by Matt Larkin
The Niflung king rose and backed away, dour, not taking his eyes from hers as she too rose, taking up Gramr as she did so. Brynhild swallowed, unable to beat down the hint of fear that tugged at her gut. Maybe it was better to just do it, for there could be no turning back. She grabbed the blade of the sword, heedless of how it sliced her palms or the icy cold that sent running up her arms.
She, the oathbreaker, would finally earn her own justice. And dare to hope she might somehow see Sigurd once more. With a sudden cry, she drove the blade into her chest.
It slid through with surprising ease, biting into her heart. At once, numbness spread from its bite. Her legs gave out from beneath her and she pitched forward, half aware as her fall drove the blade deeper, piercing out her back.
As light slowly dimmed.
44
The sorceress queen rooted through the ashes of Brynhild and Sigurd’s pyre, as Odin watched from across the Veil. So eager was Grimhild, she did not bother to check her surroundings nor wonder what vaettir might also be drawn to Andvari’s Ring. Odin didn’t know how long the queen had known of the ring or why she had made no move to claim it before now, but he could scarce let her have it, regardless.
No, while the ring lay amid the dead, no oath forbade Odin from claiming that for which he had done so many of his works.
And so, drawing upon Audr’s power, he pulled himself across the Veil and back into the Mortal Realm, swaying slightly as he did so, though stifling his grunt. Every time he performed such a crossing it cost him. Sometimes it aged him. Sometimes it sapped away his early memories. Sometimes, he knew he had paid a more subtle price, as the human part of him withered away and became more like the wraith upon whom he relied.
After what Audr had taken from him, he used the power only with the gravest of care.
Steadied at last, he removed the glamour concealing his spear as a walking stick, then trod toward the Niflung queen. She’d come alone, in the middle of the night, without anyone to watch her stealing from her dead children-in-law. A fine plan, had she been alone in the night.
“Shall I tell you the future of your line, sorceress?”
Grimhild spun abruptly on him, ash-covered hands going to a dagger at her waist.
Odin smirked at her pathetic defiance. This sorceress had once been like a goddess of mist, calling upon fell powers of Niflheim Odin had barely understood. The real irony was, her own treachery and cruelty toward her kin had wrought her undoing.
He could see it on her face as she warred with the idea of calling for guards. As she realized there was no chance anyone would reach her before he skewered her. Yet still, the proud queen did not want to surrender. Not to him, whom even her mistress so loathed.
Odin shook his head. “I’ll tell you, because I want you to go to Hel knowing all you have built has ended utterly. You see, I kill you now.” He nodded in feigned sympathy. “In desperation to hold his failing empire together, your son Gunnar bargains away Gudrun in marriage to King Etzel of Hunaland. I suppose we can assume he considered it punishment for her, as well, for murdering Hogne.”
Grimhild looked as though she wished to deny it, but instead just stood there, trembling and transfixed, as he’d known she would.
“She’ll try to resist,” Odin continued. “It will not avail her, nor Gunnar. No, he’ll send her all trussed up to marry Etzel and try to maintain his throne. But Gudrun will hate him and hate Gunnar for forcing it upon her. Etzel’s ambition knows no bounds, as seems ever the curse of kings, and he’ll thirst for the gold that was Sigurd’s. Thus, he’ll draw Gunnar to him and betray him, leaving him to die in a pit of writhing serpents.”
“No …”
“Oh, yes. Within the passing of a few winters, he’ll feed Nidhogg. And Gudrun herself … well I wish I could say her suffering will end soon. But Etzel is hardly the last of her woes. In the end, I see her taking her own life, imagining that even the torment that awaits her at Hel’s doorstep would seem a reprieve from the anguish of her life.” Odin closed his eye a moment. A long, long time ago he’d loved Gudrun, though her potion had engendered that love. Still, he hated to imagine what would befall her in life, much less what awaited her in death.
He shook his head as he opened his eye. “Well. She’ll be a while before she joins you. But in the end, even her children will be dead. And after thousands of years of power, the Niflungar will at last be broken. All the heirs of Naefil will be dead. In time, men will forget you ever lived.”
Now he advanced on her with the spear. “To which of your many crimes should we trace the origin of this tragedy, great queen? The deception of Sigurd? The abuses you visited upon your own children? Or perhaps your greatest miscalculation lay in sending Ymir to kill my father!” Odin rammed the spear through Grimhild’s sternum, hefting her up off the ground. He held her aloft for a moment, staring into her hateful eyes, relishing the pain and fear there.
Then he planted the shaft in the ground.
In her helpless flailing, Grimhild only managed to sink deeper upon it as she died. Odin spared her no more thought. Grimhild may have executed Hel’s will that day, but the goddess of Mist herself lay at its source. And one day, Odin would see to her as well.
Before that, he needed the ring.
Thus he fell to his knees and dug through Sigurd’s ashes. Prescient visions had revealed this moment many times before. He knew exactly where to dig because it was where he had always dug. The ashes were still warm enough to prove uncomfortable, but little more. He flung them aside until his finger brushed over the rose gold ring.
Andvaranaut. Andvari’s Gift. The ring with the power to break through any barrier, to carry him between worlds.
Odin’s hand trembled as he slipped the ring on his finger.
The others who had so recently borne this had no idea, none whatsoever of the power that rested on their hand. Odin had seen this moment so many times, unfolding in his prescient visions since the day he drank from the Well of Mimir. All of it had led him here. And, as in those same visions, he could not steady his breath, could not suppress the murmur in his chest. An almost overwhelming power seemed to seep into him.
Rising, he embraced the Sight and looked through the Veil into the Penumbra.
You risk everything …
Yes. Yes, he would risk everything for the chance to get back to Freyja. Because she was his soul mate. But even were she not, still, the Vanir held the key to victory at Ragnarok, he knew they did.
Stepping through the Veil was not quite like being pulled through by Audr. Rather, cloying shadows seemed to cling to him like cobwebs as he tried to move forward. The chill from the grave rushed through him at the touch of such an etheric barrier, sucking light and life from him, until, of their own accord, the shadows drew him into their world.
Though lit as by starlight, the Penumbra lacked color, everything instead cast in cold, muted hues of gray and midnight blue. No matter how oft Odin looked into it nor even stepped here through Audr, he’d never quite become accustomed to the oppressive darkness. It was an emptiness, a hunger that gnawed on souls and memories and left those who lingered here hollow shades.
But it didn’t matter. Odin had no intention of staying here. No, he was bound for a world of light, the World of Sun. Alfheim awaited him. In the sky, it glittered like a star. A heretofore unreachable sphere of crystal far above the Penumbra.
Odin strode forth, toward that star, and hateful whispers built into a chorus all around him. Ghosts and darker entities felt it, as he warped reality with Andvaranaut. The sky folded upon itself and starlight magnified in a streak that unfolded before Odin’s feet, an iridescent rainbow of color in stark contrast to the monochrome that infused the rest of this realm.
As he trod upon the bridge—and it was solid beneath his feet—he dimly wondered if the projection of this bridge, or the similar one guarded by Heimdall, was a literal one, or if perhaps his mind perceived this as a bridge of shifting colors because it could not otherwi
se interpret his passage through a nonphysical space.
Such musings fell away as reality blended with the prescient visions he had so long foreseen. Indeed, even the shadows below gave way to a swirling miasma of stormy colors, a picture of reality without material form. On and on he pushed upward, toward Alfheim. With each passing step that light grew a little brighter, until the radiance before him grew overpowering, brighter than white. Brighter than he had ever seen the sun, scorching his eye and leaving him blinded.
Odin was left gasping as the ground beneath him turned pliant, and he sunk to his knees, blinking away the brightness, vision slowly returning. Before he could see, he heard the rumble of a waterfall, and closer, the chirp of hundreds upon hundreds of birds.
He knelt on a grassy knoll, overshadowed by a tree massive enough to dim the radiance of the sun and make it bearable. Through the canopy, though, pierced rays of light of such intensity they seemed almost physical strands dotting the hillside. Not only bright, but too close. The sun was too close to the land here, leaving little doubt he had, at long last, reached the paradise of Alfheim.
Ahead lay a forest of trees that glittered in the light, glistening as though soaked with raindrops. Amid those boughs sat birds of every color of the rainbow, uttering their chittering cries. In past lives, Odin had stood in rainforests, and even those seemed to pale in comparison to the barrage of color and variety of life that had exploded around him.
A river cut along between this hill and another, coursing steadily, its waters reflecting the blinding gleam of the sun above. Palm trees like those of Asgard dotted along the banks before giving way to the denser foliage of the rainforest.
Blinking and shielding his eye with the back of his hand, Odin rose and made his way down to the river. Some plants actually grew right from the waters, oft sprouting flowers of brilliant shades.
The river must run to the falls. In his visions he had followed its course, so he did so now, knowing it must soon lead him to his objective. There would be liosalfar cities somewhere in this world and the Vanir must have taken shelter in those very cities.
Both the birds and monkeys watched him from the edge of the tree line as he made his way along the shore. Sometimes they leapt from branch to branch, even following him for a time, curious about the strange interloper.
And how strange he was.
Odin loosened his cloak and then the laces of his tunic. Sweat plastered his hair to his face and he longed to remove his hat, but it offered at least some shield for his eye against the brutal sun. This world was hotter than Asgard. Hotter even that Odin’s past life memories of rainforests and his time amid jungle islands.
The river led him into a plateau where the waters plummeted into a chasm deeper than he could make out. Indeed, water poured from all directions into the void, a cascade of falls that ought not to have existed and seemed to defy laws of nature. Whence came so much water? Yet the falls continued to flow, the sound of their roar drowning out all other noise in this strange place.
A great mist rose up from the chasm. Not a cold, fell seeming mist like that which saturated Midgard, but a clean one, a pure spray from the crashing of water.
Across the gap rose great marble columns perhaps eighty feet tall. They ran off into the rainforest beyond the falls, perhaps leading to a city, but Odin could see no way across and his prescient visions had not prepared him for what to do from here.
So much of the ground around him was taken by the rapids, so he chose his footing with care, wending his way along the plateau. In the far distance, he at last spied a bridge spanning the chasm.
He made his way toward this bridge, smiling. For who would not smile given such warmth and such natural splendor? Indeed, he suddenly found himself wondering if the Vanir he’d sent here would actually be willing to leave. A supreme irony, really, if most of them refused his offer to bring them back to Midgard.
The bridge was carved from white stones tightly fitted together in blocks and rimmed with marble rails that, despite the moisture in the air, seemed pristine and hardly eroded in the least. Odin stepped on it, recalling his visions of doing the same. This bridge carried him over the tumultuous falls and he could not help but pause midway to gape at the glittering wonder all around.
Light saturated everything here, from the trees to the waters, to the vibrant animal life. All Alfheim seemed suffused with primal energy and warmth.
Beautiful though it was, still Odin had not come here to bask in wonder, but to find Freyja. Toward that end he had waited seven decades. He would wait no longer to find his lost love. So he pushed on, coming to the opposite side of the gap and there found another set of columns forming an aisle for him to follow.
Standing beneath the giant marble edifices, Odin could not help but feel tiny in their shadows. Did the liosalfar build them? If so, why? What purpose to columns that supported no roof? Of course, Odin well knew the folly of trying to ascribe mortal reasoning to vaettir, but still, the question taunted him.
Regardless, his visions pulled him ever onward, like walking in a dream he had dreamed so many times before, mesmerized by his own footfalls on the soft forest floor. Along the path of columns he trod until he came to a path that branched away from them, and this he took, knowing only that he had always taken it, would always have taken it. It called to him.
Indeed, a song had begun to fill the rainforest, not of birds, but of voices carried on the wind, high and melodic, and somehow ethereal. Odin wandered along this path until he came to a lake where a half dozen women were bathing, and where she would come to him. Not Freyja, he hadn’t seen her here. Did he meet her later? For he must meet her, this he knew without doubt.
The women spied him, standing there waiting, and their song drifted away, though none of them seemed the least bit abashed at their nakedness. One of them cocked her head to the side and then started for him, a deep skinned, beautiful woman he’d known so very long ago.
“Idunn.” He didn’t recall noticing before, but her eyes seemed to glow, as if tiny suns lurked behind them. Time had somehow changed her. Even her skin seemed slightly luminous.
The woman didn’t speak, but rather stooped to grab a sheer white dress that she slung over her shoulders. It had no sides, but belted in the middle, offering a hint of modesty, if only a hint. Despite her unabashedness, he was left with the memory of her being the granddaughter of his own past life, and thus found himself squirming at her manner.
Idunn studied him not as a friend, but as a hawk might look at a mouse. Almost like she might intend to attack him. “Time has not been kind to you.”
If aught, her voice seemed more musical than before. “It was a rough ride to find you here.”
“If you wanted to find me, it might have proved more expedient to not cast me into another world.” A sharp edge underlay her words, like a knife hidden in a flowerbed.
Odin flinched at her reproach. “I never wanted to hurt you, nor Freyja. I took the only step I could see that would achieve our ends with the minimum of life lost.”
Idunn chuckled, the sound darker, more wrong than any he’d ever associated with her. “Our ends?”
“You were the one that asked me to overthrow the Vanir.”
Her smile grew painfully bitter. “I did not ask for this.”
Maybe it had been too much to hope for that the Vanir would be pleased with this world. A fool’s fancy in thinking he would not face judgment for his actions. Odin could do naught save sigh and shake his head in weary apology.
Idunn, though, took his hand and guided him away from the lake and back into the forest. “I think you have no idea, really, what you’ve done. How living in this place for so long has changed us. Alfheim has seeped into our bodies and souls and made us not so very unlike the liosalfar themselves. The radiance flows through us now, and our humanity already … it fades, bleached out by the merciless sun.”
“You live with them?”
“Some of us interbred with them, in fact.
And the distinctions between us have eroded.”
“Is it truly so terrible then?”
Idunn spun on him. “Would it be so terrible for you to think you had become like a denizen of Niflheim? They are vaettir, Odin. They are not like what you … what we were. The millennia the Vanir lived had already blurred some of that line, but what you’ve done has all but destroyed it.”
“You’d compare the beautiful liosalfar to the snow maidens?”
She shook her head and turned about, arms spread, inviting him to take in all the world. “You think that where there is light there cannot be cruelty? We are still in a place that is not a place, far removed from the reality we once knew.” Idunn sniffed. “And sometimes the brightest light only serves to conceal deeper darkness. This seems a paradise, doesn’t it, Odin?”
“Yes.”
“But it is both more and less than that.” The woman pointed off into the wood. “I do not think you came here for me. The one you seek has her own hall in the Redwood Grove south of the city.”
“I … I did come for you.”
“In part, perhaps, but if so, a small part. Have we not been through too much together to begin lying to one another?”
Odin let a hand fall on her shoulder. He wasn’t lying. He’d always planned to bring her home as well. “Come with me, Idunn. Let us find a way to leave Alfheim together.”
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “There are boundaries I dare not cross over. You must go alone.”
Though he could not quite understand her dismay, Odin felt his chest clench at it. At seeing Idunn, of all people, teetering on the brink of despair. He had brought her to that. Which meant he alone must work to save her from it.
First, he’d find Freyja. Then he’d fix all else he had done.
The trees Idunn had called Redwood Grove had not only red-tinted trunks, but their very leaves seemed painted in a thousand hues of orange and red, as if the canopy above Odin’s head was aflame. Here, the monkeys and birds had fallen silent and all but vanished, leaving him in eerie silence broken only by the leaves crunching under his own feet as he trod forward, and by the faint murmuring of a creek somewhere in the distance.
