VIII. First She Saw Nothing #2
Ex nihilo. Something from nothing. My mind felt slow and clumsy, pushing past my thirst and hunger to make sense of the command. It took much too long to realize he expected me to create something out of this bare and empty room.
I had no idea how to do such a task. This was not reaching into the corner of a chicken coop for eggs for Dacia.
The conversation with Death played over in my head, garbled and confusing.
The room was so small and oppressive it felt akin to that terrible coffin.
The urge to scream rose in my throat. But if I started screaming, all would truly be lost. To calm myself, I focused on the glow of the hourglass.
Symbols, odd and arcane, were etched into it, converging in a circular pattern, and I studied them carefully, but they revealed nothing on how to pass this trial.
Taking a deep breath, I turned my gaze to the room. The stones and the mortar and the hourglass were already something. But otherwise, it was swept clean. There was nothing on the floor or walls.
But if I could put something onto nothing …
The stories told in the brothel of the otherworld always involved some trickery or cleverness to escape.
I am nothing. I looked for a tool but found only my hands and my dirt-stained nails.
I flexed my fingers and dug my nails deep into the thin skin of my forearm.
Then my teeth. It took awhile, and it was painful to scratch so deep and hard, desperate to draw blood.
But finally, it welled in the scratches, and I bent closer to the floor, just in front of the hourglass, where I could see.
Careful to use each drop, I scratched the blood onto the stones. Ex nihilo. Just barely visible. Something from me, therefore something from nothing. I sat back with the thrill of satisfaction.
The sand kept dropping. The door lock did not turn. No sound or word of congratulations broke the silence. I sat there too long, too sure. The sickening realization that I had not passed finally hit me.
I should have known better—when had those fairy stories ever conveyed anything I found to be true about the otherworld?
I thought of giving the kobold a piece of bread and my throat swelled with the gravity of my mistake.
Cleverness was not going to work. That world was not ruled by trickery or whimsy—but exchange and power.
This task was about exchanging my power for something.
The hourglass showed that half my time had passed.
What if I made something new? That could count? It had to count. Something was better than nothing. Something was the point, after all. If I could crumble the stone? Turn it to dust?
I was being foolish—I knew this deep down, but I couldn’t bear to simply sit in my stupidity and wait for my fate. Fear and fury rose in my throat, and I pushed my hands against the corner of the stone.
Over the years I’d broken so many pitchers that I didn’t have to search to find that place within me. With a sudden burst of dust, a small crack formed under my hands.
I glanced at the hourglass hopefully. The crack—the dust—which had not been there a moment before, should be enough—
The sand ran faster than ever. I still had not passed.
Death was right. I only saw what I expected to see. I only did what I believed I could do. I was capable of nothing beyond the tight limits of my own mean life.
I closed my eyes.
Rochelle. Valerie. A little hut by the icy Ills.
I remembered the smell of goats and the flash of the river spirits’ tails.
How I would watch them from the grassy bank and study their slipstream of faces to see if any of them were my mother.
But the pain of my memories threatened to drop me into an ocean of grief so deep and dark and endless, my mind turned sharply away.
And yet there was nowhere else to look. If I did not create now, I would die.
I exhaled a long breath. I waded out into that emptiness—into the memories of my mothers, the way they had died, one twisted in the agony of flames, another still suspended in the creation and deliverance of me.
My father, a nameless, faceless violence that tore me from her.
Agony slipped like a river around my knees.
As the last of the sand trickled down, in the darkness that was my own, I reached into that treacherous current.
This was the river of seeing and knowing, and it ran away from me, into the otherworld where the things I most loved had been taken.
It was full of nothing and everything all at once.
I would drown in it. I would be obliterated in despair.
Somewhere in its gurgling, I heard Death’s words come back to me.
You can never have power without expecting it.
On instinct alone, I opened my hand against the push of darkness and took a handful of its raw, howling emptiness.
With my fist tightly clenched, I opened my eyes.
The last thread of sand dropped from the hourglass.
I braced myself, waiting for death. The glowing hourglass sat on the floor before me, empty, but nothing seemed to change.
The key scraped and the door swung open. Light flooded the room, and I threw up my hand to block my eyes.
Death gripped my wrist, pulling it off my face with this rough, urgent gesture and squeezing my fist open like one would a child’s. With his hand cupping mine, we looked together.
There, in my palm, laid a delicate, freshly picked violet, the vivid, purple petals only slightly crushed.
Something.
I looked up, hope beating in my chest. “I passed?” I breathed to Death.
He looked down on me like a shining saint in his otherworldly beauty and silence.
I searched those obsidian eyes, waiting for them to betray something.
I wished for a word I might say to release his hold on my wrist, to see a wrinkle of his brow or a flinch in his mouth that would show his surprise and pleasure with me.
But there was nothing except the stoic intensity of him towering over me, pinning me there on my knees.
“You passed,” he said.
Only then did I look back to the flower, relief coursing through me. Never mind the ruins, the strangeness of it all—I plucked this flower, this creation, out of the nothing. It smelled green and sharp.
“It is a weak offering, but yes, you have passed,” Death said.
He picked up the hourglass and its light fell onto my skin, casting me a sickly green.
“You will struggle mightily as my apprentice. It will not be easy. I don’t want to destroy you, but many are destroyed.
Are you willing to see beyond your small, narrow world as you’ve known it?
” He touched the symbols of the hourglass and then uttered something in a language I did not understand.
I did not yet recognize the work of sorcery. In that moment, there was no hesitation, no doubt. I had gone beyond what I knew and survived. I felt I could envision the path back—to Dacia, to my sister—and the path forward into power. I gripped the flower tight in my palm. “I am.”
“Then let us begin.” He lifted me off my knees and led me out of the dark and empty room.