Why do you talk like that?
Do you not approve of our ways? Who are you to demand?
It’s… just weird! It’s needlessly complicated sometimes and vague the next! You sound old. And you’re just a kid!
Oh.
Oh, she says. See what I mean? Vague.
This is the way everyone I know speaks; every word painting the unseen. We give breath to thought. We give voice to nothing. We make our souls understood… or, we try. I’m not very good at it yet.
Not everyone else talks like that, Babe.
They should. It makes it easier.
How the fuck is this easier?
Because… you know someone’s intentions by their words.
So… did you know Wolf’s intentions?
You saw? I… said, you know by their words, but Wolf said nothing.
Alright, alright… I’m not harpin’ on ya. I’m just… worried aboutcha.
Why?
I like you, Kid. You’ve got all the charisma of a post with pretty hair, but you have the potential to be more. I dunno. It’s like looking at a little me. Except… not me.
Why me?
Silly, why not you?
Why not some other post with pretty hair?
Pffft. You don’t think too highly of yourself, do you?
Why should I? I was born for a purpose I don’t understand. I threw away all I had for my own pride. I should have fought. I regret not asking questions. I could have… done something. But I did not. I deserve oblivion. I deserve nothingness. It is all I was destined for, after all. I don’t even know if my death means anything to Him. I don’t know if He exists…
Wow. Bitter at only seventeen. You’re really killin’ my vibe… I don’t get it. I mean, you’ve decided the ending of your story before the first page has even been written. Personally, I think you should give chance a real chance. You may surprise yourself. You may surprise us all.
Chaos will be the last thing I invite into my presence, even dead.
If I had eyes, they’d be rolling right outta my head right now, Sweetcheeks. Listen to me. Just… give him an honest go. You won’t regret it.
Chance is a gift I never had to give, myself. Who deserves it?
Who the fuck dya think, Biscuitbutt? Wake up. You’ve got shit to do.
But, I’m dead…?
Forget what you know about dying, Red. Dying is just another thing everything does. You’re not special. So get your ass up and get to work!
Rowena let out a gasp. There was a fire in her lungs. She coughed, sitting upright, fighting against a swadling of fine-threaded sheets and pillows. Finally, her hands still wrung about the silk nightgown she was sheathed in, she managed to swallow and breathe with no extraneous effort. When she reached out, she felt a small table next to her bed and found a cup and pitcher of water upon it. She drank deeply, not even bothering to question sincerity. She only wanted something to wet her parched tongue.
Only after her truths were properly inked did she look about the room, taking in its strange lines and shapes. She was in finery she had never seen before, let alone imagine. It was a palace all itself, slightly smaller than her chief’s longhouse. The walls were palest wood, like bleached pine, but they shined with watery luster. The four poster bed she rested in was as big as the floorspace of her family’s cabin; so expansive as to threaten to swallow her up in its embrace. The mounds of blankets were like snowy mountains jutting up from a milky valley.
She climbed out of that landscape and felt a weakness in her legs that prevented her from immediately standing. She leaned against the bed and marveled at the heat that touched her toes. It was like the pine held a hearthfire within it!
She took a moment to find steadiness in her feet. She didn’t feel atrophied. She didn’t feel lesser. Rather, the weakness she harbored was like moving about after her limbs had fallen asleep for a long time. There was a faint buzzing in her joints that lent to the thought. She finally made terms with her body’s weight and reached over to have another glass of water. The mothiness within her mouth dispersed, she could appreciate the sweetness of the water, the coolness of it. She was reminded of the Spring waters that came down from the mountains and filled the creeks and streams that flowed like veins through her village.
Her mood soured as she remembered that that life had been removed from her permanently.
“But… I am alive,” she whispered into the dimness.
In answer to her words, a lantern affixed to the wall beside the room’s only door lit up with bright blue light. The door opened and a disproportionately small woman dressed in black silk and blue jewels entered the room. Her dress was long enough to cover her toes, but loose enough that when she walked, Rowena could see the blue-studded slippers on her feet. She was a royal-looking woman that commanded an air of indestructibility, but when her eyes met Rowen’s own, her regal face broke out into a childish grin. She swept out a hand covered in blue gems and silver. “Name’s Gaylord, Red. Glad to see you’re up and moving. I was afraid you wouldn’t be awake in time to finish the job.”
“In time? Job?” Rowena asked nervously, still struck by the strange woman’s appearance. “Where am I? What is this place?” She felt panic, but it was distant, like in a dream where you know nothing can truly hurt you. Whoever this woman was, if she had meant Rowena harm, she could have exacted it long ago. Clove-groves, how long had she been dead?
“I died!” she declared before Gaylord could answer any of her previous queries. She put a hand to her head. “I… I remember… I was there on the cliff, but… Nothing else. Did I… not… jump?”
Gaylord approached her, waving a delicate hand in gesture. “You died, yeah. But we’ve already had that conversation.”
“The woman’s voice in my dream. You’re--”
“On the nose,” Gaylord praised. Then she grew serious. “I wish I had more time to explain the nuances, but I actually need your help, right here and right now. Will you help me? Help us, rather…”
“Why can’t I remember?” Rowena asked, kneading her forehead. Her hair was loose, framing her face in spirals of chaotic autumn colors. She didn’t want to feel out of control, but she was starting to lose grip on something, and she feared that that something was her sanity. She needed something else to grab onto. She reached out for the woman in black, but her hand passed right through the sprite-like figure’s hand. Gaylord gave her a sympathetic look as Rowena stared at her own palm, rubbing her fingers together. “Is this even real?” Rowena asked, quiet frustration bleeding into her voice, pinching the sounds.
“Yes,” Gaylord said, sighing. “But this image of a lady isn’t real. I’m just a… Mm. How would your folks describe it? I guess I’m a spirit.”
“You are the shade of someone’s dying?”
“No! I’m not dead. I’m… Look around you. You are in the palace of the Spice King. This is just one room of many guest rooms.”
“Guest room?! This is fit for a jarl!” Rowena interjected.
“Yeah, yeah,” Gaylord said with an embarrassed laugh. Then she swept another one of her jeweled hands out and said, “Everything you see, besides the furniture, is all me. The walls, the ceilings, the lights, the doors, the moors, the windows, and all the mechanics that keep this place afloat in the heavens… is all me. The spirit you see before you is just one of the many ways I can keep in communication with you.”
“Oh,” Rowena said simply, coming to terms with the spirit’s purpose and design. She wasn’t entirely shocked by its presence in the end. After all, she was in the palace of a god. Such marvels would of course be part and parcel in the wake of divinity. It was just a surprise that a Spineless Book had not been written about such a being. Or had it? After all, Rowena had only ever looked at one of Wolf’s shaman texts. She had never needed to be an expert on those beyond her own god.
She finally took Gaylord’s measure as the spirit too regarded her.
This woman is the Spice King’s palace incarnate! Rowena immediately fell to her knees, pressing her hands flat against the lacquered floor in prostration. “I act on your wishes, Kind Gaylord!” she said to the pine. “I… did not know the weight of your presence!”
Gaylord laughed and there was a rumble deep below the warm floorboards, rattling Rowena’s teeth for a moment. Then the lady said, “Get up! Come on. You can ply my ego with compliments when we’ve got the time. For now, we need your help.”
Rowena slowly got to her feet. “I will do whatever I can to please the demigoddess who has brought me back to life.”
Gaylord stifled another laugh behind the back of one hand. Then, she said, “Oh, Babe, if only I had that kind of power. No, your Spice King brought you back to life. He is the living tincture. I’m just the pretty bottle He comes in.”
Rowena wanted to press her hands to the floor again, but she resisted the urge. Her mother would kill her (again) if she ever found out that Rowena had inconvenienced their wild divine like this.
“I thought I was supposed to die to bring him back. Why did he give my life back to me? Was my sacrifice not enough to make him well?”
The palace frowned at her severely. “That’s a bunch of malarkey and you well know it, Kid. I asked Him to bring you back.” Gaylord gave her a proud smile. Then she smirked conspiratorially. “It’s been a while since He’s enacted the cycle… but I knew He needed it,” she said passed her splay of fingers. She waved her hand then and said, “Come on. I’ll take you to the gate.” They left the guest room and the corridor beyond was lit with warm, orange lights, coming from many frosted lanterns hung by doors and archways. They reminded Rowena of firefly bottles.
As they ventured through the labyrinthine walls of Gaylord’s true body, her spirit in black said in a quiet voice, “You don’t remember the jump because I took the memory of your death from you. I have it locked away for now. That sort of thing isn’t meant for you… I’m a memory saver. I give stories and take them; store them and shape them. After all, these walls have seen things many can only dream.” Her words and jesting smile were dampened even in the spacious surrounding, lending the palace a tomb-like feel despite its clean interior and fresh smells of star anise and opium.
“How old is this place?” Rowena asked, just as quiet.
“That’s a rude question to ask of a star, don’tcha think?” Gaylord demanded with feigned offense. When it looked like Rowena would hit the dirt to subjugate herself at the palace’s mercy again, the spirit laughed out loud and said, “I dunno how old I am, Sweets. Maybe eons. Maybe a day. Who knows? All I know is that when my end comes, like all stars, I will simply begin again. Fitting isn’t it?”
“Fitting?”
“I can’t bring anything back from the dead, but I can return to life from it… I guess that’s why I let Him stay here at the start. We only had rebirth in common for a time. But I suppose divinities can grow on you… like a mold you can’t really get rid of.”
“You do not mean that,” Rowena snapped.
The spirit chuckled again, sending warm tremors up between the girl’s toes. “My nose will bruise at the rate you’re going, Kiddo,” Gaylord said with a wink.
“I do not mean you harm,” Rowena insisted with a frown.
“It’s gonna take a while for you to pick up on sarcasm, isn’t it?”
“I know sarcasm. What you said was a lie.”
“It was an exaggeration, at worst. Besides, I don’t live by your rules, Gingersnap. I can lie about anything I want. Remember that.”
“Then how can I trust your intent?” Rowena asked, even as she kept stride with the apparition.
“Because I’m charming and you have nothing better to do than seek your answers through me. You’re curious like that, aren’t you?”
“Not by nature,” Rowena admitted.
“But that’s because that place you were in didn’t let you shine.”
“How do you know about any of that?”
Gaylord stopped at a large set of double doors and allowed Rowena to catch up. She said meaningfully, “Because I’ve been watching you since you were born. I’m basically your Lucky Star, Red… He doesn’t have the same appreciation for stories like me. He doesn’t know why I favor you so much. But He will… which is why we need you now. I need you.”
Rowena considered the spirit for a moment, weighing her options. It didn’t seem like she had much of a choice, but then, she was used to not having choices. It didn’t impair her or matter as much as she felt like it should have. It made her mad to admit that not caring about her own fate would be a hard habit to break. But this star spoke like an old friend; an ally willing to help her to find a future where she did care, and she did have choices, and her choices mattered.
She rubbed a shoulder awkwardly and nodded. “What is your wish, Kind Gaylord?”
The palace shade grinned again, but this time it was forced. The smile eventually turned grave and her features darkened. Her voice lowered in volume, like she was trying to keep a secret from an eavesdropper. From who, Rowena couldn’t begin to imagine. The spirit said, “Through these doors will be a gate, not unlike the one He pulled you through to get you here. I need you to go through it and find Him and bring Him back, reborn and decently separate from His wilder half.”
“Why can’t you go yourself?”
Gaylord gave her an expectant expression like she thought the question was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. “This form is not real. The gate is inside me. You can’t fit a whole neutron star through a conventional, euclidean quantum pipeline. He won’t come to me. It has to be his returned maiden that walks through the gate, else His power won’t return. If I even attempted such a thing, I’d blow us all up--Do I need to start listing shit on my toes too?”
Rowena waved her hands in defeat. “No, I… I think I understand… So, why can’t He get back on His own?”
Gaylord suddenly disappeared and then reappeared, making the girl blink in surprise. The spirit sighed dramatically. “Look, Darlin’, He paid a price by bringing you back. He’s gone back to His mother’s womb.” When Rowena opened her mouth, Gaylord put out a finger to stop her. “Ask later. Listen now. He’s in there, fighting His brother to see who will be reborn. He needs a soul yet made beast to tame that side of him. That’s where you come in.”
“But I already gave my soul to bring him--”
“And you know that your peoples’ whole sacrifice schtick is all bullshit. Okay, half-bullshit. Somewhere along the way, the truth got wrapped up in their doctrine--and that’s not my point right now!” Gaylord waved a dismissive hand. “You have to swing the fight in His favor so He can get back to us. Go in there, pledge your strength to him, and knock His socks off. Beasts can’t tame other beasts. But a maiden yet made… can. I don’t have time to hash out all the details. You’ve already got me on a couple of tangents. Tangents are my one weakness! Well… maybe also bannister polish… and lavender floor scru--Ack!” She shook her head wildly, blipping out and back into visibility again. “Just get in there and promise your maidenhood, maybe swing your womanly wiles around, and then you’ll have all the answers your god has to offer a believer… Just as soon as He’s back in the palace."
“Wiles? Maidenhood?” Rowena paled. “I thought you said tame.”
The double doors slowly opened and Gaylord gestured for her entry. “It’s all euphemism, Hotcakes. Everything’s a double entendre.” She shook her hand to enunciate the urgency. “Every moment He stays there, the weaker He becomes, and the more likely His brother will be the victor. And you do not want to know what happens if the Deathless Prince is reborn. Lots of bad things. The reestablishment of a dark afterlife where souls are used as spiritual batteries for his legions of unliving spawn--Oh! Least of all that, my destruction would be immediate, and with no promise of rekindling. Personally, I like being on this side of existence, existing!”
“I don’t know what that--What if He rejects my offer? And--Augh! How am I supposed to tame God?!”
“Don’t make me tilt the floor to spill you in,” Gaylord warned airily.
Rowena stepped lightly into the dark room. When both her feet crossed the threshold, the gate lit up the room with a sliver of dark. The girl didn’t know what she was seeing. It appeared a tear in the universe, so perfect, it might have always been there by design, but so totally wrong that it sucked all the light from the room even while emitting it. Rowena could hear music, distantly, along with sounds that reminded her of a smith’s striking iron and water running over rocks. When she turned away from the substantial nothing to look back at Gaylord, the spirit was gone and the room was eerily quiet. The sounds resumed when her eyes again rested on the rip in the seam of the palace air.
The room was only large enough to accommodate the tear’s size. It stood around nine feet tall, but waned to be just as tall as she as the moments dragged on.
She rubbed at her eyes and wished she were wearing her overboots and maybe her scaling knife. If she had a weapon at her side, she might have felt more prepared. But she was only a girl in a nighty and Gaylord, her Lucky Star, had faith that she would prevail in the task she’d been charged with.
But she did have a choice. She could wait for the Deathless Prince, couldn’t she? Or she could challenge everything she’d ever been taught and step through the gate to tame the Spice King.
Would she have more choices once she was there?
The thought overwhelmed her. She’d never been called on to make such vital, cosmic choices… and yet here she was, a speck in the grand scheme of the universe, parting through tears in its very unreal flesh.
“Don’t think about it too hard, Kid,” Gaylord’s voice came from all around her. “You’ll break your eyebrows if you keep making that face.”
“Don’t think about it…” she mumbled to herself. She pushed her hand against the gate, felt resistance, like her hand was pressing into cheesecloth or vine-choked brush. Her hand disappeared into the swirling light and dark and, for a moment, she felt like she would lose it forever. Don’t think! She took a step forward, closed her eyes, and pressed her face against the twisting kaleidoscope of water and fire.
She took another step and the gate swallowed her whole, vanishing.
ns 15.158.61.40da2
