Berserker god

CHAPTER FIVE

Skallagrim

Ibarely knew what I was doing as I cracked open the sky. The words only came to me as I flew into the crack. Sky door.

I’d opened a door. I felt I’d done it many times before. The motions of the act were as natural as breathing. I did not know where the door would lead me. I had no name of any other world to call upon. I had nothing but my little star in my arms and the image of the river in my head. So I focused on that. On the river plunging and swirling and calling to me.

And it was like I conjured that river. Shaped it out of nothing but my own thoughts. Because when we emerged from the sky door, there the cursed thing was. Curving and serpentine below, blue and bronze under the setting sun of another world.

How I knew the sun was setting and not rising, I could not be sure. I just knew. Like I’d watched it disappear below that horizon, a thousand—no—a hundred thousand times before.

I hovered for a long moment, wings beating. I held fast to the little star and studied the river and the landscape that felt so foreign and so familiar and so out of reach even though I knew I could fly down now and touch it. Touch the water, the soil, the pebbles. The reeds and rushes whose tufts I could practically feel brushing my scales, the sensation something I was sure I remembered rather than imagined.

The river below us was calm. Its twin in my head roiled and raged, banging with watery fists, shouting the same thing over and over again. You have been here before.

I couldn’t stay up in the air forever. Soon, I’d have to descend to this strange memory-scape. But something held me back, and it took me a long moment to realize that it was fear. Fear that I could descend, smell the land and swim in the water, and that it would not make a lick of difference. That I could be in this world and know it without knowing it. Remember it without really remembering anything at all.

But, even though I could not recall my own name, I knew I was not the sort of stone sky god who held himself back in fear for long.

Stone sky god?

I could not spend much time chewing on that phrase, because the little star in my arms was moving. Shuddering and stretching and digging blunt nails into the scales of my forearms. I stared at its fingers against my arms. Slender and pale and tiny and soft. Its whole body was soft. Soft skin, soft hair, soft flesh over its bones. Soft little creature, so strange and so unlike myself.

“We’re here, little star.”

Where is here?

It did not matter. It did not matter because I’d caught this star and now, even though the sun had dipped and shadows opened their wings, there was no true darkness. For the first time in so long, too long, night was bright and clear with open-throated beauty. The reeds rustled, tufts and stalks shivering like the star in my arms.

I angled my wings and descended. And when I landed on the banks of the wide river, it was just as disconcerting and nostalgic as I’d imagined it would be. Because landing here felt like homecoming when I didn’t even know what home was anymore.

Home...

I tried to assign an image to the word. But the only image in my frazzled brain was the one right in front of me. The face of the little star I’d just set down on tiny feet.

I was still holding it, my hands curled around the creature’s narrow shoulders. I was not ready to let go of it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Not when letting go meant darkness seeping back in. Not when it meant losing everything.

I needed this tiny, shivering thing with its white and grey eyes and its little nose and flat pink mouth. It was the answer to a question I did not yet have words enough to remember. The answer to something important.

“I do not know who you are, little star,” I said slowly. “And I do not know who I am.” The little star’s eyes got wider and wider as I spoke, like it could not fathom a creature such as me capable of complex speech. I could barely fathom it myself.

The words felt old and new, difficult and true as I spoke them.

“All I know is that I ca

For what it was worth, the little star did not try to go. It merely stood, trembling and staring, its liquid eyes tracking all over my face. Its gaze settled on one side of my face, above my snout, in a place I felt I should have been able to see out of. I released one of my hands from its shoulders, pressing my fingertips into a mangled void. There was a slight twinge of pain, like a wound not quite healed.

I had another eye. Did I lose it?

When? And how?

I let my hand fall from my face in consternation. I’d been so awe-struck, so relieved, at the little bit of light this star had brought back. But already my lack of understanding and memory began to gnaw at me.

I had the nostalgia of this river. The little star. One remaining eye.

And I felt as if I had nothing at all.

“Come with me.”

There was little point in me actually saying the words. The creature in my grip could not have fought me if it tried. It was too small, too weak. It stumbled and cried out as I fastened my right hand around the back of its neck and led it forward towards the water. The water – the water ahead and in my head – had something for me. A key for the blackened box of my mind. If I just got in there, washed myself in it, submerged myself, maybe something would come back to me.

I was not willing to let go of the little star even for a moment, though.

So it had to come too.

The swaying reeds and rushes were even taller than the creature I marched before me. The puffed, fluffy tips of the plants grazed my scales and the bottom of my snout, a tickle so familiar that it practically itched.

The little star did try to fight me in the end. When we reached the sandy bank of the river and water sloshed over its feet, it yelped and careened backwards against me. I held it in place, then with a soft grunt, tossed it up over my shoulder. I didn’t have the focus to fight with the creature. I needed to get into the water, breathe, and remember.

I also needed to maintain constant physical contact with the little star. So this would have to do.

“I just need to get in the water. Stop struggling,” I murmured, wading forward as the little star bucked and wriggled. Its knees crashed against my chest, its hips bucking wildly at my shoulder. I clamped one arm across the backs of the creature’s thighs, then fastened my other hand across its backside, holding it in place as I waded hip-deep into the water.

I stopped when the water reached my waist, staring down the length of the wide river, watching the way the sun disappeared and turned the surface to something silken and hushed. I felt myself frowning, the muscles in my face wracked with tension in response to the answers that I was sure were right there. Right there and just out of reach. This water meant something. The corresponding river raged inside my head, throwing images and words upwards, like the bones of lost ships hurled up to the storming surface.

For a fraction of a second, the river in front of me and inside of me converged.

The sun warms the Bohnebregg river as I wade in up to my waist. I turn back to see someone – a male – in the water with me. Behind him stands the palace on the banks.

“But you aren’t even looking,” the man says. His hair is bone-white, his eyes burning like pale blue fire. His wings, black where mine are green, rustle behind him, lit up by both the drenching sun and the bright blue points of his starmap.

“You aren’t looking for yours either,” I toss back at him easily. It’s a conversation we’ve had countless times before. He’s always been far more reserved and risk-averse than I have.

“I am younger than you,” he counters. “I have more time.”

I grin and thwack the water with my tail, sending a small tsunami crashing towards him. He does not even flinch as the glittering water explodes on his stone-coloured skin.

“Hard to believe you’re the younger one. You sound like some wizened old crone,” I scoff. He’s always been this way. A serious, stoic worrier. I slosh water at him again, more gently this time, trying to get him to ease up, to see that there is more time. There will always be more time.

But his gaze only narrows, his wings twitching with tension.

“You know what will happen,” he says gravely. “You know what will happen if you do not find-”

He vanished.

So did the sun. And the palace.

I whirled, searching for him, but he was gone.

I knew him. I knew him.

What his name was, or who he was to me, I could not say. But I felt I knew him nearly as well as myself. That he was someone important. The place where my left eye used to be ached as I tried to keep the image of him fastened in my mind. My chest heaved, my breath catching in my throat. I clung to the only thing I could, the only anchor I had in this river – the Bohnebregg river. My little star.

I clutched at its legs, feeling like if I let go, I would completely cease to exist.