It had to be a joke. A really bad joke. There was no way the ground of any area, whether or not it was magical, could bring a dead baby back to life. And a real goblin wouldn’t have given my father eighteen years, he would’ve stolen me right away, probably massacring the village as he did. Not to mention why would a goblin want me to think the Permafrost was my home, anyway? One of my sisters had gone into sudden labor and delivered her child at the creek, and no one was saying the creek was their home.

The same feeling of something wiggling in my mind again hit me. Like a memory just trying to reach the surface. But I couldn’t have because the sick shock to my system had me staggering outside of my home and retching onto the ground until there was nothing left inside of me. Funeral clothes. They were making funeral clothing for me, tailored for the harsh cold of the Permafrost, because that was where they figured I was going. To my death.

“I’m so sorry, my girl,” my father said, his hand on my shoulder. He rubbed my back as I continued vomiting until I was dry heaving on the cold, frozen ground. Hel, if I thought this was cold, then how bad would the Permafrost be?

“When?” I asked, my voice cracking with pain.

“On the next claw moon,” my father said. Both he and my mother embraced me.

Then I was falling again, and my eyes were open into the black void as my body slammed against the roots of the world tree. The roots reached far into the gap and high up into whatever stood above it, and lying on one caused an uneasy feeling—like I was staring into a mirror image. I was both right-side up and upside down, lying on blackness. From somewhere both above and below me, Hel’s voice echoed. “Each root represents a different path your life could have gone. Prove that the current path you’re on—the one which brings you so much insecurity, which brings you to free the shade of your worst enemy—is the one which your heart truly desires. Escape these worlds by root, by fang, and by iron, or stay in them forever.”

With that, my back hit another root and I was standing by the border of the Permafrost, dressed in the funeral clothes my parents had painstakingly made. White leathers, white furs, and an iron knife tucked deep inside the folds of my sleeve so that hopefully I could protect myself in the one way I knew how—protect myself from the goblin studying me with such intensity in his lilac-colored eyes that I wanted to take a step backward.