He shrugs. “Or you could think of it a different way thanentrapment. Maybe we were supposed to be married, it could be our destiny.”
“I don’t accept any destiny I do not want.”
“And yet you’re the one who sees the future.”
“The future can change,” I reply stepping away from Drekki. “It is not written in stone, which is why we need to stop socializing and set out, because we do not have a guarantee that the future will come to pass. And we have a god to raise.”
Marcello sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Very well, where are we going?”
I open my mouth but then shut it. It’s a fair question, one that I should be able to answer.
“You know right?” he asks, obviously reading the hesitation on my face,
All I know is that I need a finger and a stone. The god should not be so hard to find, a being so great as a god makes a mark when he dies. Their carcasses are a part of this landscape now. There is one not far from my own tribe in a crevice between two mountains that we call Giant Pass where the vacant eye and half of the face of a god is visible above the snow. Children have climbed onto the bridge of his nose to touch his brow for luck.
“Laduga?” Marcello demands taking a small step forward.
I reach up, rubbing my jaw. “I’m thinking,” I hiss, but even as the words escape my lips, I get a familiar heady feeling of pressure and emptiness all at once in my head. A vision suddenly rushes through my mind, consuming my senses and bearing me far from here.
In the span of a breath, I find myself standing in a hut. It’s small and cramped, the floor is covered in animal bones and strewn hay. There is a table in the center and on it lies a corpse of a woman wearing a white dress, pale and still. Some of her skin has been eaten away, more yet is stained blue from the cold. Her golden hair lies sprawled out around her. There is a spot of red in the very center of her dress, covering her midsection.
The rest of the hut is empty save for a single man. He has a bear’s head hanging from his own head, attached to a long black cloak that he wears over an engraved leather breastplate. Rabbits’ feet and bird beaks hang from his belt, and he is holding a stone in his hand. The very stone that I saw from my first vision.
“Please let this work,” he whispers. “I have avenged you, killed the whole village of those that hurt you. And then I practiced my necromancy, but they always came backwrong. I’ve tried everything to find a way to bring back a person’s soul, but I can’t find it. Still, I can’t stand to see you lying here. Let my love and this dark magic be enough. Oh, please let this work!”
His hand trembles as he holds it out and he touches his finger to her.
Immediately the woman’s back arches, her eyes fly open as does her mouth.
I stumble back in surprise, my back passing straight through the wall of the hut. I find myself standing in a village, not unlike my own.
It’s night and I turn as something shuffles into view. My mouth drops open, it’s a man, no, perhaps corpse is a better term. He has a hole in his skull as if an ax cut through the top of his head, blood trickles down his forehead, next to his nose, and all the way to his chin. Hair sticks and clings to the gore and the blood and empty eyes with an unnatural blue glow stare at me.
I move back again, my heart pounding until I remind myself that he cannot see me since this is nothing more than a vision.
The world begins to grow lighter, a clear sign that my vision is ending.
“No,” I gasp out. “I still know so little.”
Desperately I glance around for something. Some clue of where I am and how to find it again.
Then my eyes land on two mountains rising up in the distance, their snowy peaks reflected in the star’s light.
I recognize these two mountains; they are the ones that rise up on either side of giant’s pass. It appears that this place is on the opposite end of the pass from my own village.
Not far from here at all and there is a man raising the dead. We truly do live in a land of chaos, just as the Werma always says.
Such a thing should never have even been possible and yet here is this man doing it, and here I am trying to do the exact same thing.
Suddenly I feel my body again, I gasp loudly as my eyes fly open, and I once again find myself back in the clearing of the Werma’s cottage. I’m on the ground, save for my head which is cushioned in the crook of Marcello’s arm.
“Laduga!” he gasps. He slumps slightly when he sees that I have opened my eyes. “Oh, thank everything. Are you all right? You just got this strange look on your face and collapsed.”
I grimace, struggling to sit up a bit, but Marcello just tightens his hold on me.
“I’m fine,” I say. “It was just a vision.”
He reaches up, brushing hair from my face. “I thought perhaps you had died from the curse after all.”
