Past the Mountains, Among the Clouds

Wrong. I wanted her to prove me wrong. Just one word. A no would have been enough to stop my barrage of words, but Freya never spoke. She never lied. Even after years, the imprint of the abuse she faced was still visible on her. She, like the good girl she always had been, took the verbal beating as if, once again, it was her fault.

I didn't want to be right. Every word I said felt like a lash, cutting deeper into wounds that had never truly healed. I wanted her to fight back, to deny me, to stop me from tearing her apart further.

Freya's head dipped slightly, her hair falling forward to obscure her face. She didn't flinch, didn't argue, just sat there, still and resigned. And that stillness, that silence, was louder than any scream could have been.

I clenched my fist.

I could not continue. It was like confronting your greatest of failures. Yes. A failure. A failure of my attempt to help a person in need. As things finally fell in place and the dots connected, a gloomy realisation came over me. No. It was scary. It was heart wrenching.

Unable.

Powerless.

Helpless.

I could not help her. It was out of my scope. My ability to handle the situation was dwarfed by the giants of Freya's trouble. She was going to die.

How do you even prevent a god from dying in the first place?

How could I even think I'd be able to help her? 

She must've realised the same as she told her tale to us. There was no possible way to get her out of her current predicament. That's why she didn't finish it. She was hiding it. She didn't want me to feel the resignation of my failure.

Foolish.

Narcissistic.

That's what I was. To think that you can save a goddess must've been the epitome of arrogance a mortal being could possess. I clenched my fist harder.

How useless could I be!

There was nothing I could do!

"Stop." Bierra said. Her words were cold as ever.

I broke out of my self sabotaging trance. I realised Bierra stood a lot closer than before. 

"It's nobody's fault." Freya said softly, her voice trembling with resignation. Her words were meant to soothe, but they carried the weight of someone who had long accepted blame for everything.

"But I can't-"

"I said stop!" Bierra commanded.

I didn't utter a word. I hated her. I hater her for she was right. It was useless. I was useless to begin with. I clenched my fists harder, the pain in my chest spilling over into my hands. It wasn't enough to feel the anguish inside—I needed to feel it outside, too.

Suddenly, in a swift motion like that of the winter wind, Bierra took a grab of my wrists. I was put in a bind. There was rage in her eyes. They glared red.

"I told you to stop!" She raged. Her voice cracked a bit.

She was right.

"Yes. You told me to stop. I didn't. I pressed Freya—" I tried to apologise but was quickly cut off.

"Not that idiot! Look at your hands." She cried. 

Red.

Her eyes were red, but I had mistaken them for rage. No. Tears. She had been holding her tears, too.

"Not my face! I said your hands." She tried her best to not let the weight of emotions get to her. Such a stark contrast to her cold and indifferent persona. So much emotion. It was unfamiliar. It was unheard of. It was difficult to watch her. So, I did as she had told. I looked at my hands, still in the grasps of Bierra's icy fingers.

Red.

A red liquid trickled down by palm through my clenched fists, down into my elbows, straight into the sleeves of my attire. Yes. Not just fist or elbow, but the plural. I my fingers tore into my flesh, causing my hands to bleed more. 

"I told you to STOP!" She cried for the final time.

I let go my clenched fist. She let go of my hands.

"Next time you try to harm yourself like that, I'll make sure you remember the pain. Don't make me watch you destroy yourself again." She threatened with her eyes full of tears.

She too could feel for others. I had judged her wrongly. 

"I'm sorry." I had nothing else to say. 

I looked at my hands. Wounds of where my fingers penetrated through my skin had started healing. First, the wound closed up at an inhumane speed. Fibres developed on one side of the wound, attaching themselves to the other side. They grew thicker, completely feeling the wound to develop a scab. Just the next moment, the scab fell off and my wound had healed. My hands were new as ever, like there never existed a wound on them to begin with. 

Inhumane.

Otherworldy.

The aftereffects of the last night still lingered in my body. Though it felt wrong, I didn't give it much attention. I did not have the privilege of doing so.

I turned my gaze back to Bierra.

"You were right!" I cried out. Tears rushed down my cheeks.

"It was useless. It was utterly wasteful, like you said. There is nothing I could do to help her. In fact, by making her retell the tale, I had made her relive through those traumatic memories."

"I should have never brought her here. Look how miserable she looks! She says it's nobody's fault, but I know it very well. It's mine. I should have let disappear. I should have never told her to tell us her story. It's my fault!"

Yes. What a shame! I thought of myself as some hero. Just because I had the fortune of encountering the supernatural. I thought I could save people. I thought I was special. But here I was doing something unheroic. Something cowardly.

I was crashing out.

"It would've been best for all of us had I not fallen for Freya's words back at the park. Back when she said she had a change of heart. After all-"

Yes. Say it.

"After all."

Say it. Like you always do. Push the blame on others. 

"It was just one of her fa-" A sharp pain. The right of face. It hurt.

What happened? I could not understand. I just saw Bierra, her hand raised in a fashion as if she had hit someone.

Oh. I see.

I had been slapped.

"I have told you enough already. I said STOP! SO JUST STOP DAMMIT!" She cried.

I could tell she put every last bit of her energy into the slap, while at the same time making sure the slap didn't kill me because I was sent flying into a bench at the back, the moment I realised I had been slapped.

Frozen benches hurt a lot more than regular one. Not like I knew how it felt to be thrown at a regular bench.

So there we stood. In the middle of the night, in Bierra's domain. The frozen dilapidated lecture hall. I having been just been flying to the other end of the hall through a slap sat in silence. While on the other end, I saw a different facet of Bierra, the Goddess of Winter. A side which embraced Freya, the Goddess of Autumn. She hugged her around tightly as they cried together. Trying to lessen the pain. Winter trying her caress Autumn. Autumn trying her best to pass into Winter.

How foolish I could have been?

In moments when it would have been best to stand by Freya, I decided the best move would be to crash out. Saying pointless things. Saying hurtful things. It didn't matter whether the Freya at the park was just another face of hers. After all, it was still Freya. I should've comforted her, but nope, here I was, unable to accept my failure. 

What was I? A nine-year-old?

Was I so stupid to think of it as a game?

I was definitely not meant to be the hero.

Our positions didn't change for a while. I sat at my crash site, looking at the ceiling of the hall. The girls cried on the other end like there was no tomorrow. As things were, for one, there wasn't.

As I sat there, waiting for my body to recover from that all powerful slap, an idea came to mind. A stupid idea. A reckless idea. An idea so stupid, I'd be a laughingstock if I ever voiced it out. It had no backing. It was a plain old hunch that I had developed from the limited understanding of what I called godkind. The best move at this point would have been to stay in silence and let Bierra take care of Freya. Anyone could tell that, except one.

Anyone except me.

I lifted myself from the debris of my crash site and made my way towards the sobbing goddesses.

"What is it?" Bierra said in a sharp tone.

The question was more of a warning. I could tell. It was the warning, 'Be careful with whatever you say next.'

"Freya, I'm sorry." I began.

"I sincerely apologise for my behaviour. Be it what I said to you to a while ago, or me prying into your past when I definitely shouldn't have. For that, I'm truly sorry." I said with utmost sincerity as bowed in front of her.

"But I don't regret one bit knowing about your past. In fact, I believe Bierra would feel the same. I'm not pointing it out or anything, but she, too, was, in fact, amused when I deciphered the rest of your story."

"Yes, otherwise she'd have regrets when she passes on. A god disappearing with regrets can have devastating consequences." Bierra explained as she continued to hold Freya in her arms like her little sister.

"Yes. Our reasons might have been different, but I still do not regret knowing about you at all." I said, trying to keep my best confident look.

Freya looked up at me. Her expression was something I would describe as ambiguous, a mix of sad acceptance with a tint of happiness. Perhaps she was happy that she had people around her in her final moments. I say final moments, but from the wording of Freya's story, I felt there was still some time before she disappeared.

I had no intention of letting her disappear, though.

And so I said-

"Because it is through your story that I have come up with a way to say you." I proclaimed.

Ridiculous.

Reckless.

Heck, some might even call it bluff. Such was the revelation, so I won't blame them. It was truly out of nowhere, and their faces of disbelief and shock expressed the same.

But my resolve was firm.

Freya wasn't going anywhere!