There would no longer be any normal or average days in my life. No days without being haunted by the void opened inside me. No days without the memory of wings of fire, of a body aflame, of the scorching touch of the infinite. I met a god, finally, and it tore my world apart.
HoPa and I were playing Audra. It had become ritual. Mother practiced Mirtis Kardas in the morning and I watched or followed along. HoPa would prepare food for winter. This often meant packing it into a clay jar and burying it. Then we’d all wash in the river together. HoPa massaged mother and then she relaxed while HoPa and I played Audra. No matter how many times we played, I never won, and he never let me win. I assume I got better, but it never felt that way. Everytime I felt like I was close to victory, his stones would begin rising against me until I was drowning in them. Rather than discourage me, it thrilled me, for he beat me in new ways each time. I learned how to lose with my HoPa. Something I was never very good at, no matter how much practice I’ve had.
We never finished that last game. Instead, a shriek struck us dumb and mute. Holding my ears, I couldn’t hear myself screaming, but my throat strained all the same. As quickly as it came, it was gone, and all was silence.
An immense silence. The kind that sucks sound away. No birds or animals chirping or rustling through the fallen leaves and barren trees. Even the wind held its whispering breath. Mother stood. Her face so determined as she scanned the sky. She never looked back at us, though I often tell myself she did. That she turned to us, gave us a last token of love, and instructed us in what to do.
HoPa packed his stones in his bag and mine in my bag. He looped the string round my neck and smiled, “You need to be brave. Hold these close and count them when you get scared. They’ll give you strength.”
Another shriek ripped through the air and we became rooted to where we stood. My vision blurred, as if smeared with oil. The shrieking unravelled whatever it is that holds our bodies together. I collapsed as if made of water, pooled at the feet of my HoPa.
His own legs quaked. I don’t believe I was afraid until then. I don’t believe I really understood that this was the dragon approaching. The shrieking ended, and I could hear again, but every noise was drowned out by the beating of the dragon’s immense wings. HoPa lifted me up and pulled me inside. He took the time to put his Audra stones away. It’s a small thing. A funny thing. I’ve thought often about that moment. A dragon was literally crashing down on us from the sky, and he slowed his panic enough to carefully put his treasured stones away. As if we would all be back to use them again that evening. It seemed silly. Perplexing.
It was a desperate thing. A final moment where I believe he tried to force normality back into his life. If he could just put the stones back like it was any other day, any other lifetime, then all of this would end. The dragon would fly on by, the clan would return, and nothing would be lost or damaged or burnt away.
The wings so loud, it brought him back outside. He didn’t turn to tell me to stay, so I didn’t. I knew he brought me inside to hide me. To maybe hide himself. But his very heart was out there, ready to face the dragon. Ready to fight a god of wind and fire. Of power.
I remember the cloud falling over the clearing once filled by the clan. The cloud so dark and so fast that it sent a crashing burning wind towards us, knocking me to the ground. HoPa braced himself against the door, the strain of it obvious. I remember it roaring and cracking the sky, splintering my vision, and turning everything black.
I was deaf and blind to the world for I don’t know how long, but I remember opening my eyes.
The dragon was enormous. Larger than I dreamt possible. Its neck longer than a tree and its tail somehow even longer. Its wings stretched over the clearing, eclipsing the suns. It circled lazily, its legs tucked into its body. A single leg was larger than HoPa. It was black blushed with purple swirls. Like it was oil and dye had been poured in. Mesmerizing. Flowing purple through its dark scales. Its wings were black on top but a pale-yellow underneath.
Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe it. Gorgeous. Transcendant. I was transfixed. HoPa was too. Still on my back, I watched it glide over us.
I still wonder if it would’ve just passed us by. If it had bothered to harm any other clan, or if they all ran the way one does from any natural disaster. When the flood approaches, it only makes sense to get out of its way. More than that, the flood doesn’t care that we’re here. That we live and have homes stretched out in its path. The same may be true of the dragon. From what I know of the gods, they care little for us or the things we do.
But the arrow struck its nostril. Its head snapped back and roared. Distorting sound. That’s what it did. Such a deep note that it rumbled through my bones in a way that roiled my stomach. Nauseated, I bit back bile, swallowed my own vomit before I had time to think. Another arrow struck its face and bounced off its scales. Its enormous eye rolled towards my mother, and I saw her too. Standing there, her sword hanging from her left hand, which also held the bowstring and arrow. Pulled taut, she released another, but it missed. The dragon snorted and the arrow stuck in its nostril evaporated. My mother stood, unafraid. Her jaw set and her hair billowing from her head, her hemp clothing loose and without protection. She hadn’t had time to put on her armor. Not that it would have done any good.
The dragon came down lightly in the Meadow and my mother ran towards it. HoPa did too, and I followed. On the way, he ripped an axe from the log he had been chopping into firewood. It was not a large axe but it was all he had.
There was no way to tell a fight was happening. No sounds or sights. In the distance there was this intermittent rumbling, but nothing more. But we ran, fearing my mother had already lost.
The dragon raised its great head high into the air, its wings flared out behind it, unable to fully stretch in the confines of the village. Its head then crashed down where I couldn’t see. HoPa was far ahead of me, already over the next ring of hillhomes. The dragon roared again, and it launched towards the edge of the forest. Its head rose once more, and it spewed flowing light downward. It wasn’t fire. More like a river made of liquid sunslight. The forest burst into flames and that’s where I ran.
On the next hill, I paused to catch my breath. HoPa was sprinting as fast as he could towards them. I would never catch him. Panic gave me strength. They would die alone, without me as witness.
Witness. It’s funny to think of now. For that was my only use. To be witness. And yet no one would ever heed my words.
Those are the words I fill in now. In truth, there were no words that ran through my head. No stories or songs. Only rushes of feeling. My brain had reverted to that of an animal. There was panic and fear and anger and a great sorrow. A sorrow I couldn’t even name if I tried. I often wonder if it was the same sorrow all the gods hold inside. The loneliness they feel in a world infected by humanity. Whatever the case, I ran and ran and ran, following the dragon’s movements best I could, for it was all I could see.
There was little noise. That may shock you the most. When we think of battle, especially the glorious ones from songs—and there are many songs commemorating this battle, though none of them are true—we imagine there’s much more noise to the whole affair. Steel clashing, shouting, screaming, and so on. There was not even the sound of the forest burning. The dragon didn’t light the trees on fire. It incinerated them. There were no trees where its fire touched. The only record of its desctruction is the scorched skin of Saol and the blackened trees that surround their obliterated sisters.
I had never run so fast in all my life. Even so, I was too late. I heard my mother screaming. Not words, but something deep and bestial. Something deeper than her skin or even her heart. A rage so great that even the dragon paused. That’s when I came over the final hill to see. My HoPa. Only a chunk of charred meat beneath the right foreleg of the dragon. Its claws wrapped round his enormous blackening body.
It had incinerated a cluster of trees and fought my mother with its back to the forest. I didn’t see how, but my mother had pressed the dragon into a place where it couldn’t open its wings to fly, where it couldn’t turn round without getting its tail stuck between trees.
The heat of the dragon radiated, scorching the grass and fallen leaves of the trees circling the clearing, melting the already charred skin of my HoPa beneath its clawed feet, clutching his melting body. It roared, mouth open wide enough to crawl inside, but my mother stood before it, sword in one hand, tears steaming from her cheeks, skin peeling all over like she was being cooked. She was still, my mother. Her hair blowing from the radiance of that great beast, her simple clothes starting to smoke.
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The dragon—so black and beautiful it shamed the suns, ripped the light from the sky—pulled its neck in, preparing to strike, then launched its jaws forward. My mother, instead of diving away or cowering, dived right for it. Arm stretched forward. Sword extended straight out.
It happened so fast. Mother twisted away from the jaws and plunged her sword deep into the dragon’s eye. Smoke and fire burst from its eyesocket. The sword melted to nothing and my mother’s arm up to the elbow along with it. The dragon recoiled, tossing my mother’s smoking body into the air, and shrieking so loud it fractured the air and stabbed at my ears. My mother hit the ground and quickly rolled to her feet. She stood naked, the smoking tattered hemp clothing clinging to her, her hair burnt away. Her right arm missing, the stub sloughing off melted flesh. She turned towards the dragon. It reeled, spitting fire and bleeding a substance blacker than night. The very air quaked, my bones rattled in my chest as the dragon collapsed, screaming its horror.
That’s when I really saw her, my mother. The woman she would always be from then on. Hairless, her skull a melted wasteland. Her eyes forever melted closed. Her ears melted away. Her melting arm bubbled and flesh dripped away like molten glass beads. She dropped to her knees, her mouth just a gaping hole calling the name of my dead father, whose body charred beneath the dead dragon. Calling the name of my living father, my brothers lost to us.
I found myself able to move again, and I walked towards the scene of devastation.
The dragon kept flailing, tumbling backwards into the trees, burning them with its inferno touch. It clawed at its face, trying to remove the sword that no longer existed. Its eyes bled a viscous blackness. It roared and roared, but its blasting power shrank and collapsed on itself. It snapped its great head back and forth on its enormous neck, smashing over trees and pummelling the ground. It tried to stand but its legs failed. Its wings tried to beat, to fly away, but they got caught in the trees, ripping the membrane of skin until they looked like tattered sails. I watched as the dragon’s godhood failed. As its power dissipated and finally silenced.
My mother crawled towards HoPa using her remaining hand and her melted, half-arm as if he called to her in a voice only she could hear. Finding him, she clung to his blackened body whose skin sloughed off against her touch. My body heavy, my vision slurred, but I forced myself forward to pull her away from what was once my father.
The Deathwalkers came as if gliding through seams in the air, their heads and bodies shrouded by blackrobes, blackhoods. Wherever shadow and the halflight of the shaded clearing met, their bodies seemed to solidify. Two of them, one for HoPa and one for mother. With them came a song without words. A haunting melody both familiar and terrifying. Something old. Older than the bones of the world. It invaded my body. It calmed me, and this disgusted me. Like spiders crawling beneath my skin. I itched but couldn’t scratch. I wretched. They paused, watching the dragon, and shuddered. Shuddered as if even this was impossible. A dragon dead, and humans standing over its remains. Turning away, they came to what was left of HoPa’s body. They tugged at the burnt body of my father, trying to free him from my mother’s grip.
I thought, then, that this was the song my mother told me of. The song of the forest, a terrible thing to behold. A dirge for all that was lost, carried in the bodies of these monsters.
“No!” My mother’s voice came like shattering glass. Her shout startled the Deathwalker to slow long enough for my mother to lunge forward with her remaining hand. She caught the bony wrist of the one holding my father and yanked it forward causing it to trip into the scorched grass. My mother fell upon it ferociously. The other Deathwalker fell back and was gone, evaporated into darkness. But my mother had one pinned down with her knees. Hammering her fist down into its face over and over again. I caught a glimpse of its head, bonewhite and hairless, cracking beneath the force of her fist.
Human.
What I’ll never forget is the way she tore into the flesh of that Deathwalker. How she ate it piece by piece while the other reappared, flinched away, and sang its Deathly song for my dead HoPa and ushered him to eternity, as dust. Maybe to Todtor, like LoPa said.
When she was done with the Deathwalker, she tore its jaw from what remained of its head, then pawed her way to the dragon’s body, and used the jawbone to dig through the scales and flesh of the dragon. A caustic scratching that shivered up my spine. Even now, it sets my teeth to grinding just remembering. The fiery blood scarred her skin forever as it sprayed on her nakedness and the clearing, killing all that once grew there.
Coming closer, I approached the mutilated Deathwalker. The song they sang was loud in my ears but constantly being overpowered by that caustic scraping of bones on scale. Inside its hood, there was a shattered skull. Like a melon someone stomped on. Blood and brain and flesh and bone pulverized together. A sick fascination took me. I crouched beside it and reached for its dead body. Maybe to prove that it was once human. But my wrist was caught, grabbed by the bony hand of the other Deathwalker. I gasped and turned, looking it right in the eyes. It looked like a child’s emaciated face. Its lip whimpered but it made no sound. I tried to pull away, but it held me, then turned to the other Deathwalker, now dead. It touched the dead body and I was flooded with memories and images and sensations. Pain tore through me and I screamed and when I was done screaming the Deathwalker was gone, leaving the ruined body behind.
It left something in me. Something of the dead. Of the deadlands. Of Death itself. I’ve never been the same since that day, for obvious reasons. But it’s Death that’s inside me. Her icy, beautiful, ensnaring touch. I believe that I was touched by the Child Goddess of Death and Light, and it has scorched all that should have flowered from my hands. Though it all flashed through me in an instant, I still remember Her purple eyes like Twilight. Her hair blacker than the dragon. Her tiny girl’s body. A child. I watched Her sleeping. I watched the Dream spilling from Her. I saw Her holding me at the very end, at an Ocean without end. I heard Her song, and I hear it still. Even now. That song calling me always.
She believes we all belong to Her, but we do not. My mother proved Her grip was weak.
Assaulted by the lizard stink of the dead dragon, I squinted and gagged and watched as my mother ripped the dragon’s heart from its body. A heart as big as I was. She threw it on the ground where it smoked. She turned to it with her eyeless head for a long while. Maybe waiting for it to cool. Maybe remembering who and what she was. Begging the gods for forgiveness. Trying to cry and mourn for HoPa, for me, for herself.
I’ll never know what was going through my mother’s head, but I’ll always remember watching her crawl on her melted arm while her hand reached forward, leading her way to the dragon’s heart. How her hand found it and recoiled from the heat but then grabbed it and began eating. It burnt her tongue and lips away and when nothing remained she opened that gaping hole of a mouth and moaned and sobbed. I came to her then and held her. Her hairless naked body so hot it hurt me, the stink of sulphur and burning skin assaulted my lungs, but I held on for her. For both of us.
As the suns fell away and the moons glowed in the skies, my mother lay gasping in the mud made by dirt and dragonblood. I knelt vigil over her as night deepened. Often, I put my head to her chest to hear the erratic beat of her heart. I bit back tears though my whole body screamed. Every bit of me wept for my mother.
I stroked her ruined cheek and kissed her where once her eyes stared so lovingly at me. Her skin’s color was scorched away to the hue of pale deadskin, of curdled goat’s milk, wherever the dragon’s fire bit at her but she was still my mother. Even if she couldn’t hear or feel me, I stayed beside her and promised I wouldn’t cry until she walked again, or I gave her back to MotherTree.
My skin crawled. I turned to the forgotten Deathwalker watching us.
I sucked in my breath and stood over my mother, to protect her. Sweat covered me and I said, “Not her.”
The Deathwalker remained like a shadow over us, unmoving, as if it barely existed in the physical world. Like a ghost. Haunting us. I took my mother’s hand and pressed my ear to her heart. “She lives. You can’t have her!”
It watched us till the bluesun shined overhead and the redsun peered over the horizon. I never slept and barely closed my eyes, constantly checking to make sure my mother still lived, making sure the Deathwalker kept its distance. I wonder, now, if it was this choice alone that shaped my life so powerfully. Had the Deathwalkers collected her, would my mother have gone peacefully into Death?
The trees touched by dragon’s blood had all wilted and died. The entire clearing blackened.
The air surrounding us seemed to shiver and then thicken. Viscous. Like the air clung to me, like I moved through sludge, weighing me down. The Deathwalker evaporated into the shadows.
The wolf entered the clearing made by the dragon. And then a song wove through the air. Like a braided melody drifting in from a thousand miles away, from a thousand thousand years ago. Faint at first but rolling in stronger and deeper beneath while rising higher and lighter above, surrounding, then flooding my body, overpowering all other sounds. It drenched me and the air round me. It filled me so full I could barely breathe or see. My vision slurred and I trudged towards it as if swimming through mud. The wolf towered over me and mother, its fur grey and dense. It stepped into the clearing and with it came a new wind that nearly knocked me over. The music so delicate but deep. Deep from the bowels of the forest, from the bowels of history, rolling through me with the thousands of years of memory and fecundity. The wolf licked its jaws and stared at me with its huge blue eyes. It stared at me and I felt my heart expanding, all the blood in me thickening, stepping into an eternal rhythm beating from its great chest. I fell back as it approached and tripped over my mother’s still gasping body.
It brought its head so close. I couldn’t move. I wanted to touch it. To feel its fur against my skin. To drink in its godly scent. But my body was trapped in awe. So full of the forest’s music that life became unreal. Every sensation was a storm.
It sniffed at my mother and prodded her with its nose. Then licked my mother’s face and her melted arm. It turned to my slackjawed face, snorted, then trotted back into the forest.
When it was out of sight, the air decompressed, became fluid again. With it went the music, that ancient melody. It was like normal sound and light returned, stealing away that power. That magic. It broke me. An absence so profound it wore me thin. Like waking from a dreamless sleep. My throat was tight and my tongue felt swollen but I returned to mother. Her breathing had evened, her heart steadied.
My mother lived. She lived and when she woke she became their god.
