Page 18 of Wild Reverence

In my mother’s tale, she had described it much differently.

A beautiful structure of latticed iron and jewels that opened and closed according to the Gatekeeper’s fickle desire.

A barrier that could have been found in the under realm.

Well, as I stood beside the dead god of iron himself, I saw that this was a gate unlike anything I had ever seen.

It looked to be made of smooth bone, and it was huge.

Its arch loomed like a wishbone against the burgundy and saffron of the sky, and the closer we approached, the more it hummed, like the notes of a harp that had just faded.

There was nothing to bar entrance to it, but the mist was thick and swirling within.

When I opened my mouth to breathe, desperate with thirst, I caught the moisture on my tongue and drank it down.

It was enticing and sweet, like flowers in our underground rill.

“What happens now?” I asked, glancing up at Xan.

His attention was on the mist. I could see the thirst in his eyes, the intensity carving grooves into his face.

“We wait,” he said, but his voice had lost its luster.

I glanced down to see he had no shadow, even though I did, and I shivered.

The ground rumbled. Again, and again, like the tread of heavy feet. The Gatekeeper at last appeared through the mist to meet us.

She was a giantess. A wizened crone with long, silver hair.

She had one opaque eye with a milky-blue iris, dark pupil, and long lashes.

Her face looked chiseled from pale rocks, the facets harsh and bold as if the sculptor had been in a hurry while forming her features.

Her teeth were bloodstained and filed into sharpened points, and her dress was gray, gathering over one shoulder with a knot made of white and black hair.

“I see you have kindly brought my eye back to me,” she said in a voice so rich the sunset grew bolder around her.

A beat passed before I realized she was speaking to me, and the blood clotted in my veins. Slowly, I glanced down to my belt to see the moonstone eye was fully open. I had not even felt its flare of heat, like last time, when Adria had been dying.

“Forgive me,” I said, my voice hoarse with fear and thirst. “I… let me remove the stone. I did not know—”

“No, child. That is where it belongs: on your belt. I would not have plucked out my eye the night you were born and tossed it to the under realm for your mother to harvest had I not desired it.” Her attention shifted to Xan, her brows arching. “And who have you brought to my gate?”

“I did not bring him—” I rushed to say in the same moment that Xan said, “The god of iron. Xan of Underling. My immortality has been snuffed due to trickery and bad luck.”

“You mean to say the only magic you possessed has been stolen, and you have come to me, disgraced,” said the Gatekeeper, lip curled. “You have come hoping I will let you pass into the mists, culled of power and honor.”

Xan made no reply.

A lump lodged in my throat as the awkward silence continued.

“Gatekeeper,” I finally said. “What is this place called?”

“The name of this realm is so old there is no longer a word for it. Not even I can remember it, and I was here, roaming these hills, gazing up at a starless sky, for centuries. But that was long before I gave birth to Death and Fate, and my shed blood became the constellations.” She traced the knot of hair at her shoulder.

My stomach churned when I realized it was hair cut from her daughters.

Orphia and Rowena. “So now it is simply called the wasteland, where souls from the dead who long for paradise embark on their final journey to my gate. And to those who I refuse admittance… well, they are doomed to forever wander with unspeakable thirst. They become nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” I echoed. “Then this place is also—”

“Where living souls drift during dreams, yes.” The giantess smiled, but it was a terrifying sight, and it took every fiber of my being not to lurch backward. “Alva also treads here, although not corporeally, like you. Only in her mind. And she has never found my gate.”

“I do not understand,” I said, swallowing. “I am just a herald.”

“A herald who carries words, and perhaps something else,” the Gatekeeper crooned, and her one eye turned to regard Xan, who stood quiet and still as a statue at my side.

“Why should I let you pass into the mists? What accolades can you claim? Convince me that you are worthy.” Before he could reply, she withdrew a golden balancing scale from her pocket and set it on the ground with a thud.

I stared at that scale, its two opposing pans empty, ready to be filled.

Xan also stared, his breath unsteady.

Was this, then, how the Gatekeeper decided who was worthy of the mists? By the weights of a scale?

Xan listed off his many achievements, but the Gatekeeper swatted her hand through the air, as if his words were a pesky fly.

“No, no,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”

We would be here a long while if she wanted all the minute details of a god’s life.

Xan began again, this time with the night he had been born, when the stars had woken in the sky with his first cry.

But he did not get a weight tossed upon the scales until he told us the story of how once, in his youth, he had challenged Dacre to a footrace through the darkest stretch of the catacombs.

Only then did the Gatekeeper’s eye brighten and she dropped the stone on the right pan of the scale.

Not a stone, I realized as I leaned slightly closer, studying it. A finger bone, and I could only wonder whose it had been. A god’s? A mortal’s? Someone who had been denied passage beneath the arch?

Xan learned swiftly what the Gatekeeper wanted. It was not good deeds, although sometimes she cast another bone in favor of him when he had been gracious or compassionate. It was the bloody stories, the heartbreaking tales. The terrible decisions and the wretched moments.

She did not want to hear about restrained living.

She wanted to know how much of a mark a soul had left behind.

Xan was doing well. The scales were weighted in his favor, and as he droned on, my mind wandered to the goddess of nightmares and dreams.

Alva.

I wondered if she had sensed this strange magic in me from the beginning.

If she had known that I could visit the wasteland, and—consequently—dreams, which were her forte.

I wondered if that had been the true motivation to slip the scrolls to me.

Not to offer me entertainment or help me broaden my knowledge of mortals but to test me in some way.

What did she see in me, and what did she want?

Would she eventually choose to kill me, to take this nameless magic for herself?

The right pan of Xan’s scales hit the ground with a musical clink.

“That is enough,” the Gatekeeper announced with a feral smile. A bracelet made of skulls rattled down her forearm. “You may pass into paradise, Xan of Underling. Unless you would prefer to have the herald escort you?”

Xan frowned, glancing at me. His wound had finally ceased bleeding, as if all his ichor had run dry.

“Escort me where?” he queried. “She is not dead. She cannot step into the mists.”

The Gatekeeper fell silent, but her eye was transfixed upon me, as if I had the answer.

I did not.

I had no inkling what she implied, but I felt like I should. A shudder rippled through me, and I shifted my weight, keen to run back to the wasted door. To leave this place, and never return.

“Apologies,” I said to him, a scratch of a whisper. “I do not know what she means.”

“It is just as well,” Xan sighed. “I can escort myself.”

I watched as he stepped forward, his shoulders pinned back in a proud stance. He was about to pass through the gate, the mists swirling as if hungry to welcome him, when my curiosity sparked one final question.

“Xan?” I called and he paused, looking at me. “Who killed you? Who stole your magic?”

He was quiet for a moment, a troubled expression creasing his brow, as if to think back on his immortal life came with a swell of pain now. But then the distress dwindled, and peace overtook him.

“The god of spring,” he answered, just as he disappeared into the mists. “Warin of Skyward.”