by Matt Larkin
“We … we’re going to die.” Saying it aloud felt like opening a void inside her chest. A hollow, born of the realization that, despite having lived thousands of years, having thought herself eternal, she was not. The very idea! How it defied words.
Rather, it became a nameless, formless dread. While mortals out in Midgard had lived with the knowledge that life was short, hard, and only ended one way, she, an immortal Vanr, had always known differently. Since the end of the war with Brimir, she’d rarely even considered that she might not endure for the rest of time.
Even after Odin had banished her to Alfheim—perhaps especially after that, when the Otherworldly sun had saturated her—she’d not considered that her journey might end. That she, the individual consciousness that made her up, might suddenly cease.
A single sob wracked her chest. Unexpected, and unaccompanied by tears. Looking away from Odin, she clutched the gunwale. How weak he must think her. Losing control of herself in fear of death!
Odin, an Ás. People who’d only ever striven to die gloriously. And when Odin hadn’t found Valhalla, he’d gone and made it.
The man remained at the tiller, but she could feel his gaze on her back.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she whispered.
Odin murmured something and she spun to look at him. A sadness had settled over his face, but not judgment. Again, he opened his mouth, but she couldn’t catch aught he said.
“What?”
He sighed now. “I used to think it weakness, the Vanr fear of death. When we assaulted Vanaheim, I thought that. I knew the Aesir would win because we, still warriors, could fight and die without hesitation. I was young, then, naïve. Now, having endured long myself, I understand on more than the intellectual level I had grasped back then.” He grunted. “Yes. It’s not only the love of life that holds us back—though that is there—but the fear of giving up what we have. What we spent so long building. I wish I could make you and the others believe about the Wheel of Life.”
Freyja shook her head. “What does it matter? How am I to care if you say I lived before and will be born again … if I don’t remember it, how is that really me?”
Her lover fell silent a moment, gazing into the mist before looking back at her. “Are you naught more than the sum of your memories? Have you lost a piece of yourself every time you forget something?”
“Foundational memories.”
“What?”
Freyja cleared her throat. “My mother, Nerthus, was something of a philosopher. She posited a theory that the essence of a person was derived not from the totality of their memories, but from a handful of foundational memories. Events so powerful they shaped everything about us from that moment on. Our personalities, our essences, were built on the foundations of those few memories. It’s … it’s part of what made delving into the Art so dangerous.”
“Hmmm. Because one possible consequence of sorcery is the loss of memory, and you might not know what you’d lost.”
“Yes. If a person lost a foundational memory, they had thus lost a piece of their personality, of their humanity.”
“And that’s what you believe happened to the First Ones?”
Freyja shrugged. It was a plausible enough theory.
Odin, though, seemed less than convinced.
The flooding had begun to recede, but still, many valleys on Vanaheim remained inundated, and the sight visibly unnerved Odin as he guided their boat through channels that ought not to have existed.
They had both fallen silent now.
In a way, the eclipse helped them. It covered their approach, for, at least on the islands themselves, the mist remained thin. Still, to remain concealed she’d been forced to burn off her stored sunlight and, until the eclipse passed, she’d have no way to restore it. It left her feeling unarmed, almost defenseless, even as she told herself she still had strength and speed much greater than a man.
Many times, they’d heard the tumult and shouts of frost jotunnar. The creatures were calling up mist and snowstorms, transforming beautiful, green Vanaheim into some desolate imitation of Jotunheim.
To her left, ice had built up along the slope, reaching down to the edge of the water. Ice! On Vanaheim. How was she to forgive this desecration of her precious home? How was she to endure such insults?
The instinct—the need—however long buried, to call upon sorcery and punish these creatures rose up in the back of her mind, like ivy overrunning her thoughts. Choking out sense. Even the knowledge that the jotunnar had been among the first sorcerers and might retaliate in kind did not quite dissuade her. Instead, she gripped the sides of the boat tightly, forcing herself to take in the horror around her.
“It won’t last forever.” Odin’s voice was a whisper. “Naught does.”
Maybe that was what so bothered her. Freyja had helped overthrow Brimir and, like all Vanir, had come to think of Vanaheim as eternal. On losing it, on finding herself cast into Alfheim, still she found a world of greenery, and of even more endless life than Vanaheim. The Summer Court in Tír na nÓg was ancient beyond her imagining. So old, no one seemed to remember a time when it did not exist.
Oh, individual liosalfar died, on occasion. They grew too weak, had too few souls to feed on, and finally winked out of existence. But the court itself, and those strong within it, they had endured for … eternity?
“I’m not certain we can succeed in this,” she whispered back. “By all indications, jotunnar remain all over these islands.”
“Mmmm. Nearby, there’s a flooded gulley. Within that lie tunnels I think remain free of jotunn occupation. Tunnels that will carry us close enough to Yggdrasil.”
How did he know all that? Surely it meant he was relying on the Sight, didn’t it? Still, Freyja held her peace. Arguing with him on the subject would not avail her.
And Freyja had more than enough on her mind already.
As Odin had predicted, they found the inlet and followed it into a flooded tunnel. The roof was too low to guide the ship in, so they hopped over the side and waded through chest-high waters into the darkness.
Odin held a torch over his head, but the light barely managed to reach from one side of the tunnel to the other, and provided little guidance about what lay ahead.
Sloshing along beside him, her mind raced. How could he move with such purpose? Such unaffected certainty? “Suppose we get all the way to the Tree. There will be jotunnar there. They won’t leave such a precious place unguarded.”
“We’ll overcome those we must.” Odin cast a glance at her, his visage grim. “All that matters is stopping Hel. No, not stopping. Destroying Hel. I will not allow her to bring the world to the brink again.”
As if one could defeat an Elder Goddess through sheer stubbornness. Please, Queen of Mist, let us kill you. We really want to. Freyja rolled her eyes. “You speak madness. Even if you bridge our world to Muspelheim and burn away the mist, defeat the jotunnar and draugar and everyone else, even if you somehow destroy Hel’s host, she’ll just claim another.”
“Perhaps.” Except, his tone said he had more of a plan than he let on, or at least some fragment of a plan. Something he refused to share with her. Probably because he himself knew it would sound mist-mad if he uttered it aloud.
But if he wouldn’t speak of it, she saw little point in prodding him.
They came to a crevasse were the water poured down in a fall. Odin hopped over this, to continue following the tunnel beyond.
After walking for several hours through the water, Freyja was just glad to get on dry land. She settled down and yanked off her boots. “Just rest a few moments.”
Od turned back to her and slumped down against the wall beside her, pulling off his own boots and upending them.
Freyja glanced back at the fall. It might have been beautiful, if it weren’t a muddy mess dropping off into who knew where. “You really believe we’ll be born again, after all this? I mean, not only born again, but in some way that matters?”
>
Odin patted her knee. “Our souls are more than memories, though memories and actions, I think, leave impressions upon those souls. We are bound together, you and I, and others. Drawn to each other in lifetime after lifetime by forces as powerful as the web of urd. A … web of souls, rather. You once spoke to me of the idea of soul mates. That some souls were meant to be together. Forgetting, for the moment, any question of meant by whom or what, is it so hard to imagine that such souls, rent apart by tragedy, might …?” His voice broke. “Might refuse such a fate and … find a way to …”
Now she turned to him. A single tear glistened in his eye. On impulse, she wiped it away. “You can share your burden with me.”
“I am. You have no idea how much it means that you are at my side.”
Perhaps, but certainly something else weighed upon him, something he could not or would not tell her. Some prescient vision of the future? Some certain knowledge that they would die, thus confirming her terrible fear?
They rested there, Odin laying beside the fall, while Freyja lit a new torch and threw her runes. The pattern made less sense than she’d have liked, leaning over them, torch in hand.
Certainly, they seemed to confirm her earlier throws that had predicted doom. Od was right about the era ending, and that ending costing the lives of most everyone. And the runes, too, showed their deaths. But what she really needed to understand was what would happen beyond those deaths.
If Odin was right, and she might be born again, live again, maybe have another chance to—
Odin lurched over and swept the runes aside with one hand before she could read more.
Freyja rounded on him, scowling. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He shook his head, grim-faced in the shadows. “You use those as a medium to harness the Sight. It is … we have to be careful not to rely on it too much.”
“You still fail to tell me quite what you learned when you were away.” His ravings about having fallen through time, into the past, had made very little sense … though he’d seemed to believe them.
He laid a hand on her cheek. “I learned that some things cannot be changed. And some things must be.”
14
There exists a perfection for all of things, a form of a thing in its essence, of which all physical manifestations are mere reflections. If this could be true of substances, and man was a kind of substance, it ought to hold true for the emotional realities of men. A perfect form of any emotion, untainted by the myriad of factors that normally compose the consciousness of a person.
Children could experience perfect joy, having not yet developed the capacity or need for viewing the world through a multifaceted lens. Those who had lived longer found, most oft, a hint of despair in even joyous moments, aware of the transitory nature of existence, and burdened ever by the knowledge that forces continually eroded at both the joy and its potential.
And the longer one lived, the farther from perfect emotion one tended to draw, until, when centuries blurred into millennia and even those became fleeting, every instant became colored by the full spectrum of emotions. Perfection seemed almost impossible for a man like Loki.
But now, leaning upon the gunwale of the Naglfar—slick bone and jagged fingernails writhing ever so slightly beneath him—Loki tended toward the perfection of despair.
Of despondency so completely it would seem to devour creation and return it to the primordial darkness which had engendered it in the first place. And why not? Knowing what he knew, and further, what he had too much reason to suspect, how could Loki not suppose that despair and its perfection must represent the origins of humanity? Drawn from darkness, even if shown a fragment of light, and sundered from the aether, would not wretched forlornness have been the first of all human emotions?
The purest.
The very perfection of all emotion.
Ah, but then, despondency warped the thought process, compounding upon itself and spreading like the most insidious of funguses.
Even knowing that, though, he could not tear his gaze from the mists, as the Naglfar threaded its way through them, edging ever closer to Valland.
Hel would not rest while Odin remained unaccounted for. Even in her arrogance in calling herself an Elder Goddess—those unfathomable monstrosities that sucked dry the cosmos with their ceaseless hunger—she admitted, at least to herself, that the Destroyer posed a threat to her. The sole threat, perhaps. He had defeated her before, and now, Hel would take no further chances. This time, she surely told herself, she would claim all the world with such an overwhelming force that Odin, if he failed to show himself soon, would find himself completely bereft of allies.
Finally, Loki turned, looked to his beloved wife, her image now almost completely remade in that of his dead daughter. Only a hint of Sigyn’s beauty showed through. Far behind the red gleam in Hel’s eye, Sigyn was in there, watching him, he knew. Perhaps silently pleading with him to end her suffering.
But how could he? How could he do aught, knowing it would mean Sigyn would be gone from him forever?
Except, another thought had tormented him, wriggling through his mind like a parasitic worm, devouring even this fleeting, self-indulgent moment of despair.
It was the same thought that had dogged his every moment, waking and sleeping, for all the countless millennia of his life. The thought, now manifested in a particular aspect, true, but itself just a reflection of the perfection of causality.
While the vast majority of men were afforded the pleasant illusion that the future might be predicated solely upon the past—and moreover, that, at any moment, they remained free to make whatever choices suited their whims—those cursed to glimpse the chains of fate knew the shape of the universe to be infinitely more complex.
Loki was not free. Maybe he never had been.
Urd, the future, history, they all demanded he act upon information obtained within a paradox. All prescience, naturally, was paradox. All sojourns through time—bodily or mentally—were, in the strictest sense, paradoxical. A cursory observation by an enlightened mind might reveal a reversal of the normally conceived flow of causality, the past predicated upon the future. This, alone, might have terrified those enlightened minds, even had they never looked deeper, and found the direction not linear, but rather a web of intertwined dependencies.
A universe of paradoxes, barely holding itself together.
Redeemability, as he had come to think of it, remained the key. If all of time existed, chains of causality could maintain this web and hold it together. Paradoxes thus posed no real threat … until they evoked real change.
And if Loki gave in to despair, refused to fulfill the chain of events as he expected he had done in the future, he risked snapping one of those chains. Would the universe adjust? Was it possible that, in some variation of the cosmos, creation had existed without these primal paradoxes? Had he, himself, introduced some of these chains and become unaware of the fact as history rewrote itself to redeem his paradoxes?
Or, rather, as he feared, had history always been the complex web he now saw?
Always. As a being within the timeline, he lacked even the words—and thus the conceptions—for discussing events without reference to their place in time.
So.
His lost daughter.
His stolen wife.
His self-indulgence, yes, because the thought of tearing himself from them—even to do what the chains of fate demanded—it ripped out pieces of his heart in the process. This hardly represented the first time, though. He might live forever—or at least until the dissolution of the cosmos and thus the unraveling of time—but he’d died bit by bit over the eons.
What was one more?
While the better portion of the Naglfar’s passengers were draugar, still, a good many frost jotunnar served as the crew. Beings not so different than men, really, but they bore a stain, an anomaly of blood that pulled them toward the mists of Niflheim, and thus made them rather disinclined toward the
powers of flame.
Stealing away Frey’s runeblade, Laevateinn, had served as Gridr’s greatest achievement, one that had won her a place at Hel’s side. None of them wished to wield the blade, really—not even Hel wanted it overly close at hand—so they had strapped it to one of the masts as a symbol of their conquest over the powers of light and fire.
Having lost the flame of Muspel, Loki could find little better with which to arm himself.
Now, he pointedly avoided looking at it while strolling the deck. And even more pointedly not looking up to the quarterdeck where Hel stood, looking tiny next to Hrym’s bulk at the tiller.
How to steal a blade in front of the eyes of thousands of sleepless, wakeful dead?
The answer, as with most things, relied merely on waiting for the right time to provide the perfect alignment of circumstances.
Those circumstances arose when Valland at last drew into view, and the draugar began to pour from the Naglfar, an army unspeakable not only for its size, but for its perversion of the so-called natural order of life and death. Great ramps opened belowdecks, maws of the ship releasing tongues it almost seemed, and, like a torrent of bile, the undead flowed forth.
They did not speak, but rather a collective moan competed with the clank and clatter of their rusted armor and equally worn weapons.
And Hel watched them, no doubt fair overwhelmed with pride—Loki doubted she could still feel joy, as such—thinking this tide the herald of her victory.
Such a preoccupation made it almost easy to slip against the flow of jotunnar and loose the bands holding Laevateinn to the mast. Almost simple to sling the runeblade over his shoulder.
His daughter did not even look at him when he drew nigh to the gunwale. Part of him wished she would. To see her one more time, as she had been, his precious little girl marveling at the sea. And beyond, past her eyes, if he could but see Sigyn again, say his farewell to her …
