentative. “Be careful where you tread.”
“Why?”
Again, she didn’t speak. But when she walked forward, toward the stony horizon, I learned why.
The place wasn’t paved with normal stones. It was paved in faces. All ages, all races. All of them facing upward, faces contorted in silent screams, concrete or stone surrounding their heads, hiding their ears, binding them to the earth. Like something only Dante could have dreamed up.
The sight hit me like a blow to the chest. I couldn’t take a step forward. Doing so would entail stepping on someone’s face, and even though they were silent, I knew they were alive. Or conscious. Or whatever you were when stuck down here.
How was I going to find Chris down there? The cobblestones stretched out into the horizon, flat and unchanging, and there was no way to figure out who was who until you were right on top of them.
Freyja stood there, staring out at the skulls with a look of disgust on her face.
“This is terrible,” I whispered.
“I never said my world was kind,” she replied. She looked to me. “Is your own world not the same?”
I could tell she wasn’t just speaking of my own experiences, but of the ones I’d seen in her history. I didn’t know . . . I’d always hoped that the idea of eternal punishment was a human one, that when you died, there was a white light no matter what. But that clearly wasn’t the case.
“Are they stuck here forever?” I managed to ask.
She looked uncomfortable.
“Everyone’s hell is different. Everyone gets the afterworld they expect. That is, perhaps, the most dangerous facet of myth and religion: What humans believe, the afterlife creates. Perhaps these souls will eventually find salvation. Perhaps they will never escape their torment. All I know is, there is no divine force to pluck them from their misery. They must find that salvation themselves. They must save their own soul. Otherwise . . . it is best not to think of it.”
But there was something bothering her—I could tell that much. And I didn’t like the feeling that she was holding back. It made my stomach flip.
“What is it?” I asked. “What happens to them? If they don’t get out?” I found, the moment the words left my lips, that I didn’t actually want to know the answer. It was one thing to stay up at night, worrying about death and the afterlife. I
t was another to be staring it in the face.
“Everything fades,” Freyja whispered, her words sending chills over my skin. “Even eternity must end.”
She nudged the sand with her foot. “I believe . . . I believe that there was once no shore. Only the condemned buried along the banks of the Styx. But over time . . .”
I wanted to vomit. I wanted to leap out of the sand. But of course, there was nowhere else to go.
“These are people.”
“Were.”
“But their souls? What happened to them?”
“I am not a god, Kaira. I do not know the workings of such things. All I know is that even the sand nourishes the World Tree, so perhaps they are reborn once the process is complete.”
It wasn’t a time for theology, but I found myself unable to move forward. The idea that this was eternity paralyzed me.
“That’s horrible.”
She looked at me.
“That is Creation. The Tree gives birth to the worlds, and from its fruits all living things are born and nurtured. And, like leaves, they in turn give the Tree life. When their time comes to fall, they are pulled back into the Tree, become transformed, perhaps to be reborn, perhaps not. In life and in death, all things nourish the Tree, and the Tree nourishes and is all things. It does not care about what we believe. It only exists to exist. Everything else is our projection.”
There was a lump in my stomach that made me want to scream, that made me want to run away from everything I saw and everything I was hearing. This couldn’t be true. I’d been raised to believe in many gods, to believe that there were divine forces that took interest in human life. But to think that this was real, that everything in Creation was simply this: a life cycle. A mechanical, thoughtless circle that birthed worlds only to harvest them when they died . . . It was horrible. There was no white light. No great kindness.
God didn’t give a shit. Only mortals did.
I opened my mouth to ask more, but no. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to think about God or Creation or what happened when something immortal died. I wanted out. I didn’t care if I was lying to myself: I wanted to go back to pretending that everything was okay and the only thing I had to worry about was finals.
“How do we find him?” I asked.
Again, she didn’t answer right away.
“Freyja, how do we find him?”
She sighed.
“You won’t like it.”
I said nothing in response.
“The souls are brought in from the river,” she finally said. “The first were laid here, at its edge. The newer are farther on . . .”
“You mean we have to walk over there. Over them.”
Her nod was solemn.
My stomach churned as I looked out at the faces. To be bound like that for eternity, staring up at a sky as bleak as limbo, unable to move or scream or blink . . . I couldn’t imagine such a fate. Didn’t want to. But another part of me wondered . . . even if I didn’t truly believe suicide deserved an eternity of torture, would I have suffered a similar fate? If Munin hadn’t rescued me, would I be out there as well, waiting for time to turn me to dust just so the misery would end?
This could have been my future. My afterlife. And somehow, in the face of all this, what I’d been given seemed a whole hell of a lot better.
I stared at the poor soul trapped in front of me. The flesh was barely there—thin paper stretched over harsh cheekbones, the lips pulled back to reveal ivory teeth, her eyes open and darting about madly. Irises the palest blue, the whites bloodshot. It was grotesque and beautiful and terrifying, and I thought I could stare at that face for eternity. Wondering who she had been. The life she had lived. Wondering why she had decided to end it, and if she would ever receive liberation or simply become dust like the rest.
Wondering if I could actually save Chris from this fate, or if we were already doomed.
Wondering if it was worth it, any of it, when we were just cogs in this divine machine.
“Kaira,” she said, and for a moment I thought it was the bound woman, calling my name from the depths of her past. Instead, it was Freyja. She stood closer to me, one hand on my shoulder. “We need to get you out of here,” she said. She was looking at me like she was worried. Why was she worried?
She lifted my hand and held it before my face.
“You’re starting to fade,” she whispered.
It took me a moment to realize what she meant. Her delicate white fingers against mine. I wasn’t translucent. So why was my skin paler than usual? Why did it feel like, if I pressed hard enough, I could push my hand right through hers?
“I feared this would happen,” she said. She squeezed my fingers, like she was trying to get more life in me. “Mortals aren’t built to be down here. Rather, they aren’t meant to enter and leave. We have to get you out of here. Before we can’t.”
I looked around.
But how . . .
There were too many bodies out there. Too many lost souls. How would we find Chris?
“You are connected,” she said. She turned me to face her. “Kaira, listen to me. Remember what I said about holding your goal above all else. If we are to save him, you have to focus on Chris, and solely Chris.”
“But . . .”
“You are the only hope of finding him down here,” she said. “I brought us to where he was kept, but you must be the one to find him. You two are connected, whether you call it fate or love or just foolishness. You dove into the Underworld to follow in his footsteps—there is a thread between you, and if you don’t use it, we will wander lost down here forever.”
But there wasn’t a pull in my chest, no golden thread guiding me to him. There was just the emptiness, the cold press of a ceaseless eternity. There was no way I could find him, no tug that would bring me closer to him.
I wouldn’t give up, though. Not when we were here, not when we were so close. Not when both of us—no, all three of us—had already lost so much.
If I couldn’t find him, I would make the Underworld bring him to me.
“This place is what you make of it,” I muttered, the mad prophet Mimir’s words rasping through my mind.
Maybe Freyja had heard it before—maybe she knew exactly where the words had come from—because she didn’t ask me to clarify, just nodded and stared out at the skull-capped horizon.
I closed my eyes and thought of Chris. I thought of the way he looked at his paintings when he was absorbed in his work, the way he never broke eye contact when we spoke. I thought of his hand in mine as we walked through the woods, his words leaving trails in the air, a trail of bread crumbs I could follow to the ends of the earth.
A trail I would follow to the ends of the earth.
And then I could feel him there, at the edge of my awareness—the linger of his touch, the trace of his heat, the curl of his breath. Just the memory made my pulse race, but not in a bad way. There was part of me, deep and protected, that wanted him in my life. That didn’t just want to save or protect him, but wanted him to be closer. Needed him to be closer.
I need you here, Chris. I need you.
I envisioned how it would look, the painting of the two of us: our hands held, the snow fading into the white of the canvas, the sky azure and void of ravens. I let myself brush in the colors, the strokes of his arms, our fingers, his russet hair. I painted him closer. As he was meant to be. As we were meant to be.
There wasn’t a rush of power or a whir of shadows. Freyja didn’t gasp or clench my arm. And so, when I opened my eyes, I fully expected to have failed.
I thought I had.
The horizon still stretched endlessly before us, covered in the faces of the damned. But when I turned around, the river was nowhere to be seen. I turned back to Freyja; she wasn’t looking at me. Or the horizon.
“You’ve found him,” she whispered. She pointed down, only a few inches from where my feet had been.
At Chris’s face.
I scamp
ered back, suddenly aware of the sensation of skin and bone beneath my bare feet, at the cut of teeth against my heels, the squish of cheeks and eyes. I froze, clutching Freyja, as though she could lift me above all this. All the pain and torture that stretched around us, that pooled at my feet. But I didn’t take my eyes off Chris’s face.
It had only been a few hours since I’d seen him.
He looked like he’d aged forty years.
There were white patches in his hair, and his skin had lost its golden luster, pulled down into halftones of white and cream and tan. His eyes, once so piercing, now only darted around, crazed, bloodshot. Like he was searching for something.
A small, vain part of me wanted to think he was looking for me. But I knew that—even if that was the case—he needed a whole lot more for salvation.
“What do we do?” I asked, my voice swallowed up in the dead silence of the place. “Can we dig him out?”
“No,” she said. “If we are to drag him out of here, we must enter his hell. You must convince him to leave it.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to?”
She looked at me, and her gaze shot straight to my heart.
“None of us believe we are worth saving from our crimes, Kaira. You above all others should know that.”
She was right. How many times had I tried to convince myself that I deserved what had happened to me? That I deserved to be punished—for what I had done to Brad, and what he had done to me?
“There is plenty of room in hell for martyrs,” Freyja said, her hand suddenly on my wrist. “But if you wish to escape here, you cannot be one of them. And neither can he.”
She knelt, and guided me down.
“Just remember,” she said. “It is his hell, not yours. Do not let it become your own. If you forget, if you get dragged in . . . there is nothing I can do to bring you back.”
“What happens then?” I whispered.
She didn’t answer, just looked down to the sea of mute faces around us. That was answer enough.
“Remember your focus,” she said. “You found him. Now bring him back.”
Then she guided my hand down, pressed my palm to the side of Chris’s cheek. I’d just registered the stubble, the cold flesh. And then the world faded in a wash of shadow.
