by Matt Larkin
“Hel?”
“Irpa! Poor girl. Such talent. Such promise, thrown all away because of her dark urges. Plays with the dead, I’m afraid. Hmmm.” Mundilfari blew out a breath and then looked more directly at Odin. “They offered me the throne, you know. I refused, wanted to keep to my research here.” He shook his head. “Obviously that was an error, and now I have to rectify it. In her desperation to win the war, Irpa just kept pushing farther and farther into the darkness. She saw something that moved her to it … maybe it was in the Well of Urd. There’s something … down there, I fear.”
Nidhogg? The dark dragon. Odin kept himself from saying it, though. Such knowledge would unnerve anyone.
“Well. Well, I’ll have to eliminate her now. Her self-indulgences are not the only reason we’re losing the war, but they are a reason, oh yes. Can you believe she wanted an army of Flayed Ones?” He scoffed as if it were more amusing than horrifying. “Her, and Mimir, both. They must go. Ah! Well, I’ll attend to Irpa myself. She was my protégée, so it seems only fitting. Then … then you and I will eliminate Mimir and find his well. Oh. What did you say your name was?”
Odin had made a point of not mentioning one, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to help Mundilfari go hunting for Mimir. Whatever had happened to him, he needed to get back to the present. This time was … too precarious. He couldn’t predict what ramifications any actions he took in this age would have. Killing Mundilfari, helping him … No. Whatever the Norns wanted him to see—if they had even intentionally sent him here—Odin wasn’t interested.
“I cannot help you,” he finally said.
“Of course you can. You must. You will.” Mundilfari waved Odin’s objections away as though he were speaking to a willful child, then rose and stepped around him, out into the hall.
Odin stood as well, but a wave of dizziness seized him, and he slumped back in the chair. The current washed over him, caught his mind, or perhaps his very soul, and rushed it out to sea. The torrent of it had him crashing down, tumbling from the chair.
He never hit the floor.
Rather, the stormy sea of time swept him up, yanking him back into the maelstrom, leaving Odin with only the desperate thought … a fragile prayer … to hope he could pull himself back to the present.
Reality melted away.
34
The war band of wood jotunnar had surrounded the hill, moving in and out of the tree line with ease, naturally blending with the environment. The shouting atop the hill left no doubt the jotunnar had cornered victims up there. And, given that woods surrounded the hill on all sides, those survivors could not risk a retreat.
Instead, wood jotunnar would slip in and out of the forest, peppering the desperate Aesir or Vanir with arrows, weakening them and draining their morale. Before a final slaughter.
Below the hill, Freyja and Syn crouched, watching for an opening. The wood jotunnar moved with almost feline grace in their native terrain, despite oft standing six or seven feet tall, with some specimens as much as twice that.
“Thrúd has to be up there,” Syn said.
Freyja didn’t disagree. “There’s no way to reach them without engaging the jotunnar.”
“We sneak past them.”
“We’re not sneaking past wood jotunnar. It’ll never happen. Every jotunn bloodline draws strength from a connection to a spirit world. The frost jotunnar are the most numerous because they get their power from the mists of Niflheim, which have breached this world. But wood jotunnar, they are keen in places like this.”
Syn pursed her lips and eased her sword free, as if to say that, when stealth failed, she had another option.
Freyja could handle a sword, though she didn’t consider herself a master. Nor did she like their odds against several dozen jotunnar, with only the two of them, and her without sunlight to burn for speed or Sun Striding.
But what was the alternative? Return and tell Thor they’d abandoned his daughter and all the other survivors? No. Even if Freyja could have done so—and the liosalf part of her was tempted—Syn would never agree. The Ás would rather die, sword in hand, than have her prince think her a craven.
“We wait,” Freyja said.
“Wait for what?”
“When they think the camp atop the hill ready to break, they’ll charge. That’s when they won’t be ready for us to attack their flank.”
Syn spit in the dirt. “And how many people die while we sit on our arses?”
Freyja sighed. “I met your husband, you know. In Svartalfheim. He was brave, too, and reckless. But not suicidal. If you want to be alive when he returns, this is the way. It doesn’t help your people, if you die before they even know you’re here.”
The shieldmaiden glowered at her, but did settle down on her arse, staring out at the woods.
Freyja did the same. Watching. Waiting.
Trying not to hear the screams from up on the hill.
They did not have overlong to wait. A chorus of jotunn war cries drowned out the cries of pain and fear from the Aesir and Vanir hiding atop the hill.
A rush of wood jotunnar charged past, still moving with ease through the woodlands, this time in a wild charge. Now, armed with spears and shields instead of bows.
Freyja and Syn rose together, each grabbing their swords. She looked to the shieldmaiden, who nodded.
And then they were off, chasing after the charging jotunnar.
Freyja dashed between trees, covering ground quickly, but not nigh so quickly as the longer-legged jotunnar. Damn, but she missed being flush with sunlight. She could have Strode out in front of them or increased her speed and raced past them.
Instead, she winced as battle crashed above her. With the tree line, she could not see what was underway, but she could hear it, as wood slapped on wood, as stone spearheads met shields. As men were thrown down by larger, stronger jotunnar they could not hope to match.
Syn outdistanced her, clearly drawing on her pneuma to do so.
Freyja might have preferred to save hers for the actual battle, but the shieldmaiden seemed intent to save as many lives as possible.
Without much concern for her own.
Syn ran up behind a jotunn who spun at her approach. Not fast enough, though. Her runeblade bit into the jotunn’s side, splattering brown blood even as it looked as though it hit ribs. The jotunn bellowed, pitching over. Syn’s backswing half severed his head.
The commotion drew the attention of three other wood jotunnar who broke off their charge and turned to meet Syn’s advance. Which was inspiring. Freyja couldn’t even hope to fell such a foe with the ease Syn had demonstrated.
Drawing her pneuma now, Freyja sprinted forward, sword raised in the hopes of pulling one of the three away from Syn.
Another jotunn slammed its shield edge first at Syn. The shieldmaiden savagely swept Gramr forward and the runeblade cleaved straight through the shield and took off the jotunn’s hand in the process.
Freyja winced, but had to divert her attention to the opponent before her. A female jotunn who led with a spear thrust Freyja had no way to block. She fell back, narrowly avoiding tripping over a root, and the spear’s point passed within a few hairsbreadths of her face. The next thrust she knocked aside with her sword, but the impact jarred her.
Even as she fell back again, the spearpoint caught her cheek and sliced along the bridge of her nose, gouging her face. Searing pain erupted along the wound, and her brow, and Freyja tripped, stumbling to the ground. Blood streamed down into one eye, half-blinding her. Only when she paused for breath did she realize she’d been screaming.
Before her, Syn went down, a jotunn spear rammed through her chest.
No!
Madness, charging so many jotunnar. They were dead.
She was dead.
She’d never see Odin again. Or her daughter or …
In an instant, the jotunn vanished, reappearing several paces away. Her spearpoint wedged into the ground. A moment later the jotunn stumbled forward
, then toppled to the ground as someone hacked at her back. As the jotunn fell, Freyja caught sight of Sunna, auburn-haired and furious, her skin glowing with sunlight, her eyes gleaming white. Her sword sliced into the jotunn again.
A breath later, she was there, yanking Freyja to her feet.
Oh. Syn! Freyja pushed around Sunna, but the shieldmaiden was already lying on the ground, abandoned by the wood jotunnar, three of which now closed in on Sunna.
Freyja allowed the other Vanr to interpose herself between the wood jotunnar and her. The bastards had killed Syn and who knew how many others. But Sunna had held the mark of Dellingr even before reaching Alfheim and becoming inundated with sunlight. Now, she was one of the strongest of the Sun Knights.
And those jotunnar would pay for Syn’s death.
A slight flash of light, and Sunna was among them, cutting across a jotunn’s abdomen. The blood hadn’t even began to spray when Sunna vanished cleaving down on the back of another’s skull. Moving so fast Freyja’s eyes couldn’t follow, Sunna was everywhere all at once. A blur of vanishing death, hacking through her foes like they stood still.
Her blade tore through throats, hacked out the backs of knees, and sent blood spraying in all directions. When she paused, five jotunnar dropped to the ground.
Only then did Freyja catch sight of other warriors racing up the hillside, engaging the jotunnar. Not liosalfar, nor Aesir, for they wore strange fashions and wielded shamshirs like those favored by the Serks.
They were Serks.
Except, faster than the jotunnar, and at least as strong, by the look of it.
Sons of Muspel.
Sunna vanished again, giving Freyja no chance to even ask how this was possible.
A hand grabbed her arm and she spun, then gaped at the woman before her: Eostre. Dark haired, with wheat-colored skin like so many of the First Ones had.
Freyja found herself stammering, not even knowing what to say. Odin’s banishment had not affected the few First Ones still on Vanaheim, but Freyja had assumed Idunn’s mother had died in the fighting. Had assumed all the remaining First Ones had.
Eostre pulled her aside, away from the fighting. “Let the Serklanders handle this.”
“H-how?”
The other woman guided her down the slope. “There’ll be time for that later. When we heard Vanaheim had fallen, I brought a ship here to save who I could. Not even the Sons of Muspel can hold out against so many jotunnar, though. They’ll break through the enemy lines, then we can retreat to the sea.”
Ignoring all propriety, Freyja threw her arms around her friend’s mother.
By the Sun, she’d thought she was dead. She’d thought they were all dead.
Eostre allowed them no rest on the trek down to the sea. Not even a moment to catch their breath. Ragged as the survivors proved—thankfully including Thor’s daughter Thrúd, as well as thirty-seven others—no one complained. No one spoke much at all, so ragged had they become. Panting, they trudged through what remained of the once lush forests, now smoldering embers. They sloshed through waist-high waters separating hills from each other, and plodded through slopes blanketed in frost.
Would this utter devastation last, or would Yggdrasil someday restore the islands to the paradise that had endured for millennia before now? Freyja dared to hope for the latter, even if she never got the chance to see it.
Freyja had paused to claim Syn’s sword, Gramr. The shieldmaiden had seemed almost invincible with it. Strange to think Freyja would never really know quite how the woman had fallen. Her rashness, without doubt, but more than that …
She shook her head. Such things didn’t matter. It was her mind racing, struggling to divert itself from the horror around her with inquiries, no matter how useless.
Odin had been right.
Another tremor ran through the ground. They had become more frequent, and she mused that she could hear Yggdrasil groaning from the strain. As if the World Tree writhed in pain, and, in so doing, had begun to rip apart the fabric of the world.
Ragnarok had come to Vanaheim … or Asgard. Either way, it was lost now. Ravaged beyond hope of repair, even could they have overcome Narfi’s army of jotunnar. As for the Moon Lord himself, thankfully no one had seen him. Even a band of the Sons of Muspel would find themselves hard-pressed to overcome such a foe.
Freyja sighed, shaking her head. Od had done so much to prevent this, and he had failed. Four hundred years spent trying to avert this end. And what had he to show for it?
Ashes.
The mist had intruded into Vanaheim’s former sphere of protection, brushing over the beach, as if not even Yggdrasil could hold back the poison vapors whilst the land around it lay so besieged. Standing at the ship’s bow, Freyja peered back at her beloved islands and could not even recognize them.
Never, in her thousands of years, had she seen so many leaves fall from Yggdrasil at one time. Nor had she ever imagined this island paradise could lie destroyed.
Visible tremors shook all the islands and sent the waves surging against the ship, tossing her so violently she had to grab the gunwale to steady herself.
Before her eyes, one of the tiny islands created by the flooding—a hill, really—split in half and caved in on itself. A terrible cloud of debris sputtered out.
And then her ship drifted further into the mist, and Freyja could no longer see Vanaheim.
She pushed her palm into the burning cut between her eyes. Part of her wanted to weep, though liosalfar no longer seemed capable of it, or at least not with the ease with which humans could release their pent-up sorrows.
“Freyja,” Eostre said behind her. “Let me tend to that.”
Freyja turned to see the First One standing close, a strap of linen in her hand. The woman poured water from a skin over the cloth, then dabbed at Freyja’s filthy gouge. As an immortal—twice over now she was a liosalf—such a wound would heal, probably with little or no scar. But she appreciated the thought behind Eostre’s ministrations.
Thrúd believed Eir, the Aesir’s best healer, had perished with Vanaheim.
In the glory days of Vanaheim, Eostre would never have deigned to treat someone’s injury like this. Perhaps her time wandering Midgard had changed her.
“What happened to you?” Freyja asked, when the other woman withdrew the cloth.
Eostre leaned her hip against the gunwale, opened her mouth once, then shook her head. Finally, she sighed. “Odin punished me. He claimed the Vanir had failed in their duty to mankind. He sentenced me to take up my mother’s quest to help mankind.” Eostre smiled, shaking her head. “I did, with Bragi at first, before he found his own way to Alfheim.” The woman sighed. “For so long I resented Odin, thought him the epitome of arrogance to presume to task me thus.”
“But?”
“But I think, maybe he was right. I wanted to try to drive out the mists, as my mother and my daughter had hoped to do. Eventually, I came to Serkland, where the caliphs used Fire vaettir to achieve just that end. An imperfect solution, of course, but I thought it a start. And they honored me, sought my insights and knowledge.”
“Hmmm.” Freyja’s throat was dry. She had to tell her, of course. Only the thought of doing so had her stomach churning. “There’s something you need to know. Something … about Idunn.”
35
Quetzalcoatl’s Temple of Winds was an enormous step pyramid with—thankfully—no one around it. At the summit, Hermod stared down into a swirling vortex of wind that occasionally crackled with lightning. A walkway below allowed him to drop down and pace the perimeter of that storm.
The buffeting air currents seized his clothes and hair and sent them whipping about the moment he landed on the walkway. The force of it, even below him, tugged on him enough he had to brace himself on the balustrade around the walkway.
Perhaps, had he continued west past here, he’d have found another way into the World of Storm. Anlang, he’d heard it named, but the truth was, Hermod knew precious little about i
t. Save that this pyramid almost certainly connected the two, and the sick, shifting feeling in his gut told him that connection came through the whirlwind itself.
He did not, however, much relish the idea of jumping into winds of such terrible violence.
He could turn back. Stairs here led downward, inside the temple, maybe around the storm and to a way out. Of course, if he intended to flee, he ought to do so before the feathered serpent itself showed up and found him intruding in its home.
No. There was no going back. Not without seeing this through. He already stood upon the threshold of Anlang, ready to avenge himself against Hel for her betrayal. If he could not have Sif back, he could at least make the Mist Goddess regret her treachery. Oh, he knew it wouldn’t bring Sif back. Naught would now. He tapped his hand on the balustrade.
Naught would ever make this better.
Still, vengeance gave a man purpose, when all else had fled him. Hunting Serks had kept him from madness, back when he’d thought they had murdered Sif. Now … now he was hunting Hel herself, after a fashion.
“Fuck it.”
Hermod heaved himself up on the rail and leapt into the storm.
At once, the gale seized him, strong enough to keep him from falling far. It flung him round and round, stealing his screams, swirling him so fast he retched. The bile whipped back into his face and splattered his clothes. The winds blinded him, beat him like an enraged jotunn, buffeted over and over.
They deafened him.
They stripped his cloak from him and felt apt to rip off his skin. The storm devoured him.
