Awake by Viola Grace Read Free Book Online Page B

well with surprises. I am a great caretaker but not very social.”
    Kali gave a mental whistle.
    She is excellent at restoring the dead. While the Nameless may die away from Home, she retrieves them and buries them with honour and care in the same form that they lived in.
    You have protected the Nameless from knowledge of this, why? Kali had to know.
    Your lives began again here, but the constant memory that they are in danger is more than I expect any of you to live with. Pettra will continue to keep the dead, and the others will live never knowing what will become of them.
    Kali sighed, Knowing that we will be remembered, even if only by a madwoman, may help matters. There is nothing like the feeling that nothing you do matters and you will be forgotten the moment that you are over.
    I will think about it.
    The Orb ceased communication, and Odin wrapped his arm around her waist. “I wish to show you something.”
    She followed him out into the light, and he walked one of the immaculately tended paths.
    “I know that the Orb told you that there were twenty of the Firsts and that they had all been reclaimed, but count the statues.”
    She quickly did a tally of the black stone life-sized images that symbolized the Firsts. There were eighteen. Her victim was not yet in the group. “The Vorwing I killed today will make nineteen. There is one left out there.”
    “What does the Orb have to say about that?”
    “Nothing. The Orb is in mourning for the lost Vorwing.”
    “Truthfully? The deaths that it brought on do not earn it contempt?” Odin was shocked.
    She smiled and wrapped her arm around his waist. “You do not hate your children just because they do not turn out the way you plan. You understand them if you can and simply love them if you can’t.”
    “The Orb thinks of itself as a parent?”
    “It was a dead universe with no children. It wanted life, craved it, and when it could, it adopted children of its own. That those children were spoiled and were given too much was not something that the Orb had considered. It tried to do better with the next round, and though the children did still die, the Orb was proud of their actions while they lived.”
    She turned slowly and opened her arms to the thousands of graves all around them. “It mourns them every day, because every day, it lives outside time, and they live and die endlessly. Our graves are probably here as well. With time a fluid thing, it is likely that we have died and appeared here out of time.”
    He looked around him, curious. “I do not see my image in the stones, nor yours. I believe our images are within the refectory hall as they have been since the day we began here.”
    “So, three days for me.”
    He chuckled. “It did take a while to thaw you out. It is closer to five days.”
    A peculiar whistle got their attention.
    They walked back to the mausoleum, and Pettra was waiting. She smiled brightly. “Since you are here, I wondered if you wanted to say a few words.”
    The strange creature crooked her fingers, and the body floated out of the mausoleum and followed Pettra down a path to an open hole in the ground.
    “The Vorwing live a very long time, so they like to be encased in stone.” Pettra lowered the body into the hole and knelt beside it. Her hands dug into the ground and a cocoon of stone wrapped over the gauze and sealed the Vorwing forever.
    Pettra followed the stone with a layer of earth and after that, turf sprouted.
    A headstone stood at the ready, and with a casual strength, the caretaker shifted it into position. Her claws cut into the stone easily, giving Kali a feeling of relief that she had not let the woman get close.
    The Orb took Kali’s body and stepped forward to the edge of the grave. “Today, we remember Talniathico of the Vorwing. He was a good man before he took the power of the past into him and after he father twenty-seven children. Three of those children joined him on his last day, but they are now