week 2
varuo
director: Inga Birgisdóttir
This week things get meta. Here’s a story I constructed about the video Inga Birgisdóttir constructed about Varuo, the second track on Sigur Ros’ album Valtari.
We were told never to venture to the steep cliffs of the fjord. The clans on the other side were hostile to us, and in any case there was no way to travel across it without going at least a day’s walk to the north where the river was shallower but the air more bitterly cold. Every day though, just as sunset was approaching, I would run through the small wood that lined our village and stand at the top of the cliff and wait for Hella.
I had met her on my third trip to the rocky hinterland, although I suppose you couldn’t call it meeting since we had never spoken. We simply saw each other across the river, her blond hair wrangled into two plaits framing her steely gaze. We were too far apart to shout, and at first I had thought we would have to communicate through meaningful stares and gesticulations, but after half an hour of silent communion, the sky darkened and she pulsed her Light at me. I realised the blasts of white were a code, the one the priest taught us to signal for trouble if we were lost in the woods. Name? I touched my hand to the pendant around my neck, the one that held my own Light, and replied.
We had talked since then, exchanged information about our villages which it turned out had similar tales – never to go to the fjord for fear of hostile tribes, lock-ins after dark. We dreamt, conspired of creating a bridge between the two cliff faces to link our islands.
On the tenth night, Hella told me of the book, one that contained an ancient magic that both our villages had spoken of but whose practice was expressly forbidden. We could each use our Light to make the bridge if we summoned the help of Shadows. I feared the destruction such magic could wreak if we performed it incorrectly, but she said she had read carefully and would guide me. We would not fail.
The following night we arrived as the sun began to set. I called up my Light and started running through the words of the spell that Hella had given me the night before. She followed with the second passage and our Lights danced a complex pattern of many rhythms. For minutes it continued, and I thought that perhaps she was wrong and the book was fabricated, but then several yards ahead of me at the peak of the cliff, the shadow of a rock began to shake itself loose until it unfolded into a figure exactly resembling my own shadow.
Behind Hella too, a shadow unravelled, and then another appeared on my side and then another on hers until we were joined by ten of them in all. All at once they touched their hands to their throats and their Lights emerged, flickering like ours, faster and faster until all were vibrating and my skin burned with energy. The lights were humming now, and I felt a wrenching pain between my third and fourth ribs, like the edge of a serrated knife tearing through my flesh. The Lights began to glow a bloody red. They rose, and the string that usually held my Light around my neck snapped and rose up with them. Across the way I saw Hella’s face contorted in a scream as her Light tore away from her body and rose with the others.
Our Lights were beyond the clouds now, out of our sight, and the shrieking subsided. The Shadows disappeared politely, one by one. Those on my side turned to me and bowed before they folded themselves behind the rocks and into nothingness; those on the other side did the same to Hella. Again it was the two of us, standing on opposite sides of the fjord. The snow had subsided so we could even see each other’s faces despite the hundred yards between us. Our Lights were gone so we could not signal to each other, but she passed me the message with her expression: Now we wait.
