‘Humanity? But you’re – your people – were the ones wiping out humanity, wiping out us!’ I scoff angrily.
‘Us?’
Joshe frowns in complete bewilderment.
‘Wait, wait; of course,’ he says abruptly, his eyes widening with sudden understanding, ‘you – your people – think you’re human, don’t you?’
What else could I do but also frown in complete bewilderment?
‘Of course we’re human, Joshe; you’re the aliens!’
Joshe’s eyes widen all the more; and then he chuckles.
‘I suppose…yes, yes, we are, aren’t we?’
He laughs again.
‘Why the laugh?’ I snap. ‘We’re human; you can’t just take on the term, like your people have!’
‘Well, if we both accept that we’d both like to think of ourselves as being, well, let’s say, “man”, we get our rhesus blood because we were descended from the apes – whereas we call you Cornovii, meaning “people of the horn”, because, of course, you evolved in your own way.’
I shrug, a touch disappointed even though I can see why Joshe’s people might have referred to us in this way; although only the men have what we would really call horns, of course.
‘Evolved?’ I say, confused by his use of the word regarding my people.
‘From the deer?’ Joshe says quite nonchalantly. ‘Your people evolved from the deer; or rather, the roebuck, to be quite specific.’
*
Chapter 34
The roebuck?
This is the secret she hides?
She is the mother of my people, if we stretch far enough back into time.
Our earliest ancestor; yes, that’s what Joshe is implying, isn’t it?
This is what Bjorn wanted me to discover for myself; for if I hadn’t heard it from someone such as Joshe, if I’d have heard it only from Bjorn, would I have believed it?
Probably not.
And if we evolved from such an innocent looking little creature, then why can’t we evolve further and develop wings?
I look down fondly upon Bjeliq who, cradled in the crook of my left arm, still sleeps there as if it is the most comfortable bed in the world.
I feel her tiny hand in mine, her minute fingers unconsciously clutching around my fingers: the wings on her wrist fluttering lightly.
She opens her eyes
She gives me a tired smile.
Then she turns to look through the crumpled teeth of our giant host.
At the mouth of the cave, a timid roebuck nervously peers inside, her head held nervously, subserviently low.
Then, as if seeking shelter, and despite our presence, she demurely enters.
*
Suddenly, Bjeliq no longer lies in my cradling arm.
She’s gone.
And I’m lost; lost in a darkly tangled thicket.
*
Chapter 35
The ominous rumbling of the planet now completely dominating the night sky is even louder here than in our own world.
All around me, the dark trees of the otherworld forest are being torn from the earth with strained, pained wails, their roots struggling to hold onto the soil before giving up the struggle with a violent snap, a twisted coiling of released stems.
Even so, amongst all this terrible noise of the forest being torn apart, I hear a light crunching of twigs just to my side.
The roebuck is still with me.
She’s in almost the precisely same position, the precisely same stance – her head still held demurely low – as she had been when she’d entered our cave.
And yet her eyes hold mine.
They’re like the eyes of the hound, at least in the way they seem to recognise that I need help.
She turns a little, then looks back, waiting.
She – or maybe ‘she’ is a he, as a pair of feather white horns protrude from the top of the head like immature, underdeveloped wings – wants me to follow him, deeper into the chaotic thicket.
I glance nervously about me, hoping my hound has followed me here into this otherworld, to give me guidance as he had done before.
He’s nowhere to be seen.
The last time I followed the roebuck, of course, it was all a ploy to lead me astray; along with the barking like a hound to scare me off, the feigned lapwing-like injury to fool me into believing I would easily catch up with him.
And this, once again, could be another trick; a means to take me away from whatever it is he really wishes to protect.
Even so, I think…I think…I should follow the roebuck.
*
The thicket is denser still here.
I have to wrench straggling branches aside, cutting my hands and arms badly.
The roebuck seems to know an easier way, as if he carved out a tunnel beneath all this interwoven undergrowth long ago.
Similarly, he and his mate have at some point created a clearer area amongst the snarled stalks where they’ve built their home, a nest not unlike something I would expect a large bird to construct, made as it is out of woven stems.
Nestled in the midst of all this ingenious wickerwork, a child lies contentedly asleep.
But it’s not a roebuck.
It’s an angel child.
*
Chapter 36
The minute wings decorating the baby’s wrists flutter wildly, as if she’s aware she might soon be disturbed by my presence, even though she continues to sleep on through the noise I make as I approach.
Do all angel babes sleep apparently endlessly like this? Even when, like this one, they have ended up in the otherworld, having met an early end in ours?
If they do, I find it hard to understand how any of them can survive when they spend most of the time being so helpless; they’re not even capable of crying out for help if they sleep so soundly and for so long.
Is that why the child has to be hidden away here, deep amidst the thicket? Protected by the roebuck, whose duty it is to lead any potential discoverer astray?
But why has this roebuck lead me directly here to his nest – to his secret, maybe? – when the roebuck I’d come across earlier had deliberately led me even deeper into the entangled undergrowth?
Presuming, of course, that that earlier roebuck had also an angel child to protect.
But why would it need protecting?
The dead generally welcome anyone who has earned the right to come here by dying; it is only those who are still alive whose unnatural presence they resent.
Maybe, as in our world, the angel children are loathed or feared, being seen as something out of the ordinary, something thereby dangerous or at least lying beyond our understanding.
The angel child sleeps on even as I draw so close that I can breath in her delicious scents.
I reach down, pick her up; cradle her lovingly.
Don’t they say a mother can always tell her own child?
*
Chapter 37
Wait!
Does that mean Bjeliq’s dead?
But I’m not dead – as far as I’m aware – and I’m here.
Have I gone into another daze? Has that also happened to Bjeliq – she’s in a daze?
Thankfully before I drive myself into crazed anxiety trying to work out what's happened to her, I’m distracted by a rustling in the undergrowth behind me.
I’m expecting another roebuck to appear, but it’s not; it's the hound, the hound who was also in the cave with us.
The only one missing now is Joshe.
I doubt, though, that he has any knowledge of traveling into the otherworld: I doubt if he even realises it’s possible.
The hound doesn’t seem at all surprised by either my presence or the baby’s.
He timidly draws up alongside me, lowering his head.
He coughs.
And from out of his mouth there spills the phial of angel blood.
*
Even though the cacophonic ripping apart of the great forest co
ntinues, I once again hear the very lightest of rustling amongst the undergrowth as yet another hound slinks in amongst us.
She looks different to the hound who has accompanied me; she’s far more graceful – perhaps even perfectly formed.
With a fluttering of wings, a bird is the next creature to alight by the nest. It’s a lapwing, though not one making any attempt at feigning injury.
The roebuck draws closer to these two new arrivals; and with a quivering like the ripples of a pool in reverse, the three begin to swiftly merge.
In their place there stands a woman – a woman swan-like in her pure, glisteningly delicate beauty.
*
Chapter 38
In her slender hand, somehow, the woman holds the phial of blood.
She turns to me; and smiles.
It is the smile of the sun upon a field of ripe corn.
Her face is the moon, reflected on the clearest and yet deepest of pools.
Her eyes sparkle like stars, her hair shines as if it were a cascading Milky Way.
She looks to my hound.
She speaks to my hound.
‘I think your task in your world is complete; and I will reward the hound for giving you shelter by allowing his soul to join you as your companion.’
The hound ripples like moving waters, as the three creatures had.
In an instant, a man stands in his place.
It’s Bjorn.
*
Grinning joyously, Bjorn steps towards me, his arms spread in readiness to embrace me.
I step back, frowning, confused over how I feel about this.
But as he wraps his arms warmly around my waist, I find my own arms curling about him, enjoying his kiss; even though it is strangely cold yet tingling.
He isn’t the coward, the betrayer of our people I’d taken him to be, of course.
And our child is beautiful – remarkably so!
‘I’m so glad you’re safe,’ he breathes happily as we finally part.
He glances down at the child.
‘And our daughter is wondrously beautiful!’
As he speaks, the hound who has been my companion for so long appears behind him, taking up the spot Bjorn has just vacated. This hound, however, is a little more transparent than it had appeared a moment before; it is the spirt of the hound, then.
‘And you?’ I say, trying to quickly work out what all I’ve just seen must mean. ‘You were still alive, even after I…I…’
I can’t say it; I can’t say that I hacked off his head, even though he now stands before me once more.
‘You were the hound?’ I ask instead.
He nods. He fleetingly looks back with a thankful grin towards the spirit of the dog, who draws close to his heels.
‘He offered me shelter, sharing his body, so my soul could continuing traveling in our – in the earthly world. It meant I was still a hound in this world too, of course,’ he adds with an amused chuckle, his tone immediately becoming more serious as he also says; ‘but now it’s time to abandon our old world, our old forms, Heliq.’
Around us, the dark forest continues to be tortuously pulled apart by the effects of the looming planet. But my focus is upon Bjorn’s back as he turns slightly to fondly massage the hound’s head.
He has wings; huge wings of the most gloriously white feathers.
*
Chapter 39
I glance nervously down at Bjeliq, remembering now how the dead angel child I’d seen earlier in this world had abruptly grown, had sprouted her own vast, angelic wings.
And yet she sleeps on, still a helpless babe.
Bjorn notes my anxiety.
‘She – Bjeliq – still lives,’ he says with a warm smile, adding as he detects my puzzlement that he should know her name, ‘I was there as the hound as you nursed her, remember?’
‘That’s why she sleeps; because she traveling in this world?’
He shakes his head.
‘She sleeps because she’s still getting used to the fact that she exists in both the earthly and this world. Something denied me when my parents – although well meaning – hacked off my wings.’
He takes my hands, looks deeply into my eyes, perhaps his way of showing he’s serious when he says, ‘Just as you can now move in both worlds; just as the original angelic creatures left here on an earlier visit by Nibiru can.’
He turns to face the goddess.
Does he mean her?
Or does he mean the roebuck, the lapwing and the so called Hellhound that she took her form from?
‘Even I no longer recall who came first,’ the goddess says, as if she has either recognised the cause of my bewilderment of even possibly read my thoughts.
‘I see you hold the angelic blood,’ I say, indicating the small phial she holds in her hand with a slight nod of my head. ‘May I ask why, if you’re surrounded by all these angelic creatures?’
‘Because you still have a task to complete within your old, earthly existence, of course.’
*
Chapter 40
When I find myself back in the cave, I’m not coming out of a daze, as I had been expecting; I’m talking to Joshe, who’s saddened that the hound has surprisingly yet peacefully died in his sleep.
‘Perhaps it’s better for him this way,’ Josh says, glancing out through the giant’s mouth, towards a world being painfully ripped apart. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in burying him?’
‘He’s fine; he’s in the otherworld now, believe me,’ I can say with complete confidence to Joshe.
Joshe smiles wryly, half wanting to believe me, half sceptical; he has no idea, I take it, that I’ve been journeying in that very same otherworld where I saw the hound.
But why would he suspect that I had?
I was here, I realise, when the hound had curiously sniffed around Joshe’s backpack; when he had lazily lain down, as if just ready to take a long sleep.
I was here when the roebuck had lain down by the side of Bjeliq, who I had set down in her bed, who still peacefully sleeps.
The only clue I have that I haven’t imagined my travels is that I hold the phial of blood in my hand.
*
I take Bjeliq up in my arms once more.
‘Joshe,’ I say firmly, realising he’s going to wonder if I’ve lost my mind, ‘we need to step outside; I need to talk to the Stag-Headed God.’
Briefly glancing out once more at the increasingly ravaged landscape, Joshe turns back to me with a horrified expression; but then, with a resigned shrug of his shoulders, he begins to help me scramble though the tight cleft that forms Cernnunos’s mouth.
Outside the relative safety of the great god’s throat, the full wretchedness of earth’s painfully tortuous death is made all the plainer to us, the surrounding hills ironically rolling and heaving now as if fully, energetically alive, as if made fluid as death claims not just the planet, but Cernnunos himself; for yes, there comes a time when even he must die, to make way for the new.
As we slip like quiet words from the god’s mouth, we look back at him.
Joshe gasps in disbelief; for he can see him now too, of course.
Cernnunos’s antlers branch ever upwards, like some great pulsating tree being agonisingly stretched and pulled to reach up to, to become one with, the angrily throbbing Nibiru
The forests and even the seas, teaming with frenziedly tossed life, chaotically whirl around a creaking, cracking trunk.
Under his great weight, his feet still hold in place earth that, elsewhere, is being wrenched free in great, island-sized clods that soar and swirl up into space.
‘You have the blood?’ he asks me, his voice strained and heavy.
I nod and, as the goddess had instructed me to do, I hand him the opened phial, allowing him to delicately take it by the tips of his huge fingers.
As Cernnunos lifts the phial up to his great mouth, letting the blood slip between his lips as if it were nothing but the merest drop, those
other giants who are still close by forlornly glance back; but they know this is something he must do, just as their task now is to move on and spread the message to my people that it is time to leave this existence – before they too (giants and men) begin to crumble away to nothing, to die.
The goddess had told me the great god and the giants are resigned to their fate, that they only wish to see their people saved from the torments their own suffering is unintentionally imposing upon their children.
‘Can’t…can’t the blood save you too?’ I tearfully ask the great god, shocked by the destruction being endlessly and mercilessly wracked upon his body.
He attempts a sad smile.
‘It must be shared around; there could never be enough – it is for my children alone!’
The blood is rising as sap rises, up through the massive trunk, along the limbs of spreading branches. It falls with the rain; it swirls in the streams, the rivers, the seas; it is drawn from wells, and heartily, thankfully drunk.
‘I wish only that you, my children, survive me,’ the great god says, his branches losing their leaves, even snapping, in a swirl of increasingly violent winds, ‘and tell good things of me.’
His voice, like his immense torso, is now cracking, breaking up. Slivers fall from him in great lumps that first plummet then unnaturally rise, joining the rest of the vast chunks of landscape now hurtling up into space.
He sags, as life rapidly drains away, his legs shaking, crumpling beneath him. He’s staggering, unable to proudly stand.
‘You must go now,’ he says, managing what could be a last smile with his great mouth.