† the virgin goddess of truth, dressed in white and hidden out of sight †
Another day passed without a trace of Serena. In the morning, Aquila kept me busy by showing me around the town — it was very small and no one who did not know about Varkolaks and the impending war resided there — but by afternoon, I had seen what could be seen.
That was when the waiting truly began to nag at me. I knew that Serena wanted me here, for some reason, but I couldn't figure out why. This seemed to be a military base more than anything else. Less than one in ten of the people we had met had been human, but I assumed that there were more Varkolaks hiding inside than humans.
Aquila was no help in answered this question. "Why do you think she brought me here?" I asked, as the sky darkened and the snow seemed to glow in the last of light.
He shook his head. "I don't know. You'd be safer... well, anywhere else."
That night, sleep was hard to find. I was used to a busy life, with no more than six hours of sleep a night and constant exhaustion. When I did finally drowse off, it wasn't without nightmares filled with guns and chases haunting me.
The next day, the snow fell too thickly for me to go out. When I began pacing through the house, Aquila handed me a book wordlessly, and I plopped into the couch with a blanket and a cup of coffee.
"It's clearing up," Aquila commented what might have been an hour later. "May I?"
I nodded and pulled up my feet, making place for him on the couch.
"You know, you're a rather extraordinary person," he told me. "Not anyone would've had the bravery to do what you did."
I smiled and looked down at the pages of my book. "Thank you." After a moment, I drew in a deep breath and set the book aside. "You're a rather extraordinary person, too," I said, sitting up further.
He looked at me, and he did look surprised. The green of his eyes seemed infused by gold in the afternoon sun. He looked surprised, the way a human would look surprised.
"You know..." I blushed; something about the clearness of emotion in his face unnerved me. "You cling to humanity. It must take strength, I mean. And— And everything you and Karen went through, it must've been a fight."
He let out a low chuckle. "You've been with Serena for too long," he said. "You see, the secret is that we are human. No, we don't age, and we don't die, not unless someone makes us. Serena is under the impression that dying is the human condition, and if you don't die, then you can't be human, because humanity is feeling with the passion of something dying."
I frowned. "Well, you must admit that is one great barrier between us."
"Even Varkolaks don't live forever," he said. "Even mountains are washed away and stars explode and one day, everything in the universe will have died and been reborn. Everything dies, and I feel with the same passion as I did before I changed." He smiled. "When I think of Karen, of the child she carries... I don't remember ever having felt so happy before."
He folded his hands together and faced me. "Serena is a cynic. She has lost so much in her lifetime — too much. She has a lot of things buried and she is very cold, but she isn't frozen all the way through. She loves and she suffers, every day, and one day she will perish, and she is human."
I felt a cold draft at the nape of my neck and pulled my jumper closer around me. For a long moment, I was watching Aquila with his golden-green eyes so full of love, hiding away from the draft and the snow; and then the air shifted around me and my heart was clenched by a cold hand of excitement. My breathing halted. Serena was back.
"You felt it, too?" Aquila asked.
I nodded. My throat was too dry for words.
"By god, she really has you on a tight leash, hasn't she?" Even though there was humor in his words, there was true worry, as well.
I pulled on my shoes and jacket and followed Aquila out of the door. A large group of people, like one large shadow, was making its way down the main street. At their front, as if a light in darkness, Serena walked. Her hair hung loose, tumbling in ash blonde waves over her shoulders. She wore nothing but a white, sleeveless dress and appeared barefoot.
"Holy shit," Aquila breathed — and I saw why.
Behind her, the group of people, spread. It seemed to reach the horizon, so many were there. I could not see the end of the march. He touched my arm and pulled me aside as they passed me by. Serena kept her head straight and jaw raised, not even sparing me a glance. I watched her, mesmerized by her nakedness in the raw, Russian wilderness, as long as I could. Then, row after row of Varkolaks, cut off my line of vision.
"I should go speak to her," I said to Aquila.
He tried to stop me, with a hand on my arm, but I paid him no mind.
It was a struggle to pass through the crowd. Where the newcomers weren't pressing on, there were onlookers blocking my way. But I kept struggling until, all of a sudden, the wave of newcomers stopped moving. I moved around until I finally found a vantage point. I could just glimpse Serena through the crowd.
Her dress billowed in the wind and her skin seemed almost grey in the cold. Her lips were moving, and I knew she was speaking, but I couldn't listen. My mind was too filled by her presence, by her mind pulsing and thinking and puzzling so close to me. I could feel it working, chewing through words and emotions and images as she spoke. It was intoxicating.
As the crowd dispersed, I moved towards her. I was barely aware that I was moving until I was standing in front of her.
She looked at me. Her brief smile made me shiver more than the winds would, had I shed my jacket and jumper and stood in the mountains. "Ah, Melissa. I see you made it."
"Yes, I did." I gestured around me. "What is this place?"
"Hasn't Aquila told you? I told him to explain it to you. But it's rather obvious, isn't it? It's a military base."
Her mind felt ecstatic, too. She, too, was tripping over her words. "So there is a war coming."
"Well, of course."
And then the joy left me long enough for me to remember the time after she left. I recalled the dimness of the world in her absence. "Why didn't you tell me?" I whispered. I felt pathetic as I said it, like a starving, freezing, filthy beggar on my knees. "You just left me."
She sighed. "I'm raising an army, Melissa. War is coming. That's why I didn't bring you with me in the first place. Humans don't make for very good weapons against Varkolaks, in case you hadn't noticed."
"I killed Isabella," I reminded her. "I shot her. She's a Varkolak."
Serena looked around her, obviously impatient. "Listen, Melissa, I don't have time for this. You're a human. I'd have you sent away somewhere else, if I could ensure your safety anywhere else. The Lilithians have the stupid belief that I care specially for you and you would be a target. That's the only reason why you're here."
"And you don't care for me specially?" I couldn't help it. The question left me before I could stop myself.
She glared at me. "Don't you get it?" she said. "You have a purpose, like everyone else here. It's just a slightly different purpose. You think you understand the inner workings of this society, but you're not even a part of it. You're a bystander, someone whom we can tell our secrets to and who will write them down once this is all over."
There really was no traceable care for me, not in her eyes or in her thoughts. She revealed them all to me in that moment, as if to flaunt how little regard there was for me in them.
"So I mean nothing?" I asked.
She looked me up and down, as if I were a piece of furniture to be assessed. "What did you expect?"
I thought of Crystal, of how pathetic she had seemed to me once, before everything. And now I was like her. I was begging Serena to care for me, to so much as look at me. The thought of her never speaking to me again, sharing her knowledge with me, filled me with panic. My head, my heart, my veins, my blood, they were pumping, pumping with fear and loss.
"If you'd excuse me," Serena breathed and left me.
And it felt as though she had stripped me naked. I wanted to curl up around myself, fold my limbs around my heart in an attempt to stay warm. My shoulders shook with the effort to keep back my tears.
That night, it was impossible to sleep. I lay awake, watching the moonlight spill through my window. I was determined not to cry over Serena, determined to be as cold as her, and so I focused my mind on what my eyes saw. Sometimes, for patches of time, I'd forget all about Serena and the Varkolaks and myself, and all there existed was the silvery particles of dust dancing in the silvery air.
Had it not been for the fact that I was in such a trance-like state when she walked by the house, I wouldn't have heard her. Her feet were so quiet that even your own thoughts would've drowned her out.
I went to the window and peered out. Serena was floating through the street. She hadn't changed — why should she? — but she was alone.
I knew I should have left her alone, but it was simply too tempting. I pulled on my jacket and an extra pair of pants and left the house, as quietly as possible. Aquila must have heard me; I was not able to walk as if on air, and his ears were stronger than mine. But he did not attempt to stop me, and that was the only thing of importance.
What was amazing was that she did not notice me. Even as we walked out of the city with its rare noises from the Varkolaks in the houses, she did not notice me.
I followed her to a row of bushes. Here, the ground rose steeply. Stones were scattered on the ground beneath the dark green of the leaves. While Serena turned left and followed the line of the bushes further away from the city, I crawled up the hillside. It was just one meter or so; I could kneel down and peer over the hill at the mountains that were not so far off anymore. But when I crawled up, the view was entirely different.
I could not help but gasp. Rather than sloping down on the other side, or continuing into a more fertile patch, the ground fell down steeply. At the bottom, at least fifteen meters below, in what seemed to be a dried-out river pass, thousands of tents stretched out. Just like with the mass of people following Serena earlier that day, I could see no end to the tents, not to one or the other side. They seemed to stretch on forever, as though the water of the river had been replaced by a flood of Varkolaks.
I looked up again. Serena had already made it very far away from me. With as little noise as possible, I rose to my feet and followed her.
We came to a place where, once more, the earth lifted. This time, the hill was at least three meters high, and there wasn't much life growing. It was like the hill turned in a corner. On the opposite side of the dried river, the mountains had crawled very close and was now one with the side of the river pass. When I peered over the taller hill, I saw a much more fertile landscape, full of hills and plants. The tents had stopped where the river opened up, and with good reason; it appeared to be a muddy marshland rather than the stones and moss and dried grass up here.
Serena had crawled over the hill and was kneeling some meters down from me. There, the hill flattened out a little, like a narrow plateau. Her dress was muddy, now, but it still shone like silver in the starlight. Her back was to me and, for a moment, I thought she was just looking at the view.
In an attempt to find a better vantage point, I saw that her left hand was raised, clutching at her chest, and her eyes were shut. Her lips were moving, so slightly it might have been the breeze moving them.
And she was crying.
Her shoulders were trembling and her eyelids fluttered and she was crying. All my anger and attempted coldness towards her vaporized in a second, and I was crawling down towards her. With a hand, shaking with nervousness, I reached for her. It settled on her bare shoulder, soft skin, tinnitus filled my ears, poking bones...
...and the sound of fabric in the air. The dry, rustling sound of it swiping over stone floors. A breeze, so light, like air of glass, touching my hair, making them dance. My eyelids fluttering when chiffon caressed my shoulder blades.
I was in a room of stone and moonlight and curtains like water, waving in the air. They were so light that they rippled even when there was no wind, so thin you could see through them. There was light behind them, all around me, silver and white. The floor tiles were black, but I did not see them unless I looked down.
My hand moved forwards to touch a curtain just before me, and I could barely feel it. In wonder, I turned around, around, until I lost the sense of which way I had been looking at first. Wherever I looked, there was white, white, blinding light...
And then there was a rattle. Through the noisy silence, I heard it slither before I saw it. It had scales of crimson and tongues and eyes of milky white. A screamed filled my throat when the snaked passed by my ankle, over my foot, and into the curtains.
The scream stayed in my throat, but my feet moved after it. The curtains moved away from me like water parting, like air, not even felt and much less noticed. Through layers and layers of white, I went, following the blood-red snake.
A woman's giggle could be heard. It clucked like a mountain brook. The snake followed the laughter and I followed the snake. For an eternity, it seemed, I chased it, through white and white and more white, until I could no longer remember where it had begun or what had happened before I entered this strange palace.
Someone is trying to keep me from her, I thought. Someone doesn't want me to find her, to find the truth.
For surely, that was what the serpent was leading me to. The truth.
The final curtain opened up, and there she was: Serena. She was swept in endless white layers, her hair hidden and at the same time visible through the translucent fabric. She held open with her hands a parchment. On it, one word was scribbled over and over.
Veritas, it read. Veritas. Veritas. Veritas.
She tore apart the parchment, and I was back in Russia, amongst a thousand black tents, fallen into the mud.
"What do you think you're doing?" Serena hissed.
"I—." I struggled up to sit, looking around me. "I—I don't know."
A cross dangled around her neck. It wasn't a Christian one, though. It seemed like a Viking's cross, a clean Tau with a circle running through each of the four arms. The moonlight bounced off its surface and I realized that this was what she had been clutching.
"What were you doing?" I asked.
"Praying."
I frowned in surprised. "Praying?"
"There is a war coming and I am to lead an army," she said. "Praying is soothing to me."
I wanted to ask her if you could pray when you didn't believe in a god, but it felt stupid. Obviously, you could.
"If there was nothing else, I'd like you to leave."
"Of course," I whispered, stumbling to my feet. I had taken a couple of steps up the hill when I stopped and looked back at her. "You were crying."
She stared back at me, obviously not intending to speak.
I walked back to Aquila's house with a feeling of dread. I knew I had looked into something I shouldn't have seen. The room with the curtains was a room not meant to be seen by others. I wished I could set it aside and try to forget, but it came to me, unbidden, every time I thought I had managed to stop thinking of it.
It had not been physical. It could not have been. It had seemed to stretch with every step I took. Perhaps it went on forever. Perhaps it was what Serena's prayers looked like. Perhaps she did not pray with a string of words but with layers of curtains set up around the truth.
Either way, it had been something tremendous and secret. I did not see her the next day, and I had not expected to. If this did not shatter whatever our connection had been, then what would?
So when there was a knock at the door, after the sun had set and I had eaten, I did not even bother to get up to open it. Aquila glanced at me, not annoyed but surprised, when he went instead. Even though I made a point out of not caring, though, it was impossible not to hear it when he said her name.
Her presence was like electricity in the air. I sat up straight and looked over the back of the couch, to the door. And there she was.
She did not seemed to notice me. Aquila had her undivided attention as she spoke. "...something I'd like to show her," she said.
I was in the doorway before Aquila could respond. In the moment, I wanted to have the restraint to make her come to me, all the way, to beg my forgiveness for how cruelly she had heard me. I hadn't learned yet that I am not proud, that my pride would never surpass my curiosity. Her begging would have meant nothing to me, and learning her secrets meant everything.
She led me away from the town, towards the camp. When we crawled over the hill, I lost footage. Her hand on my elbow startled me, stopped my heart momentarily. It shook me to see the tenderness on her face; it was not born from pity. If I had not already been so estranged from romantic love, then that would have done it. After all, what could compare to the love of an immortal?
We sat where we had sat the night before, overlooking the encampments but hidden from their sight.
I noticed her fiddling with the cross around her neck. A few strands of her hair, tied back in a low ponytail, had freed themselves. They wavered around her face as she looked over the sea of tents. Above us, the sky had paled to black and silver of the moon and stars.
"What is that?" I asked, pointing to the cross.
She looked down at it, as if she had not noticed even wearing it. "Stilio gave it to me, once," she said. "I wear it sometimes, for strength." She traced the crossing bars with the tip of a finger. "That is the marker of the buried treasure, do you remember?"
I nodded. "Like on your back."
She traced the circle in the same way. "This is the Sun; Enlightenment; the Serpent snaking its way, round and round, into eternity."
Eternity. The word that was usually filled with wonder fell hollow from her lips.
Her hand landed, soft and light, on my shoulder. I drew in a shuddering breath and tasted incense on my tongue. The smoke lifted and I was back; back in the room with the billowing curtains, thin like the pages of a Bible.
The serpent returned, as it always did. The curtains slipped around me like water as I followed the red tail. Perhaps it was what Serena had said — round and round, into eternity — but I felt as though I was walking in a curved line.
The final curtain slipped past; the giggling like water over slippery stones rang in the air. But it was not Serena. This woman was not wrapped in white with words on a scroll. She was not beautiful. She was not bright.
Her skin was ebony and her hair black as coal. The layers she was wrapped in were deep crimson and her eyes the shade of blood. Tears of laughter glistened in them, making them even more blood-like.
Her laughter stopped. Her eyes turned to mine, attentive like a cat's.
"Serena?" she said.
And I knew; this was truth, the truth, hidden under the thousand cryptic pages of Serena's history. The secret that could never be revealed, but now stood unveiled. This was Lilith, and in Serena's mind, she was as real as anything.
Lilith stood slowly, leisurely. Her dress draped like a waterfall of blood. "I knew you'd come," she said. "My advisors doubted you, but I told them to be patient. There is a time for all things, isn't there? A time to be loyal, a time to deceive. Well, you should know. Look up."
And I did; the curtains billowed, up and up and up, like a cathedral of light. But they were not never ending. I saw the edges, edges of bricks piled miles high. And, at the top, a shimmering layer of silver over the world, like looking up through water.
There, barely visible through the ripples, I could see a shimmer of gold. Golden light filtering through golden leaves on the golden branches of a tree carrying apples of gold. And, beyond it, the pale blue sky and a clock of clouds.
"This is the Well of Urdr," Lilith rattled in my ears. "The seamstresses of fate are weaving, weaving, and they're quick at work. Fate comes for us all, Melissa, even me."
Lilith's face had become like a split mirror, forever caught in a flicker between Serena and Lilith. And the well grew deeper, and the sky grew brighter, and the apples ripened and rotted and ripened and rotted, and curtains billowed until they were lost in blackness.