Darkness in all its shades enveloped Gaiur, first touched red, then violet, then blue. Tricks of the mind played out by her freshly blinded eyes? Perhaps. It wouldn’t be the first time she experienced a phantom sensation. The twin puckers of scar tissue which marred the front and back of her right shoulder often felt as though the spear which made them was still lodged inside, particularly when the weather turned cold. This sensation of shifting darkness struck her as more than a little odd, however, for just how all-encompassing it was. She expected blindness, freshly gouged as her eyes were. Blood and tears trickled from them in hot flows down her cheeks, thick, thin, and somewhere between in the places where they mingled.
Or rather, they should have. Gaiur felt them on her cheeks before the blood red haze was overtaken by the slowly shifting shades of black. She experienced the agony in her ruined eyes, a fierce burning sensation that felt like it reached all the way into the middle of her brain. Cool dirt and gravel scratched and poked at her face and neck and hands, any exposed bit of skin they could find where she lay. Dirt which she could smell and taste, which mixed with the distinct metallic tang and odor of blood. She heard the sibilance of the crowd erupt into terrified screams and angry shouting when Varro’s jaws snapped shut around the throat of the elder who appeared to be the youngest of them, with swarthy skin and long, gray hair and a pale blue tunic stained scarlet by his own blood. Then there was the clank of heavy chains and the greatwolf’s growling and baying.
But now that was gone, all of it. There were no sounds, nor tastes, nor smells, nor sensations of touch. A void seemed to form all about her, vast and empty of the remotest sensations. Even the pain in her eyes was gone. Normally she’d consider that a blessing, maybe proof that all she’d just gone through was some terrible dream and now she was on the verge of wakefulness. A hopeful prospect, and one she’d certainly welcome if it were true, but instinct told her otherwise. No, this wasn’t a dream. There was no such good fortune to be had here. Wherever she’d found herself, whatever this hollow pitch void was, the desolace it bathed her in was very much real.
Gaiur tried to rise but found it impossible. Not because she couldn’t move; in fact, her limbs responded exactly as she willed them to, a far cry from when she was under the Völva’s influence just a few minutes before. Rather, there was no purchase to be found, nothing for hands or feet to gain hold on that she might move in any way more significant than the slow flailing of her limbs. She seemed to be suspended without any sort of weight or pressure placed upon her. This conjured memories of floating naked in a still lake, the closest comparison that she could manage to whatever this was. Yet even this felt woefully wrong, because there was no water to be had, not even in poor imitation. No pressure weighed on her skin. No current to caress it. No chill to make her flesh rise or dampness to plaster her hair to her brow and neck and back or clean, cool taste to be felt upon lips and tongue.
No pain.
No pleasure.
No sensation of any kind.
To call it unsettling was a colossal understatement. Even back in Valdun, the home where she’d been shunned over her misfortunes, Gaiur never felt so completely alone as she did now. There were, at the very least, still others around. Most of them hated her, feared her, called her cursed and an ill omen and did all of this unfairly, but they were there. They could be seen, heard, experienced. Leaving them wasn’t nearly so lonely a thing, either. Human companionship was largely lost to her in the couple years she’d been on her own, save for scant encounters with traveling caravans or run-ins with a small band of brigands here and there. Run-ins which rarely went well for them, as it happened. But she still wasn’t alone then, either, because she had Varro. This space, with its seemingly infinite darkness, offered none of that.
At least, that’s what she thought, and indeed when she saw the first signs that maybe this wasn’t truly the case she scarcely noticed them, much less believed them. Change came subtle at first. It began with the tinges of color she saw, those shifting reds and blues and violets that only just tinted the black in ways tiny enough that they would’ve been near impossible to notice without them changing against each other the way they did. Slowly, very slowly, those colors merged within that infinite dark, turning it just the slightest hint of gray, like charcoal. It was a consciously imperceptible change at first, and she may never have noticed it at all had it not suddenly and exponentially sped itself along once it happened. First, twice as fast.
Then four times.
Sixteen.
Two hundred fifty six.
Sixty five thousand five hundred thirty six.
Four billion two hundred ninety four million nine hundred sixty seven thousand two hundred ninety six.
The concept didn’t play out this way in Gaiur’s mind, of course, but the reality of what it meant played out before her presumably blind eyes. Black became white, sedate and steady at first, then with rapid acceleration so intense that the white emerged just as dazzling and infinite as the black had been. Another element of this eternal nothingness, a pale brightness to take the place of pitiless void?
She thought so at first, swiftly accepting it as a cruel jest played on her by whatever force commanded this vast emptiness, for it surely had to be at the beck of something. Realization soon struck her that for as limitless as this expanse of now white was, it wasn’t truly blinding, not in the way the black had been. For one thing, she could see herself. Her hands, stained with dirt and drops of blood which had fallen from her eyes. Her clothing, the plain linen shirt which peeked out beneath the collar of her chain hauberk. Her dirty brown pants. Her elk hide boots. The haft of her axe and the sling which held it, still hanging on her shoulder. Her woolen cloak and the leather belt she wore, from which dangled her tough leather gloves, a half full waterskin, and a good sized belt bag still filled with dried fruits and meats and a waxy parchment with some veal glew inside. Her knife was still in her left boot as well. She could see and, yes, feel all of these now, though any sense of hot or cold remained absent and no smells or tastes lingered on the still air. There still wasn’t any surface for her to gain purchase on, either, not that she could see any goal to move towards.
Of course it was a wonder she could see anything at all. The sense of having her things still upon her, that is to say being able to see and feel them again, had been enough to tell her that what she experienced up to now was indeed real. That meant the blood which dripped on her hands was real, too, and while it was possible that it’d come from the elder which Varro thrashed after she went down, she thought it much more likely it came from her eyes. A whole new set of questions was raised by that idea, chief among them being how she could see if her eyes had been gouged as she remembered. Perhaps they hadn’t been? No, if she was to accept what was happening now as real then she must accept that what was done to her in the seconds or minutes or hours before this point - it was impossible to really tell what kind of passage time held in a place that was unending in its sameness - was real as well. If she couldn’t accept that then she’d have to find proof, and without a mirror that left her with one option.
Gaiur brought a hand to her face. Under one eye, following the bone of the socket, she wiped with her thumb. Doing the same under the other, she wiped with her forefinger. Neither one flared with pain the way she’d expected them to. Any sense of the horrid burn which stretched into her skull after she’d been stabbed was conspicuously absent. Yet, as she looked down at the thick scarlet that stained her fingers, bright and damp as if it flowed fresh from her wounds, the reality became impossible to deny. This was her blood, still wet and glistening, and it had come from her eyes. So how could she see? Why?
As she pondered this, the space once again shifted around her. In the most dazzling display yet, Gaiur realized that the whiteness around her had been moving the entire time. She couldn’t see it at first, not due to the blindness she should’ve still been suffering from but due to how perfectly uniform the whiteness was. Now it was starting to come apart. Great long strings of color, pastel pale at first but quickly saturating, swirled around her in a rainbow of scintillant brilliance. Red was the first to come, followed by blue, and then yellow. Then they started to mix. Little threads of color pulled away from these three and found one another, making yet more colors. Greens and purples and oranges spun and swirled alongside the reds, the blues, the yellows. They bled into each other, then pulled away again, then reformed once more in an uncountable myriad of combinations. Sometimes they came together all at once to form motes of black. Other times, this union formed motes of white. Gaiur didn’t know why or how the combining of the same six core colors sometimes made black and sometimes made white, but this awesome and nauseating whorl was the first sign of real form she’d seen since becoming aware of the emptiness of this place.
And with this form, came sound. A voice, foreign and rich with an accent she didn’t recognize, called out to her from seemingly everywhere. “Goodness! Are you alright, miss? You seem rather unwell, what with all that blood leaking from your eyes.”
Gaiur looked all around her, trying to get an idea where or what the voice came from. It was a man’s voice, nasally and high with a pitch that reminded her of a yipping dog. “Oh dear,” he continued, and again his voice seemed to come from all directions at once. “Stirring like a sick babe. Worry not, miss! I’ll have you up and alert in two wags!”
She felt something warm touching her face. It was the first sense of touch outside of herself that she’d been able to experience since ending up in the colorful emptiness. The warm thing was soft and wet and dragged repeatedly across both of her cheeks. Instinctively she closed her eyes against it, and it was a good thing she did because the odd sensation soon passed just below her right eye. It felt familiar to her, too, though damned if she could place why. Being surrounded by this kaleidoscopic swirling scintillance made it hard to get any sort of bearing, even on memories. But as the wet, soft, warm thing continued to drag over her cheeks and chin and lips and forehead, the whorl of colors began to smear and smudge and eventually gave way to blurry images that were at least somewhat recognizable.
That’s when Gaiur finally realized why that feeling on her face was so familiar - it felt like Varro’s tongue, albeit a much smaller version. Gaiur grimaced and spat and waved her hand in front of her face, trying to bat the licking thing away. She made no contact with him or it or whatever, and when she opened her eyes again she realized that the whorling colors, the stark whiteness, and the pitch blackness all were gone. Not only that, she was lying on the ground again, right next to the gate where she’d fallen. The sky was dark and gloomy above her, like an overcast night, though the clouds dimly reflected an odd greenish glow. She must’ve gone unconscious after being attacked, and in that time day passed into night. Rolling onto her side and then onto her front, she pushed herself up onto her knees.
“And just like that she’s up on her feet and moving again!” chirped the far too cheery voice from her right. “Well perhaps not quite on your feet, but at the very least you are moving again and feeling a little bit better I hope?”
Gaiur turned to face the speaker, expecting perhaps to find a man and his dog. What she saw was somehow the least believable thing she’d witnessed yet. Firstly it was no dog that she saw, but an arctic fox sitting on its haunches wagging its bushy tail. Secondly, there was no man, just the animal staring back at her with a smile on his face as he licked the last of her blood from his chops. “I can’t say I quite care for the taste of human blood,” he said. “Far too bitter. I’d much rather partake of a tender fowl any day, but it seems to me like it’d be more rude somehow to leave it stained on my chops than to just lick it clean, don’t you agree?”
Dumbfounded, Gaiur stared at the animal for a handful of seconds. He was ash gray and white, as many of his species often were. The ashen fur lined his back, shoulders, haunches, and the top of his snout and tail, while the white lined his underbelly, paws, and everyplace else. “Not much for conversation are you, my dear?” he said.
Gaiur blinked and shook her head a little. This had to be some kind of illusion, some effect of the ritual. Either that or her mind was making these wild things up in response to having her eyes gouged. The image would vanish if she just willed it to, she was sure of that.
But it didn’t. As she stared at the fox, it stared right back. Finally she asked, “Who, or what are you?”
“What am I?” the fox replied. “Why, I’m a fox, of course! Surely you’ve seen a fox before? As for the who, it would be just as well if you called me Renald. Not my true name for I don’t really have one, being a fox and all, but the last soul I was sent to guide insisted on calling me that and to be quite frank, I didn’t have the patience to belabor the point, particularly since you human types seem to prefer having names assigned to things, even if it is largely unnecessary.”
Gods this creature could talk. Gaiur couldn’t have been in Renald’s presence for more than five minutes and already she was starting to miss the quiet of her solitary life. She must’ve been showing some level of annoyance on her face because Renald curled his maw into a sly little grin and chuckled. “Oh ho ho ho! Never dealt with a talking fox before, have you? Don’t worry, I assure you that you will get used to it! Everyone else did. Well, most of them anyway. There were a few who were so utterly dumbfounded by my presence that they…”
Renald began to ramble, and as he did Gaiur’s attention wandered away. At long last, she rose to her feet and took a look at her surroundings. As she’d already noticed, the sky had gone dark. Thick, rippling overcast hung high in the air, adding an odd sheen of silvery green to the night sky. Moon and stars both were blocked out by it and she couldn’t see whatever source of light it was that reflected off those clouds to give them that eerie glow. The gate stood beside her, but the triangular space between its stones was devoid of the churning roil of darkness which emerged from it earlier that day. If it even was the same day. Well, if the gate was here, what about the town? The heavy darkness made it difficult to see, but it didn’t compare to the abyssal pitch she’d initially awoken to. There was just enough luminance reflected off those clouds to let her see the shapes of Jötungatt’s houses. They were mostly as she remembered them, sturdy wood structures painted black with tar to protect them from rain, but there was something off about them, too. Their shape was just a little bit off, as if they’d been stretched or bowed in small ways that didn’t quite fit the memory she had of them.
“Excuse me!” Renald barked. He bumped into the back of Gaiur’s knee with his head and she very nearly wheeled on him with her axe. “Oh put that away! If anyone should be resorting to a spot of violence it should be me! Do you have any idea how rude it is to ignore someone like that?”
“You talk too much,” Gaiur said curtly, though she did place her axe back in its sling. Of all the confusing things happening around her, the one thing that seemed pretty certain was that this fox didn’t intend to harm her. In fact, hadn’t he said something about guiding souls?
Renald huffed his annoyance at her. “Well! I see someone woke up on the wrong side of the realms today, and I don’t just mean because your soul’s not meant to be here! I can’t abide rudeness like that, I’ll have you know!”
The fox would’ve continued on his tirade had Gaiur not interrupted him to ask what he meant about her soul. The fox huffed again, an action she realized must be equivalent to a human sighing in annoyance. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get at, my dear,” he said, his tone not entirely unsympathetic. “Despite how things may appear on the surface, your soul has crossed out of your world into one where you don’t belong.”
Gaiur’s face darkened, her eyebrows knitting together into a grim frown. “My soul has crossed?” she asked. “So, I’m dead, then?”
“That’s not exactly accurate,” Renald said. “But, for all intents and purposes, I’m afraid the answer to that question is effectively yes.”
In the afterlife, there is only one thing that I want.
Charon on his boat, a drink from the Styx,
and silence, blessed silence, and talking not.
But Guair, poor poor soul, she might as well have the pox
for she who died way too soon, has a talkative fox.
Really enjoying this. I was *not* expecting the talking fox, but he is a great character!