The ground beneath her feet is impossibly dry, the moisture long since leached away by the bitter cold, and no matter how carefully she walks, every time her foot comes down, it makes a sound like bones breaking.
“Where has the light gone?”
She turns toward the voice. It is Raven. In the darkness, his bright plumage is as black as everything else, but she can hear the faint sound of his feet as he hops from foot to foot, unable to bear the touch of the frozen ground.
“My father took the sun and the moon from the sky,” she says, feeling both sadness and guilt at his selfishness. “So that he will not have to share their light with anyone.”
“There is enough light for all. Why would he want it all for himself?”
She does not know the answer.
“You are his daughter,” Raven says. “Surely, if you asked him, he would restore the light to the sky for you.”
“He will not do it for me.”
“Perhaps there is something we can give him in exchange for just one day of light.”
She knows it is a futile endeavor. “What could we give him that is better than the sun and the moon?”
“I know of a light that is even brighter and more beautiful.”
“Then you have no need of the lights in the sky.”
“This is a different kind of light,” Raven says. “A light that can melt a frozen heart.”
“My father’s longhouse is far from here. I cannot find it in the darkness.”
“I can help you find it, if you will let me ride upon your shoulder so that I do not have to walk on the cold earth.”
Although she does not believe anything can melt her father’s frozen heart, the possibility of finding her way out of the darkness is not something she can ignore. “I know that my father’s house is on the shore of a lake that feeds the river, but the water is frozen as hard as the ground. I cannot tell where the land ends and the river begins. And I cannot tell which way is upriver.”
Raven hops up onto her shoulder and whispers in her ear. “If you sing to the river, it will wake up and sing with you.”
Sing? Sing what?
She realizes it doesn’t matter, so she begins singing whatever comes into her mind, and as she does, the ice — all of it — melts, and the river joins in the song. She moves toward the sound, and soon there is a splash as she steps into the rushing water. She turns until she knows she is facing upstream. Now she knows which direction to go.
She hears another splash and realizes that Raven has leapt off her shoulder and into the water.
“Raven!”
She listens, but there is no reply. The only sound now is of the river, rushing all around her.
Raven is gone.
She wonders what to do now. She can find her way to her father’s house now, but without the light Raven promised, she will never be able to convince him to return the sun and the moon to the sky. At least in her father’s house, she may hope to catch some glimpse of the sun, and feel its warmth again.
The longhouse is not far away, but as she draws close to the sturdy structure of logs and earth, she hears her father’s voice. Shouting. Yet, there is something different about the sound. Curious, she goes nearer and sees radiant light shining from within.
“Higher!” shouts a new voice, child-like and full of innocence, and very, very familiar.
“I cannot throw it any higher, grandson,” booms her father.
Grandson? How can this be?
She is her father’s only child, and she herself has no husband. Her father guards her as jealously as he guards his other treasures.
She goes closer, and pushes past the heavy blanket that covers the door. Her father is there, and so is her son. They are playing, throwing the sun and moon about the room, as if the shining lights are nothing more than pine cones. As she looks at the boy, she remembers bringing him into the world, suckling him, nurturing him, and yet she also knows that none of it is true. It is a fiction, spun of spider silk and dreams, but it is a fiction her father believes.
Now she understands what Raven meant when he promised a light brighter than the sun. The light of a grandfather’s joy.
“Let’s go outside, grandfather” the boy cries, but it is not a boy, and not her son. It is Raven, wearing the skin of a beautiful human child. “I can throw it higher than you can. I’ll show you.”
Her father, blinded by the light of joy, does not see how Raven is tricking him. “Oh, you think so, little one? Here, take the sun. I will take the moon. We will throw them together, and you will see who can throw higher.”
The two of them — the angry old man who is, for the moment, not quite so angry, and the boy who is not a boy — rush past her, outside into the open. Without a moment’s hesitation, the boy draws back and throws the sun with all his might.
Or so he makes it seem. The golden light barely rises above the roof of the longhouse before falling back into the boy’s hands.
“Oh, ho!” cries the old man. “Impatient, are we? Now it’s my turn. Watch this.”
He bends his knees, reaching down as if to gather strength from the earth itself, and then hurls the moon up, up, up into the inky blackness.
Suddenly, with a rustling, Raven bursts out of his human skin, spreading his wings and lofting into the sky. One talon clutches the sun, the other grasps at the velvet darkness, tearing tiny holes in the firmament as he claws higher and higher, chasing the still rising moon.
The old man cries out in dismay, but whether he mourns the loss of his prize or the loss of his joy, she cannot say. His cry becomes a shout, then a peal of thunder, chasing after Raven. He howls again and again, beating the Earth in frustration, and the Earth shakes with such ferocity that the longhouse falls apart, but nothing he does can bring Raven back. And while he rages, the moon sails past the horizon and slips behind the firmament.
The sun, knowing that it is almost free, begins to burn brighter, too bright to look at. Raven cries out in agony as his feathers blacken, burnt by the sun’s touch, but he does not let go. His talons tear still more holes in the sky, but as the sun rises higher, its light pushes back the darkness, transforming night into day, restoring life, filling the world with light…
Fiona came to with a start, legs jerking, feet reaching for the ground that was no longer under her. She threw her hands out, as much to catch herself as to grab hold of this new reality in which she found herself.
There was something in her fist, a crumpled piece of shiny fabric. Where did that come from?
“Fi!” Gallo shouted. “Thank God.”
“Aunt Gus…?”
“Get up, Fi. We’re in trouble.”
She sat up, the memories flooding back in, but her recollection of the darkness, of Raven stealing back the sun and the moon, did not slip away as dreams usually did.
The giant trilobite-centipede creatures were everywhere now, swarming toward them. They were so close that she could see their black eyes, tipping long stalks that protruded from the segmented carapaces, and chattering mandibles.