Fate of the Gods by Matthew J. Kirby

“The Forest is an archetype?” Natalya asked. “How does that work?”

  Archetypes aren’t just people. They can be places and objects, too. The Forest appears in numerous myths.

  The air just outside the tunnel felt heavy and smelled of something Owen couldn’t quite identify, a scent that was green and rank. Something about it tensed his body and tingled his neck, but he couldn’t recognize it, and didn’t know why it unsettled him. Regardless, their situation hadn’t changed. “So what you’re saying is, we do have to go through the Forest.”

  “Unless we just stand here,” Natalya said. “Or we leave the simulation.”

  Owen nodded and sighed. “Right.”

  I’ll be right here, Monroe said. I can pull you out if things go south. But remember why we’re doing this. The collective unconscious DNA that you all carry is connected to the Trident.

  “Understood.” Owen took a step forward, crossing the boundary. The soft, rich soil gave way a half an inch beneath his foot, and he noticed mushrooms growing all around. He took another step, and another. When he and Natalya stood some yards away from the tunnel, they turned to look back at it.

  From this side, the opening through which they’d entered the Forest wasn’t a tunnel, but a stone portal. Two rough and massive stone slabs had been set upright on their edges, parallel with each other, and a third slab had been laid on top of them, forming a doorway with nothing but forest on the other side. The gray rock from which the slabs were made bore weather scars and blooms of lichen. The lonely monument stood there among the trees of the Forest, silent and imposing, and Owen couldn’t tell whether it or the woods had been there first.

  “No going back that way,” Natalya said. “The tunnel is gone.”

  “This memory isn’t stable,” Owen said. “I don’t like this.”

  “Monroe said it’s fine. Let’s just keep going for a little while and see what happens.”

  Owen looked around them. The Forest in each direction appeared endless. “Which way?”

  “I don’t think it matters.” Natalya looked to her left and her right, and then gestured to her right. “Let’s keep going that way, I guess.”

  Owen resumed walking in that direction, and when he reached the first spot of sunlight and grass, he paused to look up. A seam of empty sky looked back at him, and from the perspective of the Forest, the break in the canopy was a wound full of blue blood. He and Natalya left that light behind and ventured deeper, trying to walk in as straight a line as they could, winding their way without a path through the trees. Their journey seemed to drive the distortion’s edge before them, as if they traveled in a pocket of reality they created as they went.

  Owen heard birds singing and knocking at the trees. He heard insects thrumming and chittering. He smelled leaves, and flowers, and dirt, and occasionally, that disturbing and rank odor, as on they walked.

  It was impossible to say how far they traveled, and Owen had only a vague sense of the passage of time, but he eventually reached a point in the Forest that stopped him against his will. He looked down at his feet, and then his mind became aware of the terror his body already felt.

  “We’re not alone,” he whispered, trembling.

  Natalya froze and peered off into the trees. “We’re not?”

  “No.” His eyes widened and his heart thumped. “Do you feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “There’s something in the Forest with us.” He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it as surely as he felt the soil beneath his feet.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” But Owen knew that whatever it was, he had been smelling it all along. “Let’s keep moving. Quietly.”

  So they resumed their journey, taking care with their steps to avoid twigs and roots, neither of them speaking. Tree after tree they rounded and passed. Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps. And then Owen glimpsed something up ahead. A difference in the unending pattern of the Forest. He couldn’t see what it was, but it was large, and it lay on the ground.

  He stopped and whispered to Natalya, “Should we go around?”

  “No. Let’s see what it is.”

  He nodded, and they crept closer, using the trees to hide behind, until they were near enough to see it wasn’t a living thing, or even a moving thing. Owen stepped out into the open and approached it, still confused. It seemed to be made of some kind of translucent material, all folded and twisted, about six feet wide. But then Owen saw how long it was, stretching off in either direction through the trees.

  “What is that?” Natalya asked.

  “I don’t kn—”

  But then Owen noticed a subtle repeating pattern in the material. And he realized how he knew that foul odor. It was a smell from his third-grade teacher’s classroom. She had a terrarium, and on the first day of school that year she had introduced the class to its occupant. Until then, Owen hadn’t thought that snakes would smell, and most of the time they didn’t. But sometimes they did, and so did the terrarium.

  Natalya leaned closer. “Wait, is that skin?”

  “Yeah,” Owen said. “It’s a shed skin.”

  Natalya turned to look at him. “From a snake?”

  “Looks that way.” Owen took in the size of it again, recalculating. “It’s huge. Not just anaconda huge. It’s huge huge.” Owen wondered where the previous owner of the skin might have gone. “I want to see just how long it is. Should we find the head? Or the tail?”

  “I guess.”

  Owen decided to turn to the left this time, and they followed the snakeskin as it curled and wound away into the Forest. They walked a few yards, and then a few more, expecting it to stop, but the skin kept going, and going, until they’d walked several hundred feet without reaching the end of it. The skin behind them seemed to vanish with the trees in the shadows, and Owen wondered if this was another distortion in the simulation that Monroe claimed was stable. An endless loop of snake.

  “This has to be another archetype, right?” Natalya said.

  Owen nodded. This was the presence he had sensed. “Let’s try to get out of this Forest before it finds us.”

  But they still didn’t know exactly how to get out, other than to just keep walking. So that’s what they did, but much more cautiously now. Owen jumped at every rustle along the ground and every snap above him in the branches, and over time, his unrelenting dread burned off the edges of his senses so that he started hearing and seeing things that weren’t there. Figures darted just out of view. Voices whispered unintelligible speech. The Forest had swallowed him.

  How are you two doing? Monroe asked. I’m showing spikes in your adrenaline and cortisol levels. Both of you. Increased blood pressure and heart rate, too.

  “Snakes will do that,” Natalya said.

  A snake?

  “I think you would probably say the Snake,” Owen said.

  You found the Serpent.

  “Just its skin,” Owen said. “The Serpent is still out here.”

  “Maybe it’s a good archetype,” Natalya said. “Like the snakes on that medical staff.”

  The caduceus? Monroe said. I doubt that. The snake is almost always a symbol of fear and death. Exceptions to that usually mean we’ve tried to take control of that fear by inverting the meaning of the symbol. Even worshiping it.

  “I’m sorry, are you trying to help?” Owen asked.

  Yes, I am. Just remember, this is a memory. Probably from a time when our ancestors were smaller and the snakes were bigger. But this memory isn’t literal. It’s symbolic. Symbols can’t hurt you.

  “Are you sure about that?” Owen asked.

  Yes. Just keep a firm grip on your fear and your mind.

  “What if we can’t?” Natalya’s face looked pale in the dim light. “What if—?”

  “Shh!” Owen said.

  A sound had found its way into his mind. A quiet sound, a sinuous sigh along the ground, from somewhere in the Forest nearby. Owen held still and waited, listening, w
atching the trees.

  Nothing made a noise.

  Nothing stirred.

  And then he saw the Serpent.

  Its head emerged first from the woodland depths, the size of a leather sofa. Black and crimson scales gleamed around its mouth and nostrils, and framed its copper eyes, which seemed to shimmer. Its slender tongue whipped the air as it slithered directly toward them, bringing more and more of its endless body out of the shadows. The sight of it immobilized Owen, as if he were a panicked rodent.

  “Run,” he whispered, as much to himself as to Natalya.

  David sat deep in his chair, alone in the common room, facing the windows. He stared out into the trees, and thought about the Viking simulation. The fact that Östen owned a thrall hadn’t stopped Grace from synchronizing with the memory, but the process was apparently different for her. So she had stepped in and taken over, rescuing him like she always did. But this time, it also kind of felt as though she’d left him behind, so David had left her in the Animus and come here to be by himself.

  He wanted to call his dad. But he’d be at work right now, and as a welder, he couldn’t exactly drop everything and answer his phone whenever his son called. Even if David could talk to his dad, he wasn’t sure what he’d say or ask.

  David had to deal with this on his own.

  Back in Mongolia, he and Grace had come together in a way they never had before. She’d finally treated him like he was more than just a little child. She’d trusted him. But then Isaiah had used that dagger. The fear prong of the Trident. David would never forget the vision that had invaded his mind.

  He was walking home from school and he was alone, even though Grace had told him not to do that. But Kemal and Oscar hadn’t waited for him, so what else was he supposed to do? He’d made it about halfway to his house when he saw Damion standing on a corner up ahead. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Damion. Everyone knew to stay clear of him. So David ducked into a drugstore to wait it out for a bit.

  He bought a Coke, and then he flipped through some magazines, until someone bumped into him from behind.

  “Watch it,” David said, turning around.

  A huge white man stood over him. He wore a ball cap backward, and had a blond goatee on his chin. “What’d you say to me?”

  David swallowed, but he wasn’t about to back down. “I said watch it.”

  The man stepped closer, eyes narrowed, smelling like mildew and bad cologne. “You threatening me, boy?”

  “No.” David’s heart beat hard enough to make his T-shirt quiver. “And don’t call me boy.”

  “You threatened me.” The man reached under his shirt. “Everyone in here will say you threatened me.”

  David ran, scrambling down the aisle, and then out the drugstore door, where he crashed right into Damion and dropped his Coke. The brown soda splashed all over Damion’s shoes and pants. David didn’t wait around to see what would happen next. He knew what Damion would do, so he kept running.

  He heard shouting and swearing behind him, and he knew Damion was chasing him. But when he looked back, it was both of them. The white guy was chasing him, too, and both men had guns. If they caught him, they would kill him.

  David had to get home. If he made it home, he’d be safe.

  So he took every shortcut he knew, and ran faster than he ever had, but he couldn’t escape his attackers, who were always there. Always behind him.

  Somehow, it was dark by the time he reached his block, but when he got to his house, the lights were out. He leapt over the gate and raced up the porch steps, then frantically unlocked the door and burst inside.

  “Grace!” He closed and bolted the door behind him. “Dad!”

  No answer.

  “Mom?”

  Through the blurry window in the door, he could see the wavy figures of Damion and the white guy approaching his gate, the streetlight behind them turning their shadows into giants climbing David’s front steps. There wasn’t anywhere else he could go. No other place to hide.

  “Grace!” he shouted. “Dad!”

  The dark house ignored him. The two men stepped through the gate and walked toward the door.

  David was alone. He wasn’t safe. The door wouldn’t stop them. The windows wouldn’t stop them—

  That was where the vision had ended. That was David’s greatest fear. Not Damion and the white guy.

  The empty house.

  David was on his own.

  But he didn’t want to be afraid of that. He didn’t need his older sister to come in and save him. Right now, the only thing he wanted was to get back inside the Animus, but he still had to figure out a way to synchronize with his ancestor. How was Grace able to do it? Why wasn’t she as angry as he was? She’d probably say that she was just as angry as him. And yet she was in the Animus right now and he wasn’t, because it was different for her, apparently.

  Could it be different for him? It was all a mind game anyway. Did he need to agree with his ancestor on everything? He’d always assumed so. But maybe not. Maybe that assumption was actually the thing blocking him. Maybe it wasn’t the anger, after all, but the belief that his anger had to be a barrier.

  There was only one way to know.

  He rose from his chair and left the common room, then returned to the Animus room, where he found Grace still harnessed inside the ring. He’d never really watched someone using the Animus from the outside. His sister looked a little goofy, walking in place with the helmet on her head. Victoria sat at the computer terminal nearby wearing a headset with a delicate microphone, monitoring multiple screens that displayed information on the simulation and Grace’s biodata.

  “How is she doing?” David asked.

  Victoria glanced at him, and then went back to watching Grace. “She’s good. Good physiological response. Strong synchronization.”

  David nodded. Then he pulled up a chair next to Victoria and sat down.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” David said. “But I want to try again.”

  “You want to go back into the Animus?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him and cocked her head. “To be candid, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We can’t afford to waste time—”

  “I can do it,” David said.

  “But why bother? Grace is in, and she’s locked. We don’t need anyone else.”

  “Maybe she needs a break. She’ll need one eventually, right?”

  Victoria gestured up at the screens. “She seems to be doing well.”

  “Could you ask her?”

  Victoria leaned away from David, her elbow on the armrest of her rolling chair, and didn’t answer for several moments. “I suppose,” she finally said. Then she touched a button on the side of her headset. “Grace, how are you doing?”

  Pause.

  “Good to hear,” Victoria said. “Do you need a break?”

  Pause.

  “Okay, then, let’s keep you—”

  “Can I talk to her?” David asked.

  He received a sigh of apparent irritation, and then Victoria spoke into the microphone. “Grace, I have David here with me. He’d like to speak with you and … yes. Hang on a moment.” She pulled the headset off and held it toward David, her eyebrows raised.

  After he’d taken the headset and put it on, he adjusted the microphone and said, “Grace?”

  Hey, she said. You feeling better?

  “Yeah,” he said. “But this is weird. You’re right here, looking like an idiot with that helmet on, but you’re also there. In Viking land.”

  Sweden, actually. Or Svealand. Östen would clarify.

  “Right. Speaking of that guy, I think I want to try again. So if you ever need a break or anything—”

  You want to try the simulation again?

  “Yeah.”

  You don’t have to. I got this.

  “I know you do. But you don’t need to do that for me. I want to do this.”

  You su
re?

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m good.”

  His sister went quiet.

  “Grace?”

  Put Victoria back on.

  “Sure.”

  David handed the headset over, and then waited as Victoria put it back in place, tugging the microphone toward her lips.

  “Grace, it’s me,” she said. “Yes, I—what’s that?”

  Pause.

  “I see.” Victoria looked over at David, and he caught a hint of a smile on her face. “You need a break, do you? Very well. Stand by.”

  David sat down and waited while Victoria took Grace through the extraction procedures and pulled her out of the simulation. After the helmet came off, Grace blinked and shook her head, her hair a little wild, as Victoria undid some of the clamps and straps.

  “Could you give us a hand?” Grace asked.

  “Oh, sure.” David jumped up and went over to help his sister out of the harness and the ring. Then it was his turn to climb in, and Grace worked with Victoria to secure him in the Animus framework.

  “I need to switch over to your profile and biodata,” Victoria said. “It’ll just be a moment.”

  David watched Grace take the chair he’d been using. She sat down and wiped some sweat from her forehead with the heel of her palm. Then she pulled out her ponytail, and with the elastic held between her teeth, she ran her fingers through her hair, pulled it smooth and tight toward the back of her head, and then stretched the elastic back around it.

  “So what’s going on in Sweden?” David asked her.

  “Östen is at Uppsala, where an army is gathering. They’re expecting a battle.”

  David nodded. “Okay.”

  “What if you desynchronize?” she asked. “You want to go through that again?”

  He was trying not to think about that. “I won’t.”

  Grace rose from the chair and walked over to him. “Just remember, you don’t have to justify him. You don’t have to agree with him or make excuses for him. You don’t have to explain him or apologize for him. You don’t even need to accept what he did. All you need to do is accept that he did it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

  She nodded and backed away, and a moment later, Victoria stood up and said they were ready. She brought the helmet down and placed it over David’s head, and then she spoke in his ear. David felt impatient, already looking past the process of entering the simulation, to the simulation itself. He just wanted to be inside the memory.