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“Aye,” Harald said, breaking the bottle’s seal with glee while his ramfrog leaped to the table. “The dead never stop coming, do they?”
“Never,” Tuonen said grimly with a shake of his head. Death was the only thing certain in all the worlds and would be so for an eternity. Though Tuonen was an immortal Lesser God and didn’t view time the way most mortals did, he avoided thinking of living his life, just like this, for eons to come. It made him want to tear his hair out at the monotony of it all.
Tuonen left the Golden Mean through the twisting streets of the city, through a series of checks and gates until he was outside the main walls, which stretched for miles up into the ever-present clouds of Tuonela. He went to the dark river, got in his ferry boat, and set out toward Death’s Landing. Tiny snowflakes began to fall from the charcoal clouds, dusting his coat, andTuonen wondered what set his father off in a foul mood. Snow was ever-present in the north, but near the city in the south, it was rare, unless his father, Death himself, was feeling particularly miserable. His moods controlled the weather, after all.
The boat glided through the dark waters with increasing speed, the way it did when Tuonen was late to pick someone up. The boat didn’t communicate with him, but even so, it seemed to be autonomous and committed itself to the job more seriously than Tuonen often did.
To Tuonen, there was no rush. Time often behaved strangely in the Underworld, especially where the newly dead were concerned. Though countless people and creatures throughout the universes died every second, their entry into Tuonela was slow and controlled. Whether it be Tuonen or Lovia, they were constantly going back and forth between Death’s Landing and the city, transporting the dead one at a time (though sometimes more if they happened to have died together).
In the case of Aven Morris, Tuonen didn’t know anything about them, except that the bell hadn’t been rung, which meant he might be dealing with a special case. Sometimes, he liked the challenge of dealing with mortals who didn’t accept that they were dead, but on this day, he wanted things to be easy, just so he could go back to his game against Harald and try another ramfrog.
It wasn’t until the boat left the snow-packed drifts of the Frozen Void and cut through the fog toward Death’s Landing that the belligerent dead revealed themselves to Tuonen.
It took him a moment to realize he was staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Aven wasn’t feeling like herself. In addition to the fact that she was standing on a strange shoreline, enveloped by a deepening mist, when moments earlier she had been…well,notthere, she felt like she’d been drugged. In fact, as she tried in vain to make sense of her new situation, she was certain that her slow thoughts, a sense of disassociation, and feeling of being completely empty inside (as if someone removed my lungs and my heart, she thought absently) were because she was drugged. Someone somewhere must have slipped something in her drink.
But had she been drinking? What had she been doing moments before this all happened? What had happened, anyway? She couldn’t remember, and the more she tried, the more her past seemed to slip away. She lived in London…didn’t she? She had a flat in Shoreditch, she ran an animal shelter with her best friend, she had trained as a classical pianist before…before…
No, she thought to herself.That’s what they want. They want you to forget where you came from. That’s what this place is, a place to erase your memory and yourself.
That thought frightened her. Until that moment, she hadn’t really been afraid, just disoriented, but now, she felt her pulse quicken, and it gave her the smallest bit of comfort.
If I have a pulse, then I have a heart, and I’m not empty after all.
She straightened up, her Reeboks slipping slightly on the pebbles, and tried to think. It was like her brain was wading through porridge.
Who am I?
Where am I?
All this time, the constant lapping of the black water on the pebbles hadn’t ceased, became nothing but white noise in the background, but now, there was a new noise: the sound of water splashing, rhythmic, getting louder, closer.
A dark shape came through the white mist until Aven had to blink at what she was seeing.
A large open ship, similar to ones Vikings would have used to cross the north seas, slid into view, its hull scraping loudly along the pebbles.
Aven took a step backward as a figure came forward to the bow of the ship.
Fear struck her like tiny lightning strikes as she felt the figure’s eyes on her, shrouded by the thick mist.
“You didn’t ring the bell,” a deep male voice said. The words fell over her spine like warm water, the first pleasurable feeling she’d had since she’d arrived.
“The bell?” she repeated.
The figure raised its arm and pointed to the spot beside her, where a large iron post was stuck in the rocks, a bell hanging off it. She hadn’t seen it before.
“Ring it,” the man said.
Aven felt herself reaching for the bell but then stopped herself. The world seemed to turn upside down for a moment, and then she narrowed her eyes at the man. “Why?”
“It is Death’s Bell,” he said. “You ring it so the ferryman can take you to the afterlife.”
“But I’m not dead,” said Aven. She was drugged, yes, and totally confused, but she wasn’t dead. How could she have even died? She would have remembered that.
The flat in Shoreditch, five floors up with no lift,thatshe remembered, lugging her groceries up with burning thighs.
She didn’t remember dying.
