Chapter 28
It was only a few steps later that I saw what it was, and my feet stopped moving. I wanted to gasp, to scream or to run as the dim candlelight fell on their forms, but that terrified part of my mind forced my body to remain still and silent. Along the tunnel on either side of the pathway were figures that stood like sentinels, tall and oddly shaped. Horns jutted from their heads, jagged teeth protruded from their mouths, arched backs gave way to the angled legs of an animal. Thick, grotesque arms ended in talons identical to those of a bird, only larger. They were like nothing I’d ever seen, and yet somehow everything. A horrid amalgamation of human and animal, blended into a single creature that could spawn the worst of nightmares.
A sense of time and urgency beckoned me on, but I remained stationary, staring.
They weren’t moving.
The longer I gazed at them, the more I noticed: they were all cast in the same ashy grey colour and stood still as statues. They were statues, I realized a moment later, all carved from stone. Nothing more than harmless figurines like the carved animal toys that children played with. Stone couldn’t harm me.
I let out a sigh of relief.
There was a soft whooshing sound and I slapped a hand over my mouth.
All of the stone creatures were now looking at me.
My heart thundered like it never had before, as terror in its purest form ripped through me. They had moved. The stone had moved. And their eyes, grey and empty, could see me. I was sure of that. With a sickening wave of understanding that crashed over me like a frozen wind, I realized my mistake: I had made the smallest of sounds. I’d known that, but I’d broken the rule. These monsters responded to sound, and now that I had their attention, one more mistake could be my last.
Ever so slowly, I removed my hand from my mouth. Silence, I thought as strongly as I could, forcing it to become lodged in my brain, letting it consume all other thoughts.
I drew in a quiet breath, and I took a step forward, recalling everything I could about how the snow people had taught me to walk on our journey through the mountains. I placed each foot gingerly on the ground, small bits of relief teasing my mind every time I did so without making a sound. It was frightfully slow-going, every footstep a test of my patience, but I knew I was on the right track when my steps took me out of their line of vision. Their heads remained still, looking back where I’d been standing. Not having those vacant grey eyes locked on me gave my body warmth and energy once again.
Onwards. One step at a time. The ground was uneven, mounds of rock and loose boulders dotted at random throughout the room. All of the smaller, broken bits littering the floor meant that each step had to be carefully considered. It felt like hours before I could at last see the end of the tunnel and a small doorway. I’d have to drop to my knees and crawl through it. My legs aching from the exertion of moving my body so slowly, I passed the last of the stone sentinels, taking a final look at their horrifying forms – the sharpest, most dangerous parts of wolves, rams and birds of prey.
I shuddered.
Only a few more metres remained between me and the doorway when my foot kicked a small stone I hadn’t seen – I’d been staring at the beasts – and the sound cut through the silence and bounced on the walls. I stopped moving, frozen in place as a strange sort of shuffling sound whispered behind me. I was too afraid to turn around and see what had happened, but too afraid to move forward. They must have heard the sound, and all eyes would be turned to me once more. The thought was repulsive, the image of those stony eyes watching me.
I felt a strange sort of light breeze on my neck, like the breath of something close at hand, and I could be still no longer. I turned slowly, my heart in my throat, to find every single one of the stone sentinels standing directly behind me, grey eyes now gleaming.
A scream erupted from my throat. I tore my eyes from them and bolted for the door, running as fast as I could force my legs to move. Thundering footsteps followed, along with shrieking howls like predators on the hunt, about to dive on an innocent animal. I was the prey, but if I could just reach that doorway in time…
They couldn’t fit through it, I realized as I grew closer. I just needed to get through before they caught up to me. There wasn’t far to go.
I kneeled swiftly and began to crawl through the opening. I was so close, so close, but something grabbed hold of my leg, claws sinking through my clothing and into my skin. A scream caught in my throat as I used every bit of my strength to pull away. I kicked and thrashed, bracing myself with a firm grasp on the wall beyond the doorway, and in a sudden snapping movement that sent me hurtling through the door, the creature lost its hold. I collapsed on to my back, their shrieking fainter now that we were separated by a wall.
I lay there, panting, tears wetting my cheeks. My body trembled, my leg stung. I breathed in and out, but it quickly became too fast, and I was consumed by the sensation of not being able to breathe.
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.
It was a few moments before I could stand, my whole body still shaking. As I finally hauled myself to my feet, I ducked to look back into the tunnel I’d just left. It was dark, without our candlelight, but the creatures were nowhere in sight.
My legs felt foreign beneath me. Weak. Unsteady.
Despite my shaking, I was reignited with a relief so strong it replenished my rapidly depleting stores of energy. I traversed a low stone room slowly, and it soon gave way to a narrow tunnel leading upward. I could feel the straining in my tired legs as I climbed higher and higher.
I longed to be able to speak. To ask someone what those creatures were. What that cold, dreadful sense of doom I’d felt earlier was. I knew reaching the Goddess wouldn’t be easy, but I hadn’t been prepared for just how difficult it would be. The memory of those chilling eyes haunted me. I hoped, with every bit of strength my body had left, that those stone creatures were the last hurdle before I finally reached the Goddess.
But as the uphill walk ended, and through an archway I caught sight of a vast room partially open to the night and lit by the moon, I knew I was wrong.
The floor of the room was dotted with hundreds of what looked like torches that stood on the stone, unlit, ready. There was nothing around to light them with, save for my candle – who had placed them there, and why?
A groaning filled the room, and something moved across the expansive stone before me. I froze, eyes wide, as a creature white and glistening slowly rose to its feet with yawning movements, as though it had been sleeping for centuries. Somewhere, in the corners of my heart that harboured a love for storytelling, excitement and disbelief sparked to life. The beast’s head rose up, up, up, until it nearly rested against the partial roof high overhead. Thin, crystalline wings fanned out beside it, and a long silvery tail uncoiled behind it.
A dragon. A dragon made of ice.
I stood for a long moment, facing off with a creature that, until now, had only existed in tales told at bonfires and in runes on cave walls. But here, in this room, in these mountains where nothing made sense, it was real. It was as real as I was. As real as the stone beneath my feet. And that meant something to me. I had always been the storyteller, the one who knew the stories of the stars better than those of her own people. This creature justified all of those frozen nights studying the constellations with Ymir, all of those hours spent spinning tales to wide-eyed children around fires, all that time I’d spent studying rune stories with Ivar. It symbolized so much: that, despite everything I’d heard from my father, my sister, the other villagers, there was a place in this world for the daydreamers and the souls who dared to believe in the things they couldn’t see. For those who believed that stories were more than just words that froze in the air.
These thoughts felt so simple, so out of place in this strange room filled with torches, before a dragon whose jaws could bring death in mere seconds. Yet, after everything I’d been through, they were the thoughts that gave me just enough strength to keep going.
I took a few steps towards the torches, ready to cross this room and find a way past the dragon. It heaved in a breath so large it sucked all the air from the room for a head-spinning moment, and then let it back out in a blazing eruption. White-hot fire engulfed the space, so intense it forced me back as far as I could go. A brutal heat seared my face, my body. Sweat broke out on my back, my neck, and I was forced to shut my eyes as I pressed against the stone wall.
In a few seconds, it was over. Slowly, I opened my eyes. All of the torches were now lit. Hundreds and hundreds of them flaming across the room. That immediate, inescapable heat was gone, but a distinct warmth remained.
I took a step forward to pass between two of the torches, but their flames suddenly flared up so large and hot that I was forced to run backwards. I tried again, moving to walk between a different set of torches, but with the same result. My heart sank as I stared at the wide distance separating me from the other side of the room – and the dragon, who now stood silently, watching.
A few paces to my left, I again attempted to pass between two of the torches, but was forced away. I let out a gasp of frustration as I fled from the heat and again returned to the wall.
“How do I get through?” I said to myself. The dragon didn’t move, only continued to stare with its glistening eyes.
I glanced up at the roof, where it gave way to the sky. It was a clear night, the stars bright overhead in their silently watchful way. Help me, I said to the sky, because it was the only familiar thing around me. Ivar, my family, everyone I knew was far away. Ri was gone. Everything here was new, different, frightening, but not the stars. The stars I knew. The stars I loved. The stars I could understand. Only part of the Goddess was visible from here, but I wanted to scream at Her, so close to Her and yet so terribly far.
Something sparked inside me as I looked back to the flaming torches. It was probably nothing, but an idea found its way into my mind, and I couldn’t silence it. I turned to take in the rest of the room.
I needed to get higher.
There were a few stalagmites here and there, and part of a naturally-formed pillar that looked like it had broken centuries ago. I didn’t want to imagine what sort of thing had done that, but it would serve my purpose. Pushing my cloak back over my shoulders, I fought against the aching and exhaustion to hike myself up on to the broken pillar. It took a few tries before I was gently teetering on the uneven surface, pulling myself to balance on my feet.
From my perch, I saw the floor of the room in an entirely new light. The torches weren’t random, nor were they placed in neat and even rows. They all had a place amongst the others, a reason for their positioning – and exactly what they symbolized hit me with a sudden force. They were shapes, pictures. Each torch symbolized a star in the night sky, part of The Five Greats that hung above us around the Goddess. As such, I suspected that all I needed to do was walk between the right torches, take the correct path to Her.
I smiled in near-delirious relief as I slid down from the pillar, alight with new excitement. I ensured the dragon was still calm and quiet across the room before I walked a few paces to my right and gingerly stepped between two blazing torches.
Nothing happened.
No blazing inferno turned me away. I was right. Follow the path between the stars. Do not disrupt the constellations, and I’d make it through. I passed one torch after another, sometimes pausing to look around and remember which star was where, and which course to take.
I was nearly halfway across the room when I paused for longer than usual, staring at two different sets of torches. Both looked just as right – and wrong – as the other, and try as I might, I couldn’t quite recall which star sat where. I chewed on a fingernail and gazed as them, trying to paint the night sky in my mind. There were so many stars, so many tiny points of light to remember that the harder I tried, the more confused I became. When I looked up to see if the answer was visible overhead, it wasn’t. We were traversing our way between the Horned Horse and the Giant, neither of which I could see from the room.
The movement and flickering of the torches grated on my nerves the longer I stood there.
I thought for several minutes. Time pressed against me and I was keenly aware of every second I delayed to the point where, at long last, I chose at random and moved between them.
I felt a rush as the dragon drew in a breath, and turned to run just as it let out an inferno of heat and pain. Just like that, all of that time and concentration was undone in seconds. I was back at the wall where I’d started from, and as the flames from its breath died down, the torches had moved. That meant, I realized with a groan of frustration, that the constellations had shifted and I’d have to approach the Goddess through a new path.
That frustration gave way to anger, and I flung off my cloak and shoved hair from my eyes. I’d crossed the plain, escaped the jōt and survived the mountains this far. I was going to survive this, as well. I knew the stars. This was my one skill and I’d be damned if I let it get the best of me.
Again, I climbed on to the stone pillar with shaking limbs and had a good, long look around. This time, it was the Warrior and the Wolf nearest at hand. I stared at the torches, replacing them in my mind with spots of light in the night sky. I knew these constellations, and I knew them well. I could get through this.
Taking a sharp piece of stone that lay near to the broken pillar, I used it to draw on the floor in scratches. I made a map of tiny spots all around me, drawing the constellations as precisely as I could remember, occasionally stopping to close my eyes and envision the sky. I imagined being back on my favourite rock by the sea, where I’d lie out late at night and watch the sky. I could see it, see everything familiar. Then I returned to drawing furiously on the floor. When I had included every single star I could remember, I traced out a line between them, the pathway to the Goddess. That was my course. I stared at it for a handful of minutes, counting the stars to the left and right of each twist and turn.
Then I nodded to myself.
With a renewed spirit, I turned back to the torches and walked between the first set.