Whatever voice awakened me has summoned me home.
But this isn’t the home I left when my time came to join my spirit kin. Chickens and goats have scattered to the hidden ravines and caves of our highlands. Men bearing that damned gnarled cross at their arms stomp and kick and smash all those things they deem garbage: our great-grandma’s embroidery, the garland of copper coins Yaya brought to this land after Smyrna burned, copper platters and wild boar hides hanging on our walls since before the Ottomans retreated from Epirus. They would have stomped on you too, my granddaughter, if their leader hadn’t barked his orders.
You’re old, now, my dear girl. My Maro. Older than I was when I left this earth, and you stand tall and slender like a cypress, clad in black from head to toe, like all grandmas of Epirus. You watch the mangy pack of dogs ruin your home. You watch that fair-haired man—that Herr Schreiber—settle on your divan as though he owns it, expecting to be served supper like an honored guest. Do they think you a coward when you serve them hot mountain tea and moustokouloura? Does he think you a collaborator when you don’t reach for the stacks of foxglove and hemlock drying overhead, and you serve them just tea with a drop of wild honey?
He thinks he knows you, that one. He thinks that the sigils he wears on his collar, those that identify him as a Son of Thule, give him power over the illiterate women of this land—of every land. He thinks himself of ancient bloodline. Fair of hair and black of heart, Herr Schreiber fancies himself Alexander and Ozymandias. But death brings another kind of clarity, and I see him for what he is: a cruel, deluded fool. A fool who chooses to ignore the power the crones have wielded in this land since long before the Trinity, long before the Twelve.
The sum of the loose parts that I am—ash and dust and fragments of dead things—quiver with pride, Granddaughter. I wish I could stand with you, but I cannot. I can only follow when you slip out into the night once they all fall asleep. I follow down through narrow and steep trails carved onto the mountainside by wild goats, toward the cavern where Grandpa Daedalus’s statues measure the passing eons by the drip of water that erects stalagmites.
That’s what the Son of Thule has come for. He won’t steal them. Not while you breathe. Not while we linger.
We continue downwards, over the Boidomates River, through the ruins of the Nekyomanteion, to the gate carved into the mountainside that requires the might of Heracles to open. We take the secret way in, through the forgotten chapel further down the cliff. One single icon survives within: The Virgin holding the Infant on her breast with her right hand, the bottom of her long cypress-green dress afloat in the dark waters. Perhaps the black kerchief that she wears on her head hides little serpents instead of hair, and perhaps there’s no feet but a great scaly tail beneath the surface, and perhaps in her left hand she’s wielding the storm.
Here, tonight, in the Cavern of Statues, we shall make our stand.
When my great-granddaughter returns from Alexandria after the war, what will she find in these depths? Her yaya’s charred corpse and the cavern of her ancestors ransacked? Or will she find rows upon rows of statues—statues of tin and iron and copper, with quicksilver blood? Will the great urns that now buzz and sizzle when one nears them be stomped-on shards? Will the stacks of papyri and parchments with the memoirs of Grandpa Daedalus be cinders and ashes marring the cave walls? Or, worse yet, will they be in the fangs of Thule’s hound?
Hurry now, my girl, and get ready. In the far end of the cavern, by the hidden entrance that leads to unknown depths, Grandpa Daedalus’s loom stands behind a row of guardian statues. Cogs and wires and nails and springs and crystals litter the floor around it. Your gnarled fingers fly upon the strings. But this loom has more than strings, it has pipes and wires and tiny little cones like copper lilies that await harmony and rhyme instead of bees. Had I lungs, I’d hold my breath at the sight of my girl’s cracked lips forming voiceless words. A tremor runs the length of the cavern—no, it runs the length of the mountain at the anticipation of the coming thunder.
The statues awaken. And they’re cranky.
Careful, my girl. Harness your breath over the lilies. One slurred epithet,
one hurried antonym, one miss-toned word might confuse Daedalus’s host. They, like us, are old and rusty. Yes, we tried. We oiled their joints and polished the crystals of their eyes and their hearts. We knitted new nerves from gutted radios when we could. We fed countless thermometers into their veins to replace the dripping, elusive quicksilver. But no one taught us how to read the charts. And we stumbled and failed, apprentices to long-dead masters of forgotten crafts. But the words, we remember. The prayers to Mistress Night may sound blasphemous in the presence of a younger god and his saints and prophets. We hid them within lullabies, wedding songs, and funerary laments, even paeans that carry munitions to soldiers and a message to the Infinite.
We remember. We stand.
Eyes of crystal light up all around us, reflecting the fire that burns in chests of shining metal. Star-stone, my yaya told me once, as she heard it from her own yaya. A star that fell from the heavens and shattered over these mountains long before Grandpa Daedalus’s time. Its fragments drilled bottomless holes through rock and riverbeds until some of them landed on Acheron’s shore. Daedalus tracked many of them down, the tale goes. He fashioned them into pulsating hearts inside his statues to keep them alive so they can count the days and number the months of innumerable eons. And now, with lightning in their eyes and storm in their chests, they groan and growl and flex their fists and stomp their armored feet.
Careful, Maro, I plea, and flit closer to your creased brow. I land a kiss on your forehead. You don’t notice, and I weep tears of ancient smithereens. Better this way. You’re immersed into the loom’s soul now. You look up, not at me but past me. You look through me to the great door that has never been opened since the lord of these halls left. The enemy storms the gates with explosives.
It takes three blasts to break through. Several rays of flashlight pierce the thick dust, and as it settles, it gives form to the others in the room, floating amidst the statues. There’s Mana, and Yaya, and great aunts and great-great-grandmas, forms that flicker before dissolving like dreams. But we do not flee; we hide from the hounds of Thule who crawl through the debris, and over crumbled rock, and flash their crude light over stern metal faces.
When Schreiber grins, when he dares a step forward, you breathe into the lilies.
“Oh, Lady of the Crossroads, Goddess of the Triple Ways, give heed, you who protect the world at night, and before you demons quake in fear and immortals tremble…”
And the sum of my parts dissolves and reassembles into something else. Something greater. It feels as though a maelstrom has sucked me in and now siphons me through time, counting my days and weighing my deeds. Through flashes of moonlight I see my yaya showing me the loom, and mana teaching me the secret brews that heal and kill and drive men mad, and the birth of my son, and Maro as an infant in my arms, and…The procession of images stops and leaves me yearning. Now I gaze around through crystals, and I have hands of metal and massive feet. And I’m not alone. Now almost every statue harbors a soul and a guard against the enemy at the gates.
Schreiber grins. He mumbles a mix of words he should not speak. They are not his to speak. He hasn’t earned them, and the taunt in his voice mars their legacy.
“So, it’s ‘Come and Get them,’ now?”
Well. That’s not what you said, my dear girl. You have another verse for him and breathe it into the lilies. It sends a row of soulless statues forth. We, the others with memories and souls, do not move. Not yet. And my feet, feet of metal plates curved around pistons and cogs, sheltering veins of rushing quicksilver, have rooted in the brittle soil. How can a heart of star-stone possess such yearning? It anchors me to the spot where ancient metalsmiths assembled this body so I can listen. My granddaughter recites ancient verses mixed with new ones—your own, my child? Each word flows perfectly intoned, each line articulated and crafted as finely as Daedalus’s loom. You’re so much better than I ever was: disciplined, your voice clear, steady, the cadence of those new words in flawless harmony with those that linger unspoken on metal lips around you.
The invaders aim and shoot. I don’t recall an order from Schreiber to do so, but they do. Seven of my soulless brethren march in perfect formation, even as some steps falter, even as some joints creak, even as some crystal eyes flicker and go dark. Several bullets ricochet. Somewhere, a sizzling urn shatters. Elsewhere, a statue falters and falls on the one at its right and they both collapse on the floor, an entanglement of copper and iron limbs. And over there, human arms are torn from shoulders, heads are stomped into the ground, and the cavern floor drinks its fill of enemy blood.
We didn’t sign up for this, their spirits cry as they fill the great hall, a thick mist of torn souls. And what did you sign up for, reverberates the retort from every corner of the cavern. To torture and kill those unarmed, safe in the numbers of your packs? Did you not expect a time of reckoning?
They do not hear. They do not listen. Some spirits attempt to invade the soulless statues. Was this Schreiber’s plan? But then my girl speaks again.
“Oh, nether and nocturnal and infernal, quiet and frightful One, oh, you who has your meal amid the graves, Night, Darkness, Broad Chaos, Necessity. Hard to escape are you.”
A breath of air flows inside—fresh, mountain air. The scents of cedar and pine and the murmurs of the river fill the cavern as the pipes and the bellows of the loom siphon midnight inside. It’s the breath of Mistress Night. Chilly. Eternal. Unforgiving. And it finds the howling spirits wanting, and it shatters them to crystalline shards for their audacity. And the rest? Now they plead, now they scream, now they sizzle on their way…elsewhere. I do not know where. I do not want to know.
But I want to know where their leader is. He remained hidden in the shadows between wall and crumbled gate, and watched the massacre. Had he somehow foreseen this? Our ancient oak is not the only oracle that’s survived in this new world, and others might have survived elsewhere. Even in his Thule.
Now he emerges from the shadows and marches grinning to his death. The weapons he carries are heavier and shoot harder, faster, with deadly force. He shoots the first of the soulless in the face, and his eyes glow when the ancient statue tumbles over. He steps on the fallen body, assuming his boots are worthy to soil that which he’s incapable of crafting. Determined to destroy what he cannot steal, he aims at the next.
“Moira and Erinys, Torment, Justice and Destroyer, keep not Kerberos in Chains. Unleash. Defend.”
Maro, no! Do not utter those words I dread to hear! Mana! No, please, no! That…that statue over there that now marches towards Thule’s hound, the one with the creaky knees and the drawing of Athena’s owl still visible on its breastplate? That harbors my mother’s soul. And that other, a mismatch of tin and copper and iron, assembled from an assortment of fallen metal soldiers, with Hephaestus’s insignia on its shoulder? My grandma. I want to scream but this metal body has no throat, no voice to beg. Maro, send me instead!
You speak again, and family and kin charge the invader. I don’t. I can’t. My legs don’t move. Is this damned body broken? I flex my fists, stomp my left foot, but do not move one step forward. Is a wire somewhere loose? A cog rusted? I cannot tell. You do not notice. So, I remain by the loom while the enemy nears. He shoots. They charge. He shoots again.
New verses leave your lips, your voice now solemn and deep. My little girl, when did you grow capable of such darkness? When did the kerchief fall from you head, your long gray braids now curling and coiling around your neck and shoulders? Is it even you? Or has Mistress Night come to join us?
Perhaps it’s still you. Perhaps it’s not. But when he aims his guns at you, beyond my metal kin, you speak your words sharp and unforgiving, and death comes from above. A dozen metal birds, each the size of a sparrow, plummet down. They pierce bone and muscle and that accursed armband, and send him to his knees, coughing up blood. He pulls one from his side, then holds it up into the glow of the discarded flashlights, and gawks. A smile curls his bloodstained lips. Then he pulls out the bird jutting out from his throat. His final words are a bloody gurgle. He falls face down in the dirt.
It’s over. It has to be.
One last word into the lilies, and the spirits of our kin depart upon the breath of Mistress Night to what lies ahead. Now it carries more than the scents of the mountain; it smells of fresh bread and cinnamon, and cedar logs in the stove. It smells of the crude soap for linen washed in the river. It smells of family and home.
I want to go home, too.
But I’m still rooted here, and I watch you leave your safe place behind the loom to dislodge the birds from the corpse. Clever girl. I thought those broken. None of them seemed to work when my yaya showed them to me decades ago. Some scroll somewhere detailed how an ancient smith crafted the first of their kind in Sicily. Now you pluck them from the hound’s corpse and gather them in your wicker basket, your face calm as if harvesting tomatoes from the garden. And with every one of them, I hear a chirp and a cry and the flutter of ethereal wings. The souls of these little soldiers are on their way home as well.
Why am I still here?
I want to call you but cannot. Do you even know I’m still here? Did you ever? Or…or will you leave and forget me in here, bound in this body, my purpose unfulfilled and my existence forgotten? Will…
Who is this? Who laughs in the shadows?
You do not hear the low chuckle that cascades over rock and metal. You’re preoccupied with the gathering of the birds, tiptoeing around corpses, checking on the now-still statues. But there’s another here: Schreiber’s soul that was never released. He coils around the curves of the metal bodies, slithers in and out through the hollows between chests and shoulders. A murmur assembles through the loose mist that he is, a plea and an offer of blood that traces back to kings and demigods. Or so he claims, the deluded fool. He insists on whispering sweet nothings to woo the Lady of the Three-way Crossroads with an offer that sounds too rehearsed to be sincere.
The nerve! Does he really think he–
No. It cannot be. Somewhere between one moment and the next there’s a sliver of doubt within the lady’s essence. Countless little forked tongues emerge from the starless night to taste the blood and soul of this son of Thule. Let me see, he pleads, and this moment of divine weakness is all he needs to slither within. Not with a sigh, but with a howl, he forces his way into a shining statue with Hyperion’s insignia on its chest. Neither a king, nor a god. But a Titan, then? Was this his plan, all along? There’s a shiver of triumph and a shudder of rage. Then he rises with the arrogance of someone borne to conquer. And he marches towards my girl.
You spin on your heel. The basket slips from your grip and falls. The metal birds scatter on the ground. A step backwards. Then another. You trip and fall and kick the dirt to get away from him. But where can you run that he won’t find you? That he won’t kill you?
And I’m useless like those blood-covered birds, their essence spent. I’m trapped, unable to even avert my gaze so as not to witness the slaughter. My eyes remain fixed right ahead on the crumbled remnants of the fallen gate and the shields still propped against the wall. A ray of light falls upon me when you kick at a discarded flashlight, and I catch the monstrous reflection of the useless brute that I have become. Someone’s hand had drawn an insignia on my chest as well: an anchor with a great tail coiled around it. Tethys, the Lady of the Deep.
Well.
Hyperion might not be the only Titan rising tonight.
The call to arms comes from the forked tongue and the needle-point teeth nibbling at the edge of my soul, demanding vengeance for the deception and the sacrilege. My heart of star-stone quickens, pumping quicksilver blood faster through my veins. This pulse breeds sound, the beat of myriad marching drums, and my hands follow. I have no breath, I have no voice, but I have fists to slam on shields, on my own breastplates, and one functioning foot to stomp on granite.
Crystal eyes ablaze with rage seek mine. If he had lungs, he’d howl. He charges with the finesse of a crazed ram. He punches empty statues, he stomps on urns, tramples down everything in his path.
I stand my ground. I stand alone. The drums within my metal shell breed whispers and stir memories. I see now. I see the patterns Grandpa Daedalus traced on every curved plate, every piston and cog and wire, patterns awakened by another kind of sound—another kind of words. And I know. I stomp my one good foot, metal on stone. Then metal on metal, palm on shields, the clank of tin and copper and iron, forming verses in a tongue no living soul has heard or spoken since the time of the Titans.
Not all paeans are written in human words. Mine, tonight, will be in thunder.
And my remaining soulless brethren heed the call. They stand. They turn. They close in on the intruder. But he’s faster and he’s bigger, and my command of this strange tongue is lacking. When he charges me, I will fall.
But you, Maro, will not fall. In the few meters it takes him to reach me, I form one last command: palm on shield, palm on heart.
Defend.
Defend her.
And the others know and turn towards my dear girl. One last pump of quicksilver blood and he’s upon me. He raises his fist. I raise my palm. My fingers breach his breastplates the minute his punch dislodges my head. I fall and turn, and the world turns and rolls and spins, and I see the walls and the dirt and the walls and a shining circle of guards around Maro, and I roll and fall, and there’s dirt and broken pottery and pebbles and–
I am whole.
I’m in my body again. All bony joints and wrinkles and spotted skin and an old flannel nightshirt. I curl and uncurl my toes in the warm, wet sand. I glance around and find myself standing on an endless shore. And just ahead, a black boat and the Ferryman, his palm still up and requesting the fare.
But what could I possibly give to Charon? Then my knuckles shoot pinpricks up my arm, and I realize I’m clutching something in my hand.
A star-stone. So, I did it. I ripped it from the intruder’s chest just in time. I broke him, and he will never harm another soul. At last, I can sigh. At last, I can grin. So, I do, and offer Charon his fare.
He scoffs, but accepts it, then tosses it over his shoulder onto a shimmering pile by the tiller.
As I board, I spot his three-headed mutt farther down Acheron’s shore with a catch in his fangs. A catch who screams and flails his arms as Cerberus tosses him in the air with one head to catch him with another. A pale, naked man, neither Alexander nor Ozymandias—not even a hound. Only a man whose soul was found wanting.
