Excerpt: a better place, or a better way to fall

She found it—the place, a plane of ice and snow dunes and mountains visible but unreachable through the trackless woods—in a dream. At least, she was pretty certain it was a dream. It had that oneiric quality, the half-felt dusts of winds that otherwise shook the lanscape, the frigidity that to her was only a little chilly, the world that swam in and out of focus in greys and whites with only splashes of colour here and there—the pink of her knuckles and fingertips, the steel blue of a distant body of water, an ocean, the brown-black of her hair. Reality kept shifting in and out of itself, though there didn't seem to be a standard by which to measure it.

She found a stone, picked it up, and set it inside her cheek. She had no pockets. Her naked body like an arrow, arched towards the sky. She took a step and named herself. Hel. Seemed appropriate. As she walked the snow melted under her feet.

-----------------------

"Hello?" Njo said again, weakly. "Is it going to snow?" and the chamber said no, no, no.

"Obviously not," came a sudden and very unwelcome voice. All three of them started, and Njo almost fell flat on his ass. He wasn't used to ice. He was used to the slippery of water on wood, not leather on frozen water. There was the boy. The boy that none of them had seen at the time, yet there he was, looking at them and scowling kind of miserably. He was not, it seemed, looking forward to meeting them either, despite the fact that they had nothing to do with his death. He had a gaping hole in his stomach, and bloody mess inside of it like his organs were churned around with a spoon when the knife was in there. He had a trail of blood coming out from his mouth, which he wiped at, and which immediately reappeared. "It's much too cold to snow." He snorted, too.

"I thought it was never too cold to snow," said Brae, his voice shaking a little. He had heard the stories. He had written it down in his own blood, because he felt that that, at least, was a story to use his blood for. That is, he used the boy's blood. He felt that the least he could do was to make sure that some part of the boy told the story. The boy fixed him with quite the stare, and curled a smirk around his lips.

"On earth," he said, "it is never too cold to snow. Not even close. But here--here is the coldest place on earth, and not in temperature measurable by man. This place is filled with the icy chill of hate and indifference, and it is colder than anything you could feel ever on your skin. Stay too long here and you end up like them." He pointed to one of the dark spots, the nearest one, where someone was screaming like a banshee, though it fell on ears deaf to it, was absorbed by the ice and served in cooling it yet more from their cold, shrunken breaths. Brae shivered next to Njo, and his shiver brushed against Njo and passed into his heart.

Loki, too, looked perturbed. "We're going to leave here, though, right?"

The boy looked at Loki with very small eyes, and his smirk disappeared. "At least once, yes." Loki had the decency to make the space behind his eyes look utterly terrified. Though he crossed his arms over his stomach loose and defiant.

It was Brae who spoke again, his voice small as possible so as to avoid echoing yet more in the chamber. "What's your name?" There was a slight pause.

"Alighieri," said the boy, and he threw back his head and inside his eyes were thousands of rings like the rings on a tree, all inside his wise and knowing eyes. The eyes said he had been around the lake too many times to count, and yet here he was again, sighing smoke ships in the air and wiping the blood from his lip. "But you can call me Ali.” Then, at their open and wide-mouthed stares, “My punishment," he said, death-quite yet filling the whole chamber, "is in part this lip. It never stops bleeding because I never stopped bleeding the living. Everyone around me," he laughed suddenly and harshly, "bleeding like stuck pigs. I caused rivers of blood in might short, short life, a life fit for a butterfly, really. You would have liked to see it," he said, specifically at Loki, his smirk turning cold and raw and hungry. "You, especially. You would have been shaking in your mocassins at what one child could cause, and you would be thrown about in the ring of jealousy for all eternity." Suddenly he doubled over, screamed in pain, and a waterfall of blood spouted out of his stomach like water from a sewage pipe.