Chapter 31
I approached the altar and laid myself down, slowly, carefully. An intense wave washed over me then, realization of so many things. I stared straight up at the open roof – which perfectly surrounded the constellation of the Goddess. It made sense. It all made sense. Why I had to come here. Why Her stars never moved. Why there was such an otherworldly sense in this room. There She was, staring back at me expectantly, waiting, Her face wholly encompassed by the jagged stone edge of the peak.
My throat constricted. What would I say? Could She hear me? In the hundreds of times I’d imagined this moment, I was always sure of my voice. Sure of my choice of words. Yet now, faced with the prospect of actually doing it, words abandoned me.
Something overhead caught my attention. Orbs of light, a small handful of them, were descending from the open roof. They floated down at their own speed, not carried by the breeze, and the sight of them tickled within me a sense of familiarity. I’d seen them before. I recognized them. How? They’d played no part in my life until now, not in my childhood, not in the village…
The plain. With a sudden ferocity of confidence, I knew they were the lights that had brought me through the storm. They were the ones, somehow, who’d led me across the plain and delivered me to the safety of that cave where I’d awoken, confused. My handwriting played in my mind.
Then came the lights. I don’t know what they were or where they came from. I lost consciousness for a time, but I know they led us to this cave.
That meant, then, that they were the very same lights from Gregor’s story. The ones that led his ancestors through the storm to safety.
They belonged to the Goddess. Did Her bidding. If She couldn’t directly interfere with us mortals, then perhaps the things at Her command could.
This moment, it was the pinnacle. It was the very reason I’d come, the very reason I’d endured the wind and cold and fear until this point. But somehow, everything I’d seen and everything I’d heard and everything I’d feared paled in comparison. This room, this altar, those orbs, they instilled in me a kind of bone deep chill that encouraged me to run away.
But the village.
Father.
Anneka.
Ivar.
I saw their faces, saw their fright and despair, I saw the plague shattering them into sparks and the Ør coming for the survivors. Why had I let myself speak such cruel words to my father? Anneka might have hated me. My father might not have loved me. But no one deserved to die like that.
Slowly, the orbs began to climb again, towards the opening of the peak.
“Wait,” I said instinctively. They froze. “Please, wait. What are you?” I paused, waiting for some form of response, but again they started to rise away from me. “Stop!” I screamed.
Stillness. Silence. The orbs stopped ascending.
“Stop. Whatever you are, if you’re sent by the Goddess, then please stop and help me. I’ve come so far for answers. I can’t leave without them.”
The lights made a small movement closer to me, and then paused again.
“I need to know why,” I said, distantly aware of tears running down my face, into my hair. “I need to know why this is happening.” I moved my eyes from the orbs to the Goddess beyond. “I need to know why you sent us the red lights when we could do nothing to save ourselves. I need to know why the Ør are on their way to butcher us after so many years of peace. I need to know why the plague keeps terrorizing my people. I need to know why we deserve it. And I need to know how I can stop it.”
More orbs descended from overhead. They circled around me, dancing. My voice seemed to beckon them, to encourage a response.
“Tell me what I must do and I’ll do it,” I pleaded, not moving my eyes from those bright stars shining so starkly above me. “I’ll do anything. We can’t survive the plague and the Ør. We can’t.”
I paused, breathless despite having only said a few words. As I lay there, staring into the face of the Goddess, I finally realized how wholly exhausted I was, like I’d never slept a night in my seventeen years. Every word took a little more out of me, until I was certain I’d have nothing left.
The lights started to ascend again. Pure, searing fury burned through me, and a store of energy buried somewhere deep inside burst out through my tongue.
“Stop!” I screamed again. “Don’t you leave me! I have travelled through snow and wind and mountains. I have left my family behind. I don’t even know if they’re still breathing. I nearly lost my life crossing the plain. I had to fight a monster I never thought I’d live to see. I left the only home I’ve ever known to come to the one place I was taught harbours nothing but death. And I would do it all over again if at the end it meant I would get answers. I’ve come in search of answers. I deserve answers.”
The lights had surrounded me again, swirling about me before clinging to my body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my voice sounded different, but I was so enraged, so full of emotion that I couldn’t stop to process every thought.
“I couldn’t save Skane seventeen years ago. I couldn’t stop babies from burning to death. I couldn’t stop elderly couples, married for most of their lives, from having to watch each other go mad with fever and die. I couldn’t stop my own mother from leaving me alone as a baby.” The stars overhead were blurred by tears. “She should have lived. I should have died.” I blinked to clear my eyes, but more tears fell. “And I couldn’t stop any of it. But I’m here now, and I want to stop this. Just tell me how. Just tell me what to do and I will do it.”
I realized as I fell quiet what had been different, what I couldn’t quite place earlier.
My words were no longer words. I was speaking in song. I felt sharply different than I had moments before, when every second I could feel energy seeping from my body. Now, with every passing word and every passing second, I renewed, charged.
“Show me how to save my people. Show me how we can defend ourselves. Give us the power to win.”
It was my song, they were my pleas, but there was another voice, another song that I could understand.
“Ósa.”
The voice was so pure I was afraid to raise my own again. “Yes,” I sang softly.
“Ósa, you have not the room in your heart to learn how you can save your people.”
I faltered, tried to reply, and then failed. I don’t have the room in my heart. I couldn’t make sense of it, no matter how hard I tried to.
“I don’t understand.”
“Why do you want to do this?”
I closed my eyes and pictured home. “They all deserve to be saved. Even my family. Especially my family. I want my father to forgive me.” My throat tightened as I sang the words.
“That isn’t so. You want your father’s forgiveness, but you do not need it. And you know that.”
Tears streamed from my eyes, turning cold against my skin. I knew my answer before I sang it in a whisper. “I want my mother to forgive me.”
The Goddess was silent for a moment as a sob erupted from my core, but my view began to change. Light gathered against the sky at the opening of the peak and a face eased into clarity. I didn’t have to ask who it was. A new rush of tears fell from my eyes and on to the altar.
“Ósa,” the woman said. Golden hair, as I’d imagined. Green eyes. A sweet smile, not unlike Anneka’s, if she ever used it. She reached a gentle hand towards me, and while it didn’t appear to reach me, warmth caressed my cheek.
“Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I continued to repeat it until another sob choked out my voice.
“Ósa,” she repeated. I never wanted to stop hearing her voice. So soft and beautiful and full of a kind of love I’d never experienced. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You did nothing wrong. You were only days old, and so much stronger than I. You had the will to fight that I didn’t, and you still do. I can see it in your eyes, behind your tears.”
“I hurt Father and Anneka so deeply. I want them to forgive me, but I don’t think they ever will.”
She quietly hushed me, and again I felt that comforting warmth on my cheek. I wanted to hold it there, to never let it leave. “You don’t need their forgiveness, Ósa. Their bitterness cannot command your life. Do not hold on to this guilt. It has plagued you for far too long. Lighten your heart and leave room for good things. You defied the odds and fought to survive as a baby, and you won. You were given a life just as fairly as your father and your sister. Never forget that.”
The warmth faded, and I instinctively reached out for her.
“Don’t leave me,” I said in a rush. “Don’t go.”
“This journey is not about me, Ósa. And it is not yet finished. There is more to be done.”
“Please,” I whispered.
“I love you, Ósa. Hold that in your heart.”
She began to fade away.
“I love you too, Mother.”
My heart ached as she disappeared, but it also felt lighter, as though the weight I’d been carrying for seventeen years had suddenly been removed. The stars of the Goddess came back into view, and again Her voice permeated the room.
“When the time comes, you will know how to save your people. You will know how to defend yourselves. You will have the power to win.”
With that, the lights and the voice began to fade away. “Wait!” I shouted, nearly rising from the altar. “There’s something I must know.” Some of the lights remained, and I still felt that sense of Her presence nearby. “Why does this happen? The red lights? Will it ever stop?”
There was a long pause, silence reigning in the room while I waited with bated breath. She certainly didn’t have to answer, and more than likely wouldn’t, but I couldn’t live with myself afterwards if I didn’t at least ask. Try to understand. None of this would matter if the past was doomed to repeat itself over and over again. The children and grandchildren of the people we might save this time would only die the next time the red lights showed. It was a pattern, a cycle of destruction that offered little room for hope.
“Once,” said the voice, so soft and gentle that the beauty of it could bring a person to tears, “long, long ago, when they were still the only beings to walk the world, a god and a goddess fell out over an island. She saw in it a beauty, a chance for a people and a world all its own. He saw only a chance for dominion, a land to rule. So the two of them did battle, and while her powers were stronger and chased him away, it was not before he cursed the island to a death that would repeat itself irregularly, unable to be stopped by the goddess. Since she could not break the curse, she exiled herself to the sky, where she could watch over the island eternally. The sky and all things in it are at her command, but the island she cannot touch.”
I gazed at the stars, open-mouthed. Something painful tugged at my heart, and I realized I felt pity for the Goddess. Pity for a darkness that was beyond her control. Pity for the death and destruction she was forced to witness over and over again. One day, either by the hand of an Ør or in my own bed at the age of one hundred, I would die, but she would still be here. She would have to watch it happen again.
“The plague,” I said. “I came to ask for help. To ask you to keep it away. We could not handle the fever and a fight with the Ør. But … you said that you are unable to stop it.”
She was quiet for a moment. “The Ør are a battle you must face, for they are even now massing at the shoreline, but I can help you fight. Meet them head-on and you will see what I can do. But fight you must, and I cannot guarantee the outcome. The plague … the plague is different. It is something I have no power to destroy.”
A long silence slipped by, and then her voice, soft, as though she wasn’t really saying it to me, said, “The curse now placed upon the land, undone by no immortal hand, steeped in blood it now shall be, once or twice a century.”
Though the words were quiet, they resounded in the room like a song. I didn’t know who’d written them or where they’d come from, but they meant something more than our simple poems and songs back home. These words were tied to something ancient, a curse rooted in the very beginnings of Skane.
“The power of the curse is strong, but the power of the stars will always be stronger,” She said, and again I wasn’t sure whom She was addressing. “My immortality prevents me from bringing that power to the land, but you are different. If you can command it, if it can touch these shores, it can push aside any curse or any power lurking beneath the snow. Harness that power, bring it to life, that it may chase away the darkness haunting these lands.”
The words spiralled around, jumbling together until I didn’t know one from the next. None of this made sense, and even less so the more I thought about it. If you can command it. Bring it to life. Chase away the darkness.
She paused again, then said, “Hurry, Ósa. Time is against you. When the moment comes, you will know what to do.” I waited, hoping that She would speak once more, but then all sound vanished from the room. The lights that had clung to my body began to fade, yet I felt nothing. My ears rang with the sudden quiet, and drying tears stung my eyes. She would help us! I sat up, slowly, shaking. All the lights had disappeared.
I stared at the stone floor, thinking of everything and nothing. The past few minutes, they might have been a dream, might have never truly happened, and I worried that if I stood up, it would undo everything. I might find myself back home, rising from my cot in the corner, beneath a sky bleeding red, helpless and small. But there wasn’t room for fear. My body flooded with a hope so intense it nearly pulled my mouth into a smile. I focused on my senses, on ensuring I was here, in this room, on this stone, feeling its coolness beneath me.
Glancing up to the sky and drawing in a deep breath, I tensed.
Something was changing overhead.
The stars of the Goddess shone brighter than I had ever seen them. They fairly near pulsed: pulsed like the rhythm of my heart, an optimistic voice in my head making itself known for the first time. I ran to the door. Something inside me knew that when I stepped on to the ridge, back into the clear, cold night, things would be very different.
I passed through the doorway and took in lungfuls of the chill air. Above, the universe was changing. The stars that formed the Goddess were moving, gliding through the night sky further towards the south. Within moments, none of them any longer remained directly overhead, directly over the peak in the part of the sky where they’d sat since eternity began. Now, in the spot where I’d always looked up to see Her, to where I’d always turned my head when I needed that drop of comfort from above, there was only darkness. But not entirely, I realized with a start. Where they’d previously been close to invisible in contrast to the Goddess’s brightly shining stars, there were new stars.
Faint, small stars that I didn’t recognize, but something within me seemed to understand. There were small empty spots in other constellations, insignificant, easy to miss stars that only someone like myself or Ymir were likely to notice. And there they sat, in the wake of the Goddess’s sudden move. Around us, other constellations were changing, moving, shifting. The entire sky seemed to be transitioning. In the west, the Warrior and the Immortal slid towards the northern edge of the sky, yet a single star from each was travelling away much faster. They streamed across the sky towards our mountain, and within moments had joined the fainter stars in the newly-made emptiness. To our left in the northwestern sky, the Giant was changing as well. He was moving, further towards the west, but only subtly. Something else about him changed, which was far more apparent. The stars within the constellation were moving, and as with the Warrior and the Immortal, individual stars moved to join the space overhead. I realized, after a few more thundering beats of my heart, that he was kneeling.
From far and wide, stars were moving, coming closer and joining the new set that was growing, while the ones left behind spiralled north, then west, then south to get out of the way. I was reminded, though on a much grander level, of the eddying pools of the tide along the coast. I pulled my attention away from the other constellations and watched as an image began to form. They spun and shifted, taking a shape my eyes fought to understand. Words began to rise in my chest, but they weren’t mine. They were unbidden, yet dying to come out. I couldn’t contain them. Couldn’t stop them. They erupted in song.
“You have come to me selflessly, with the hope of saving those whom you love, and for that, you are blessed. You carry within yourself the power of the stars, the power of the sky. Go and fight your battle, and the power will go with you. The mountains and all within them are at your command. Speak, and they will listen.”
When the voice left me, I fell to my knees gasping for breath. A wave of unnatural warmth crashed against me on the open ridge, despite the bitter cold of such a height, of the dead of night. It wrapped and curled around me, a blanket of comfort that renewed my soul. A light sparked in my mind. I could see it inside me, like a candle behind my eyes. There was such an intense energy within me I could have run all the way back to Neska.
When I stood, I wasn’t the same girl. I wasn’t the Ósa who’d entered that room such a short time ago. Everything was new, fresh. Ready. I looked to the sky once more, where the stars had stopped moving. Where the Goddess had been only minutes before, sat the new form of a girl. She was smaller than the Goddess, but every bit as bright, and twice as fierce. Like the sky was a mirror, I knew who it was.
It’s you, said a voice from within.