As she walked, she listened to the stillness of the wood. No squirrels chattered and no birds sang. From time to time, a frozen branch would crack and tumble to the ground with a dry crash and clatter in the distance.
Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe this isn’t Yaga’s nightmare at all. After all, these are waking nightmares. Maybe they work differently from regular ones.
Wren came around a bend in the stream and found a wide flat glen ahead where a cottage stood in the center of a clearing.
Or maybe this is the right place after all.
The cottage did not sit on the ground. In the center of the clearing there stood two massive old trees with huge twisted roots snaking and writhing through the frozen earth. The trees were only a few paces apart, and they were both cut off some twenty feet in the air. And upon the tall stumps of the trees was the log cabin.
Omar said something about this. In Rus they build tree-houses to store meat where the bears can’t reach it. But I never pictured something like this.
She glanced down at the clawing roots at the bottom of the two trees.
It looks like the house has giant chicken legs.
She entered the clearing and eyed the high ring of earth that encircled the two trees. The mound was covered in snow, but as she came closer Wren saw that were dull gray lumps poking up all along the top of the frozen wall.
It’s probably a stone wall to keep animals away.
There were two openings in the wall where the little stream trickled in from the north and trickled out to the south, and Wren paused at this natural gateway to brush the snow off the nearest of the gray lumps, and found a human skull staring back at her. She froze, her hand still raised in mid-swipe. A sheet of frozen snow groaned and broken free of the wall for many paces off to the right. The snow crashed to the ground, revealing a wall of femurs and ribcages, and tiny finger bones.
It’s like something out of the old sagas. Maybe a demon lives here.
“Hello?”
No answer.
Wren entered the ring of bones and began circling the two trees, peering up at the log cabin in search of a door or ladder, but she saw neither. As she walked, the hard crunching of the snow underfoot softened into a wet sucking sound and she felt the ground clinging to her feet. She looked down, expecting warm brown mud.
Her boots were soaked in blood up to her ankles. Looking back, she saw that the last few of her boot prints were all full of bloody puddles.
“Yaga?”
A crow screamed in the distance. She looked up into the woods and stood very still, listening. And as she peered up at the trees, she saw something moving. Many somethings. Slowly, she realized it was the trees themselves. Their stiff and bare branches were all gradually sagging, drooping lower, gently bending and arching as though they had become as soft as supple leather. Shards of bark began to fall away from the branches, revealing the moist pink and red flesh of the trees spotted with dark blood.
Wren closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She felt her heart pounding and her hands shaking.
It’s not real. It’s just a dream. Just a nightmare. It’s not real.
She opened her eyes, but this time ignored the ground and the woods and tried to focus on the cabin high above her.
“Hello? Anyone?”
She made a second pass around the two trees just to be sure she hadn’t missed something the first time, but she only confirmed that the house had no windows, no doors, and no way to climb up to it. And with each passing moment, the stark black and white landscape around her was swallowed up by wide swathes of crimson on the earth and up the trees, seeping up out of the ground.
“Damn it, Yaga, I’m tired of this game. Show me the door already! Show me now!”
A terrible wooden groaning and keening echoed through the wood, and Wren stumbled back into the bone fence. The soft bloody earth under her feet shuddered, and the ice cracked, and a deep rumbling shook the ground.
Woden, be my shield.
One of the trees beneath the cabin was bending sharply halfway up, and the base of the tree began to rise, its clawing roots tearing up the earth. When it broke free of the ground, huge clumps of dirt and snow tumbled from the exposed roots like dead bodies. Then the roots came down to rest on the ground and the other tree bent and tore itself free of the ground just like the first one.
It’s going to trample me!
Wren bolted toward the nearest opening in the fence, but the cabin lunged and planted one of its massive tree-legs directly in her path, splashing her with the blood from the pools all around her. The impact shook the ground from under her and Wren slipped backward in the muck and struck her head on the skulls of the fence. As she clutched her aching head, she looked up, expecting to see a filthy mass of roots about to crush her into the ground.
But instead, the cabin leaned back and forth, stomping its tree-legs one by one as it shuffled around and around in a slow circle within the bone fence, stepping back and forth across the tiny stream. Eventually it turned halfway around, and stopped.
Wren remained still and silent, her eyes darting around the clearing, waiting for something else to happen. But nothing did.
She sat up, and then stood up, her eyes fixed on the cabin above her. There, in the wall of the cabin facing her, was a door. A door that had not been there before.
“Okay, that’s something. But how am I…” She glanced around again for a ladder and saw that none had appeared during the cabin’s clumsy dance. She looked back up at the door. “Well, it is a witch’s house, I suppose. She wouldn’t need a ladder.”
Wren held out her right hand and focused on the sun-steel ring on her finger. It took very little effort to make her own soul shiver just right to make the ring buzz ever so gently against her skin. She pulled the aether in from the clearing, in from the woods, in from as far as she could reach. The cold mist slithered over the pink snow in thin wisps, but eventually she had enough. Wren sat down cross-legged and gathered the aether under her, and then she lifted herself off the ground.
She had never lifted herself so high as the cabin, in fact she had never risen more than a few feet off the ground. So she moved slowly, struggling to keep the small cloud of aether beneath her as dense as possible. Two feet, six feet, ten feet. Wren kept her eyes on the door and tried not to think about the vast empty space forming below her legs.
When she reached the height of the cabin, Wren grabbed the wooden handle of the door and pulled herself forward so she could stand on the shallow lip of the door sill. With a pillow of aether at her back to keep her from falling, she wiggled and shook the handle until the clasp popped free and the door swung out toward her. She waved the aether forward, and it delivered her safely into the cabin.
The interior was very dark, as the only light inside came from the doorway that she was now standing in. There were no windows, shuttered or otherwise, and no hint of a hearth or candles to light. So Wren held up her sun-steel ring a second time and squeezed it tight until the eight meager souls inside it made the ring glow with a dim orange light.
“Yaga? Are you here?”
She stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind her.
Instantly a dozen large candles sprang to life, but Wren had barely glimpsed her surroundings before an ear-splitting screaming erupted all around her. She slammed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut from the pain of the noise, and she crouched down as a wave of vertigo swept through her, threatening to send her spinning to the floor.
Wren didn’t move. With her eyes closed and ears plugged, she waited for the screaming to stop, but it didn’t stop. She couldn’t tell if it was one voice or a thousand voices, male or female, near or far. There weren’t even pauses for the screamers to catch their breath.
After several long moments of this, Wren cautiously opened her eyes and squinted at her surroundings. She was still inside the small cabin, still crouched just inside the door, and from her position she could easily see everything around her. And what she saw was terrifying.