Page 17 of Wild Reverence

XI

Company for Old Souls

MATILDA

I was not there when Adria at last woke as a goddess.

She slept for three days and three nights, and eventually my mother demanded I return to our burrow and leave Bade to his disgrace.

I bristled at this—how could she speak so ill of her own ally?

—but swiftly learned she was “court speaking.” Gossip was simmering through the hall and corridors.

The once powerful and fearsome god of war has marred himself by loving a mortal woman, and now he has thrown the stars into chaos by making her one of us.

The chaos was truly an exaggeration, but it illuminated a deeply buried fear.

Adria was the goddess of peace, but could there be more to her powers that we did not know of?

“This cannot lead to anything good,” Phelyra stated one night when the alliance—sans Bade—had gathered beside our fire, drinking wine.

At some point I had realized that all of them—Phelyra, Alva, Zenia, Bade—were gods whom mortals feared.

Prayers written to them were fueled by worry and tension and fright, never by love or devotion, and the divines only grew more powerful for it.

I mulled over this as I sat off to the side, sorting those fear-stricken prayers that had come in for my mother.

But I was listening intently to their conversation.

“Adria is not one of us,” Phelyra continued. “She will never belong here. Bade has done her a terrible disservice. He should have let her die in glory on the battlefield.”

“Adria will be fine here,” Alva said in a drunken lilt. “Besides, that is four less stars for Orphia, and five less stars for Rowena.”

“I did not know you cared to count stars,” Phelyra said with a shrewd glance. “You have never stolen magic before.”

“That is because I don’t care.” Alva drained the rest of her wine, heedless. “And I did not know you cared so much about mortal feelings, Phel. I thought you would be far more worried about what impact Adria’s divinity will have on ours.”

“Impact?” my mother echoed.

“Yes.” Alva poured another chalice of wine, at which Zenia twitched her nose in disapproval. “Do you not wonder about it? How might her magic influence ours?”

“Oh, you are speaking to rile us, Alvie,” Phelyra drawled. The moniker drew a thunderous expression from Alva. “A nine-point constellation is good, but magic rooted in peace is weak, submissive. I think we should worry more as to how Bade will try to use this to his advantage.”

“He does not want to use her,” I snapped, unable to keep my mouth shut.

All three goddesses turned to look at me, sitting with the heap of written prayers.

“What I mean to say,” I amended, cooler, “is that he does love her. He does not want to control her.”

“You are young, sweet one.” Phelyra’s tone was patronizing. I ground my teeth. “One day, you will understand this better.”

“Leave her be,” Alva said. “She knows more about mortal kind than you.”

“What do you mean?” My mother’s voice was sharp.

I went rigid, suddenly afraid to look up. Alva and her drunken tongue were about to expose the fact that she lent me dream scrolls. That I had forged a connection with a mortal boy named Vincent.

“Because she is the herald of all three realms,” Alva replied, and I released a slow, tremulous breath, continuing to sort the prayers my mother had been ignoring for a sennight now.

Their conversation drifted to other matters, but it wasn’t until they began to leave that I realized Alva was not at all drunk. She deftly slipped a dream scroll to me with a wink, her eyes clear and shining like jewels. What game was she playing?

I waited until my mother went to market, and then I cracked open the scroll, scanning the inked dreams for Vincent’s. I found it toward the end, which meant it must have been dreamt the other night.

He was sitting at a desk in his bedchamber, writing a letter. The light streamed in through the window, awakening a sheen of blue in his long black hair.

The door swung open, and he glanced up, his eyes wide when he saw that it was me on the threshold.

“ Red! ” he cried, standing so quickly he overturned his chair.

I could hear joy in his voice; I could see delight limn his face as he looked at me.

The air between us became golden, sweet.

It felt like reuniting with someone after missing them for a long time.

“Where have you been? How did you find me?”

I did not answer.

In fact, I was frowning, as if I could not see him.

He hurried across the room to reach me, but I shut the door in his face, and the dream broke.

I rolled up the scroll.

My hands felt icy, my heart was erratic.

The wasted door at the fortress. I had opened it and seen a strange land. A gate that led to a dreamscape.

Quickly, I donned my sandals and reached for a cloak.

I hid the scroll in one of my belt pockets before I went to the coffer in the back room.

Gold and silver coins rested within; they were cold in my cupped palm, shimmering like water when I ran my fingers through them.

They were so plentiful here in the under realm, as were the gemstones, that I sometimes forgot their true value.

Sighing, I grasped coins by the handful, filling two more pockets.

If I was going to leave, I needed to do so now, before my mother returned.

The spiders watched me from their far-strung cobwebs; the fire danced high in the hearth, eager to catch a glimpse of me as I slipped soundlessly from the burrow.

Commotion echoed down the corridors as I ran through them, the fog ebbing low. It sounded like a violent argument had spawned in the hall, but this was commonplace ever since Adria had been immortalized, and I continued on my way, reaching the wasted door at the ruined fortress without being seen.

There were no clouds that night, and a full moon was rising, spilling silver light across the broken flagstones.

I did not know what to expect when I reached the wasted door this time. My stomach was in a knot as the oakwood creaked open, revealing the pink hills, the strange trees, the two suns and four moons. The constellations that burned in a sunset sky.

“Vincent?” I called.

Only silence met me.

I stepped into this realm, leaving the door ajar.

For every ten strides I took, I reached into my pocket and dropped a coin, so I could find my way back to the threshold.

To my shock, the coins had transformed. They were no longer gold and silver but Skyward currency.

Pieces of the sky that could melt into music.

Time passed as I wandered, leaving a trail of coins behind me.

I searched but could not locate an obsidian archway that would lead me to Vincent’s dream.

In fact, I was alone here in this bizarre land, and soon my thirst grew so great that I knelt at the iridescent stream, eager to sip from it.

But when I lowered my hands into its currents, there was nothing.

It was an illusion, and my heart gave a lurch of fear.

“Will you walk with me to the mists, Matilda?” asked a deep, sad voice.

Startling, I turned to see a god, familiar even though I had never spoken directly to him.

Xan, the handsome god of iron, who was of the Underling High Court.

I was surprised that he even knew my name, that he had stopped here to make a request of me, until I saw that his throat had been shorn.

Bright, hot ichor was pouring from the fatal wound.

I watched it stream down his broad chest, drip from his fingers like rain.

Is this a dream? I wondered, rising.

“What happened to you?”

“Come, walk with me,” he said again, but he did not wait to see if I would. “Keep an old soul company.”

He resumed his journey, following a well-worn path that snaked toward the light of the full moon. Up one hill, and down another. His steps were lumbering, his pace measured. I quickly caught up to him.

“Are you dreaming, Xan?” I asked. “Is that why I see you here?”

He laughed. “Dreaming? No, child. I am dead.”

I bit my lip, uncertain what to say.

He glanced askew at me, his hazel eyes lively despite his macabre announcement.

“You see the wound, yes?”

“Yes, but you are speaking. Your voice—”

“The dead can still speak, that is, until we reach the gate at the mists.” We walked a few more paces in silence, and then he said, “Are you dead? I see no wound on you.”

“I… do not think so?”

“You sound uncertain.”

“I have never been here before, but I was breathing when I arrived.”

“Has your mother not told you of the wasteland?” Xan asked.

“This is where all of us go, if and when we die. Divine and mortals both, should humans desire paradise instead of becoming shades in our courts. This is how we reach the mists. We must find the gate and walk through it to achieve eternal rest. But only if the Gatekeeper deems us worthy enough to pass.”

“Oh, yes.” I tucked hair behind my ear, although Zenia had only mentioned the wastes and the dreaded Gatekeeper to me once.

A bedtime tale that I had thought was mere myth, based on her reluctance to repeat it.

Now, my mind overflowed with theories as to how I had stepped through a door to reach this place.

How I was—hopefully—not dead, but trespassing in a scape for the deceased, but then I remembered Vincent and how I had been present in his dream. I had heard his voice here.

Is he dead? Worry cut through me, making my breaths skip. No. Logic tamped down my wild thoughts. Alva’s scroll proved he was dreaming. He is alive.

“Ah, here we are,” Xan said.

We had reached the gate of the mists. The gate to paradise.