by Matt Larkin
“Naught you can see,” Achlys said, her voice like a whisper, seeping from her lips into his mind. Timid, and yet so immense he had to wonder if she could kill with the force of her words alone. Mist seeped from her mouth as she spoke, vile and no doubt toxic. “Invisible chains bind me, nonetheless. Keuthonymos and Hekate wrought their treachery with exquisite care, such I would almost have to admire, circumstances being otherwise.”
Hekate?
“Hel, if you prefer. Rangda. Milu. Anput. Whatever she wishes to call herself. As if she were truly one of us, she is host to myriad names, down through the eras. But we are older still, and we saw when your kind first rose from the seeds.”
Seeds? Was she deliberately speaking in riddles?
Hermod opened his mouth, but words failed him. His tongue felt frozen solid, so dry he could scarce move it.
“You wish to know what holds me here, on the threshold of Hvelgemir, where Hekate can gorge herself on eldritch power she does not fully understand? The bindings stretch along the roots of Yggdrasil. Six seals that hold me here and thus offer her a limitless font of vigor from which to draw on. One here, in my world, my followers have already destroyed, as well as the one guarded by Nidhogg. But the other four lie in worlds not so easily reached by my children.”
Hermod felt as though his skull would crack and burst apart from the concussive energies buried in her sibilant voice.
“In your world, beyond the Veil, lies one seal. Another rests in the hateful World of Sun, and in the equally loathsome World of Fire. The last, in the World of Storms.”
Hermod pressed his palms against his temples, desperate to keep the pain contained within, and yet further to keep from saying—or even thinking—aught which might offend this entity. He could not imagine the audacity that Hel had in thinking to bind Achlys. Yet … his bargain remained with Hel, not with the Elder Goddess.
Perhaps she heard his thoughts, or perhaps not, but she leaned forward, twirling her fingers—and a spiral of mist—beneath his chin.
“You, child of a psychopomp, can pass between Realms and between worlds. You can walk in sunlight and stand the presence of fire. You can go where no other can.”
“No.” Growling out that single word felt like lifting a mountain. Any defiance of her will seemed utter madness.
But then, Achlys was the Goddess of Mist. Madness was her purview.
“I have other tasks to attend to. Only when those are done will I consider your …” Request sounded like a poor choice of words. “Plight.” Speaking took so much out of him, he slumped down, catching himself with his hands.
“Refuse me and I shall have Keuthonymos seize your body.”
“We … have a different … bargain.”
Besides. Keuthos couldn’t maintain control of him in Alfheim or Muspelheim. Odin’s tales made that seem fair certain. No, the Elder Goddess needed his willing help. And Hermod would not give it until he had returned to Midgard and fulfilled his pact with Hel. Until Sif and Baldr were released from her prison.
Fool …
No. He wasn’t going to break an oath, either.
“Then take him back to his fragile world,” Achlys said, at last. “Take him, and let him see what his oath buys him.”
At once, the pressure holding him down abated, and Hermod scrambled away, half running, half crawling back into the swirling mist. This was the power wielded by the bound Elder Goddess? He did not even want to think how terrible she must seem when freed.
We go to Naströnd now … Prepare yourself for the darkness that coalesces between the Realms …
Yes. And then Midgard.
22
It was far to the Norns’ mountain, through Bjarmaland and almost to the Midgard Wall, and Odin dared not rely too heavily on the Sight to help him avoid the Deathless legions, jotunn armies, or other dangers along the way. In desperation for speed, he’d risked taking a small ship—none would crew it for him, so he had to do it himself—from Rijnland up past the Jarnvid.
From there, he’d had to pass through the trackless winter wastes of Bjarmaland by dogsled. Some few vestiges of the former colony of Holmgard remained, and in those villages he’d acquired the dogs. In the past, he had ridden upon Sleipnir’s back to reach his destination, and the miles had passed in a dreamlike blur. Now, he’d have given almost aught to sit astride his old friend once more, claiming speed dogs could not hope to match.
They probably couldn’t see too far ahead, given the incessant snow flurries and mist. Still, he kept the dogs guided true. This much, he could trust to the Sight for.
With no one to discuss his predicament, he spent the miles touching the edge of the Sight for other purposes, as well. Yes, now he knew the trap of prescience, and thus he forced himself not to look too deeply, not to peer into the distant future and thus, to hope to prevent himself from becoming locked into any particular course.
You still assume that’s how this works … That your course was not set either way … That your very refusal to look does not also lie within the web of urd …
Odin grit his teeth, trying to ignore Audr’s grating sibilance along with his discomfiting point. Yes. Perhaps all of it, even this, fell within the Norns’ schemes. If so … if even such a plan as this had been accounted for … then perhaps he was truly powerless to change aught.
But.
But, there seemed one sure way to unravel their designs. To prove, to himself and to them, that free will was no illusion, that he could choose. Loki might have argued the fact that, because he did not happen to have made a given choice, did not mean he did not have a choice.
Odin wanted more than semantic validation of his existence.
How to prove the Norns did not control him?
Create a paradox. A decision, an action that so totally undermined a vision as to prevent it from becoming true, and thus, sidestep the truism that prescience must account for itself. Yet, he and Loki had long ago settled upon the agreement that he simply would not see aught which would create such a system.
It had seemed more palatable when he had not known the Norns were the ones pulling the threads. To know a mind, other than his own, governed the fabric of his life, created an enmity within Odin that he could not suppress, could not name, could not deny. Like an ember in the back of his mind, searing his brain, undermining every thought and deed of his existence.
Heavy snowfall caught in the bitter winds and whipped over his face. Twilight was settling in, and the dogs must surely be on the brink of exhaustion. His supplies for them had run low already, and, despite the light woodlands all around, game had become scarce.
Everything had begun to die in this Fimbulvinter.
Warmth would not return to Midgard. Not this time. Hel had thrown all her fury at the world. Odin had not yet foreseen the totality of her plan, nor could he keep his mind focused on the Queen of the Mists when yet direr foes lay soon before him.
After pulling the dogs to a stop, he leapt from the sled and sank ankle deep into fresh powder. Grumbling, he trudged over and loosed the dogs. “Go on. Hunt if you can.”
Beneath a weathered, dying fir tree, he cleared enough snow to make a patch of ground for a fire. Getting one started in this weather might prove impossible, but he had to try. Both he and the animals would be in need of the warmth this night. Besides, fire might keep snow maidens and ghosts at bay. Odin had no desire for their company.
He sniffed, striking flint in the hopes of drawing a spark. The wind swept away what few he got going. A mortal would have frozen to death days ago. Even now, Odin was not quite certain that urd was beyond possible. Maybe it was too much to hope for, in fact, to imagine he had already broken free of the Norns’ game simply by moving against them instead of against his foes in this world.
Indeed, he gambled now, desperately hoping they would show themselves in the mountain where he’d first met them. If not, he would have wasted this trip.
A paradox … he needed a paradox to begin to unravel th
eir web.
And if you unravel the very timeline …?
Odin groaned. “You mean if the web of urd … is the timeline? Is history?”
Yes … Break it … And none of us have the experience to harbor a guess what would happen … Suppose history collapses upon itself … The foundations of reality sucked into a maelstrom of nonexistence more complete than the Roil …
No. No, damn it. Odin refused to surrender, to give in, for fear of what might happen if he took a stand against the Norns.
You cannot change fate, Valravn said. Fate is fate. Even the greatest of spirits must bow to the eldritch powers that dwell beyond our Realms.
Odin didn’t bother responding to that. The claim was the very reason he was out here. Because he demanded to be in control of his own destiny. Because he refused to allow those he loved to suffer and die when he could do something to preserve them.
Loki had guided the course of history straight toward Ragnarok. But he was a slave to these Norns. Which meant, they wanted Ragnarok. They had worked, perhaps even from the time of the last eschaton, to bring history back around to this moment.
Naresh—Odin—had fought Hel and defeated her, at terrible cost, and so little of the world had survived their battle. And now, fifty-two hundred years later, it was all playing out once more. How many times had the world ended?
His memories were not so clear, but he suspected he’d always be there, in one incarnation or another, playing out these cataclysmic battles against Hel.
Fuck that.
One way or another, the cycle would end.
So give in … die …
Paradox. Yes, it came back to that. Whether or not Odin could find the Norns, much less defeat them, he had settled on one way of making absolutely certain their prophecies could not unfold as they had woven them.
Fenrir could not kill Odin, nor could Odin kill Freyja, if Odin first killed himself. Suicide. Let them resolve that paradox.
Perhaps Loki had felt trapped by their web for eons, but if so, he had clearly missed the one way out. Oh, Odin knew he’d be born again, spun out once more by the Wheel of Life. Except, if he wasn’t there to fight Ragnarok, if the Norns’ vision became impossible to fulfill, would that paradox then reverberate through the web of urd and …
Something drew nigh.
Embracing the Sight, Odin looked into the Penumbra, and yet, while he saw ghosts in the distance, none had wandered too close to where he still struggled to light a fire. So what …?
A woman moved through the shadows, luminous, and yet etheric. Odin blinked away the Sight and rose, grabbed Gungnir. Indeed, the woman, clad only in an unadorned, loose white dress that whipped about in the wind, drifted ever closer. She had white hair, and opalescent eyes, and her feet left no impression in the snow, though she appeared at least partially present in the Mortal Realm.
As she drifted closer, he could not look away from her face. It was … timeless. Like she was neither young nor old. A statue, with a billowing gown that blended with the mist and snow.
“Who are you?” he demanded, when she at last came to a stop some distance away.
“Dís. A warning.” Her voice was soft, sibilant, but not loathsome like Audr’s. Rather, distant, almost dreamlike. “Desist from your musings and return to the course of urd as it lays before you.”
Odin balked. They knew. “You serve the Norns. And if they sent you … does that not mean they fear I might succeed?” That Odin was, in fact, a threat to them. And why not? If the Destroyer could bring down dragons and vaettir and even Hel, why could he not break the hold of three old women?
“Desist. The only warning.”
Shaking his head, he pointed Gungnir at the apparition. Was Dís her name? A title? Well, it mattered naught, in the end. “I think I understand. You’re afraid of what will happen when I succeed. Well, allow me to send a message to your mistresses.”
The entity cocked her head to the side. Her mouth slowly opened too wide, her cheeks splitting apart into strands of sinuous flesh with horrifying gaps between.
What … the … fuck?
Now, Odin fell back a step, raising Gungnir higher.
The woman’s dress vanished like mist, though the flesh it revealed beneath was aught but sensual. Rather, it looked weathered, ancient, yet muscular. She jerked violently from side to side and her flesh began to rupture. From between her ribs crawled free four segmented appendages like the legs of a spider.
His mind screamed at him to strike now, before the madness continued, yet he found himself transfixed, staring in rapt horror at the spectacle.
Her eyes popped out, and in their place grew faceted, pupilless lenses.
The creature uttered a hideous, chittering growl, shaking her arms and legs and gyrating wildly.
The sound shook Odin from his paralysis, and he leapt backward, even as the creature flung itself airborne. The dís landed in the spot Odin had vacated, its spider arms lancing downward like spears that would have pierced him in four different places.
Odin lunged back in with Gungnir, thrusting, screaming in fury and absolute horror at the abomination before him. The thing batted away his spear with one hand and Odin scrambled away, even as it lunged in with another. A spider arm sliced upward, gouging his shin, and sending him stumbling away, barely maintaining his feet.
Another chittering roar that seemed to shoot through his mind and rend it into tiny pieces. Until he could no longer tell where the thing was. Or when.
Odin thrust Gungnir forward and hit naught save air. The creature’s form broke apart.
The entity was all around him. Her form blurred, seeming to occupy a dozen places at once. Places she’d been or was now, or would be, all in a mind-shredding blur.
Odin screamed, flailing wildly with Gungnir, desperate to keep it at bay. Audr and Valravn had begun to shriek within his mind, somehow sounding even more horrified than he was at this thing that jittered in and out of time.
In the most profound desperation, Odin tugged at his visions. A reflex. He caught images of himself melding with the afterimages—or fore-images—of the creature in a wild dance. Still shrieking, he moved in time with his own apparitions, fending off the abomination with desperate swipes of his dragon spear.
He was giving in to the visions. Allowing the tide of them to pull him back into the trap.
Or …
Gungnir clanged off a spider leg, sheared along it a moment. Then Odin twisted the spear and thrust up, burying the undulating blade inside the creature’s hideous maw. The dragon spear punched through the back of the abomination’s skull.
All blurred images vanished in an instant, leaving only a single, impaled monster. One that thrashed violently in some mix of convulsion and rage, before at last falling still.
Grunting, Odin placed a boot on its chest, then heaved the creature off his spear.
Immediately, it began to warp back into itself, like linens folded into a bundle, before breaking away into loose strands that vanished in the wind.
Odin slumped down to his knees. What the fuck was that?
He’d … he’d … given in to the visions. Played into the Norns’ trap … or he had used the visions against their own servant …
Of course. How else did one overcome an entity that existed outside of time?
So, then. Had he failed, or had he found the answer? A means of turning the very weapon of his enemies back upon them?
Either way, the Norns knew he was coming for them. And they were scared enough to have sent that thing to stop him.
Which meant, above all else, he was on the right track.
The one way to change the future.
23
Rustling came from behind the undergrowth, on the slope descending toward Yggdrasil. The sound had Thor spinning around, Mjölnir in hand, ready to smack down any wood jotunn fool enough to test his patience.
Only, it wasn’t a wood jotunn, but Tyr who came stumbling out, bruises still marring his face, cr
usted blood coating his beard.
“What the fuck, man?” Thor demanded. “You want another beating? You want me to rip off your other hand and slap you with it?”
Tyr spit. “Want to stop you from getting killed.” His words wheezed through his still broken nose. “Stop Odin’s last child from dying. Figure that’s worth doing. Even if you are a troll’s arse.”
Just looking at the thegn had those spots swimming before Thor’s eyes again. Man was … ugh, what was that word? Provocative? No. No, that wasn’t the word he was looking for.
These days, Thor couldn’t even remember what having his head working right felt like. Just so … Vexing! Like the damn thegn.
Thor pointed at finger at the man. “Now, look. I aim to smite every last trollfucking, arse-sniffing, bushy-browed jotunn from here to Thrymheim. You can either help, or you can watch.” Huh. “Or I guess you could leave. But what you can’t do is stop me. Mother’s ghost will rest easy knowing I sacrificed the army that murdered her.”
“Still figure you’re invincible, don’t you?” Damn, that wheezing grated on Thor. That, and Tyr shook his head like Thor was still a fucking child. Vexing bastard. Deserved to have that fastened as his name. Tyr the Vexer.
Thor glowered at him. “I’m going down to the valley and hammering my way through the jotunnar. Not hardly letting those jotunnar claim so much as an apple core. The way I see it, Mother is dead, Father’s away, and that makes me in charge of Asgard.”
“Asgard’s aflame.”
Thor threw up his hands. “Fuck, man! You want me to command it to stop burning? I mean to say, I’m in command of you. And I’m ordering you to help me break the jotunn lines. Are you with me?”
The thegn cracked his neck, then grimaced. “I’m with you. Not much chance of success, is all.”
Thor refused to believe that. Mjölnir was hungry, and he was going to feed the damn hammer.
“Would’ve helped if you hadn’t smashed my face. Right before such a battle.”
Thor shrugged. “It’s what I do. I smash faces. And skulls. And heads.”
