The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 15: Present becomes the Future: Clarinda and the Gåtefull Runer

At the end of the tunnel, the Norn ceased speaking. A vast cavern loomed before the group, and light brighter than that of day flooded the entire subterranean space.

Trees fringed the broad cave and grew in hilly stands along the pathways that laced themselves throughout the uneven terrain. Grass sprouted in tufts between the formations of natural rock and stalagmites that thrust upward from the earth, and in some places the turf lay expansively in broad, thick, and verdant swards. Wildflowers in sweeping meadows that stretched as far as the eye could see filled other stretches of the cavern.

Astonished, Aurelius initially looked ceiling-ward for the source of light, but then saw that the radiance shone from silver-white fire flickering hotly over the surface of the lake that dominated the center of the cavern. Shadows fled from the argent flames that coruscated like starlight on top of the otherwise still surface of the water. Rock formations and boulders covered with light green moss lined the shores.

Something on a bridge leading to the flaming lake amazed him even more that the underground Eden. On that bridge another Clarinda spoke to a cloaked woman!

"Hold here for a moment, everyone, and stay out of sight," Verdandi said, pointing at the women. "Time needs to realign."

Aurelius took in the sight of a Clarinda on the bridge, and then, gaping, turned in wonder back to the one standing beside him. Surreally aware that there were, indeed, two Clarindas within shouting distance of each other, he clasped her hand more tightly in his own.

"Just watch," Clarinda whispered. "This is why I couldn't talk about the council before now; we're all members of it!"

"What? You mean, the entire company?"

"Sì," she said, keeping her voice low. "That Clarinda over there, that's my past self, but I'm also returning now into the present."

"Past and the present together?" the Hospitaller hissed, completely confused.

"Shhh, it's a Norn thing," the merchant's daughter confided. "I'll try to explain later. That other woman is Urd, the Norn that I'm training to become after she gets killed by Morpeth."

"That's been bothering me, Clare; if you know she's going to die, can't you prevent it?" Aurelius asked, taken aback that Clarinda was so calm about there being two of her in the grotto. "If that was Morpeth who blew a hole in the mountain, shouldn't we have tried to stop him back in the tunnels?"

"They don't think Fate can be avoided, but I'm working on it. Now, tranquilla, Aurelio! We need to let all this happen so we can get to the Well."

The group remained in the shadows on the far side of the cavern and watched as the Clarinda on the bridge shook her head in response to something just said by the robed woman in front of her.

"I just learned that Satan played 'Uncle Servius' to Santini over five years ago," the other Clarinda said. "Are you saying that he and Hela somehow drove him to the Holy Land when he was living in Sicily so that he'd be in the area where the Codex was—or, where it would be—some five years later? Did Old Nick free Farbauti and Morpeth?"

"This meeting was just after Fenris pounced and carried you through Hela's window, and I'd escaped from her tower," Clarinda whispered to Aurelius. "I came back here before I returned to find you in Niflheim."

"Perhaps," Urd replied to the other Venetian girl, "but I'm of the belief that there's something else at work here, Clarinda. Someone who's organizing events and manipulating people at a level I've not seen since Loki roamed the Nine Worlds."

"Loki? The trickster god?"

"Yes, but he's still bound at the deepest level of Mount Glittertind. My sisters and I've been checking regularly on him since all this began, and he's still where Odin left him, tied to a rock until the end of time."