Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
It wasn’t until the boat left the snow-packed drifts of the Frozen Void and cut through the fog toward Death’s Landing that the belligerent dead revealed themselves to Tuonen.
It took him a moment to realize he was staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Aven wasn’t feeling like herself. In addition to the fact that she was standing on a strange shoreline, enveloped by a deepening mist, when moments earlier she had been…well, not there, she felt like she’d been drugged. In fact, as she tried in vain to make sense of her new situation, she was certain that her slow thoughts, a sense of disassociation, and feeling of being completely empty inside (as if someone removed my lungs and my heart, she thought absently) were because she was drugged. Someone somewhere must have slipped something in her drink.
But had she been drinking? What had she been doing moments before this all happened? What had happened, anyway? She couldn’t remember, and the more she tried, the more her past seemed to slip away. She lived in London…didn’t she? She had a flat in Shoreditch, she ran an animal shelter with her best friend, she had trained as a classical pianist before…before…
No, she thought to herself. That’s what they want. They want you to forget where you came from. That’s what this place is, a place to erase your memory and yourself.
That thought frightened her. Until that moment, she hadn’t really been afraid, just disoriented, but now, she felt her pulse quicken, and it gave her the smallest bit of comfort.
If I have a pulse, then I have a heart, and I’m not empty after all.
She straightened up, her Reeboks slipping slightly on the pebbles, and tried to think. It was like her brain was wading through porridge.
Who am I?
Where am I?
All this time, the constant lapping of the black water on the pebbles hadn’t ceased, became nothing but white noise in the background, but now, there was a new noise: the sound of water splashing, rhythmic, getting louder, closer.
A dark shape came through the white mist until Aven had to blink at what she was seeing.
A large open ship, similar to ones Vikings would have used to cross the north seas, slid into view, its hull scraping loudly along the pebbles.
Aven took a step backward as a figure came forward to the bow of the ship.
Fear struck her like tiny lightning strikes as she felt the figure’s eyes on her, shrouded by the thick mist.
“You didn’t ring the bell,” a deep male voice said. The words fell over her spine like warm water, the first pleasurable feeling she’d had since she’d arrived.
“The bell?” she repeated.
The figure raised its arm and pointed to the spot beside her, where a large iron post was stuck in the rocks, a bell hanging off it. She hadn’t seen it before.
“Ring it,” the man said.
Aven felt herself reaching for the bell but then stopped herself. The world seemed to turn upside down for a moment, and then she narrowed her eyes at the man. “Why?”
“It is Death’s Bell,” he said. “You ring it so the ferryman can take you to the afterlife.”
“But I’m not dead,” said Aven. She was drugged, yes, and totally confused, but she wasn’t dead. How could she have even died? She would have remembered that.
The flat in Shoreditch, five floors up with no lift, that she remembered, lugging her groceries up with burning thighs.
She didn’t remember dying.
The figure shifted, as if anxious. “Even if you don’t ring the bell, it won’t change the truth.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The ferryman,” he replied.
“Do you have a name?”
There was a pause before the man jumped off the boat, landing in the knee-deep water. Here, she could finally see what he looked like. He was tall, stupidly so, and broad-shouldered. He took up so much space, it reminded her of the time she had gone to California and walked beneath the redwoods, feeling their power and strength and age, and she wondered how she could feel that now. He was spectacularly, almost inhumanely, large, but his face didn’t come with the feeling of depth and wisdom she had felt when she was humbled by those trees. He was beautiful, but he was young. Only his eyes hinted at something deeper.
“Tuonen,” he said. “I am the Son of the Death. And whether you want to believe it or not, nothing changes the fact that you’re dead.”
Son of Death, she thought. She wanted to laugh; she knew she would have under other circumstances, but somehow, the title felt right. He looked maybe a few years older than her, in his late twenties, and he had the thick, shiny black hair, high cheekbones, and haunted eyes that anyone cosplaying Death would have. But it was also in his presence, his smell, his energy, that seemed to envelop her with each passing second, that made her think of a forest in autumn.