Faint wisps, their hues faded enough to almost be colorless. Like strands of thread fluttering through the ether, tying everything together.
In wonder, I spun around, not caring how much noise I made, looking at these links that spread throughout the world. Everything was related, intertwined. Like a wonderful orchestra, playing in tandem, one instrument’s success contingent upon its mate entering at just the right time.
The armor clanged as I floated through the forest, spinning about with no other concerns. Some secret of life had revealed itself to me and whispered in my ear to come along for the ride.
And I would not ignore its call.
Until a fist rocketed from behind a thin tree, catching me in the jaw. My sword dropped to the ground and the helmet flew off. To my surprise, I tasted blood within my mouth. Before I could consider the implications of this, a rough hand jerked me up, and I found myself face-to-face with a familiar foe.
“Hello, print shop girl,” Albin hissed, his human face twisted into a wolf-like snarl. “It is wonderful to see you again.”
16
My first reaction was fear. I froze, like a deer caught in a hunter’s sights, unsure what to do next. Albin’s tight grip dug into my skin, threatening to break my arm. If it could still be broken.
That thought gave me the bravery to unleash a kick toward his shin.
It wasn’t strong, but there’s a lot to be said for the unexpected. His grip loosened, and I stumbled away, collapsing into the bone ash. Gray dust rose like an ominous fog. I scrambled backward, trying to locate my sword.
I found it—next to Albin, who stared at me with a maniacal sneer. It was then that another memory came to the surface: of how Kalos had distilled the dark essence from the corpse. By melting it down, piece-by-piece.
Or, at least, starting to. For Albin was largely intact—sans one hand, the stump covered in scar tissue indicating that it had been cauterized.
“Our fates are ever intertwined, print shop girl.” Albin picked up the bronze sword, testing its point against his skin. His pale features were covered in blood, although there was no evidence of the gunshot wounds. The skin around his neck appeared slightly off-color around the place where I’d jabbed the sword into his throat. “I have spent years waiting for this day.”
Years? I had seen him only a week before.
“You’re dead,” I said, backing away as he advanced.
“As were you, print shop girl.” He jabbed the sword, more a toying thrust than a kill stroke. I overreacted and slammed against a tree. It cracked underneath my weight, and I fell into the bone meal.
But I recovered quickly, and got to my feet, keeping a distance from him.
“Who let you down here?”
“I take what is mine.” His teeth flashed, vicious and cruel. It was then that I realized the blood wasn’t his. For a moment I worried that his initial ambush had inflicted some sort of mortal damage. But my jaw only felt bruised. No, the blood coating his body was from his slain enemies.
Can someone die when they’re already dead? I knew not what to call it when a denizen of the Underworld—or the Weald, and whatever other realms existed—met his final slumber.
All I knew, a cry rising in my breast, was that I did not want to yield to the darkness just yet.
The sword slashed through the air, aimed at my throat. The light colored bands swirling around it, however, tipped Albin’s hand before the attack launched. I tucked into a roll, hair brushing against the chalky ground, channeling instincts I did not understand to dodge the blade.
I heard the sword thwack into one of the trees. The branches themselves were sparse and sickly, but one thing worked in my favor: they were voluminous in the Weald, making it unfriendly territory for longer swords. I popped up, only feet away from the wolf.
Unsure what to do, I tried to land a feeble punch. With a snarl, Albin easily knocked me aside. I choked as I inhaled bone chips, the unburned edges scraping against my skin as I tumbled along the ground.
“I have come for my true lord,” Albin said. “The one they call the Demon King.”
“I don’t think he’s here.” I steadied myself on a tree, wiping blood from my otherwise dry lips. Albin glared at me, the two of us separated by ten feet and a half-dozen randomly spaced trees.
“Not here, stupid woman.” I was glad to know that, after surviving for more than a minute, I had been upgraded to “woman” in the werewolf’s feverish eyes. “Beyond the gate.”
He threw back his head, and I expected him to howl. But with no moon, he just laughed, a cackling, nasty sound at my expense.
“I don’t understand.”
“You know not what lies beyond the hound’s gate,” Albin said, finally containing himself. “You do not even know why you fight.”
“Because I have no choice.”
“Then you and I are alike in that regard,” Albin said. “For I will carry out my master’s will and reclaim Woden’s Spear from the half-demon wretch who still walks amongst the living.”
At least Kalos was still alive. “I can’t let you leave this place.”
“How much you have grown in eight years. So bold.”
Eight years? He must’ve been manic, his mind snapping from being whisked to the Underworld.
He strode forward with perfect confidence, not bothering to free the sword. I circled around him as he closed the angle, the unknown strands beckoning for me to follow them. Soon enough, Albin and I had almost swapped positions, me with my back to the sword—only feet away—and him staring at me, a curious look on his face.
“I do not understand.” His eyes expressed a supreme confusion. The confidence vanished. His head swiveled, assessing his own position. “It is impossible.”
The realm of bones laid still, the strands of faded color drifting away. A panic seized my gut when I realized I was again alone. It had led me here, this strange intuition, subtly harnessing the wolf’s own instinct to turn him around and grant me the upper hand.
But the machinations were as foreign to me as they were to him.
He snarled. “A sorceress, perhaps?”
“I don’t know any magic.” I blurted the words out before I could stop them. A hard gleam took root within his fearsome gaze.
“Beginner’s luck, then.” Albin charged, the sinews in his bare torso threatening to rip from his skin. I waited a split-second, a memory flashing before my eyes. The report of the flintlock pistol, the wolf still coming. His teeth latching into my leg, powerful and unyielding.
Fluttering in and out of consciousness, Kalos’ strained voice hovering above me. Right before the light went out, the half-demon uttering, “I’m sorry Ruby.” Like he had done all he could to keep me from death’s door, but found it beyond his power to do so.
I didn’t wait for the ethereal woven light to guide me. Backpedaling, I swung my arm toward where the sword was stuck in the tree. I found it, but a little too high. The sharp edge sliced through my palm, and I grimaced.
Readjusting my hand, I found the hilt. Albin’s bare feet churned, kicking up a storm of blackened bone meal as dark as his soul as he closed the gap.
How long had it been? A second, no more. Blood pulsated in my hand, dripping in rhythm with my beating heart.
Wrenching the blade from the tree with my limited strength, I waited for his teeth to sink into me once more. But instead, I felt the wood give and the sword rip free. I looked back to see Albin leaping through the air, hands outstretched like a wolf’s claws, aiming for my throat.
With an awkward motion indicative of my lack of practice, I jerked the blade upward with both hands, swinging it a wobbly half arc. It bit into his flesh, severing his head at the neck. I closed my eyes, bracing for impact, the entrails to rain down upon me.
But nothing came.
I opened one eye, worried that I hadn�
��t killed him at all. Albin’s body hung in mid-air, a look of terror and shock writ across his face. His form dissolved, like metal losing shape in a molten forge, withering into a blackened husk that broke apart like burnt paper on the wind.
The ashes scattered around me, brushing my cheeks as they fell.
I heard footsteps, and I swung around, brandishing the bloodied blade.
Galleron emerged from the trees, a sage expression on his face.
“You do not belong here, Rebecca.”
A fury coursed through my chest, and I rushed at him. He easily sidestepped my attack, the blade clattering into the bone chips as I lost my balance. His words sunk in as I struggled to rise.
Galleron offered me a hand, his expression the same. “The strands of aura and essence. You can see them, can you not?”
“I—how?”
“Because I see them as well.”
“And you don’t belong here?” I spat the words. It was difficult to pinpoint why, exactly, I now desired to stay. Or at least not to leave. Were they really the same thing? Perhaps killing the wolf once more had awoken a bloodlust that could only be sated through combat.
“There may only be one commander.” But his eyes told a different story. Unlike the lifeless, dull legion, this man felt. Saw. Experienced. The weight of the years trapped within the Weald, loyally discharging his endless duty, flooded through those eyes, wordlessly transmitting the truth to me.
He wished to spare me the same fate.
“I can be commander.”
That thin smile emerged from the shadows cast by the helmet. “I am sure you can, Rebecca. But this world is not yours to protect.”
“What are we?” I whispered, worried that the trees had ears.
“Realmfarers,” he said simply. “And those trapped in one place do not suffer a good fate.”
I wanted to ask him what fate that might be.
But the way his grin turned into a tortured grimace, I needn’t ask at all.
17
A Realmfarer. Perhaps the rarest of magical creatures. Not truly a creature, in any sense, since I possessed no incredible abilities. I could not drink blood or run at super speeds like a vampire. I did not possess preternaturally gifted senses of smell and hearing, nor the strength of a wolf. Unlike a sorceress or a witch—or many other creatures of essence—I was unable to cast spells.
What I had been granted was an intuition. An understanding of time, matter and the way consequences swirled together. Not quite a predictive power, but a sort of guide for what might be true and what was not.
That, and like an angel, I could pass through any of the nine worlds I wished without a guide or, you know, dying again. But from what Galleron told me, the only one worth a damn was Earth. The others had mostly fallen into disrepair following Ragnarok, like colonies abandoned by their homeland.
As one final bonus, my life would be long. But I was not immortal.
I asked him about the dead. Why I came back to life.
He just laughed, and had said that most didn’t. Nothingness was the fate of almost all creatures.
Maybe I should have considered myself lucky. But rocking back and forth on the bed, the day of the escape finally here after over nine weeks of waiting—weeks of drilling and patrolling, where I could feel the light extinguishing from my eyes—I remained unsure whether living was preferable to dying.
And yet, I had felt it while fighting Albin. That burn—a mixture of fear, adrenaline and wonder. Fighting against the unknown abyss, an eternity of nonexistence. A will to live, no matter the cost.
My mother would be furious. If I had been a lax churchgoer prior, I was dangerously close to veering into the realm of complete nonbelief. What of heaven, or some afterlife that awaited me? But then, after seeing all this, how could I believe anything else? If I died today, the Weald was not the future that awaited.
Footsteps echoed in the winding stairwell, and I straightened. Technically, I was not supposed to be up here. During that initial week, Galleron had mended my wounds and guided me during my disoriented state. But now, I lived in the tower barracks, sleeping with the rest of the soldiers.
I liked it better up here. Sleeping with the legion was like being surrounded by empty vessels. Machinery that looked like men, talked like it, even, but were a strange facsimile of the real thing.
Galleron emerged from the stairwell’s shadow. His boots tapped against the stone. Deliberately, I knew, from our experience out in the Weald. For me to realize he was still human. And perhaps for him as well.
Blood coated his knuckles. Most creatures turned into bone husks when they died in the Weald. I did not understand why; something to do with the properties of the Realm. An absolute death with no return. Those whose bodies survived were torched with flaming arrows.
Hence the forest’s sparseness. Nothing survived long down here that was not meant for this world.
“You’re hurt.”
“A little hiccup.” Galleron’s bloodied hands carried some sort of firearm.
He walked over, his face haggard and spent, and slumped onto the bed. It creaked, protesting under the added weight. I shifted over, so that he could place the gun down. It featured one barrel, vastly different than the double-barreled flintlock Kalos had once given me. This piece looked more modern and professional than any firearm I’d encountered. It was also far larger than the pistol.
“A shotgun,” he finally said, by way of explanation. Galleron grabbed what looked like a grip and pulled on it. I heard a scratchy ratchet. “That’s the slide.”
“I’ve never seen one before.”
“Just point and shoot,” he said, holding it up to his eye. I could see that a sight had been mounted on top. It looked like a cross was mounted in the center. For aiming, rather than prayer. “I got it for you.”
His eyes drifted toward the ceiling.
“You went out? But how?”
“No. Someone brought it to me.” The lines at the corner of his cheeks tightened. “They brought these, as well.”
His hand emerged, golden-rimmed shells rolling around his palm. I stared at them, the way they caught the Weald’s strange light. Then I realized that strands of essence were dancing around them. They mingled with some plain munition.
“What do they do?” I said in an awed voice.
“All beings are nothing but energy,” he offered, the enigma meaning nothing. His hand found mine, the shells spilling to the floor. “Do not load them unless I tell you.”
“Why?”
“Rebecca…”
“What?”
“You must promise to listen to my instructions.”
I looked deep within his eyes. “Okay.” The word was unsure, unsteady.
“Promise.”
There was a long silence where I could hear nothing but our breath. I’m unsure who started it, but soon we were kissing, fumbling in the scratchy sheets like there would be nothing beyond that hour. And, for all I knew, that was the truth.
An hour, a day, a month—when it was over, and I lay next to him, hearing his breaths, I said, “Why do you need me to promise?”
In a sad tone he said, “So there’s no hesitation.”
Alarm beat through my bare chest, and I said, “Why would I hesitate?”
When he didn’t answer after a long time, I still didn’t understand.
But I whispered, “I promise.”
And then Galleron stood up from the bed. “It’s time to get dressed.” A melancholy hung in the air. “It is time for you to go, Rebecca Callaway.”
I swore I heard his voice catch.
And then he was gone, down the stairs.
18
Cerberus was neither a Realmfarer nor a Seer, but the ancient dog possessed a sixth sense nonetheless. Either that or he was merely ornery, conditioned in
to constant suspicion by his ageless task.
I pushed open the door to the barracks and stepped into the open. One of the dog’s three heads immediately turned and snarled, snapping against its chains.
“Quiet,” I said.
The beast’s agitation only grew. Dusk in the Weald always maintained a sort of funereal silence; this outburst shattered the ominous calm irreversibly, like a mirror dropped to the ground. Nine weeks of planning, a careful path mapped out through the similar trees. Galleron drawing both legions away to a far corner of the Weald under the veil of a training mission.
And now this barking hound would ruin it all.
The closest head loomed over, the expression in its hate-filled eyes saying it all. One way or another, it knew that I was up to something. Its neck bulged, veins threatening to pop from the motley fur as Cerberus hurled himself against the chains.
The wooden gate groaned and shook, the ancient timbers holding the dog in place.
“I have no quarrel with you.”
The beast disagreed. It snapped its mighty jaws, spittle flinging down like foul-smelling rain. The chain was too short to reach me by the tower door. No doubt an intentional design, perhaps after some hapless centurions became a snack.
I closed my eyes and revisited the plan. Nothing had changed. Make it to where the realm’s fabric was weakest and simply disappear. I fumbled inside my pockets for the bullets, wondering what the essence-tinged ones did. Cerberus sat and howled, roaring in a doleful, rhythmic manner that seemed almost to carry a tune.
Then I heard a click. A giant key in a massive lock, turning with the force of a thousand gears. I looked up, backing away from the three-headed monster stomping near the massive gate. One iron collar fell away, that head twisting in demented glee at its newfound freedom.
Perhaps there were parts of the Weald I did not understand. Such as emergencies: when, if the beast hummed just the right frequencies, some invisible force would grant a temporary release.
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