River of Shadows

by Karina Halle

  “You are always sticking up for him. After all he’s done to you.”

  Her little face falls and I immediately feel bad. Shit. She’s in love with him, isn’t she? The horny little mermaid is in love with Death.

  “Hey,” I add softly. “I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to be you. You’re an entirely different species, in a whole other world. We both take imprisonment differently.”

  She nods, worrying her lip between her teeth. “It’s not that I forgive him for what he’s done,” she says. “It’s just that I can’t hold a grudge. I just can’t. And I know that you’re going to free me when the full moon comes, so I’m already living in the future. This already feels like the past to me.”

  Hell, with the way time is supposedly all chaotic out here, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true.

  “Just remember,” Bell says, “your future will come too. And you will want to let go of grudges, so you can truly be free. You’ll be with your father again and this will all seem like some very strange dream.”

  My heart clenches at the mention of my father. I’ve been trying not to think about him, because when I do I obsess and drown in a spiral of worry. I don’t know if he’s in the Upper World like Surma had mentioned. I certainly hope so, but at the same time I worry about his memory of all this being gone, which means he might not know what Eero and Noora are really up to. My only hope is that Rasmus made it back home too and will help my father. I know I was just bait to him, collateral to trade, but as long as my father means that much to him, I pray he’ll keep him safe.

  “And if you don’t get out of here,” Bell goes on, “it’s because Death would have yeeted you out of here. That’s the word, right? Yeeted? Even Lovia wasn’t sure.”

  Fuck. What if that’s what all the snow is about? What if it’s not so much Death dealing with a form of rejection, which must not happen often with a God, but that he’s planning my demise? The snow doesn’t mean he’s upset, it could be a personification of the violence and death to come.

  Suddenly there’s a heavy knock at the door. I exchange a harried look with Bell and leap to my feet as she swims to the back of the tank until she’s completely hidden.

  I walk to the middle of the room and clasp my hands at my middle. “Come in?” I ask warily. No one has ever knocked before. They always unlock the door first and then barge in.

  Now the door opens without unlocking—which means the door was unlocked this whole time—and in steps Death.

  “Good morning, Hanna,” he says in his deep voice, his presence flooding the room, bringing with him an air of power and death. “Will you take a walk with me?”

  Oh, fuck. I’m dead aren’t I? I’m getting yeeted by his hand.

  I glance down at my dress. In my bouts of boredom over the last few days, I’ve tried on everything in the wardrobe. Not everything fits, but some things I rather like. Today I’ve put on a yellow dress with puff sleeves and an empire waist that looks straight out of the Regency era. Since I’ve been lounging, I eschew anything with a corset, which I think are unnecessary evils, a million times worse than a bra.

  “You’re fine,” he says to me, nodding at my attire. “It’s a walk through the castle. I’m afraid I can’t do anything about the weather at the moment…” He lets it trail off, as if I’m able to do something about the weather. My god, what if Bell was right?

  I stand there, frozen in place, staring at him. Today he’s back to wearing his flowing robe and his skull is more simple, a human one with jagged bones growing out of the top to form a crown, but I can’t feel his eyes the way I normally do. I can’t read anything off him at all except his usual aura of authority.

  “You don’t have to come,” he says after a moment, his tone softening. “I only figured you’d been in here for days. Not locked in here, as I’m sure you just realized, but inside this room nonetheless.”

  I lick my parched lips, finally finding my voice. “Why was the door unlocked?”

  He folds his arms across his chest. “I wanted to see if you’d run. You didn’t even try to fly, little bird,” he adds in a whisper.

  “It would be pointless, wouldn’t it?” I counter. “You’ve told me time and time again that there’s no way I can escape. That the walls and wards will keep me in, that the realm would probably kill me.”

  “Yes. But probably isn’t definitely. And you’re someone who will grab hold of whatever hope there is.”

  “You sound disappointed,” I say. “I guess I should get used to disappointing you.”

  There. Now I feel him. I feel the change in his energy, and though his posture hasn’t changed at all, it’s like he slumps internally. The wind outside these walls wails in response. Death has walls just as any of us do, just as this castle does, and they aren’t always impenetrable.

  That little bit of information gives me a lot. It gives me the hope he just said I’d hold on to.

  “You don’t disappoint me,” he says gruffly, his demeanor changing again. He clears his throat. “Okay, perhaps you do a little. I thought there would be more fight in Hanna Heikkinen. This is the mortal who defeated my Goddess daughter, who stole her boat and wielded her sword, slaughtered the Swan of Tuonela. There will be poems and rune songs sung about you, like a legend. I want to see that girl. I want her to spar with me, to fight me, to show bravery and defiance.”

  He walks across the room to me, his steps slow, his boots echoing. He stops right in front of me and peers down and I see his gray eyes peering at me brightly in the dark shadows, like a silver star.

  “I do defy you,” I tell him, raising my chin. “But I don’t wish to die. And I don’t think either of us know what you want from me just yet.”

  “I think I’ve made it clear,” he says brusquely.

  “Then if you want it, take it,” I tell him. “I can’t stop you.”

  He cocks his head. “But you have stopped me. That’s the thing.”

  His gaze holds me hostage and I don’t know how much time is ticking past or if it’s standing still, as it’s known to do.

  Then he reaches out and grabs my hand with his. His gauntlets look like leather, but they feel like the softest fur. “Let me take you somewhere you’d like,” he says, giving my hand a squeeze I feel in my toes. “To the Library of the Veils.”

  Okay, now he has my interest. Truthfully, I would have gone anywhere, just to get out of my room. I realize there’s a chance he’s still planning to murder me, but I’d rather die somewhere different, I guess. Surrounded by books sounds like a good way to go.

  I nod and give him a tight smile, and even though I don’t look at Bell as I walk past, I can feel her trying to ask for more sunshine.

  “I figured you like books,” Death says to me as we walk out of my room and down the hall. The castle is a little brighter than normal, thanks to the light bouncing off the white snow outside and filtering through the old windows.

  “You figured I like books?” I repeat. “This is starting to sound like small talk.”

  “There is no small talk with you, fairy girl,” he says, his hand releasing mine and sliding up to my elbow where he takes a firmer hold. “Everything you say is like a double-edged sword.” His skull tilts, glancing down at me. “You know, I never thought a mere mortal would fascinate me as much as you do, but here we are. I just can’t seem to figure you out. You’re frighteningly complex.”

  I burst out laughing. I feel like I haven’t laughed for days, and the sound is foreign to my ears.

  “Me? Complex?” I scoff. “Right. Okay. You want to know how complex I am? I’m a social media manager for a clothing company that marks up twenty-dollar coats which I convince people to buy for five hundred. I live in North Hollywood, in a shared house, as do most other working young professionals, surrounded by succulents and surfboards. I take capoeira on Wednesday nights, I go to a local bar and drink margaritas on Fridays. My favorite food is ramen, I don’t have a cat but I love cat videos, I wear all the sweate
rs as soon as September hits even when it’s eighty degrees outside, and I don’t care if people know I love pumpkin spice lattes. I watch anime but I watch anime porn more, and I scroll through TikTok to help me fall asleep at night, even though it makes me buy candles and crystals and crochet supplies that I never use. I am not complex. I am what they call a basic bitch. I just happen to be a basic bitch in the Realm of the Dead. And maybe that’s what you find fascinating.”

  Death stops and stares down at me and I can almost feel him thinking, a pause hanging between us as he takes in all my babbling.

  Finally, he says, “Basic bitch?”

  I wave my free hand dismissively. “It just means I’m not special. I’m no different than anyone else. Whatever complexity you see in me, it’s not there. I’m just…foreign to you.”

  “Ah,” he says, slowly nodding. “I thought you meant you were not very adept at being a bitch, and I was going to say otherwise.”

  I glare at him. “That’s funny. Did Death manage to make a joke at my expense?”

  “Who said I was joking?” Then he starts walking again and tugs at my arm. We go up the grand staircase to the next level and turn the corner. There’s a huge iron door with an inscription on it that I can’t read.

  “What does that say?” I ask.

  “There was a door to which I found no key,” Death reads. “There was a Veil through which I might not see. Some talk a little while of me and thee, there was—and then no more of thee and me.”

  I stare at the door. Not only does there not seem to be a lock, there doesn’t seem to be a handle either.

  But Death runs his hands over the skeleton designs down the middle of the door and then something hisses and the door opens, the air sucking us in, as if we’re opening the door to an airlock.

  “Welcome to the Library of the Veils,” Death says, placing his hand at my back and ushering me in.

  It’s dark save for the grand windows that line the end of the room, done up in the circular petal designs you might find in a Catholic church, but then all at once the lights go on, illuminating how grand the room is.

  No, grand isn’t the right word. It’s fucking magnificent. I’m such a whore for libraries in general—I once spent the majority of my Manhattan vacation inside the New York Public Library—but I’ve never seen any like this.

  The library itself is at least three stories tall in places where the bookshelves reach up into the narrow circular turrets of the castle, the shelves themselves built into the iron walls. It’s the library from the Beauty and the Beast cartoon, except gothic and foreboding. It’s not just all the iron, or all the skulls and bones as décor, or the strange glass cages placed around the room with blankets draped over them, but it’s this strange sense of…I don’t even know if I can describe it. It’s a sense of life and of death, it’s ever-changing and powerful, like the atoms in the air are constantly being rewritten. It feels like there are more than the two of us in here, that instead there are hundreds of thousands of people among us, people that I can’t see. I can feel them all at once, all their energy, and I’m not surprised to feel the hair at the back of my neck standing stiff.

  There’s also a large floating book in the middle of the room and a dog made of iron guarding it.

  “That’s Rauta,” Death says rather proudly, gesturing to the dog. “You wore his collar for a bit. Remember?”

  Rauta opens its mouth and growls at me, literal sparks shooting out.

  It’s fucking terrifying, and I’m not kidding when I said it’s made of iron. Part of it looks like a normal Tuonela dog, with bone and some patches of fur, but other parts look like they’re welded on. Like a steampunk demon hound with red glowing eyes. Thank god that collar is back around the dog’s fat neck, even though it doesn’t seem to be chained to anything.

  “Not a dog person?” Death asks.

  “I love dogs,” I say defensively. “Just not the ones that belong to Doctor Frankenstein.”

  Death chuckles and walks over to Rauta, crouching down to pet it. He strokes his gloved hand over the dog’s head and the dog visibly calms down, its metal tongue hanging out as it lies down on the rug. “There’s a good dog,” he coos to it. “You’re doing a good job guarding this place. A very good job.”

  “Is he sentient?” I ask, peering at him. The iron dog totally seems at peace now.

  “All animals are sentient,” Death says, straightening up. “They all experience emotions. They all have souls.”

  “You know what I mean. Is it like Sarvi?”

  “Oh. Thank the Creator, no. I couldn’t handle that.”

  I go back to looking around the room. It really is morbidly beautiful, and the more I stare at it, the more the details surprise me. For one, the lights that came on aren’t from candles but from white lights glowing from sconces around the room. For two, the books themselves, all bound in leather and skins, seem to jostle and move on the shelves. There must be thousands and thousands of them all subtly vibrating.

  For three, pretty sure I just saw a ghost glide past from one end of the library to the other.

  “What?” Death asks, staring at my face.

  “Is this library…haunted?”

  “Oh. Yes. Very much so.”

  My eyes widen. “By who?”

  “By whom, you mean? And it doesn’t matter. It changes all the time. It’s haunted by the dead. I don’t see them anymore, though I did when I was a young boy.”

  “But why is the library haunted, of all places?” I ask.

  “It’s the Library of the Veils,” he says patiently. “You know what the Veils are, don’t you?”

  I give him a look like no, I don’t know shit, remember?

  He grabs my hand again and leads me to the black velvet couches under a stained glass rose window. I sit down and he pulls a book off the shelf, handing it to me, the snow from outside the window causing colors of navy and eggplant to bleed through.

  “This is a volume of The Book of Souls from 1946, your time, your world,” he says.

  I flip it open and gasp. The page is moving like I’m looking at someone’s home videos played on mute, an image of a man drinking beer on the beach superimposed on the paper. The man smiles and then the scene changes to him driving down an oceanside highway, holding the hand of a pretty woman with a 60’s hairdo. At the top of the page, it says Emanuel Courier: December 12th—July 8th 1965.

  “Every person that has ever lived is in the Book of Souls, even if they only lived for but a minute,” Death explains as I watch the scenes unfold on the page, the life of Emanuel Courier. “When you die, your entry is complete. Nothing more to be added. You see, Hanna, when I said that I knew you, I meant it. You told me that you scroll the TikTok at night and that you like tiny prickly plants, but I already knew that about you because it’s already playing in your own entry in the book.”

  My god. Has he really been able to watch my whole life like that? “I need to see my entry!” I exclaim. I flip through the pages but all I see are the lives of people who were born in 1946.

  “Why? You’ve lived it, haven’t you?”

  “For the same reasons we take photos and videos. So that we don’t forget.”

  “Don’t you think it would be for the best if you did forget?” His voice lowers. “You’re not going back to that life.”

  I nearly growl. I hate being reminded of that. “I want to see it.”

  “Maybe some other time,” he says firmly. “The last thing I want is for you to yearn for what was.”

  “And you don’t think I’m not already doing that?” I shout, getting to my feet.

  He takes the book from my hands and snaps it shut. “I was just showing you something I thought you might appreciate,” he says sulkily, turning around and sliding the book back on the shelf. “Each book is organized by date of birth, then by world, and they’re constantly being filled and updated.”

  That last bit of information distracts me enough. “How many worlds are we
talking here?”

  “There are…a lot. Tuonela oversees them all. You think Sarvi came from your world originally? I assure you, unicorns did not. This land, this library, is the meeting place for the Veils, the thin shrouds that keep one world from bleeding into the next.”

  It’s all too much. All these books filled with all the lives that ever lived across the universe. No wonder the damn library is so big, it’s not like he’s collecting all the special editions of Dickens or something. Each book, one person per page, constantly refreshing, like an Instagram story that keeps going and going, all the way until their death when there’s no more life to add.

  “Why do the ghosts haunt this place then?” I ask. “Shouldn’t they be in the City of Death?”

  “Not all that come to Tuonela come willingly,” he says gravely. “Sometimes denial is stronger than death. Those spirits feel the souls in here, in these very pages, and they’re somehow comforted. I try not to judge them, even though it is my job in the long run to bring them to the city. Instead, I harness their energy so at least they’re good for something.” He gestures to the glowing white sconce on the shelf above him. “They power the lights,” he adds proudly.

  I’ll admit that’s pretty genius, but Death doesn’t seem like the type who needs his ego stroked anymore. “So, what’s the floating book out there? Is that haunted? Is that the book of your life?”

  Another dry chuckle. “The Book of Runes. The most powerful book in the realm, perhaps in all the realms.”

  Oooh. So that’s the Book of Runes. I look over my shoulder, staring at the floating hardcover. Rauta is still lying on the floor beneath it, but this time keeping a red eye on me. “Why is it so powerful?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he says.

  Uh huh. I think back to what Rasmus had said about the book.

  “They say that some magic, in the right shaman’s hands, can rival the power of a God’s,” I repeat faintly to myself.

  “What was that?” Death asks quickly, stepping toward me.

  I look past his skull sockets and into his real eyes. “It’s what Rasmus told me. It’s why he wanted into this place, to get his hands on that book.”