Bran and I lie on the ground, head to head. I can’t tell if he’s alive or not, and I’m not ready to find out. I close my eyes, and in my mind, I see that it’s raining, but it’s not water that falls from the sky. I see the boundary falling in jet-black rain drops, and with it fall the creatures of the supernatural world. Eagle. Thunderbird. Wolf. Sisiutl, on wings that glitter in the sunlight. Raven.
The last drops down beside me and hops onto my chest. He cocks his head from side to side, and then pokes his beak right in my face. Bet you didn’t expect you could do that, did you?
I don’t answer.
He chuckles. This won’t be the last we see of each other. He hops off my chest and takes to wing, flying after the horde of supernatural creatures that have now descended into our world.
I reach out with my senses, testing to see if the spirit world still exists, and it does, just beyond the mist, just beyond reason, but that mist is thinner now, and maybe one day it’ll evaporate so that the spirit world and the physical world will be one again, just like they were a long, long time ago, in the time of the old stories.
After a while, I sit up. The obsidian shard is still in my hands, bound to me by a crust of my own blood. Bran wakes shortly after, and we realize, after speaking words that we can only see, that our hearing is gone. There’s always a price to pay in the world of spirit, and a sacrifice to be made. I should have known that right from the start.
The dzoonokwa have left, except for one. She stands just beyond the tree line, watching us, hidden by the shadows so she’s hard to make out. She’s shorter than the rest, closer to my height, and thinner. Her hair finer. Her hips not as wide. She raises a hand for one fleeting second, and then vanishes into the forest.
Bran and I rise from the ground, and leave too.