by H. M. Long
Thunder rolled. Clouds gathered in the south and the unmistakable crackle of Esach’s fury echoed through the valley. I tasted a fresh, clear wind.
The wind rushed towards Aliastros, tossing his curls about his head. Gadr strode up to his shoulder. Esach appeared with a crack, her belly flat and her eyes filled with deadly intent. Aita came too, sweet and regal and smelling of lavender and pine.
Out across the water, the Miri converged; the remaining Gods of the New World, facing down the Gods of the Old.
I did not feel Eang when she came. She appeared next to Esach, healed – or at least mended enough to fight – with her bearded axes loose in hand.
My heart slammed into my throat. Eang. Eang had come? I stared at my former goddess, snared in a web of emotions so thick I could barely claw my way out. My instincts still screamed to run to her, to bow to her. I thought of myself begging for her forgiveness in a mountain meadow, trembling in the rain for fear of her vengeance.
Vengeance that today, I might finally meet.
I gripped my shield and pulled my magic in close – amber and free. The pressure driving me to my knees eased, but I did not reveal my advantage yet. I might not be a Miri myself, but a whisper of their power ran in my veins. Perhaps Eang would not find me so easy to punish.
A moment after my former goddess arrived, the winter wind came. It gusted around her and took on the form of a great, muscular man: Winter himself. Ogam’s father.
Out on the water, I saw Ogam throw out one hand. His ice-spear appeared, tall and glistening. To his left and right more gods assembled, Arpa gods I recognized from statues and figurines – all answering the summons of their God of Gods.
Without warning, Lathian released his hold on the Arpa soldiers. They surged to their feet and slaughtered half a dozen Algatt before the northerners realized what was happening.
The wind struck. It was Aliastros’s and Winter’s all at once, cold and strident and wild. It rushed up our bodies from foot to head and poured into our lungs, cleansing and freeing. I gasped, blinded by the swirl of my own fraying hair as the force that kept Nisien and the Algatt on their knees broke.
Nisien, still at my side, staggered to his feet shouting, “Run!”
I couldn’t remember how I found an axe in the chaos that ensued. I blocked and hacked and stumbled, coming back to back with an Algatt. If the man noticed I was Eangen, he gave no sign. We simply defended.
Nisien had been right beside me, but within seconds I lost sight of him. Block. Dodge. My Algatt companion died and I sprinted again, stumbling up the shoreline. An Arpa charged me. I raised a commandeered Algatt shield and hurled it, taking him full across the face.
Out across the water, the gods collided – wind and lightning raged while snow and thunder clashed, all of it obscured by Lathian’s smoke. I caught only glimpses – Gadr chasing down Ashaklon, the Archeress’s arrows flying, Esach driving a bolt of lightning into Styga’s chest. Styga exploded into a burst of starlight and shadow before regathering, sweeping themselves into the bands of black that encircled Lathian.
Ogam dropped down in front of me and drove his spear into my shoulder. I screamed so wildly that I thought my head might rupture. But the cold was worse. It spread through my body in a great rush, dulling all pain, freezing my lungs and threatening to crack my bones.
“I gave you the secret of the gods,” Ogam hissed, shoving his face into mine. His spear cut deeper, separating skin and muscle like a lever. My feet slipped and he slammed me down onto the ice.
The air was knocked from my body. For a heart-pounding, muffled instant, all I could do was lay there. Blood brimmed and overflowed from the wound beneath his spear, languid and dark with the cold. But neither he, nor I, missed that it glistened with amber.
The sight enraged him even more. “And what have you done? You squandered it. You turned against me!”
Words were not something I could muster – cold and shock left my mind blank and my lungs shuddering – but there was something far greater, far more powerful, beneath it.
Defiance. For his own selfishness, for his bitterness against his mother, he had handed Lathian the world. My world. My people. Yet he would remain, immortal and untouchable?
I began to amass the magic of the High Halls – the magic that he had led me to, the magic that had enabled his mother and those like her to masquerade as divine. Power that they, long before I, had stolen.
Ogam’s spear crackled with amber light, lancing up from my shoulder towards his hand, and shattered. Fine shards and dust like powdered glass burst left and right, separating the Son of Winter and me for a timeless, glistening instant.
He lurched back, stunned and unexpectedly weaponless. Then, as the dust fell, I forced my numb body to its feet.
Another spear materialized in Ogam’s hand, flashing in the smothered pastel hues of dawn. I shattered it with a flash of will and threw the full force of my rebellion into his chest. This was no subtle magic, nor was it the invisible burn of Eang’s Fire. This left my scarred hands in cords of rippling amber, fast as whips and thick as snakes. They slammed into Ogam’s chest and punctured his flesh, seizing his bones and jerking him down.
The Son of Winter crashed onto his knees. The ice beneath him groaned and began to fall away, separating into floes to either side of our own drifting island. Ogam’s eyes bulged, gawking and gasping with dull shock. Silver-scarlet blood welled, soaking the fine, punctured cloth of his kaftan in a dozen widening stains.
Then, from one rapid blink to the next, Eang was there. She stood behind Ogam, chest heaving with exertion, blood clinging to her disheveled black braids. Below a windblown tangle of hair, her gaze leveled with mine, hard and flinty as a raven’s. She raised one of her twin axes, her upper body turning and knotted muscles coiling beneath her black tunic.
I jerked my magic back into my veins in one frantic tug and retreated across the ice, regathering my strength for a defense. But the axe was not meant for me.
The weapon buried itself in Ogam’s back. I made a sound – a scream, a choke – as Eang spun her son around, hauled him off the ice and drove him under the surface of the lake.
Face down in the water, Ogam bucked and flailed. Bubbles surged around him like the Headwater’s springs, but Eang did not release him. She held her son under the surface of the White Lake until his protests slowly, slowly faded.
Far out across the water, the ice floats Ogam had made ruptured with resounding cracks, scattering those who battled atop them. But no one cried out for the fall of Ogam. No one rushed to his defense. Lathian himself, wrapped in black cloud, did not even falter in his progress across the lake.
The wind lessened and a spattering of snowflakes caught in Eang’s braids. Kneeling in the water, she released her son’s motionless body. The axe remained in his back, while the other had fallen on the ice close to me, dormant and forgotten.
Together, Eang and I watched Ogam drift; I with the stunned certainty that he would stand up again, and she with a numb, frigid kind of wistfulness.
“The lake of the God-Killer,” she who had been my goddess said, letting droplets of lake water fall from her fingers. The sky had grown darker now, but she did not seem to notice. Nor did she look to where humans cut one another down and Miri clashed in a chaos of wrath and elements. “The one place on earth where an immortal can die.”
The water. I understood its significance, even as my eyes filled with the sight of Eang and Ogam’s drifting body. The water of this lake had killed Eang’s Fire, and finally extinguished the immortal Son of Winter.
“Did he tell you, Hessa, how I left him to die when he was a child?” Eang rose as she spoke and, without looking at her son again, hinged her axe free from his back. Then she stepped back up on to the ice where I crouched, water dripping from her sodden clothes and Ogam’s silvered blood from her murderous axe. “I did it on the word of Fate, you see – the promise that my son, one day, would be my downfall. Perhaps if I’d tried harder to destroy him, perhaps
if I’d had the will to bring him here… But even I am not without feeling. Even I was not without hope.”
My eyes darted to her other axe, lying on the ice a pace away. The shoulder Ogam had pierced, my left, was nearly crippled. But my right was whole.
“This is what happens, Hessa, when we try to evade Fate.” Eang moved closer now. Amber flickered through my eyes and I sensed the Fire in her, liquid and brutal, harsh and building – the well from which all Eangi power had flowed. It was a wave which, in moments, would crash over me.
“And that?” She indicated Ogam’s corpse with her silvered blade. “That is the fate of traitors.”
I lunged for the fallen axe.
Eang screamed. As her Fire had been the source of ours, so her scream was the pattern after which our own were formed. It filled the mountain valley like a clap of melodic thunder, undulating and crackling and reverberating. It turned my stomach to water and burst through my head, howling in my ears.
But I did not collapse. My bones did not break, nor my senses yield to the force of her wrath. Instead I rose to my feet, Eang’s own axe in my good hand and amber power twining my body like a second skin.
There was an instant of quiet in the wake of her cry. As its last echoes drifted up the sides of the mountains I felt eyes upon us, felt even Lathian cock his head and cast an indifferent glance as a lone human woman faced down the Goddess of War. Somewhere nearby, Nisien stood at Estavius’s shoulder, and Esach pulled Gadr to his feet and the Archeress lowered her bow.
We mirrored one another, Eang and I – our postures, our axes and the black of our hair. She had shaped me in her image, after all. I was the product of her Fire and rage and hunger for vengeance, the last of the priesthood who had served her and anchored her for a hundred generations. The priesthood that she had used, and abandoned.
How many Eangi’s spirits surged through her veins, Vestiges depleted and forgotten? How many lives had she snuffed for her own, and how many Eangen had she left to perish while she hid from Rioux and the Archeress? How many promises had she broken?
There was nothing just in Eang, nothing righteous. And with that understanding in my veins, I screamed back.
It was less a scream than a roar, backed by a tide of smothering, quenching magic. It struck Eang like a hurricane wind and bent her double. Her heel slipped back and one hand clawed at the ice, catching herself before she could fall, but the constant heat of her Fire rippled and extinguished for one brief instant.
In that same moment, the water of the lake began to glow. I felt power there, power beyond mine or Eang’s or even Lathian’s. Power that grew and mounted and made Lathian himself screech in sudden, dreadful understanding.
Thvynder, Omaskat’s god, was rising.
Eang looked up at the same time as I did. Our eyes locked, and I attacked. I launched myself across the ice and drove into her, hooking her axe beneath mine and hurling it down. Eang howled, her Fire whipping out in renewed and savage force, but my blade had already swung again and found its mark. Her collarbone shattered, skin and bone and vein divided, and my magic poured into her blood.
The Goddess of War fell. I stepped back, blinded by both the spray of warm ichor and the light shafting out of the lake. The ice barely diffused it, leaving me sightless to everything except the ferocity of my own magic and the crumpling, ragged form of Eang.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the corner of my soul, I realized what I had done. But there was no rejoicing, no thrill of bloody vengeance. There was only serenity, and a stolid, sober vindication. Eang would never manipulate or threaten me, or my people, again.
A dog barked, and the light of the lake waned. Eang still lay spluttering on the ice as I stooped to pick up her own fallen axe and retreated, carefully cradling both weapons as my shoulder bled and my vision greyed.
The dog barked again. I turned my head and squinted as Ayo streaked down the shoreline in a limping run. She made for a man who looked like Omaskat, wore a blue tunic like Omaskat, but was wholly alive. And when I glimpsed his face, both of his eyes were gold.
Without a word, the man lifted one arm. The other, I saw, held an infant to his chest. Vistic.
Lathian screamed. Old Gods and New fell to their knees or scattered to the wind – submitting. Fleeing.
But there was no escape. A second pulse of light burst out of the center of the lake with the force of a breaking dam and a great cloud of shimmering steam filled the valley.
I saw it billow towards me, enveloping the gods as it came. Aita bowed and the wave passed her, ruffling her hair and skirts but leaving her unharmed. It rushed past Esach, Aliastros, and Gadr too, each falling to one knee or bowing as the light touched them.
Only when the light reached Lathian did it falter. For the barest second the Arpa’s God of Gods held against the blazing tide, braced, howling in fury and contempt. Then, with one last scream, he was extinguished.
By the time it reached Eang she was still, and Ogam’s body had long ceased to twitch. But Ashaklon, Rioux and the Archeress were not so fortunate. They vanished in a screaming swirl of smoke, along with what remained of Styga and a dozen others. One by one, the wave took them.
Then the wave struck me, and my world buckled into silence.
EPILOGUE
The last of the winter snow melts beneath my palms as I press them into Albor’s frigid earth. The white-crusted beams of the Hall of Smoke stand out against the sky, stark and devoid of life.
Beneath the snow, bones lie cold and silent. Below them, in the blood-saturated dirt, the souls of my people twist and ache and yearn. Eidr. Yske. Vist. I can sense them, but they are lost in the horde of restless spirits.
The rest of my traveling companions remain outside the walls. I am the only living thing in town save Omaskat’s dog, who noses around the ruins. At the traveler’s bidding, the animal has not left my side since the aftermath of the White Lake, guarding me over a long winter of negotiation with the Algatt and the journey south, after the last of the winter storms.
“Forgive me for not coming to you sooner…” I whisper to the earth.
Wind whisks through the empty homes, hollow and forlorn, and under my palms, the spirits of my people roil. Their distress fills my ears and it is all I can do not to flee. Sweat breaks out across my back and tears run down my cheeks. I am grateful now that I cannot pick out Eidr and Yske among them. I could not bear to hear the suffering in their voices.
“I release you now,” I say and begin to draw runes in the snow, laced with a steady, amber magic. “I release your reward and the Long Sleep. Thvynder has granted us our High Halls, and I will join you there when my days are at an end.”
One by one, the keens of the dead fade, and I sing them from the Waking World with a soft, mournful song. The tension in the earth eases beneath my hands but I continue to kneel, quelling an old, familiar sorrow. At last, I reach out and draw one more symbol in the snow. The rune for closure and finality.
A head butts my shoulder – my right, thankfully, as my left still aches in the cold from Ogam’s spear. I drop back into my heels as Ayo burrows her way under my arm and sits, lending me her warm, solid bulk. Comforting position thus assumed, she casts her gaze back out across the village, ears twitching.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur to the earth.
Once, Ogam accused me of insincerity. But now I know my weakness and my place in the world. I understand it. So I issue my apology to my people for their suffering, and for Eang, who failed them so thoroughly.
Thvynder, through Omaskat, has made peace with the New Gods, annihilated the Old and thrust the Arpa threat back beyond our borders. They have kept their word, and our High Halls await the arrival of these souls – and mine. Yet as I kneel here, memories of my old life overwhelm me. I marvel at how the pain can be so fresh, so stark even after nearly a year. I ache for Eidr’s arms, to bury my face beneath his beard and take in the scent of him. I long for Yske, for how we would lean against one another on cold win
ter nights, for the sound of her voice rising into the rafters of the Hall of Smoke.
Now Sixnit crouches before me, her face lined with compassion. As I squint through my tears, my eyes snag on the baby strapped across her chest. This is not Vistic – no, Sixnit’s growing son remains, for now, with Omaskat on the shores of the White Lake. This infant is entirely other, her eyes closed beneath a fan of snow-white lashes. Ogam’s lashes.
Nisien is not far behind Sixnit, one hand holding Cadic’s bridle as he scans the empty village.
The other woman takes my hands. “Come, Hessa. It’s time to go home.”
* * *
Another summer passes. Another autumn.
The fire burns low. I take a handful of sage from the bowl at my side and toss it into the flames, where it curls and blackens. Smoke lifts the heady scent over the assembled inhabitants of East Meade and on into the high, dark rafters.
The Eangen watch, their hush disturbed only by the crackle of the fire, the howl of winter wind and the brush of heavy clothing. They are a rugged lot, these survivors, and so many faces are missing. But the meeting hall of East Meade is still full, bolstered by Soulderni refugees. Lathian and his court may be gone, but their absence has sent the Arpa Empire into turmoil. Danger continues to roam beyond the north.
My eyes linger on one Soulderni man. The dark curls of his beard and the smooth planes of his cheekbones are familiar, beginning to fill the gap in my soul where Eangi sisters and brothers once were. He is my friend, he is my confidant, and his presence strengthens me.
Nisien meets my gaze and smiles.
The child sleeping in my lap does not stir as I lean around her, her tiny forehead tucked into my stomach. Sixnit, next to me, brushes at the little girl’s milky curls. Both anxiety and hope are written across my friend’s face, but undergirding it all is love.
“Headwaters of Life, Weaver of the Stars. Pillar of the Four, Eternal, Unfaltering.” My voice carries throughout East Meade’s Meeting Hall, like Svala’s once did through the Hall of Smoke, though now I pray to a different and true god. “We dedicate this child to you; a daughter wrought in the darkness of the Old World and born into the clarity of the New. Write her name upon your hands and prepare a place for her at your feet.”