THE UNDERREALM
THE FIRST THING I was aware of was the cold.
This was not hell as I’d always imagined. It was not unbearable heat and encircling orange flames. There were no screams of agony or maniacal cackles, no chaos or mutiny or loud, lawless violence.
Instead, there was a slow falling of ash from an imperceptible sky, rows of jagged white trees, and a dark, desolate ground that sprawled out like endless tundra. Everything was too stark, too smooth, the ground like black glass and the trees like pale marble. A silvery mist whorled in the canopy, but I got the sense that even if I could have seen through it, the sky would not really have been the sky at all. It would have been a sheet of purest black, or maybe white, no sun or moon or stars but instead a featureless canvas; something unnatural, something terrible, something that hurt the naked eye to behold.
My chest rose and fell in ragged peaks. I had seen this place before. It had lurked just beyond the periphery of my understanding, as though my body had always known it would come back here. I had caught glimpses when trying to flee the asylum – almost like the torture experiments had shaken it loose, had swept away the dust from the crypt to reveal what had always lain beneath.
Whatever a soul was, the Underrealm was seared on to mine like a brand.
Clambering slowly to my feet, I took stock of my new form. In the vaguest of senses, my outline was ghost-like. Still the rough shape of Branwen Blythe, but altogether more ethereal, blurred around the edges, insubstantial in a way I found wholly unnerving. There was a lightness I had never felt before, as though gravity had lessened its pull.
All around was stark white and absolute black and deathly quiet.
And the most troubling thing of all was that it felt like coming home .
Long ago, I had lived here, come of age here.
Something in me sank with recognition – but not the fearful, disgusted kind. It was nostalgia. Almost … peace . Comfort. Belonging. I shook the feelings ferociously away, as though I could shrug off the complicated emotions like an old coat.
Beside me, Arden stirred.
This form, too, was an approximation of Dylan Green, but the more I stared, the more I picked out other features from various lives. The strong nose from Algeria, the atrophied leg from Vienna, the smooth, dark skin from the desert. These elements flickered in and out, a constant morphing waver, a hundred identities climbing to the surface. It struck me that none of them truly defined Arden, though. Something emanated from deep inside the soul, like a beacon, a lighthouse, the only true touchstone I had ever known. Flora and fauna and sepia-stained pages, sharp intelligence and stoic stubbornness, beautiful words and deep-rooted melancholy, so old and so young all at once.
Arden was neither girl nor boy, neither solid nor unwhole. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ The whisper felt like a lie on my tongue.
We were not clothed, but nor were we naked – it was more that our forms lacked the definition to pick out any intimate features. We were a curious grey-silver, smudged like chalk sketches, and yet we were possibly the truest versions of ourselves we had ever been.
Arden patted the place where his coat pocket might have been. ‘No knife.’
So it was to be my bare hands.
Unless …
I looked around at the hideous white trees. They were bare as skeletons, not a leaf or bloom to be seen. Could I snap a branch to use as a kind of sword? I approached the nearest tree, picking out a branch with a nicely pointed tip. But as I gripped it between my ghost-hands and tried to snap it off, there was no give.
Was my spectral form incapable of physical feats? Was I unable to interact with this terrible landscape?
A memory came to me, rich and textured: my child-self clambering up the tallest tree I could find, trying to see how vast this world of mine was. The slick, cold surface beneath my palms, the slip of my foot on a narrow trunk. And then, when I reached the top, a soaring feeling of freedom, of joy, so potent that I’d whooped . I’d whooped, and it had echoed through this broken realm for a moment too long.
Nausea rose in me like mercury in a thermometer.
‘Are you all right?’ Arden asked again.
I nodded. ‘Just remembering an everything-the-light-touches-is-my-kingdom moment I had here as a child. Totally fine and normal.’
‘Do you remember much?’
No, but also yes .
Long stretches of not speaking to another soul, the songs and plays and solitary games I would make up to entertain myself. Not-bodies pinned to seething coals, eyes bulging but no screams, wondering aimlessly whether I might save them. Running, running, running, until my almost-lungs were fit to burst, until I was gasping on my hands and knees – just to make myself feel alive.
A loneliness so dark and absolute it felt like the bottom of a well, like a black hole that swallowed all else.
I shook away the memories. We could touch the landscape. That was all I needed to know.
I tried again to snap a branch; still nothing. Arden crossed over and made the same attempt, but there was not even the slightest creak of cracking bark.
In fact …
I took a step back and frowned. There was no bark at all. The branches were perfectly smooth, with an almost glossy, pearly sheen to them.
Like –
‘Bones,’ murmured Arden in horror.
I fought the urge to retch. Ash continued to fall, a soft, muffling presence. White flakes clung to me, to the bridge of my nose and the tips of my eyelashes.
How could we snap bones ?
But it was not impossible. I thought of how easy it was to snap a human finger, and reasoned that we just had to find a branch slender enough.
I picked out a far narrower twig with an equally sharp end; more of a rapier than a cutlass, but it would do the job. Perhaps, because of its raw material, it would do the job better than a steel blade. There would be something immensely satisfying about plunging a bone into the Mother’s throat.
You can ’ t kill your own mother , whispered a low, hoarse voice in the back of my head, certainly not my own. She raised you.
She is not my mother , my consciousness snapped back. My mother is in South Wales, searching every nook and cranny of the hills to find me. That is love. Not this.
You still believe in love? asked the voice. After all this time, your fate has not bled you dry of it? You still have not learned that love cannot conquer all?
Love is the only thing worth believing in , I replied.
The voice said something else, but I tuned it out, pulling hard on the bone. The twig broke free with a crisp snap. I had no pockets in which to conceal the weapon, but it was easily hidden inside a clenched fist.
Would it be enough? Would she bleed? Or did the Mother have powers beyond our ken? Could she wield life and death like a bow and arrow? Was her form even material enough to destroy?
Back in the trenches, she’d seemed solid, three-dimensional, if not altogether human. But down here, Arden and I were something other . The Mother likely would be too.
What if the bone shard met nothing but air?
What then?
Arden swallowed and looked around. ‘How strong is your tether right now?’
I searched inside myself, and almost instantly gripped the terrible thread that tied me to the Mother. It tugged at me like a magnet, guided me like a compass. There was no north or south or east or west in the Underrealm, but it pulled me somewhere beyond the trees.
‘That way.’
As we walked, disquiet swelled in my chest. Everything was too … stark. The light was too light and the dark was too dark, like the most dreadful chiaroscuro painting I’d ever seen. The bone trees glowed white as though lit from within, and the shadows moved around them with a hideous kind of orphic sentience.
The Underrealm felt like the death of everything.
And yet here, I had lived .
I couldn’t reconcile those two things.
There was a low, distant chatter, though I couldn’t ascertain where exactly it came from – because it was everywhere, in the stoic stretch of the sharp bone branches, in the flurries of ash that fell from above, in the light and in the shadows, pressing in from all angles. And while they were not the agonized screams I’d expected, they were somehow worse; frantic, disembodied, almost delirious.
I found it profoundly disturbing, not just because of the eerie sound, but also because I could not shake the feeling that these were the tortured voices of my ancestors. Their sweet faces came to me – my empress mother in Northern Song, my grandfather in the Berber caravan, my beloved sisters in Vard? – and it took everything in my power not to break down and weep.
They were so scared, and in so much pain, and I couldn’t get to them.
Whether it was true or whether it was a cruel sound effect designed to weaken me, I did not know. But the impact was still awful and unrelenting, like standing beneath a waterfall and absorbing its full force.
As we passed several small white lakes, Arden shuddered viscerally. At first glance I thought they were frozen over, but as I looked closer I realized they too shone with an unnatural brightness, a searing ferocity.
Understanding – or perhaps memory – hit me like a physical blow.
The beds of coal, burning white-hot.
And yet still the air around them felt frigidly cold. Everything here was wrong, logic-defying, unsettling in a way that made me want to turn and run in the opposite direction.
But we had made the decision, and it could not be unmade.
Arden’s entire outline was sharp, taut, as we passed coal bed upon coal bed, and I shuddered to imagine their helpless body pinned to the white heat for an entire week. It had been so agonizing that the nightmares had followed for a millennium.
And I was responsible. I had caused that pain.
The further we got into the forest of bone trees, the stronger the tether pulled, until I feared I wouldn’t be able to stop walking even if I wanted to. In fact, it felt like all the energy in the Underrealm was being sucked towards the same pole star in a low, terrible orbit. I thought of reaped souls and the Mother sustained by suffering, and wondered if I was walking alongside that very pain. If I was just one more morsel on which she was about to feed – or if, after all this time, she might be happy to see me.
Right when I thought I was about to buckle beneath the intensity of the lure, we came to a glade in the skeletal trees. Ash rose and fell around the clearing in unassuming mounds, and the shadows writhed and groaned with darkness.
At the centre of it all, there she was.
The Mother.