XI
Company for Old Souls
MATILDA I was not there when Adria at last woke as a goddess.
She slept for three days and three nights, and eventually my mother demanded I return to our burrow and leave Bade to his disgrace. I bristled at this—how could she speak so ill of her own ally?—but swiftly learned she was “court speaking.” Gossip was simmering through the hall and corridors. The once powerful and fearsome god of war has marred himself by loving a mortal woman, and now he has thrown the stars into chaos by making her one of us.
The chaos was truly an exaggeration, but it illuminated a deeply buried fear.
Adria was the goddess of peace, but could there be more to her powers that we did not know of?
“This cannot lead to anything good,” Phelyra stated one night when the alliance—sans Bade—had gathered beside our fire, drinking wine. At some point I had realized that all of them—Phelyra, Alva, Zenia, Bade—were gods whom mortals feared. Prayers written to them were fueled by worry and tension and fright, never by love or devotion, and the divines only grew more powerful for it. I mulled over this as I sat off to the side, sorting those fear-stricken prayers that had come in for my mother. But I was listening intently to their conversation.
“Adria is not one of us,” Phelyra continued. “She will never belong here. Bade has done her a terrible disservice. He should have let her die in glory on the battlefield.”
“Adria will be fine here,” Alva said in a drunken lilt. “Besides, that is four less stars for Orphia, and five less stars for Rowena.”
“I did not know you cared to count stars,” Phelyra said with a shrewd glance. “You have never stolen magic before.”
“That is because I don’t care.” Alva drained the rest of her wine, heedless. “And I did not know you cared so much about mortal feelings, Phel. I thought you would be far more worried about what impact Adria’s
divinity will have on ours.”
“Impact?” my mother echoed.
“Yes.” Alva poured another chalice of wine, at which Zenia twitched her nose in disapproval. “Do you not wonder about it? How might her magic influence ours?”
“Oh, you are speaking to rile us, Alvie,” Phelyra drawled. The moniker drew a thunderous expression from Alva. “A nine-point constellation is good, but magic rooted in peace is weak, submissive. I think we should worry more as to how Bade will try to use this to his advantage.”
“He does not want to use her,” I snapped, unable to keep my mouth shut.
All three goddesses turned to look at me, sitting with the heap of written prayers.
“What I mean to say,” I amended, cooler, “is that he does love her. He does not want to control her.”
“You are young, sweet one.” Phelyra’s tone was patronizing. I ground my teeth. “One day, you will understand this better.”
“Leave her be,” Alva said. “She knows more about mortal kind than you.”
“What do you mean?” My mother’s voice was sharp.
I went rigid, suddenly afraid to look up. Alva and her drunken tongue were about to expose the fact that she lent me dream scrolls. That I had forged a connection with a mortal boy named Vincent.
“Because she is the herald of all three realms,” Alva replied, and I released a slow, tremulous breath, continuing to sort the prayers my mother had been ignoring for a sennight now.
Their conversation drifted to other matters, but it wasn’t until they began to leave that I realized Alva was not at all drunk. She deftly slipped a dream scroll to me with a wink, her eyes clear and shining like jewels. What game was she playing?
I waited until my mother went to market, and then I cracked open the scroll, scanning the inked dreams for Vincent’s. I found it toward the end, which meant it must have been dreamt the other night.
He was sitting at a desk in his bedchamber, writing a letter. The light streamed in through the window, awakening a sheen of blue in his long black hair.
The door swung open, and he glanced up, his eyes wide when he saw that it was me on the threshold.
“Red!” he cried, standing so quickly he overturned his chair. I could hear joy in his voice; I could see delight limn his face as he looked at me.
The air between us became golden, sweet. It felt like reuniting with someone after missing them for a long time. “Where have you been? How
did you find me?”
I did not answer.
In fact, I was frowning, as if I could not see him.
He hurried across the room to reach me, but I shut the door in his face,
and the dream broke.
I rolled up the scroll.
My hands felt icy, my heart was erratic.
The wasted door at the fortress. I had opened it and seen a strange land.
A gate that led to a dreamscape.
Quickly, I donned my sandals and reached for a cloak. I hid the scroll in one of my belt pockets before I went to the coffer in the back room. Gold and silver coins rested within; they were cold in my cupped palm, shimmering like water when I ran my fingers through them. They were so plentiful here in the under realm, as were the gemstones, that I sometimes forgot their true value. Sighing, I grasped coins by the handful, filling two more pockets.
If I was going to leave, I needed to do so now, before my mother returned.
The spiders watched me from their far-strung cobwebs; the fire danced high in the hearth, eager to catch a glimpse of me as I slipped soundlessly from the burrow.
Commotion echoed down the corridors as I ran through them, the fog ebbing low. It sounded like a violent argument had spawned in the hall, but this was commonplace ever since Adria had been immortalized, and I continued on my way, reaching the wasted door at the ruined fortress without being seen.
There were no clouds that night, and a full moon was rising, spilling silver light across the broken flagstones.
I did not know what to expect when I reached the wasted door this time.
My stomach was in a knot as the oakwood creaked open, revealing the pink hills, the strange trees, the two suns and four moons. The constellations that
burned in a sunset sky.
“Vincent?” I called.
Only silence met me.
I stepped into this realm, leaving the door ajar. For every ten strides I took, I reached into my pocket and dropped a coin, so I could find my way back to the threshold. To my shock, the coins had transformed. They were no longer gold and silver but Skyward currency. Pieces of the sky that could melt into music.
Time passed as I wandered, leaving a trail of coins behind me. I searched but could not locate an obsidian archway that would lead me to Vincent’s dream. In fact, I was alone here in this bizarre land, and soon my thirst grew so great that I knelt at the iridescent stream, eager to sip from it.
But when I lowered my hands into its currents, there was nothing. It was an illusion, and my heart gave a lurch of fear.
“Will you walk with me to the mists, Matilda?” asked a deep, sad voice.
Startling, I turned to see a god, familiar even though I had never spoken directly to him. Xan, the handsome god of iron, who was of the Underling High Court. I was surprised that he even knew my name, that he had stopped here to make a request of me, until I saw that his throat had been
shorn. Bright, hot ichor was pouring from the fatal wound. I watched it stream down his broad chest, drip from his fingers like rain.
Is this a dream? I wondered, rising.
“What happened to you?”
“Come, walk with me,” he said again, but he did not wait to see if I would. “Keep an old soul company.”
He resumed his journey, following a well-worn path that snaked toward the light of the full moon. Up one hill, and down another. His steps were lumbering, his pace measured. I quickly caught up to him.
“Are you dreaming, Xan?” I asked. “Is that why I see you here?”
He laughed. “Dreaming? No, child. I am dead.”
I bit my lip, uncertain what to say.
He glanced askew at me, his hazel eyes lively despite his macabre
announcement.
“You see the wound, yes?”
“Yes, but you are speaking. Your voice—”
“The dead can still speak, that is, until we reach the gate at the mists.”
We walked a few more paces in silence, and then he said, “Are you dead? I
see no wound on you.”
“I … do not think so?”
“You sound uncertain.”
“I have never been here before, but I was breathing when I arrived.”
“Has your mother not told you of the wasteland?” Xan asked. “This is where all of us go, if and when we die. Divine and mortals both, should humans desire paradise instead of becoming shades in our courts. This is how we reach the mists. We must find the gate and walk through it to achieve eternal rest. But only if the Gatekeeper deems us worthy enough to pass.”
“Oh, yes.” I tucked hair behind my ear, although Zenia had only mentioned the wastes and the dreaded Gatekeeper to me once. A bedtime tale that I had thought was mere myth, based on her reluctance to repeat it.
Now, my mind overflowed with theories as to how I had stepped through a door to reach this place. How I was—hopefully—not dead, but trespassing
in a scape for the deceased, but then I remembered Vincent and how I had been present in his dream. I had heard his voice here.
Is he dead? Worry cut through me, making my breaths skip. No. Logic tamped down my wild thoughts. Alva’s scroll proved he was dreaming. He
is alive.
“Ah, here we are,” Xan said.
We had reached the gate of the mists. The gate to paradise.
In my mother’s tale, she had described it much differently. A beautiful structure of latticed iron and jewels that opened and closed according to the Gatekeeper’s fickle desire. A barrier that could have been found in the under realm. Well, as I stood beside the dead god of iron himself, I saw that this was a gate unlike anything I had ever seen.
It looked to be made of smooth bone, and it was huge. Its arch loomed like a wishbone against the burgundy and saffron of the sky, and the closer we approached, the more it hummed, like the notes of a harp that had just faded. There was nothing to bar entrance to it, but the mist was thick and swirling within. When I opened my mouth to breathe, desperate with thirst, I caught the moisture on my tongue and drank it down. It was enticing and sweet, like flowers in our underground rill.
“What happens now?” I asked, glancing up at Xan.
His attention was on the mist. I could see the thirst in his eyes, the intensity carving grooves into his face.
“We wait,” he said, but his voice had lost its luster.
I glanced down to see he had no shadow, even though I did, and I shivered.
The ground rumbled. Again, and again, like the tread of heavy feet. The Gatekeeper at last appeared through the mist to meet us.
She was a giantess. A wizened crone with long, silver hair. She had one opaque eye with a milky-blue iris, dark pupil, and long lashes. Her face looked chiseled from pale rocks, the facets harsh and bold as if the sculptor had been in a hurry while forming her features. Her teeth were bloodstained and filed into sharpened points, and her dress was gray, gathering over one shoulder with a knot made of white and black hair.
“I see you have kindly brought my eye back to me,” she said in a voice so rich the sunset grew bolder around her.
A beat passed before I realized she was speaking to me, and the blood clotted in my veins. Slowly, I glanced down to my belt to see the moonstone eye was fully open. I had not even felt its flare of heat, like last time, when Adria had been dying.
“Forgive me,” I said, my voice hoarse with fear and thirst. “I … let me remove the stone. I did not know—”
“No, child. That is where it belongs: on your belt. I would not have plucked out my eye the night you were born and tossed it to the under realm for your mother to harvest had I not desired it.” Her attention shifted to Xan, her brows arching. “And who have you brought to my gate?”
“I did not bring him—” I rushed to say in the same moment that Xan said, “The god of iron. Xan of Underling. My immortality has been snuffed due to trickery and bad luck.”
“You mean to say the only magic you possessed has been stolen, and you have come to me, disgraced,” said the Gatekeeper, lip curled. “You have come hoping I will let you pass into the mists, culled of power and
honor.”
Xan made no reply.
A lump lodged in my throat as the awkward silence continued.
“Gatekeeper,” I finally said. “What is this place called?”
“The name of this realm is so old there is no longer a word for it. Not even I can remember it, and I was here, roaming these hills, gazing up at a starless sky, for centuries. But that was long before I gave birth to Death and Fate, and my shed blood became the constellations.” She traced the knot of hair at her shoulder. My stomach churned when I realized it was hair cut from her daughters. Orphia and Rowena. “So now it is simply called the wasteland, where souls from the dead who long for paradise embark on their final journey to my gate. And to those who I refuse admittance … well, they are doomed to forever wander with unspeakable thirst. They become nightmares.”
“Nightmares?” I echoed. “Then this place is also—”
“Where living souls drift during dreams, yes.” The giantess smiled, but it was a terrifying sight, and it took every fiber of my being not to lurch backward. “Alva also treads here, although not corporeally, like you. Only in her mind. And she has never found my gate.”
“I do not understand,” I said, swallowing. “I am just a herald.”
“A herald who carries words, and perhaps something else,” the Gatekeeper crooned, and her one eye turned to regard Xan, who stood quiet and still as a statue at my side. “Why should I let you pass into the mists?
What accolades can you claim? Convince me that you are worthy.” Before he could reply, she withdrew a golden balancing scale from her pocket and set it on the ground with a thud.
I stared at that scale, its two opposing pans empty, ready to be filled.
Xan also stared, his breath unsteady.
Was this, then, how the Gatekeeper decided who was worthy of the mists? By the weights of a scale?
Xan listed off his many achievements, but the Gatekeeper swatted her hand through the air, as if his words were a pesky fly.
“No, no,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”
We would be here a long while if she wanted all the minute details of a god’s life. Xan began again, this time with the night he had been born, when the stars had woken in the sky with his first cry. But he did not get a weight tossed upon the scales until he told us the story of how once, in his youth, he had challenged Dacre to a footrace through the darkest stretch of the catacombs. Only then did the Gatekeeper’s eye brighten and she dropped the stone on the right pan of the scale.
Not a stone, I realized as I leaned slightly closer, studying it. A finger bone, and I could only wonder whose it had been. A god’s? A mortal’s?
Someone who had been denied passage beneath the arch?
Xan learned swiftly what the Gatekeeper wanted. It was not good deeds, although sometimes she cast another bone in favor of him when he had been gracious or compassionate. It was the bloody stories, the heartbreaking tales. The terrible decisions and the wretched moments.
She did not want to hear about restrained living.
She wanted to know how much of a mark a soul had left behind.
Xan was doing well. The scales were weighted in his favor, and as he droned on, my mind wandered to the goddess of nightmares and dreams.
Alva.
I wondered if she had sensed this strange magic in me from the beginning. If she had known that I could visit the wasteland, and— consequently—dreams, which were her forte. I wondered if that had been the true motivation to slip the scrolls to me. Not to offer me entertainment or help me broaden my knowledge of mortals but to test me in some way.
What did she see in me, and what did she want?
Would she eventually choose to kill me, to take this nameless magic for herself?
The right pan of Xan’s scales hit the ground with a musical clink.
“That is enough,” the Gatekeeper announced with a feral smile. A bracelet made of skulls rattled down her forearm. “You may pass into paradise, Xan of Underling. Unless you would prefer to have the herald escort you?”
Xan frowned, glancing at me. His wound had finally ceased bleeding, as if all his ichor had run dry.
“Escort me where?” he queried. “She is not dead. She cannot step into the mists.”
The Gatekeeper fell silent, but her eye was transfixed upon me, as if I
had the answer.
I did not.
I had no inkling what she implied, but I felt like I should. A shudder rippled through me, and I shifted my weight, keen to run back to the wasted door. To leave this place, and never return.
“Apologies,” I said to him, a scratch of a whisper. “I do not know what she means.”
“It is just as well,” Xan sighed. “I can escort myself.”
I watched as he stepped forward, his shoulders pinned back in a proud stance. He was about to pass through the gate, the mists swirling as if hungry to welcome him, when my curiosity sparked one final question.
“Xan?” I called and he paused, looking at me. “Who killed you? Who stole your magic?”
He was quiet for a moment, a troubled expression creasing his brow, as if to think back on his immortal life came with a swell of pain now. But then the distress dwindled, and peace overtook him.
“The god of spring,” he answered, just as he disappeared into the mists.
“Warin of Skyward.”