3.

 

Zaifyr’s memory was fragmented, broken by a life so long that he could not recall it perfectly. Years, decades, centuries were lost to him. But he remembered hearing Meihir tell the village that Hienka’s hibernation had been undertaken to avoid the War of the Gods. Thinking of survival only, the Feral God had plunged its land and its people into a brittle winter, forcing them to endure a cold harshness that hid it from its kin. “We made a mistake,” she whispered, a week after the return from the cave. “We thought we followed a god that honored community, loyalty and strength, but we do not. It is primitive and feral and knows not of these things. It created winter not to protect us, but to protect itself. To hide, to kill all around it. We have worshipped an image that is false and now that it is awake, we find ourselves slaves to it.”

Thousands of years later, Zaifyr lifted the slick bottle to his lips, the dampness seeping through his fingers. As snow melted in the mountains, Meihir’s new, intimate knowledge of Hienka brought a deepening despair to her eyes. It was she who first stopped calling upon the god for help, she who stopped calling the Feral God a him, and referred to the god as an it. “We have taken from the sleeping,” she said, “but it was not a gift offered to us. We have not understood the conditions of our worship. Our ignorance has blinded us to the bonds that we have created, the sacrifice that can be made without our consent.” Yet, she alone stopped calling on the god and life in the village, Zaifyr remembered, continued much as it had before Hienka had awoken, with only the weather changing. It did not take long for the people of Kakar to forget her words, to believe them a sign of her failings, of the god’s rejection of her.

And then, months later, he awoke in silence.

“Mother?”

It was an eerie silence that stretched out from the bare room he slept in.

“Father?”

Pushing back his furs, and with the lower half of the chain around his wrist in the palm of his hand, he rose and drew aside the cloth door. Nothing stirred. The dirt was cold beneath his feet, the air still. Even the dogs were quiet. He repeated his call, though the sense of wrong that had compelled him to raise his voice saw him only call for his mother. Moving through the house, he pulled aside the door to their own room. There, he found them lying together in their furs, both still. No breath arose from them, no shift or twitch shifted the coverings and, as he bent over each and his fingers touched their skin, he found it cold.

In the hearth room he found the dogs, large black-and-gray beasts, lying still around the cold, black pit. Out the back, his steps directing him without thought, he stepped onto fresh snow and saw the animals in the pens. They too were dead. It was there, while staring at the bodies of ducks and rabbits, animals they planned to kill themselves for food, that the enormity of the situation hit him and he stumbled.

They were dead.

They were all dead.

His eyes blinked rapidly as the tears seeped down his cheeks, the silence broken by the sound of his bare feet walking across fresh snow.

Leaving the house of his parents, he continued into the center of Kakar. He found the nineteen men and women he knew intimately. Each was wrapped in the charms of their family, the charms that would protect them at the age of twenty-nine, not at the age of nineteen; yet they had done that, the charms saving each of them. Half dressed like him, and with looks of shock and loss upon their faces, they were silent. Their voices had been stolen by the growing realization that everyone but them was dead. He did not know how long he stood there with them, surrounded by their dead in houses of silence, but it was until a soft voice spoke:

“Hienka is dead.”

Meihir.

She made her way toward Zaifyr, thin, bent, her skin so frail that the light appeared to shine through it.

“How?” he whispered.

“The Wanderer and Leviathan.” The witch stood in the large firepit of the village, her feet black. “Hienka took back what we borrowed to fight them both—to fight the God of Death and the Goddess of the Ocean. It killed the first. The Wanderer was weak from previous battles and Hienka struck so swiftly, a hunter to its prey, using our blood and our life to empower itself.”

“Why did he not take us?”

“The charms. They tied you to a different fate, hid you from it. It could not take you then, for it had agreed to take you elsewhere.”

“Why not you?” he asked, a hint of anger in his voice. “Why not you?”

Yet, even as he spoke, he realized that the fragility of Meihir’s skin was not due to her age, and that the light really did pierce her form.