Far Off Unhappy Things
Chapter Twenty Four – Interlude one.
By Renko Doremi Rodenburg
Gunthilde fell. She fell and tumbled, as if being carried by the rapids of a river. Around her was not water but an absence of anything at all. Just when her consciousness settled, got accustomed to the violent haze around her and she tried to scream-
She woke up with her fists clenching sand. Despite her disorientation, she quickly got up and looked around for her beloved greatsword. Gutachschwert was nowhere to be found. Instead, only an empty beach stretched on into the distance, disappearing in the dark. Little green lights burned above her, further confusing her as to where exactly she was. Behind her was water, still as black glass. In front of her the beach became rocky, and the rocks and hills somehow blurred into the sky. Into the ceiling? She wasn’t sure. The geometry of the landscape before her made little sense. Paths led between the hills- or were they tunnels leading into a rockface?
Another curiosity was her clothes. Gray robes clung to her body. She had never worn robes or any kind of cloth in her life before. The majority of the last five years she had worn a thin mesh of ringmail, fine enough to trick people into thinking she was mostly naked from a distance. Having it taken or stolen or Autumn forbid having lost it was a thought too painful to bear. But there was no use dwelling on problems with no apparent solution- so Gunthilde gave herself six seconds to orient herself, picked a direction, and started walking. After wandering away from the water and to the right for a while, a light started blinking in front of her. It seemed to be a sort of signaling lantern, the kind wizards kept to signal others from the tops of their towers.
She wondered how Alexis was doing. She had been uninterested in what most of Autumn’s court and close circle were doing, but the boy had put her back together after suffering gruesome injuries several times. It was curious to see him work with flesh and tubes and glass and ichor. He’d wanted to draw Autumn’s blood for his experiments several times, but the Deer God had laughed and walked away every time the boy had requested him. Ah, she thought. The Deer God’s blood was only hers. She expected a warm feeling to fill her stomach thinking about her lover, but it stayed painfully, curiously absent.
Confused, she looked around. Drifting off into thought, or worse, nostalgia was not her thing. Looking around, she realized she’d blindly followed the blinking light in the distance for quite a while now. So that was what it was, a light that tricked the mind. Made it lose focus. It blinked again, but she was ready for it now. She wouldn’t let herself be distracted from wherever she was and whatever she was doing by some fairylight.
What was it, then, that she was doing? And where? The last she remembered was Autumn’s throne room. Pale light from the overcast skies had filtered through the windows like always, casting the room in hazy orange shadows where it fell through the amber glass. Vines rustled in the wind, and it had become colder than it usually was. Cold. It was painfully cold, even in Autumn’s throne room. It was empty, and Gunthilde was alone.
“Hello?” She yelled. Nothing, not even an echo. “What in-” she said as she slapped herself and found herself standing in a glade or grove- or a cavern, she realized as she looked around. It wasn’t clear where tree ended and rock began or where the ceiling passed into the night sky.
Before her, amidst bleak flowers stood a pale girl in black robes, holding up a lantern. The little light in it flickered and blinked, goading her forward.
“What is going on?” Gunthilde demanded to know.
“You slipped out again,” the girl said. “Look at the light. Listen to my voice, and look at the light. There’s somewhere you would much rather be.”
There was something in the way the girl pronounced the words, or perhaps something with the rhythm in her voice.
“…Follow me…”
“…You’re safe here…”
“…You’re alone…”
“…We’re almost there, focus on my voice…”
“Kuro, what in the Plutocrats name are you doing?” A much shriller, much less pleasant to listen to voice demanded.
Gunthilde slipped out of her haze again. Water lapped at her ankles. She had been about to step into a little lake or pond of sorts.
“Morana,” the pale girl said.
“What are you up to, Kuro?” Morana asked.
Gunthilde turned around, her thoughts still hazy. The second girl was as pale as the first girl and had equally dark hair, but she had a markedly different face. Riverlander, she thought.
“What is this,” she demanded to know as she stepped back out of the water and up to Kuro.
“Hey,” Kuro said as she jumped back with inhuman grace. “It’s just a shade,” she said, more to her companion than to Gunthilde.
“What were you doing with her? Is guiding them straight into a pond some new policy I haven’t heard of yet?”
“Tsk,” Kuro spat. “I was just doing a little service for a friend.”
Gunthilde attempted to grapple onto Kuro, who stepped deftly out of the way. “Explain to me what is going on,” Gunthilde yelled at the pale girl.
“There’s an Alraune growing near the pond,” Kuro said. “It gets hungry and occasionally rewards me if I bring it shades to play with, to eat.” She turned away to hide the guilty look on her face from her friend. “I’m not the only one doing it, anyway,” she mumbled.
“Are you insane?” The second girl shouted. “An Alrau- have you lost whatever little green flame performs the task of the brain in that head of yours? What if it gets big enough to hunt unassisted? Is it going to go on a rampage to devour the newlydead? Is it going to stop there, or is going to go after nymphs? What if it ends up eating one of your sisters? What could it possibly be offering up to trade to you to make that worth it?”
“Secret pathways through the roots of the world,” Kuro mumbled, before turning about and running off. Her running was eerie, closer to gliding. She didn’t make a single sound as she vanished into the sprawling undergrowth.
“Witch,” Morana spat. Droplets of her saliva started sissling and burned straight through the plant they had landed on. “You,” she then said while pointing at Gunthilde. “You’re in luck I passed by here, or your eternal hereafter would have been rather extraordinarily painful. I’m kind of busy, but if you follow me around I’ll drop you off on one of the paths leading into Hades proper.”
“H- no. I’m dead!?”
“Tsk,” Morana spat. “Yeah, you died. You’re gone. Luckily for you, whatever you conceive of as ‘death’ is basically just more life. It’s a lot worse, but hey, it’s better than nothing.”
“What?” Gunthilde asked, as she walked up to Morana. She was a full head smaller than her, and she’d feel more comfortable holding this conversation looking down on the woman. In control.
“You’re d-e-a-d,” Morana spelled out. “You make your way along the paths of the dead, and if you make it to the Halls of Judgement you can get judged and you can live out the rest of eternity in whatever circumstances have been decided fitting for you.”
“I will not be judged,” Gunthilde said.
“Then you can wander around good old Limbo here as long as you like, but either one of my sisters who has gone a little over the verge will get to you, another shade will get to you, or one of the myriad things that eat little tender shades like you will get you.”
“Let them,” Gunthilde said. “I’ve faced worse foes. I’ll do you one the way my sister did Autumn one, and I’ll leave a pile of your sisters in front of your doorstep.”
“No,” Morana said. “You won’t do that at all. You’re going to come along- I’m looking for a specific shade that died around the same time and in more or less the same place you did, so he can’t be far- and you’ll head to the Halls of Judgement so you can get your just reward.
If she was as quick as her friend, the only way Gunthilde was going to be able to hit her was through a feint. She moved to strike the nymph, putting in enough effort to make it look real. Taking the bait, Morana stepped out of the way and right into a high kick Gunthilde threw at the maximum speed she could muster. The nymph was surprisingly heavy, but rolled over nonetheless, yelping in pain.
“You!” She screamed as she crawled up and dug into the folds of her robes, no doubt to procure a weapon. Gunthilde charged her, but as she did a man leapt out of the bushes and onto Morana, attempting to put the nymph into a headlock.
“What?” Gunthilde and Morana said at once, but though Morana was thrown off and confused all Gunthilde saw was opportunity. She kicked the girl into the stomach as she was struggling to escape the man’s headlock, which made her stop resisting for just long enough-
With a satisfying crunch, the man twisted the nymph’s neck and broke her spine. The now-dead Morana stopped struggling, and the man climbed up. Like Gunthilde, he was dressed in gray robes.
“I’d been waiting all day for her to get distracted, I can’t thank you enough,” the man said as he bowed before her. He looked up at her for a bit before his eyes went wide in surprise. “I suppose they got Autumn then, if they’ve gotten you?”
“How- who- you will tell me what is going on, right now,” Gunthilde said. To make sure that this time her questions would actually be answered, she grabbed the man by his robes and pulled him in close. “Answers. Now.”
“Autumn,” he swore. “No need to treat me like this. We’re dead, we both died. I was under the palace when that spirit got me, that Lampade. I knew she’d be waiting for me down here, so I snuck around until I got the opportunity to jump her. Now that we have done so, we have to grab her weapons and tools and run. She’s not going to be dead forever, so we need to get the hell out of limbo and into Chaos if we actually want to escape.”
“What?” Gunthilde said. “Again,” she demanded. “Slower. Less words.”
The man she held up by his clothes rolled his eyes and started again. “We dead. Evil spirit can’t die. She will be back. We steal her sword, we run away. Avoid punishment. Is that simple enough for you, cro-magnon girl?”
“If we’re dead,” she said. “How can we still get injured?”
“How should I know?” He asked. “We can’t die though, but we can change form from what I gathered. Who knows, you might stay conscious even if your ‘body’ dies.”
“I see,” Gunthilde said as she tackled the man and brought her elbow down on his stomach with enough force to rupture the skin and abdominal wall at once. Blood splattered into face as she crushed the man like a bug. She got up, straightened her clothes and rifled through the nymph her belongings until she found a little scythe or sickle. Content in having a real weapon, no matter how small, she left the man- the screaming, trashing man whose innards had just turned into outtard- in the glade.
Dead, she thought. That’s why she didn’t have either her beloved Gutachschwert or her finemail armor. Maybe she hadn’t been buried with them. Maybe that belief had been wrong to begin with, and not even one’s blade could be taken with them into the afterlife. It pained her to think that some mercenary would now be running around with her beloved greatsword, if one had managed to lift it up to begin with. She thought about her sister.
Her sister. That-
She was in Autumn’s throne room, clinging to her sword for support. The disease that had taken her lover was wreaking havoc on her body as well, and Alexis was nowhere to be found. Before her stood her sister.
“Reinhild,” she attempted to say. Halfway through pushing the words beyond her lips she had died.
“Reinhild, you’ve come,” she said, but Reinhild couldn’t hear her. “It should’ve been you,” she screamed. “You should’ve killed me, you should’ve killed me!”
It was to no avail. Reinhild could not even see her. All Reinhild saw was a miserable pile of tattered rags of flesh that had once been her, had once been the great barbarian Gunthilde. But now that wasn’t her anymore, now she was nothing at all. Darkness swallowed her.
She had died before getting to exact her revenge on her sister. If she had to die, why couldn’t it have been at the hands of her most hated foe? Why had she died of disease and infirmity instead of Helmatöt ripping through her chest cavity?
“Reinhild,” she whispered. One day Reinhild would die, too. Maybe she should head to the Halls of Judgement anyway, and wait for her sister there. Throw her shade into the Lethy, drown her in the waters of forgetfulness.
In the distance before her, in a field where the world slowly transitioned from cavernous-forest-realm into an endless foggy haze, stood a tower. Time and space betrayed her, and before she could change course, she found herself in its shadow.
Intimidating and imperial it loomed over her. A massive construction of gray, almost silver bricks overlaid with shale, with ample but small windows, and a massive crown-like structure imposed on top. A misty trail led to tower- or from the tower- but whereto Gunthilde could not tell. Two massive, wooden doors adorned with copper door knockers loomed in front of her, almost unavoidable. Final. The door knockers resembled angels, stained a beautiful greenish blue from weathering and oxidation. Each of the angels held what seemed to be a font, arms fitted in joints so that they could be lifted, and the font brought down again against the main body of the angel to produce a resounding rattling or knocking sound.
Before Gunthilde could decide to try and run, the doors slowly opened. She’d half expected a creaking noise, but instead it sounded like the wind rustling through dry leaves.
Inside sat a man at a dining table. Behind him hung a painting of a woman. Her hair was bright orange, an unnatural hue even for the Lands Lost. Eyes like jet and ears so pointed, so sharp they might as well have been knives. She stood with her naked back towards the viewer, looking over her shoulder as if to see who was gazing at her exposed back. Black wings grew from fleshy slits between her shoulders.
“Ah,” the man said, looking up from his empty plate. “You’ve come to visit me in my despair, then?”
Gunthilde stepped inside without answering, and looked around. The room was dusty and deserted. There were wooden stairs, but most of them had long ago rotted away. The only thing of note in the room was the old man’s dining table, but it was just as decrepit as the rest of the room.
“Oh,” he said. “You aren’t her? You look like her, you know.”
“Who are you?” Gunthilde asked, as she walked up to the man’s table, dragged a chair along and put it down right next to him. She preferred talking to people while being uncomfortably close up in their face.
“I’m Edgar,” he said. “And some things in my life have gone terribly, dreadfully wrong.”
“I assume so,” Gunthilde said. “Given that you’re here in hell with me.”
“Ah,” Edgar said. “Yeah. I was supposed to be murdered by this red-haired huntress, Reinhild. My whole life I sat waiting in this tower waiting for her to show up to kill me. Then when she did show up- I don’t know what happened. She fled, and instead of by her hand I got killed by some no-name bandits. What cruelty, don’t you think? To mess up your only purpose in life like that.”
Gunthilde did not answer. Instead she closed her hands around the man’s neck, and started to squeeze with all her might.
