So they dug, and dug, and dug.
The hole was now so deep they couldn’t climb out. Anthea chattered on about her kingdom of Las Vegas, with its glowing lights and loud noises. About expensive chariots and dancing women and mundane magicians who specialized in all sorts of slight-of-hand.
Her chattering occasionally triggered his mind to make shapes and places out of the shadows in their pit, and sometimes those shapes and places triggered other, strange, asynchronous memories.
He’d dug himself out of a prison, once. Not for the time he chased down a maiden in a dark forest, and not for any similar crime. He could not remember why, yet there had been mortar between cut bricks of granite, and the constant drone of the sea outside. Seagulls and the smell of dead turtles had wafted up from the beach.
And every so often, he’d remember names. A place called Castilla. Tribunals and God and Queens and Kings. Pain and anguish and begging for the release of death.
Then more digging.
And one day, the floor of their pit became the wall of their tunnel. They both felt a pull, a need to dig up, and turned accordingly.
Neither he, nor Anthea, nor the dress understood how long it took for the turn to block the dust and howling from the Hell-adjacent territory behind them. Time and space meant nothing here, nor did hunger, or yearning, or pain. They were inside the structures between life and death and they burrowed between day and night. Between fire and ice. They bathed in the frozen ashes of murdered worlds.
They dug upward, chipping at the limestone, breaking through new layers of schist.
Finally hitting dirt.
They’d found the edge of The Land of the Living—the dark place where the boundary became more life than death. Where living things worked in the service of death. The soft place filled with bugs and beetles and worms.
Anthea chattered about how this could not be Las Vegas because the loam here was too rich and hearty. The soil smelled fresh, not like a desert, and clearly had been tended lovingly by whomever tilled here.
Perhaps they had found the land she sought—the place where she could fulfill her destiny to become a thing called a valkyrie.
“This might not be the world you remember,” he said. They were as likely to break through into another circle of Hell as they were to find the place they’d called home.
She shrugged and her soft blonde curls bounced sweetly around her rosy apple cheeks. “But it is, my love,” she said.
She’d begun calling him “my love” what felt like centuries ago. Strangely, it satisfied a craving he did not realize he had. Or, more accurately, a hunger that up until now had never been sated.
He did not argue. How could he argue with the round, blonde vampire whose touch fulfilled all his small hungers?
He hit the ceiling of their tunnel and the tip of the pike broke into air.
Sweet air. Fresh air. Cold air.
Snow drifted down through the hole.
“Oh!” Anthea said. “This is definitely not Las Vegas!” She jumped to get a better look. “Lift me up, love,” she said as the dress flowed over her hand. “Gloves, you know.”
He lifted her up so she could peer through the hole. She grinned.
Then she stuck her fingers through and into the air.
“Is it night?” he asked. She wasn’t a vampire who could walk in daylight. He probably wasn’t either, though he couldn’t remember that any more than he could remember his name.
She pulled back her hand. “It is!” She kissed his dusty forehead. “We’re home!”
He set her down and peered up at the hole. More snow dusted his face. He shook it from his eyes and laughed.
Parts of him remembered snow. Scandinavian fjord snow. Ural snow. Flakes dropping through Black Forest trees. Snows high up in the Pyrenees.
All the snows from all the times and the places.
He blinked and rubbed his cheek. These flashes would be his undoing.
A few more pokes with the head of the pike and the roof of their tunnel collapsed. Fresh air flowed in and moonlight laid down a beautiful, clean, silver sheen.
Anthea laughed and clapped her hands. And the dress…
The dress inhaled the world above and exhaled out all their burrowing dust. The shimmers that had been muted obsidian became gleaming black glass. The reflections that had been covered with dirt now danced with the refractions of crow feathers.
The dress wasn’t alive. Not in the living way of bugs and beetles, or birds and bats. It responded, and it processed, and it did what it wanted, but it was something more than life. Or something less. It was a force all by itself.
And it wanted back into the mundane world even more than he did.
He lifted Anthea up far enough that she could pull herself through the hole. He attached the pike to the harness on his back that he’d fashioned from his armor’s plating. Then he dusted his hands and gripped the edges of the hole.
The giant who did not remember his name, the huge man with the bolt scar on the side of his face and the inert magical armor on his body, pulled himself back into the world of people.
Anthea sat on a rock only a few paces away. She stared out over a lake as a halo of blonde curls surrounded by wave after wave of all the types of blackness.
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “There you are,” she said.
“How long have you been waiting?” he asked.
She shrugged again. “An hour. Maybe a bit more.”
And yet their pit had strung time along like his synchronous and asynchronous mind.
She tilted her head as she often did when she read his thoughts from the pulls and pushes of his face. “We moved through a veil,” she said, as if that was enough to explain the strangeness of the missing hour, maybe
