Smile At The World
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“You can’t stop it,” he said. “I don’t want you to.” He turned away, and I was glad he’d been forced into honesty. If there’s one thing that gets on my tits more than anything else in this world, it’s when people lie straight-faced.
The sun beat down on his back, so hot that he felt as if someone had laid a fire under him. Sweat poured off the sides of his head and dripped to the ground. A few strands of black hair stuck out like burnt straws at each temple and across his forehead.
For once, no one noticed; they all stared at his feet as if he were an object of some great interest that would only become apparent with careful study. His boots shone darkly in the sunlight, almost black against his skin-toned legs. It seemed strange to be alive while the other two were dead. It was a strange time to be alive. “They’ll kill us both for what we’ve done,” he muttered to himself.
“What did you just say?”
He froze. Had he really? But he hadn’t meant to say it aloud. The voice behind him made him flinch – not from fear but from something deeper, darker. A feeling that made him shrink back into himself even though he knew she couldn’t see him through the heat of the sun. Something about her voice reminded him of home. Her accent, her tone.
It wasn’t possible. No one could possibly have known him here. Not since before he ran away. And certainly not by his real name.
She was young. She looked like any girl might look if you stripped them bare of all their trappings: hair and clothes and make-up – nothing left between them and themselves except for flesh and bone. Her face was pretty enough, although it didn’t seem like anyone who’d grown up with her as a friend would ever call her beautiful.
“I think I heard you,” he said slowly, trying not to stare at her too obviously. He wondered how long ago she had been there; when he saw her last, it hadn’t been until she’d begun to run. Did she know he was following?
Did she care? He tried not to let the thought trouble him. What happened after death was irrelevant in this moment, and if he allowed his imagination to stray, that was where he would go astray.
“Who are you?” she asked again. The question sounded familiar now. It had been the same question they had posed to each other every day for weeks. It had been the first word out of her mouth after Isobel had died. They had played it back and forth like an old record – over and over, as the days turned into months.
“No one important,” he replied. “Just me.”
And suddenly she stepped towards him. He flinched again as she touched his arm. It had been years since anyone had touched him, and he was surprised that his hand didn’t recoil as far as it once had. He looked down at his own flesh – it was hard to remember that it wasn’t always there – and then at her.
He remembered what she’d been wearing, the way her hair fell about her shoulders, the shape of her hips. And it wasn’t just memory – it was the same body, he realized. Just with different eyes.
For a moment, everything seemed to slow down. The light shimmered over the horizon and the wind rose and sank. He saw a man riding past on horseback, and another playing a horn in the distance; neither had he seen before nor had they come close enough to matter.
It was as if he stood outside himself watching from somewhere above the world – seeing the landscape as if it belonged to someone else.
Then she was gone, and everything returned to normal. “We’ll get caught,” he said quietly. “If they catch us.”
Her laugh came out low and bitter as if she’d been expecting this answer all along and had prepared a response for it. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You need to feel that you’ve got away with something.”
“Yes, of course,” he admitted. That was true enough, but it also scared him. This was what he wanted, or rather what he needed; he didn’t understand why yet, but it felt as if he’d missed this part of himself since he’d escaped the city. “But I don’t want to die.”
“Neither do I,” she said simply. She pulled herself up on top of a boulder and sat beside him. For the first time, he realized that she’d stopped running; she hadn’t fallen further behind because her legs were too tired, but perhaps she had slowed down so that he could catch up to her easily.
Now he could watch her closely. The movement of her body against the rock made him think of a flower in full bloom, opening and closing its petals.
She held out a hand to him without speaking, and he took it. When he touched her fingers, he expected them to be cold and brittle, as if her life itself had left her already and only remained in the flesh around her wrists. But when he touched her skin, he found it warm; not hot, but warmer than he remembered the air to be in recent weeks.
It gave off a faint scent, like a bouquet of flowers he’d never smelled before, but one he wanted to smell more of. His mind told him it was perfume, and yet he sensed no hint of the artificial sweetness that was such a feature of her kind’s lives.
He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes and listened to the wind blowing through the leaves, and he tasted her touch on his skin. It was as if she’d poured her life into him, and now he carried some of it about with him as he moved on in this new place. It was a gift, and yet she didn’t say anything about it, and that made him feel even more grateful to her.
There was so much he had missed, and he wasn’t sure which part of himself was missing now, or what that part did.
He couldn’t remember his life in the city. All he knew of his old self was this vague sense that it had been somehow separate from his new self – as if there were two people inside of him as if his memories of living in the city were like dreams and this was reality, though he didn’t know what this reality might look like any more than he’d known how to describe dreams before waking up.
He had been one person. He’d had a purpose. He hadn’t really been alone. Now he was both these things. There were two of him and one of him. And he wasn’t entirely sure which of them was the real him now.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said softly, looking into her eyes. They were bright yellow as if she were staring straight at the sun. Her lips were full and red, like strawberries, and she wore the same jewelry as before: a necklace made of small gold discs strung together with black cord and studded with tiny silver coins.
She laughed again, still in the same low tone. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“You know,” he replied. “Back home.”
She nodded. “To your home.” She hesitated as if weighing whether to speak her thought aloud and then spoke it anyway. “Do they live inside us? Are they all around us? Do they have a language and thoughts and feelings just like we do, but only we can see it?”
He looked at her blankly, as if he’d never considered those questions before. The words had an eerie ring to them. As if she’d asked him something impossible as if it could not possibly be true.
“Maybe they do,” he said slowly. He remembered her words, the strange words she’d spoken before: “The dead are everywhere, and yet we don’t notice them.” Perhaps she could see the ghosts in the forest – or perhaps he had begun to feel them, as she had done. Or maybe they were real, and he was seeing only their shadows like she’d said.
When he spoke again, he felt his voice come out in a rush, as if he were telling someone else about these things, as if they were only words and not his own thoughts. He spoke without thinking; he was talking to a stranger now. A stranger who happened to share his name. “They walk through this world unseen most of the time, but sometimes we catch glimpses of them.”
She stared at him, and for a moment, he thought he saw a shadow cast upon her face by the moonlight that glinted off the water. It seemed to take up only a portion of her features; he wondered whether it was only a reflection in the water itself and whether she could hear his thoughts as clearly as he heard hers.
Then she blinked and he thought it must have been nothing. That perhaps it had only been a trick of the light.
But then she said, “Perhaps we should go back to the boat. We’ll get lost otherwise.”
He looked away from her and toward the river and the woods beyond. It was too dark to make out much of the land now. But as he watched, he saw a faint glow coming from somewhere far downriver; as if the night sky reflected the flames of the fire burning below.
For a moment, he felt himself being drawn to the light’s source as he’d once been pulled to her hand. Then he shook his head and turned to the girl in front of him again, saying, “It will take us days to get back to the shore. We should stay the night here.
Tomorrow we can find a way to cross over the river.” He wanted to tell her that if she stayed with him, it would be safe; that he would protect her from whatever dangers waited on the other side. But he also knew it was wrong for him to think of her like that.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t use that word again. It wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t real.
But still, there had been another time when she had saved him… “We’ll sleep in the grass here,” he said. There was no point staying in the boat any longer. The river was quiet enough, and there were no sounds of the sea. But he felt compelled to say it again. To reassure her. “I won’t hurt you.”
Her smile returned, and he couldn’t help but feel relieved, even though he hadn’t meant for it to happen. But then she said, “Don’t worry, I’ve slept under worse conditions than that.”
Then, abruptly, she leaned forward, wrapping her arms around his waist. She pressed her lips to his, pressing herself close to him. As he tried to return the kiss, the sensation was electric. He had never felt anything so soft and warm in his life. His stomach fluttered, and he forgot himself in the strangeness of it.
This was what he had dreamed of for years, he thought. This was the closest he’d ever been to a woman; he couldn’t remember ever having kissed a girl before. When his hands slipped to her back, they tingled where his fingers rested upon her skin; she was as cold as the air and his hands began to sweat beneath them.
She tasted faintly of flowers, a faint fragrance in the night air, mingling with the scent of damp earth and wood smoke. He wanted to hold her, to pull her close as he always had held her doll, to press himself against her, but instead, he let her slip from him, stepping back to look at her, unsure of what he might see in her eyes.
She stood staring at him with a dazed expression on her face, as though she had awakened suddenly from sleep. Her cheeks were flushed; he could smell the warmth of her breath on his neck, and feel the heat of her body pressed against his.
The wind blew past them both and he could feel a breeze brush the hairs of her scalp lightly against his face. She was breathing heavily, but he could not tell if she was angry or frightened, or even just confused by what had happened. She stared at him as if she was looking for something – some memory of his that had slipped away.
And then she took a step backward and turned and ran into the forest.
***
As soon as he heard her footsteps die away in the woods, Uthari felt a calmness wash over him. It felt as if he had finally come home after wandering aimlessly through the world for so long. For a moment, he thought that it must be some sort of illusion caused by the light of the fire below. But when he looked again, he saw the glow of the flame moving along the ground. As if it had a mind of its own.
For a moment, he stood there staring at the fire, wondering whether he should speak. But he felt too tired for words. Too tired for anything other than to wait.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the glow grew brighter until it was as bright as daylight.
The light was blinding.
He shielded his eyes with one arm, feeling himself being dragged toward it. As he stepped up onto the bank beside the river, he was aware of his heart beating louder and faster inside his chest, and his head was dizzy with fear and confusion.
But he forced himself to remain motionless, to keep his head bowed as the wind carried the sound of the flames down the bank towards him as if the trees themselves were burning. As if the water itself was boiling.
He felt a sense of foreboding wash over him. He knew that this was the work of his father’s people. They had come seeking vengeance on him because their own power had begun to wane. Because they had failed to stop him from destroying their greatest creation.
If he had been thinking clearly, he might have recognized it for the warning it was. He could hardly have been expected to recognize it for such.
A few more steps and he was on the bank. A small figure huddled in the center of it; he couldn’t make out much detail except for the brightness of his hair and the way her head lolled listlessly against her shoulders. Then the flames leaped up and washed across him, enveloping him. He closed his eyes and waited for it to pass… and when it did, the darkness returned slowly.
It wasn’t dark anymore.
No, the forest was full of light; it shone like silver on the leaves and cast a silvery gleam upon each strand of hair on every tree. Even the sky above was filled with a shimmering glow as the sun rose high in the morning sky.
And all around them, he could hear the voices of people: children playing among the trees, laughing at the antics of animals; lovers walking hand in hand. They sounded young and old at once, and they sang softly of love lost and found again.
And somewhere in the distance, he could hear someone crying – a little child perhaps, or an elderly man sitting alone in his home. And everywhere he looked, the land seemed to be changing, the hills and fields becoming greener as they became lush with life and vitality.
“Father…” he said softly. “We’ve made it.”
His voice echoed through the clearing. There was no echo in this place. No echoes at all. The wind blew the words away into the distance. The wind brought with it a scent that reminded him of the woods behind his home – but fresher, sweeter somehow.
As if it had a taste to it. The very air around him was different now; he could feel it in his lungs and his fingertips. The forest itself was alive, and his people lived here. In this forest, he thought. I am home.
“Is anyone there?” Uthari called again, stepping up onto the bank and peering about him. He could barely make out any details. Everything appeared to be shrouded in mist, and he wondered how far away those voices sounded. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. Maybe they weren’t real after all.
They came nearer. The voices grew more distinct. His breath caught in his throat; he knew these people. He knew them all.
“Father? Is that you?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I’m here. You have come home.”
He heard their footsteps crunching through the snow; he followed the sounds up to where his father had stopped beside a tall, slender woman who was bending over a small girl. She was smiling gently. Her hair was white and her skin was smooth and pale, and as she looked up at him, her eyes glowed brightly as the stars.
“You’re finally back,” his mother said simply.
She held him close for a moment, pressing her cheek against his.
“We have been waiting for you… and now we can begin again.”
***
The world began to grow distant, and his vision blurred. Something was wrong with his eyes, he realized. It wasn’t his father holding him; it was someone else entirely, and as the fog began to clear, his senses dulled. His head was spinning. His body felt heavy, and something deep within was calling to him, begging him to let go.
And then he saw Uthari standing beside him and he knew he didn’t belong there. He had never belonged there. Not really. And as he slipped deeper into sleep, his last thoughts drifted toward his mother and his father. His home, which he would never return to.
As the first rays of sunlight struck the earth, Uthari took a step back from the edge of the riverbank and turned to look at the people gathered before him. They had not been expecting to see him so soon. Many of them stared at the stranger in his robes and wondered what he meant by coming to them at a time like this.
Only a few of them were familiar faces. Some were women and children; some were men wearing leather armor and carrying long swords, and one of them carried an axe in his belt. All of them were clad in furs and cloaks that protected them from the cold wind, although they wore only thin garments beneath their clothes to keep the warmth.
Uthari nodded to himself; they would make fine allies. This is why he sent them here when he needed them most. To fight alongside him.
Then he remembered something that had escaped his mind in all the chaos. His father had died.
That must have happened after the war ended, he told himself. Before we left on our journey southward. We’ll have to tell everyone later, once we reach the city. Once we have everything sorted out, once all these questions are answered. For now, just think of it as a sacrifice to gain power and knowledge… and to save my son’s life.
Uthari shook his head at the thought, but his mind was too busy trying to piece together the events that had transpired since he had woken up in the dark cavern beneath the temple to give much thought to the implications of Uthar’s death. What matters is that he lives, and we live. That’s what will matter when we finally stand upon the summit, looking at the rest of the world around us.
A shout went up, and the crowd parted slightly in front of him to reveal the source of the noise: an older man, perhaps a little younger than he was, and wearing a short-sleeved shirt of red leather. He had a full beard – black and bushy – and was holding a sword across his shoulder.
A shield hung beside him, along with two spears – both of which he held casually as if preparing for the next battle rather than addressing a gathering of people. He stepped forward quickly, pushing aside the others before him. “You are Uthari? I am Tharin.”
“I am,” Uthari said, taking a step towards him. “You are well met, Brother.”
The bearded man glanced around at the others gathered near them and said, “These men and women are my companions. We have fought many battles together. They bear no grudges against you or your people.”
“Indeed?” Uthari asked him. “You’ve all chosen to follow me, and yet you remain loyal to these strangers?”
“Brother,” Tharin said softly. “If ever there were any doubts about our loyalty, they should be cast away now. We have seen your power, and we know that we cannot afford to turn back.”
“You came to me because you knew I could help you find your lost brother,” Uthari said. “Is this true?”
Tharin nodded slowly. “Yes. But we also wanted to ask you something else.”
“What is it?”
“Why did you bring us here?”
He hesitated, wondering how to explain what was inside his head.
After a long moment, he said, “You’re the ones who can defeat Grendel.”
For a few seconds, there was silence. Then one of the men in leather armor, a big lad with curly hair tied up in a ponytail behind his head, looked over at his friends and grinned.
“We don’t need to defeat him,” he shouted. “Just kill him!”
His comrades laughed, and Uthari raised his eyebrows in amusement. They had been listening after all. The fact that he had been able to use their fears – of being killed by Grendel – to draw them close enough to hear him speak was promising. It meant that he was succeeding where other leaders might have failed, by winning them over through force and cunning rather than words alone.
But he had no more time to consider them. As the sun began to sink towards the horizon, Uthari felt the tugging pull on his mind. The Archdemon had found him again. And this time, Uthari knew he would not be defeated.
The End