Excavation Camp, Greenland
6 December, 2014Glaciers floated peacefully in the water on this wintry day, beautiful and glimmering in the sun – they caught the eye of anyone who bothered to look out at sea. Nikita Nedbalek glanced wishfully at the bobbing hunk of ice, wishing she could be that carefree. Her excavation team had yet to find anything other than an old arrow, their hopes falling at another dead end. Nikita huddled into her jacket, imagining a beautiful long ship floating on this water, heading towards a new destination, a new beginning for the Vikings. Her light blue eyes traced the border of ice, picturing women and children preparing for the return of the men. They had scoured the entire area, her and the team, but nothing was found. Nikita couldn’t help but look once again, thinking she might have missed something, hoping that something was there. But, wait, what was that?
Nikita narrowed her eyes, squinting to see until her eyes hurt and her cheeks ached. In the ice cliff, there was a tiny crack, wide enough to fit a person. How had they missed it? Did they accidentally skip it somehow? It didn’t matter; Nikita leapt to her feet and prepared to call for her team. Turning, she gazed onto the miserable folks. They were huddled together to shield themselves from the icy wind like penguins, and every few seconds, one of them would light the fire that had blown out. The sky was just beginning to darken, night lurking over their shoulders in the distance. Nikita couldn’t bear getting their hopes up and then dashing them if it ended up being nothing. She would just have a quick peek, and if it was something she would alert them…if it wasn’t, they would go home.
Snow crunched under the brunette’s feet as she sprinted to the cliff edge. Blood thundered in her ear and her nose burned from the cold, but all was disregarded in favor of coming closer and closer to her discovery. The hopeful feeling had churned into an excited foreboding in her gut. Skidding and sliding, Nikita arrived to the edge, but she was faced with a dilemma: she had no equipment. Too far to quit now, she lowered herself over the edge and placed her booted foot on an ice ledge. She descended and descended, her feet slipping every so often, but she would always catch herself. It was with immense relief that her frozen legs splashed into the cold water, the liquid sloshing onto her pants and chilling her to the bone – it was worth it: she had to find something, had to, or everything would have been for naught.
Looking around, Nikita searched for the crack in the wall, her gloves slithering across the wet ice as her teeth chattered and her skin blued. The Nedbalek heiress felt her heart plummet and her actions became jerky, frantic. The crack was gone, nowhere to be seen! She pounded on the ice walls, kicked at the shore, but her reactions caused nothing but pained limbs. Nikita backed away from the wall, tears dribbling from her eyes and stinging her face with winter.
“No,” she sobbed, “this can’t be! This can’t be the end! For it all to be a-a hallucination.”
Nikita had a moment to wipe her eyes of the remnants of sadness before she left. Opening her puffy eyes, the ice twinkled back at her – she snarled at it. Then, to her amazement, the ice cracked vociferously like a soaring whip and blackness zigzagged down the blue-white structure, just wide enough for her to go through. Nikita could not help the joyful smile – maybe she missed it somehow?
She squeezed her body through the gap and started to walk in total darkness. It twisted and turned, continuously sloping downwards, and the only thing that guided her was the cold walls pressing on her shoulders. Many times did Nikita almost fall, her foot hitting a rock in the rising water. When she had begun to fear drowning, the water up to her shoulders and her body numb from the chill, the water had lessened the further she went until it slopped against her ankles. Claustrophobia crept in the back of her mind, a fear that she would reach a dead end and not be able to return, but Nikita pressed on until finally the narrow passageway opened up to a cavern.
Nikita could not believe her eyes.
The tunnel had led to a ledge in the cavern that precariously shook with every step. Light filtered from nowhere, drizzling over the cavern in the morning light that was not possible to see during this time of day. The beams illuminated a wall of dead, black bark at least a mile away that stretched for on and on; Nikita could not see the end of the wooden wall as blackness danced on the sides of the cavern. A long, thick branch that was easily the size of a black road and the color of one created a slanting bridge to the wall and underneath it was pure black. For a startling moment, Nikita was afraid she had found an abyss, but then her rational mind once again took over. It was only when she glanced up that her rationality left her – the wall ran up and up and up until distance obscured her vision and black reigned. Nikita realized it was a tree, a twisted mangled tree.
“That’s impossible.” Nikita snorted, shifting nervously on her leg. “I definitely did not walk that far.”
That same foreboding sensation tingled in her stomach, but Nikita knew she must press on. She was far too close to turn back now. With nowhere else to go, the archaeologist began to walk the thick branch. It did not budge with her weight, did not move. Every once in a while she would walk into a twig – if you could call it that, but it was a twig if the wooden road was a branch - in her path, it would take up most of the room and leave almost no walking space; Nikita would have to grasp the thick twig and inch past on her tiptoes. There were no leaves, only barren sticks attached to each other by fate.
Her feet were just beginning to tire, the soles aching and her arches in pain, when she decided to take a break. Sitting down in the middle, she only then realized she was no longer cold. She wasn’t hot either; it was a neutral temperature that hung precariously in the balance, only one element needed to push it to one side. This air was heavy on her skin like in the woods, but felt light on her lungs and she could breathe in the scent of a forest. There was another scent; there was no way to describe it except that it reminded Nikita of death.
Curiosity took a hold of Nikita’s heart, and ever so slightly, she inched to the edge. Dancing dark was all she could see – it disturbed her. The woman was just about to move away when a slight ripple of movement, only slight, shuddered through the tree and Nikita, frightened,
slipped. Gravity had control over her body as she plummeted, falling and falling and falling.
And falling. And falling. Her screams had become yawns after falling for four hours, the air whooshing by her and become customary. Her fear of death was conquered by complete boredom as she continued to descend. The light followed her, revealing the black bark wall and the half mile she had walked. Nikita knew she must be out of shape if walking half a mile had worn her out. As she continued to fall, Nikita had forgotten that she would die, or deliberately pervaded it, and instead thought of what she would do when she returned to the excavation camp. The first thing was to get into shape.
All thoughts were ceased when her back collided with the edge of another branch and snapped, effectively killing her.
For sixty-four hours, Nikita’s dead body fell. The once icy cavern wall on her left had become the wet dirt of underground, and then stone, and then it was nothing but stars twinkling around her body. And still, in this reversed sky, the bark wall continued to run and her body continued to fall until her sixty-four hours were up.
Nikita’s back first collided with the ground, shattering all her bones and ripping through her skin, then her head made contact – it, too, shattered against the ground. Her beautiful light blue eyes were the only thing left untouched as they stared glassily into the nothingness that was above. She laid dead amongst the feet of someone else.
Nikita’s blood ran a river towards a large bark arch – a root. The wall of bark had roots grown out of it, thicker than the branch, which were jabbed into the ground savagely. The blood made contact with the root and was immediately sucked up. Instantaneously, the black bark became a healthy brown color, the air lightened until the scent of death was no longer present, butterflies and birds began to chirp and the dull morning glow became brighter, happier. The cavern thumped with life from Nikita’s sacrifice.
The feet twitched and green eyes opened.
The feet were connected to tan bare legs that ran up the torso of a woman, her body covered in a coarse ripped brown rucksack of a dress. Her hands were chained to the stone wall behind her, her wrists were raw from the metal rubbing against her skin. Matted, greasy black hair stuck to an oily forehead as emerald eyes roamed her whereabouts. A hand trembled on a protrusion above her and a decapitated snake head shuddered as its body beckoned it. Her eyes caught that of Nikita’s dead body and she frowned.
Her mouth opened, and when she talked, a croaking raspy sound came out instead of the beautiful tinkling of what was associated with women. A single sentence was said.
“You have brought the destruction of your brethren.”
