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I look around, expecting the giant rabbit to come out to get me, or that deer beast, or some other creature of cosmic horror, but it seems totally deserted. I take a closer look at the giant bunny prints and see skeletal footprints join up with it, along with other weird tracks. All of them are pointed south in the direction of Shadow’s End, as if all the resurrected beings have been called there through some internal messaging system.
Gee, that’s not unsettling at all, I think.
Still, I can’t afford to let my guard down, especially not as I’m about to make the long, desolate track to the City of Death, where I’ll be completely exposed to assailants.
So, I start running. The further inland I get, the more worried I get. The despairing thoughts keep jutting into my brain, wanting me to spiral out of control. Where is Tuonen in all of this? Is he safe? If my mother somehow infiltrated Shadow’s End, would she actually hurt him? I’d like to think she wouldn’t, but I also know my brother. He’s got a good heart underneath that blasé attitude, and I know he’d do what he could to stop our mother if she was intent on doing something devastating.
What would she do then? Would she choose her son over her ambitions?
Fuck, I hope so.
I give my head a shake as a fine drizzle starts to fall. Clouds roll in, dark and low, the air eerily still. Though the snow is gone and I’m in the sand of the rocky desert, the mist makes it seem like I’m walking into infinity.
Then, out of the grey, comes a shadow.
I stop, my hand at my sword, and watch with bated breath.
From a distance, it’s hard to say how big the figure is—could it be a monster?
But as it gets closer, I realize it’s the size of a tall man, and it’s not a walking skeleton either.
It’s a man in a cloak.
The Magician.
“Loviatar!” he calls out to me, walking quicker now, and I run a couple of steps to meet him.
He stops in front of me, holding me by the elbow with his velvet gloved hands as I stare into the void of his face, at the spinning galaxies and shooting stars.
“I thought you would be dead by now,” he says. His normally calm and serene voice is panicked. “The Inmost dwellers have taken the city!”
Fuck.
“What happened?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I should know, but I didn’t see this coming. It had been so long since you brought me another dead that I went inside the gates to see if I could find out what was amiss. All I saw were the Inmost Dwellers running to the Golden Mean. Someone said they had all been let loose.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know, but I know it wasn’t your father.”
“No,” I say grimly. “It wasn’t him.”
“It was Louhi,” he says. “Perhaps not by her physical form, but at least indirectly. That much I know.”
“And she’s awoken the Old Gods,” I tell him. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. That’s what I was coming to tell you. There hasn’t been any dead to transport, but I decided to head down anyway, and that’s when I saw them. They started rising out of the ground, like half-dead monsters, creatures I’d never seen before—the Bone Stragglers too.”
The Magician doesn’t say anything for a moment as two moons seem to spin around where his eyes should be. It gives me the impression of a computer processing or, more likely, a universe of information being searched.
Finally, he says, “Shadow’s End has been compromised then. The City of Death has collapsed. We must head to our next allies.”
“The Forest Gods,” I say. “I think the way might be clear. From all the footprints and tracks I saw, it looks like the Bone Stragglers and the Old Gods are heading to Shadow’s End.”
“How were you able to get to me without being harmed?” he asks.
I show him the tear in my cape. “I have this for a battle wound. I was only attacked by one of the Gods and a few Bone Stragglers. The skeletons I can easily deal with in combat. The weird beast thing was harder to take down. I had to plunge my sword into its brain, but it worked.”
“Good to know there’s a way to defeat them.”
