From the Earth to the Shadows

by Amanda Hocking

  The instant the tip pierced his skin, I felt it. A fiery heat shot through me, and a blinding light flashed out from inside of Abaddon. The force of the explosion of light and heat was so powerful that I went flying backward.

  I held my arm over my face, shielding it from the explosion, and then I waited to land. But when I opened my eyes, I was still falling—plummeting down over the edge of the building toward the skeletons waiting below.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  The good news was that the skeletons caught me. The bad news was that it was like landing on a trampoline made of broken bones.

  I expected them to tear me apart, but they were instantly moving me, passing me backward like I was body-surfing over the dead. I tried to fight them off, but they gripped me from every angle. I managed to get my right hand free long enough to safely tuck the spear into the lining of Asher’s jacket, and then I let them carry me away, since I couldn’t fight them.

  It was like floating on wild river rapids, with them hurriedly pulling me along. The skeletons must’ve been a hive mind, like ants, because they worked together so quickly and efficiently that they had dragged me all the way to Skarpåker Park in record time.

  From what I could see as they carried me, the camera crew was all gone, as were most humans. The crowd in the center of the park appeared to be entirely skeletons and immortals, though I couldn’t discern if the immortals had followed Ereshkigal from Kurnugia or if they were residents of the city.

  The skeletons lifted me up, pushing me onto the rocky outcroppings, and they tossed me onto them, like ocean waves tossing garbage onto the beach. I scrambled to get up, but then I saw her—the self-appointed queen of the underworld resistance—so I decided to stay back on my knees.

  Ereshkigal walked over to me, and I was taken aback by how imposing she was in real life. This was my first time meeting her, and she had an ethereal beauty that was almost painful to look at. Her dress was like a black mist forming around her, perfectly coiling to the parts worth accentuating, and her hands were clasped in front of her.

  With a knowing smile, she looked at me and said, “You are the one that has given me so much trouble.”

  “Right back at you,” I said, which actually made her smile deepen. “What do you want with me?”

  “Are you not the leader of the Valkyries?” she asked.

  “Leader?” I said with a laugh. “I’m not even technically a Valkyrie yet.”

  “Then why have you been leading the fight against me?” she asked, seeming surprisingly unruffled about having my position so wrong.

  “It’s a long story, but the short version is: because I saw what you were doing, and I couldn’t stand by and let you destroy the world.”

  “I don’t want to destroy the world,” she insisted. “I merely want to set it free!”

  “But the way you are going about it, you are destroying the world!” I shouted at her. “The underworld cannot be unleashed without dramatic disastrous consequences. Even if you weren’t plotting to kill us all or overturning millennia’s worth of doctrine and binding ecclesiastic law, where do you think you will live? There are nearly twenty-five billion beings living here right now. There are barely enough resources to go around, and you want to add the billions of beings from the underworld?”

  Her expression was impassive as she said, “Then so be it. Only the strong will survive.”

  “But you already had your turn!” I argued. “Let the rest of us get a chance at being alive.”

  “It is still my turn!” she snarled, and her face contorted with rage. “Do you not understand that? It never stopped being my turn. I am still alive, and I refuse to be locked away any longer.”

  “I’m not saying that your life was fair or that Kurnugia is the most ethical way to handle immortality,” I said carefully. “What I am saying is that the earth cannot hold us all, and if you insist on opening Kurnugia for everyone to escape, you will doom us all. The world will be destroyed, and you and Gugalanna and everyone and everything will be doomed along with it.”

  Still she stood unmoved by my pleas. “If that is the only way to be free, then so be it. I will not give up until all the Valkyries are dead and the seals to Kurnugia have been completely removed so that everyone can be free.”

  “There is no other way, then,” I said simply. “You and the earth cannot coexist.” The whole time we had been talking, I had been palming the spear inside my jacket, so it would be ready at a moment’s notice.

  She tilted her head then, and I struck. She tried to stop me, but it didn’t matter where I stuck the weapon as long as the tip pierced her skin. She howled and her eyes flashed black, and that was the last thing that I remembered.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  The air smelled of pine needles and earth, and the rain felt cold as it landed on my face. My back ached terribly, but it was the dull throbbing in my head that made it hard for me to open my eyes.

  When I finally managed to open them, I was staring up at a forest. Trees towering over me, their branches covered in thick needles, with only the smallest gaps through the canopy where I could see the overcast sky.

  Then someone stepped in front of me, blocking the dim light, and the rain falling on my face blurred my vision, so I couldn’t see who it was—only a shadow standing over me.

  I knew I should be afraid, but I felt strangely at peace and resigned to whatever happened next. Like a part deep inside me had always known that it would come to this, that this would be how it ended.

  The figure bent over, extending a hand toward me, but I made no move toward it.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said in a voice like faraway thunder. “Take my hand, Malin.”

  That’s when I realized that I recognized the voice. I knew him.

  I blinked hard, unable to make sense of the world, but when I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t in the forest. I was in Skarpåker Park, lying on a pile of bones that dug painfully into my back, and Odin was standing over me, holding out his hand.

  “I don’t bite,” Odin tried to assure me. He looked down at me with a warm smile, his one good eye shining brightly, while the left was withered shut.

  I took his hand, because I needed him to help me to my feet since the bones made for unsteady ground. The sky above us was still dark and angry, and the park was littered with thousands of broken skeletons and piles of ash. Both of Odin’s ravens were nearby, picking at the remains, but I couldn’t see any signs of Ereshkigal or Gugalanna.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Ereshkigal used her own blood—along with that of your friend Asher—to unseal Kurnugia, but it was only powerful enough to allow for her, her lover, and the most primitive form of death to make it through,” he explained. “She wanted to kill all the Valkyries, and the combined power of all your blood would be enough for her to break the seal for everyone.

  “But when you killed her—no, killed isn’t the right word. You annulled her existence.” He moved his hand vaguely, as if motioning to the ether. “It’s as if she never was, and her power to unbreak the seal was removed.”

  “What happened to Gugalanna?” I asked.

  “He is nothing more than a pile of ash,” Odin said, gesturing vaguely around to any number of piles of ash around us.

  “Why are you here? Why are you pretending to help me?” I asked, but my words came out sounding more exhausted than accusatory.

  “Who says that I’m pretending?” he countered.

  “I know that you were behind all of this,” I said. “The only reason any of this was possible was because you were putting it together. You gave Ereshkigal the means to escape, and you sent Velnias to set up my mother.”

  He laughed then, a warm sound that resonated through me. “I had far less to do with all of this than you are imagining. Yes, I gave information to Ereshkigal, to Velnias, to you, that put all of this in motion. But that was all.”

  “Then who is behind all of this?”

  “The same one who
has been behind every decision that everyone has ever made.” Odin smiled. “My wife, Frigg.”

  “Sloane was right,” I realized. “Frigg wrote out our entire destinies.”

  “Not entirely,” he corrected me. “She wrote everything until this moment.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “What does that mean?”

  “When you thought I was the one pulling the strings, getting everyone to do my bidding, were you not angry?” he asked pointedly.

  “Of course. I was furious. And I’m still pretty angry about what involvement you did have, to be honest.”

  “But when I said that Frigg has been controlling everything for centuries, you showed no anger?” Odin questioned. “Why were my small actions more upsetting to you than her constant ones?”

  “Because…” I paused, trying to understand it myself. “I trusted you. I don’t like the idea of anyone controlling me or conspiring against me, but Frigg is just a name to me. You were someone I helped, and I thought you were helping me.”

  “And now you think I have not been helping you?” he asked, looking down at me directly.

  “My mother is dead because of you,” I said, letting the venom into my voice for the first time since he’d woken me.

  “Your mother was alive because of me, too,” he shot back.

  “Am I supposed to thank you for that?” I asked with tears stinging my eyes. “Thank you for giving me an angry, severely damaged woman for a mother, who could never love me, and then taking her from me before I had to chance to…”

  “To what?” Odin pressed when I trailed off.

  “I was going to say until … I got her to love me. But … she was never going to love me, was she?”

  “No.” He shook his head sadly, and his voice was filled with a soft comfort. “It wasn’t in her design, the same way it’s not in yours to fly or mine to die. I am sorry that life hurts, and I know it’s of no consolation, but there can be no joy without suffering. I have tried too often to protect you all from far too much, and it never ends well. Humans crave chaos, even if it is only the illusion of it.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I looked out over the pile of bones. “It’s never boring here on earth, I’ll give you that.”

  “I created the Valkyries to protect humanity,” Odin said. “The immortals were too powerful, but the other gods dared not strip them of their immortality. It was a precedent they were terrified would take over until none of us were left, and the Vanir gods were no longer welcome. We have seen it happen in other worlds.

  “Myself, Frigg, and some of the other gods thought that predestination would be the key,” he went on. “We would be the ones keeping the balance, guaranteeing it never tilted in the favor of one side or the other. The Valkyries were merely an illusion of power granted to humans, both to help keep them safe and to put enough fear in the immortals to keep them in line.

  “But all too soon it became apparent that we had made a grave mistake.” He frowned. “It is impossible for life to flourish without free will. Frigg tried to allow room for creativity, for that inventive spark and curiosity that makes humans so special, but it is near-impossible to infuse when every major event in your lives has already been preordained.”

  He stared off wistfully before adding, “She tried to give you as much freedom as she could, in your thoughts and emotions, but when your actions and choices are limited—or eliminated entirely—there is no real freedom to be had.”

  “Where is Frigg?” I asked.

  “She yet sleeps, in Vanaheimr, where she has been sleeping for the past five thousand years. She’ll be awaking very soon, and I will go to her then. I hope to be able to bring our son with us.” He focused his gaze on me. “But that is up to you.”

  “Me? How is that up to me?” I asked dubiously.

  “Frigg only wrote the predestiny until the moment that Ereshkigal was killed,” he explained. “We both wanted to give the Valkyries enough time that humanity would have a chance to survive among the immortals. The time also allowed for the Vanir gods to grow complacent, forgetful, and distant from the earth, so they would care little about what happened to it.”

  “Are you saying that you’re going to kill us all?” I asked.

  He grinned broadly. “On the contrary. All of this work, all these centuries of planning, it was all done so that one day you could all be free. Not just the Valkyries, but the humans, the immortals, everything on this earth.”

  And that’s when it finally hit me. “The Drawing of the Nine was never about stopping Ereshkigal.”

  “No. It has always been our secret fail-safe, a back door into free will. The other gods would never allow it, and they would have been furious if they had known what we were doing. So we had to give the power to you,” he said. “And, fittingly, this choice cannot be made by me or Frigg or any of the immortals. It must be made by you.”

  “What choice?” I asked.

  “Come.” He held out his hand to me again. “We should return to your friends, and you can decide then.”

  EIGHTY-NINE

  Traveling with a Vanir god was much cooler and easier than any other form of travel. Odin pulled me into his arms, and within moments we’d been transported from the park to the roof of the Evig Riksdag.

  We appeared near the edge, off to the side of where everyone else stood gathered in the center. There were a few bones strewn about, which meant they’d had to fight off a few skeletons while I’d been gone, but they all seemed to be okay. Valeska was flying around—I wasn’t sure if she was taking in the carnage or if she was looking for me, or both.

  It was Oona who spotted me first, letting out a squeal of delight and rushing over to throw her arms around me. I had stowed the spear back in my waistband, so I tilted away from her hug as much she would allow.

  “I knew you weren’t dead,” she insisted, but the ferocity of her hug contradicted that. “You can’t die.”

  Asher was right behind her, and once she finally released me, he pulled me into a much more gentle embrace. “It wasn’t until you were gone that I realized that I never made you promise to come back to me.”

  “I thought you knew,” I told him honestly. “I’ll always come back.”

  Valeska returned to the roof just as everyone gathered around me and Odin, demanding to know what had happened. It took a few minutes for me to explain, with only a few contributions from Odin. Everyone still regarded him warily, particularly Valeska and Sloane, and their distrust did nothing to calm my nerves about the situation.

  “Why wasn’t I told of any of this?” Samael asked Odin, once I’d finished my explanation as best I could.

  “Because Frigg and I worked tirelessly to ensure that this would happen, and I have spent five thousand years away from her for this,” Odin said. “I could not risk undoing thousands of years’ worth of work and loneliness, for if word got to the other gods or the wrong immortal, all this would be for naught.”

  “We have to do it,” Valeska said, speaking up now. “Why would anyone turn down a chance to be free?”

  “It sounds too good to be true.” Sloane pursed her lips. “You keep saying ‘free will’ like it’s this tangible thing that can be handed to us. What does it mean? How would it work with immortals? What will become of the Valkyries and Eralim?”

  “Free will does come with a price,” Odin answered. “In order for this to work and be fair and for humanity to have a real chance, immortality will be a thing of the past.”

  “How?” Quinn asked. “All the immortals will die?”

  “No, no, no one will die, not from this,” he clarified. “All beings with supernatural powers—Valeska’s wings, Malin’s strength—and even the magic of this world, like Oona’s sorcery—all of that will remain. Only no one will live forever any longer. They will get one lifetime, and that’s it.

  “There will be no more Kurnugia or Zianna,” he said. “Only earth, and the time that you have on it.”

  “What is one lifetime?” T
eodora asked. “What that means for a dragon cannot be the same for a mouse.”

  “It will vary from being to being, but bodies will deteriorate and grow old in a way comparable to the beings of their kind,” Odin explained. “The average immortal will have about a hundred years, either from the day they are born or from today, when their immortality was removed.”

  “A hundred years,” Samael repeated softly. He was the only one among us who had immortality to give up.

  “What about you?” Quinn asked Odin. “What becomes of you and the rest of the Vanir gods?”

  “I cannot take away immortality from anyone in Vanaheimr, not because I’m unwilling but because I am unable,” he said. “But we have free will, and we are already so far removed from you, I don’t see it as being an obstacle.”

  “How long do we have to decide?” Sloane asked. “I mean, the idea is that we currently have free will, because we’re being offered a choice. What happens if we do nothing?”

  “If the ceremony is not performed by the time the sun sets, everything will revert to how it has always been,” Odin said. “I will return to Vanaheimr, where Frigg will awaken to continue writing your destiny, if that is what you wish. There will be a great mess to clean up here because of Ereshkigal, but beyond that, nothing will change.”

  “So it’s up to us?” Asher asked. “The nine of us get to decide if there can be free will for the entire planet?”

  Oona folded her arms over her chest. “It doesn’t seem right that we have to make such a drastic decision that will affect every living thing.”

  “How is it any different from how they—we—have already been living?” Valeska argued. “Well, except everything was decided by only two gods.”

  “Life has never been fair,” Teodora said.

  I looked to Samael, who had been mostly quiet as we talked.

  “Would you give up immortality?” I asked him. “If you got to choose all on your own, which choice would you make?”