God Within Us

RUN!” echoed the voice in her ears.

RUN! it sounded again at her back, the voice cracking from desperation and fear as arrows fell and horses thundered across the plains.

Yesugei’s voice followed her long after he was swallowed by the high grass, his call ever hounding at her back as she rode her courser through the woods, iron-shod hooves trampling through lacerating shrubs and bushes as the branches whipped and scratched at her face.

The plains were long gone, but the blood and screams seemed to whisper through the woods all around her, grasping like fingers to pull her back into the nightmare of hissing arrows and swirling dust. If she looked back, she was afraid she would be there all over again - seeing Yesugei lying beneath his slain horse, hearing his cries for her to run, and then the shame would crash over her all over again.

Soon, the feeling of the horse beneath her disappeared - becoming as much a part of her as the familiar weight of the Kladenets that rested in the crook of her arm. By the time the darkness of night shrouded the dense woods around her, the courser’s mad sprint had slowed to an exhausted crawl, and then the poor steed could bear her no longer. She dismounted from the tired horse carefully, but when her feet touched the ground she felt the roiling terror that drove her through the day evaporate into an empty, hollow exhaustion. It was all she could do to avoid hitting her head as she sank to the ashen ground - and once she laid down, she knew she would not rise again for a long while.

High above, Vasilisa saw the skies had cleared at last as she turned onto her back. The night looked strangely beautiful after nine days of empty darkness - though the moon was hidden from her view by the trees, it seemed as though she had never seen so many stars in her life. The snout of the Dragon was near its zenith, and harrying it from below was the Lion, its jaws snapping around the great beast's zig-zag tail. There was the Stallion rearing up across the east, and the Huntsman striding out from the west, half-hidden by the canopy of the forest overhead. The stars shone tirelessly - eternally - their cold beauty untouched by the madness consuming the world below.

She wanted to curl up into a ball and weep, but the tears would not come. She felt as though they had all been squeezed out of her long ago, leaving only a terrible emptiness inside that could never be filled. But the stars above shone as brightly as ever, untouched by her sorrow.

How can they look so beautiful? wondered Vasilisa, her thoughts growing tired and scattered as she felt her eyelids growing unbearably heavy.

How can the stars look so beautiful while the world is so ugly?

***

When she closed her eyes, she felt herself falling - falling endlessly through a dark, clouded sky. There was no moon, no stars, no lights to guide her sight - only the bitter cold of the wind that rushed against her face and fluttered through her hair.

When she peered down from the clouds, the ground seemed so far below that she could only make out the vaguest outlines of the sentinel trees that rose up from the ground like spears. She could feel how fast she was falling, and she knew what awaited her when she hit the ground - even in dreams, one could not fall for an eternity. She would wake up before she hit the ground - or if it was a nightmare, perhaps she would see herself skewered by the treetops before awakening. But the pain would not come - she would always wake up before the pain.

And what if this is no dream? A soft voice whispered, though it seemed to come from all around her as she fell.

“It must be a dream,” she replied. She grasped at the fading wisps of her memories, and remembered how she had fallen asleep - shrouded in the misery of the world that was now rushing up to break her fall. “If this isn’t a dream - then I will die. Humans cannot fly - and so I fall.”

How do you know you cannot fly? spoke the voice, light and mocking. Have you ever tried?

She had come close to trying - once. When she was a little girl - no older than eight - she had climbed one of the great towers of her father’s stone keep and sat on its tiled roof. The boys Stavr and Pyotr had called her stupid for climbing so high - but they said so from a distance, sheepishly lingering by the windows as they craned their heads up to look at her.

She stayed there all through the night, and when the lights of the sky appeared she remembered how they had sung to her then - they called her to join them in the heavens, beautiful and eternal. But when she tried to reach for them - the Dragon, the Lion, the three Star-Maidens and all the others - she realized she was only a girl, and that she was afraid. Afraid to leap. Afraid to fly, for fear that she would fall.

The ground was rushing up to her ever faster, and down below she saw something else - something writhing and twisting between the sentinel trees. Something lurking, waiting, hungering. Terror lanced and spread through her chest as she glanced down at the waiting darkness - and though she told herself it was all a dream, she felt her own whispered words now rattled hollow.

“Please,” she managed to choke out to the darkness of the night sky. “Help me.”

What do you think I am trying to do? came the voice.

As it spoke, she saw a spot in the clouds begin to twist and darken, forming into a roiling mass of shadows. The shadows took on a vivid form, tendrils of darkness shaping into fluttering silks as the unshaped mass transformed into a man who seemed to float through the air as though it were water, his robe twisting and flapping violently in the wind as he descended to her level.

Golden eyes opened to meet her own.

“You are dead.” she muttered to Chirlan. She tried to make her voice sharp and deadly like her mother’s, but it only came out as a squeak.

Am I? the sorcerer asked wordlessly, his voice ringing in her mind as his thin lips twisted into a small, coy smile.

His smile was warm, genuine - Chirlan’s whole face seemed to glow with a life that she had never seen in the reality of the waking world. Yet she felt the corners of her mind tugging at some strange feeling - the feeling that once, long ago, she had seen him as he appeared to her now.

But the feeling was not hers - it felt as alien to her as the Apostles’ crystals, as though she were peering into the mind of another, a shadow of a memory from a life lived eons ago. The Chirlan that she knew was cold and lifeless, left to rot alone in the darkness of a cavern beyond the eyes of gods and men.

“I saw your corpse festering in the waters. You are dead - nothing more than a rotten spirit. Why do you torment me?”

Aren’t I supposed to be helping you? Chirlan said. His smile twisted into a rueful grin as his eyes flicked down to the approaching ground and the darkness below. A far greater torment than anything I can manage waits for you down there.

His words seemed to further stir whatever lay down there in the woods - a great hiss rattled up from the trees and the darkness, but she did not dare to look down again. She heard other sounds beneath the lurking darkness of the ground below - the tolling of bells, a woman’s bitter sobs, and the roar of crashing ocean waves.

“This is just a dream,” she whispered to herself. “It must be a dream. None of this is real. And when I hit the ground, I will wake up.”

When you hit the ground, you will die, rang Chirlan’s voice through her mind. The voice in her head was no longer mocking - she sensed the urgency in his words. She sensed his fear.

“What am I to do?” she eventually said to the sorcerer.

The ground was drawing nearer - the darkness was growing closer. Soon it would swallow her whole, and she would either wake up, or she would die.

I told you already, the sorcerer spoke voicelessly. The answer is to fly.

His golden armbands jingled lightly as he drew forth one clawed hand, awaiting her grasp. She felt herself falling faster and faster - as though she were now being sucked into the waiting, hissing darkness.

Fly with me, now! the sorcerer beckoned, his look fearful as he peered down at the darkness rushing up to swallow them both. He would not leave her - if she was to die, then she sensed he would die with her.

Fly, or die.

She thrust one hand out to grasp Chirlan’s. As soon as her hand was in his own, she felt a searing pain as his gold-tipped claws bit deep into her flesh. And then she felt her fall slow - as though she had landed into a pool of water. When she looked down, the grasping tendrils of darkness faded away along with the sentinel trees that waited to impale her - the ground below melted and swirled into a uniform, unbroken plane as smooth as ice.

Her feet touched the ground gently, and as she settled onto the invisible floor that ran beneath her she felt Chirlan’s iron grasp on her hand weaken. But when she looked up to speak to the sorcerer, she saw only the glittering stars above - a thousand-thousand twinkling lights, every one a dream, and every dream nurtured by a dreamer.

They grow lesser every passing day, whispered Chirlan’s voice from all around. The dreams are fading - and the dreamers will soon awaken. The world below rings its death knell even now.

The heavens above seemed to stretch on forever, but as she tried to focus on one of the glittering stars above she saw a scar rip across the night sky - crossing from one side of the endless heavens to the other. She saw another crack appear, and then another, and another - and like a growing spider’s web, the cracks in the night sky grew ever more until the perfect heavens above her head were ripped apart into a shattering mosaic of a thousand different pieces.

Then the mosaic above her head shattered, and in the great fragments of the glittering night sky she saw them - the dreams.

She saw the smoking ruins of a city put to the sword as though she were a star herself - watching from high on. As she traced her eyes from one end of the city to another, the cobblestone streets and the great stone towers made themselves known to her memory. If she looked hard enough, she wondered if she could see a little girl sitting atop the roof of the tallest of the bastions. The city’s carcass lay sprawled out, but she sensed there remained life yet within the husk - there was a whisper, a sigh, that echoed up from the death and rubble.

She cast her gaze about the city, and found herself looking to the Elder Tree, the last of the ancient, immortal oaks that once stood upon the hill of Belnopyl. The tree was no longer there - in its place, she saw there stood a giantess with skin like that of tree bark, her eyes closed in serenity, hardly moving, hardly stirring, and her feet were rooted to the earth. Long arms stretched up towards the sky, and from the tips of her fingers Vasilisa saw thin boughs curving up to the heavens, and from each branch dark green leaves sprouted, full of life. The woman’s chest was hollow, and from the place where her lungs would have been there was instead a dark, yawning pit from which a slow, steady stream of silver water trickled. Vasilisa’s eyes lingered upon the woman’s face, but then the giantess’ eyes opened with a flash, and then the dream was broken.

She then looked towards the east, and in the glinting light of another falling fragment she saw another dream. A dream of fire and choking sulfur - of ash and death. When she opened her eyes to the dream, she saw a great valley awash in a lashing sea of flame and molten stone. Rising high above the flames and boiling heat were a dozen robed men dressed in the silks and gold of kings - and all knelt before a broken, bitter man whose heart burned through his chest. The king of kings turned his gaze to the sky, and his howl rang far and wide across the burning steppe - filled with rage and sorrow - and the shadow that stretched from his form cast a pair of dark wings upon the valley to swallow it whole.

She looked away from the flaming valley, and felt her gaze turned to the north. Higher and higher she rose, past the boreal forests, past the taiga, on and on. A great shimmering wall of vibrant green and violet light lay beyond the frozen wastes, and when she went beyond even that she saw sprawled beneath her a great lake. In the deep of night, the surface of the lake seemed like a portal to the heavens - its smooth, unbroken surface reflecting all the lights of the sky above. Then she saw that there were two figures on the lake, dancing and twirling upon the surface of the water - one was a man, clad in heavy furs and garb of a land and people she knew not, and the other was a woman, with long, dark tresses and with skin like cracked stone. When she narrowed her eyes, she realized the dancers upon the lake were locked in battle - a bright sword was in the man’s hand, and a long, black knife in the woman’s. A cloud passed over the dancers’ heads, shielding them from Vasilisa’s eyes, and when it passed the figures upon the lake had disappeared to reveal another.

A woman, cloaked in pale suns, knelt upon the surface of the water. Over her head was a crown of eleven burning motes of light, and in her hands there burned a twelfth, searing the flesh from her fingers. In the bright light Vasilisa saw she was looking upon herself, weathered and broken, yet also regal and proud. A woman her mother and father would be yet proud to call their daughter. She saw herself raise the mote of light to the sky, as if beholding it in wonder. Then, at last, she opened her mouth, and swallowed the burning star.

Then the dreams began to fade, and the shattered night sky began to fall.

The lights and their dreams faded one by one as the shards fell from the heavens. As they fell, the shards became spines long and sharp, the death of the dreams leaving them darker than night.

The dreamers fell from the heavens, and where they pierced the ground below death washed across the land in a great, suffocating wave. She saw death reaching for her, howling and screaming.

Now you know why you must fly, Chirlan’s voice whispered to her as death rushed to embrace her. Now you know why you must live. The Mother’s water, the kiss of fire, the swallowed star. The Question…the question of all mortal men…it must be yours…

The hand of death reached out to her, and as it grasped for her the darkness shuddered and swirled around her as it ripped away like a veil.

She saw the grasping hand was not of shadows, but pale and trembling with fear - it belonged to a woman, with black hair and deep, dark eyes. Vasilisa knew the woman from somewhere, and when she saw the faded griffon sewn into her dress she remembered.

Nesha’s voice shook as she shouted to the others who watched from afar.

“She’s awake!”