Catherine Knutsson - Shadows Cast by Stars

“Leave him alone!” I lash out with my battered wings but hit nothing. The man has disappeared.

Is that the best you can do? he cackles when he reappears on the other side of Bran. Why don’t you give up now, before you really cause problems? I’ll let the boy go if you do .

“No,” I say, because there’s a reason this creature suddenly wants to strike a deal. He has Paul. I think fast- what do I have that he wants? I stare at the moonstone hanging at my throat, and suddenly I know. It wants the monolith to remain intact. That’s why the dzoonokwa brought us here, why the raven has helped me along. They’re trapped by the monolith, trapped in the boundary that protects the entire Island, just like Ms. Adelaide said. And the sea wolf wants to keep it that way.

But why is it that he can come in, and yet the creatures of spirit can’t leave?

Because of whatever that stink is that follows him. I see it now, curling there, looming in the darkness, taking form. It rises up, a great maw and nothing else. This is what the creatures of the spirit world fear. I can sense it, rippling out toward the dzoonokwa, coursing through the nothingness around us. They are trapped, and while they are, the sea wolf and his denizen can hunt them as they desire-and us, too. I’ve already seen the poison gas take one person already. Saul. I thought it was my fault. But perhaps it wasn’t after all.

And now, I am here-because I share the power of sisiutl, the strongest of the spirit creatures, and if I want to break the monolith, there is nothing the sea wolf can do to stop me.

I rest against the monolith, pressing my head to its cold, shining surface and listen, turning so I can see my eyes reflect back at me. Do it , my mind whispers. The searchers have already found their way through. The monolith is failing. If the creatures of spirit die altogether, what then? And what if this creature gains their power first?

Your brother , the sea wolf says.

Yes, my brother. Me, for Paul. If I do this, if I take Paul’s place, I will save him.

But I can’t. Even as a great sob rips through my throat, I know I can’t. I must stop the sea wolf and whatever it is that follows him, no matter what the cost.

And that cost, for me, is my brother.

So before I change my mind, I seize the moonstone with my mouth and press it to the monolith. At first, nothing happens, but then from far off comes a faint noise, like the sound of ice cracking under the warmth of a spring sun. It has begun.

“Bran,” I say, turning just in time to see him begin to shift back into his human form and vanish. “No!” I scream, grabbing at him. “You have to stay here!”

He slowly opens his eyes and the plumes of red reappear on his head. “I hurt,” he moans.

“I know, I know,” I say, helping him up. “We’re almost done. Just one thing left to do.”

Pain rockets through my bad shoulder as I fold my wings and help Bran stand, ignoring the sea wolf, who is poised to strike. Bran leans into me, and with the last of his strength, he presses his stone into the monolith just as the sea wolf leaps toward us.

The world shudders. The monolith screams, a sound that defies description. My ears feel like they’ve been shot with glass and I’m forced to drop the spirit stone so I can press my hands to my head. My ears-I’ve never felt such pain! Bran falls to the ground and vanishes. It doesn’t matter. We’ve done what we needed to do. Cracks appear, turning the surface of the monolith into a spider-web. I see my face fragment into a mosaic of selves, each one skewed, each one me.

No! the sea wolf howls. Do you know what you’ve done?

I ignore him. Smoke seeps out of the cracks on the monolith and I drink it in, greedily consuming its power. Its power is now mine, and I will devour it whole and turn it on this creature of nightmares beside me.

The sea wolf rushes to the other side of the monolith, lapping at the smoke, trying to claim what he can for itself, but it’s too late. With each breath I take, the cracks widen, until chips slough off. The creatures of the spirit world rush forward, catching them in their maws and swallowing them before disappearing from sight. The dust left behind I swallow myself. I don’t know what this will do to me, but I do it anyhow as my sisiutl self takes over and drives me on.

When the chips stop falling, all that’s left is a single obsidian shard. It slices my palms as I seize it and turn it over and over, watching as my eyes stare back at me.

I don’t see the sea wolf lunge at me, but I feel him. Before he can tear flesh from my body, I lift the obsidian shard high in the air, and with all the strength I have left, I rip the veil between the worlds apart.

B ran and I lie on the ground, head to head. I can’t tell if he’s alive or not, and I’m not ready to find out. I close my eyes, and in my mind, I see that it’s raining, but it’s not water that falls from the sky. I see the boundary falling in jet-black rain drops, and with it fall the creatures of the supernatural world. Eagle. Thunderbird. Wolf. Sisiutl, on wings that glitter in the sunlight. Raven.

The last drops down beside me and hops onto my chest. He cocks his head from side to side, and then pokes his beak right in my face. Bet you didn’t expect you could do that, did you?

I don’t answer.

He chuckles. This won’t be the last we see of each other . He hops off my chest and takes to wing, flying after the horde of supernatural creatures that have now descended into our world.

I reach out with my senses, testing to see if the spirit world still exists, and it does, just beyond the mist, just beyond reason, but that mist is thinner now, and maybe one day it’ll evaporate so that the spirit world and the physical world will be one again, just like they were a long, long time ago, in the time of the old stories.

After a while, I sit up. The obsidian shard is still in my hands, bound to me by a crust of my own blood. Bran wakes shortly after, and we realize, after speaking words that we can only see, that our hearing is gone. There’s always a price to pay in the world of spirit, and a sacrifice to be made. I should have known that right from the start.

The dzoonokwa have left, except for one. She stands just beyond the tree line, watching us, hidden by the shadows so she’s hard to make out. She’s shorter than the rest, closer to my height, and thinner. Her hair finer. Her hips not as wide. She raises a hand for one fleeting second, and then vanishes into the forest.

Bran and I rise from the ground, and leave too.

I t takes several days to get back. When we arrive, we skirt around the village, stopping at Ms. Adelaide’s so she can send word to my father before heading to Madda’s the long way so no one else will know we’ve returned. Before we left the clearing where the monolith no longer stands, we decided that after all we’ve been through, we deserve a little time to ourselves. Time to heal the wounds we both bear.

Healing is more than medicine. Madda always said that healing starts with the heart, and though we aren’t healed yet, we’re on our way. Some of our hearing has returned, but not all, and I don’t think it ever will. A small sacrifice, I suppose, for freeing the creatures of the spirit world. Maybe one day they’ll return to give thanks, and I’ll be able to ask for my hearing back. But maybe not. We talk about these things, Bran and I, between the moments when we stare at the fire, sleep, look at the stars when the sky is clear. We talk about what it means that the boundary is no longer there. We talk about the guilt we feel, and what will happen when we tell the Elders what we’ve done. We talk about if there had been another way, if we could have tried something else, if we were somehow mistaken about what the dzoonokwa wanted us to do. We talk about Plague, and the men it infected, and wonder, Have we just been lucky, or is there more yet to come?