by A. R. Kahler
He appeared from the mists, or maybe the mists disappeared from him. But he stood there, in the dim streetlamp, in the alley, and the world was heavy. Heavy as my limbs. As my empty hands.
I am still holding Chris’s hand. I am still safe.
“Oh sweet Shadechild,” the figure said. He didn’t move toward me, but his every word was the sharpening of a dagger. I cowered back and stumbled against something. Something that cried out.
I turned on my heel, looking at the child at my feet. A baby. With dark skin and dark hair, clean as crystal. A raven’s feather clutched in her palm.
“Did you ever wonder,” the figure asked, “why she calls you that?”
I shook my head. Backed away from the child now squirming on the concrete. It was cold. So cold. How was she still alive?
“Because you were born in shadows,” he whispered, right behind my ear. “That is the game they play, the gods. They create their spawn, delight in their cleverness. The Aesir’s avatar killed his mother coming into existence, as the Aesir wanted their hero to sow blood in his wake, to make the world bend knee. But you . . . the Vanir had darker desires. They wanted something else. A different sort of worship. They don’t want blood. They want to seep into the consciousness of every mortal, the shadow to the light—the constant fear and reminder of mortality. They don’t want humans to tremble in fear. They want mortals to bow in subservience, to the inevitability.”
The figure moved past me, knelt down to the child. To me. His robe was gray and mottled, like a snowy owl, like snow itself. I swore I saw the nubs of wings protruding from his back, but when I blinked, they were merely folds of fabric. I knew him then. The same figure I’d seen behind and within Jonathan.
The same figure Freyja was sure she’d banished.
“And so they crafted you, sweet one. Have you never wondered about your history? Your own flesh and blood?”
He stroked the baby’s forehead. I wanted to scream at him to stop, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t open my mouth. Ice froze my veins, even as the snow began to fall around us like broken prayers.
I had wondered. When I was younger. When I learned I was adopted. I’d loved my mother and father, but the moment they told me the truth, I felt the rift. I wasn’t theirs. Not really. And according to them, I’d never truly know. My biological mother had left me with no word, no way to be traced, at the doors of a hospital. I’d been taken into the system, and my adoptive parents had taken me in soon after.
But I hadn’t let myself wonder for too long. I knew it was a dangerous road to travel. My adopted family had shown me love. It was more than my blood had ever done. I wasn’t going to throw that in their faces by being indignant or demanding information they didn’t have. The past was the past. I preferred leaving it there.
“This is your history, Shadechild. Child of the shadows. You were crafted from darkness the moment the godchild was born in the roots of the World Tree. You were her compliment. And like her, you have no family save for the Tree itself. No relatives. No blood.”
The figure stood and turned to me. I couldn’t see his face through the shadows of his hood. I stepped back anyway. I didn’t want to see that face. I didn’t want to let him in.
I looked back to the child.
“You want to have a future,” the figure said. “You think you can win this little battle. But you have no future, Shadechild. You have no family. No reason to defend. Those who love you only do so out of pity, and those who help you only do so to further their own desires.”
A raven appeared then, bleeding from the shadows, like ink pouring into water. I knew him immediately. Munin. The raven cocked his head to the side, seemed to study the child. Me. And I knew, in the deepest recesses of the Underworld, the Allfather was telling Hugin to watch over Freyja. To turn her into a weapon. While Munin turned me into a sheath.
More shadows curled around the baby, coalescing into a blanket as black as night. Munin clutched the blanket in his beak and unfolded his great wings, and then silently, effortlessly, took off into the darkness, disappearing into the sky like a mirage.
“Why are you showing me this?” I whispered.
“Because you wish to have a future. You wish to save humanity. Why? When you have no past. When your humanity is itself an illusion? You have flesh and you have blood, yes. But you have no ties to mankind. There is no future for those like us, Shadechild. We are nothing but names in the book of history—a purpose served, and a life unlived.”
Those like us? I shivered. And not from the cold. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He laughed. The sound of an unfurling avalanche.
I’m going to have a future. I’m going to save Chris, and then we’re done. Heru is gone. The battle is avoided. I’ve won. And now I can have a normal life. . . .
“With a god of the Underworld in your head?” he asked. “If you believe that, you are not the girl I thought you were. She will not rest until she has felt vengeance. There are reasons she can see into your head, but you cannot see into hers. If you knew half the things she felt . . .”
He stepped up to me, placed a frozen hand on my shoulder.
“You will kill everyone you love because of her. The future I showed you, that was not my doing. But hers. Yours. The world will run red with her anger. The loving life you desire will never be yours. She would never let you have happiness, not when she was denied it.”
I thought of what I’d seen in Mimir’s well. Freyja and Bragi. Her love’s sacrifice. And I thought of the resolve in her heart at the very end. The desire to scorn the gods. To make them pay.
“Why are you here? Why are you telling me any of this?”
“Because I am tired of being played by the gods,” he said. “And if you had any sense, you would be as well. Remember this, when I am proven right. She will never be your savior, and you will never be his. You are nothing but shadows, Shadechild. Shadows and regret. And that is the only future you will ever know.”
He turned, then, and stepped away. Into the pooled light of the streetlamp. Into the center of the circle.
“The battle nears,” he said. “But not the one they expect. Prepare yourself, Shadechild. The end comes.”
Deep in the shadows of his cowl, I could feel the coldness emanating from his smile. Then he spread his arms, and his cloak spread like wings, and in a gust of snow and pearlescent feathers, he was gone.
Leaving only the circle in the snow. Only the drifting feathers. Only the light.
Only the words echoing in my head, the ones I’d seen written in ink and blood.
The Tree will burn.
I knew where we were before I even opened my eyes. I could feel it humming through my veins, everything vibrating, less of a noise and more of a sensation stuck in my bones, drawing me forward, calling me by name.
I opened my eyes and nearly wept. How could I describe such beauty? In all its simplicity, how could I understand its perfection?
The heartroot of Yggdrasil stretched down before us, glistening dark like ebony and silk, the skin of it as smooth as the face of the stars. It was larger than a skyscraper, stretching down through the shadowed expanse of the world and into a lake that formed from the pooling tides of the river beside us. The water’s surface flickered in the low light like stars swirling around their cosmic nexus. I blinked, and realized there were stars swirling over the lake. Stars like fireflies, in purple and green, and they danced over the water in patterns that seemed to breathe prophecy.
We stood on the beach, the sand finer than flour and as dark as coal. It felt like standing before an altar.
Everything was quiet. Heavy. Expectant. And yet everything was filled with energy, a movement that pulled at my heart.
The potential. This was the potential for everything.
This was where Creation began.
This was where Creation would end.
I didn’t even look over at Chris: his hand was still in mine, and I could feel him staring i
n awe. I didn’t speak to Freyja, because words seemed sacrilegious here. I could feel her emotions too—the fear, the duty, the resentment. She had sacrificed her lover to be here, to ascend. She had sacrificed everything to come to me, to fulfill her duty. Our duty. Our martyred duty.
In the smallest corner of my mind, I held on to the memory the river had shown me. The doubt. But that was fleeting. That was fading.
The Tree will burn.
No. That was impossible. The Tree was all. The Tree would last for eternity.
The Tree was eternity.
One couldn’t kill God.
I could have stood there, staring, forever. As if standing there would answer all my problems. As though at any moment, the Tree would speak through my veins, and I would know the secrets of the universe. I would know how small my troubles were. And I would feel peace. Because we stood at the feet of Creation.
Because we were Creation.
Of course I would lay down everything for this. How could I have ever thought I would do anything else? How could Freyja have ever believed she could overturn the will of God?
As if she’d heard me—of course she’d heard me—Freyja broke the dream.
She stepped forward, her feet dipping gently into the sand as she walked toward the lake.
The moment her foot touched the lip of the water, a dozen of the floating lights swarmed her foot, curled around her sole. She continued walking, and the lights continued to coalesce around her feet, dispersing whenever she stepped up, swirling every time she touched water. Like they existed only to hold her up. Her gait was smooth. Steady. The lights danced around her, casting shadows and color over her pale skin. She walked on the water’s surface as though she were a savior. As though it were as simple as breathing.
I turned to Chris. I wanted to tell him something. Anything. I’ll protect you. We’re safe now. We can be together. But the hum of the heartroot was too great, and the silence around us too sacred. Instead, I guided him forward and hoped he would feel at least a small amount of that reassurance, that promise. His fingers were like porcelain in mine. I wasn’t too late to save him from the shadows in his own heart. I wasn’t too late to save him from his inner hell.
Even though I knew he would carry it with him forever.
I would be there to help guide him out. Forever.
The faerie lights descended the moment my feet touched water, buzzing and filling my limbs with a pleasant sort of static. I almost laughed after the first step. I was walking on water. I was performing a miracle. And yet, here, it felt like nature. Like all the world was a miracle, and there was nothing that could be seen as mundane.
We walked, hand in hand, and it felt like moving through a dream. Every step made the Tree’s vibration grow stronger, louder. Heavier. My reflection stared back at me when I looked down, the water still swirling, and I couldn’t tell if it was the waters moving beneath the surface or simply the dance of the lights. Down there, I swore I saw the cosmos stretching for eternity. I swore I felt it in the blood pumping through my veins, a map of my own inner workings.
Freyja didn’t speak when we stopped beside her, before the root, fireflies still buzzing around our feet, my toes just barely registering the coolness of the water I stood upon. Warmth radiated from the treeflesh, and the vibration was so loud, so thick, my teeth vibrated in my skull. My blood frothed in my veins. The root was so smooth up close; it reflected the fireflies like an obsidian mirror. My heart ached, to be this near.
The Tree was God.
The Tree was All.
And in that moment, the Tree was calling to me.
Freyja nodded. Maybe to my thoughts, maybe as an indication. I couldn’t speak. Words wouldn’t make sense here. She reached toward the Tree. My hand mirrored hers, and Chris was close behind. Without speaking, all three of us placed our hand to the Tree.
We reached toward God.
The Tree reached back.
• • •
We floated in darkness, suspended on threads of shadow and whispers. The vibration was less intense in here, but my bones still hummed with power. Chris was beside me; I could see him from the corner of my eye, even though I couldn’t move my limbs. I couldn’t panic. I felt nothing. We floated in the darkness and I felt only calm. Peace.
Then the shadows faded, or a light grew, and I felt something new in the space of my chest.
Awe.
They were before us. The whole of the cavern arched around them, a cathedral of gray and black that spanned stories and centuries, a temple of twisted stone. No, not stone—treeflesh. Walls of root and tendril curled and curved around us, twisting and carved in filigree and archways, like the chancel of a cathedral, everything ebony and muted light.
The three Norns existed in its center. The nexus of the nexus. The beating heart of God.
Even if Freyja hadn’t told me what they were, I would have known. They were like nothing I’d expected, nothing I’d seen in storybooks, but that was a distant thought, a different memory. These were the three weavers of fate, of creation. And for all their terribleness, they were beautiful.
I couldn’t judge their sizes, even though they were hundreds of times larger than myself. Their heads were oblong, like potatoes, the flesh mottled and thick and pale, their eyes lost to skin, their lips the mere shadow of a space. Their bodies hung below their necks, limp and clothed in rags that dangled far into the abyss, their limbs long and frail, trailing like spiderwebs. But what use did they have for movement? From the tops of their heads sprouted a lacework of antlers. The bone curved and curled above them like crowns, twining into the treeflesh, into the antlers of their sisters, and the roots mirrored, twisting around bone, into skull. They were one and the same, the Weavers and the Woven, the cosmic and the conscious. In the most distant corner of my thoughts, perhaps, I would have found them terrifying.
Instead, I wept at their beauty.
They were the guardians of the world, tenders of the Tree. They had woven me into existence. And they would snip the threads of my life when it was time.
How had I ever feared death, when it was such a tender choice?
We didn’t speak. We didn’t have to. I knew what they needed. A sacrifice. Something more precious than life itself. Freyja had given her lover to rise to the mortal world, but Chris was far too young in my life to be worth such a cost. I searched my heart. What would be the hardest to give up? Not a lover, or a family member. Not a memory, though I had many I wished to lose. What had carried me through my life? What did I need to survive as much as breath?
“Your art.”
The words filtered through my mind like the deepest strings of a cello. And for the first time since being by the heartroot, I felt a trace of fear.
My art?
No. No, I couldn’t.
It was the one thing that had carried me through the darkness, the one thing that allowed me to wake up every morning. When I was depressed, I drew my demons and better horizons. When I was having anxiety attacks in public high because I wasn’t popular enough, or outgoing enough, I found solace in the back art studio, surrounded by paint and other outcasts. I didn’t just send myself to Islington to define myself: I went there to protect myself. My art was how I expressed, how I coped, how I integrated. I couldn’t give it up. Without it, I was nothing. Life was nothing.
I could only imagine days without it. Rambling through life with no spark, no purpose, no passion.
What use was there to being alive, if there wasn’t art within it? If everything was muted gray and empty? Like a drained corpse.
No. Like a concrete slab. A tombstone.
Art was creation.
Without it . . . without it, it would be like remaining here, in the Underworld, forever.
Anything else. Let it be anything else.
Despite the fear, despite the fact that every cell in my body screamed otherwise, the response that drew through my bones silenced all doubt, a surge of water to my growing fire.
> “You hold your skill above all things, even yourself. And that is how we know it is what you must sacrifice.”
My heart was numb, but the spark I had, the spark that was left, burned bright with rage.
This was Chris’s fault. I’d followed him down here to save him, not to play the martyr. Why was I the one who had to sacrifice something, when this was his journey?
“He shall also sacrifice,” the voice said. “It is not your place to decide the cost.”
No. It wasn’t fair. Freyja hadn’t mentioned this when I followed him down.
Give up my art?
What would I have left?
Chris, I thought. You’ll have Chris.
I felt him there, beside me. Maybe I should have asked if he was worth it. Maybe I should have questioned. Maybe I should have listened to Freyja and let him drown.
But deep down, I knew this was right. This was what I was meant to do. Art had been my life up until now. Chris . . . he might not be my everything, he might not be my entire future, but his life was important. To me, I thought, it could be even more important than art itself.
I looked over at him. He stared at the Norns, tears in his eyes, his lips moving wordlessly. Just the sight made my heart swell. He was worth this. He was worth this.
Right?
I didn’t say yes, but my heart answered for me.
I blinked, and the middle Norn floated before me. Only she was human now, her flesh glowing like a star. She looked like my mother. She was my mother—the raven hair, the fierce eyes, the proud smile. And I saw, then, the other two sisters. The Maiden on her left, with hair as fine and lush as silken thread. The Crone on her right, her hands gnarled and holding sheers cut from Time. And the Mother, my mother, she smiled.
“Your sacrifice has been accepted.”
She reached to my chest. And when she placed her hand where my heart should be, my body and soul unraveled in trails of red silk.
I gasped at the pain, at the ecstasy, as infinity opened within my veins.
As the world wove itself anew.
