I - Lucidity

"What do you think of this one, daddy?"

Michelle placed another of her drawings on the table, completely ignoring the breakfast in the way of her exhibition. It was another of her dream sketches; after we moved, Sarah encouraged her to draw her dreams every morning. Apparently, it somehow helped her young mind cope with the sudden changes of being dragged halfway across the country. I didn't really understand it, honestly, but Sarah was the psychologist, not me.

Her tiny, blue eyes sparkled in the reflected light of the morning sun, searching desperately for my approval. I was exhausted - Sarah was still brewing our morning coffee - but I mustered the best smile I could conjure and picked up my daughter's drawing.

There was egg yolk smeared on the back of the page.

It was some kind of animal; a smaller shape on the bottom that looked like a kind of body, with a long neck ending in a round head. It had two, yellow eyes and what looked like some kind of beak. All of that, obviously, was my best attempt at constructing a coherent image out of my nine-year-old daughter's scribbles. "That's really good, sunshine. What is it?"

She was young enough to miss the subtext of the statement - I didn't know what she had drawn - but even then, I didn't know it would have deterred her. She was grinning, ear to ear, as she snatched the page out of my hands and pressed it against her chest.

"It's an owl! Isn't he beautiful?"

"So you've already decided that the owl is a 'he?'" I grinned as I spoke, "Isn't that being a little presumptuous?"
Michelle donned a mocking frown and stomped her foot, "No! Or... yes! Don't you sass me, mister. I'll send you to your room."

I had to restrain myself from laughing, barely keeping my intricate facade intact. "You didn't answer me. How do you know that he's a boy?"

"You can hear it when he talks. He has a deep voice, like a lion!"

"So, it's an owl that sounds like a lion?"

"Yeah! Now you understand!"

"And what did he say?"

Her face contorted with focus; she was trying intensely to remember what had happened in her dream. "I'm pretty sure that he said.... To fail the dissertation!"

My brow furrowed, what was she talking about? I didn't have any graduate students defending this semester - but even then, why on earth would she tell me that? I looked over to Sarah, who had come to a stop in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, "Did you hear what Michelle just said?" She nodded.

"Do you have an explanation?"

The gears in Sarah's head turned for a moment, "I don't know, Jon. Maybe she's feeling ignored with how much you've been working?" A fair theory; I had been spending a lot more time on campus than I used to before we moved.. She had likely overheard me talking about a dissertation, and figured that was what was taking all of my time.

I rotated in my chair, bending over to look into Michelle's soft, blue eyes. "Have you been feeling lonely, sunshine?"

She frowned slightly, then slowly nodded her head.

I didn't have to conjure my second smile, "Then how about I pick you up early from school, lets go down to the park. Would you like that?"

Needless to say, she did.

II - Free Will

Three swift knocks came at my door; I put down the book I was translating and shouted, "It's open!" A moment later, the door opened - it was Dr. Matthew, one of the other professors in my department. "Hey Jon, sorry to interrupt, but, do you have a moment to talk?" We had never really been friends, nor were we enemies - we were just indifferent to each other. Never had a reason to be anything else. I marked my page in the book and closed it on my desk, "Sure, what can I do for you?" Matthew quickly took a seat in one of the leather chairs in front of my desk, "We've had a problem, a bit of an emergency. You've published work on Swedish folklore, right?"

Cautiously, I nodded as I spoke, "A few papers when I was a grad student, but mostly about translation difficulties, if I remember properly." Matthew's face lit up, "Perfect! Absolutely magnificent! The department is in immense need, and you are uniquely placed to rescue us from our plight?" Still reserving my response, I waited for him to continue. "Dr. Lukas had a heart attack last night; he's at General, but they don't think he's going to make it." He paused, as if expecting me to understand where he was going with his strange anecdote.

"Do you want me to bring him flowers?"

Matthew laughed, "No, but you're aware of that doctoral student, Edward Stewart, is about to present his preliminary dissertation today, and without Dr. Lukas, he won't be able to. I won't involve you in the bureaucratic details, but it will suffice to say that, unless he gives it today, he'll have to wait another year before he can." He attempted his most emphatic, pleading look, as he continued, "I know you don't have to, but we would be incredibly indebted to you if you would sit on the panel. Edward's work is actually on some unusual translations of Swedish folklore, so it's right up your alley. The best part is his research - if it gets completed, it's going to change the history of our entire field. Its importance cannot be overstated." He paused, letting his words hang in the air.

"Please, Jon, will you just give us a few hours of your time?"

Half an hour later, I was sitting in one of the dusty classrooms in the archaeology department's main building. It was on the north side of campus, and I rarely ventured that far from the language department. Still, I was there, with four professors that I had never really cared to socialize with. Matthew was one of them - the other three I didn't recognize.

As soon as the student entered the room, I realized exactly why Matthew had needed me to come. The whole "we need another professor or we can't do it!" line seemed incredibly fishy to me, and when I saw the faces of the other professors, I realized why I was there.

Of the four professors, it was obvious that two of them did not like Edward - Matthew needed me to give the tie-breaking vote that Dr. Lukas would have cast, had he not been hospitalized. I made a mental note to myself of Matthew's manipulation, and filed it carefully away.

Edward only took a few moments to set up his materials; after he was done, he quickly handed hard copies of his final paper to each of us. The other professors had obviously already read it, so I quickly thumbed through it to have at least a general idea of what we were going to be talking about.

Edward's face was confident, sure of himself, when he began to speak.

"Thank you for coming, in the next few minutes, I plan to upset everything we thought we knew about Swedish folklore. Specifically, about death deities." He notated locations in his research paper as he continued to speak, "As you are certainly familiar with, one of the most enigmatic figures in Swedish folklore was the Raven spirit, who was portrayed often as a harbinger of death and disease. No oral records of him remain, only written narratives, and the stories are highly inconsistent. This is because everything we know about the Raven spirit is actually, itself, a translation of an even older story."

On the projection screen behind him, images began to flash.

"You can see in this traditional, wood carving, one of the most well-known stories about the Raven, in which he steals the body of a diviner to punish the child of a sorcerer." Old symbols on wood, with certain areas highlighted in yellow. Before I could start to mentally translate the obscure dialect, he had already changed the slide.

"Now, here is the same story, older, and written on a tome-stone." The same story, with minor differences, appeared on the screen. The highlights indicated similar points in the narrative and, like the previous slide, vanished before I could translate the entire thing.
"But, as we trace this story as far back as it can be followed, we notice a strange substitution begin to happen more frequently as the texts get older." More images flashed, all taken of old, stone engravings - runic symbols and strange patterns.

"The Raven is no longer a deity, but is described as a servant of an older, more powerful being. This deity is described as a 'great owl' with a 'thousand-clawed shadow.'" Another image appeared - poorly drawn by whatever man had tried to sketch it thousands of years before. It was like an owl, but with the horns of a bull and a long, curved neck. "What you are looking at is a being called, 'Ayroh,' the Great Owl, and he is the missing link in creating a comprehensive Norse pantheon, which has always been incomplete because of the lack of a truly defined 'death deity.' After this presentation, I aim to convince you that he is not only a powerful force in the pantheon, but that he is most likely the central figure of all Swedish myths."

My eyes fixated on the image on the screen, the black owl with the long neck. There were ravens, swarms of them, coming from his shadow, and surrounding him like a fog.

His eyes were yellow.

I felt an elbow nudge me; I looked to the side to see Matthew looking at me emphatically. Edward was long gone, and I was alone in the room with the other professors. My eyes glanced down at the papers in front of the men around me - two had voted to accept the paper, and two had voted to fail it. The tie-breaking vote was mine.

I looked down at the paper, and I felt a faint coldness touch the back of my neck.

I brushed the feeling off, and wrote at the bottom of my analysis.

"Pass."

III - White Throne

Michelle was barely awake when I laid her down in bed; an afternoon spent rampaging around the local park was enough to completely exhaust her tiny body. She was smiling, just like she had been since I walked into her classroom and checked her out of class early. After the dissertation meeting, I convinced the Language department to let me cancel the rest of my classes for the day.

It was already dark outside - we had gotten stuck in traffic, behind some ugly accident, on the way home - and so, when I clicked the lamp off beside her bed, the entire room was plunged into darkness. Just when I reached the door, I heard her small voice chasing after me. "Oh, daddy, I almost forgot."

I stopped in the doorway, with the light in the hallway at my back, and looked in at my daughter's drowsy face. "You failed the dissertation, right?"

"Darling, why would I do that? Didn't I take you out today? Are you still lonely?"

She shook her head, awkwardly, against her pillow. "No, that's not it, daddy. The owl just might not be happy, that's all."

She was silent for a moment - when she spoke again, her voice was weak, "I just don't want him to yell at me again."

I leaned against the door frame, "Sunshine, you don't have anything to worry about. If you have any bad dreams, you should just come crawl into bed with me, and I'll make it all go away."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"I love you, daddy."

"I love you too, Michelle."

I left her door open and walked down the t-shaped hallway in the center of our house, opening the door into my own bedroom. It was dark, and I could see that Sarah had already gone to bed. As I sat down on the corner of my bed, I remembered that she was having a big conference at her clinic in the morning - I made a mental note to pick up a bottle of wine on the way home from work the next day. She would likely be exhausted, and whatever I could do to lessen her burden would be worth my time.

I quietly undressed myself and crawled into bed beside her. She shifted as I pulled out blankets up over my body; the stress of the next day was definitely taking its toll on her sleep.

Anytime she got stressed, her sleep cycle was always the first thing to go.

I shut my eyes and allowed myself to drift to sleep - peaceful, restful, calm.

In the middle of the night, I felt Sarah moving. She got out of bed and, as I tried to focus my sleep-blurred eyes on her, stumbled out of our bedroom and into the hallway, likely going to the bathroom. As I laid my head back on the pillow, I thought I saw something unusual out of the corner of my vision. It looked like Sarah went left in the hallway, instead of right, towards the bathroom. The left hallway was a dead end; there was nothing down there but Michelle's bedroom.

After a few minutes, Sarah still hadn't returned. She was a lighter sleeper than I was - maybe she had heard Michelle cry out in the night? My mind immediately went back to my last conversation with my daughter; I concluded that Michelle must've had a bad dream, and Sarah was in there comforting her. Another few minutes passed, and Sarah still hadn't returned.

Sighing, I threw the covers off of myself and swung my feet out of bed. As much as I wanted to go back to bed, I remembered the promise that I had made to Michelle. If she had a bad dream, I would make it all go away.

Groggily, I stood up out of bed and walked into the hallway. For some reason, my eyes were having immense difficulty focusing in the darkness - it seemed unusually thick, consuming. I had to place my hand on the wall as I maneuvered down the hallway, taking the left towards Michelle's bedroom.

Her door was open.

I peered inside, but I couldn't see anything at all - it was just too dark. Casually, I reached my right arm across my chest, and flicked the lights in the room on.

Michelle's bed was covered in blood, and Sarah was kneeling down beside it.

Sarah's head was bent backwards, hanging limply in the center of her back. Her neck was broken, and her wide-open eyes stared at the wall behind her.

Her hands were clasped around Michelle's head, covered in blood, and her fingers were buried inside Michelle's eye sockets.

I began to scream.

IV - Arrogance

The news called it a murder-suicide. Stress from her work built up inside her, and she just snapped. Killed her own daughter then took her life. They tried to play it up with the "this could happen to you!" angle; it circulated pretty strongly for a few weeks, and then everyone else gradually began to move on.

My university gave me indefinite paid leave, until I felt well enough to return to working. I didn't know if that would ever happen.
I remember that, on my last day there, Dr. Matthew knocked on my office door again. I didn't say anything, but he poked his head inside anyway.

"How are you doing, Jon?"

I stared at him blankly, "I'm alive."

He tried to manage a smile, and failed. "I'm really sorry to hear about Sarah and Michelle, there's never any way to prepare yourself for that kind of thing."

He was trying to be sympathetic, and, although I found him reprehensible, I wasn't going to bat away an olive branch, no matter how poorly offered. I was too tired to anything but.

I tried to manage something like conversation, "How has Edward been since his dissertation?"

Matthew frowned, averting his eyes, "Well, it's still an ongoing thing, you have to understand...."

"What? What are you talking about?"

He blurted the next sentence out as a jumble of words; he obviously was uncomfortable even discussing the subject.

"After he finished his presentation, he threw himself in front of a cargo train down at the shipyard. The police ruled it a suicide."
I was dumbfounded, "I'm...I'm sorry to hear that."

He shrugged defensively before he spoke, "They didn't even report his death; bigger news came out that night, and he was just swept under the rug. It's just been one of those years, hasn't it?"

I didn't know what to say; we stared at each other for a few more moments, and then he left.

V - Promises

I didn't sleep the night after I talked to Matthew. I just leaned my back against the wall at the head of my bed, and stared at my hands in the darkness.

There was something to all of it, I was certain of it. It might have been my mind trying to draw connections where none were - there is no compulsion stronger in the human mind than to try to explain what has no explanation. That's where conspiracy theories come from, that's where delusions are born. That's where religions begin. It all goes back to men trying to explain something beyond them, that they can't fathom or even begin to. Men would look at the sun and, finding it unexplainable and fantastic, would decide that it must've been god.

I knew in my heart that there was no reason; Sarah had just snapped and taken Michelle with her. She might have taken me instead, but I'll never know. I will never know why she did what she did.

I don't know how long I sat there, staring at my hands in the dark. There was just nothing else that I could do.

I was alone.

Late in the night, I felt a weight, light and gentle, on the foot of my bed, and a strange coldness filled the room.

"He's yelling at me, daddy."

I looked up, and a pair of giant, yellow eyes stared back at me from the darkness at the foot of my bed.

They blinked once, and then were gone.