Dusk in Kalevia

by Emily Compton

  There were, if he was completely honest with himself, other motivations as well.

  The noise of the party swelled as someone opened the double doors to the balcony. “We’ve been looking for you!”

  Vesa turned. It was His Excellency the Kalevian ambassador--a ruddy, portly gentleman who had been nothing but kind to Vesa since his assignment here. Vesa would have suspected that his family heritage had something to do with it, except that Kamarov’s good nature seemed to extend to just about everyone.

  “Why are you hiding out here?” He joined Vesa at the railing, smelling strongly of the cup of Akvavit in his hand. His face glowed even more brightly than usual.

  “Just wanted some air. It’s a nice night.”

  “Warm for this time of year.” Kamarov took another swig of liquor.

  “I should probably get back in there, eh?”

  “Well, there’s someone I’d like you to meet--a member of the press corps. She’s been saying she wants to do an interview.”

  “With me? I just got here, so what could I possibly have to say?” Vesa laughed. A tray of gravlax canapés floated by and he selected one absentmindedly to pop into his mouth.

  “She’s spent time in Kalevia and she--oh, there she is.” Komarov waved, and Vesa turned to follow the direction of his greeting.

  A woman in a simple gray suit walked toward them, the long cut of her blazer and wide-legged pants serving to accentuate her considerable height. Her gait was masculine and purposeful, and before she waved back, Vesa already had begun to feel an inkling of recognition.

  “Vesa Uusitalo, the ambassador said, “This is Kaija Karhunen. Correspondent for The Helsinki Dispatch.”

  “It’s been a long time.” Kaija extended her hand. One side of her mouth was turned up in that little half-smile that Vesa still recalled with painful clarity.

  Vesa tried to say something, but the words would not come. He just accepted the handshake and nodded, staring into her face, marveling at how little it had changed.

  The ambassador cleared his throat. “You know each other?”

  Kaija’s voice was hoarse. “We’ve met.”

  **

  It was ten o’clock, and the sun hung low behind the pines. Zophiel stretched on the boards of the dock and listened to the water lapping at the pipes below him, enjoying the pleasant exhaustion of a long summer day.

  It was times like these that he felt most comfortable in his human body, his senses filled by the world around him. He closed his eyes and drank in the smell of the lake. If he had to choose one scent to represent his time on earth, this tang of freshwater muck and old leaves seemed fitting--it was not a sweet smell, but a good one.

  Had he ever known a time such as this? Toivo had long since faded from the memories of the people in Kalevia, but perhaps something of him remained, the last vestiges of the man they had dreamed up still lingering in Zophiel’s appearance. Zophiel had no idea how long this could go on; he knew that elsewhere, nations brooded, threatening each other with launch codes and blue jeans, but for now, he had obtained a precious equilibrium in this tiny cabin just over the Finnish border.

  When the long shadows of evening reached the dock and fell across Zophiel’s body, he shivered and sat up. The wind had already begun to develop an evening chill. He looked back toward the shore and up the mossy stone steps sunk into the bank, where the old summer cabin stood dark under the trees. As he watched, almost as if in reply, a light turned on in the window.

  He closed his eyes again, listened for the opening and closing of the door, the soft sound of feet descending the steps and venturing out onto the dock. Even before he felt the hand on his shoulder, Zophiel could feel Solas standing over him.

  “Supper,” said the Darkness, stooping to run fingers through Zophiel’s hair.

  For now, there was peace.

  Waters seek a quiet haven

  After running long in rivers;

  Fire subsides and sinks in slumber

  At the dawning of the morning

  Therefore I should end my singing,

  As my song is growing weary,

  For the pleasure of the evening,

  For the joy of morn arising.

  - The Kalevala

  End

  Short Story Continuation

  Dawn in Valle del Cauca

  Lucia could hear the coming of the dawn: the sounds of the forest gradually shifting from their nocturnal murmur. She had writhed for hours on top of her sleeping bag, the jungle air like a damp blanket over her body, smothering her as she chased sleep. Sweat pearled on her skin and plastered her fatigues against her legs. Miserable, she clawed at the jacket balled beneath her head, ran her hands over her bare belly, and shook the droplets from her fingertips. She felt ready to tear her clothes off, her skin off--anything to escape slow drowning in the night heat.

  For the first time since her return, Lucia Palomo wished to toss aside her new body and flee.

  To distract herself, Lucia ran over the orders again, but this only exacerbated her restlessness. Each time she imagined the raid, it played out differently--sequences of violence unfolding in her brain. How many members of her squad would die as they stormed the compound? She imagined a slaughter, old battlefield memories of those she couldn’t save, blood on the snow. She wasn’t worried for her own safety, for although El Cóndor armed his enforcers well, she knew that none among them had bullets that could harm her.

  None, save one. She wondered what he looked like--this mysterious lieutenant who stayed out of the limelight, whispering in the drug lord’s ear, the unseen force behind the growth of the most powerful cartel in these mountains. Tomorrow she would know. Today.

  “You or me,” Lucia mouthed at the darkness.

  She rolled over onto her side, deciding to make one more valiant attempt at sleep--and then froze, electricity shooting up her spine.

  There was something outside her tent.

  For a moment she thought she sensed an assassin, but she felt no malice, none of the telltale fury that surrounded humans on the prowl. The life hum of the jungle masked its approach, and she imagined claws wrapped in the velvet of silent paws, muscles spring-loaded beneath spotted fur. There was a terrible moment where she considered what it would feel like to be torn and mangled by an animal’s teeth.

  That was one physical experience Lucia had yet to live out, but she wasn’t keen to try it. She wondered if she could touch whatever it was--whether she could soothe it as she would a person. She could talk to her doves, but had never tried forming a link with a large animal before. She reached out, unable to see past the warm funk of the biomass seething in the jungle outside her tent’s thin nylon walls. She could dimly feel the bodies of the others--US Special Forces and Colombian--tossing in their shallow sleep, and the dumb, meandering spirits of countless small creatures.

  Her breath caught; cold plunged into her feverish chest. She sensed a hole in the jungle. The seething life was blocked out like a cloud across the sun, like a pocket of nothing, a gash in the fabric of the world.

  Like a shadow.

  Then the bastard couldn’t wait until morning, she thought. So like a criminal, sneaking up to kill her in her sleep. She shuddered, her fingers creeping toward the automatic rifle by her side.

  “Zophiel?”

  The name was whispered in a woman’s voice--a hesitant hiss in the dark. The familiar tone from an unfamiliar throat struck Lucia like vertigo.

  The last time she had heard that voice had been on the other side of death.

  **

  In the lengthening evenings, Zophiel and Solas settled in early against the cold. They kept the radio on as they cooked supper on the wood stove, listening to the thin, static-filled broadcasts--sometimes Finnish, sometimes Russian or even Sami. Occasionally they would pick up faint snatches of a Kalevian program--playing folk songs, propaganda, or their sanitized imitations of whatever popular music spun on the record players of young people across the border.


  The sound of the radio made the cabin seem brighter, somehow, and gave them something with which to fill the quiet nights. Around midnight, when the stations went off the air, Zophiel would lie with his ear pressed to Solas’ chest to feel the drowsy rumble of his voice--sometimes Finnish, sometimes Russian or even Sami, languages tangled in the strange liminality the two of them inhabited.

  The night it all came to an end, Zophiel had braved the chill and gone down to the dock alone to watch the northern lights. Winter had crept in, embodied in a thin crust of ice around the edges of the lake and frost on Zophiel’s breath. The aurora was curiously brilliant--perhaps the result of a solar flare or some other astronomical incident.

  Solas would know, he thought. Solas usually joined Zophiel on evenings like this, sharing various observations on the cosmos, finding things in the night sky that no matter how long Zophiel stared upward, he could never quite perceive. When Zophiel looked at the sky, all he saw was beauty; the stars spoke to Solas, and Solas alone.

  Zophiel’s thoughts were broken by a shout and the slamming of the cabin door. He looked up the bank to see Solas barreling down the steps in his undershirt. There was barely time to brace himself before Solas crashed into him, sweeping him into a hug so fierce he could barely breathe.

  The feeling could still startle him, even after the decades of living with his shadow--a moment of unsteadiness like falling into the sky. He struggled to extricate himself from Solas’ grasp, pawing at the bare skin of those arms where the cold had raised goose bumps, but Solas was already turning away, frantically pulling him toward land.

  “You’ve got to hear this.”

  Zophiel stumbled after him up the slick stones. “What? What’s going on?”

  Solas didn’t answer while he wrestled Zophiel inside, not even bothering to help him out of his coat. The radio was going crazy--a mob of voices screaming in incoherent jubilation--until the announcer began to speak once more.

  “The Bornholmer Straße is packed with crowds as people pour through the border, jamming the streets in celebration. Westerners greet their neighbors from the East with armfuls of flowers, and people everywhere are opening bottles, toasting each other like friends reunited. Young men and women from both sides are climbing atop the wall, dancing together until you can no longer tell the East from the West...” The newscaster’s voice was choked with emotion as he continued to describe the events unfolding around him.

  Zophiel turned in amazement to Solas, happiness shimmering in the air between them. “It finally happened?”

  “The beginning of the end.” Solas nodded.

  “I can’t believe... But it could have been lifetimes!” Zophiel didn’t specify whether the lifetimes in question were humans’ or theirs. “Lifetimes, Solas, before it came down.”

  “The world moves fast these days.”

  “Just...everything will change.”

  “Some things,” Solas said, grabbing a handful of Zophiel’s coat and reeling him in.

  “We should--”

  There was a sound.

  For a moment, Zophiel had no idea what had occurred--his mind unable to parse the jolt of pain in his side, the growing red spot on the white of Solas’ shirt. It was only when he saw the spiderweb hole in the glass of the kitchen window that he understood.

  Solas fell against him, gripping hard enough to hurt. The wound felt different to Zophiel this time, the pain more real and permanent, and he could feel it coursing through the both of them as he reached out to Solas with all his might, shining in the midst of their sudden fear.

  Here were all the years they had spent together, what they had overcome, enemies turned lovers in times of war. Don’t forget. Please, just...

  Solas’ legs gave out and he slumped to the floor, his weight dragging Zophiel down with him.

  “Find me,” Solas gasped in his ear, and then it was over.

  Through the haze of his own pain, Zophiel could feel the exact moment Solas flew, the body in his arms no longer home to the infinite dark--just a useless shell that had once held something more. Zophiel found himself shaking; pain, shock, a sudden blast of cold.

  The front door was open. Two black-clad figures stood in the night, their rifles trained on him.

  Zophiel pressed a hand against his side, his flesh throbbing around the same bullet that had severed Solas from his body. He forced himself to his knees.

  “Fucking finally,” the smaller of the two figures said as he stepped into the room. He glanced casually around while keeping his gun trained on Zophiel. “You two know how to hide.”

  As the first jagged flickers of shadow crept around the edges of the room, Zophiel clutched at the awful hope that Solas had survived, even as his mind screamed out at the invading spirit. But it was too cold and detached to be his partner--this was an unfamiliar Angel of Shadow, despair and fear wandering into his home on two legs.

  Zophiel finally managed to speak the word lodged in his throat. “Wh-why?”

  “Sometimes, we’ve got to make a little adjustment.” The man’s British accent was muffled by a scarf covering the lower half of his face. “Kalevia ended in a draw, but it still left something for you to hover near--a Not-War, a Half-Peace. But what you two were--are--isn’t useful anymore.”

  “Ja. Nothing personal.” The second, larger man in the doorway shifted uncomfortably, almost shy, a glimmer of light tamped down within him. Zophiel felt sick.

  “Who are you...?” Zophiel was weakening, the black smudges of their stealth gear swimming before his eyes.

  “Progress,” the Shadow said, and shot him.

  Freedom, racing over the surface of the world at the speed of light, flying. Humanity was distant; only an echo of countless minds. The thing called Zophiel was everywhere, nowhere--in words on a page, notes of a song. Zophiel became the roar of the jackhammer as it broke up a wall, the jingling of keys in a square, the clang of a jail gate as it opened to release a man into the African sun. Zophiel was in the stars, in the moon, in every symbol to which a person ascribed significance, and for a time, that was fine. It was freedom.

  Zophiel, however, found that the more time passed, the more difficult it became to recall what had come before. The memories were still there, like a dream of someone else’s life--hints of violence, suffering, love, and joy. Zophiel remembered running from that once, but no longer. Now, while threading a bright path through a tangle of doubt and fear that formed in a human’s soul, Zophiel struggled to regain that consummate balance, longing to blaze into a waiting stretch of darkness and flicker endlessly in twilight--agony and bliss, discord and peace. Zophiel wanted nothing more than to fall like a meteor to Earth, arms wide, ready to find the lost one...

  Then, in a bed in an apartment in Bogotá, Lucia Palomo opened her eyes.

  **

  “Zophiel!” The voice in the jungle came again. “Say something.”

  Lucia took a deep breath. “It’s me.”

  There was a scuffling sound at the front of the tent, and then a figure lifted the flap and tumbled in. Lucia scrambled against the new body in the small space, sliding her sleeping bag against the nylon floor. Lucia bunched herself into the corner and grabbed her flashlight.

  She clicked the switch, and a face emerged in the dark, centimeters away from her own. Lit from below by the harsh white bulb, the visage hovered like a terrible apparition, all sharp angles and ominous shadows, before abruptly disappearing behind a pair of hands.

  “My eyes! Warn me next time, will you?” Lucia’s visitor hunched over, her arms raised to ward off the beam.

  Lucia adjusted the flashlight, and the woman’s form coalesced as she straightened. She looked around, blinking.

  Lucia saw now that the woman was tall and dark-skinned, dressed in mud-spattered hiking clothes. She toyed with the fringe of the tattered red scarf slung around her chest, the only sign of tension marring her composure. As she leaned closer, her black hair spilling over her shoulders, Lucia had a clear view
of her eyes for the first time.

  In that gaze--dark, clear, and terribly, terribly old--Lucia saw everything and nothingness, memories of previous lives rising in her mind more clearly than ever before. She recalled looking into those same eyes while poised on the brink of both victory and defeat, seeing them fill with pain or desire. She flashed back to a particularly vivid memory of being handcuffed to a chair in the basement of a government building, and those eyes staring into her, into him, down to the very core. That moment in every incarnation when Zophiel finally met that look again, while not always pleasant, shook her across lifetimes.

  “Solas.”

  As soon as the name left Lucia’s lips, she fell into the woman’s arms and buried her face in a veil of soft hair that smelled of earth and campfire smoke. Despite the heat of the night, Solas’ sweat-slick arms were cool to the touch. Lucia pressed herself against her, willing her shadow’s body to draw the sweltering misery from her own.

  Cold hands, Lucia thought. I remember this.

  The darkness inside beckoned her, tangling shade throughout the rays in her chest. Although every instinct urged her to throw herself down into the void, Lucia forced herself to hold back, pulling off of Solas and regarding her at arm’s-length. The Angel of Shadow was smiling, her full lips curving up in a smirk that Lucia knew well.

  “Not bad,” Solas said, her eyes roaming across Lucia’s body. “So what’s your alias for this one?”

  “Lucia Palomo.”

  “Chaaya Tarendra. Pleased to meet you.” Chaaya pressed her palms together with a little nod and then reached out to grasp Lucia’s hand. “Again.”

  “Not funny.”

  “No, you’re right, it’s really not.” Chaaya sighed. She cleared her throat and spoke again, her Spanish infused with subtle Tamil vowels. “You weren’t gone as long this go-around.”

  “It was probably the first time I actually wanted to come back.”