Oli stared into the starlight of the woman's eyes. He looked at the deep lines of her old face and tried to read the expression there. Was it triumphant? Fearful? Sad? All those things and more, or none of them at all? She had asked him a moment before why he did not recognise her. What was there to recognise in this ancient face?

  "I've never met you before," he replied. And yet, he did not feel that was entirely true.

  “I left you languishing so long, wrapped up in that human life. You don’t see with your own eyes."

  What did she mean, ‘wrapped in that human life?’ For all his insistence that he did not know her, something about her presence felt familiar. Something about her called to him.

  “Who are you?”

  “You don’t need anyone to tell you who I am. I am your own mother.”

  “You didn’t raise me. You didn’t give birth to me or feed me. You didn’t look after me.” The statement came out as an accusation. Why should she have, this total stranger?

  “Oh, you mean like them.” She raised an arm and waved it away. “Yes, I borrowed them for a part.”

  “My parents... borrowed...” Oli repeated her words numbly.

  “You’ve had enough of that life. You know it. It doesn’t fit you, but you wear it anyway, convincing yourself that the way it chafes will one day become bearable. You were never meant to wear it for so long. Soon you'll cast it off.” She gestured at the black water behind him, groaning with the effort of moving her arm.

  Oli glanced nervously over his shoulder.

  “You want to go in, don’t you?” she said, straining to lean forwards.

  “I want to know what it is,” he replied. “Not to go in.”

  “You’ll have to go in, if you want to know,” she replied with a smile. "There's no other way."

  He thought of the steep side and that fathomless depth, where the darkness seemed to come alive and writhe endlessly over itself.

  “I’ll die, won't I?”

  “Of course.”

  She said it as a matter of fact, as though it would be like getting his feet wet or catching a chill. And then a terrible thought occurred to him. He remembered the story about the sleeper queen who devoured her own children and found immortality through her cycle of carnage. He looked at her black, bottomless eyes. He realised what else held the same morbid fascination as the lake.

  “A sacrifice,” he whispered, and she nodded gently like a tutor pleased with a child’s progress. “Are you... the sleeper queen?”

  A silence hung between them. Then she laughed. A cackle and a crackle that sent a shiver through him, like the sound of ice creaking and snapping underfoot.

  “Me?” she exclaimed. “Am I Yurusuuru? Oh, she would love to know I was mistaken for her.” The old woman tilted her head back and laughed again. “Even more, she would like to be mistaken for me.” Then she looked thoughtfully, perhaps even affectionately, at him. “You think I made you for the purpose her children serve? Perhaps I did. Her venom was deep inside me when I planted your seed. But I've been watching you recently, ever since the day you first laid eyes on me. You are brave, boy, and full of love. You are everything that I used to be, before she laid her fangs upon me. Watching you... It's reminded me of who I am. I'll take the human path to immortality, not hers.”

  "The human path to immortality? What do you mean? We are not immortal."

  "They, not we," she corrected him and leaned forward. "You have lived so long amongst them and have not understood them. They’ve been in this forest for almost as long as I have.” She reached out, trying to touch him but Oli jumped back. A look of hurt flashed briefly across her face.

  “I made you. My child.” She said the word ‘child’ as though she were experimenting with the taste of it in her mouth. “You will be my heir. It means that I am your sacrifice.”

  Oli stared at her.

  “What are you?”

  “The same as you, if you can claim your inheritance. Help me up. I must go before you. I will take my sickness with me into the place where mortals go. But for me, there will be no return."

  She held out a bony hand and waited. Oli reached forward and hesitantly took it. Her skin felt like old leather that had been left out in the rain. He felt dizzy for a moment, as though he had just run a great distance and his energy was drained. He wanted to sit down. The woman looked suddenly different. Her silver hair became a brilliant white, like the colour of starlight itself. Her skin became as smooth and clear as bleached bone and she seemed to float to her feet as though carried by the wind. I have never seen anyone or anything more beautiful than this.

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  "I just wanted a taste, that's all."

  The light that hung around her a moment before diminishing in front of him. Oli's strength returned and before his eyes she aged again. That smooth, beautiful face that had, for a moment, held all the radiance of a full moon, now decayed and fell back to the haggard visage of the old woman. Hunched and crooked, barely managing to walk, she brushed past him and staggered towards the lake.

  "Don't go in!" Oli cried out, suddenly afraid to be left alone. "I haven't got to know you at all! I don’t even know who you are! What about all the answers to my questions?"

  She stopped when the water was up to her waist and turned to face him. "I have this one warning to give you. She'll be looking for you. You'll feel so powerful that there's nothing in the world to be afraid of. But she'll be looking for you while you're still young. Be careful, child. Be more careful than I was."

  She fell back into the water and sank like a stone. The surface of the lake closed over her.

  Oli walked to the edge of the lake and stared into the black depths. He saw forms and shapes in there, different shades of darkness moving in the void. He thought of his mother and father, and of Adalina. He could almost feel his sister's hands on his shoulders, protecting and comforting. He wanted to feel that again. He wanted to eat grilled eel by the fireside and listen to Father telling stories about Grandpa’s adventures. He could learn to hunt and build a roundhouse, couldn’t he? He could pay attention at lessons and studiously ignore the path that led south. Perhaps this life is not so bad. When he looked up and turned away, though, he felt the darkness beside him. It would always be there. Always on the edge of his thoughts, pulling him away from wherever he was, tugging at his attention so that he only ever lived half a life – until he resolved it. He had to know what was in there, even if it meant his death.

  Oli turned back to the lake, intending to enter, and found that he already stood knee deep in the water. He slipped and fell.

  Memories passed before him as though they were visions of someone else’s life. They fell over one another, and at the sight of each one he thought: this is not me, this is not mine. I could have been anything at all. He saw himself getting lost in the forest and how close he had come to finding his way home. His real home. He saw the people who had stopped him, the people who loved him, who never understood that he belonged somewhere else. And then he saw the other life that came before his. The old woman. The child. He heard a name, long left unspoken. Mortana, daughter of the king of heaven. His life or hers, they were all just memories floating in the water. He felt the long years of cold; millions of years numbering more than the leaves that fell on the forest floor. He drifted in silence with his other family, her family, through an endless void toward a distant pinpoint of light. She arrived and felt the warmth of it, saw colours and wanted to know what it was to touch, to taste and smell. She heard the entreaties and warnings of the one she called Father, Hurean, as she fell towards the earth and struck a hole so deep that it crossed the barrier between life and death.

  And there she hid, exchanging forms with the creatures of the world and living in their shapes, feeling through their skin. She was a child then, and she played as one. She soon forgot her father and siblings. She got lost and when she realised what had happened, she realised too that she never wanted to return. She made friends there. She gave them gifts. As her siblings and her parents broke trust between each other and descended into bickering, Mortana stayed out of it. She did not want priests to follow her, like they did, fighting wars between each other in honour of her vanity. She felt that, though they called her the Lost Daughter, the other gods were the ones who lost themselves. The gifts she gave to her friends, she gave freely.

  But one creature in the forest always wanted more. Yurusuuru came up from beneath the earth and stalked her through the shadows. Oli saw the first memory of the first sighting of that great monster. She had not been a monster in Mortana's eyes, just another creature to learn from and to share with. When Yurusuuru wrenched her shadowy form from beneath the soil, the trees around her shook and creaked as though in pain. She towered above Mortana, a shadow that cast shadows that were deeper than the darkness at the bottom of the world. Oli looked up at the beast through his mother's eyes, through centuries that separated this memory from today, but time itself no longer mattered. Mortana, in her innocence in those early days, saw curiosity. Oli saw only bottomless envy.

  Yurusuuru begged for gifts and used them to deceive others. She weaved webs around the land and tried to catch the lost god. Mortana treated it like a game. She laughed and played, letting the malevolent beast come ever closer. She taunted it and goaded it and grew ever more complacent, leaping free of the nets and running into the forest trailing laughter behind her. Yurusuuru was her friend, wasn't she? One day, the creature landed its fangs upon her. She thought nothing of it and continued to play.

  But the venom was inside her.

  The memories changed. The young girl, once frozen in eternal youth, grew older in whatever body she inhabited. She settled on a human one and it aged like theirs. Her mind grew old. She felt terrified and trapped. Yurusuuru, the friend to whom she had gifted too much too quickly, whispered in her ear about cures that didn’t work and weaved a web of confusion in her thoughts. She lashed out in fury at anyone who came close, hurting them through her former friends and turning her gifts into poison. Her memory came and went and at times she raved through the forest in a state of delirium or rocked and sobbed beneath the boughs she once loved.

  Then one day, in a moment of clarity, she accepted her fate and laid out a plan. Oli watched as Luthold and Winilind came to the lake and met the only friend that she had not yet brought fully to ruin. He watched them make love. She placed a child inside them and that child was him and a part of her. A part of all of this. The forest. Oli saw that she loved him in that moment, even in the depths of her confusion. He remembered how he had recoiled from her touch and suddenly the water was full of tears that sparkled in the darkness like stars.

  He sank deeper, into a place with no memories or thoughts, and that regret turned into a poignant sadness at the fleeting beauty of his own life. His tears flowed into the coldness that pressed against his body. Perhaps they would float up and wash away down the rivers of the forest. Then there was no cold, and no pressure either as he went deeper still. He went so deep there was neither up nor down.

  There was nothing, until that too was gone.