Chapter 29: In the Place of Dead Dreams

The princess and the shadow stepped out on the balcony to show themselves, and to receive one cheer more. But the learned man heard nothing of all these festivities, for he had already been executed.

--Hans Christian Anderson, “The Shadow”

Chang’e floated along the forge. Her blue aura clashed with the red-orange fires. Since her original robes ripped, she changed into a black dress, just as lovely as the previous gown, glittering with a million points arranged to mimic the constellations. “Couldn’t help but notice you remolded the entire shape of this satellite. Thought as a neighbor, I should come over, on behalf of the other moon gods. Does anyone know how to work a bow and arrow?” she asked the companions, who rallied together. “I got my husband’s original set back from Artemis.”

“How hard can it be?” Bennu flew through the recent hole in the wall. This was clearly not rhetorical. He glanced nervously at his friends. Uncertainty, however, took a back seat to the sudden peril of a tank directed by Tecciztecatl.

The bow’s quiver was made of two stag antlers bound with vines. Bennu placed it over his thin neck and across his shoulders. The simple wooden bow he held in place with his wings. His beak nooked an arrow while a leg pulled the string. He fired!

It appeared archery was never going to be Bennu’s best subject. Then again, it served its intended function of causing mayhem. He accidentally caught the tip of one arrow on fire, which he afterwards kept doing. Shot into the gun, the vehicle imploding. Even Mr. Aitvaras failed to do so much damage. “Oh dear,” was all the phoenix mumbled.

Tecciztecatl gestured for another panzer to cross the impromptu bridge. Its hatch opened; a rabbit lobbed a painted grenade at Goldtalon’s head. The projectile was deflected by another of Bennu’s arrows, though he was actually aiming at Ostara. The explosive went high enough nobody was harmed. Bennu aimed at Ostara again.

The Easter Bunny flicked her wrist. The arrow became a lollipop, which she ate whole, stick and all. Her focus, however, stayed on Chang’e. “Oh look, a pretty floating nightlight. Who cares? You’re just one of an increasingly dwindling pawful of moon gods. That gravity ‘theory’,” Ostara made finger quotes, except she did them behind her ears like unimaginative pranksters do when posing for pictures, “basically put an end to the myth of celestial bodies being chariots driven by magical horsies. There should be even fewer gods on Earth. This time, none will stand in my way. Or sit. Or fly.” She cackled, an invariably upsetting category of sound, but made much worse coming from something so outwardly adorable.

 While Ostara argued with Chang’e, Anansi took Goldtalon’s candy barrel, which somehow survived the crash unbroken. The griffin protested, but the spider turned the container on its side, spreading a trail all the way to the Easter Bunny’s heels. “Just a little more silk,” he muttered, tugging a long line from his spinnerets.

Ostara heard and turned around. She tripped on the line, sliding ear-first into the honey pot. William Henry pulled himself from the drill wreck. His visor was up. The boisterous, laughing version of him was replaced by someone dead serious about finding nails. With them, he hammered the barrel’s lid closed. Except Chang’e, the companions helped flip it over. There was a slight jostling noise, which could just be tanks fleeing in the distance.

“Cowards!” Tecciztecatl screamed while running outside. He waved his peg-leg like a conductor’s baton. (And just as usefully.) The battalions ignored his increasingly hysterical orders. Some broke formation, distancing in any way possible from the crescent peak. The scruffy lieutenant harangued one panzer in particular, which backed right into him. The leg Ridil healed remained attached, but his other one was severed. He sat complaining in a pile of dust, working out what to say to the boss once she found him.

“Will Ostara be able to breathe?” asked Grace, not much caring if the answer was “no.”

“Rightly, she should drown,” answered Anansi, “but Ostara’s no ‘mere mortal.’ A barrel won’t hold her long. I say we get to that hangar.”

“You mean to use the goddesses’ vimana?” asked Chang’e. “Good, because I stole the keys.” Under its tarp, the ship did not resemble the scissoring boomerang Melek Panoptes had gifted. Its structure was a circular disk, easily taller than a one-story house. On the outside was a series of rings, like the kind hugging Saturn’s belly. These rings, however, were not made of ice, but magnetized iron.

Upon Chang’e unlocking the hatch door, William Henry claimed the steering wheel. His smile returned. “I’ve programmed many, multiple, plenty machines like this!” he rattled off excitedly. “I call myself a ‘ferromancer,’ because steel talks, communicates, speaks to me. Like how sculptors picture what a block of marble should be even before chipping, hewing, removing their bits. Metal wants to be bent, shaped, molded, but only in certain ways. Otherwise, it gets unhappy, sullen, weepy. That’s why rust exists.”

Grace hardly understood how metal might talk. At least birds had mouths. While much of Mooncry had fallen to pieces, when crossing to the hangar, she took stock that the treasury remained standing. She hoped the egg cache stayed safe, and there would be a chance to liberate them later.

The vimana possessed no rockets. Instead, electricity coursed between its rings. When same-poled magnets crossed, it moved forward. When opposites aligned, it slowed down. William Henry pulled a switch which set them automatically spinning. The disk hovered in place.

“I’ll have it ready, prepared, worked out in four minutes,” William Henry shouted loud enough even those taking their time getting in could hear, “not that Earth-time matters much on the moon. Frankly, honestly, truthfully, I’ve almost forgotten how long minutes last. Anyway, destination?” he gazed about.

“Home,” Bennu shook his tail. “Specifically, mine. Exile be damned: return us to Nephelokokkygia!”

Chang’e did not cry, but dotted her eyes with a handkerchief from force of habit. Unable to sit, she hovered out of the other’s ways. Anansi tried to make her laugh, but before Grace could see if he succeeded, Goldtalon tugged her outside.

He gestured for her to get on, and he lifted Grace through a Swiss window into the sky. By imprint, she shared his enhanced senses. The crescent moon, once nearly two-dimensional, visibly expanded.

 “Waxing gibbous.” Grace used Bennu’s term. “Ostara must have lost pow…” They heard something barreling their way.

It was a barrel, and as it stopped beneath them, fuzzy feet kicked through the bottom. Ostara pulled herself out of the honey, but even a goddess’s powers cannot clean off that stickiness. “One last change, augur! I might still get some use out of you. But the others must pay for the minor setback I’ve endured. Death seems appropriate, with the possibility of bringing them back so I can kill them again.”

“No,” said Grace. “I’ve got family waiting at home, and the secret so they—and everyone else—won’t ever become your slaves.” Goldtalon set down near the vimana. The last stragglers.

Ostara cooed. “Face it, sweet augur, given how time passes differently in the Astral, your earthly parents are probably long dead. If they live at all, they must be too senile to even remember having you. Or, they gave you up for lost, then moved on to have other children better behaved than you, who never question their elders.”

“No.” Grace’s head felt hotter than the forges. Goldtalon tensed beneath her, licking his beak. Even without imprinting, it was clear what he found so appetizing.

Ostara shook her sticky head. “Happens more than you’d hope. Family and friends will abandon you without an afterthought. Petty squabbles result easily in wars. That’s all Ragnarök was, no matter what the sagas say.

“In this life, you either abandon those you thought you cared for, or you’re abandoned by those you thought cared for you. I think I know how the world works better than a little girl. But if you insist on sentimentality, agree to be my exceptional friend, and I promise—no matter what—you’ll see your family again. Even if a hundred years passed down there, I can call them from their graves, or make them young again. Don’t you want to stay on my good side?” 

Grace knew who her friends were. No matter how annoying they could act, they came with her into mortal danger. Repeatedly. Even when they owed her nothing. Schrodinger was gone, but Bennu, Diana, and Fox stayed with her. Even if they were not literally with her at the moment. Ostara had to be fought, for theirs and everyone’s sakes. But Grace lacked the physical strength.

Luckily, she also had a griffin for a friend. Griffins make the best friends. Goldtalon simultaneously roared like a lion and screeched like an eagle. “Eat like jackalopes, mommy?”

Grace smiled evilly. At least, she tried to. Her thoughts were on Schrodinger. Choose what you want to do, Goldtalon.”

“Stay away!” Ostara demanded impotently. She pulled a pawful of spores from somewhere and threw them in Goldtalon’s face. His stare remained focused, unglazed. Evidently, once cured someone could not be infected by Radixomniummalorum bokor again.

“Hjckrrh! Honey-coated.” The light-up pink sash tattered to the ground. Goldtalon wanted to keep the jeweled tiara, but in the rush to the vimana, dropped it.

Without Ostara directing them, the remnants of her forces manically fled the ruined palace. Long, lean legs propelled them ever-forward. For a brief time, rabbits were visible by their natural silver glow. Eventually, that was eclipsed by the dark side of the moon. 

Once inside the vimana, Grace placed her bag by the couch where Diana and Bennu sat, Fox propped between them. The cabin felt much roomier than the demolished ship. For one, there was a pink pillow large enough for all three to lean against. A crystal bowl of chocolates sat on an armrest, but nobody bothered. Diana compulsively touched the scratches on her face. Fox tried not to throw up from her iron allergy.

Grace unsheathed Ridil, which had become second nature to her. “I can fix all that, if you want.” Pink sparks removed the red marks on Diana’s face, but her warts and saggy skin remained. If it had a mind, the healing sword must have decided her visage was not an illness.

 Afterwards, Fox pulled back her hood and stumbled into Grace. “These might help you in flying. When you and Goldtalon leave us behind, I mean.” She snapped an uncomfortably tight object around Grace’s forehead.

It took a second to realize they were Fox’s goggles. Grace was about to explain they would always stick together, even after returning to Earth, but a sudden jerking fit from Goldtalon interrupted. A full-body spasm threw him back out the vimana door. Grace followed.

As she stroked the back of his neck, Goldtalon coughed up a hairball. A living hairball. While his sharp beak had reduced Ostara to bloody bits before swallowing her down, the rabbit arrived now in one piece. And she was mad. Mad as March, though it was actually April.

Like sponges that grow when submerged in water, spit-shined Ostara expanded. In her case, till she was (by anyone’s standards except possibly Bonegrinder’s) a giant. Her buckteeth and claws grew to match her new proportions, giving her more weaponry than some tanks.

“You’re lucky I’m so weak, augur!” Ostara’s tone conveyed the idea that no one in the universe (at least the galaxy) would ever feel lucky again. “I had to expend most of my power to remodel the moon as I wished. Otherwise, I’d easily kill you and your griffin now!”

How much worse was the goddess at full strength?

“I thought you wanted me to join you.” In her adventures, Grace learnt when bad guys wanted to talk about themselves, you kept them going until they got distracted. On average, this proved stupidly easy. The colossal hairball, however, blocked every avenue to the hovering vimana. Nooks and crannies can be squeezed through if one is small enough. Grace never felt so small in her life, but with Goldtalon, they could not get past.

“I see what your goal is!” Ostara blinked. The soft spring in her enormous eyes became the sick green of swamps. “You’re right: I’m not ready to let you go!” A giant paw grabbed the outermost ring of the vimana.

Bennu stood on the threshold, an aura of black flames around him. He bent his head, ready to spring out and attack. But the hatch door close automatically. Thunderbolts of static arced into Ostara, but while hair stood on end and she picked up a burnt smell, she was unharmed. The giant heaved the house-sized disk into space. To her, the display probably felt like nothing more than tossing a frisbee. To the passengers, it felt like nothing could stop them from puking. To Grace and Goldtalon, it felt like nothing helpful would come their way again.

The vimana had many amenities, but lacked any sort of weaponry or defense. Had he regained control, William Henry might have rammed it into Ostara. Instead, he and the others were cast straight through the Place of Dead Dreams, past where Magonian shepherds were corralling a cumulonimbus.

Grace and Goldtalon were afforded little time to dwell on how utterly abandoned they were. She fit the goggles over her eyes. They could not match Ostara’s strength, size, magical power, or willingness to do harm. But whatever the size, rabbits possess little natural flying ability. At a certain point, though, griffin and rider would have nowhere further to fly, even if the gibbous finished waxing. But the moon’s transition stalled when the Easter Bunny returned.

“You may be an augur, a potential object of mirth to me once. But no more!” Ostara’s voice was a hurricane. “To think, a mere mortal trying to undo centuries-worth of a goddess’ planning. You must have been crazy to come to Mooncry, girl. Even if you’d brought every friend you ever made, could have made, or would ever make, I’d still annihilate you all!”

“I didn’t ‘try.’ I did.” Grace’s retort was no more than a whisper, but with ears like satellite dishes, Ostara easily heard.

The giant struck at the flyers, attempting to squish them as human do mosquitos. Quickly, Goldtalon zoomed, looped, twisted, turned, danced, and pirouetted out of the monster’s reach, never losing bearing on his enemy’s position.

 Grace was not done responding. “I’m crazy, a total loony. So are my friends. We went a long way. Saw a lot. Worked, cried, screamed, said hurtful things, apologized, and…and sacrificed. But I’m more than loony! I only speak for myself, but I speak to birds. I’m a healer, like my mom. And a pilot, too, like my dad. I’m also a dreamer, like my Grandmam. Who are your friends and family, Ostara? What did they make of you?”

The Easter Bunny responded with what might have been foreign swearing, possibly just growling. After the next barrage of strikes, Goldtalon was compelled to rise so high, Grace saw all the places in the Astral moon they visited. Air thinned till breathing became its own struggle. Still, Ostara pursued.

On the far end of the crescent horn, Adamson and his dog, Aiken Drum, clung to a bamboo plant taller than a redwood. Whatever Ridil healed in it, the formerly weak stalk rooted itself deep enough to keep the pioneer and his pet from following Mr. Aitvaras into the void.

The tail of the Man in the Moon’s coonskin cap flapped in the wind as he waved to the flyers one-handed. “Friendly suggestion for crossing the bodily vastness of space: don’t inhale before flying out. That’d kill your insides before anything else can. Instead, you two should empty your lungs entirely. Maybe you’ll last a bit longer! Thanks for your help settling the Garden of Nod!”

With their gargantuan nemesis never letting up, Grace and Goldtalon backed their way to the sickle-sharp peak. While slightly thicker than when tanks rolled down it, the slope remained steep. Griffin and rider forced themselves to think of it as nothing more than a ramp.

They plunged. Grace knew from Bennu and Schrodinger that the dream moon was different in many ways from the physical hunk of rock in space while overlapping in others. Now she knew, even with monsters, demons, and an evil goddess, the Astral version coddled them compared to the present vacuum.

As Adamson suggested, Grace and her griffin emptied their lungs, even as their natural instinct was to hold their breaths, as when submerged in water. Space was, in practice, the opposite. Instead of heavy pressure and buoyancy, there was none. To call the physical distance between Earth and its moon “cold” or “hot” is not especially relevant. If asked, Goldtalon would describe it as “Boiling and freezing at the same time.”

They felt weightless, but not in the recreational way of jumping on a trampoline or riding down a roller coaster. More in the sense they could effortlessly drift off and never be found. Their previous vertigo was euphoric by comparison. There was silence, too, putting the so-called Silent Forest to shame. That place only borrowed space’s quietude, as it had taken shards of crystallized stars. Magical or not, Grace and Goldtalon would only survive this void a half-minute or so. (But minutes were only measured on Earth.)

Then, she and Goldtalon were back in the Astral, with air to breathe again. Granted it was not good air. They could also hear, but none of the noises were pleasant. In the Place of Dead Dreams, fear, regret, and despair surrounded them. Unlike when the vimana partly shielded them, those anxieties were now all too visible. Everything they once tried escaping, internal or external, received its due invitation to the pity party.

But Grace and Goldtalon did not choke on dead hopes as before—they spit them out. The girl remembered something Diana mumbled. Everything that might affect them was only what they brought themselves. Ostara refused to acknowledge the darkness inside herself. The goddess trailed them to that space, and under all the horrors she evaded for over a thousand years, began to shrink.

Grace and her griffin were able to see why. So this was what Ragnarök looked like.

A serpent long enough to circle the planet grappled a crazed man with a bushy red beard which stood on end because of static. Between iron gloves, he held a hammer. Though actually smaller than William Henry’s, each hit with it against the snake made the clapping sound of thunder. Lightning bolts scorched its slimy scales.

Another man, handsome and literally glowing, wielded an elk antler to fight a giant with features obscured by a cloud of smoke. The antler melted against a sword on fire. No, wait! A sword made of fire. The handsome man’s light dimmed.

A girl, handsome like the man, rode a chariot pulled by lynxes. She wore a hood of falcon feathers. Three identical crows sat on her shoulder. Right behind, a woman covered in ice propelled along on blood-covered skis, outpacing the arms of an enormous squid.

An old man with an eyepatch rode an eight-legged horse, which had the misfortune of losing all its footings at once. The rider was engulfed by a wolf with metal spikes growing from his back. Its breath sucked in cyclones. Utlunta’s grandson was less than one hair of this dog in size.  

 A boat passed. On it were dead men still very much on the move. With files and scissors, they trimmed their finger-and-toenails, combed and groomed their hair (which never stop growing) and dressed in what Grace’s mother would call their “Sunday best.” The animated corpses armed themselves with swords and shields before jumping into the fray. Overlooking from the prow was a woman of two kinds. The right half of her face was so gorgeous you could die happy seeing it. Then she turned to reveal her left side, and you could just die.

At the center of the battleground was a dragon weighing more than a star, so dark it snuffed out all nearby light. It struggled with an equally huge bird resembling an eagle or condor, but with green plumage and violet suns bursting from his eyes. A skyscraper-sized squirrel with tusks and horns watched from a wooden raft floating in a lake of blood shaped like a footprint.

And that was not one-sixteenth the entire battle than appeared before the three lost travelers, if only in some phantom form. 

Ostara gripped either side of her face. The Easter Bunny’s appearance morphed into a woman with smooth, wheat-gold hair matching the rabbit’s fur. In her eyes, every shade of green danced chaotically. About her hung odors of a hundred different growing things only united by the common lifestyle of being born in spring, grown by summer, parents by autumn, and dead by winter before starting over. This Ostara—the original her—would appear uniquely gorgeous among mortals. But lined up among other gods, she would never stand out in any way. Neither pretty nor ugly, thin nor fat, tall nor short, other immortals likely never paid her any attention.

With that realization, Ostara screamed. Loud enough to scar the ears of even the hardiest opera singers, to shatter glass houses, to break the sound barrier. But none of the gods fighting and dying in that dark space bothered noticing.

The form of Grace’s regrets is not something anyone but her can describe (and she is not telling). It asked the same question as before, however. “How could you leave Grandmam?”

Grace gritted her teeth, saying aloud “What matters is how I’m getting back. Grandmam, dad, mom, Mrs. Tatters, Ol’ Hoary, my city, I’m coming home! We’re coming home!”

Goldtalon had been silent since fleeing the lunar surface. He stared down whatever nightmares came to assault his senses with such intensity, they decided it was best to leave him alone. The last stray regret he encountered involved dropping Ostara’s tiara. The griffin never stopped flapping his wings forward, and Grace never let go of him. With no fears or regrets blocking their way, it was easy to see what was ahead.

“Neffa-cock-idg-ya!” Goldtalon screeched.