“And am I next?” I said, thrusting my face over his completely shorn mountain of a chin. He stood just slightly shorter than myself.
He smiled and lowered his hood. A face like golden ice stared at me. His forehead was wide and his face long. His nose was as sharp as a glacial peak yet it sloped in such a way as to appear small against the powerful expanse of his appearance. His eyes were even icier—so light a blue that not even a clear bright sky could replicate their brilliance. His hair was golden and wavy, messily pushed to one side and of medium length. So, this was what an original Hyperborean looked like. Not pale white like northerners, nor brown like easterners. He was white-gold with sun-filled skin despite this frigid land. But the light in both our eyes were unmistakably of the same kind. The sun shone differently according to the land one lived in, but it was still the same sun, as long as the people were of the sort that looked up.
Still smiling, he said, “You are next. For not only do I heal, but I see. I am the seer of this land and I see that your ears listen to your hand. Be sure to be pure.” His eyes melted into a contemplative gloss as he latched his glare onto and into my eyes. “You will bring us a new people and a new Hyperborea. To do this, you will need to cross treacherous seas and savage lands. You will have to kill monsters and armies of men. Your friends will die, as will you, but your people will live on. Beware the gods, Rangabes! Beware even those you believe. I see three priests coming, not in the future but now. They will talk with you here and will never cease speaking as long as you exist.”
“You prophet, I merely want to fulfil my task so that like an arrow struck dead center, I may be retrieved not as a trophy but as a divine weapon to be used again and again. My deeds will allow for greater ones to be done in my name. Sharpen me and point me away! I long to strike the savage land in the heart,” I said as I searched the empty landscape in vain.
“Then speak with these priests but do not fall victim to their honeyed words. The priests are the sons of the god of the North Wind, Boreas.” Abaris placed his hand on my shoulder and leaned close. “The priests are called the Hyperboreades. They lorded over Hyperborea and the more they drained our people of light, the more this once perfect land frosted into nothingness. These wicked priests were not in submission to any king, they sucked this land dry of any power or good. Do not let priests be kings! Ever! Do not let the weak-willed rule! For if you do, your new land will suffer this same fate. Wyrd’s warble cannot set either path clearly, it truly is your fate to love, cultivate, and garden. Lord over it! But these priests remain, haunting the land they froze. Their father has long since passed into a forgotten gale, howling with a wind that carries only cold. They come now, look.” Abaris pointed over my shoulder and I turned.
Three figures ghosted out of the cold air. With their robes white as snow, only their pitched eyes stood out clearly, like fractal Tartaruses amongst the blank of the tundra. Their robes billowed with tendrils of snaking smoke that wafted about like a putrid breeze from a dying corpse on a summer day. Their stench carried a heat, a deathly plague fitting of a summer spent in a sickly Venice. They weren’t translucent like ghosts, but they weren't quite whole either. They floated in a gaseous manner and from the way their faces tightened and creased, I couldn’t help but imagine that this was what a dead body forced to live on would look like. This... deformation. They all held pale blue lanterns, one in each of their left hands, swinging and creaking like rusted hinges. Cold light flickered from the lanterns, the flame weak and impure. The priests held them out as if to keep away some unseen force.
The three of them drifted close to Abaris and I, floating before us like dead bodies in a polluted lake. They spoke with one voice and their mouths opened up like crypts, black as their eyes and with no teeth to be seen. If wind had fingers and it scratched them into bloody stumps against a locked door, that still wouldn’t capture the shrill whip of these screeching priests’ wails.
“Who are you to think yourself worthy of carrying the light of Hyperborea? Do you think your spirit can hold such fire without burning to ash? Do you?” They hissed, their wilting whispers rotting in the air.
“I’ve outshined the moon, its darkness unable to reflect myself back in blindness,” I said.
“But we possess the sun. You will be burned alive!”
Abaris stepped forward and pointed his finger at the ghostly priests. “Demons! Filth! Hyperboreades unworthy of carrying such a name! The sun set on you long ago, and you heralded its demise. This tundra, this deathscape is your doing. Rangabes is more Hyperborean than you three!” Abaris said, spitting into the snow.
“Look,” they said as the three of them split apart like an opening door, arms held open and beckoning the impossible vision that shimmered into being.
Green trees soared up from the icy ground and the lifeless hanging sun suddenly lit up to an orange-white, burning with extra warmth. Buildings of gold grew right up amongst the trees, the massive oaks dwarfed by the golden columns and white roofs that covered large swaths of land, the massive forest forming a perfect garden. A city now stood before us with shining domes glimmering there like stars hanging in dark green heavens. But this perfect city was without a sound. No birds chirped. No music played. No children sang.
Abaris shook his head and started to sing,
“Never the Muse is absent
from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.”
Abaris sighed and looked at me. “Pindar said it best. Yet what is this but a husk? Hyperborea was a land of love and life. This is a vision of despair and death. The priests have not the power to bring back the tropics here in this vision. We stand on what was once warm water and beach, teeming with blazing life.”
“Why show me this, you deceitful spirits? You who reigned so pathetically over this perfection. How could Apollo appoint such fiends?” I said.
As if heeding my call, the air in front of me sizzled and cracked in two as a ruby door burst in red flame. Out came Apollo followed by Hesiod, Cerberus and Lugh. So Lugh had lived, something I was glad to see—but even more, Hesiod my brother had returned. The two of us leapt into each other's arms.
“I’d worried you’d been lost; it’s been so long my friend! How I missed your companionship and our longwinded talks, brother,” I said, laughing while hugging him.
“I thought the same. The wall took you in and I feared I’d never see you again,” Hesiod said, still embracing me.
Cerberus, the loving pup, leaned his big heads down and nuzzled the two of us. I laughed and scratched behind his ears while Hesiod pet his snouts.
“And what of your armor? You are without clothes.” Hesiod stepped back and shook his head while looking at me and chuckling. “Your axe?”
I surprised myself as I acted on instinct, holding out my hand and letting a gold flame flicker in the center of my open palm. The flame burst and unfurled, and out of its grown blaze Solisinanis emerged from the vanishing fire. Hesiod stared at me with wide eyes. I held the warm hilt and said nothing. The thought of Apollo pulling his weapons from the air in bursts of similar light made me wonder: why stay listening to him in submission? I looked over at Apollo who watched me blankly.
Cerberus said to only Hesiod and I, “Beware Apollo. We do not trust him here at the end of this road. You are too much of an anomaly to him now.”
My face tightened but I knew he spoke the truth. I stepped away from the two of them and glanced at Apollo and Lugh who both nodded. With a wave of my hand, Solisinanis disappeared in a flash of light. It was truly a part of me now.
“Apollo, our god and king,” the Hyperboreades said, wisping over to him and bowing their heads.
“You come at last. Yet you let your home die. What is it that you want here, Apollo?” Abaris said, his body relaxed but his voice tense and forcefully
slow. “No road can lead here and no ship can reach these once pearled shores, yet you open your strange door of magic, chasing after the worthy path of sunlight that Rangabes burned into the heavens. Why? I’ve ridden your arrow around this globe for so long now, searching for a cure, and yet you ceased to return. I always return, hoping that somehow everything will be set right here once again. Was it you who told your priests to set things so wrong?” The disdain colored Abaris’s voice black; he had no sense of reverence for the god of his people, the god who had so starkly left them to freeze. Yet he still stood in a confident and easy posture—neither stiff nor slumped, but leaning royally as if they air held him up at his command.
“Your tongue was put in place by me, and so it might still be severed. Watch your speech or your eyes might follow.” Apollo glared at Abaris and turned to acknowledge his priests. “Arise, and tell me what you see in Rangabes.”
“Unworthy. Unworthy. Unworthy.”
“This vision? Hyperborea is no more,” Lugh said to the priests. Apollo tensed at the interruption, his mouth flickering into an almost frown.
“It is so, to see if he is worthy,” they said, turning to point their lanterns at me.
“What is it you would have me do?” I said, wanting to get away from everyone but Cerberus and Hesiod.
“Now is the time to be his steed,” Apollo said to Cerberus with a look up and a nod. “Rangabes, ride with Cerberus into the forest. Seek my temple that has been resurrected for your glory to be gained. There, you will find the final essence you need to truly begin.”
“And what of I?” Hesiod said, his talon balled into a fist of sharp shards. “I am not being separated from him again.”
Lugh looked at him with disgust. “You walk amongst gods and breathe again, not on your own accord, poet. You may have sung once of Apollo, but now you whine like a toothless pup. Have you forgotten why you live?”
“I’ll show you teeth,” Hesiod said with his chest glowing red and his talon unfurled.
“Go with him then,” Apollo said in a solemn voice as if he were pronouncing funeral rites.
“Be careful Hesiod,” Cerberus whispered.
“We go,” I said firmly.
Cerberus lowered his three heads and I climbed aboard. Hesiod stayed there staring down Lugh and Apollo like a madman before three of Cerberus’s serpents extended down and pulled him up by the waist to sit right behind myself. I was done with the scheming solar gods and those three priests. Abaris could do whatever it was that he’d come to do. Apollo’s mysterious, old servant couldn’t yet be trusted.
I held tufts of Cerberus’s black fur and leaned forward, and the great hound of Hades leapt ahead. His bounding sent us speeding straight through the trees. The forest and its golden buildings towered so high it felt as though we were shrinking. We rushed under the canopy of green and gold, and I expected at least some semblance of life, yet the emptiness of the air that lacked fragrance or sound exposed this glorious vision for the deceit it was.
Cerberus slowed to a walk as the trees bunched together and the undergrowth, thick and blooming with white flowers, reached up to his knees. There were many smaller trees scattered about, dwarfed next to the endlessly towering trunks belonging to the oaks of the forest.
“Why don’t you let us go on foot from here on out,” I said, patting and scratching right between Cerberus’s shoulder blades.
He might have been a mythical, deadly beast, but he was still a dog, and I might have imagined it, but his serpents were wagging about like tails while I pet him. He stopped his trot and lowered his body to the ground, and Hesiod and I both leapt off. Even lowered as we were, it was still quite the drop, and I almost fell as my foot got caught on a vine. Hesiod bumped into me but managed to stay upright as he shot me a wry grin. I pulled my foot free and shrugged.
“This forest, this dead lie, is throwing all my senses into the dust. Nothing. I smell nothing. I hear nothing. But there is something. I feel it. Something. Be ready, we are at our journey’s end,” Cerberus said, his heads looking in all directions.
“Which dome do we head to? Which building? They all appear similar, all garish in their gigantic uniformity. I doubt Hyperborea was this simple, this plain.” Hesiod walked to a flower and eyed it with suspicion. He then kicked at the trunk of a tree, checking to see if it was truly there. “It’s real, whatever that means here.”
“Those priests were warped and decrepit like ghouls, evil intention manifested by their physical existence. They ruled this once perfect land. Why? And why would Apollo create them, and let such monsters plague the city to death?” I said, massaging my forehead. I was so close to leaving behind death that only now was I beginning to realize how alive I felt.
To taste of sweet life again! How I longed for roasted lamb and a glass of wine beside a warm fire. How I longed for my bed. But the time for rest had long since gone to sleep. I was awake now. Cerberus abruptly turned his heads and tilted them at me, raising his ears, watching me as if I were a stranger. His lips pulled back and he growled. He shook his heads back in forth as if in battle with himself, and his snakes stood still, all of them pointed at me.
“Cerberus?” Hesiod said, inching closer to me as he eyed the suddenly rabid hound.
I ran to Cerberus and stroked the black fur on his chest. “I’m here, it’s me,” I said with my head pressed against him.
“Get away!” Cerberus screamed in my mind, tearing into my soul with an impossible anguish that I screamed aloud with.
“Rangabes!” Hesiod yelled as he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away.
Three of Cerberus’s mighty serpents snapped down at me, just missing my head. I stared at him in a stupor. There was only beastly wrath burning in his red eyes. Flames blew out from his nostrils and he roared as he bounded forward. I propelled myself out of the way with a side burst from my arms.
Hesiod leapt into the air and aimed straight for the serpents. Cerberus’s head stretched and snapped at Hesiod’s flying form, but his twisting, red glowing body was too fast and high to reach. I watched in horror as he dove down onto Cerberus’s back and raked his talon through the biting serpents. He ducked his head as he carved his way through, but his talon couldn’t cut deep enough to sever. Bursts of black blood showered him and he threw his arms up to ward off the snakes’ deadly bites.
But he was one and they were seven, and that seven swelled to ten as Cerberus turned his heads as far back as he could, biting from behind. Still I sat there helpless. What was I to do? Could I harm him after all this? Why had he turned? I’d thought he was destined to become a hound of light, if he hadn’t been already. He was as much a part of me as Solisinanis was now.
I winced as Hesiod stumbled, and two snakes wrapped around both his ankles, hoisting him upside down. The other serpents struck in a flurry of bites at his body. I clenched my fists and let my marks glow, but before I could send off a burst, Hesiod’s chest scorched red and shot out a burning, scarlet stream of light that flung him free and sent him hurtling at a tree. He thudded into it and tumbled to the ground, but the flowers mercifully padded his fall.
Cerberus turned his attention back to me and charged as he belched out a wall of flame. I crossed my arms and shielded myself in blue-red energy as the fire passed over me. Cerberus leapt with his claws swinging down, tearing through my field of light like it was paper. I fell to the ground, rolling out of the way of his giant paws.
Running away from his burning fire, I yelled, “You are a hound of light! Whatever this is, it is a lie, a nightmare! Do not fall asleep to who you truly are!”
Hesiod sprang to my side and said, “Listen to him! I once called you a glutton, an eater of raw flesh and an offspring of darkness. I wrote this down, but I was wrong!” He unleashed an aura of red from his chest, covering us in a blood-like light of protection.
Cerberus breathed his flames at our shield while scratching it with his claws and striking down with his serpents. I added my light to Hesiod’s
own, and our shield held as we poured out our strength. Cerberus backed away and eyed us, the evil in his eyes weakening as he shook his heads in frustration.
Hesiod called out to him from behind our light, “Cerberus, your parents Typhon and Echidna, two of the most powerful beings to grace this earth, they are your past but not the everything that is your present. From where did you come, hound of darkness? No... not darkness, for Hercules carried you into the light. Your blood has been redeemed. This curse cast over you, from this land and/or from Apollo’s blackened hand, it is only for those who sleep. Apollo may have awoken you at the gate, but his lingering song has become a lullaby. You chose to stay awake then. You can choose to awaken now.”
Cerberus shook his heads harder and he roared, yet his voice was silent in our minds.
I lowered my arms, letting the shield lessen in size and brightness as only Hesiod kept it aglow. I said, “You were pulled into the light, Cerberus. Will you stay or go back to the dark, closing your eyes to the power of pursued glory? It is either/or. The dark is only your shadow.”
“Purify me,” Cerberus groaned, his voice bouncing off the walls of our minds with a ferocity that staggered us both.
Hesiod and I combined our light again, this time forming a white orb of increasing light that hovered out in front of us. Cerberus howled, his bark an anguished roar and his voice a screaming cry within our minds. We pushed the ball of light straight at him and it rolled through the air growing until it completely swallowed him in its path. He howled from its midst and the light burst open, cracking like an egg. Cerberus stepped out as the orb was absorbed into his fur. He no longer was colored black, but now stood with a shining white coat of fur, just as I had seen him in the ancestral plane. Yet now he stood even more glorious than he had then. His serpents were gold and their eyes a bright white. He slowly walked to us, looking at us with a peaceful gratitude that words could never capture.
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