Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a girl with a head full of wonders. For if there had not been one such, word would not still go around.
***
She awoke most nights to the distant sound of howling wolves. They sounded like they were right outside her window, but after a moment of fright, lost in her dreams, she came back to herself and listened to the lilt of their voices, long on the still, cold air.
The Saints' Books and Books of the Cataclysm and other holy tomes held in the carved cedar box beneath their church's altar spoke many times of wolves, and of the terrible, wonderful dreams they brought. There was a holy sickness, so the books said, that infected only the most transcendentally pious.
May they come to eat our flesh.
May they come to tear us apart.
Holy of holies, the notion, said the priests. To not only worship the ancient saints, brought with the first settlers of this mountain valley, but become one of their monsters, to be consumed by them-! They always gave a great fluttering of eyes and pressing of hands to hearts when speaking of this, their tones appropriately hushed.
The girl always nodded, her small, pale face set in what she hoped was similarly-appropriate piety, but secretly she thought there was nothing holy about the idea of being eaten.
"The pain sets you free," her father told her, when she related this secret to him one day. He was a carpenter, the best in town, able to join two beams so closely even the girl, with her years of watching him work, could never find the seams. Now, he had paused in his work, surrounded by long, soft curls of planed-off wood, the air thick with the fragrant smell of it. "That's the notion, anyway. Frankly I don't see what all the fuss is about."
The girl giggled. "It doesn't sound very nice."
"Not nice at all." He had sawdust in his blond beard. He might have paused his work, but his hands were still busy. He had a penknife and was whittling a piece of wood into the shape of an animal. "Me, I'd rather die in my bed, with my white beard to my toes, surrounded by you, my sweet, and a hundred grandchildren."
"That's a lot of grandchildren." She wrinkled her nose. "How about just one?"
"Oh?" Her father made a grand show of considering. "Well, I suppose just one. What does this one look like? A kitten? A lamb, like the ones I saw you stroking yesterday when you were meant to be gathering eggs? Maybe a little goblin?"
"No! Not a goblin. A little girl, like me."
"Just like you. With long blonde pigtails and a dreamy, schemey look on her face." He held up the little wooden animal. Now the girl saw what it was: two horns, four legs, a small friendly face. "It's not quite a lamb, but..."
The girl took the little wooden goat and cupped it in her hands. Her father might scoff at priestly tales of sacred pain, but the girl had heard his talk with the other men of the village, when he invited them to their beautifully-made home to boast and drink and discuss, as he said, 'important matters'.
She was meant to be in bed, but she snuck out and padded in her little woolen slippers to the doorway outside the sitting room. Through the shadows she saw the leaping flames, their orange glow shining on bearded faces, heard the glug of strong spirits and the words flowing just as thick and fast.
She hunkered down, her head pressed to the carved door frame, and filled her mind on their conversations. Tales of the village- gossip, her mother would say, with a roll of her eyes and a stroke of her palm down her rounded, pregnant belly. The price of timber, of lamp oil, of chicken feed. The news that came from the outside world, conveyed in by merchants in caravans drawn by shaggy, sure-footed horses, the sole sort that could traverse the treacherous mountainsides that were the only way down to the world beyond.
The mysteries of the surrounding crags and forests, strange creatures glimpsed over a gun barrel, a deep cave that reflected back the voice, so that to speak within was to hold a conversation with onesself that could last for hours-
"Days," the man claimed. He was Claude Moreau, a fisherman from the flank of the village that spilled down onto the shores of a nearby lake, a big man with gentle hands and three small sons, too young to play with the girl, but old enough to want to. "I'd have been stuck in there, chattering away forever, starving to death, if Josef hadn't come and yanked me out-"
"Because you had the bait box!" Josef crowed, and the house filled with laughter.
***
When the girl awoke one night to wolves, something was different. Something had changed. She lifted her head from the thin goosedown pillow and found a hazy stripe of gold across her coverlet. She rolled over and saw the outline of gold around the door.
Voices from without. The low moan of pain.
Slowly, so she might make no sound, the girl slipped from bed. She crept to the door and pushed it; her father had hung it, had carved it, and it swung wide silently. The sitting room was empty, but the door to her parents' bedroom was open, and from it- cries, gasps, the smell of something thick, and sweet.
The girl knew it. Of course she knew it. Every child of the village, born in this harsh mountain place, had it as their cradle-song. Chickens beheaded, pigs slaughtered. The dring of it in a bucket. The weeping of it over the snow.
Blood.
It was not meant to be here. This was home. But here it was, intruding. The girl crept toward the door, pale and hushed, her night-gown shimmering in the candlelight, a small and silent ghost. She came to the doorway and stood and looked within.
Her mother lay on the bed. On her side. Her hand was pressed to her stomach, her nightgown so soaked in sweat it clung to her body, translucent. The bed was a bath of blood. It ran in streams from the blanket, dripping and pooling on the floor. A red ribbon of it reached for the girl's toes; inside, revulsion howled and curled, but her body would not move. Her mother shuddered. A sound escaped her, a low, aching cry.
"Is...is that the doctor..."
The girl did not realize it was her mother's voice at first. It all struck her, then, as if her thoughts were coming to her late. The baby. Something was wrong. Her father had gone for the doctor. He had not come back yet.
"No," the girl whispered.
"Please...please, O saints of warding, O wolves of mercy, let him...come back..."
Her words dissolved into a howl. The girl thought of the wolves. Somehow she made herself move. Somehow she made herself stand alongside her mother, then kneel before her, as if giving worship to her as she lay and screamed and bled.
By the time her father returned with the village physician hurriedly tucking in his shirttails, roused from bed at this late hour, the blood had long gone cold, and the girl had fallen asleep, curled in the hollow of her mother's body, like the baby that was meant to come.
***
It was later, deep within the night, that the village craftsmen's tales turned to the past. To the histories.
The girl, half-dozing, always perked up at this. The only place to find the histories of the village were in the church, and then only a piece at a time, each Sabbath-day, read from the dusty, doddering lips of a dusty, doddering priest. Told by her father, the histories struck a match in the girl's mind and filled the inside of her head with a shadow-box of wonders.
A great crystalline city, deep beneath the earth. Spires to touch the skies, carved from gemstones, a thousand-thousand people filling the air with their songs and their laughter. A perfect place; a perfect utopia. No one fell sick, or went hungry. No one was lost to the snows, no child born blue. No graves were dug, no priests called to lay aconite and mountain ash and silver in crosses over hands laced. There was no need to gather eggs. There, she might dawdle all day, stroke the lambs' wool as fine and white as new snow. There, she might lay and listen forever to whatever tales she liked, and never grow tired.
A perfect place, sundered. A great calamity. Of this her father had no details, merely a darkness in his voice. Flames, perhaps floods; perhaps the place was consumed by the earth, bitten and swallowed in a snap. What mattered was that the people were flung from their perfect dream and into the nightmare of the world beyond.
For they had never known anything else, her father said, the fire burnt low, the glowing coals the only illumination in the endless dark. They had no need for gods within their paradise, but when that paradise was gone, they searched and sought and found their saints, as if waiting, in the air. Save us, they pleaded. Save us and spare us. We are lost and we are lonely.
And their saints were merciful. And their gods were waiting. And their gods asked for little. Only their love. Only their devotion.
We will save you, they promised, give you all you seek and more. We only ask that you become ours, and do as we say in return.
The girl's eyelids drooped, heavy with sleep. Mercilessly, she pinched herself. She wanted to hear the end of the story.
And so the people swore to their newfound gods they would give them their love, their devotion. They became theirs, and swore they would do all they asked for, and more.
For what is that, in return for life?
***
Her mother was lain still and cold on the scrubbed pine table, wreathed in garlic blossoms, a coin on her forehead, another slipped between her lips. The girl sat by her side, holding her hand. She wore black, mourning-clothes never before used. The house was cold, too. The fire had not been lit, and in the corners, dust had begun to accumulate.
No stories, no songs.
***
There are places, the saints whispered, where folk would never die. And those who had left the city, whose loved ones had perished in the cataclysm, lifted their heads in wonder and yearning. To live forever, the saints whispered. To live eternal. To never be forgotten.
That is what we want, they said. To be remembered.
So there is someone who will love us in another time.
So there is always someone waiting for us.
Come with us, they called, deep within the trees, to the ragged and the weary. Soon you will find salvation. Follow us, and it will be yours.
***
When the girl's father at last returned, his clothes were filthy, his fingernails black with what might be dirt. The look in his eyes frightened the girl- hungry and hollow. In his arms he clutched a bundle.
A child, the girl thought, for a moment. The baby that was meant to be born, that died with Mother.
As he neared, however, she saw it was no child within the wrappings, but a wooden box, warped and blackened with age, bound over and over again with red twine.
She blinked as another man entered behind her father. The elderly priest, she saw, who read the holy books so dully.
Her father never went to church unless Mother dragged him along, lamenting his soul. What was he doing with a priest now?
"He can save her," her father said. "Sweet one, your mother- she is not dead. Don't you understand? The stories...they're all true."
A smile broke over his face, trembling and strange, like candle flames in a breeze. The girl saw something brittle in it, something fragile. Something fervent, too.
"She can come back," he whispered.
They made the house dark, drew the curtains, waited for night. Waited for the wolves' howl to fill the frozen air, waited until the ring of candles round her mother's corpse was the only light in the world. The priest made his preparations. He had brought many things, producing them one at a time from the depths of his robes. A reliquary, gilt and glass, filled with clouded yellow liquid and a single human eye, its pupil long-since turned to milk. The bones of some small creature. A goat-headed figurine carved from white crystal.
The girl sat in a corner, her clammy hands in fists on her knees, eyes wide. She did not want to watch this. She did not want to look away.
The priest finished his array and, for long minutes, whispered over her mother's body. Then from the depths of his black and yellow robes he drew the hooked knife.
The girl's fists tightened as he slid its point down her mother's belly. Open it spilled, and the glistening stuff within was revealed. The smell now was not blood; it was warmer, richer, stranger.
Inside the old box-
Something thudded, light as a fingertip tapped against the wood.
The priest straightened. In the candlelight his face was a death mask. He lifted the knife; the girl stiffened. Her father stood with head bent and lips fluttering. The knife cut through the strings on the box in a twang.
He lifted the lid.
Within-
It was a baby after all, the girl saw. A living baby. Not blue, not still. But it was wrong. It writhed. It pulsed there in the priest's hands, unfurling long, pinkish tendrils from its slick flesh. They snaked and coiled gently around the priest's arms, nosing at his skin, at his robes, as if curious, or hungry.
She will live again.
He placed the infant inside her mother's slit-open belly, and the tentacles furled round it, sealing up the wound with a faint, fleshy crackle.
She will live again.
The only evidence it was there was the empty box. The faint pulse of her mother's belly, grotesque for the stillness that surrounded it. And the gash, a perfect red line down her mother's pale corpse skin.
And if she does not-
***
Her father came to stand by her.
After a moment, his hand rested on her shoulder.
"She's strong," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "She'll come back. She'll resist the wolf-sickness. I know she will."
"Did they ever find it?" the girl whispered.
"Find what?"
"Did the saints lead them to the place where the people can live forever?"
Her father smiled. "They found it. Of course they found it. That place is here, Miranda. This is the place where what we love will never die."