The Path of Ravens (Asgard vs. Aliens Book 1) (2 page)

The woman I have named as Ayessa stares up at
me, cold and confident. She evaluates me as a stranger might, her
look containing no recognition. I blink a few times and realize that
she 
is
 a stranger. We have no memories, and so what
else can we be but strangers to anyone, including ourselves?

Yet I know her, I feel certain. Not only that.
She is important to me... or was.

"Is that her name?" our male companion
asks excitedly. "How do you know it?"

"That is her name," I say. "I
know no more than that." The admission deflates me.

Our guide grabs the woman's arm and urges her to
her feet, making her face me. Frowning, she complies. "Look at
him," he insists. "If he knows your name, then maybe you
know his. 
Think!
"

She looks, and I think I catch a glimmer of
something in her red-lit eyes, but she only shakes her head.

"Speak that word of yours to her," our
companion suggests.

My chest constricts. I swallow to prepare my
throat to speak the word which I suddenly feel certain must pertain
to her: "Wellspring."

Ayessa's expression does not change, but a
minute movement draws my eyes downward, where I see both hands ball
into fists. Her jaw tightens. A heartbeat later, she relaxes, slowly
shaking her head once more in defeat.

"Ah, well," our companion sighs. "At
least one of us has a name. Perhaps another who has gone ahead will
have one for me."

"Crow."

It is Ayessa who says this, the first word I
have heard her speak. It is in the 
other 
language,
the fragmentary one which has come up with us from the abyss, not the
alien one in which we are comfortably and fluently conversing. I only
stare at her red lips in wonder, picturing a black bird, until she
answers our companion's quizzical look.

"Your hair," she explains to and of
him. I look again and notice what I had not bothered to until now,
that the man's hair is long and sleek and darker than Ayessa's. His
appearance does call to mind that of the bird she named. Ayessa adds,
in a tone just short of insult, "That, and you won't stop
cawing."

The target of her annoyance laughs, a sound
which graces the ears in this place of the dead. "Crow," he
muses. "I suppose it will do until a better one comes along."

He turns sharp, appraising eyes on me. I know
his intent and stop him with a raised hand.

"I will take no name," I tell him.
"None other than the one which is truly mine."

Crow shrugs and yields to my wish. Ayessa
resumes her seat. It is she who must be the one to give me my name,
as I gave her hers. But for now, her lips remain sealed.

There is not much else for us to talk about, we
whose present lives can be measured in minutes. And so we sit
silently, each delving blindly into the abyss within, endeavoring to
drag forth whatever might drift into reach. That is what I do, at any
rate, with no success. I am compelled to stare at Ayessa, but manage
to resist, mostly.

It is not long before the painted witch in her
alcove spasms and groans, which Crow tells me is the sign of a new
awakening. We scan the cavern floor and see a corpse begin to stir.
Crow brings him to join us. He is a big man, a head and a half taller
than me, with arms as thick as Ayessa's thighs. He has no name and no
memory, and looking into his dark eyes stirs nothing inside me.

We require only one more to make our five, and
within a short while we have him. After the customary
non-introductions, Crow instructs that man in the task which had been
his until now: wait for four more to rise, do not bother the witch,
and pass along this task to the last among you.

For Crow, myself, Ayessa, and the hulking one,
the dark tunnel mouth awaits.

The tunnel winds sinuously up and up on a gentle
incline. In exerting ourselves, we begin to notice how warm it is.
Beads of sweat slide down my temple from my hair which, unlike
Crow's, is cut short. Hissing red torches line the rough walls, but
their wide spacing gives us long stretches of total darkness to
traverse. When there is light, I look past the sweat-sheened shoulder
of Crow, who marches in front of me, toward Ayessa. I stare at her
and reach deep within for understanding of what she might mean to me.
Nothing comes, but I sense, I feel, that in another existence, in
other flesh... I loved her. If that is so, and as we walk I grow ever
more certain that it is, then I must find a way to awaken the same
feelings that surely must dwell within her.

I know even less how to accomplish that than I
know what lies at the end of this tunnel that twists and  turns
and bears us ever upward, never forking or offering us a choice of
this way or that. We have been told, second- or third- or ninth-hand,
that we are to ascend. Not one of us suggests doing otherwise. The
only other choice is remaining below, and even forgetting the
presence of the witch, our desire to know who we are, why we are
here, and where 
here
 is, is too great to consider
refusing.

The air in the tunnel grows hotter. A faint wind
pushes fresh, dry heat into our faces. I am about to make this
observation to the others, the first words that any of us will have
spoken in a long while, when we round a bend and behold what can only
be the end of our journey. It is an oval of light, bright and steady
unlike that of the torches. We pause, bunching up in the tunnel, damp
shoulder to damp shoulder.

Ayessa is first to venture forward. We follow,
fanning out two and then four abreast as the tunnel broadens. The new
light is a pale pink streaked with other colors: purple, white,
orange. A sky? I possess no clear memory of having seen the things
called sunrise and sunset, but somehow I know of them. Is that what
this is? Hope quickens my step. We all move faster, eager to see and
learn.

The tunnel floor steepens and becomes jagged,
and we climb. Displaced rocks tumble down behind us. Reaching the
slope's crest, we stop.

And we stand and stare, struck with awe.

When I am again able to think, I know with
certainty that even if, as I suspect, I have lived once before, 
or even a hundred times before, nothing in my experience resembles
the vista before me. The luminous expanse of colored streaks is
indeed a sky, but spread under it is a barren, cracked plain of black
rock across which rivers of fire slither like glowing veins or the
branches of a skeletal, burning tree. All around that plain, towering
mountains rise up, some spewing flame from fang-like peaks. It is 
as if some great fire-serpent rose up from the depths to swallow a
mouthful of the earth but stopped halfway, leaving the land stuck in
its petrified maw forever ruined.

A scorching wind, the serpent's breath, rushes
at us from the direction of the plain, burning eyes that already
blink in disbelief. We have emerged high up on one of the stone
teeth, a mountainside, and we are not alone. A little way down, upon
a craggy shelf of black rock, figures scurry about in clusters. I
have little doubt that they are the awakened corpses who ascended the
tunnel before us. On this mountainside they appear minuscule.

Their movements are frantic, showing scant
direction, and they are crying out. I cannot extract meaning from the
shouts, but for one word: 
Myriad
.

"Look, there," Ayessa says calmly, and
my eyes turn in the direction of her outstretched arm. In the
distance, a bright green line writhes, as if a colossal, wriggling
worm sat upon the jagged horizon.

"What is it?" Crow asks. None among us
know more than he, but some instinct tells me that it this green mass
is the object of our fellow corpse-warriors' fear.

Suddenly I know its probable name, and I venture
to speak it.

"Myriad."

"You there!" someone cries, and I look
down the slope to see one of our kind waving an arm wildly. "Come
down and arm yourselves! Swiftly!"

We look at one another, Crow, Ayessa, the hulk,
and I, and decide as one, in silence, that we have no good reason not
to obey. As we pick our way down the mountainside, I for one find it
hard to keep my eyes on the rock underfoot rather than on the peaks
and plains of this new world, a view as wondrous as it is terrifying.

The man who has summoned us wears a sheathed
sword and carries a round shield on his back. As we reach him, he
points to a pile of arms and says impatiently, "Choose from it
whatever suits you."

Before he can dash off to rejoin his comrades, I
grab his shoulder and demand, "What is this place,
brother?" 
Brother
, I call him without any cause I
know. But it suits, and perhaps emphasizing our shared plight will
incline him to talk.

"Hades," he replies tersely, then
shakes off my grip and departs.

Ayessa becomes first to push on down the slope.
The hulk follows her, then Crow and I, and we all hasten to the heap
of weapons. There are long, slender lances, stout spears, swords of
varying length with scabbards to fit, shields that are round, oblong,
flat or curved, and bows with quivers of arrows. All have clearly
seen prior use. A dried, flaking residue coats many of the blades and
the outer faces of the shields. I would call it blood except that it
is black, and just as I know seas and sunsets without having seen
one, I am fairly confident that blood ought to be red.

I pick up and swing a few weapons from the pile
before selecting a sword with a well-nicked blade a little longer
than my thigh. I feel no particular connection to it, but of the
choices, it feels the best in my hand. There is less on offer when it
comes to shields. I feel drawn to a round one, but Crow claims the
finest of this type, or at least the most intact, forcing me to
settle for second best. Underneath blotches of the black substance,
my shield's blazon depicts the face of an animal that a moment's
searching of my newly awakened mind tells me is a lion. Crow arms
himself similarly to me, while Ayessa chooses a lance and a curved,
rectangular shield. The hulk takes a heavy, long-bladed spear.

Thus equipped, we race to join the massed
others, this army in which we apparently are soldiers. The green
mass, in the meantime, has grown larger, its appearance less akin to
a worm now than a great roiling cloud, glowing green in the gaps
between the distant peaks. In the space of a minute, it wraps around
the mountains, enveloping them so that only the jagged, dark crests
still show. It oozes out onto the plain, inexorable in its advance,
blotting out the rivers of liquid fire which prove no barrier.

As we reach the rock shelf where stands the army
of the dead, I see that the warriors have tethered themselves
together with lengths of thick rope in groups of four or five. I
quickly count and put our number at less than a hundred. I cannot be
sure what sort of enemy approaches in that green tide, but it surely
dwarfs us.

I seize the first man I come upon and ask, "What
is our purpose?"

He looks at me with fear and not a little
confusion, and he laughs bleakly. "If you heard Ares address us,
then you know as much as I."

"Ares?" I echo. "I know not the
name, and have heard nothing. What did he say?"

"The Myriad comes." He nods at the now
less-distant green fog. "It has devoured all their kingdoms save
this one. We are to battle it."

"How does one battle a cloud?" This
from Crow.

"It's no cloud," the man snorts. "It
is a swarm. Of those." He sweeps his unsheathed sword in the
direction of something I had scarcely noted until now, a collection
of what look like three multicolored boulders. Leaving the man
behind, Crow, Ayessa, the hulk and I walk closer to the lumps, which
I quickly learn are not boulders at all.

The first we reach is a purple blob about the
mass of four men. From its glistening skin extend more than a dozen
tentacles, all irregularly studded from base to tip with razor-like
spurs. The body has more eyes than it does limbs. Some are closed,
others open and sightless. Hardly any two eyes are of the same size,
and they are set into the wrinkled, gelatinous carcass with no
thought given to symmetry. It gives off a putrid stench which
combined with the sight itself fills me with revulsion.

The second, nearby, is also tentacled, and
summons forth from my shrouded memory of another life the image of a
certain slimy sea creature, an 
octopus
 I think we
called it. But however fractured and imperfect my memory is, I know
that the many arms of a typical octopus were never affixed to a
single, enormous eye comprising almost the entirety of its bright
green body. Nor should its tentacles end in sharply spiked clubs.

A third carcass is red and tubular with two
eyeless mouths, one at either end, each brimming with sword-like
yellow teeth. It has no eyes or other features.

All three monstrosities are damaged. Black blood
is smeared around their gaping wounds, surely accounting for the
dried smears on our weapons.

"The Myriad," a voice booms from
behind me, like two rough rocks grating together. "Endless in
form,  endless in number." I tense and whirl, hand falling
to sword as I look upon a monster of different kind,  a living
one. This creature looks much like a man, but of giant proportions,
twice my height and breadth. His size, however, is not his most
remarkable trait; that distinction goes instead to the single, 
round eye set in the center of his expansive forehead. By its
placement, it seems that he was never meant to have possessed more
than the one.

"I'm sorry, friend," I say to One-Eye
in hope of assuaging any offense given by my reaction. "You but
startled me."

"They took my home of Ocean, killed my
people, the Cyclopes, my king, Poseidon, and then ravaged high
Olympus, where Zeus was slain. What you see is all that remains of
the three realms of the Chrysioi.  It is Hades, the  lowest
of the three, and its king and queen, too, lie dead."