Page 34 of Up from the Earth

I had done that. I had given birth. I had survived the journey required to bring him into the world. And I would survive this.

Turning back to the stove, I looked down into the pot, the expansive black interior seeming to stretch on into nothingness.

“Heat, heat, heat. How can I make heat?”

I half-expected The Crone to step in and say something, but when I glanced over my shoulder at her, she just smiled at me. False kindness was painted over her face, and I clenched my jaw as I returned to my work.

“Heat…I need to make heat. I—”

I stopped. Natural warmth came from the center of the earth, the well of molten rock that kept the entire planet at a livable temperature. It was like a heart, its steady drumbeat lighting up rivers of magma that spread through the crust like veins.

Like a heart.

Dropping my head, I closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling of my heart pounding against my ribs. That constant rhythm was there, booming as strong as ever despite everything. Because Iwasstrong. I was as steadfast and stable as the earth beneath my feet.

I was the earth.

My heart was its heart, my core was its core, and my veins were its veins. Running beneath my skin were winding streams of liquid iron melted by the enormity of the fire that dwelt within me.

I hovered my hands around the base of the pot. There was still a bit of kindling left unconsumed by the previous fire. The stout sticks charred logs that might catch again—if I could provide a source of flame. My skin hummed, a steady orange glow emanating from my naturally blue veins. Heat swelled in the palms of my hands, and itburned.

“Ah,” I groaned, the pain radiating up my arms.

Voices, sourceless and eerie, chanted somewhere invisible, and my skin burned. The smell of heated air, that familiar scent of the furnace coming on during the winter, swelled around me. When I looked down, my illuminated hands shook, the air around them wavering like that over blacktop in the summer.

Heat enveloped me from head to foot, sweating now pouring from my forehead. The charred logs beneath the pot began to glow at the edges, but they weren’t catching. I pulled more from the center of my being, forcing the heat of the earth to enter my body and move through my hands to the wood.

At that, a wave of dizziness swam through me, and I stumbled, my right knee buckling so that my elbow crashed down into the stove.

“Cerri—”

“Step in, Beast King, and your precious wife will not secure this task. You know the rules.”

I could hardly hear their squabbling for how that chanting crescendoed in my head. It was a furious drumbeat, a droning cry that made my ears ache, and screaming voices that demanded I give everything to the flame.

Pulling myself up, I squeezed my lids shut, grasping for that place inside me that had seen me through the birth. I had to push through this just as I’d pushed through that, through the pain, through the exhaustion, through the doubt.

The sounds were everywhere, louder than the screams I knew bled from my mouth. Energy surged up from the center of my chest, and I didn’t hold it back. I allowed it to roar through me, channeling the raw essence of primal fire through my hands.

The wood caught, a whoosh of flame licking up around the pot. I knew it was not over. I had to maintain the flame—give it everything I had—so that, at last, the metal would liquefy.

Roasted meat. I could smell something so similar to it, that fragrance of a potential supper. But I knew. I knew there was nothing here burning, nothing here cooking, but my flesh. My hands throbbed with pain, so much that it had transcended the physical, and my consciousness hung on by a thread.

Still, I would do this. I would keep going.

Practically hanging on the stove, I held my hands in place, giving myself to the magic that kept the fire burning. I shook, balanced now on one knee. Time stretched into nothing until my awareness of the world dropped away. I could sense myself about to pass out when a creak in the floorboard to my right pulled my head up.

“And look at that.”

The baba ega’s voice was a crooked stick dragged through the mud of my mind. I needed to get up. I needed to see the product of my efforts and know that I had indeed survived this. It took a strength I was sure I’d already used up to pull myself up to standing. Gripping the stove to do so had nearly sent me down again, the pain enormous.

But I was up, and I looked down into the belly of The Crone’s large pot—her cauldron.

In the center, a slowly dimming pool of liquid metal sat. The orange gradually changed to a swirling gray-red, and the still-burning logs kept the steel from solidifying.

I’d done it.

And I hated what I’d created.

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