On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) (17 page)

In the distance, so far away they could barely see it, another blue torch flickered to life. They jumped. Before long their guides had carried them so far that the bone forest was nothing more than a memory on the horizon behind them.

The snow thickened to the point that now the blue light rested on top of it, rather than on the torches. The bone pillar that held it aloft was buried in the drifts.

“How much farther?” Angelica asked, as if Jovian would have any kind of answer for her. He frowned and shook his head.

Two more jumps and they found themselves at the base of a mountain, a winding trail leading up the side. The trail looked as though a lot of people climbed it, worn down with dirty tracks and covered with hay for traction. Along the path the same blue torches wavered in a slight breeze.

Another thought took them to the base of the path, but their thoughts wouldn’t propel them further from there. On frozen feet, they trod the distance up the mountain path, pulled onward by their feet rather than their minds. The further up the traveled, the more the wind picked up, making them hunch over, bracing against its bite.

Angelica kept casting her eyes up, wondering if they would ever make it, but the wind was blowing back at her, bringing with it gusts and drifts of snow, which were increasingly harder to push through.

Finally the wind stopped, and they stood in a small clearing before a large cave. Directly across from them, twisting up out of sight, the path continued, clotted by more windblown snow. The inside of the cave glowed a soft yellow and promised warmth, but out in the clearing they couldn’t feel it.

There were shadows also, slinking and dancing around the walls of the cave.

“Do you think that’s where we need to go?” Angelica asked, creeping up to the edge of the cave. Considering the writhing shadows on the walls, she didn’t dare show herself too soon, lest there be a beast inside other than Baba Yaga.

But even as she asked, two blue torches shimmered into being to either side of the cave entrance, and a thin sheen of fog slipped out of the top of the cave like smoke out of a chimney. Angelica’s eyes followed the fog up to the clouds above.

As one rather large puff of fog billowed out of the cave and up to the clouds, the snow began to fall harder, as if the fog was what gave the snow its form.

“I think that’s our answer,” Jovian said, stepping up before the entrance of the cave.

As with the lilting house of the forest hag, the opening to this habitat was gigantic. The woman who dwelt here needed all the space she could get. The interior of the cave was larger than Angelica could have imagined, stretching up into darkness where the light of the huge bonfire in the central room couldn’t even reach.

The back of the cave lay in shadows, but before it was claimed by complete darkness Angelica saw a path that lead to the left and out of sight. If she concentrated, she could almost see a ghost of firelight coming from further down the tunnel.

Jovian stepped forward, but he was met by resistance, unable to cross the threshold.

“Come on!” he said, banging his fist uselessly against the barrier. Where he touched, sparks flew off the force field. “She needed us here so badly, you’d think she wouldn’t always block our way with riddles.”

Angelica crossed her arms and thought. Last time there was something they could use to get inside. She remembered the rotting door with its large hole in the side that they thought was where the handle had been, but turned out to be a hungry mouth instead. Then they had used a bone.

Jovian hit the field again and sparks danced across the surface, illuminating faint traces of lettering. He turned back and slumped to the ground, deep in thought.

“I don’t know how to get in here. Last time we entered rather easily.”

“Wait, it looked like the sparks lit up letters or something,” Angelica said. She pressed her hands to the wall, and the sparks danced across the surface. The longer her hands stayed in contact with the invisible barrier, the more sparks flittered across the expanse, and the more letters were exposed. Words formed in blue light, like that of the moonlight on the snow, as some invisible hand scrawled the lettering in an arch over her head. But she was too close to read it.

“Jove,” she said. “Back up and see if you can read this.”

Jovian had already come to life when she mentioned the letters, and now he backed up as far as he could without toppling off the edge of the cliff. She watched his eyes squint as the letters continued tracing themselves across the open air.

“Speak your truth,” he said slowly, reading as the words wrote themselves out, “and enter.” He huffed.

“Is that it?” Angelica asked.

He waited for a while longer to make sure nothing else was going to be revealed, and nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” Angelica said. Moving away from the wall, she watched the letters fade out, like a lamp burning out of all its fuel.

“But what truths does it want?” Jovian asked.

“It’s not like we’re hiding anything,” Angelica said.

“What does it even
mean
by truth?” Jovian wondered, throwing his hands to the sky and letting them fall in his annoyance to slap against his bare legs.

“Maybe we can just start saying things?”

“Like what?” Jovian said.

“I don’t know, anything. Truth doesn’t have to be something we
know
, can’t it also be something we fear?” Angelica said.

“Like that we are half angel, and we’re not even sure what that means?” Jovian said. The barrier seemed to ripple.

“Good,” Angelica said. “Or that Amber is already dead.” The barrier pulsed blue, lighting up her skin in cerulean relief.

Jovian nodded. “Or that we are slaves to our angel blood.” Another flare of light, this time brighter.

“We’re getting closer,” Angelica said.

“Or that we aren’t people at all, but just aspects of our mother,” Jovian said. The barrier flashed, and continued to pulse like a beating heart.

“And when we get to the Turquoise Tower, and our humanity is burned away, will that mean I will stop being Angelica, and you will stop being Jovian, and the only person who will exist is Sylvie?” Angelica said. Jovian looked down to his feet.

In a flash of light, a bright blue hole formed in the center of the invisible wall and burned across the air at the entrance of the cave. It sped out in blue sparks which showered down around the snow like drifting embers from the ethereal torches they had followed to the cave. Finally it was done, and Angelica tentatively placed a hand to the opening to see if they could enter. Her hand passed through where the barrier had been.

“It’s open,” she said, and then smiled.

Warmth poured out of the cave, returning sensation to their freezing limbs and their numb toes. It was a welcome feeling, and Angelica stepped into the embrace of the cave, standing near enough to the fire that she could warm herself, though she suspected the chill in her bones wouldn’t leave any time soon.

There on the stone floor, just out of sight from the entrance, lay two long jackets. Angelica shrugged her arms into the red one, cinching it at her waist, and felt a preternatural warmth suffuse her body.

“Look there,” Jovian said, tying the green one around himself. He nodded to the path that led to the left, just out of sight. Light came from that way, deeper inside the cave, and a noise tickled their ears. At first Angelica thought it was a bubbling brook, but as the light flared higher and the bubbling intensified, painful screams greeted her ears.

“She’s back there,” Angelica said.

Jovian nodded and walked past his sister, deep into the shadows of the path. Angelica wasn’t sure if Baba Yaga could truly fit in the path; it didn’t seem large enough.

The light ebbed back out of sight, leaving them in near-darkness, with only the illumination at the end of the tunnel drawing them on. They placed one foot carefully before the other, not able to see what they might trip over on their way.

Before long they stood in the light of another room, this one much like the room in the leaning house where they’d first met Baba Yaga. On the wall was a large pestle, and to the side an even larger mortar. The floor was littered with hay, except around the fire.

A huge shadow filled the back of the chamber, and though the light touched everywhere in the room, the shadow behind the cauldron stayed.

“Ah, the Two return,” Baba Yaga said, her voice like hinges in need of oiling. The shadows in the chamber shifted, and then they were able to make out the image of the lumbering giant of a hag perched behind her cauldron. She was sitting, her knees drawn up like Angelica imagined a toad might crouch. Her arms were bent, stirring the contents of the cauldron. The flames spouted higher when the crone laughed. From within the bubbling brew she could hear the souls of the tortured, the deplorable in life, screaming out as their sins were boiled from their ether. The steam flowed higher, tracing its way down the path and out into the main chamber, where Angelica could only imagine it was creating more snow outside. “I was expecting you.”

Though it was hard to see the crone lurking in the shadows, Angelica could see the deathly white hands that stirred the pot and the trail of white hair that slunk down the front of her moth-eaten black robe to trail in the bubbling brew she tended in her black cauldron.

Her hands looked healthy. Her hair was vibrant and shining. She must have recently fed on the blue password which sustained her.

“Your truths are interesting ones,” Baba Yaga said.

“Is there any weight to them?” Angelica wondered.

“Choose your questions wisely, lest you tire me and have to fetch more of the blue password,” Baba Yaga said.

“What is the true reason mother split her soul between us?” Jovian asked.

“There’s only one true way of knowing that, and it’s to ask Sylvie yourself.”

“But she isn’t present,” Jovian argued.

“But she lurks inside of you. All you need to find the truth is search within. But I suspect she knew the darkness wasn’t gone from the lands, and so she did what any mother would do — she gave you the ability to live your lives, while lending you her strength to face what’s to come.” Baba Yaga spoke as if she knew the truth of their birth.

“So we are real people? I’m really Angelica and he is really Jovian?” Angelica wondered.

“A foolish concern. Do you feel other than Angelica and other than Jovian? What makes you any more Angelica than Sylvie? We are all formed from the same ether, and we come here at the end of our times.” She motioned to the cauldron before her. “If we’ve done wrong, our wrongdoings are boiled from our wyrd, and then we enter the sea of reincarnation again. If we haven’t done wrong, we join with Goddess once more, and then, after a time, journey across the sea of reincarnation to be born again.”

“But mother didn’t make the journey to the afterlife.” Jovian said.

“Angels are different; they don’t
need
to go through the same motions as humans. While they are made of the same ether, the ether that comprises them is slightly different than it is for humans. Sylvie exists outside of you just as much as she resides
inside
of you. Her memories and her cunning have passed on to you, but what is Sylvie still exists after her physical death. She didn’t stop being just because she passed her energy on to you. Just as you exist as your own identities.”

Angelica was confused.

“And to answer your questions, when you get your wings, it isn’t the angelic side of your mother that will bleed through, it is the angelic blood of Angelica and Jovian that will drive the humanity out of you.”

“But if she isn’t the driving force inside of us, how did she die? Cianna said that she split her soul into our bodies,” Jovian said.

“Yes,” Baba Yaga said. Her arms were now losing their firm grip on the spoon, her posture growing more stooped with every question. “She split her soul into you, but every person that lives is a reincarnation of energy that once drove another person. That doesn’t make you any more Aaridnay than it does Jovian. Energy isn’t created or destroyed, it just changes forms. Even though your mother split her soul into you, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t individual people.”

Angelica considered that, and it made sense, though it was still strange seeing things her mother had seen before and knowing things her mother knew, and even having that other consciousness take over from time to time.

“It’s because you are anakim that you see those things,” Baba Yaga told them.

“Why did you bring us here?” Jovian asked.

Baba Yaga stooped lower, but her hair was still vibrant, her hands not withered as Angelica knew them to be when she grew too weak.

“Because of the trial yet facing you,” Baba Yaga said. “A while back, my sister Baba Yaga of the forest gave to you the will to do that which must be done. Now that I shall give you another gift. The knowledge to do that which
must
be done. You can’t defeat what lies before you without it.”

“And what lies before us?” Angelica asked.

“That I do not know, only that some great darkness faces you at the Turquoise Tower. Just as the Norns can’t see your future, so is it that I cannot divine it either. I only know that darkness lies before you.”