CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

The Heart of the White Forest

I hadn’t been paying attention before. The last time I entered the Red Forest, I had raced into the shrine to wake Doctor Christian because I had only been thinking about Trinity. I hadn’t noticed the changes that surrounded me. As I entered what should have been the Red Forest, everything surrounding me had changed.

The Red Forest was no longer red. At every turn, I was surrounded by whiteness, light, and prisms reflecting tiny rainbows through every leaf. I didn’t have to chase through my body to see that the redness was completely gone from the Red Forest There wasn’t a single drop of blood left. I wasn’t human anymore. Yet, I felt no panic, no rush to jump back to what I had been before, no rush to instruct my cells to make themselves over again in red. I suddenly realized that King Christian had been waiting. He had been waiting for the moment that the sword was withdrawn from my heart before he added the finishing touches to my white, immortal heart. He did the last bit while I was sleeping in the helicopter.

In front of me, the pool of blood surrounding the shrine was gone, and in its place was a pool of water so clear that it looked like liquid diamonds.

Christian had been embarrassed by his blood. Now I could see why.

The shrine had been pulled apart like it had been peeled like an orange and the peel was spiraling upwards in a grand staircase, white and sprawling. Up the stairs, there were platforms extending from four landings—the four chambers of his heart.

Since the chambers had no walls, Christian’s heart was completely open. I could see the throne King Christian used to sit on. He was gone. He didn’t need to stay. I was never going to get hurt again. Never again would I bleed, take a bullet, lose a tooth or have a period. I didn’t need to eat or breathe. He had rearranged the matter inside me to its largest benefit. My body was powered by something I didn’t understand. He understood. He was the monarch of the body of an immortal being. Others would have taken thousands of years to perfect their body to this standard and I was getting it for free because someone like Christian had married me.

Had the real man, Christian, understood what he was giving me when he decided to switch hearts with me in that hospital room all those years ago?

I felt upended as I took my first steps up the staircase.

That was when I realized my black dress was gone. I wasn’t going up the stairs wearing the identical white dress I wore in the real world as I rested in the chair. I was wearing a white dress, but it was not like the white hospital gowns I had worn before surgery. It was a dress with very simple lines looping over one shoulder, set with a line of gemstones down every seam. The fabric looked like millions of pinpoint crystals but felt like cashmere.

On the first platform, I ran my hand along the back of King Christian’s throne. I would miss him. I pondered how much work he had done inside me before he disappeared through the mirror. It hadn’t been important for him to say goodbye. He had work to do inside his own body and I would see him in the real Christian when I opened my eyes.

I knew Christian had told me to go speak to the fourth version of him, but the second chamber was closer and the mirror hung in the air without walls to hide it or hold it. Taking the stairs, I approached it, touched the altar, and whispered through the mirror to the Other Christian, but nothing happened.

I thought about the Other Christian. I loved him. I had never encountered another person in my whole life who was as patient with me as he had been. I had never had a teacher who wanted me to learn as desperately as he did. When we were together it felt like he ached for me to improve, for me to grow, for me to become. He didn’t even get to see how good I became at his lessons. He was off fighting other battles. I suddenly missed him so much that a wave of pain passed over me.

My skirt wasn’t hefty enough to have to gather it in my arms to get up the stairs quickly, but I hurried up in my bare feet.

The third landing extended again and there was a pool of water there. The pool was clear and I could see the White Forest through the bottom of it. Doctor Christian wasn’t there.

I thought for a moment about him. He hadn’t given me his secrets the way the Other Christian had. We didn’t even talk. The only interaction I had with him had been the moment when he opened his eyes.

I understood something about why I hadn’t been able to wake him when I tried so many times. It was the same reason why I had never been able to heal the aloe vera plant. It was because I had not been able to win over Christian or the plan in a battle of wills. I always lost… until Trinity needed healing. For her, I was willing to fight him. The words written on his face were only readable to someone with iron-hard resolve. He only woke up when I wouldn’t take no for an answer. You couldn’t be a noodle and read the language of the gods. Perhaps one day, I would learn how to give orders so mildly that they couldn’t be ignored, just like Doctor Christian.

I glanced upward. The Christian in the last room had been blindfolded and tied to a mast. I looked up the staircase. I hadn’t been able to see it before, but the final chamber still had walls. Up the stairs, it had a door.

It was where I was supposed to go.

Up the stairs, I took my last steps into red.

Behind the door, there was still red inside me. In the final chamber, the walls were still red. The room looked exactly the way it had before the grand transformation of the White Forest.

Inside, Christian was there as he had always been, blindfolded, gagged, and tied to a mast. I circled him and considered what I ought to do to wake him. I moved to untie the blindfold. The bonds fell off as I touched them. Then the rope that held his arms fell from his wrists. The walls and ceiling of the room fell like the petals of a rose, crashing down to the floor, like five dead bodies tossed from the cliffs to the white sands below.

I peered over the edge, looking downward, confused by the red rectangles.

“Hello, darling,” I heard behind me.

I turned and saw the Last Christian standing in front of me. The look on his face surprised me more than anything. He was so triumphant. He had won and, from the look on his face, he had won big time.

In the next second, I was in his arms and he was kissing me. It did not feel as it had when the other versions of him tried to kiss me. It felt real. I should have felt excited, but suddenly, he was a stranger and I turned away from him.

He kissed the side of my face, but he was in tune with my emotions and he put some distance between us. Undeterred, he laughed. “I have waited for you for far too long. You seem overwhelmed. Is all this too much for you?”

I drew my eyebrows together. “Talk to me. Help me understand.”

He put his hand behind his neck and jutted his elbow out. He was making his body into angles, which always made me feel safe, stirred me with desire, and made me forget my doubts. He was always what I wanted.

He responded to my feelings with his own. “You are the woman I have waited all my life to meet. Me. And you haven’t met me yet. I am the level four god, which means,” he said with a sharp glance at me, “I’m not like the other versions you’ve encountered.”

“What does that mean?”

He put his hand out in a vague gesture seeming to mean everything. “I am the place where all Christian’s memories are housed. I know how I became immortal. I know who I really am, not just the nice bits I put up for show.”

I stood my ground, though a part of me was distressed by the new version of him I was meeting. Never had I met a Christian who was this forthcoming. Hearing him talk was like getting to the final resolution of a book when you’d been reading for volumes. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get to the end. Maybe I wanted to stay in the middle of the story forever.

He slid his fingers under the strap of my dress and looked in my eyes. “Most importantly, I remember what I do. I orchestrate the creation of solar systems. I don’t just terraform planets. I make galaxies.”

I stuck out my lip. “If you’re so important, then why are you here on Earth?”

He rubbed the side of my arm possessively. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

I refused to answer but returned his hard stare with one of my own.

“This planet is a mess. I came here as a favor to one of my friends who has gone on to level seven. He wanted me to see if I could fix this planet. It’s one of his favorites because it was one of his earliest projects. I came here.” He paused before explaining, “One of the things I can do easily is see into the future. See around a star for a bit and I can see hundreds of years into the future. I was here. I looked around your star and I saw something I’d never seen before.”

“What?”

“You.”

I gasped.

“It’s time to stop playing games, darling,” he said patiently. “I did not make you a goddess. You were one already on that fateful night I held you in my arms in the hospital. You were in no danger of dying on the operating table if you didn’t want to be. You were letting the people who thought you were ill continue to think you were ill. You were being a little imp who was lying to everyone. At first, you did it because you wanted your parents’ attention. You were just like Trinity. Later, after your parents died, you did it because you wanted me to pity you. You wanted me more than any woman has ever dared to want me before and you were only on the edge of womanhood. It took my breath away. I saw a future with you if I stayed on Earth. I was stunned. You see, most gods are married. I had been on a little mission to prove that I didn’t need to be married to be a god. I could do everything without a wife. When I saw my future with you, I was upset, so I left earth, went elsewhere, and prowled around. When things don’t happen quickly, there’s plenty of time to think. After all, you weren’t born yet. When I was on other worlds, I looked into the future, and soon you were in every future. You were tying me up and telling me that I had to stop fighting you. You were building the most beautiful worlds anyone has ever seen and pushing the boundaries of what matter could do. You were showing me how to think better and how to build things that would last. Not matter, atoms and molecules, because those things can’t last forever in one state. They constantly have to be rearranged, but how things like the sword in your chest could last forever. Eventually, I realized I could never outrun you, and you weren’t even born yet.”

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Blinking, I couldn’t respond. I could barely breathe. Was he saying the opposite of what Pricina thought? He hadn’t picked me because he was desperate or because I was convenient? Ge chose me because he had had hundreds of years to think about it and I had been his choice?

Continuing, he went on. “I decided to come here and fix this world, but soon it was obvious that the immortals here were going to push this planet toward destruction. Those deranged immortals with fingers growing out of their faces were not god material. They were grasping, greedy, hateful men who did not know the lines between creation and destruction. Many people figure out immortality without understanding the ethics that govern it. For my friend, I couldn’t let them ruin His planet. Besides, I had to wait here… for you.”

“What are you saying?” I wanted to hear everything he thought.

“I decided to let this thing with the poles get out of hand.”

My eyes widened. “You did that on purpose?”

“I didn’t command the poles to shift. That was happening anyway. I decided to use it to the advantage of the planet. I worked on holding it still, partitioned my brain, and I let all the immortals in the village think that the enormity of the task had taken me down. If I was the greatest god they had ever known, how would they do my job? The idea that it could break them did break them. Those greedy gods went into the North Iron Room and tried to fix the world. It was arrogant, and it cost them.”

I felt something in my chest fall. Thinking of their misshapen bodies bothered me, and my expression went downcast.

The Last Christian took my hand. “If you could have seen what they were like when they were at their pinnacle, I don’t think you’d be as bothered by this part of the story. They were the type that didn’t want to sacrifice anything. I saw it in myself, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep breath and sighed. “I mean, that was why I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to do everything myself, get all the credit for my accomplishments myself, but for what? Glory? Maybe it wasn’t exactly greed. Perhaps it was a desire for independence, and that feeling at one time made me greater and stronger, but it wasn’t serving me anymore. I am friends with a level seven god while I sit as a level four god? There’s a word for that.”

“What is it?”

“Damnation,” he replied with a clear voice. “If I can’t progress anymore then I am damned. It’s just that simple. However, my friend is merciful and he knew what I needed and, better still, where I could get it. He had looked into the future of this world and knew this was where the key to my eternity was hidden. You.”

I felt faint as he tucked me under his arm.

“Do you know what I had to do to be worthy of you?”

“What?” I mouthed.

“I had to risk everything. I had to let myself fall back to level one. I couldn’t offer you a diamond heart for our heart transplant. What was a young woman with red blood running through her veins going to do with a diamond heart? That was the only way to win you.”

“You took yourself to the verge of death so that you could be with me?” I gasped.

He skimmed the tips of my hair with his fingers and looked at me curiously. “You were hurting yourself because you too wanted love. The damage you did to your heart when you were a child was real because you were ordering yourself to break. You were doing it quietly, the way I changed faces, without entering the Red Forest. The damage you did to your heart was so real that even after I exchanged my healthy heart for your broken one, I couldn’t heal it. Without access to the higher levels of godhood, my body couldn’t repair someone else’s cells even if those cells were in my own body. Your heart was told to break and it stayed broken. It hurt me every day.”

My face twisted in pain. “I’m sorry.”

“I won’t fault you. Whether leading to creation or destruction, everything begins with a wish. You wished for love. You wished for me to love you and I do. I love you now and I’ll love you forever. Already, you mean so much more to me than I suspected when I peered around that star. The excitement you’ve ignited inside me feels like it will burn infinitely. And now, do you know what I wish for?”

I pushed back my pain and asked, “What?”

He put his hands on me. “I wish we had already finished this last thing so I can finally make you my wife.”

I gazed at the intensity of his expression. I had waited for him to say those words to me, and now that he had, I couldn’t hold his stare. I looked away. “What do we have to do?”

“The first thing we have to do is turn those last bits of red to white. Do you know how to do that?”

“I guess I need to order those cells to take on the same structure as those around them.”

“Good,” Christian said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

The next thing that happened was that those broken bits of red wall that lay on the floor of the White Forest changed. The red was replaced with dots of white the same way a red barn turns white in snowfall.

“Why is it so slow?” I wondered.

“Because you’re doing it and you’re new at this. Don’t let that bother you. Soon you’ll be able to do this and much more in the blink of an eye. I need to be certain that you can maintain your body before we correct the poles.”

“How are we going to do that?” I asked, not understanding the connection. Why would I need to be completely invulnerable to fix the poles? Couldn’t the problem be corrected with matter manipulation by moving the iron staff of the world?

Christian explained. “We don’t need my body in the North Iron Room or the one you call the Other Christian. You and I are all that is needed. Soon you’ll understand why it didn’t work when the immortals in Nhagaspir tried it and why they should have known that it would never have worked. It is very violating to try, not to mention stupid. A magnetic field is not just a river of metal. There are invisible forces at play that need to be taken into account and a person who can only rearrange matter has no business touching it.”

“You did it,” I reminded him.

“Yes, but I really wasn’t doing anything and… I’m always playing a larger game.”

“What are we going to do? The process of changing those cells down there could take days,” I admitted, checking on the progress of the remaining fragments of red.

The Last Christian rolled his eyes. “You’re slowing it down on purpose. Don’t pretend you’re not. Please don’t. This is a simple thing.”

“Then why are you hesitating to give the complete explanation?”

He thought for a moment and then gave in. “Fine. I’m the version who can create and destroy matter. I’m going to open a tear in space inside your perfect body. It will expose a small neutron star on the other side for a fraction of a second. Neutron stars have very strong magnetic fields. It will act as a magnet for our world by uniting our splintering core and flipping the poles all at once.”

“If you could have done that sooner, why didn’t you?” I insisted on knowing.

“I had a lot of people to kill who were very against dying. And you… I wanted to show you the depth of your transformation. It’s true that I could have done that using my own perfectly white body as the shield to protect this world from the radiation of the star six hundred years ago. Neutron stars are where heavy metals like gold and tungsten are formed. It’s a melting pot where matter is stewed at temperatures far above the hottest temperatures felt on a yellow star. When you were human, a sunburn could hurt you. Now, having a star in your chest is nothing. I won’t even need to heal you. You can absorb the radiation, protect your planet from it, and allow the star’s magnetic field to heal the planet.” He glanced down at the fallen walls I was supposed to be correcting. “Did that one just get redder? Beth, are you losing your nerve?”

My fingers trembled at what he was suggesting. “That seems like an extreme solution.”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to do it.”

My swollen eyes challenged him. “Is it?”

“Of course. There will be consequences.”

“Like what?”

“Natural consequences. Airplanes will crash. Who knows what they’ll crash into. Could be mountains. Could be buildings. Animals won’t know where to go when they migrate. They’ll end up in strange places, and miss protecting nesting grounds. Not just birds, but fish and wolves, and who knows what else? I can do it myself, but I’ll need some time to perfect my body. If you go through that mirror and take a stroll through the Red Forest in my body, you’ll see how far I have to go. The poles have been sliding for six hundred years, so they can probably slide a little more if that’s what you want.”

“That isn’t fair,” I complained sullenly.

He smiled, beautiful in the assurances he provided. “All this makes perfect sense and the only part of this that is unfair is how many shortcuts I’m offering. Think about this carefully. On the first level, you must achieve control of yourself. You are not fit to rule anything until you have control of yourself. I planted a mechanism inside you that changed the way you operate. Everything about you is transformed. Your fragile human brain is gone and in its place is a control room where if you want your body to do it, it is done. The gift extends to the second level where you think you were given the ability to rearrange matter. That was never the case,” he said with a somber headway.

“Then what? I’ve been commanding matter all this time.”

“Darling, what I’m saying is that I gave you the authority to rearrange matter, and then I taught you how to do it. Neither of those things is worth anything without the other.”

“The third level?”

“I didn’t give that to you because that is not something that can be given easily. Not only that, but it is not necessary for this exercise. Truthfully, you came further on level three then I anticipated. I planned to perfect your body, give you matter manipulation and move you directly to level four, which is what we are doing now.”

“You’re very generous,” I said numbly, thinking of the immortals who had been working toward level four for hundreds of years and had fallen pitifully short.

“What I’m suggesting for you is perfectly safe and will take under a minute. I do appreciate that it is a big jump for you, but I want you to learn how to take big jumps. I didn’t come here early to get you, to be with you, to take you to higher places only to let you fall to the same small-mindedness that is killing the immortals of this planet. Trust me.”

I looked in his eyes, the gray-green of his eyes. I didn’t realize before that confidence was green. His gaze went straight through me. “Fine,” I said, waving my hand and transforming the last of the red inside me to white in an instant.

The Last Christian didn’t move at all, but all the pieces that had been the walls of the fourth chamber flew into the air and made the stairs of a staircase up to an even higher level. Though the fifth pavilion was not yet there, there was now space for it.

He brought me close to him and placed his hand on my chest over my heart. “This is the moment when all my promises for us come true.”

What happened next took less than a minute, just as he said.

There was light. It was inside me. There was heat. It was everywhere, beyond me, and into the world outside me. I could feel it in my fingertips and out the ends of my hair. There was pressure. It was like delivering the sword, but the feeling was not concentrated in my throat. It was everywhere, but my body’s reaction to it was completely different. The sword had sliced my body with its edges, burned my insides with its heat, and had come straight through me. The star Christian introduced me to was something so much larger, so much hotter, and so much stronger. It was like knives hitting every cell in my body at once instead of just one attack coming from one direction like the sword. This came from everywhere and when the pain from my insides traveled to my skin, it broke against me. Like you were cutting a tomato that was suddenly made of rock.

In an instant, I learned I could push it back. The pain stopped and the light from the star shone inside me like I had become a lantern. The force of it didn’t even throw me out of the White Forest. Instead, I opened my eyes, saw the Last Christian, and saw his smile. He looked around at the White Forest inside me like he’d never seen it before and beamed.

“I love this,” he said softly. “I love all this. That should do it.” He snapped his fingers and the light was gone.

I leaned into his chest and put his arms around my waist. “It was all fixed, just like that?”

He nodded. “It was easy to fix. It was easy for someone like you to fix.”

“What goes up on that fifth pavilion?” I asked, looking upward.

“I’m not sure. I’ve been held back for so long, I’m not sure I can remember. We’ll have to find out together.”