Chapter 26 Daedalean Creature
DAEDALEAN CREATURE
The drive is over six hours if you don’t stop, but the last time I made it I was riding away from Solidago, not toward it.
That was a lifetime ago and it felt like it went on forever then, the coast stretching into the endless distance, mile after beautiful, gobsmacking mile.
This time we’re making it at night, the moon quietly shadowing us as we creep out of the city and then the state, reminding me that this nightmare won’t be over until that well is empty and the Fathom is far from here.
What happens to Arla then, or any of us?
I couldn’t say. But without her source, surely the worst of her power will be drained.
Maybe then we can go to the authorities, report Aaron’s and Brennan’s murders. Maybe then they can contain her.
At least we decided to drive my car tonight, since my Mazda crossover has back seats that fold flat.
Anneli’s book was still inside. I pore over it as Levi takes a turn behind the wheel, flipping between chapters, trying to find some reference to what specifically is trapped in Arla’s basement.
There is nothing that points directly to the Fathom, though several water goddesses are listed, from Sassuma Arnaa in Greenland to Tiamat of Mesopotamia to the Greek Thalassa I’m already acquainted with.
She explains how the “primordial waters” indicate memories in the collective unconscious of both the mother’s womb and evolution from a shared aquatic species.
At the same time, they represent our fear of returning to a preconscious state, what we perceive as the loss of autonomy and control, as death itself.
She does the same with fire, likening it to dual roles of protector and destroyer, order and chaos, the heart of civilization and the center of our apocalyptic nightmares.
This she attributes to an instinctive understanding terrestrial species carry of the sun, the giver and nurturer of life.
But we know it also as our sure demise, for all stars must die.
According to Anneli, water and fire are not opposing elements but procreative dualities that generate, nourish, and govern life through their union.
While today’s mind might think of them as separate, copulating entities, she insists their reproduction is parthenogenetic, housed figuratively if not literally in the bodies of these ancient goddesses.
She describes them as forces, more than beings, that hold within them the violence of our awakening and the seed of our destruction.
It’s hard to imagine she wrote this before her experience on the mountain. I wonder if she’d write it differently now. Setting the book down, I look at Levi.
“Learn anything useful?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s better if I drive and you read.
The journal, I mean.” I pick it up from the floorboard and unwrap it again, flipping through its many decorated pages.
There must be something here that can help us.
I have the key; I can get inside the chamber.
But what then? How do I make it so the Fathom can get out?
“Take some time,” Levi says. “You need rest. We’re not going to fix this by sacrificing ourselves.”
His choice of words unsettles me. He has no idea how close they are to the truth. But he’s right—I’m terrified and exhausted, and that combination does not make for the best problem-solving skills.
I return to Anneli’s book, my eyes finding a paragraph I haven’t read yet.
Primordial goddesses are neither benevolent nor malevolent.
They do not plot and scheme, nor are they passive observers.
They are to be feared and revered. Appeasement is questionable, control, futile.
It is their nature to be unpredictable, but not accidental.
Their actions and reactions may be beyond mortal understanding, but they are cosmically true.
How one might reveal herself to you, it is only one profile of a compound face, one facet of a complex prism, one arm of a Daedalean creature.
Shivers skitter over my skin, the dance of arthropods.
I brush at my arms reflexively and feel the the Fathom-like breath against the back of my neck.
The realization that she has witnessed me even as I witnessed her, that one of us will be forever changed, the other forever unchangeable, my knowledge of her as newborn as fresh snow, while her knowledge of me is older than the world itself.
How small we’ve been thinking, our little cult, deceived by that finite room, that tiny door.
All while her thoughts have birthed galaxies and set fire to whole histories.
Which means Arla, Brennan, Cadence, me …
we are no accident. The call Arla described, the gifts we each experienced, the death that claimed me for seventeen long minutes—these seemingly random encounters are not random at all.
We just can’t see the design. All along Arla thought she’d been calling the shots, but she’s merely been relaying them.
We are the pieces, but the Fathom is the board, the player, and the game.
Every person she has drawn to that chamber has been intentional.
And she could only have one purpose—to set herself free.
She used the promise of our power to convince Arla to do her work for her, let her puppet believe it was a master.
But she’s been biding her time down in that well because as an immortal, time is all she has.
Some things simply don’t fit in cages.
I put the book aside, rub my eyes, and look at Levi, who’s quiet behind the wheel, steadfast. I’m weary in a way I’ve never been.
I’ve lived harder these past couple of weeks than in all my thirty-odd years.
They’ve been a blur of magic and monsters and fire and blood.
At least, looking at this man still beside me after everything, I can say one good thing has come of it.
She’s standing in the water when I see her, her back to me, red hair plaited down it, spooling like a ribbon at her feet. Dara. The ocean rolls in front of her, a lavender expanse of placid waves that come to nip at her ankles.
There is something off, though, something not quite right. Maybe it’s the impossible length of her hair or the unusual breadth of her shoulders, the swooping cape of iridescent feathers coursing down her back. Or maybe it’s that when I call her name, she doesn’t turn.
My feet plunge into the sand as I move toward her, and it is only when I reach her side that I see it isn’t her at all. Even if the nose and chin are right, the pattern of freckles, the smooth space between the eyes.
Her irises are spinning quasars, the whites swirls of smoke. It’s her face, but it’s been drawn over a question like a silk veil.
“You’re not Dara,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. “I’m not. Would you prefer this?” Her body thins to cellophane and ripples like liquid, running down into the ocean and back up in a column of water before resolidifying as Arla, raven-black hair and green eyes.
My flinch sends her spinning apart again.
Droplets scatter over my face as she melts beside me and reconfigures into Anneli’s bright hair and colorless eyes.
Before I can respond, she is shifting once more, coming together as áhce?eatni, terror of the glacier, wings of an owl and the antlers of a reindeer.
I shudder to see what the artist saw, this beast maiden of the North.
And then she is gone, and Thalassa has replaced her, a body of silver scales and crab claws snapping overhead, eyes like thunderclouds.
Before that image can fully settle, she morphs again into the large, lithe form of a dragon, her slender head spewing fire and her barbed tail whipping behind us.
Heat pours off her scales that clink against each other like steel.
Then, all at once, the dragon is gone, and she is a woman once more, with the proud, golden bearing of my grandmother, complete with Aurelia’s slanting eyes and hard jaw, just like she looked in the portrait.
I throw my hands over my face and cry out, unable to bear it. And when I pull them away, she is Dara again, if a bit more.
“Who are you?” I ask, though I know. I feel the answer wiggling inside me like a parasite.
She turns to me. “I am all of them. And I am you too.”
When she looks at me this time, I see my own long face and stick-straight hair, but only for a second, a ripple across the surface.
“If you prefer, I can be fins and tentacles, hair and fish, the sleek shock of an eel.”
“You’re the creature in the well,” I respond, the memory emerging.
“I am the well,” she says to me, anger in her tone. “And the water. I am the thing that lives within.”
I quiver at her ire. “You’re the Fathom.”
“I am a multitude,” she answers. “An expression of something too vast for you to comprehend.”
The ocean spreading to infinity before us suddenly takes on new meaning. “How is this possible? Where are we?”
“You’re dreaming, Jude. And dreams are a specialty of mine. You’ll forgive me for invading yours, but we are past due for a talk.” She glances sidelong at me.
“Now?”
“You have the key,” she explains. “The spell, the chamber—it’s yours now. Of course, I’d wanted this to happen much sooner. But you lacked a certain … sensitivity, making the connection harder to establish, and were too young to be of use to me, so I waited. But before you could come of age…”
“The fire,” I supply. Dying.
“Yes,” she confirms. “And after you were impossible to reach. Though I have tried of late, with what meager messengers I could muster, after the other one began to fail me.”
“The cat in the street that night. That was you.” The rat. The spider. The moth and dove. So many small ways she’s been reaching out, showing herself to me from the beginning.