Berserker god

CHAPTER THREE

Skallagrim

Igasped, and it was like the very first time I ever took breath. I wrenched my head back, my eyes—no, my eye—wide and unblinking. My skull was going to split. I knew it. Could feel it. Feel the bone cracking, buckling, breaking under the pressure of the tsunami inside it. The ferocious wave, like a suddenly undammed river, filled me with sounds, tastes, thoughts, memories, memories. Memories when I had not had a memory in... in...

In I did not know how long.

I could not recognize it all, could not tell one memory from another. Could not place all the syllables joining and separating, words and not-words sparking into sound and then disappearing. It all crashed and took everything along with it, flooding through my head. A dauntless river, a wide and glittering river, a river that felt somehow familiar, like I’d swam in it, bathed in it, lived my entire life beside it...

My life. What life? What life?

What life had I lived once? Who had I been until now? There was someone before the darkness. There had to have been. Someone distant and discordant, someone whose name was nothing to me now but the sound of water crashing over rock, wind rustling through the tall reeds of somewhere, somewhere, somewhere...

Knees digging into dirt, I groaned and closed my eye, clutching the sides of my head as the river slammed and swirled. If I let go, the bowl of my brain would crack and then shatter. And I’d fought too cursedly long to be obliterated now by nothing but the force of an entire life forgotten inside my own head.

It was all moving too fast. If I could just grab on to something, anything, maybe I’d be able to make sense of it all. Stop the river just long enough to snatch a single thought or word or sound.

There! There was a sound!

The sound of scrabbling through rock and dust.

I cracked my eye open, and for the first time since I did not know when, could see. Truly see. Forms and shapes and shadows and light. Light concentrated in the shape of a not-dark thing that ran from me. Feet flying. Arms pumping. Hair long and flowing like silver that comes from the sky at night.

I could not ever remember uttering a word out loud before now. Perhaps I never had.

But I did so then.

“Little star.”

It was a desperate rasp. A plea. An echo from the river. I could not tell if I recognized the voice or not. But I felt it come from my throat, so what else could that mean but that it was mine?

I panted and grunted on my knees, still clutching both sides of my head, and watched the bright creature as it ran. Everything hurt. Bone and blood vessel and sinew. Every part ached like my entire body had been stretched too thin for too long. Like each cell had been swollen, bursting, raging, brutal, berserk.

A word from the river, shooting out like an arrow took hold of me.

Berserker.

The further the creature got from me in this valley, the more my head hurt. And the blacker the edges of my vision became. The river receded, taking everything with it, until the crash of water was replaced by fever and fury and darkness so viscous, so vicious, that I nearly forgot how to breathe.

I did not know what that little star was.

But I needed it. It had taught me something, brought me back to something, and I could not bear to lose it or be lost again. It had brought me back to language and thought and myself, whoever in the cursed skies that was.

I tried to call it back. Little star. Little star. But the words never made it to my mouth. Something between my brain and my teeth had stoppered it all up. Already, things were disappearing. I was disappearing. And maybe I never even knew the words I’d wanted to say at all. I tried to remember, tried to slice through shadows until I reached the pure chaos of the river’s churn. Little... Little...

Little not-dark. Do not run from me.

Limbs stretched and swelled. Scales rippled. Claws lengthened.

Power surged. Power that felt like anger, like hunger, like poison, like pain.

Drag body through the valley.

Darkness everywhere.