Gods of the Ragnarok Era Omnibus 3: Books 7-9

by Matt Larkin

  “Uh …” Odin’s head was throbbing. Maybe he ought not trust the man, but he didn’t know what else to do. He could both hate and love Loki. Loathe him, even, for what he’d done on behalf of the Norns, and still understand. Finally, understand. Loki had ruined Odin’s life, destroyed his family, his legacy. And done the same to his own. Because no other option seemed to lie before him.

  Loki clasped Odin’s head behind the ear, drawing him to meet his gaze. “When did Heimdall attack you? At the very end of all things?”

  Odin nodded, not hardly trusting himself to speak of it. Let Loki know. It didn’t matter anymore. Maybe naught mattered anymore. “I don’t know if I can forgive you for all you’ve done. But I … I understand it.”

  “Do you? Do you truly understand it?” Loki shuddered. “Do you know of Ginnungagap?”

  Odin nodded numbly. “The primal void völvur claim all the cosmos sprang from.” Wait. Now he sat up, staring at Loki.

  “A primordial darkness from which man arose … and which is even yet seeking to devour the creation it gave rise to. Something beneath existence.”

  And Naströnd was like a capstone above it.

  “I know what I have to do.” So hard to swallow. “I’m just not sure that I can. The forces arrayed against me are … immense beyond imaging. Ancient, powerful. I … I’m just a man. You should have done these things yourself, Fatespinner.”

  Loki tightened his grip on Odin’s head a moment before releasing him. “But you are not just a man, brother.” He reached over now, and grasped Odin’s tunic, and yanked it apart, revealing the rune bands covering his chest. “You are a thousand men. A thousand different warriors, who have lived a thousand times.” Loki thumped a rune, forcing Odin to look. Each of these was one of his lifetimes. “You and I may have both learned every form of warfare in history, but your experiences are not linear. They are exponential. They are one man, fragmented into myriad lifetimes. Pain and love and loss. And the knowledge and strength of all those lifetimes is in you, compounding down through the ages. And if you were to allow those thousand warriors to become one warrior again …”

  His failure to elaborate bespoke some tension, reflected in his eyes. A fear or a hope he dared not even give voice to.

  Because he didn’t know it was possible.

  This was … all of it … a gambit. A last, desperate chance Loki had taken in the hopes that, somehow, Odin might be able to access the buried depths of his soul and fuse those disparate lives into a single warrior who would become an army unto himself.

  “Brother …” Odin began. Then shook his head. “I’m not sure I can be what you hope for. I’m not sure that’s even possible. I just know I … I have to do something, even if it’s the wrong thing.”

  Maybe, in releasing the fires of Muspelheim, Odin had done just that. But he had resolved himself that any price was worth it, if it meant finally overcoming Hel and ensuring she could not rise to threaten the Mortal Realm ever again.

  Perhaps the flames had already done that. Either way, he had to get back.

  From the look on Loki’s face, his blood brother had thought much the same, even if he yet lacked the details.

  And something else … something, born perhaps of prescient insight, his or Loki’s, he could no longer say. An almost certain revelation that forced itself unbidden into his mind.

  This was it. This would be the last time he would see Loki.

  This man, his brother, who had passed through so much with him. Whose life had so helplessly entwined itself with Odin’s, must now diverge. The thought of it washed over him in a flood of memories as powerful as any temporal current, that for an instant, stretched on forever, he found himself certain the tides of time had caught him once more.

  “You are Loki?” Odin asked.

  “Yes, Odin, I am.”

  “Where do you hail from?”

  Loki laced his fingers together on the table, eyes refusing to release Odin from their gaze. “That’s not what you came here to ask me, nor would names of far-off lands hold much meaning to your ears.”

  “Do your parents still live?” Odin asked, without looking back at Loki.

  The man did not immediately answer, but Odin could hear him poking at the fire. “All my family, and all I have loved, are gone now, lost in the march of years.”

  “I seem to have opened an old wound.”

  “If Ymir sees us coming, we lose our one advantage.” Odin scowled, staring up at the peak, barely visible through the snow. The storm was growing worse. “I will not allow Father to go unavenged over some vӧlva’s tale of the mist. A man doesn’t go mad in one night.”

  Loki drew up close to him now, shaking his head. “Your brother speaks truth. Fire is life, and it was given to mankind at great cost to the giver. It is our only ally out here. And as a frost jotunn, Ymir abhors the flames. If you cast it aside, you lose a shield and sword both.”

  “Thank you. Brother.”

  Loki snorted. “Brother?” he asked, when Odin turned back to him.

  Odin leaned back on his elbows, grateful for even the slight respite. “Without doubt. You saved my life and that of my little brother. You alone helped me uphold my vow. You may not have been born of the same woman as I …” But what did that even matter? No one controlled what family they were born to, but there was no reason you couldn’t choose others. Rolling to his side, Odin pulled a knife from his belt. Loki stared at it without any hint of alarm. Pity—Odin had expected to at least startle the foreigner.

  Instead Loki raised his eyes from the knife to Odin’s face. Odin drew the knife along his palm, opening a shallow cut. “We shall be brothers in blood, my friend, until the end of our days.” He held up his dripping palm for Loki to see, then passed the knife.

  The other man took it without hesitation, though he did watch Odin’s eyes a moment before opening his own palm. “Some things cannot be undone.” He set the knife by the fire, then offered his hand.

  Odin clasped it, mingling their blood. “Nor should they.”

  And then, there he was, crouched in the snow, little changed since those early days when they had first met. Face almost as much as puzzle as it had been back then, those crystal blue eyes searching Odin’s own eye. Desperate, perhaps longing for urd to unfold in some way other than how he’d foreseen, and how Odin had lived.

  But despite Loki’s gambit, or even because of it, history was immutable. Merciless in its procession. The chains of fate stronger than orichalcum.

  And perhaps Freyja had not been entirely in the wrong. The essence of a soul did lie, somewhat, in memory. A sea of memories, yes, built upon foundational ones that compounded to create the essence of a man.

  Faced with the utter certainty of loss, a loss that had suddenly become almost unbearable, all the wounds that had so long festered now seemed shallow grazes washed away by the tides. Cleansed.

  For there, sitting across from him, was the closest friend Odin had ever had. One who knew well how badly he had wronged Odin, wronged the world, and still, in his own way, tried to save it. Tried to save Odin, as much as he could.

  His dearest friend.

  Overcome with choking emotion, Odin threw his arms around Loki’s shoulders and embraced him, not caring about the tears that welled in his eye. “I … love you, brother.”

  Maybe … it was the only thing left to say now.

  Loki returned his embrace, his unshakable calm finally broken as he trembled, ever so slightly. Because, underneath the countless millennia of his life, Loki was, after all, but human. True, neither of them could afford to truly be good men, given the stakes they faced, but they could, at least, at the last, be honest about the bond they shared.

  And when Odin pulled away, the look on Loki’s face served to confirm it, the reality, the realization. They would not look upon each other again.

  At least, not in this lifetime.

  Arms at his side, Odin flung himself back into the tides of time, into the merciless curr
ent that would carry him toward the destiny he could not avoid a moment longer. For if he were not there to fight Ragnarok, all that had transpired and all he and Loki had sacrificed would prove in vain.

  So he found himself standing on a beach, staring out at the sea, the mist no longer encroaching on the brilliant isles, burned away by the flames. In their place, a wall had somehow arisen around the island, shimmering, glistening with water. Almost black.

  It took Odin a moment to recognize that glistening for what it was: scales.

  The scales of a serpent immense beyond imagining, encircling this entire island and cutting it off from the rest of the world.

  And he knew—though he had never given consideration to it nor much believed it possible—what had transpired.

  Woken by the cataclysmic shift in the nature of reality, the greatest of all sea serpents, one said to encircle the world, had, in truth, come and encircled the source of destruction. Spawned from chaos, it was drawn to chaos.

  Jörmungandr. The World Serpent.

  Perhaps it had come to devour him.

  He walked the shore, having seen no sign of frost jotunnar still on the island, and could not help but cast glances at the behemoth trapping him here, ever fearing to find the monstrous head attached to that body.

  As Odin looked on, he realized those scales moved in the waters, as the serpent slowly circled the island.

  For a time, he wandered, until at last coming to find Freyja and Idunn lurking at the rainforest’s edge, seeming equally bemused at Jörmungandr’s bulk.

  A moment Odin hesitated, then pressed on, shaking his head as he approached the two women. At his approach, Freyja brightened and came racing toward him, kicking up sand along the beach.

  Beautiful. Glorious.

  And Odin could not shake the image of her writhing underneath her brother.

  He caught her wrists rather than allow her to embrace him.

  “What?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  And all he could do was grimace. A moment. But he owed her an answer, however terrible, and Idunn seemed content to give them this moment alone. “I saw you.”

  “Saw me what?”

  The words stuck on his tongue. They choked him, so foul. “I saw you … letting Frey …” Odin grunted, hardly able to even form his accusation. Had any dared to speak such before him, he’d have had their heads for it. The claim alone would have demanded a holmgang, and to the death. “I saw you and Frey …” He sucked air between his teeth. “Intimate.”

  Freyja cocked her head a moment, then jerked her wrists away and folded her arms over her chest. “You really are jumping through time, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. And you have not answered the …” What? It wasn’t even a question. He’d seen it.

  Freyja shrugged. “Answered what? That it was custom among many Vanir, especially twins? You do know my parents were twins themselves?”

  Odin flinched. Njord and Nerthus? He hadn’t known it, nor had aught he’d read made mention of it. Perhaps, if what she said was true, Vanr society did not think to record it for it was not uncommon enough.

  He ought to accept that.

  Instead, he turned from her, unable to make himself look upon her radiant face. The thought of such custom churned his stomach. Right or wrong, he could not deny the visceral disgust it engendered in him.

  “Fine,” she snapped after a moment more.

  When Odin finally looked back for her, she had stormed off into the forest, leaving a bewildered-looking Idunn in her wake.

  Idunn poked at the campfire. “The Vanir, the First Ones, they were not a homogenous people.”

  Odin sat across from her, hands on his knees. Waiting for Freyja to come back. Knowing she wouldn’t. He’d hurt her, of course. And still, he could not forget what he’d seen.

  Idunn had continued speaking, sporadically, about these customs, but Odin did not even really wish to hear. That something was accepted did not make it acceptable. Tradition alone offered little justification for violation of morality. When he’d tried to say as much, though, Idunn had questioned how morality could be legitimately applied to consensual sexual conduct.

  “Those who Grandmother first joined were a collection of refugees from the Skyfall Isles and areas around them. But they joined with others as they trekked across the continent, and the groups melded. I think the word Vanr meant something like ‘friend’ in one of the languages of those she met, and, because Chandi wanted to unite humanity, she encouraged the group to befriend any who would come.” She was staring at him now, but Odin kept his gaze locked on the fire. He didn’t want to hear justifications for this. “Among some of those branches, there was no incest taboo, at least not among royalty.”

  “That only makes them wrong.”

  Petty human morality, Valravn said with a chuckle. Wrapped in a self-indulgent circle.

  Idunn snorted, then shrugged. “Because they thought differently than you? If there is such a thing as morality …” From the corner of his eye, he caught her wince. “If there is … surely it hinges only upon harming others who don’t wish the harm. Claiming Freyja hurt you by whoever she lay with before you were even born, that’s not a legitimate wound, Odin. It’s arrogance.”

  The worst of it was, he knew Idunn spoke the truth.

  And it sickened him all the more.

  Part III

  Year 400, Age of the Aesir

  Winter

  21

  Though he knew it for an indulgence, Loki had allowed himself the thought that he might have turned away from what lay ahead. From the result he’d known was coming since meeting with Odin centuries ago. For a time, Loki had looked deep into the flame, trying to decipher exactly when and where this battle would take place.

  He knew it was coming, and he’d allowed himself, briefly, to consider taking another path. An indulgence, because history did not allow him to make such a choice, nor had it ever. Besides the risk of paradox inherent in walking away from his path, he would have risked damning Odin and potentially unraveling the final days of this era.

  Still, it pained him, tearing himself from Sigyn’s side, and even leaving Hel, his precious child. But history was bigger than him, or his family, or any family.

  And if Odin was to fight his final battle, Loki had to ensure he made it there, as he had always done.

  Strange, knowing the man had made his reconciliations with Loki before Loki had suffered the true ravages of Odin’s wrath. But such paradoxes were familiar, redeemed by themselves, and tolerable. Loki could scarcely remember a timeline not interwoven into such knots.

  So he had come to Asgard, and watched it burn with the flames of Muspelheim. Fires he had stolen so very long ago, and tried to so desperately to control.

  The very world shook at their release, and Loki sheltered within a lagoon, watching the sky catch flame, watching the immolation of an era begin. It was an agony, seeing the end of so many lives, and knowing, on some level, they died because of the choices he had made. The world inundated in blood only so it could rise anew.

  And Loki, left with a flickering hope he dare not even given voice to, lest the Norns or Ananke strip him of it and undermine the final facet of his gambit.

  Later, from the underbrush, he watched as Heimdall attacked Odin, and as Odin vanished, swept away into the sea of time, his form seeming to melt into currents in the sky. Gone to meet him, a meeting Loki had lived long ago, and now had to fulfill.

  Then, sheathed sword in hand, Loki rose and advanced on Heimdall. “Watcher.”

  The guardian spun on him now, glaring. “You.”

  “I cannot allow you to go after Odin again.”

  “Your puppet has undermined the balance of creation once more, devastatingly so. He cannot be allowed to walk away from such actions unscathed.”

  Loki shrugged. “He won’t.” Odin would suffer, maybe more than any others, save perhaps for Loki himself. It was always the way. “Besides, the balance was already
disrupted.”

  “This world had settled into an equilibrium already, adapted to the prevalence of mist resulting from the last revolution of the cycle. A cycle which, some have begun to believe, does not necessarily serve our ultimate ends. Either way, he has carried it too far.”

  Loki raised his sword grimly. As he pulled it from its sheath, flames sprang up along Laevateinn’s blade. “There are not so many of you left, Watcher. Do you truly wish to cast aside your immortal existence in a fight with me? Foreswear any further pursuit of Odin.” Though Loki knew well enough Heimdall would do no such thing.

  “Your arrogance is matched only by his.” Heimdall hefted his own oversized sword. “And you shall finally be struck down for it.” A beat of his wings hurled Heimdall forward with the force of a gale.

  Loki flung himself to the ground, rolled under the charging Watcher, and came up, runeblade raised. An instant later, Heimdall spun around, blade descending. Loki parried, the clang of blades like a gong. Heimdall’s strength numbed his arms, even with pneuma drawn.

  The Watcher’s foot snapped up and Loki just managed to twist out of the way of a kick that would have caved in his ribs. Grunting, he whipped Laevateinn back up. The runeblade slashed against Heimdall’s golden mail, scourging links but barely scraping the flesh beneath.

  Heimdall’s hand caught his shoulder and shoved, sending Loki stumbling away. Another beat of those wings had the Watcher soaring at him. This time, Loki did not try to parry, but rather let himself fall, rolling to the side.

  His foe’s godlike speed forced him onto the defensive immediately, dodging, parrying, whipping his runeblade around as fast as he could. Growling, the Watcher led with an aggressive slash that might have taken Loki’s head clean off. Loki ducked under it and scored a gouge along Heimdall’s leg. The guardian’s fist caught Loki in the chest and sent him flying backward.