The Song of the Ash Tree 03 - Already Comes Darkness

by T L Greylock

  He knew each realm. Muspellheim burned, its fires raging as it sensed the end coming. And there was Alfheim, empty and silent. Raef was certain that realm had long since succumbed to fate. Asgard, golden and bright, was highest of all, but a shadow lurked over it. Fenrir’s breath, Raef knew.

  And then there was Midgard. Raef’s heart ached to see it, smaller than the rest, green and vulnerable. It seemed about to be extinguished.

  Raef began to climb. The runes became handholds, the wet clay hardened beneath his boots, giving him traction against the smooth ash and the rot. He vaulted into the branches as swift and sure-footed as Ratatoskr the squirrel, and then he was crawling along the length of a branch, Midgard trembling at the far end, ready to go dark and plummet into the nothingness that awaited below Yggdrasil’s branches. Mimir’s well was shrinking and Odin’s eye was spinning.

  Raef was halfway to Midgard when he stopped. He had nothing with him but the dragon-kin’s talon and this he began to saw into the ash wood. Back and forth again and again, each cut making the world tree bleed.

  When the branch hung by nothing but a thread of Yggdrasil’s fiber, Raef stood and stepped across the wound he had gouged, landing lightly on Midgard’s branch, and in that moment the world tree broke free.

  It was not the branch that fell, though Raef felt his heart plunge from his chest. Instead it was the great ash that dropped away, taking the other eight realms with it. It spiraled into the waiting void and the last of Mimir’s waters drained away after it. Raef watched the ash tree until he could see it no longer and he was left suspended on Midgard’s branch, the world he loved still beating alongside him. Beside him floated Odin’s lost eye. Raef plucked it from the air and, stretching as tall as he could, placed it high above Midgard.

  “It is done. And you will always be watching Midgard.”

  A star, the final lingering shard of light, fell without warning, striking Raef in the heart. He dropped from the branch and was swallowed by darkness.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was Odin’s eye he saw when he woke, though it was not the eye from the well. It was set in a sad, worn face. But the Allfather was smiling.

  “I am dreaming.”

  Odin shook his head. “No.”

  “You are fighting Fenrir. You cannot be here.” Raef looked around. He could see nothing.

  “The wolf is swallowing me. I let him take me the moment I felt Midgard break free. Soon, my son Vidar will avenge me, ripping the great wolf’s jaw apart. Thor has fallen already, though he lingers through the pain of Jörmungand’s poison even as the serpent draws its last breath.”

  “Then how are you here?”

  “Because this is where I need to be.” Odin smiled again, his face suffused with a light of its own, his burden stripped from him at last. He seemed young again. “I never dared hope. And yet hope came to me unbidden. What could be done against the long-told fate? Nothing, and yet here we are. Here you are, at least, Raef Skallagrim, the living heart of Midgard. I never spoke of it to anyone, never let my dream of Midgard’s survival live in my heart for fear of its discovery.” Odin lifted a hand to his missing eye. “It lived here instead, out of reach of Loki and all the rest who sought destruction. I could not even tell you, though I longed to share my hope of what you might achieve through strength of will. Even when I began to understand that perhaps the reason I could not read your fate was because it was your fate to survive, to contradict everything these nine realms have ever known, I had to keep my silence.” Odin studied Raef for a moment. “Your friend spoke the truth. Yours is a great heart, Raef Skallagrim, and it alone has done what nothing else could.”

  Raef closed his eyes as the Allfather spoke of Vakre. He could not fight against that grief. When he opened his eyes again, Odin was watching him. “Why Midgard? Why not Asgard?”

  “Because it is man, not the gods or the giants or the alfar, I cherish most, and Midgard was the world most dear to me, the world I made after my own heart. Men and women are beautiful in their weaknesses, Raef, beautiful in their faults and their failings. And because of this, because their lives are fleeting, they are worth saving.”

  The Allfather stood, though only then did Raef realize he had been sitting. His own body seemed to be stretched flat on a table made of air.

  “And now you have done it. Take your world, Raef, and set it free. Make it grow. Live.”

  “Do I survive alone?” Rushed, desperate, those words were.

  Odin’s sad smile returned, and with it Raef could see his pain, pain at having lost a fragment of himself. “I can no longer see Midgard, Raef. Not the bright rivers or the wind-swept peaks or the warmth in the earth that waits for spring. It is for you to discover what remains.”

  Raef blinked and Odin was gone, leaving behind a great emptiness, a gulf that Raef felt in his gut. The gods were no more. The nine realms were no more. There was only one realm.

  But Raef was not alone. A gentle breath blew across his face, followed by a horse’s velvety black nose. The horse bumped his cheek and Raef inhaled, suddenly feeling as though he had not taken a breath in a very long time. He came to his feet, suspended still where the green plain had been, where Yggdrasil had grown from a seedling at the edges of Mimir’s well. The horse was waiting and Raef knew its name.

  “Sleipnir.”

  Eight legs the father of horses had, a tail made of wind, and a star in each eye. Tears pricked the corners of Raef’s eyes.

  “You are all that remains of Asgard. Did Odin send you for me?”

  The tall black horse pressed his head against Raef’s chest. Raef twined his fingers into Sleipnir’s silky mane and pulled himself onto the bare back. Exulting in his own strength and speed, the horse reared up, calling to the lost stars, hooves sending sparks into the darkness.

  Raef clung on to Sleipnir’s neck and murmured, “One last ride, then, before you follow him.”

  Odin’s mighty steed whickered in response and then they were racing through the dark and everything was a blur and Raef felt his heartbeat slow and then stop.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  When Raef began to understand that he was alive, it was the cold that stirred him, that opened his eyes.

  He lay atop a slab of stone. The world was dark around him. A single star tinged with blue fire glimmered above him and Raef knew he looked upon the eye of Odin, the one he had placed in the sky. But there was no light to see by, nothing to show Raef what he had salvaged from the grip of fate.

  He stood on his cold stone and realized that the world he had saved was a bleak and empty one, that whatever life lingered there would soon perish in the dark. It was as he had feared.

  How much time passed, Raef could not have said, and it did not matter, for there was only time and nothing else. The cold seeped into him and his eyelids grew heavy.

  It was through this lash-strewn vision that Raef saw light. He blinked, sure it was imagined, but as he strained his eyes in the dark, the faint glow he had doubted began to grow, to spread rich fingers of golden light across the land, illuminating harsh mountain slopes and a shining river and cool forests, green forests free from the burden of winter.

  When at last the light took shape, bursting over the horizon, the sight of the flaming disk brought Raef to his knees and he wept.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The stars had come back to live in the sky.

  Not as many as before, and the brightest paled when compared to the memory of their lost brothers and sisters, but the night sky was no longer a place of darkness and doubt, of fear.

  A moon had been birthed, too, following the sun that was Vakre across the sky, though where it had come from Raef could not be sure. The pale face seemed familiar, friendly, even.

  But it was the daylight that brought him joy. He watched every sunrise in the days that followed the severing of Midgard, waiting for Vakre’s light to break across the world once more, reveling in the warmth and brilliance. It was in those moments of first light that he fe
lt Vakre was near, that he might have looked over his shoulder and seen the son of Loki as he once was.

  He mourned, too, in those days. Siv had never been found. Raef had waited at the place of her abduction, had searched for her, but when the new spring passed into summer and still there was no trace of her, he looked to the eastern forests less and more to the western seas. He hoped Loki had been kind to her, had brought her a swift peace.

  A king had been named. Bryndis had called her gathering, as she had promised, and though Raef had sent warriors and shieldmaidens of Vannheim to speak their voices as they wished, he had lingered in the west and waited for word to reach him. When a rider came bearing the name of Eirik of Kolhaugen on her lips, Raef thought of Finndar Urdson, the Far-Traveled, the last man to bring news of a king to Vannheim, and wondered where the son of Urda had met his lonely end.

  The Vestrhall and the village were alive with the voices of children. The market was flourishing with fish and pelts and food. The soil was richer than it had ever been, the farmers said, and the fishermen spoke of fish in the fjords in numbers greater than ever before. Few spoke of the dark days before the new sun had come, though rumors reached Vannheim of a changed land, of mountains where none had been, of rivers altering course, of fjords snaking new arms through the wilderness and coastlines changing form. They talked of the gods still, though always with something left unsaid, as if they understood that world, the one under Odin’s watchful eye, was gone, even if they did not quite understand their new one or how it had survived. It was a time of contentment.

  But not for Raef. He smiled to see his people laugh in the light after the long winter. He found joy in the forests beneath the canopy of green leaves with a bow in hand and an axe at his back. He swam in the fjord and waited for the sun to warm him every day. But he was restless.

  The ship was finished on the longest day of summer. Raef had worked much of the wood himself, had designed it to be fast and strong, and now, as the ship builders drifted away from the fjord at twilight, drawn to the scent of meat roasting in the hall, their work done, Raef was left alone on the deck.

  The crew was chosen, the supplies gathered, the weapons sharpened. They would set sail at first light, striking out across the sea road in search of the unknown, and Raef would hoist the sail using a set of beloved, well-used seal skin ropes that had belonged to the brothers Rufnir and Asbjork, who had dreamed of taking the sea road with Raef and were now a memory of Valhalla.

  The sea dream had come back to Raef not long after he had returned to the Vestrhall, fueled by his grief, embedding into his heart with such strength that he could not ignore it. The preparations had given him a means to lose himself in work, to forget, for a moment, the wound he hid at his core, the toll extracted in Yggdrasil’s dying moments.

  Raef leaped to the sheer strake at the bow, wrapping his arm around the smooth prow that leaned out over the water. Above him, the smoke-colored kin’s face, rendered in wood, stared out, ever vigilant, at the western horizon. Raef could already taste the sea spray on his face, could feel the ship riding the waves, could see the wind filling the black sail.

  At Raef’s back, a summer storm lingered in the eastern sky, moving north, so distant the thunder could barely be heard though the bolts of lightning that split the sky and reflected down the length of the fjord promised savagery. The western sky promised nothing, and yet, somehow, everything, and Raef knew Vakre would follow wherever the wind took him.

  The sound of boots on the deck of the ship drew Raef’s ears but not his eyes.

  “Is there room for one more?”

  Raef, his heart racing, dared not look, lest his eyes shatter the voice he had heard.

  “Look at me.”

  And then she was there, her hair of red and gold burnished in the light of the setting sun, her eyes, green and warm, searching his face, her hands reaching for him.

  “Siv.”

  She smelled of sunlight as Raef took her in his arms.

  “How?”

  “Even Loki has regrets.”

  There was more to be said, more questions to answer, but that could wait.

  Raef did not let go of her as she turned to face the sunset and the sea. He rested his chin on her shoulder and breathed in time with her beating heart.

  “What are you looking for out there?”

  Raef was quiet for a moment.

  “I was looking for something to make me forget.”

  “And now?”

  “Now? Now I search for whatever it is I will find. I know no other way.”

  Siv ran a hand down the dragon-kin’s wooden neck. “What is she called?”

  The name came to Raef unbidden, for he had not yet let himself speak it aloud, and grief constricted his chest. “She is Sun-Sister.” He could feel Siv smile, could feel his heart smile with her.

  “I have never sailed on the sea,” she said.

  Raef, his arms wrapped around her still, entwined his fingers with hers. “Then take my hand.”

  List of Characters

  Raef Skallagrim, lord of Vannheim, dispossessed

  Vakre Flamecloak, half god, son of Loki

  Siv, presumed deceased

  Eira, a metamorphosis gone wrong

  Tulkis Greyshield, fancies a fancy chair

  Isolf Valbrand, Raef’s cousin, usurped a fancy chair

  Aelinvor, daughter of Uhtred, lord of Garhold

  Visna, proud, like all Valkyries

  Rufnir Bjarneson, Raef’s childhood friend

  Anuleif, He Who Burned, an odd little fellow

  Dvalarr the Crow, warrior of Vannheim

  Skuli, a captain of Vannheim, eager

  Njall, a captain of Vannheim

  Torleif, lord of Axsellund, a new, untested ally

  Eyvind, warrior of Axsellund

  Fengar, lord of Solheim, the unlawful king

  Griva, knows best

  Alvar of Kolhaugen, jealous

  Romarr, lord of Finnmark, Vakre’s uncle

  Ulthor Ten-blade, a bad egg

  Valdemar, the broken man

  Tora, deceased

  Inge, very much alive

  Finndar Urdson, the Far-Traveled, half god, son of Urda

  Ailmaer Wind-footed, in search of golden apples

  Brandulf Hammerling, lord of Finngale, Raef’s former ally

  Eirik of Kolhaugen, a good egg

  Hauk of Ruderk, crafty, big schemes and big dreams

  Bryndis, lady of Narvik, fierce

  Thorgrim Great-Belly, lord of Balmoran, may or may not be dying

  Eiger, the Great-Belly’s son, bursting with filial love

  Cilla, brave, likes sharp things

  Dainn, Raef’s uncle, awfully troublesome, as dead men go

  Bekkhild, Siv’s sister, missing

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Alisha at Damonza, who stuck with me on this third and final cover until we got it right.

  Big shout out to my comrades from the SPFBO, who have populated my little writing world quite nicely. Don’t get emotional on me, but, uh, you’re all winners in my book. I hope we will continue to grow pillage the world together. Thanks, especially, to Travis, who loaned me his eyeballs when I needed them.

  Most of all, I want to thank my readers, who met Raef a few hundred-thousand words ago and took every step of the journey with him.

  About the Author

  T L Greylock is the author of The Song of the Ash Tree trilogy, consisting of The Blood-Tainted Winter, The Hills of Home, and Already Comes Darkness.

  She can only wink her left eye, jumped out of an airplane at 13,000 feet while strapped to a Navy SEAL, had a dog named Agamemnon and a cat named Odysseus, and has been swimming with stingrays in the Caribbean.

  P.S. One of the above statements is false. Can you guess which?

  www.tlgreylock.com

  @TLGreylock

  @tl_greylock

  of the Ash Tree 03 - Already Comes Darkness