Chapter Text
The earth was cold. It had been cold for such a long time that she had nearly forgotten what warmth felt like. Warmth was sunbeams and days full of blinding yellow light. Warmth was light and the earth was dark. It was also quiet, only worms and moles with their soft tunneling through the even softer loam that made her lonely resting place. She could even hear the soft groans of the trees, their roots reaching down, down down as their branches stretched up to the sky. Had she any breath in her lungs she would have sighed.
Oh how she missed the sky.
The sky and the multitude of stars that lay beyond. So much to be explored with the eons at her fingertips. How she longed to see it all again.
The Earth curled tighter around her, the flow and thrum of the ley line washing over her as she fell back into a dull version of sleep. But still memories of watching the stars swirled through her mind’s eye. She had counted them all, once upon another lifetime, but now she was confined to an earthen tomb, forever to lay in this inbetween.
Then the warmth started. Slowly at first, no more than the mere notion of warmth, the whisper of an essence like the first rays of Spring sunshine. Then she felt it in the palm of her upturned hand, a drop of water that trickled down her arm until it reached her chest where it ignited something she though had died long ago.
Her fingers curled into her palm of their own accord, chasing that feeling of heat.
Then her arm pulled closer to her chest. She hadn’t been able to do that before.
A new heat wrapped around her wrist, it pulled and tugged, dislodging her from the bed of soil and roots. It pulled her up up up until she felt the bark of a tree against her back, it too was warm to the touch.
She carefully opened her eyes and a scream tore through the night. It left the air charged when it ended, like a clap of thunder in a heat storm without rain.
“Many thanks,” She croaked out, a breath rattling painfully deep in her lungs. The woman, since she now saw that it was a woman who had rescued her, had stopped screaming quite so loudly, and was instead muttering to herself. It had been so long since she’d been able to speak in her mother’s tongue that the words felt heavy and leaden in her mouth. “May the goddesses smile upon you.”
“What?” The woman was suddenly standing before her, green eyes wide and searching her face. The woman was beautiful, warm brown skin dusted by a faint spray of freckles. Like stars, she thought to herself. Her savior was a goddess made physical with earth colored hair that curled gently around her jaw and eyes that shone with the pale light of the moon. “What did you say?”
Sarah, her name was Sarah she remembered that now, tilted her head to the side. She couldn’t quite understand what this divine woman was saying. It felt garbled, her own tongue twisted into something that she once recognized but no longer did. It tickled something in the very back of her mind, the part that hadn’t woken yet. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay, well, it seems we’ve found ourselves at a bit of a barrier. I can’t understand you and you obviously can’t understand me. And I’m talking to a person I just dug out of the ground because I was looking for mushrooms that Indrid said would be out here. The bastard saw this coming didn’t he?” The woman had stood back up and was pacing back and forth, hands motioning more violently with every word. After pacing back and forth three more times she stopped in front of Sarah once more. “Well my name is Juno Divine and well I guess I found you…”
Juno, she understood that much. Juno, goddess of births and unions of love. “Juno?”
The woman smiled, small and bright like the first crescent moon of the lunar cycle. “That’s me.” She put a hand on her chest. “But who are you?”
“Sarah, my name is Sarah Drake.” The vowels came out rough around the edges as her mind tried to recall the language she had learned before… before what she still couldn’t recall. Her mind was a riptide, pulling her far away from the shore as it remembered. She was falling through years, hundreds of them. It was dizzying.
Juno seemed taken aback, now sitting on the forest floor where she had been standing, her eyes as wide as dinner plates. “Well I’ll be damned.”
Sarah closed her eyes, letting the nausea roll through her. Coming back from, well from what was in essence a death state was certainly taking a toll on her body, like it didn’t quite know what it should be doing. Breathing sent a dull fire into her lungs, it wasn’t warm instead simply a pain that licked like flame. She tried to blink the grit from her eyes, they too stung. She was acutely aware of how her hand moved up up up until it rested on Juno’s cheek, she could feel the warmth under her palm.
“Thank you,” she breathed out, this language still felt too rough in her mouth. It left a metallic tang on the roof of her mouth, it reminded her of blood.
Juno opened her mouth a handful of times before any words formed on her lips. “Of course.”
Neither of them moved, too entranced in the other to even think such thoughts. Sarah noted how pale her earth stained hand was against Juno’s cheek, being away from the sun had not been good for her. She even had crescents of soil under her fingernails, it made her nose wrinkle.
“Can you stand?” Juno tempered the silence that had begun to grow tense, her words soft as down feathers.
“I believe so.” She pulled her hand back into her lap, again she noted how the colors of her gown had faded with the earth. The violet now a decayed lilac, the grey border now a sickly white. She took another painful breath before pulling her legs underneath her. The decayed leaves were soft under the soles of her feet as she stood, not quite as unbalanced as a newborn fawn, but she was far from graceful. She tumbled into Juno when she attempted a step forward.
“Careful now.” She placed a steadying hand to Sarah’s lower back, heat seemed to radiate from that spot outwards. “Let’s get you out of the woods and cleaned up, yeah?”
Sarah just nodded as Juno lead her away from the grave, for that’s truly what it had been, and out into a world she was seeing for the first time. The trees were bathed in a dappled moonlight that cast shadows around every bend. A fickle breeze shook free a shower of golden beech leaves that floated down right into their path, adding to the decomposing carpet beneath their feet.
“Where are we?” It had occurred to Sarah that these woods were not the same as the ones she had grown up in. The trees were wrong, it all felt off. The ley line was there, she could feel it now, running beneath her feet like a river.
“Monongahela National Forest, Kepler, West Virginia.” Juno answered with a concerned crease in her brow.
Oh. She then voiced that thought aloud.
“Different name from when you were, uh, laid in the ground?” Juno cringed at her own choice of wording, but the hand on Sarah didn’t falter as they kept walking.
“Different everything.” She twisted the edge of her mantel between her fingers, the fabric was still soft if not a bit weather worn. “Where is West Virginia?” Her stomach was already in knots from the answer she knew was coming.
“Eastern coast of the United States of America.” Juno looked more puzzled than anything else, the twist of her lips betrayed her desire to ask Sarah why she wanted to know.
“Oh,” she lamented again sadly. She was so far from home, but what was home after spending an unfathomable amount of time in the earth? Was it that crypt of loam and tree roots? Was it the cottage she had grown up in with her mother and sisters? Or was home simply the sky above her head, full of infinite possibilities? If the time called for honesty she didn’t think she could ever know the exact answer to that question.
“I have a friend, he’s actually the one who sent me out here, who might be able to help. He can see the future, and he’s been around for a long time. I think he can help.” Juno spoke up again as they stepped past the last of the tree line and into a opening that was paved with stone.
“Let us go talk to this seer then, I have many questions.” She nodded resolutely. She was awake and she needed answers. She also didn’t mind getting to spend more time with Juno, in the short time she’d known the other woman she though she would never tire of her presence, it was almost unsettling.
Following Juno’s lead she managed to hoist herself up into the contraption that ley line helpfully supplied as being called a truck, fastening the safety belt across her body. The engine roared to life and music started to hum quietly throughout the cab. It was peaceful in a sense, the night pressed close against the windows but the stars, there were so many stars as Sarah stared out the window. She traced the familiar shapes with her eyes, mumbling their names in the language of her mother and her mother’s mother, not the one that tasted of copper and dirt, but maybe that one also tasted the smallest bit sweet under all that.
Sarah sighed, breath fogging the window as trees and land blurred past, illuminated for only the briefest moment before rushing by, returning to the darkness of the night. She continued to count the stars, ignoring the way her heart beat like a rabbits when she glanced over at Juno. The stars couldn’t see the flush on her face anyway.
