by Lana Popovic
There was power down there, too. It ravened and reached, for anything beyond itself.
It was so hungry. And it saw me.
Then a grip I’d completely forgotten tightened like a manacle around the memory of my hands. And with a yank so sharp it left a trailing vacuum in my wake, I left both the dark and light behind.
I HAD MY body back. Or I had something, anyway, something that could feel.
Because everything was pain.
Maybe it was a tithe for how effortless that first step had been, Fjolar tugging me through the arch of my own wisteria into that golden soak. Maybe this agony was the toll, this sense that my core filaments had been unwound and then woven carelessly back together. My bones ached as if the marrow inside them had swelled by three sizes, and my skin felt peeled back to expose glistening nerves. Compared to everything else, my throat hurt in an almost minimal way, a raw, stripped ache that I would have dismissed as barely devastating if I’d been able to make myself stop screaming.
Fjolar’s voice boomed from somewhere above me, echoing in my chest. “Iris! Flower girl, what’s the matter with you?”
With a monstrous effort, I shoved my knuckles into my mouth, bit down on them until teeth met bone, and eked one eye open. Through the film of tears, I could see the wavering outlines of his face hovering above me. As he dipped closer, the tips of a stray lock of his hair brushed my cheek.
Just that glancing touch, the slight scratch of hair over inflamed skin, was far too much to take.
“Get away!” I shrieked. “Don’t touch me!”
Then I plummeted into something between sleep and unconsciousness, like a burned-out meteor thudding into soil.
IT WAS THE smell of the sand that woke me.
I opened my eyes slowly, the root of every eyelash a bright pinprick of pain. As soon as the sleep evaporated, my senses snarled to life. The cool breeze battered my exposed cheek, and where my face rested, I could feel the individual imprint of every grain.
And the smell of it . . . glass came from sand, and so I knew what it was made of, rocks and crushed shells and crumbled sea-cliff stone, swept together by wind and water. But I had never known sand to be so pungent, an acrid, mineral tang mingling with the salty kelp smell of fish and the sea.
Bile welled up in my throat, and I took shallow mouth-breaths until I felt like I could prop myself up without everything inside me rushing out. Slowly, I eased up to sitting. With every gritty blink, the blurred world around me slid into sharper focus.
By the time I’d fumbled my way onto my knees, my vision had reached the piercing clarity of a fever dream—enough to make out the nicks in the sun-bleached ribs that curved around me. They cradled me like a bone shelter from the lurid purple of the sky, so riddled with streaks of stars that I thought of it for the first time as a true celestial body. Something with its own circulatory system of glowing arteries and veins.
“Oh, what?” I rasped to myself, dragging a hand over my flaming face. “What the fuck?”
I gripped one of the ribs and shakily levered myself up. Once I was standing, the ribs came up to my thighs, and a knobbly column of vertebrae trailed many feet away from me, half buried, so long that at some point spine must have turned into tail.
Thousands of others jutted from the sand, an eroded graveyard rising from dunes frosted with mica. Shielding my eyes—that ultraviolet sky made it hard to tell what time it was, but still the light was glaringly bright—I turned in a shaky circle. Nothing but sandy crops of rock and desert spitting up chimera skeletons, flippers scattered beside bones that looked like they had once been finely articulated feet.
There was something so morbidly decadent and improbable about it, all these picked-clean pieces of lost life strewn over sparkling desert. The patterns of the remains were so precise that the gleam thrashed inside me, yearning to fractal it all. To whip this burial ground up into a hurricane of rib cage within rib cage, chained by links of interlocking tails and wreathed with gusts of speckled sand.
I could smell them too, I realized. I could smell all these bones, their petrified reek. Even after all the years it must have taken to scour them so clean, I would have sworn they still stank of blood and copper.
It brought everything flooding back: Mama on the floor of the café, wings of blood unfurling to either side, suspended in some chrysalis between death and life. Malina and me hunting Dunja through Montenegro, stripping back layers of lies. Following, hand over hand, the tangled ropes that tied us to the coven of our family, until we finally reached the central knot that was Mara.
Mara, our far-mother, who’d sold daughters to Death so she and hers would never have to die. Mara, who had let Fjolar whisk me away even as Dunja, Lina, and I broke the spell that bound us all.
That was where my logic stuttered. If the spell was truly broken, how was I even here? Because this was Fjolar’s kingdom; it had to be. The haven in which he whiled away the lifetimes of his performing brides.
As if I had summoned him with the thought, I could see his shadow lengthen beside mine. It fell bulbous and too long, at an angle that made no sense without a central light source in the sky to cast it.
“Flower girl.” Beneath the thin-skinned veneer of calm, I heard the simmer of excitement. He was thrilled—no, elated that I was here. “Are you better yet?”
I wheeled to face him, the entire world swimming giddy with the movement, as if I were the focal point of a colossal kaleidoscope. Fractals of skeleton and sand chased my vision, like the tracers I’d seen the one time I dropped acid with a group of Belgian tourists passing through Cattaro. So long ago, now, it felt like, and who knew how far away.
Lina had taken care of me that night, when I’d come crashing down from the high like a tightrope walker taken by a sudden gust. I swallowed a sob at the thought of my sister, her reedy violinist’s fingers cool and gentle on my sweaty temples as she sang me into calm. Soothing and sweet as a springtime breeze.
And just as far away, while I was stuck here with him.
“Am I ‘better yet’?” I spat at him, so flushed with fury I’d have lunged over and swung at him if just keeping my feet planted under me wasn’t demanding the use of every muscle. “Oh, yes, I’m all set now, thank you. Except that you took me, you stole me from my sister and brought me here where everything hurts and everything smells, it’s all too bright, and why is everything so much?”
“Because I thought you’d like it that way, flower,” he shot back, and I felt a moment of precarious give inside me at the familiar challenge in his eyes—somehow even bluer here than they had been in my world, bright and variegated like delphinium crossed with fennel flower, still edged in smudged black liner. Otherwise, he looked exactly like I remembered, like he’d belong best at a rave held in a mead hall. Platinum hair tucked behind the spirals of his gauged earrings and brushing broad shoulders, the nearly neon purple light flinging the Nordic bones of his face into stark relief. His lips the only point of softness.
“Isn’t too much of everything exactly what you claimed to want?” he demanded. “Though I admit I didn’t foresee the . . . side effects of bringing you here in such full blush.”
“Full blush?” I echoed, my voice still warbly with rage. The edges of my vision throbbed like strobe lights, but I found if I kept my gaze locked on his face, it wasn’t quite as maddening. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve never done it this way before. None of Mara’s daughters ever came here with me in the flesh. When their souls crossed over with me, their bodies always stayed behind. But you . . .” His eyes flared with jubilance, and this time he didn’t bother to feign restraint. “You’re all the way here. Body and soul, both right here with me. I’ve brought you with me fully.”
He paused and gave me an expectant look, one pale eyebrow lifted, as if waiting for me to discover that I was actually giddy with delight at how completely he had me trapped.
For the first time, I looked down at myself. I was still w
earing the plain white tank top, jeans, and too-big pink-and-black sneakers I’d found rummaging through Dunja’s sort-of-stolen van. Both the clothes and my bare arms were covered in a fine, gritty layer of silvery sand. I dusted off one forearm experimentally, and just like the rib that I’d used as a crutch, the sand felt mostly like what it was. Too keen and too gritty, but undeniably real.
But this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I remembered Dunja’s dance, the way she had painted for us the sweeping, dream-spun magic of this place, the beautiful vacuum of it—just a backdrop for her performance. Nothing here had been real for her; she hadn’t been able to touch, smell, taste, or hear anything but Death, in the form he’d taken to match the lover she’d most wanted.
He had been the focal point of her entire existence during the years she’d spent dancing for him.
It was nothing like that for me. For all that I wanted to slap that slick self-satisfaction off his face, looking at Fjolar felt nearly normal. Or as close as I could come to it, here where “natural” light looked like it’d been filtered through an amethyst prism.
“You sound pretty damn euphoric about that, Fjolar—Death—whatever I call you now,” I said bitterly, wrapping my arms tight around myself. “Like maybe I’m supposed to thank you for stealing me so thoroughly. But it feels like poison here, all wrong. I need to leave, right now. You need to take me back.”
He laced both hands behind his neck as layers of expression settled over his face, so many things at once that I didn’t want to see. Smugness, radiant pleasure, and underneath it all, a bedrock base of dense defiance.
“No.”
Pure despair cascaded over me. “Fjolar, please. Being here is going to kill me, I can feel it. I need to go home.”
And I need Lina, and Luka. Luka, whose see-you-soon kisses, right before I climbed up to Bobotov Kuk with my sister and my aunt, still felt warm on my cheeks and between my eyes.
“You aren’t understanding.” His face turned stony. “I never had to keep a lover here against her will—and why would I do it now, with you so sullen and ungrateful? I’m not saying that I won’t take you back.”
“Then . . . what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I can’t.”
Three
HE HAD IMAGINED HIS FREEDOM SO CLEARLY, IN CLOSE TO countless different ways.
That was something to be said for millennia of banishment, for being buried beneath years stacked upon years. It did give one lavish time to think. And if those thoughts grew blotty and formless, wisping through the mind like squid ink through water, what of it? There wasn’t a single soul anywhere nearby to hear them told.
He had never doubted it would give way eventually; nothing in this world was forever, at least nothing besides him. But how would it begin? With a hairline fracture, maybe, threading through the frozen pillar that formed his prison. Something that would spread like a slow web, fissures creeping through the column until it crackled before finally buckling beneath its own weight.
Or maybe it would dissipate in flakes, little shards shaved off by years of swirling currents. He could hear the relentless churn of the water against the ice, though he had never heard any sounds of life. The moat of magic that surrounded her column—the massive spear that kept him pinioned to the seafloor like a needle through a moth—warded it from anything living.
Or at least, after such long, lonely, and waterlogged silence, he thought that it must. He couldn’t know for certain; her magic had never been fathomable to him. If it had, he would have begun gnawing at it when she first flung him down here.
Crunching and licking and scraping at her ice until it couldn’t hope to hold him.
But he had never understood the shape and measure of her gleam. He had seen her shine with it, of course, but you could watch the sun until it scorched your eyes and still never know how its fire held dominion over the sky.
She had always been beyond his reckoning.
It was part of why he had loved her once he finally found her. Even when the hunger swelled beyond resistance or reason; even when the oily darkness in his veins rushed like a voracious tide. It was why he had been content to bask in her light, to rest his cheek on her collarbone even when the want spoke to him in its legion of whispers. You love her, and so? Tear her to pieces, pluck her apart, flay her until all that gleam comes pooling out. Drink your fill of it, and of her, and then you will have drunk her love. She is all for you, you lord and master of this realm.
Yours to break open, like everything else.
But he could not do it, could not bring himself to consume her. Could not douse the fire inside her, dull the luster of those clear eyes. Not when she slept curled under his chin next to their stone-ringed, flickering fire, and he could smell the warmed scalp beneath her hair.
He could not do it, not while she loved him back so well.
Except that it had been a lie. Every scent, every taste, every whisper of her skin against his skin, spun cleverly like wool to pull over his eyes. Until he was blind enough with trust to follow her to that clearing, wreathed with snowy pines beneath a star-choked winter sky.
He had known that she was something much more than simply beautiful, but he had not thought that she could possibly be so strong. Yet she had been strong enough to cast him here somehow, to sink him hissing into the water like the ember of a falling star.
On his long descent, he had seen the water’s menagerie of wonders. Sleek beasts with beak-like snouts, and mammoth ones that bugled mournful songs. Turtles that spared him only half a glance, and swarms of silver, speckled fish, scattering as he plunged through them with bubbles boiling in his wake.
Then her magic had hardened around him, filling up his eyes. All he saw was darkness and the faintest sprites of light—the tiny bits of sun that augured through her pillar, to needle him with the promise of a daylit world so many leagues above.
In all this time, he’d been so severely, savagely alone, with nothing to sustain him but the memory of her face. And with little else to dwell on, he had thought he would surely feel when it began. A rending or a cleaving, the birth of some fresh rift.
Yet when the pillar vanished, it went in sublime silence.
In one moment, it crushed him as it always had.
And in the next, it was simply gone.
Four
Iris
“HOW LONG DO YOU PLAN TO STAY DOWN THERE?”
“What do you care?” I mumbled into the bony knots of my knees. I’d found that curling up mollusk-tight soothed me a little. The smell of my own skin, the press of my arms where they locked around my legs, the fall of my hair around me like a protective veil—they all felt like a shield. Maybe it was because the materials that made me weren’t alien like everything else here.
“I said, what do you care?” I repeated flatly, when Fjolar didn’t answer. He was sitting near but not quite next to me, reeking of exasperation. “You just told me you had no intention of getting me out of here. And since it hurts to move, and looking around is almost worse, why should I do either?”
“That isn’t what I said,” he snapped. “I told you I didn’t know how to let you go, given that I’ve never had a flesh companion here with me before. I thought having all of you here would be spectacularly different, a new thing. I certainly didn’t know it would be like this,” he added petulantly. “Or I would have thought twice on bringing you, believe me.”
“Can you stop saying ‘flesh’ like that?” I snapped back. “It’s making me feel like you lugged me here like a sack of steaks.”
“Why are you being this way?” He sounded so baffled and galled that I huffed an incredulous laugh into my knees. “You liked me before. Truly liked me, past the magic that bound us. You wanted me, and badly. I felt it, tasted it on you. I know you’re not comfortable yet, but we’re here together. I set you free from all that held you back, gave you everything you said you wanted—and it’s still not to your taste?”
My head whippe
d up so fast a needle of pain zinged down my neck. “You’re Death, for fuck’s sake,” I spat at him, galvanic with fury. “You lied to me about everything, and then you ripped me away from everyone I actually love. Yes, I liked you, when I thought you were a bad-idea boy with beautiful ink and clever hands and a mother like mine. Of course I liked you; that’s why you came to me that way. But you’re not even really human, and here isn’t any realer than you are. So if you can’t take me back, what difference does it make if I never move again?”
I heard him draw a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Let’s molder away here, then. If you want to sulk yourself to the bone under a sky that never changes, that’s exactly what will happen. The many pieces of this world—they’re not like yours. They don’t abide by planetary rhythms, day or night, the shifting of seasons. They’re only and always exactly as they are. Like living paintings.”
I chanced a peek. The sky above hadn’t changed a glimmer, from what I could tell. Its light still pounded over us in that same incandescent violet, and the Van Gogh whorls of supernovae and huge, bright stars twinkled as aggressively as before. They were fixed points, speared to the sky, as incapable of momentum as everything else here.
Still, they were outrageously beautiful, even eerier than the skeletal menagerie clawing through the sand around us. But as exuberant as this place looked, I could see how such a solitude of bones and stars could get kind of tiresome.
“They may be static,” he continued, “but they’re also wonders, stitched together in a way your world could never accommodate. There’s so much to see here, if you’d bother to look. So much beauty for you to bloom for me. I molded it for you and you alone, willed it into being in the time it took for you to cross over here. I made it with you, like I’ve done for every one of Mara’s daughters who’s come before.”
I squinted at him. “What do you mean, you made it with me?”
