We might have. If the sky had not started shifting overhead.
It darkened, though there wasn’t a cloud in sight, before solidifying into a sheet of hard rock. Sky door.
It was how I’d brought Suvi here.
And now someone, someone potentially as powerful as I was, was doing the same thing.
“Get behind me!” I did not know why I even bothered saying it. I was already reaching for Suvi, grasping her by the arm and thrusting her behind my back. My wings slammed open as I gripped her wrist and walked her backwards, staring upwards the entire time.
Mother’s Claws spilled from the temple, filling the courtyard, aiming weapons upward. But they did not seem overly afraid, just cautious.
“It is likely Aeshyr.”
A voice from beside me made me snap my jaws and hiss, but it was merely Jolakaia who’d followed the Mother’s Claws out here. My breath dragged in and out. Darkness clouded the edges of my vision, and my bones felt suddenly too large for my scales. Suvi was struggling at my back, trying to break from my hold, but I did not let her go.
“The other stone sky god I told you about,” Jolakaia said slowly. “Remember, Skallagrim? He comes here to trade, that is all. He’s never shown any violent inclinations towards anyone here. You need to get a hold of yourself!”
I shook my snout once, twice, like I was trying to dislodge an insect from my ear. I remembered her telling me about him. I even remembered wanting to speak with him, to ask him questions. But being faced with him here, now, as he cracked open the sky and descended into the courtyard while Suvi was right there at my back was another matter entirely.
Suvi was no longer fighting my hold. She’d noticed what was happening overhead, and when she saw the other stone sky god, the one called Aeshyr, she crowded closer to me instead of fighting to pull away. That change in her – from fighting me to huddling against my spine – made ferocious heat expand in my chest. She did not like to be captured by me, cornered by me. But when faced with a new danger, something frightening, something male, I was the one she hid behind willingly. I was the one she trusted. Me.
She knew that when it counted I’d protect her. And by the skies, as the other winged male touched down, I vowed I’d do it.
My starmap buzzed, my power primed to lash out and drive him back the moment I needed to – the moment I sensed the merest whiff of a threat from him.
“Skallagrim,” Jolakaia murmured low but sharp, a warning. A warning not to fight, not to rage, not to destroy half the people in this courtyard and leave the other half limping and limbless. I ignored her, because above the heads of the Mother’s Claws between us, Aeshyr’s eyes met mine.
My first thought was those are a dead male’s eyes. Hollowed out and lifeless. His face seemed hollow, too. Pale skin stretched too-tight over hard bone. In places, it almost appeared as if bone jutted right out of his body. There were shiny, black, near-metallic-looking blades embedded in his skin along the sharp line of his cheekbones. His face was closer to Suvi’s in structure than mine – no snout. But Suvi’s had life and colour and movement and his did not.
His hair was shorn very short, shorter than Jolakaia and the other servants of the temple. What little ghostly buzz of hair was left told me the colour was pure white. His brows had hair, like Suvi’s, but were almost invisible. With thin lips and a nose that did nothing special to draw attention, all there was to look at on his emotionless face was the black slashes along his cheekbones and the haunting emptiness of those dark eyes.
He did not look angry and made no show of violence, but somehow his flat stare across the courtyard was more disconcerting than if he’d come through the sky door roaring and raging. I became aware of how tightly coiled every muscle in my body was, my breath rushing in and out as he appeared not to breathe at all.
And then he started to walk. It took me a moment longer than it should have to even realize that he’d begun to move. The first thing I noticed was the way the Mother’s Claws had parted for him, and then the way he seemed to be larger, closer than before. I jerked and snorted when I finally clued in that he was striding – rather, more like gliding – on long, lean legs towards me.
Now that the Mother’s Claws had shifted, I could see the rest of him. Plain dark trousers, heavy-looking black boots (that somehow made not even the slightest whisper of sound on the stone) and a tattered-looking dark vest made up his form of dress. His starmap glowed moon-white on skin that was nearly as pale. The black, shiny protrusions were not just there on his cheekbones. Hard plates of it were visible beneath his vest at his shoulders, and along the lengths of his arms – one long spear of black from shoulder to elbow, then another from elbow to wrist. Even his knuckles had hard points of black poking out of white joints.
His wings were large, but starkly skeletal. A frame of black bone supporting the stretch of very thin, translucent flesh. It was only the spread of his glowing starmap across his wings that made the skin between bones visible at all, only the pulsing light that showed that these were real wings, living wings, not simply the wasted branches of bone.
Can a stone sky god die and yet keep walking?
He came to a stop before me. Those lifeless eyes gave me the impression that he was searching my face even though his gaze did not move at all. I kept my wings extended, shielding Suvi from view as she remained still at my back, like a warm, Suvi-shaped stone.
“Skallagrim,” he said. His voice was like wind scraping over desolate plains. “I see you’ve found her.”
“Found...”
And suddenly I’m not with Aeshyr but with another white-haired male. We’re standing together in the river, and I know he loves me but he’s worried for me, his familiar face grim.
“You know what will happen,” he says, and it feels like an omen. “You know what will happen if you do not find her.”
The collision of the memory with the present shook me, and I grunted with the force it took to remain here, remain standing, remain in Suvi’s service. Aeshyr was somehow already gone, moving past me into the temple, and in a delayed, drunken movement, I turned to face him so that Suvi remained hidden. How a male who looked like barely more than a strung-together set of bones in boots could move that quickly defied all reason.
“He has come to trade. Nothing more,” Jolakaia said, much as she had before.
But Jolakaia was wrong. This time, he would not merely trade and disappear.
This time he’d have questions to answer.
He knew me on sight. He knew my name.
I see you’ve found her.
Who else could he mean but my little star? He knew about Suvi without even seeing her at my back. How? In the blasted expanse of the stone skies, how?
I would speak with him. He had at least some answers for me, I was certain. Part of me wanted to chase him down right now, pin him to the stone, take that strange dead-eyed face between my claws and order him to speak.
But my first priority was Suvi. Seeing her safe mattered more than anything else. As Aeshyr disappeared into an unknown part of the temple, I took Suvi back to her room.
And then, despite her confused protestations and the unease unfurling in my guts at the thought of even momentary separation, I left her there.
