The Prize Worth Securing

The morning she was due to surrender her humanity, Astrid made sure to eat a hearty breakfast. She was lucky it was even a possibility this far out in the forest. Rationing had left her with half a cured sausage, a chunk of cheese from the last farmer she'd bartered with, and hardtack she softened with a foraged tea. It wasn't enrapturingly delicious, but it was more than serviceable to be her last meal in her current skin.

While eating, Astrid took care to check over her map. It had been filled out over the years to become more than the lousy vague thing she had started with. That was the nature of chasing myths. Anyone actually successful in achieving the goal of this endeavor wouldn't be motivated to go back and map their experience. Such tasks would be markedly beneath a god.

Astrid had spent a decade deciding how to go about achieving divinity which was, considering others with her ambition dedicated entire lifetimes to the task, a prodigious amount of time to come to a conclusion. Outside of tending to the family apiary, bringing honey to market, and growing the flowers necessary to ensure production, she had done little else. A husband had never been in the cards for various reasons, and her bees and sisters' children more than fulfilled any maternal stirrings she'd felt over the years. Outside her familial obligations, Astrid often took weeks of leave to either study old legends at the city academy or to explore the forests of the region. The map she now examined was littered with notes and marks from these excursions. In truth, it was third copy she'd had to transpose which was not terrible considering the rain and thorns and general wear the sorry thing had been exposed to.

Shouldering her pack, Astrid stood and kicked dirt over the embers that had boiled her tea. It was due to rain later in the morning judging by the heavy bellies of the clouds she could spy through the canopy. That might slow her trek, but Astrid's spirits stayed up. There was only one more place to look after all this time and she would know success by the end of the day. No other option existed.

And so the rain fell on her oiled cloak and Astrid's boots sought traction on the slippery underbrush. It was a steep downward slope to her destination which meant she clutched saplings with one hand while chopping brambles with the other. Those brambles were thick here so that she could not see if the goal was present until she was past them. After a point they were all she could hold on to to keep her footing, making Astrid grateful for her thick leather gloves. It was mid afternoon before her machete had cleared a narrow path, and so it came to be that Astrid stood at the bottom of a gully on the bank of a shallow pool. She stood for a moment to breathe— bleeding from where prickles had gouged her face and wrists.

A frog called from somewhere nearby, and Astrid set down her pack to rummage through it. With some difficulty, she pulled a sheathed dagger out from under her supplies. It felt strange in her hand, the hilt warm to the touch even through her gloves, and the sapphire in the pommel appeared to glow against the clearing's shade. The blade itself shuddered as she raised it, still sheathed, toward a crack in the rock face of the ridge she had just descended. From that crack ran the stream that filled out into the pool. There would be a spring in the cave, and she would need to prepare to face it.

Off came the oiled cloak and the gloves. Off came her skirts and boots and socks. Off came her shirt. The final act of disrobing was to remove the ribbon from her hair and let her mane it fall over her shoulders.

Naked, Astrid unsheathed the dagger and pulled a waxen pouch from her pack. This was all she could and would take into the cave, and the weight of both items put her at ease. Into the frigid water she waded until she found the center point of the pool. Here it came up to her mid calf and was somehow even colder than the first steps in. Under her feet, Astrid could feel a smooth stone. Tentatively she tested the space in front of her with a foot to find that it was also stone and cold as ice. It burned as she let her weight settle.

Assured she was going in the right direction, Astrid strode forward directly toward the opening of the cave. The muscles in her feet and calves screamed with the exertion against the cold. She bit her lip to bleeding and continued upstream. At the mouth of the cave Astrid had to duck to make it in and stoop even further with each step until she was in a low crouch. Her thighs, long used to strain, complained only mildly compared to the fire lower down. Someone lesser may have fallen backwards, but Astrid had trained for this, had spent days under waterfalls eating only honey, had crouched for hours at a time watching the movements of spirit hares and gauging ley line flow. She was her goal and her goal was her, and that gave Astrid nothing but forward momentum.

After traveling for long minutes in total darkness, the ceiling began to rise again and Astrid emerged standing at the very back of the cave. Here was the spring. Here was where Astrid was finally permitted to sit, lit just faintly by a circle of glowing sapphires embedded in the rock face.

She sat, legs crossed, in what may have been a puddle of water but that nevertheless burned her just as the stones along the way had. Dagger laid across her lap, Astrid reached into the pouch she'd brought and withdrew a chunk of honeycomb. This she set in the very center of the spring where she could feel the water bubbling under her fingers. Quickly, she withdrew her hand, took up the dagger, and waited. It took only a heartbeat for the stone walls to begin to buzz with no crescendo—immediately loud and encompassing. Stings pricked across her naked skin, hundreds then thousands of them on every surface exposed to the air. She could feel writhing in her hair and the pain screamed across her body. She tasted blood from biting her tongue. This too had been part of her training though it had hurt her heart to agitate her bees into stinging.

Just as Astrid was on the edge of losing her composure, a blinding light rose from the spring and filled the cave. Tendrils unfurled and reached for Astrid, but she held the dagger true and in two motions cut a cross into the heart of the luminescence. Shrieking, it began to fall away back into the spring, but a deft jab in the center of the cross rendered it skewered on Astrid's dagger. She pulled the blade out, dropped it, and grabbed what could be construed as the sides of the light with her hands even as it began to fade. She did not allow it to do so and instead brought the mass of light to her mouth and opened her jaw to the point of pain. In poured the light and tears sprang to the corners of her eyes with the stinging, burning, rawness of sensation. All of it passed her lips and Astrid closed her mouth.

It took ten heartbeats for her flesh to begin to melt away. It did not peel back in layers of skin alone— muscle and tissue together sloughed off the bone as smoothly as a wedding gown dropped from the shoulders of a virginal bride. Only her skeleton, glowing blue and bright, remained. The rest was washed away towards the pool, turning it red.

The being that had been Astrid could see the pool and the surrounding forest as clearly as if they were in front of her— just as it could see the city and the fields of home. It saw the flowers and the hives in neat wooden houses just as clearly as those in wild trees and in stalks of grass or under the earth. Its body began to reconstitute itself around its bones in a spiral of hexagonal comb. Once complete, its wax flesh was as yet empty— waiting for life and honey to fill it. To do so, in flew thousands of bees of all kinds. Like a mist they descended on the body to wrap it in a new and writhing skin. With a consciousness still entrenched in the life the young god had only just shed, a single triumphant thought resounded throughout its being as it finally took to its feet and stood.

At long last— the family's honey would never again place second at the harvest fair.