“Aerra bai. Aerra bai.”
“Let me go!”
It was probably stupid trying to speak to it in English. Even if it could speak, that didn’t mean it would understand. But even so, I did it again, and again, and then said the same thing in Finnish. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Maybe if I said it enough, forcing the words out of my terror-constricted throat, it really would let go.
It did not let go. But it did stop saying aerra bai, quieting, as if listening. It grew more still, too. I didn’t realize how much that thing had been shaking until it stopped.
I still shook. My whole body trembled in its grip. The muscles along my back tensed and tightened against the solid strength of its massive chest and abdomen. I spasmed violently when the monster’s snout moved down and brushed my cheek. Its breath grazed my neck, a heated fan that made goosebumps rise and pucker. The sweat from my sprint grew cold, and my clammy body shivered even harder.
My entire spine turned to ice when I heard the ship lift off.
“Let me go!” I screamed, my urge to fight renewed. I could not be left here. Not alone, not like this.
Whether it was a response to my sudden spasming, or a response to the new sound of the ship in the air, I couldn’t be sure. Either way, the monster tensed, standing and hauling me right up along with it. It was so huge that, simply by holding me one-armed against its chest, my feet dangled and kicked a metre off the ground. I gripped its forearm, both marvelling and cringing at the metal-hard strength beneath those scales. Golden light glowed beneath and between the scales, spilling over my skin as I scratched and squeezed. That light was beautiful. And it was warm. Warm on my fingers when the night-drenched air was turning cold all around me.
The only warning I had for what came next was a leathery snapping sound behind me. But I didn’t know until we were in the air that it was the sound of wings unfurling.
A scream tore from my lungs as we lurched into sudden upward motion. Both the alien’s arms were around me now, holding me against its chest as we arrowed into the sky. We were going so fucking fast. Faster than the ship, which was now below us even as it ascended.
I wondered if they had me up on the viewscreen, or on some scanner in there. No doubt they knew what had become of me.
No doubt there was nothing they could do.
They could try to shoot us down, I guess.
Kill the monster and me all at once.
But that seemed less and less likely with every ferocious beat of the creature’s wings. We carved through the night like a hurled knife.
Until suddenly, we stopped.
The alien replaced one of its arms around me with its tail, holding me firmly while it raised its newly free hand. Directly above us, the stars dimmed as if being viewed through thicker and thicker ice. And then I couldn’t see the stars at all.
It’s happening again.
The sky was blackening, hardening. Turning to stone once more, right before my eyes. And there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. If I made one wrong move, one single slip, I’d be hurtling down towards the ground faster than I could say hyvästi.
When the sky ahead was dense and coal-coloured crystal, the monster raised his gold and emerald hammer of a fist and smashed it. I flinched at the colossal crack of sound, then tried to quell the way my stomach flip-flopped in response to my movement that high in the air.
Just like before, a huge crack had opened in the stone. But this time, nothing came through it. Never mind flip-flopping – my stomach felt like it dropped out of my body entirely when I realized what was about to happen. That we were going to go in.
“No! Stop!” I sobbed, voice cracking as the monster beat its potent wings.
But it didn’t stop.
It plunged into the abyss beyond that crack and it dragged me right along with it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Skallagrim
Ibarely knew what I was doing as I cracked open the sky. The words only came to me as I flew into the crack. Sky door.
I’d opened a door. I felt I’d done it many times before. The motions of the act were as natural as breathing. I did not know where the door would lead me. I had no name of any other world to call upon. I had nothing but my little star in my arms and the image of the river in my head. So I focused on that. On the river plunging and swirling and calling to me.
And it was like I conjured that river. Shaped it out of nothing but my own thoughts. Because when we emerged from the sky door, there the cursed thing was. Curving and serpentine below, blue and bronze under the setting sun of another world.
How I knew the sun was setting and not rising, I could not be sure. I just knew. Like I’d watched it disappear below that horizon, a thousand—no—a hundred thousand times before.
I hovered for a long moment, wings beating. I held fast to the little star and studied the river and the landscape that felt so foreign and so familiar and so out of reach even though I knew I could fly down now and touch it. Touch the water, the soil, the pebbles. The reeds and rushes whose tufts I could practically feel brushing my scales, the sensation something I was sure I remembered rather than imagined.
The river below us was calm. Its twin in my head roiled and raged, banging with watery fists, shouting the same thing over and over again. You have been here before.
I couldn’t stay up in the air forever. Soon, I’d have to descend to this strange memory-scape. But something held me back, and it took me a long moment to realize that it was fear. Fear that I could descend, smell the land and swim in the water, and that it would not make a lick of difference. That I could be in this world and know it without knowing it. Remember it without really remembering anything at all.
But, even though I could not recall my own name, I knew I was not the sort of stone sky god who held himself back in fear for long.
Stone sky god?
I could not spend much time chewing on that phrase, because the little star in my arms was moving. Shuddering and stretching and digging blunt nails into the scales of my forearms. I stared at its fingers against my arms. Slender and pale and tiny and soft. Its whole body was soft. Soft skin, soft hair, soft flesh over its bones. Soft little creature, so strange and so unlike myself.
“We’re here, little star.”
Where is here?
It did not matter. It did not matter because I’d caught this star and now, even though the sun had dipped and shadows opened their wings, there was no true darkness. For the first time in so long, too long, night was bright and clear with open-throated beauty. The reeds rustled, tufts and stalks shivering like the star in my arms.
I angled my wings and descended. And when I landed on the banks of the wide river, it was just as disconcerting and nostalgic as I’d imagined it would be. Because landing here felt like homecoming when I didn’t even know what home was anymore.
Home...
I tried to assign an image to the word. But the only image in my frazzled brain was the one right in front of me. The face of the little star I’d just set down on tiny feet.
I was still holding it, my hands curled around the creature’s narrow shoulders. I was not ready to let go of it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Not when letting go meant darkness seeping back in. Not when it meant losing everything.