“You must live, Toma.” Her mask shifted to Galina. “The both of you must.”

The dirigible blared for a third time. If I just sat here a little while longer, I could go outside and it would be as though nothing had changed at all, as though we’d never left the izba in the first place.

“There will come a day when you will die, my child.” Papa’s sibilant murmur passed over me like the wind through willows. He sank to a crouch before me, his mask’s beatific face raised skyward. As he wiped away my tears with his tattered wrappings, the hearth-light danced over his barren sockets and baroque-pearl teeth. There was nothing left beneath. “And when you do die, I pray that your bones will sleep undisturbed and hallowed. But if something draws you back to this world and you find yourself wandering as we once wandered, know that we will be waiting to brush the grave soil from your face and clear the moss from your mouth. Know that we will bring you home. And wherever you go from here, always remember—all that you love will return to you.”

As Mama and Papa led me to the door, a three-bell chime echoed through the izba, the sign of the dirgible’s approaching departure. The moment I opened the door, it was as though something seized hold of me, a force as irresistible as gravity that urged me across the threshold, beyond the shadow of the eaves.

I broke into a run, feet pounding across the gravel and dirt. The wind whipped at my face and threw my hair in a black banner behind me, its chill exhilarating me. I expected to spot the dirigible rising past the decaying forms of the nearby izbas, but as I neared, the airship remained earthbound.

“Vanya, we’re coming,” I shouted, and shocked myself by laughing. This feeling that spurred my heart into a frantic beat, the warmth flooding my face, the grin that tugged at my lips—this was joy. This was what it meant to return home.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began working on Bone Weaver during a period of self-discovery, after I had hit a dead end in researching my father’s side of the family and decided to look into where my mother’s family had come from. Ultimately, my new search just took me down a rabbit hole even more convoluted than the former, and I realized that when my mom said most of her ancestors had come from “Russia,” she really meant imperial Russia. More specifically, parts of modern-day Ukraine, Lithuania, and western Russia.

After hitting enough walls thanks to butchered transliterations, lack of records, and disappearing towns, I lost interest in the genealogy research, and instead became fixated on the absences—the circumstances that led to my mom’s ancestors immigrating to America during the 1900–1910s, the persecution and war that they fled, what life was like in imperial Russia, the political and social strife of that period, and the construction of identity and nationality. One thing led to another, and along with reading about imperial Russian and Eastern European history from the 1700–1900s, I also became deeply interested in Slavic (and to a lesser degree, Baltic) folklore, monsters, and superstitions.