We stood on a barren plateau of dark rock. Gray boulders jutted out here and there, shot through with blue veins. Above, a night sky spread, glowing with mother-of-pearl haze, as if someone had wrapped the upper layer of the atmosphere in a pearlescent veil. Beyond the haze, the night sky spread, the kind of sky that you would never forget, alive with the light of distant stars, where nebulae rioted and clashed.
I had been here five times. I never saw the light change. It was always like this: a diaphanous haze and the universe beyond, unreachable and cold. Too big. Too vast. If you looked at it too long, it filled you with despair.
In front of us a wall rose, hundreds of feet tall and sheer, made of the same rock as the plateau. A gate punctured it. It was wide open and from where we stood, we could see that it was a hundred feet deep. I once looked at a piece of chalk under a microscope during my brief time at college. I don’t know what I had expected, but I saw globules made from circles of delicate lace, except instead of thread, the lace was crafted with calcite shells shed by millions of microorganisms. The gates looked like that. Layers and layers of elaborate pale khaki lattice in dizzying patterns, some places resembling spider web, others a beehive; yet others forming delicate mandalas. Holes punctured the gates here and there, only to reveal more patterns.
“I don’t like this,” werewolf Sean said.
“It’s a place of serenity, but not happiness. You have to turn into the wolf form now. The prophets will let you in if you look like an animal. They view animals as part of nature.”
“The gates look like jaws. With teeth.”
“That’s because they are. If you try to enter as you are, they will close on you midway through.”
He studied me for a moment. “We can go back.”
“No, we can’t. The Archivarian is in there.”
“Tell me about this Holy Seramina.”
“I met her when Klaus and I were looking for my parents. Something about my power appeals to those of Eno. They feel a kinship with me and they let me enter. I talked to three of them, and Seramina was one of those three. She’s a Kelah. Her people live in large cities they call nests. Each nest is led by the royal pair and a council of advisers. Each nest also has a holy one, a spiritual leader, to whom all look for guidance. The holy ones see into the future, but they foresee only disasters, so they can save their people from misfortune. Seramina foresaw a colossal creature that would devour the nest, but she wasn’t believed. The threat was too strange. Nobody had ever encountered a creature like that. And Seramina was mating at the time, and mating interferes with the holy one's ability to see into the future. The creature arrived and devoured the nest, eating everyone within except her. She watched them all die. Now she’s here, among others in the Sanctuary.”
“That’s a lovely story,” Sean said. “We should go back.”
“You can wait here, but I have to go in.”
He shook his head. His body blurred and a massive wolflike creature trotted over to me. I put my hand on his furry back - he was so large, I didn’t have to bend down - and took the first step through the gate. It remained open.
We walked in silence, the wolf and I. Something watched us. I couldn’t see it, but I felt the weight of its gaze. I didn’t want to be here.
The gate ended. A garden spread before us, filled with wide trees, their bark black and smooth. Each tree grew apart from its fellows, its blue glowing leaves shimmering within a dense canopy. Bulbous orange fruit hung from the branches, glowing like paper lanterns. Long silky grass, a dull, gunmetal gray, filled the spaces between the trees, spreading into the distance. No birds sang. Nothing disturbed the silence except for an occasional breeze that rustled the branches. I fought an urge to hug myself. When Homer wrote about the bleak plains of Elysium where the ancient Greek heroes lived after death, he must’ve had this place in mind.
Sean bared his teeth.
“I know,” I told him.
A swirl of tiny white lights drifted from the trees, lining up to light a path in the grass. We were being summoned. I followed it, Sean moving next to me on silent wolf paws. We walked deeper into the woods, but the trees didn’t become denser. It remained the same: a tree, some fruit, and the grass, then another tree…
We came to a clearing. A stone wall blocked the way, leaning to the side slightly, its surface slicked with moss. The lights flared and vanished.
A creature stepped from the shadows behind the wall. She was eight feet tall and slender, with leathery skin the color of butter. She stood upright on two long legs. Her four arms, delicate and narrow, put you in mind of a praying mantis or a damselfly, but her eyes belonged to an owl: large disks of blood-red with round black pupils. A gossamer tunic obscured her body, made with diaphanous layers of pale glittering fabric.