Page 61 of Ascendent
Human bones. Leg bones and arms, pelvises and ribs. Skulls and jawbones, detached and suspended separately, as if they were laughing across the distance of three pines, as if their jaws held the entire forest between their grins.
The wind blew. The bones spun and jostled together. Holes in the long bones twirled into view, the wind whistling through their hollowed shafts in low moans and meandering wails. The wind held, kept playing a single note––the sound of suffering––in an unending vibrato.
He’d heard that note before. He’d heard it in Kayerkan when he was 16, standing in the snow and listening to old records, and he’d heard it through his headphones, trying not to sob, trying not to call his roommates’ attention. It was the sound of screaming violins, the sound of anguish, the sound of a tortured mind screamingwhy. It was the sound of his soul.
He hissed, turned away. Closed his eyes—
When he opened them again, Kilaqqi was standing over him. The older man wore faded jeans and a leather belt with, tied ribbons and yarn and mirrors hanging over his thighs. A fur cape hung over his shoulders. Figures and sigils had been drawn on his chest. Reindeer, bear, and stars above them. Whorls and lines, what looked like rivers. A tree running down his chest, and three worlds attached to the tree’s branches. On his head, iron antlers rose, twelve tips hung with bells and tied with ribbons of every color.
“It’s time, Sasha.” Kilaqqi had held out his hand.
He was bundled in furs and helped onto the reindeer saddle. His reindeer seemed perturbed that she had to carry Sasha, an obviously inexperienced rider, and had snorted and huffed as she’d set out after Kilaqqi, riding his reindeer far more capably and nobly. It was all Sasha could do to hang on, and stay awake.
He felt the swirling cold of someone just about to freeze. When the snow had fallen, and the air had frozen, and the body was starting to feel the pinch, the stab. Whatever Kilaqqi had done to him, the ice in his soul had ebbed, but he could feel it pushing, trying to return. He wouldn’t survive if the frost slid between his bones, between his blood. If the ice festered in his mind.
He couldn’t survive it again.
They rode for over an hour, deeper into the darkness. Bones hung in the trees overhead, and when the wind whistled, Sasha heard it again, his soul’s scream. Usually, he lived with that silent scream, that personal rage, alone, in the very center of himself. Hearing his soul’s lamentations from every direction, from the trees and the stars and the world on all sides, made him breathless, made him dizzy. What was inside him was now outside.
Ice made perfect mirrors on the forest floor, on the taiga’s meadowlands. Starlight reflected like a photograph. What was up was down. Were the stars above him or beneath his feet? Had the reindeer stepped into the sky? He looked up. Kilaqqi’s torch looked like the sun.
He tried to watch the moon. But the stars were dancing, spinning like fairy wheels, and the moon waxed and waned and waxed again, as if all of time was happening around him. He watched stars blink out of existence and new ones form, eruptions of flame and sparks and lightning against the night sky.
He’d never felt so small.
At last, they stepped out of the forest and onto a sloping hill, angled down toward a massive, circular valley. From end to end, it was over two kilometers wide. Every tree grew away from the center, as if trying to escape. Kilaqqi lead him down the slope, to the very middle. Overhead, the stars seemed to jump, quiver.
Sasha frowned. The stars, the moon, they were spinning around something, some kind of fixed point that he was getting closer to.
Kilaqqi stopped in the center, the lowest point of the valley. He looked up. “They spin over our heads in this place.”
“Why?” Sasha struggled to speak.
“Because this is where they fall. Where they land when they strike Earth. This is the cradle of the stars.” He slid from his reindeer, patted her rump, and sent her away. She trotted up the slope, back into the shelter of the trees. “Your people call this place the Tunguska Valley.”
Tunguska. He wracked his memories. An explosion had gone off in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, more powerful than a hundred nuclear bombs combined. Scientists still didn’t know what had exploded in the taiga, what had toppled trees for thousands of miles, had left a ring of destruction like a bomb had exploded. In the center of the zone of destruction, there was no deep impact crater, like they expected to find after an asteroid impact. There was only a ring of death, of blown-over trees, of burned and scarred Earth. His flight school comrades used to joke that it was aliens, that one day they’d come back to Siberia, and then they would blow the aliens out of the sky.
“For us,” Kilaqqi said. “This is the most powerful entrance to the spirit worlds. We will need that power to journey tonight. We must find your soul.”
“I’m dying.” Sasha shivered. “Aren’t I?”
“We must find your soul tonight.”
Kilaqqi helped him from his reindeer, shouldering his weight when Sasha couldn’t stand. He helped him to the ground, spread out the bear fur for him to sit on. Sasha pitched sideways and buried his face in the fur. He couldn’t sit up anymore. And, the world only made sense from the side now. He could see the stars above and below. They seemed to glow from beneath the grass, from the underbelly of Tunguska.
Kilaqqi started a fire, burning pine and spruce and moss in the same iron bowl he’d been burning in all day. Smoke wafted, reached for the sky. Kilaqqi carried the bowl in a wicket of antlers, twelve times in a circle, chanting as he went. The smoke made Sasha dizzy. He closed his eyes. He could still see the stars.
“This is the way the stars formed.” Kilaqqi’s voice traveled on the smoke, floating and falling in whorls and ripples, danced on starlight and the scent of decay. “One day, when there was nothing but the heavens in the universe, Father Bear went out to hunt. Little Bear, left alone, was curious, and he went out into the star garden. But he did not know where to step, or which stars were still growing, or which were for pulling up and eating. He dug playfully and fell through the heavens, through the sky. He landed on Earth, and all the stars spilled out with him, the young and the old, the new and the still growing. The stars stuck to the roof of the world, trying to return to their garden and Father Bear. But they were stuck. Now, Little Bear roams the world, collecting fallen stars so that he can bring everything back to his father at the end of time.”
Stars overhead danced, faded in and out of sight. Exploded, reformed. Shattered and fell. Crashed like glitter on top of him, bursting into ice that fell like broken rain.
Kilaqqi knelt and held out a tin cup. Something warm sloshed within. It smelled like ammonia and sour grass, like the inside of his old base’s locker room. Sasha tried to turn away. “Reindeer juice.” Kilaqqi gently guided Sasha’s head up, held the cup to his lips. “You will need this to start your journey.”
Sasha tentatively opened his lips. Pungent, hot liquid flowed into his mouth. He wanted to gag. He wanted to vomit. He tried to push away. Kilaqqi poured more reindeer juice past his lips and then held his hand over his mouth, tipped his chin back. Forced him to swallow.
Coughing, Sasha pressed his face into the fur. That was piss. That had been urine. Reindeer urine. His stomach heaved. He glared at Kilaqqi. He’d trusted him, but what the fuck was Kilaqqi doing forcing reindeer urine down his throat?
Kilaqqi raised the cup to the stars and then drank deeply, not hesitating, not shuddering. He tipped his head back and threw out his arms. Spun in circles, until Sasha couldn’t watch anymore. He turned his face back into the bear fur.
