Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  She started walking down the middle of the road, and she nodded to the people as she passed them, but no one nodded back. They walked on by as though they didn’t see or hear her at all.

  It only took a few minutes to reach the end of the village, where she paused to gaze out over a frozen field that may have held rows of wheat just a few weeks ago, at harvest time. Now everything was bare and empty, resting for the winter.

  Wren was about to turn back for another pass through the village when a small boy came running out of the woods at the far end of the field. He careened over the dirt rows and dead stalks and flew by Wren on his way into town. He shouted over and over again, “Mama! Papa! The sainted mother! Help!”

  She almost followed him back to his house to hear more, but instead she set out across the field. She could see the boy’s tracks easily in the fresh snow and broken mud and at the edge of the field she pushed her way through the dead bushes and entered the woods.

  The trail led downhill and Wren lifted her skirts to step over the broken branches and fallen saplings. Hundreds of brown and silver trees stood silent watch over her, their trunks making dark pillars against the white of the snowy ground. The slope was rocky in some places and icy in others, and she fell more than once before she reached the bottom of the hill. There she found a small stream running over a bed of round stones with bits of ice clinging to the mossy banks.

  Now what? Where am I? What am I doing?

  “Hello?” she called.

  No one answered.

  Upstream or downstream?

  She turned right and started crunching along the snowy bank of the stream, following it back up in search of its source. The water wound through the woods in the deep depression of its bed, and Wren wondered if the water ever filled the channel, perhaps when the spring thaws unleashed the floods that were frozen high on the mountains in the distance.

  As she walked, she listened to the stillness of the wood. No squirrels chattered and no birds sang. From time to time, a frozen branch would crack and tumble to the ground with a dry crash and clatter in the distance.

  Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe this isn’t Yaga’s nightmare at all. After all, these are waking nightmares. Maybe they work differently from regular ones.

  Wren came around a bend in the stream and found a wide flat glen ahead where a cottage stood in the center of a clearing.

  Or maybe this is the right place after all.

  The cottage did not sit on the ground. In the center of the clearing there stood two massive old trees with huge twisted roots snaking and writhing through the frozen earth. The trees were only a few paces apart, and they were both cut off some twenty feet in the air. And upon the tall stumps of the trees was the log cabin.

  Omar said something about this. In Rus they build tree-houses to store meat where the bears can’t reach it. But I never pictured something like this.

  She glanced down at the clawing roots at the bottom of the two trees.

  It looks like the house has giant chicken legs.

  She entered the clearing and eyed the high ring of earth that encircled the two trees. The mound was covered in snow, but as she came closer Wren saw that were dull gray lumps poking up all along the top of the frozen wall.

  It’s probably a stone wall to keep animals away.

  There were two openings in the wall where the little stream trickled in from the north and trickled out to the south, and Wren paused at this natural gateway to brush the snow off the nearest of the gray lumps, and found a human skull staring back at her. She froze, her hand still raised in mid-swipe. A sheet of frozen snow groaned and broken free of the wall for many paces off to the right. The snow crashed to the ground, revealing a wall of femurs and ribcages, and tiny finger bones.

  It’s like something out of the old sagas. Maybe a demon lives here.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  Wren entered the ring of bones and began circling the two trees, peering up at the log cabin in search of a door or ladder, but she saw neither. As she walked, the hard crunching of the snow underfoot softened into a wet sucking sound and she felt the ground clinging to her feet. She looked down, expecting warm brown mud.

  Her boots were soaked in blood up to her ankles. Looking back, she saw that the last few of her boot prints were all full of bloody puddles.

  “Yaga?”

  A crow screamed in the distance. She looked up into the woods and stood very still, listening. And as she peered up at the trees, she saw something moving. Many somethings. Slowly, she realized it was the trees themselves. Their stiff and bare branches were all gradually sagging, drooping lower, gently bending and arching as though they had become as soft as supple leather. Shards of bark began to fall away from the branches, revealing the moist pink and red flesh of the trees spotted with dark blood.

  Wren closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She felt her heart pounding and her hands shaking.

  It’s not real. It’s just a dream. Just a nightmare. It’s not real.

  She opened her eyes, but this time ignored the ground and the woods and tried to focus on the cabin high above her.

  “Hello? Anyone?”

  She made a second pass around the two trees just to be sure she hadn’t missed something the first time, but she only confirmed that the house had no windows, no doors, and no way to climb up to it. And with each passing moment, the stark black and white landscape around her was swallowed up by wide swathes of crimson on the earth and up the trees, seeping up out of the ground.

  “Damn it, Yaga, I’m tired of this game. Show me the door already! Show me now!”

  A terrible wooden groaning and keening echoed through the wood, and Wren stumbled back into the bone fence. The soft bloody earth under her feet shuddered, and the ice cracked, and a deep rumbling shook the ground.

  Woden, be my shield.

  One of the trees beneath the cabin was bending sharply halfway up, and the base of the tree began to rise, its clawing roots tearing up the earth. When it broke free of the ground, huge clumps of dirt and snow tumbled from the exposed roots like dead bodies. Then the roots came down to rest on the ground and the other tree bent and tore itself free of the ground just like the first one.

  It’s going to trample me!

  Wren bolted toward the nearest opening in the fence, but the cabin lunged and planted one of its massive tree-legs directly in her path, splashing her with the blood from the pools all around her. The impact shook the ground from under her and Wren slipped backward in the muck and struck her head on the skulls of the fence. As she clutched her aching head, she looked up, expecting to see a filthy mass of roots about to crush her into the ground.

  But instead, the cabin leaned back and forth, stomping its tree-legs one by one as it shuffled around and around in a slow circle within the bone fence, stepping back and forth across the tiny stream. Eventually it turned halfway around, and stopped.

  Wren remained still and silent, her eyes darting around the clearing, waiting for something else to happen. But nothing did.

  She sat up, and then stood up, her eyes fixed on the cabin above her. There, in the wall of the cabin facing her, was a door. A door that had not been there before.

  “Okay, that’s something. But how am I…” She glanced around again for a ladder and saw that none had appeared during the cabin’s clumsy dance. She looked back up at the door. “Well, it is a witch’s house, I suppose. She wouldn’t need a ladder.”

  Wren held out her right hand and focused on the sun-steel ring on her finger. It took very little effort to make her own soul shiver just right to make the ring buzz ever so gently against her skin. She pulled the aether in from the clearing, in from the woods, in from as far as she could reach. The cold mist slithered over the pink snow in thin wisps, but eventually she had enough. Wren sat down cross-legged and gathered the aether under her, and then she lifted herself off the ground.

  She had never lifted herself so high as the cabin, in fact she h
ad never risen more than a few feet off the ground. So she moved slowly, struggling to keep the small cloud of aether beneath her as dense as possible. Two feet, six feet, ten feet. Wren kept her eyes on the door and tried not to think about the vast empty space forming below her legs.

  When she reached the height of the cabin, Wren grabbed the wooden handle of the door and pulled herself forward so she could stand on the shallow lip of the door sill. With a pillow of aether at her back to keep her from falling, she wiggled and shook the handle until the clasp popped free and the door swung out toward her. She waved the aether forward, and it delivered her safely into the cabin.

  The interior was very dark, as the only light inside came from the doorway that she was now standing in. There were no windows, shuttered or otherwise, and no hint of a hearth or candles to light. So Wren held up her sun-steel ring a second time and squeezed it tight until the eight meager souls inside it made the ring glow with a dim orange light.

  “Yaga? Are you here?”

  She stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind her.

  Instantly a dozen large candles sprang to life, but Wren had barely glimpsed her surroundings before an ear-splitting screaming erupted all around her. She slammed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut from the pain of the noise, and she crouched down as a wave of vertigo swept through her, threatening to send her spinning to the floor.

  Wren didn’t move. With her eyes closed and ears plugged, she waited for the screaming to stop, but it didn’t stop. She couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a thousand voices, male or female, near or far. There weren’t even pauses for the screamers to catch their breath.

  After several long moments of this, Wren cautiously opened her eyes and squinted at her surroundings. She was still inside the small cabin, still crouched just inside the door, and from her position she could easily see everything around her. And what she saw was terrifying.

  Her legs gave out beneath her and she fell on her side, she forgot how to breathe, and all of her insides turned to ice.

  There were two dozen men screaming, and one woman screaming back at them. The men were not standing or sitting in the room. The men were the room. The men were the walls, their bodies melted and twisted and flatted against the logs of the cabin, their bodies turned and bent and leaning at every angle, their heads hanging out into the room to scream. And they were all the same man, the same ugly man with limp black hair and a drooping black mustache and a large crooked nose.

  Some of them were blackened with frost and some were white as bone. Some even had bones erupting through their skin as their bodies stretched out across the walls. And Wren realized that there were no candles in the room after all. Every few paces, there was a hand or a foot or a face on fire.

  In the center of the room lay Yaga, curled up on the floor with her clawing hands wrapped around her white head. Her screams came from her belly as she kept her face down and did not look up at the tortured men around her.

  Wren felt her hands shaking. They felt so thin and fragile and useless, her hands. Her belly felt hollow, and she couldn’t think a single thought, couldn’t form a single image in her mind because the screaming crowded into her ears, drowning out her own thoughts. The only thing that welled up inside her was a single word:

  Out.

  She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees, trying to cover her ears as she moved and keeping her eyes narrowed to slits so she wouldn’t have to look at the screaming faces on the walls. When she reached Yaga’s foot, Wren grabbed it with both hands, shuffled around, and started crawling back toward the door.

  The screaming wormed its way inside her, piercing her head, gnawing at her chest and bones like a thousand hungry locusts. Her heart sank by degrees with each passing moment, from shock to disgust to fear to despair to self-loathing to an all-consuming desire to die, just to escape the screaming.

  But still she crawled, and she pulled on the witch’s leg.

  When her head struck the door, she reached up and fumbled with the wooden handle, but the door would not open. Tears poured down her cheeks as she pounded on the door, and she moaned wordless prayers for silence, for darkness, for sunlight, for death, for anything but the fiery chamber of screaming faces.

  She slammed her hand against the door one last time and it swung out and open, and Wren tumbled out, dragging Yaga with her. The two women spun out into the cold, empty air and Wren had a brief glimpse of the blinding white snow before she struck the ground and lost consciousness.

  Wren awoke slowly, her eyes focusing slowly through layers of white blurs, her ears focusing slowly through layers of white noise. Gradually she blinked away the pain and looked across the bright white snow and ice at the old woman lying beside her. The stream gurgled by their feet and the winter wind whistled through the leafless trees. And in the distance, she could hear people talking and boots crunching on snow.

  The blood is gone.

  The trees all stood tall and stiff again wearing their black and silver bark, and the snow was just snow, and the ice was just ice, all white and silver and hard and cold.

  She sat up and knocked the cold wet clumps off her clothes, and then she crawled over to Yaga and rolled the old witch onto her back.

  Yaga stared up at the sky, and blinked. “Where am I?”

  “Outside.”

  “Where’s my Koschei?”

  Wren took a deep breath. “The real Koschei is on a Turkish ship. And sooner or later, he’ll be set free or he’ll be rescued, and he’ll come home to you. He’s immortal, just like you. You’ll see him again soon.”

  Yaga sat up and looked around the clearing. “I’m home?”

  “No. This is a dream. Your dream. You’re not really here, in Rus. You’re in Constantia, in the south. You’re in a tower in the palace.”

  “I know you.” Yaga frowned. “Or do I?”

  “You do, in the waking world,” Wren said. “I’m a vala, a witch, from Ysland. We met earlier today.”

  “I’m dreaming.” Yaga looked at her sharply. “But I’m not asleep.”

  “No, and that’s the problem. You need to sleep. And you need to stay out of there.” Wren pointed up at the cabin above them.

  Yaga nodded. “I’ll go to the village.”

  “Good. I think some of the people are coming to check on you now.” Wren looked over her shoulder at the woods and saw tiny shadows moving among the trees. “So I’m going to go back to the waking world now. Are you going to be all right here?”

  Yaga nodded slowly. There was a miserable blankness about her eyes and mouth.

  “All right then.” Wren stood up, leaving the old woman sitting in the snow in the shadow of her cabin by the edge of the stream. She hesitated, uncertain of what to do next, and then she started walking upstream, away from the approaching people.

  When she was back among the trees and the clearing was out of sight behind her, Wren sat down on a cold stone and looked at the ring on her hand. “All right. I’m ready to go back now. Back to my own body. Back where I belong.”

  A soft cackling laughter resounded from her ring.

  “Gudrun? Kara? Hrist? Brynhilda? I want to go back to my body now.” Wren glared intently at the ring. “Come on now, I know how this works. Omar told me. You can’t just do whatever you want. You have to listen to me, like when I make the ring glow, you have to do it. I’m in control here.”

  The dead witches laughed louder.

  Wren tightened her hand into a fist and focused on the little golden ring between her knuckles. “I command you to take me back to my body! I command you! Right now!”

  The world fell out from under her and Wren flew up into the air, tumbling out of control into the cold white sky above the silent forest. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the clearing where Yaga’s cabin stood above the stream, and then everything went black.

  Wren sat up. She was sitting in the dark again, on the blank patch of cold, smooth earth beneath a pale circle of moon
light in a starless sky. “Gudrun? Kara?”

  The eight valas of Denveller stepped out of the darkness, ringing her in on every side.

  “You’re just a child,” Rangrid said. She was a bulbous creature of folds and mounds and humps, and she hobbled forward with her little fingers fidgeting together over her huge breasts. “You were nothing as an apprentice, and you’re even less now. You don’t deserve to wear the ring of Denveller. You don’t deserve to command us.”

  “Truly the great line of Denveller has failed,” Kara said. “But perhaps it can still be salvaged. Perhaps one of us should return to the world of the living in your place and—”

  “Enough!” Wren shouted. “All of you! Shut up! You’re all dead. Do you hear me? Dead! And I’m sick and tired of listening to your insults and your cackling. You’re dead, and you’ll do as I say!”

  “You think you can threaten us?” Gudrun hissed. “We are, as you say, dead. You can’t threaten the dead, little one.”

  “Can’t I? I wonder.” Wren lunged at her shriveled little mistress, spun the crone about, and wrapped her arm around the old woman’s throat.

  Gudrun gasped and wheezed as she clawed feebly at Wren’s arm. “Let me go!”

  “Why? I thought I couldn’t threaten you,” Wren said softly.

  “What is this?” Kara backed away with a look of horror on her face. “How can you do this? We’re ghosts, we’re invincible here.”

  “Remember the corpses in Vlachia?” Wren asked. “Omar said the ghosts were clinging to their bodies. Even though they knew they were dead, they still wanted to be human. Do you see, ladies? The human soul can’t become something else, something more than human. We’re human. We’re always human. We’re only human. Now and forever. Even here, in death, we’re still human. And you can still suffer, like any other human being. We don’t transcend. Humanity isn’t some step toward a higher state. Humanity is our lot in life. And in death.”

  She released Gudrun and the old woman hobbled away into the soft arms of Rangrid. Wren straightened up. “That’s my lesson for you. Something none of you knew. Something I learned for myself. Something that I don’t think even Omar understands.” She pushed her hair back from her face, tickling the edges of her tall fox ears. “So, now, I’ll ask you ladies again. Let me back into my body. Please.”