Shadows of the Short Days

by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

  “And you?’ Hulda had asked, shaking with anger. “Were you born in the old world? Do you not belong to this world? What makes you any different from my baby girl?’

  Two adult men started to escort her firmly out, taking care not to use force to injure a woman holding a newborn, but still not giving way.

  People just watched them throw us out, Hulda always said. The hurt of the betrayal had not softened with the years. It had made her harder. The next week they came again, but this time she brought every single blendingur in town who wanted to attend. There were around ten of them, mostly kids or young people who lived in the halfway house old Fjóla ran. Fjóla and Hulda teamed up to tear into the priest, the deacon and the people who sat by while kids were denied basic decency.

  “These are your children,” they said. “It takes a village. And by shutting your doors to them you might as well leave them out in the freezing cold.”

  A quiet fell over them. A chilling reminder of the methods used by Hrímlanders in the past, both human and huldufólk. There was too little food on this barren island and oftentimes too many mouths to feed. Livestock fell sick and died, or were mutated horribly by the sorcerous land they fed upon, long winters and cold summers rendered crops useless. Infant mortality was more common back then, so why waste the resources in bringing up yet another child when there were too many working mouths to feed already? Many of whom were as likely to die from disease or hunger, anyway. Back then, blendingar had frequently not even been given the benefit of the doubt. And in reminding them of that unspoken, buried past, the two women conjured up a deep and hurtful shame, especially in the older members of the congregation, some of whom had lived through the last days of those long, dark times. Perhaps some had even carried out those bleak, cold sentences of death on crying infants. The lava fields were said to be riddled with the spirits of children dead from exposure – called útburðir in Hrímlandic. But such angry spirits would be the least of the dangers found lurking out there in the sorcerous, jagged terrain.

  The people joined Hulda and Fjóla in their protest. Let the children in, they said. Let them be baptised and hear the holy word. Let them know the history and downfall of their people. They had to know their past so it could not be repeated.

  It felt like the worst kind of winter storm, Garún’s mother had said, when the huldufólk reached out to each other back and forth, giving in to feedback loops upon feedback loops, trying to reach a consensus. Trying to understand and empathise.

  They could attend Mass, the reverend finally agreed when the overwhelming feeling of the congregation had settled, as long as they stood at the back. Blendingar were not to be seated.

  This, too, would change in time. But one step at a time was what Garún’s mother used to say. A phrase Garún started to loathe as she got older. She wanted to take leaps and bounds, not baby steps. She wanted to run, to soar.

  The church in Hamar was a tall rock at the centre of town, as great and imposing as the grandest cathedrals built by humanfolk. Or that’s what the huldufólk said. Garún had never seen such a building. She wondered what kind of buildings her father’s people had. What was there inside the towering city walls. The houses in the village were humble shacks made from driftwood and rusted corrugated iron, the buildings neatly placed between the undisturbed lava rocks. Foundations were laid by packing turf and rocks, in the traditional house style. There were no roads in Huldufjörður, only winding paths that connected the village in an intricate web. Some houses were painted, and people often pooled their money together and bought cheap paint imported from the city. They picked bright, vibrant colours: dandelion yellow, crimson, sky blues. Some huldufólk were better off than others, but you couldn’t really tell from their homes. The times of abundant riches, overflowing decorations and vanity had passed, but they still wanted their village to be beautiful. This world could never replace the one that they had lost, but they still wanted to make it theirs. To make it glamorous in a different manner. They were all stuck together, barely surviving by the fractured remains of their ruined world, far away from Reykjavík’s city walls, as close to the sorcerous energies of the seiður-infused lava fields as they could possibly be while still remaining safe.

  Garún quickly grew to despise going to Mass. Not only was it difficult to walk with her mother through town with people staring at her, she was also afraid that the children leering outside her house would catch up with them. And the Mass itself was more often than not a hateful sermon of the downfall of the huldufólk, their pride and hubris and lust for entertainment at the cost of the suffering of other, lesser races.

  Sometimes she saw the other children on the street, the blendingar hiding behind tubs of fish or stacks of pallets. They stared at her and she stared at them. These were Fjóla’s kids, the strays she’d taken in. Hulda told Garún that they had just been left on her doorstep through the years. Orphans from the city. Maybe if Fjóla hadn’t been there, they would have been carried out into the wilderness and left there. Garún couldn’t believe that someone would do that to an infant. It broke her heart every time to think about it.

  She often asked her mother about her father. Who he was. Why he never visited. If he was dead. If he knew she existed. Her mother didn’t respond. The only answer she got was being told to keep quiet and not to be insolent, and that was that. When she asked her grandmother, she was told not to reopen old wounds.

  On just one occasion had Garún managed to get something out of her mother, when she came home drunk one night. Garún was eleven. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to ask at that moment. She had reached out to Hulda, and found a profound sense of tenderness and sadness. Alcohol usually made her mother harder, not softer. The feeling was so new and overwhelming that Garún jumped back in surprise.

  “Liljurós,” her mother had responded in a slurred voice, perhaps too drunk to have noticed Garún reaching out to her. “He called himself Liljurós.”

  Then she went to bed and fell asleep.

  Garún kept the name deep inside her, like a fragile treasure. She didn’t even dare to whisper it out loud, even though she was by herself and no one could hear her. It was too delicate, too precious, to risk it.

  Later in life she would better know what feeling it was that her mother had felt that night, usually buried too deep within her for anyone to find a trace of it. It was grief.

  * * *

  Garún began trying to get out of attending church. At first she tried crying, but that didn’t work as her grandmother took to silencing her quickly with a slap. Worse would be coming if she kept on, Snædís had told her.

  “You are too old to cry and I’m not about to let you spoil all the hard work your mother has done on your behalf. Be thankful.”

  And that was the end of that.

  It was a general rule of Garún’s childhood that she grew up too fast – or was made to grow up too fast. They lived in a rickety shack in Huldufjörður. It was a small village and gossip spread fast. Garún’s mother was not about to let it be known that her daughter didn’t go to church, after all the trouble they had gone through. She had a responsibility, Hulda had said. To make things better for the ones that would follow. Snædís never went to church.

  “The old world is gone,” she would say every time Hulda invited her along with them. “I’m not about to spend my Seiðday grovelling by its ruins.”

  The world of the huldufólk had ended quickly and violently. There were many stories about how it had happened. Thaumaturgical wars, ecological catastrophes, divine punishment. How it happened wasn’t that important, only that it had happened. In the end, every story reached the same conclusion. They all blamed the arrogance and depraved urges of the huldufólk, the privileged, corrupt world they had made for themselves. Their world had been one based on limitless desire, beauty and greed. For centuries the huldufólk had used gateways into other worlds to lure people in and feed upon their memories. Their supernatural charisma, allegedly heightened
by the thaumaturgy of their own reality, coupled with their other-worldly display of riches, could lure in any kind of creature. The huldufólk made them into pawns in their cruel games. They stole away children, elders, teenagers, human and non-human alike. Supposedly their reach had encompassed countless realities. The feasts could last for months, where groups of extravagantly dressed ladies and lords would feed upon the succulent minds of their captives until nothing remained. Delicious morsels of fear and suffering, tender love and compassion – everything tasted exquisite to their refined palates. Revenge was practically impossible, no one could utilise the gateways except the huldufólk themselves. Their weapons and sorcery assured their absolute dominance. They were beautiful and cruel, and the other worlds were created only for their amusement.

  Until the foundations of their reality shook and shattered and the huldufólk fled in terror-stricken panic into any other dimension they could. Their fate elsewhere was unknown. Maybe there was still an empire in another dimension where the huldufólk ruled over their inferiors, as if nothing had happened, but if that was the case then no one could verify it. When the huldufólk fled into this world they were not met with mercy and were actively hunted down. Their centuries of cruelty, along with the folklore spun about them, gave the humans more than enough justification to pay them back in kind. In remote Hrímland, they had found a foothold, where the land was almost unpopulated and toxic from seiðmagn. Here they could try to endure. News of huldufólk abroad was rare; travellers of their own kind existed, but they were few and far between – unverified rumours brought on passing ships. They were scattered to the wind, still, after centuries.

  The apocalypse shut almost every single portal into the huldufólk’s dimension. There was no going back. But what remained were ruins like the church in Hamar and abnormal oddities like the Forgotten Downtown. When an entire reality collapses, others feel its aftershock. Cracks start to appear, which widen into gaps with time and erosion.

  To Garún, the church in Hamar was like a god lording it over the town, a protective vættur of the land that was only challenged by the city walls in the distance. After all, the huldufólk were Hrímlanders, and just like all Hrímlanders they had to live by a mountain. The church was their mountain. Huldufjörður’s people streamed into the rock on every Seiðday. The lava rock was tall and angular, jagged and coarse, almost like a stalagmite. To all appearances it seemed like a regular part of the volcanic landscape, barring its unusual size. But as you walked inside another world came into view.

  Glory was the word that came to her mind every time she entered. Divine glory. The ceiling was high, much higher than the rock’s height indicated. Tall windows reached up, many of them broken but some still intact, their stained glass covered in fine cracks. Broken statues lined the walls, one between every pair of windows. No matter what the weather was outside, golden light and a warm summer breeze always came through the windows. The stone pews were made of lustrous marble. They were carved from the same stone as the floor and the entire inside of the church. It was all one seamless marble stone, which looked as if it had been shaped with seiður or galdur, not carved. The stained glass and statues depicted events and creatures that had been forgotten hundreds of years ago. But it didn’t matter. They were all masks of the one god.

  The altarpiece itself depicted Adralíen-toll in all its glory. The one god was made from countless hands, each of them holding a mask of a vættur, a god, a demon, a monster. In the centre was a white, expressionless mask. Disconcerting light shone through its eyes. This mask was the only consistent one among the countless others, which were never the same any two Masses in a row. Sometimes it swapped out the mask in the centre during Mass, but no one ever saw it moving. At one moment the blank mask would be there, but then something realigned itself in the blink of an eye and Adralíen-toll would be holding up the mask of Drókumljár, the god of galdur and disease. In a moment the altarpiece could change again, so the hand would now be holding the mask of Týrrkt, the three-tongued betrayer. Neither the priest nor anyone else had the explanation or the knowledge of how the altarpiece worked. It was an ancient piece of art, one of the few intact remains of the world that had been.

  Garún usually spent her time at Mass gazing out of the window. She sat by herself at the back as soon as she was old enough. Her mother sat with Fjóla and the other children. With time they had been given the privilege of sitting down, not that she considered this to be anything resembling a kindness. It simply made them easier to ignore if they weren’t standing. Garún had seen through the priest’s façade. He too was just a mask, hiding his true face.

  The church was enormous and as a result, even when everyone in the village was in attendance, was only half full at best. The priest’s voice sounded clearly through the church, reverberating in the nearly empty chamber. The acoustics carried his voice so he always sounded as if he was standing right behind Garún. Every Mass the reverend talked about the sins of the huldufólk and their fall from grace, their arrogance and unnatural greed that caused Adralíen-toll’s heart to be filled with contempt, making him place the mask of the Destroyer Who Creates the Vortex upon his face, shaking the foundations of the world until they collapsed. He spoke of how they had to repent for the sins of their past, for the millennia of lust and cruelty, and only then could each and every one of them earn their place in the embrace of the one god, becoming a mask in his hand that the god might one day place upon his face and thus grant them eternal life. Everyone could hope. But it was a hope tainted with self-reproach.

  Garún learned to ignore the reverend’s preachings, let the vile hate disappear into the background so he was nothing more than the ocean roaring in the distance. So she spent her trips to church mostly doing what she did at home: looking out into a distant world and daydreaming.

  Behind the cracked glass she simultaneously saw the weathered hovels of Huldufjörður, and something else. If she let her mind wander she sometimes saw very clearly into the world that had been, which still let its sun shine into the church. Every time she saw a different place. A ruined city made from singing glass, slowly being taken over by an exotic nature. A boiling, black sky filled with colours she had never seen before, where living lightning bolted through. Vast forests of rotten trees and impossibly shaped mountains in the distance, split down the middle. Over it all, a brighter and redder sun, more cruel than the one she knew. Hungrier. But all these visions were like the glass in the window, broken and incomplete. Vanished splendour. Garún wanted nothing more than to shatter the window and jump through, flee into a broken world where she might be able to live her life in peace, unharassed. But she knew that if she did so she’d only land on the hard ground outside the rock, still in Hrímland, still in Huldufjörður. That world was gone and would never be revealed to them again.

  * * *

  “She has to go out,” Hulda had said while stirring the pots. “She’s a child, she should be playing outside. This isn’t healthy for her.”

  Garún was sitting at the top of the stairs, trying not to breathe. The entire house had creaked like an ancient mansion from the day that it was built and she was not about to alert her mother and her grandmother to her eavesdropping.

  “She might get hurt. They might do something to her.”

  Her grandmother’s voice was thick with stubbornness. And something else. A tone Garún was not used to hearing Snædís use. Worry.

  “Keeping her locked inside will do her even greater harm.” The sound of utensils, knives in the drawer. Hulda was likely about to cut the rye bread. “Things have changed – are changing. Even the reverend knows it and has stopped trying to fight it. I won’t bring my daughter up to be afraid because of who she is.”

  “What she is,” Snædís said.

  The gentle sounds of cooking stopped. The pot was bubbling.

  “She is not a thing. All right? I won’t have you talking like that, mamma. Not in my house.”

  A murmur of agreement.
The cooking resumed. The knife tapped the board as it cut through the tough brown bread. But it was sweet and delicious with lots of butter. Garún hoped her growling stomach wouldn’t alert them.

  “When I’m looking over her we abide by my rules,” Snædís said in a definitive tone.

  “No, Mamma. She is my daughter. She deserves a better world. And we’re making it for her. But I can’t—” A sound. Her mother swallowing a lump in her throat. “I can’t do it if you’re in our way as well. Not with everything else stacked against us. Against her.”

  Quiet.

  Snædís got up, started helping Hulda with the cooking. They started setting plates.

  “I know, elskan, I know.” Her voice was soft now. Gentle. “I’m not against you, I just … I don’t want to see her get hurt. There is so much hurt in the world, out there.”

  “I know, Mamma. But we will make it better for her. And she will make it better for others.”

  Garún scurried away from the top of the stairs as her mother walked out into the kitchen doorway and called out to her.

  “Garún! Dinner!’

  * * *

  She couldn’t remember how old she had been. Six? Eight? Too old to be going out properly for the first time by herself. Too old to play with other children for the first time, that’s all she recalled. The feeling of inadequacy and anxiety. Her heart was racing as Snædís called to her the next morning, after her mother had gone out to work at preparing the salt fish.

  “Garún, get down and dressed! You’re going out to play. No sense in keeping you inside in weather like this.”