January 9, 1939
The radio is their sole source of comfort during the day, but also an ever present source of terror. There's little else for a family to do in the cramped attic, but between the radio operas and dramatic readings is the propaganda. Terrible, hateful propaganda that tells Elsa how cowardly and greedy she is. That tells her how evil her people are, how all their great country's problems are her fault even though she loves Germany as much as the next girl. Propaganda that tells her how disgusting homosexuals are, though even her family doesn't know that little secret…
Her mother had wanted her to marry the butcher's boy across the street- or across the street from their old home, Elsa reminds herself. Blond haired and blue eyed just like her, the perfect aryan match. Elsa hadn't known how to tell her mother why that wouldn't work, and now she doesn't have to. The only good to come out of this whole situation.
Elsa's brother listens intently to the radio- he's only nine and easily amused. He doesn't yet understand what he hears. Her parents are behind the partition, arguing quietly again though they think she can't hear. "Iduna, we have to try. If we stay…" her father's voice. "And go where? Even if we make it, you've heard the radio. Nowhere is safe. The Wehrmacht is rolling over everything. No one can stop our blitzkrieg." Even now, it's "our" blitzkrieg. Our army. Our war. Our SS even, though no one talks about them here.
Everyone is distracted, so Elsa can read her book. She found it here, under a floorboard. Dust coated and ancient, not written in German. Elsa has always been good with languages though, and some of it had already been translated on yellowed sheets of parchment nearby. It isn't impossible, given a few pages in each language, to work it out. Elsa has nothing but time and the clothes on her back.
The book speaks of things. Things like a forgotten Egyptian king, and a way to stave off death. Things like lost knowledge, and a way to save her family. Terrible things too though. Ways to bring back the dead, ways to bind bone and brass and carven stone into terrible vengeful constructs like the gollum of legend, ways to pollute the mind and wither the muscles.
Elsa has been thinking of trying one of the spells for a while now- oh, nothing big or dangerous. None of the spells for modifying your own soul, none of the powerful spells that could get out of hand. Nothing that requires any real sacrifice to work either; Elsa doesn't know if the spells are real. For all she knows, the whole thing could be a joke. It feels right though, and she needs it to work if her family is to survive.
A simple spell then, to listen at a great distance… The book had said to reach out for the magic, but what does that mean? Elsa wonders if she should try to raise her hands or something when there it is. Not visible, not tangible, nothing she can describe really, just a sense of incomprehensible power lurking, writhing, eager to be used. The spell burns itself out and Elsa lets it fail, sits there stunned. Her heart hammers in her chest like a loose piston in a failing engine- she did it! The magic is real! There's a noise downstairs like a dropped pot.
Elsa hides her book, and all of the papers that go with it. Boots on the stairs- the SS? Her breath catches, her heart is in her throat. The trapdoor opens and it's only the nice old herr Oaken who has been hiding her family. He peers around the little attic and his twinkling eyes- mostly hidden by bushy brows- seem to see through everyone like a piercing wind. Her brother listening to the radio- no, not what the man is looking for. Her parents, argument comically paused? No… Elsa, seated at the battered little table, trying very hard not to look at that one section of loose flooring- herr Oaken's eyes seem to light up like tiny Hanukkah candles.
"Ah," he says, and the sound is like a suddenly punctured tire. "Little frauline Elsa. I should have known." Her parents look at him as if wings had just sprouted from his tweed back. "A noise, I thought," he says. "We can't risk you being heard. People below, in the shop, ya? I will come later, when it is safe." He shuts the trap door behind himself, and Elsa's mother moves- quickly but quietly- to turn off the radio. It isn't the first time herr Oaken has had to warn them to be quiet, but it's late and the shop is closed. Her parents seem to believe him, but Elsa can't hear anyone below- anyone except for Oaken and his prodigious family that is…
That night, Elsa is woken by a thick finger on her lips. Her eyes snap open, her heart thrums like the propeller of one of the luftwaffe's fighters, but she doesn't move. Just holds carefully still like a wounded dog warily assessing her surroundings. Herr Oaken and his fair wife stand over her, lit only by the moonlight.
"Come with us," frau Oaken whispers, and the couple moves back to the trap door. Elsa knows it is dangerous to follow, knows that someone might see her, but she dresses and follows anyway.
The couple leads her down to their shop's little basement. It is normally crowded by crates of unopened back stock, but tonight it is crowded by men and women chatting excitedly. They quiet quickly when the Oakens enter.
"This is her then?" One of the men near the front says. "She doesn't look like much."
Elsa doesn't understand what is happening, and worries that the Oakens are about to whore her out, but they make no move to lay a hand on her and the staircase behind her is not blocked. Maybe they plan to threaten her family in order to make her cooperate, but if she runs now before they give their threat…
"This is her," Frau Oaken says, and Elsa hesitates in spite of herself.
"I may not be strong enough to work a spell," Herr Oaken says, "but I can sure feel one building. Go ahead Elsa honey, show them." Elsa frowns.
"I don't have the book," she says quietly, catching on. "I'm sorry. I can go get it?"
"That's all right," Herr Oaken lays a heavy hand on her shoulder and she stiffens in spite of herself. "Just do what you can without it."
Elsa nods hesitantly, reaches out for the power, and there's an ocean of it, crashing against the barriers of her mind like the pounding surf. She shies away from it, and an awed whisper sweeps the crowd.
"She's powerful," someone says. "She just sees the power so clearly," someone else says. "And to think she hasn't studied it at all."
"I've studied," Elsa says quickly, and is not entirely sure if she is defending herself in doing so or not. "I read most of the book I found. From Nagash?" The magic is real! And other people know about it!
"An old book full of outdated, half functional spells," a woman in the crowd scoffs.
"I'm sure you're all much better," Elsa mumbles.
"Better? No," someone laughs. "I know a hundred spells but I'm only strong enough to make a little light. Let me teach you, at least someone will be able to use them."
"I can do Van Hel's, but that's it," another says. "She might even be strong enough to work the litch ritual, not that we would, of course," they seem to all talk at once, but it's a healthy happy hubbub that puts a shy smile on Elsa's pale face.
February 23, 1940
There is a pounding on the door. A quick staccato sound. Oaken stands, and motions Elsa up the stairs. Elsa closes her book and goes, but before she reaches them, the door flies from its hinges. There are men there, grey coats and shiny leather boots and crimson arm bands and caps with shiny silver eagles. It's over, and Elsa knows. Herr Oaken must as well, but he just shakes his head sadly and rolls up his sleeves.
"We are having problem?" He asks. One of the men smiles and steps forward, singles himself out as a leader. His smile can barely be called that- the sort of expression a shark might have before the frenzy, if a shark had lips.
"Your neighbors say you have not been entirely honest with us Herr Oaken," The man says almost apologetically. Almost. "You don't mind if we look around, do you?" His gaze catches Elsa's- his eyes are blue, but not like hers. Blue like a fish's belly maybe- sickly and pale and ugly.
"My daughter," Oaken says quickly, but the SS officer's smile only grows wider. Elsa closes her eyes.
Faster than a man his size has any right to move, Oaken darts forward. His colossal fist connects with the man's jaw, lifts him off his feet, hurls him into the wall where he falls and lies unmoving. One man is no match for the secret police though, especially unarmed. Their pistols bark. The spent brass hits the ground before Oaken does.
Elsa reaches out for the magic, but she can't quite seem to get her mind around it. She tries to take it from the flowers outside but they refuse to give up their life. She tries to take it from the men who are attacking, but their minds are the sort of iron that only unthinking indoctrinated devotion can create, and Elsa's is a boiling cauldron of panic and rage and sorrow and… her heart is thrumming like a hummingbird's wings as of it knows that soon it will not be and it is trying to get a whole lifetime's worth of heartbeats in the little time she has left.
The men are not gentle when they grab her shoulders, their fingers dig through the knit wool of her shawl like augers and they force her to her knees with a dull thud. They keep their pistols pointed at her, but there's no need: she can't work the magic with only a year of practice and with the hate and sadness and panic and confusion all blending together into something like apathy- her heart doesn't seem to know what emotion ought to be dominant so none of them are. They don't kill her though, and they don't kill her mother or her father or her brother.
September 19, 1944
The walls are grey. The ground is grey. The sky is grey. The guards and their towers and their guns are all grey. When there's food, that's grey too. It's not often that there is food though- Elsa's ribs and spine and wrists and hips are all testament to that, sharp and visible whenever she undresses. She rarely does.
She's the only one left. A fever took her brother last winter- the huts have thin walls and no fire or oven, their clothes are patchwork and cheap. Nothing to keep the cold away, it's a small miracle his tiny body endured this long. Her parents not long after. They had given their meager food to him, and after he died, to her. Now it won't be long for her to join them.
Winter is here again- the harsh white German winter. Booted feet and truck wheels keep the yards clear and grey though, like everything else here. Elsa is almost looking forward to the end that must be coming. Even as she obsessively studies the book she had smuggled in. Even as she feverishly tries to work out the litch ritual, she waits almost eagerly for that end to come. Even if the Christian hell waits for her, it cannot possibly be worse than this place.
There's a loose nail in the wall by her bed. She has considered it. It wouldn't be hard, just a little tug to free it, then a little jab and peaceful oblivion. Or she could run at the fence like so many others have. Force the grey-coated guards to chew her up with their big machine guns. It would be so easy, but her parents had told her to live, and she imagines sometimes that they are watching. Imagines often enough to keep her away from the fence.
People have been disappearing lately anyway. Taken away on forced marches, almost far enough away that those who stay can't hear the machine guns. Sent to take a shower- everyone knows it isn't water that will come out of those faucets but they go anyway.
Another day.
A little bit hungrier. That indescribable emptiness, as if the absence in her stomach is trying to suck the rest of her in to fill it, and as if there's a baffling paradoxical fullness at the same time. She tries to eat dirt. It helps. Some. Another day.
Eventually, the words on the page start to make sense. The precise patterns that the magic must be forced into, the terrible source of the incomprehensible power, the way the universe moves together just so and the way to subtly alter it so that your soul can no longer fall out of it when you die. The old Egyptian text speaks of ritualistic burial bindings, and organ jars, and offerings set aside as investment for use in the afterlife. Elsa doesn't know much about any sort of afterlife, but Oaken and his friends have taught her enough about magic and about the great mysteries of the universe that she knows most of the ritual is unnecessary. Knows also ways to make the delicate gears and tributaries and reservoirs of power more efficient. Not actual gears, of course, and not actual tributaries and reservoirs. Magic is much more fickle than that and much more abstract too, but the analogy helps her to imagine it and in so imagining, to shape it to her will. Here a loop- for lack of more appropriate language- that lets much of the mind slip through. There a chain of "gearing" that steps up the magical "torque", too much and with too much of a sacrifice in responsiveness.
So she studies, and so she changes the great ritual where it has its flaws, and the days leak by like water from a cracked bucket. A sort of gradual slipping where no day feels any longer or shorter than the one before it, but all the days past have vanished into the opaque mists of the past, and all those before stretch out impossibly vast before her.
Sometimes, half mad with hunger and with the death that slowly steals up her limbs, Elsa writes great lists of foods that she would like to try one last time before she dies. Sometimes she burns those lists in a futile effort to stay warm. Always though, the thought of her parents' wishes drives her back to that impossible old spell, and the thought of their reproach should she give up keeps her at it when the hieroglyphs blur together and dance madly on the page.
For a while, she is stumped by the question of where to get the sacrifice to fuel the spell. For days, she toys with the idea of stealing the lives of those wicked grey guards, but it could never work. She could never break through the iron of their indoctrination- not mired in the swamp of her own despair at least- and though she might be able to ambush one or two with that loose nail or hers, her luck wouldn't last and much of her meager strength has been taken by her fast approaching death.
And then, one day, it clicks. Every life is a sort of power, is it not? Well this place is suffused with it. With more death than could ever be found on any battlefield. With more death than any ten cemeteries. With enough power to work that horrible ritual a dozen times over. A hundred times over maybe. Such a mighty ocean of power positively filling the air and she hadn't noticed it before, as one does not realize how bright a room is until Someone turns off the lights. So much power, she doesn't have any excuse to wait. And if she's wrong? Then it kills her, and at last she is free of this hell. What to use as a phylactery? What to bind her soul to? She must choose carefully because if it is ever destroyed, she will be too. Well, Nagash's old book has survived for three thousand years without change, won't it survive another three thousand just as easily?
She works her ritual. The shrieking of reality becoming malleable to her is lost in the constant roar of the crematorium. The way the storm clouds gather as if to proclaim "see here is one who has defeated death!" Is lost behind the perpetual clouds of ash. The way the wood of her bed flexes away from her as if afraid is lost in the apathy of her bunk mates.
And then it's done and she feels no different. Less hungry maybe, but that could be her imagination only.
Another day. She feels stronger, almost. Not physically, but the magic is closer and more responsive. With so much power laying around, perhaps she ought to work the ritual again? For some of the people marching off to meet the machineguns maybe, or perhaps the showers? Ought she not save someone at least, if it's within her power? Yes. Resoundingly, absolutely, yes. But also they ought to be given the choice. Who is Elsa to decide someone's eternity for them? How to broach the topic though, and who with?
Never once does she consider turning her magic against her captors. Too ingrained in her psyche is the knowledge that resistance is impossible. Too absolute is the illusion of Nazi invincibility. It's a pity. Had she thought to bind the cursed ash of the ones already dead into a great vengeful ushabti, or to work the invocation of Nehek over the mass graves and in so doing raise an army of the restless dead, perhaps she could have spared herself a great deal of suffering. Perhaps saved a few others.
The grey guards come for her barracks next. Cover our tracks before the allies get here is the thought. Make sure no one is left to testify to the horrors they endured. Elsa goes complacently to the showers.
Dying is such an odd experience. Not painful, exactly. A sort of peaceful release. Gone is the omnipresent hunger, and the ache in her dying limbs, and the dizziness of malnutrition. So easy to just fall, to not feel the way she hits the ground. To lie there and wonder when she will rot.
So easy to feel rough grey hands dragging her grey corpse into a pile- is that really her corpse? So thin! She doesn't think she could have lasted much longer anyway. Others are piled atop her, but she doesn't really mind. She can see the magic boiling off of them, everything their life ever was fading to join the titanic miasma of suffering that suffuses the place. It's beautiful, in its own way. The imaginary blues and greens and reds and purples- for magic is invisible of course, but the dead are much closer to it than the living.
She feels the fire- oh how she feels that. As if every nerve in her body were sending pain at its maximum capacity. She would black out from the impossible agony, but she is very very dead and the dead do not blackout. Maybe her bunk mates have all gone to the afterlife, but Elsa can see the shackles of her magic binding her to that old book, even as her soul writhes desperately to break free.
Days later, on the huge ash flows that the crematoriums of Dachau leave, something stirs. Just a mote of ash. A little anguished nothing. The magic works too well. Even without her will to direct it, even begging for oblivion, her magic knits two specks of ash together. Then three. Four. On and on, a skeleton forms, soot blackened and mangled. Ash is piled on top and no one notices. Muscles- crisp and reeking and blackened slither over the ruin of her frame. An unbeating heart congeals, a knotted core of the horrible revenant. Elsa would scream if she could see what she has become, but she has no eyes and her lungs are still melted and scattered. A brain forms, or the beginning of one, but all it can comprehend is horror and agony. The kind of agony that there are no words in any language to describe. Skin, peeling and cracked, grows over the corpse like mold on an old piece of bread.
It feels like an eternity, and maybe it was, but the thing doesn't hurt anymore. It can't feel it's own heartbeat, and that unnerves it somewhat, but at least it isn't hurting. There's something wrong, but it can't quite put its finger on it- isn't even sure if t has fingers anymore- so it waits and sobs quietly. Elsa! It's- her- name is Elsa. She sobbs. Her skin heals, breasts form, and hair, eyes, fingernails, the soft tissues of her nose and mouth and crotch that had all been the first to burn.
Elsa has no heartbeat, but she isn't burning anymore. She is naked and alone, buried under the ashes of people she knew, but she isn't hurting. It isn't so hard to wrap herself in her magic, and fade from view. It's harder to make her dead limbs climb out of the ash pile, and harder still to totter out onto the field. Guards are near, loading shoes into a truck, and Elsa looks for hers. Her little black flats that she loved so much.
There isn't really enough of Elsa to feel anything, isn't enough left to think any more than in a dream, but it will come back to her. Eventually. The numbers are still on her wrist, black and menacing and just like they came back, so too will her grief. That thought scares her a little, but only a little because there isn't much of Elsa to be scared.
AN: so… err… this chapter was very not on time… you may have noticed. It was also very not easy to write. You maybe guessed that too? In addition to the frustration of writing… all of it, I guess… I couldn't figure out what to do about the language. Obviously the characters in this chapter would have been speaking German to each other, and previously in this story I've been writing German dialogue in German. That's partially to obfuscate the meaning though, and I felt like a chapter of all dialogue that was difficult to understand would only frustrate the reader. What's the alternative then? German inside the quotes, and then a copy in English after as an explanation of what was said? That seemed clumsy and like it would only bog down the story, so I settled for just writing it in English and consistency be damned.
Also, I hope that the descriptions didn't become too cliche. Descriptions of the extremes of sensations are difficult to render unique.
Also also I hope it didn't become too graphic for a "T" rating…