by T. A. Pratt
She’d remembered all of those events before, but the existence of Daniel had been neatly edited out of all of them. Now he was back, a core figure of her formative years. Gods. How badly had she screwed herself up, stunted herself emotionally, by magically forgetting the one time she’d actually really truly been in love?
But then she remembered Daniel’s return, years after his disappearance, driven mad by seven years spent trapped on the bottom of the sea, subsisting by draining the life force of creatures down there with him. She recalled her joy at his return, and how it had transformed into horror when he insisted he had to bring their dead mentor back to life, and tried to drain her life force when she attempted to stop him. She’d been forced to kill Daniel to save herself. She shivered, all over, and not just because the stone beneath her was cold. She took in a deep, shuddering breath, and gasped, and sucked in another, and realized she was sobbing.
Yes. She could see why she’d cut Daniel out of her mind. How could you go on with grief like this?
“I can see you’re going through some stuff,” the dragon said. “I hate to interrupt, but I sort of had this idea that I was going to reveal my identity right about now –”
Marla sat up, wiping her tears away, marshaling years of iron-willed self-control and pushing her feelings down. “I know who you are, Elsie. It’s not like your voice is any different.”
Elsie Jarrow was a legendary figure in the magical world, the most powerful chaos witch in history, so potent that just being in her presence tended to give people cancer, as random mutations cascaded through their cells. Elsie had led a group of sorcerers on a mission to assassinate Marla a while back, and Marla had defeated her. Not killed her—killing Elsie Jarrow had been beyond her abilities back then—but she’d cast Elsie’s mind out of her body and dissolved the witch’s essence into the sea, spreading the particles of her being far and wide, with the hope that she’d lose all intellectual coherence in the process.
Apparently it hadn’t worked, or anyway, not permanently. But Marla had more resources now.
“Do you like my new body?” Elsie said. She stretched her vast neck and took a bite out of one of the dangling roots, chewing it and swallowing.
“You haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic. Wasn’t there a dragon in Norse mythology that gnawed on the roots of the great world tree?”
“Very good! The dragon Nidhogg. Well, its name was a bit different in Old Norse, but that’s as good a transliteration as any. That’s what I’m doing down here, Marla: gnawing at the roots of the world. Have you figured out where we are yet?”
Marla looked around carefully. She licked her fingertip and held it up to the wind. She knelt and thumped the stone with her first. She pressed her ear against the cold stone. She picked up a loose stone and tossed it off the ledge, where it fell down into the cavern that Elsie’s draconic body more-or-less filled, and nodded to herself when she heard it hit ottom.
“Looks like we’re in some kind of big stupid cave, Elsie,” she said.
Elsie laughed, and the cavern trembled. “You don’t even smell afraid. How is that possible?”
Marla shrugged. “Last time I faced you, I was still mortal. I’ve had an upgrade since then. I can’t die anymore, which makes me a lot less inclined to worry. I’m immortal, by marriage.”
“Oh, really? If I eat you, digest you, and turn you into dragon shit, you won’t be dead?”
“I doubt I’d enjoy the experience, but no—I’d be whole and healthy again pretty soon. There’s a good chance I’d come back to life inside your stomach, actually, and you know what I’d do then?” Marla grinned up into a face as broad as a football stadium. “I’d kick my way out. So, no, you don’t scare me. What do you want?”
Elsie rested her chin on the ledge again and gave a happy sigh that felt like a gale-force wind to Marla. At least it was warm. “You know, I’ve missed you, Marla. I always liked talking to you.”
“You tried to kill me.”
The dragon rolled her eyes. “Oh, well, that was just, you know. A thing. Besides, didn’t we go so deep into being enemies that we practically came out the other side as friends?”
Marla frowned. “I must have missed that particular transition.”
Elsie ignored her. “And now that you’re a god, we can basically converse as equals!”
Marla snorted. “Good to know your opinion of yourself hasn’t suffered. I defeated you just fine when I was your inferior, you know.”
Another warm sigh. “That’s not really something to be proud of. A prion, which is a thing that isn’t even alive, can get into a person’s brain and reproduce itself until the gray matter looks like a sponge, reducing the greatest mind in the multiverse to lumpy porridge. The inferior can often defeat the superior. That’s what makes life so deliciously unpredictable.” Elsie flickered out her tongue, and Marla leapt aside to avoid being struck by the forked muscle, which was as a big as an ocean pier. “Normally, Marla, I enjoy the confusion of my enemies and my friends and also strangers, but since you seem to be constitutionally immune to suffering uncertainty, I’m going to tell you a few things. First of all: we aren’t on Earth.”
Marla nodded. “The presence of the giant tree roots sort of tipped me off. This is one of those mythic sorts of things, I figure.”
“You’re righter than you know. Where we are, Marla, is in the land of the dead. You know, your home away from home?”
A little trickle of worry flowed down Marla’s spine. She’d been to the underworld as a mortal, more than once, but she wasn’t supposed to do that anymore. She spent half her life in the underworld—but when she was here, she wasn’t just Marla Mason. She was the Bride of Death, co-regent of the land of the dead, and her conscious mortal mind was dormant or expanded or incorporated into her god-self, which was vaster, more merciless, and even bitchier than Marla herself at her worst. She definitely wasn’t feeling particularly god-like right now. When she was the Bride, she knew, the travails and torments of individual humans didn’t matter to her, any more than one broken stalk of wheat would matter to a farmer striding into a field with a scythe. The Bride certainly wouldn’t cry about Daniel, or anyone else.
“You brought me to Hell?” Marla said.
“Oh, sweetie. You were already here. This isn’t your month of mortality. You’re only partway through your month of being divine. Death and his Bride must have noticed me down here at the bottom of the sea of chaos, eating up the souls of the dead for sustenance, building my own little kingdom. You—the Bride—came down to investigate, and I tricked her—tricking people is one of my favorite things—into giving up her divine power before she could face me.”
Marla made a face. “The descent of Inanna trick.”
“You’re repeating yourself, Marla. But, yes. When you strip the goddess away from the Bride of Death, what’s left... is you.”
Marla thought about that for a moment. “Death is going to notice, Elsie. He’s awfully fond of me, in both my forms. And since you’re a soul in his domain, under his control –”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not dead. I came to this place alive, Marla. I was just a million loose particles of incoherence spread throughout the sea, driving the occasional squid insane just in passing, but then a little bit of me collected around a... vent, sort of. A hole. A portal. There was magic, there, and something in me responded to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.”
Marla nodded. There were a few places where you could reach the underworld from the world above—the heart of the odd volcano, the deepest chasm of the occasional sea. There was a long tradition of giving humans a chance to enter the underworld and win back their loved ones, but Death said there was no reason to make it too easy.
“Bits of me collected there,” Elsie said, “until enough of me came together that I could think again, and then, because I’m a curious sort, I went exploring, and I found this place. The land of the dead, billions of sentient souls, all in their o
wn little bubbles of existence, creating their own afterlives.”
“So you’re alive. Do you think that helps you?” Marla shook her head. “This is Death’s domain. He can boot you out. He can kill you for real. You’d better clear out, Elsie.”
“Do you realize what the underworld is made of, Marla? It’s made of chaos. The formless nothing of pure potential. The basic state from which all order arises. The dividing line between order and disorder, and the shift between the two, that’s where I live! The first thing I did when I came down here was turn myself into a dragon, just to see if I could. That’s not all I can do. I can be a god here. I can create anything I want, and unlike those poor dumb dead souls up there, I can do it consciously.”
Marla nodded. “Okay. So... do that, then. I think we have enough chaos to go around. You can be the big bad monster lurking at the bottom of the primordial sea. Create your own perfect paradise. I don’t mind. Death might get territorial about it, but I’ll talk him down. How about it? We’ll be benevolently negligent landlords.”
Another sigh, this one like a summer breeze. “You know, I tried that. I made a mansion on the moon and filled it with harem boys and girls and others. I conjured armies of monsters clashing on fields of flame. I made skyscrapers fall into each other like dominos. I bred contagious lunacies. But none of it satisfied me, because there’s one way the dead people in this place have it better than me: they think their worlds are real. But, me, I know better. I know I made it all up. It’s impossible for me to be surprised.”
“It’s a pretty sweet situation, though, still. Lots of people would love to live in a fantasy world of their own creation.”
“I am not most people, Marla. This play-pretend world simply isn’t as good as real life. It’s like punching a pillow instead of a face. It’s like eating carob. I need real people to mess around with.”
“Okay,” Marla said. “So, what, you want me to show you the door? I can probably do that, and get you back to the world above.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a body to go back to. You know that. Out there in the world, I grew too powerful, became too much the embodiment of chaos, and even if I stole someone else’s body, it would just rot around me. Besides, the inside of other people’s heads always smell terrible.”
“I’m at a loss, then, Elsie. What’s your plan here? I know you like having plans, the more elaborate the better, because that way you can gain power when they inevitably go wrong. For you, every lose-lose situation is a win-win.”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought, Marla, and to be honest, it was your example that gave me the idea. I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve transcended what it conventionally means to be ‘human.’ There are people who’ve called me a demi-god, even—an avatar of disorder. But since I don’t believe in doing things halfway... I’ve decided I’d like to become a god. For real. For really real.”
“Huh. How do you intend to go about doing that? I only managed it by marriage, and sorry, Death’s not polyamorous.”
“I thought maybe if I ate some souls, that would help, so I’ve been doing that—snacking on the immortal sparks of any afterlife-bubble that drifts too close to me. They were delicious, very refreshing, and frankly some of them make pretty decent hallucinogenic drugs, but if eating them has made me more like a god, I haven’t noticed. Still, the devouring served a dual purpose: to get the attention of a god.”
“Ah. So the plan is, eat me, then?”
“The plan was to strip you of your divinity and cloak myself in that raiment instead. Except most of the things you stripped off just returned to nothingness when I touched them. The only things that stayed real were some broken bits of stone, and this ring.” A huge claw rose up, and there was her wedding band, pinched between two enormous claws that narrowed to the sharpness of needles. “I tried putting it on, but—nothing.”
“Well, sure. The ring’s an artifact, but it’s not like whatever wears the ring is married to Death. That would be a really stupid way to arrange things. Can I have it back?”
Elsie shrugged—Marla could now cross “see a dragon shrug” off her life list—and flicked the ring through the air. Marla snatched it as it fell. She’d had some vague hope that it would flood her with divine power, but no dice, not even when she put it on her finger. Oh well. It had never given her any godlike powers when she wore it in the mortal world, either. She felt good having it back, though.
“I think there is power in some of these objects,” Elsie said, “but the power is specific to you. I can’t use it. It’s like a dress that won’t fit. Or maybe like an transplanted organ I rejected.”
“So, not to keep harping on this, but—what now?”
“Oh, I figure I’ll keep you here until Death starts wondering where you went, and then I’ll hold you for ransom and make him give me his divine power –”
Marla bent down, picked up a stone, and flung it as hard as she could right at the center of one of Elsie’s immense eyes. The dragon roared and reared back, but by then Marla was already running for the door. If the door didn’t open, she’d have a problem, but it swung open under her hand. Typical. A rational person would have made the cave inescapable, but Elsie wasn’t a fan of locked rooms. She liked leaving the possibility of things going wrong.
Marla stepped out into a marble foyer, like the lobby of a fancy hotel, and an old woman behind a coat-check counter looked at her in alarm. Marla ignored her and started running, and her foot struck something as she ran—a shard of bluish stone about the size of her hand. There were half a dozen other shards of the same stuff. A snatch of a poem by Yeats fluttered through her mind—something about lapis lazuli—and she remembered that Inanna had carried a lapis lazuli measuring rod with her when she descended into the underworld.
Marla bent and picked up the hunk of stone, and felt a jolt, like a flicker of lightning passing through her body, and suddenly her senses expanded, and she could feel the vastness just beyond the opening on the far side of the room. The stone melted away, dissolving into her hand, but the power it imparted remained.
Ha. She’d snatched up a piece of her surrendered divinity. Not enough to turn her back into the Bride, to get full access to the whole suite of divine powers, but maybe enough to get her out of here. She rushed through the hole where some doors had clearly once been –
– and into a cloudy black nothing, where lightning flashed. Shit shit shit. She gestured instinctively, and a set of rickety wooden stairs assembled themselves from raw chaos, heading upward. Right. The stuff around her was formless void, but it could be shaped by someone with power and will. Marla was a tiny bit short of power, but she sure as hell had will.
Fuck the stairs, then. Marla lifted her chin, looked upward, and flew.
•
She drifted among bubbles in assorted colors, some beautiful, some just gross. She’d created some clothes for herself from shreds of chaos, briefly considering dragon-slaying armor before settling on her customary garb, loose shirt and pants and big stomping boots. Freedom of movement and the power of kicking: what more did a woman need? After a moment’s thought she made a dagger, too, then decided to go bigger, and turned it into a double-edged sword. She’d wielded a sword forged in Hell in the past, and if this one wasn’t so much forged as imagined, well, she still felt better having it. She sheathed the blade on her back and pondered her next move.
Something needed to be done about Elsie. The smart thing would be to keep flying upward until she found Death, fill him in on what had happened, and let him bring his divine wrath down on Elsie. The idea didn’t sit right with her, though. She’d descended into this primordial sea to set things right, and even if she didn’t remember taking on that mission, she didn’t like the idea of admitting defeat. She was no match for Elsie, though, in her current state.
Marla didn’t even know if she was still indestructible. Her mortal body couldn’t die on Earth, but this wasn’t Earth, and she had no idea if this was even her real
body. She had some bit of the Bride’s power, and access to buried memories that weren’t available on Earth, so what the hell was she? Some kind of Bride-Marla hybrid? A demi-god?
One of the lessons she’d learned in recent years was that she couldn’t do everything herself. Sometimes, you had to ask for help. Crawling back to her husband and asking him to save her was an intolerable idea, though. What alternative did she have?
She looked at one of the passing bubbles, the color of mud, and her mind said: That’s Carl Offenson’s afterlife, and it’s mostly a bar situated by a slow-moving river full of trout, where his tab never comes due and the jukebox always plays his favorite Eagles songs. She propelled herself through space—not thinking about how she did it, the same way a millipede shouldn’t think about how it moves its individual legs—and looked at more bubbles. A milky-white one full of infinite ice, where a man snowboarded forever. Another was a smoky hell of warehouses and piers. One was just a swimming pool the size of an aircraft carrier, filled with topless mermaids. Another was an entire galaxy, with a spaceship the size of a small planet drifting through the void, piloted by a steely-eyed war hero who’d been an avid computer gamer in his mortal life. Yet another was an endless field of delicious mastodon who lifted their heads and welcomed the spear.
She knew the names of everyone in every bubble around her, and what their afterlives contained. She thought, Daniel?
A grayish sphere rushed through the void and hovered before her. The interior was heartbreaking.
She stepped into it, and found herself on a rainy street in the city of Felport, where she’d lived, and where Daniel had died. He’d been a formidable sorcerer, with a power she’d never encountered in exactly that form since: the ability to manipulate the life forces of everything around him. He could animate unliving things, and he could drain life from those around him. He liked a good meal, but he didn’t need to eat, since he could subsist on tiny bits of life force drawn from flowers, trees, animals, anything around him, taking quantities small enough that they were never missed, but that, combined, sustained him. That’s how he’d lived in the aftermath of that terrible mission with Jenny Click, lost on the bottom of the sea, in a sort of coma, leeching just enough energy to survive from the life around him. When their mentor Artie Mann had died, a geas laid on Daniel had spurred him to return to the world. Artie had wanted Daniel to bring him back to life, but by the time Daniel made it to Felport, their teacher had been dead for a long time, and if that rotting corpse had been animated, it would have come back as a horror. Something with Artie’s memories, maybe, but souls weren’t meant to be snatched out of hell and restored to their bodies, and he would have come back wrong.