by Xan van Rooyen
in Issue 131, December 2022
The witch’s boots were ruined.
Rättäkitti squelched through the forest, blood welling from the undergrowth to soak her toes and scab her shins. The air tasted of copper and rust, a sweet putrescence lingering at the back of her tongue as she passed beneath the drooping branches of wilting birch and sagging spruce. Bark peeled from the trunks like the adder’s discarded scales. It crumbled between Rättäkitti’s fingers, desiccated snow littering the soup now lapping at her knees before being consumed by the rising red.
A slop and gurgle heralded the arrival of a pine log bearing Kihovauhkonen. He straddled the beam, bare feet cutting swaths through the sludged currents.
“And so it has come to pass, my love.” He caught the twisted body of a blackbird as it plummeted. Its wings were broken, feathers scorched and curled with plumes of smoke. Its eyes had turned to ash, beak open in a final gasp.
“All as you said it would be?” Rättäkitti watched the oracle tuck the dead bird into the pocket of his waistcoat, head and protruding pinions the grotesque petals of a corpse corsage.
“No tail-less horses running amok just yet.” His log bumped up against an iron obstacle. “But the rest, yes.” With a sigh, he alighted and offered Rättäkitti his hand, hauling her up onto iron.
From east to west, the forest had been flattened beneath the crush of an immense belt.
“Was this Ilmarinen’s doing?” Rättäkitti clambered up a stud.
“Who can say for sure. I never saw my brother at his forge, only the result upon which we stand.” Kihovauhkonen stumbled as the belt beneath their feet moved, a slow cinch of rock and sediment, permafrost cracking with the pressure as a notch was tightened by an invisible hand. A low groaning, the land aching, its pained sigh a gust of wind that tore through the flaking trees.
A drift of feathers tumbled from the tarnished sky and Rättäkitti canted her head.
Crows and owls, geese and sparrows, cranes and harriers, from the tiny warbler to the glorious swan—all were caught in a shimmering net, the air itself turned tangle. Necks hung broken, wings contorted, each dangling a grotesque pendant at the throat of destruction.
“Please remember, I only saw it. I did not make it so.” Kihovauhkonen touched Rättäkitti’s elbow, the gesture tentative, the warmth of his fingers sending a shiver through the witch. The day had grown cold, the sun occluded by feathers as the wind whipped a slurry from branch and bird alike.
Through the spiraling detritus, Rättäkitti forged a path along the belt, breath gathering in hoarfrost at her lashes.
Kihovauhkonen began to sing in his reed-marsh voice, weaving a melody to string the night with constellations, to tear the darkness into ribbons of green and purple. But his voice held no magic now, the sacred words ash on his tongue, the songs falling like pebbles into the spilled vein of the earth below.
The belt tightened and Kihovauhkonen caught Rättäkitti before she tumbled into the churning eddies below. She clung to the oracle, pressed her ear to his chest bound flat beneath the waistcoat, desperate for a heartbeat. She heard only the echo of blackbird song. Kihovauhkonen’s heart had always been made of stone. If she took a hammer to it, she wondered, would it split to reveal a thousand shimmering facets—or would it be dull and lifeless—petrified.
She pushed the oracle away, but he caught her hand. “Do you hear it?”
A lone wolf howling as more wings blanketed the sky, turning day to night. The sloughing of bark and branches, the crunch of the earth’s bones succumbing to the tightening girdle—and beneath it all, the slow grind of teeth.
“I never wished for the curse of prophecy. I never wanted it to be right.” The oracle said with a sincerity flickering flame-white in the depths of his granite eyes.
Rättäkitti pressed her hand to his face, his cheek smooth beneath her palm so unlike the brier-thatch beards his brothers grew. But they were gone now, sleeping as hill and mountain, slumped beneath the ocean or drowned hunchback in a lake, nodules of spine rising islands from clear water.
Only Kihovauhkonen remained to see the great maw swallow the world.
Rättäkitti closed her eyes, hand falling from his earnest face. He was not to blame, but still the world was ending and he had seen it. She had not expected his fireside tales and the secrets of his visions whispered across their shared pillow to come to be before her flesh could feed the worms.
She had gathered root and mushroom, flower and herb. She had sung every incantation, offered posies to the gods and cut runes across her wrists in the hopes of appeasing Time—but the scars she bore had done nothing to counter this demise.
Their feet lead them to the edge of the forest where trees had been reduced to stands of splinters at the shoreline. Blood welled against the sharp edges of the lake, the waters turned to glass.
Rättäkitti stepped from the iron belt onto the crystalline surface. Trapped below were tadpoles and perch, the thrusting body of a crested grebe and the fish forever beyond its reach, a tapestry of threadleaf and pondweed. Her heels clinked staccato across the surface, every step sending a web of fissures radiating through the brittle sheen.
Kihovauhkonen walked beside her, his giant’s body held human in the clenched fist of a spell fueled by determination and love.
He loved her, she knew. He had stitched it into her skin with kisses, knotted it into the cascade of her hair with his fingers, breathed it between her lips when their gasps had turned to prayers as their bodies slick-seamed and well-fitted had arched and shuddered.
It was not his fault the world was ending nor that it was happening before her tresses had grown white, her skin wrinkled by the stories Time-etched across her body.
And he was not alone in his visions of the future. She had seen pillars of flame erupt and consume, immense tongues of orange lashing at the earth. There was smoke on the breeze, a trickle of warmth seeping from the west to melt the rime from her lips.
“What did you see?” The oracle brushed ice turned dew from her brow with a tender thumb.
“This.” She opened her arms to encompass the expanse of the lake. “Us.” She took his hands and pressed his knuckles to her lips.
He smiled and pulled her down, cradling her in his lap, muscled arms wrapped around her willow frame, his chin resting on her shoulder as she softened into the press of his body. Bird bones snapped between them but she nestled closer, a moment’s contentment as the belt tightened and the lake shattered beneath them.
The great maw chewed up tree and earth, hedgehog and fox ground to dust, moose and bear caught between stalactite canines that pierced and ripped, a gullet of gulping hunger. Spittle flew from tattered lips, landing with a hiss and spark, setting fire to the absence left in the mouth’s wake.
Rättäkitti burrowed into Kihovauhkonen as he released the spell keeping him small. He grew, cradling Rättäkitti in the safety of his curled palm, human flesh turned to bedrock that fractured gnashing teeth, that withstood the gout of flame.
A final swallow and even rock tumbled into darkness.
A full belly, a disgruntled world meeting an unwilling end.
A steaming belch.
Kihovauhkonen felt cool air against the quartz of his neck. With the slow shift and seismic rumble of tectonics, he unfolded his limbs. Shards scree-sifted from his shoulders, landing with a splash as glass once more became water.
Ilmatar, Bringer of Light and Life, greeted him with the gift of breath, a sigh unfurling across the ravages, forgotten tunes whistling through the cracks and hollows of his body. Ilmatar settled in the shallows and lifted an open palm. A gull swooped low and, in the time it took Kihovauhkonen to remember how to blink, seven eggs appeared on the outstretched fingers. Six of gold and one of iron.
One by one, Ilmatar threw the eggs against Kihovauhkonen’s flanks—one burst to throw stars across the black, another yolk broiled and flickered to become the sun while the gooey whites congealed into moon. The spent shells wallowed and settled and so the land became. The rest left glossy trails down Kihovauhkonen’s arms, pooling in his palms. He washed his fingers in the deepening waters, coaxing life back into being, finally easing his mighty limbs into the wash of waves, his head resting on Ilmatar’s lap.
Ilmatar raised a fist and pounded the center of Kihovauhkonen’s chest, picking through the rubble with deft fingers, burrowing through his glittering innards until reaching the chambers of his heart cut with ruby and crystal, sheltering a withered form. Rättäkitti.
Ilmatar exhumed the witch, exhaled a sticky breath, and placed the human upon Kihovauhkonen’s knee, now a sloping hill already sprouting pine and birch. The oracle-giant closed his eyes and joined his brothers, lulled to endless sleep by the patter of Rättäkitti’s footsteps across the landscape of his body, her lilting songs bringing visions of a gentler future.
©December 2022, Xan van Rooyen
Xan van Rooyen‘s work has been seen in many publications including Hyphenpunk, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and Daily Science Fiction. They have also written several novels. They write young adult fiction and queer fiction as well as science fiction and fantasy. This is their first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.