A/N: Chap 2 review responses are in my forums like normal. I will not be posting next Saturday due to family travel. I hope everyone is able to enjoy a long weekend.
Chapter Three: The Matchless Earth
Even hours after arriving in the strange forest, Taylor found herself losing her balance when she tried compensating for the weight of wings that weren't there. The only thing that kept her going was the comforting caress of the spirits in the soil that cushioned her bare feet.
Ahead of her, Morag navigated the narrow trail like a squirrel. The girl was easily two inches short of five feet, with dense, uncut hair that had hints of blonde below a rough thicket of tangles and twigs. She had a powerful stench of old sweat, shit, piss and woodsmoke, as if she'd never bathed in her life. The oily glaze of her skin testified to the same. Her dress was a plain, undyed woolen blouse that hung down to her ankles with a thin length of twine that secured it around her waist and held what looked like a hand-carved knife made of bone, and a leather pouch that held a trail mix of dried berries and pine nuts.
Everything about the girl spoke of a subsistence living; of a crushing poverty that no one in Brockton Bay could understand. Even so, Morag felt a thread of happiness about the boots she carried in her hands so strong Taylor could see it in her very soul.
The horses nickered when they felt Taylor. Taylor looked, trying to see if anything about them was unusual, but as far as she could tell they were simply horses; ill-fed but otherwise healthy. She walked up to the nearest, soothing its spirit as she rubbed the line of its jaw. This one, like the other, wore a hand-crafted leather saddle, with metal rings as joints for the leather work, and sturdy leather bags at the back of it for additional supplies. They were not the same style of saddle that Taylor was accustomed to from the few times her mother took her riding, but they were well made regardless.
The third, older animal was burdened under a massive chest and bundles of supplies that hurt its back badly enough that Taylor winced at the feel of its suffering.
"Should we take them back to your village?" Taylor asked.
Morag shook her head fervently, as if the idea itself was more frightening than Taylor's interrogation of Mez's soul. "No! If White Tree suddenly has a horse, them Crows'll think we kilt them! They'll kill us all! No, we gotta...I don't know. Hide em, maybe? There's an old bear cave on the hill where we found you. We can put the stuff there, maybe."
So that's what they did. For the first time since arriving, Taylor found herself with more practical knowledge about this strange world than Morag, and gathered the horses into a packtrain. She saw quickly why Mez and Chet abandoned their mounts. Walking the horses, though, managed to get them through the dense underbrush with only a few hangups.
"There's the cave!" Morag declared, pointing when they finally reached the clearing.
With her bifrost eyes, Taylor studied the cave. It had an uneven floor and a low-hanging roof, but was large enough to hold everything. So, starting with the poor pack animal, they started unloading.
The chest was the single heaviest object. Taylor found herself in the novel position of straining to lift something, but eventually she managed to get it on her shoulder. The edge of the wood dug into her flesh, but it was the only way she could carry it.
"I don't think even Pa could carry that," Morag said.
"It's pretty heavy," Taylor agreed as she made her way, trembling, up the hill. So it went, trip after trip, until they had stripped the three horses of everything they had, including the saddles. It was Morag who suggested stripping the bodies as well, and so they did. Taylor took the soiled clothes down to the stream. Without soap or detergent, she instead asked the spirits of the water to strip away the filth.
It felt odd how well Mez's clothes fit. They were not so well tailored that her different shape stood out. She gladly replaced the strange silk sheet with loose woolen trousers that she had to tighten with a draw-string, a roughly woven linen shirt that hung almost to her knees when not tucked into the trousers, and over it a woolen vest. She left the black cloaks the two men wore in the cave.
By the time they were done, the sun was setting. Morag watched it with a pensive expression. "Pa's gonna box my ears," she muttered. "It's not safe at night. We'll have to stay here."
They dug into the dead men's supplies and found a cheese wheel and a loaf of dark bread that had a hard outer crust, but a soft, chewy interior. The stream provided cold, fresh water. They ate together at the mouth of the cave as night fell over the forest.
"I ain't never talked to a god before," Morag said as they ate. "I mean, who talked back. I talk to the god in our tree all the time, but he don't say much. What's it like being a god?"
"That's hard to say," Taylor said. She thought of her mother's memories and her father's stories. "I know there are different types of gods. Some gods are spirits, like the god in your tree. They don't talk to mortals, but I can see them, and ask them for help. Like when I stopped you from running, or when I stopped Chet."
"What kind of god are you?"
"I'm a living god. I was born, just like you."
"Will you get old and die just like me?"
"I...don't know. My mother and father were thousands of years old, and they never aged. I didn't think I would either, but this world is so different. I'm not sure how that will work here."
"Do you shit?"
Taylor fought not to choke on her bread. "What?"
"Do you shit? Or piss? Do you bleed like a woman? Do you eat or get hungry? I mean, what's 'living god?' mean?"
The questions forced Taylor to think about it.
"I'm not sure how things are here, Morag. But in my world, the gods had an ultimate purpose to protect the world itself. They fought each other, and sometimes were cruel to the mortals who worshiped them, but the power of faith and divinity helped shield the world from the monsters that live out in the void between the stars. It was one of those monsters that I had to fight."
"Was it a big monster?"
"So big you wouldn't be able to see him. It was like an ant trying to see you, when your foot was all that its eyes could behold. That's why I needed these bifrost eyes. He came to our world and killed many of the gods, and it tore the protections around our world. I restored them, and I think I beat him, but with his dying blow I think he killed me. I still don't know how I came to be here."
"Wow. Still, do you eat? Do you shit or bleed like a normal woman?"
"I'm eating right now, aren't I? And yes, I...I guess I shit. I mean, I didn't at the end, but now...I don't…" Taylor felt her cheeks flaring. "I don't have monthlies. Gods don't work the same way humans do, like that."
"Must be nice," Morag muttered. "What else can you do?"
"I can enchant things to heal, or hurt. I can command the spirits of the world around us, or the souls of humans. I can breathe underwater, and...well, I used to be able to fly."
"Like a bird? Did you have wings? Was that the scars on your back?"
Taylor nodded, fighting back a surge of loss and irritation. "Yeah. I lost them. And it feels like it's just been minutes ago."
"Sorry. Hey, you gonna eat the rest of that bread? Never had bread like this a'fore."
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
Morag made a little nest for herself with old leaves and fell asleep in the cave almost the moment her head went flat against the sand of the cave floor. Taylor, though, closed her eyes and tried to remember what happened when she dove off Yggdrasil.
The moments that followed that terrifying dive blurred in her mind. She had lots of fuzzy recollections, then painfully sharp, clear moments like still photos in her mind. She found the core collection of Scion's primary shards and plunged Havetien into it. That much she remembered.
She had vague recollections of thousands of Golden avatars pummeling her, killing her as she clung desperately to the sword and poured her magic and divinity into it. Then there was an explosion—a supernova of both physical and spiritual power. She had the faintest impression of pieces of herself blasting away, followed by an eternity of falling, until a strange giant asked about machine spirits and shielding.
It took a simple, primitive sword driving painfully into her shoulder to confirm that her magical protections were shattered; that this body she moved in was not the same she'd grown accustomed to.
Pieces of herself.
When she blessed the stream and asked for healing from the spirits of the sun, soil and water, her blessings folded back on herself, healing her as quickly as if she'd eaten one of her own enchanted apples. With a thought, the cold wind of Hel flared from her arms as strongly as ever on Earth Bet. She could feel the spirits around her; the magic that permeated the wood under her.
Magically, she felt as strong as ever, if not more so. But physically?
She struggled to even carry a few hundred pounds. Her wings were just gone, as if cut from her back. She wore primitive clothes while sleeping in a cave that smelled like a giant, unwashed dog. And an unwashed girl.
She cast her mind outward, hoping to find another being like herself. If this was a different world, surely it had its living gods as well, didn't it?
What she felt was a strange, utterly alien tendril of divine power unlike anything she could have imagined. It felt more like a sentient Yggdrasil than any living, thinking being. Its spirit permeated and throbbed through the soil below her, and the heavens above, but it was a slow, quiet god.
Within the tendril of that alien divinity, she felt a mind. A human mind.
She snapped her eyes open, and found a man standing before the mouth of the cave. He stood unsupported, his hands clasped before him. He appeared at first to be a pale man with an albino's red eyes and pale skin and hair. There was a suggestion of a wine stain birthmark just under the collar of a great, black-feathered cloak made in the same cut as the two men she'd killed the day before. However, as soon as he appeared his features aged rapidly into a gaunt, skeletal figure, only to return to the young man and repeat the cycle, again and again.
"How very odd," the figure said.
His voice slid like a chorus of breezes through a thousand trees, audible only to her magic.
"Who are you?"
The figure froze, though his features kept flowing through time from relative youth to old age. "You can see us. Of course, with eyes such as those. You called us; all of us, from across all the span of our years. You do not belong here."
"I don't even know where here is," she said.
"Truly. This is so odd. Every moment of my future is here, now. Thoughts from now until my death, all pulled here by your call. It is a bleak future I've condemned myself to, all just to try and save my people."
The chorus that spoke so sibilantly through her magic resonated with her; she could see the truth of him. A harsh, bitter life of both privilege and denial, of blood and regret. Until finally the gods of the trees called him to be their voice; their eyes.
Darkness comes.
With his truth revealed, she saw the shadow of a name. It was no longer truly his. "I see the man you used to be. Brynden Rivers. What shall I call your current and future self?"
Again, the figure with the constantly aging and deaging face froze. "You can see that much? Yes, I once went by that name. Not so long ago, by your time. That man died. All that remains is the Raven. The Three Eyed Raven, the last greenseer."
His words rang with meaning that only Taylor could understand. It explained why he came through the tendrils of alien divinity she sensed below. "A greenseer. A good term."
"And you, young godling? What shall I call you?"
Rather than give her formal name, she spoke her familiar one. "Taylor."
"A familiar name," Raven said, studying her intently with eyes that went from sharp to rheumy and back with every breath. "A name one might use to whisper sweet nothings or call a child to mealtime. It is not a name of power, not for one such as you. The very ground sings your praise. The trees whisper of your light. Your voice called every aspect of my being from across the span of my days. What is your true name, godling?"
"Telos."
The greenseer smiled. "Ahh, now that is a name of power."
An actual crow stood on her toes, its tiny claws finding purchase in Taylor's knee. Three tiny black eyes stared at Taylor, two as normal, a third in the creature's forehead. It cawed at her, but in the sound she heard the same man's voice.
"And who are you, godling, to wield such a name? What wonders have you done? What people worship you?"
The words rang in her mind, deep and ancient. It was a challenge from one agent of the divine to another.
"I am Telos," she declared. The words came from her divinity itself, echoing her first meeting of another god's challenge a lifetime ago. "Daughter of Freya, goddess of magic, wisdom and fertility, Queen of Asgard and the Valkyrie. Daughter of Kratos, Mars the Warbringer, God of War and slayer of Olympus. I am Telos, goddess of hope and man's final purpose. I am Queen of the gods of America, and for my people and my land I fought and defeated the Destroyer of All Things. By my sword all worlds of man were saved. This and more have I done."
The young-old man squatted beside her once again. She felt no breath from him, only brisk air. He studied her somberly. "You carry deep scars, Telos, Queen of Gods. Parts of you are gone entirely. What did your victory cost you, godling?"
"Everything," she admitted. "I don't even know where I am."
Raven stood now ten feet away, as she first saw him. He held his hands behind his back while he leaned slightly toward her with a shifting, constantly aging face. "Then come with me, I will show you what I can."
Taylor reached deep into that foreign divine magic, and in so doing felt his metaphysical hand take hers. He pulled at her, but could not move her on its own. "I cannot show you, if you do not allow," the projection of the man told her.
She stopped resisting, and gave herself to his power. In the blink of an eye, she floated high above the clouds, borne by Raven's sight, and stared down at unfamiliar continents. She looked and saw oddly familiar lines of magic like a latticework in the heavens around the world. They were not in the shape of constellations, but rather in the shape of a root system. The magic felt like trees. She turned and studied the ageless and aging figure beside her.
"The trees guard their world."
"Is that not the ultimate purpose of any god?" He turned to face the void, and Taylor followed suit until they faced an odd nebula far into space. To mortal eyes it was barely a pinprick in the sky, but to Taylor's Bifrost eyes it seethed with colors beyond mortal description, as if space itself had been torn and still bled in agony. It reminded her of the burst of dimensional energy when she tried to recall Sennecherib's soul.
"That wasn't there the last time I looked into the void," she whispered in horrified awe.
"All things change," Raven whispered. "The godwood stood firm since life formed on this world, eternal sentries against the chaos of the void. But man came, and as we are want to do, we brought destruction in our wake."
He motioned toward the world below, and through her bifrost eyes she saw the massive craft that defied all description sending people to the world below. They appeared to have two colonies-one on the far eastern edge of a vast continent, and the other on a large peninsula on the western side. They built cities that would have made Gene Roddenberry weep. But then, far away, something ripped space apart to create the tear she saw. Through the vision she could not sense the psychic wave that struck the world, but she saw many tendrils of the old god's protections shatter before it. And then, to her horror, she saw the two cities erupt in billows of nuclear fire.
"Stygai," Raven said grimly. "Our first great sin in this world. The first steps men took, and the first strike against this world's heart. The second city had no name that survived, not even to myself, but its destruction rattled the very bones of Valyria."
She watched as the survivors of the broken colonies spread like a virus across the largest continent. They cut the godwoods down as they spread, and slaughtered the children of the gods in the process. Fear, ignorance and hatred moved in their wake as they lost all sense of who they originally wore, and the vast technology that brought them to that world.
As they spread, the root-shaped shield that protected the world began to grow even thinner, and elements of the darkness beyond continued to seep down to the world below.
"The future is beyond my sight," Raven told her. "But the past is clear enough to see. For my past sins, and for the future hope of my people, I condemned myself to a life in the trees. By your call, I can see the span of my life and see that I only staved off the dark for a little time. You were never a part of it. From this day to the end of my days, you were not here, until you are. And now that you are, it all changes."
Once more they were in the cave. Taylor sat within her own weakened physical body while her magic beheld the greenseer before her. The raven knelt before her. "Men shall play their games of thrones," he said, as much to himself as her. "Winter comes, as it has come before and will come again. I see now you are not a god of this world, but a god you are still. The trees call to you, to help them save this world from the dark. Will you help?"
"Do they know if I can return to my own land? My father, or my chosen family?"
"You did not come here through a doorway, young goddess. You were thrown across time and space. There is no going back to what was, not even for one such as you. You are a living god reborn to this world, one never before seen in these lands, and it is that living aspect of your power that binds you always in the present. Will you help?"
No going back. Taylor could remember her father's face perfectly-not just the bearded god of war, but the shaven, gentle father who held her in his lap in the rocking chair he made by hand. He told her stories every night as he rocked her to sleep.
She remembered Lisa's mischievous smile or the hopeful, awe-struck gaze of Maria, or the joy that Shaquelle Washington felt in just living her life. She thought of Sunny and Sanna and all those who filled her life, now lost to her.
But then she thought of Morag, not even 15, who bravely stood up in the face of danger. Who helped her despite her fear. For Morag, if no other, Taylor would help.
"You have decided," the Raven said in his chorus of voices that spanned the man's life.
"Yes."
"Then you are no longer Telos of America. You are Telos of the Trees. Welcome, my goddess."
Raven was gone, but she could still feel his echo in the roots far below.
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
According to Morag, the village of White Tree was the largest village in the area. During their day-long walk through the forest, following a trail through dense forest underbrush filled with birds, chipmunks and other animals, Taylor imagined she was walking toward a quaint village with wattle and daub houses and torch-lit posts in the cobblestone streets like in the movies.
What she saw left her mouth dry.
White Tree was less a village as it was a massive, white tree with four hovels built under the shade of its impossible branches. The people and homes were lost against the spiritual weight of the tree.
"What is the tree called?" Taylor asked Morag as they crossed a narrow stream into the commons of the village.
"The godwood," Morag said. "Don't forget your blindfold."
Taylor pulled on the folded linen strip she'd cut from Chet's extra supplies and quickly covered her eyes. She might as well have been wearing empty glass frames, since the linen did nothing to obstruct her magical vision. Her gaze was once more drawn to the tree. Its trunk was wider than she was tall, by a fair margin to spare. It bore a carved face, almost like something out of Tolkien, but the face was distorted by ages of growth.
The tendril of divine power she felt deep within the earth surfaced here, now, with that massive tree. The power of it welled up through the living wood to the explosion of blood-red leaves that dominated the forest all around. No other trees grew close to it. As she approached, the face seemed to shift until it looked at her with recognition-one divine being to another.
"Who's that?"
The unwelcoming voice drew her attention from the tree to see a man standing on the edge of a common plot of farmed soil that sat between the hovels. Like Morag, he wore undyed wool-a simple tunic stained with mud and sweat, and short trousers hitched up to his knees. Unlike the crows, his footwear consisted of a wood sole and leather straps. Like Morag's.
Behind him, two other men of similar age and build left off their work in the fields and came to stand behind the first, who appeared to be the leader. Nothing about the situation was anything like what Taylor had been imagining on the way over.
Morag held up the boots. "Look, Pa! Telos found a pair o' boots for you!"
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
Twenty people lived among the four hovels. Each of the houses was roughly the size of her family's kitchen. They held no amenities-just a fire pit in the middle under a hole in the wood beam and sod roof, and straw bedding. Morag's mother, Usha, had a few roughly made clay pots that held what little supplies they had.
After Morag's lively introduction of the blind woods witch named Telos who found the pair of boots, Taylor was sat by the door of Morag's home with a spindle and a wad of carded wool. She knew in theory what she was supposed to do just because of the memories her mother gave her through her now lost Brisingamen. But having memories of doing a thing was not the same as actually doing it.
However, everyone else in the village was working. Even the younger children were lugging around pales of water or feeding the hares that Morag took pride in catching and breeding. The only children not working were those so young they couldn't walk steadily-they just paraded naked around the common area just beyond the shadow of the tree where the village grew its rye and barley, kept its five sheep and two lambs, and kept a stye of pigs, while skinny, odd-looking chickens moved around freely eating at the bugs that were everywhere.
The smell of the place reminded Taylor of the pig and chicken farms they used to drive by on the way to the cabin at White Mountain-like an open sewer. The whole place spoke of crushing poverty and disease.
"Can ya no spin, child?" Usha left off where she worked with the other women of the village to check on her.
"I think I can," Taylor said. "It's just been a long time." She twisted some of the wool to make a loop around what looked like a bone hook set in the top of the spindle. "Is that right?"
"Yes, child. Pinch, draft some of the wool, and spin. When you have enough, notch it and gather the yarn around the shaft of the spindle."
The task itself was simple, just a matter of practice and muscle memory. After a moment of watching, Usha nodded and went about her own work. The implication, unspoken but obvious, was that if she did no work, she would not eat. And since everyone there thought she was blind because of her blindfold, spinning wool was the only task they trusted her with.
They seemed to also think being blind meant being simple, because Usha and the other women of the village spoke about her openly, as if she were not just sitting a few feet away spinning yarn from wool.
"Thenns tattoo like that." That was Norna, the wife of the largest of the men of the village, Kern. They had five children, the eldest of which was Morag's age and had spent half his time working the fields with his father, and the other half staring at Taylor as if he could strip her with his eyes alone.
Morag only had two siblings-her other four siblings died either at birth, or by illness later. And judging from how pale and weak the third mother of the village looked, they would lose another member soon. Sattie's spirit spoke of profound weariness and sickness. Her body was wracked by parasites and worms, but it was the tumor in her ovaries that would be the death of her.
Her daughter, a few years younger than Morag, hovered by her side to help where she could.
"Talks more like a kneeler than a Free Folk, even a Thenn," Usha said. "Poor child, left alone out in the forest. Woulda been a kindness to end her, methinks, if'n she were born that way."
"No easy thing, you say," Sattie said wistfully. Her soul spiked with remembered pain. Not all the children lost died naturally. Taylor kept her head down and tried to remind herself that this was not Brockton Bay. There were no hospitals, nor parahuman healers here. If a child was born with a defect in a subsistence village, it was obvious what they did.
If a child could not work, then it would not eat. With that harsh reality, killing it would seem a mercy in their eyes.
"She doesn't move like the blind," Norna declared.
Like Sattie, and Usha, Norna had intestinal worms, as well as lice and flees in the thick matting of her hair. "And she's so big! I ain't never heard o' no woman taller than a man! Think she's a giant breed?"
Usha chuckled. "Shush you, carrying on like that. She's no giant's get, just a tall girl. She was well fed. I'm thinking some kneeler lord threw her out for her blindness, and sent her north o' that wall o' theirs so we'd et them."
Usha had ulcers and multiple other conditions from chronic undernutrition. In fact, every one of them had faced deprivation in the past, stunting growth and development. The men were not tall or muscular, but rather small and wiry. They were strong, but would not stand up well against larger, more well-fed men.
The truth of them spoke of hardiness, loss and an almost mindless will to survive. Of strength of will that far exceeded their bodies.
She continued spinning the large bundle of washed, carded wool.
They ate two meals a day, both of which came from a single communal pot. The men took their servings first, then the women, then the children, and then Taylor. She had to scrape the wood-carved bowl they gave her against the bottom to get the watery gruel. It seemed to be made mostly of barley, with bits of meat and vegetable thrown in. The meat tasted vaguely like chicken. There was not much after the others took their fill.
And yet, when she looked about her, all it took was a glimpse of their souls to know that Usha and Morag intentionally took less than their fill so that there would be enough to share. Taylor increased the mouths to feed, but did not increase the food available to feed them.
Morag gathered extra straw from around the village and placed it down inside the crowded unmortared stone hovel where she, her sister Aliss and her brother Otor slept with their parents. The space was crowded, filled with smoke after they closed the animal skin doors, and smelt of urine from the night pale.
Just moments after everyone was in bed, Taylor heard grunting and rhythmic movement, and realized to her utter shock that her hosts were having sex right there in front of her and their...children.
Right.
Different culture, Taylor told herself as she covered her ears and tried to sleep on a bed of insect-laden straw while Morag's parents tried to make another baby.