by Neil Gaiman
The gods started from one end of the pool, beginning immediately underneath the falls and wading until they reached the other side. They caught nothing.
“There’s definitely something living down there,” said Thor. “I felt it push against the net. But it swam down deeper, into the mud, and the net went over it.”
Kvasir scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Not a problem. We need to do it again, but this time we will weigh down the bottom of the net,” he said. “So nothing can get underneath it.”
The gods gathered heavy stones with holes in them and tied each stone to the bottom of the net as a weight.
The gods waded into the pool again.
Loki had been pleased with himself the first time the gods had entered his pool. He had simply swum down to the muddy bottom of the pool, slipped between two flat stones, and waited while the net had gone above him.
Now he was worried. Down in the dark and the cold, he thought about this.
He could not transform himself into something else until he left the water, and even if he did, the gods would be after him. No, it was safer to remain in salmon shape. But as a salmon he was trapped. He would have to do what the gods would not be expecting. They would expect him to head for the open sea—he would be safe there, if he got to the sea, even if he would be easy to spot and catch in the river that led from the pool to the bay.
The gods would not expect him to swim back the way he had come. Up the waterfall.
The gods hauled their net along the bottom of the pool.
They were intent upon what was happening in the depths, and so were taken by surprise when a huge silver fish, bigger than any salmon they had ever seen before, leapt over the net with a twist of its tail and began swimming upstream. The huge salmon swam up the falls, springing up and defying gravity as if it had been thrown upward into the air.
Kvasir shouted at the Aesir, ordering them to form into two groups, one on one end of the net, one on the other.
“He will not stay in the waterfall for long. It’s too exposed. His only chance is still to make it to the sea. So you two groups will walk along, dragging the net between you. Meanwhile, Thor,” said Kvasir, who was wise, “you will wade in the middle, and when Loki tries that jumping-over-the-net trick again, you must snatch him from the air, like a bear catching a salmon. Do not let him go, though. He is tricky.”
Thor said, “I have seen bears pluck leaping salmon from the air. I am strong, and I am as fast as any bear. I will hold on.”
The gods began to drag the net upstream, toward the place where the huge silver salmon was biding its time. Loki planned and plotted.
As the net came closer, Loki knew that this was the critical moment. He had to leap the net as he had done before, and this time he would race toward the sea. He tensed, like a spring about to whip back, and then he shot into the air.
Thor was fast. He saw the silver salmon glitter in the sun, and he grabbed it with his huge hands, just as a hungry bear snatches a salmon from the air. Salmon are slippery fish, and Loki was the slipperiest of salmon; he wriggled and tried to slip through Thor’s fingers, but Thor simply gripped the fish harder and squeezed it tightly, down by the tail.
They say that salmon have been narrower near the tail ever since.
The gods brought their net, and they wrapped it tightly around the fish and carried it between them. The salmon began to drown in the air, gasping for water, and then it thrashed and twitched, and now they were carrying a panting Loki.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you taking me?”
Thor just shook his head and grunted, and did not reply. Loki asked the other gods, but none of them would tell him what was happening, and none of them would meet his eye.
III
The gods entered the mouth of a cave, and with Loki slung between them, they went down deep into the earth. Stalactites hung from the ceiling of the cave, and bats fluttered and flickered. They went down lower. Soon the way was too narrow to carry Loki, and now they let him walk between them. Thor walked immediately behind Loki, his hand on Loki’s shoulder.
They went down a long, long way.
In the deepest of the caves there were brands burning, and three people stood there, waiting for them. Loki recognized them before he saw their faces, and his heart sank. “No,” he said. “Do not hurt them. They did nothing wrong.”
Thor said, “They are your sons and your wife, Loki Lie-Smith.”
There were three huge flat stones in that cave. The Aesir set each stone on its side, and Thor took his hammer. He broke a hole through the middle of each stone.
“Please! Let our father go,” said Narfi, Loki’s son.
“He is our father,” said Vali, Loki’s other son. “You have sworn oaths that you will not kill him. He is a blood brother and an oath brother to Odin, highest of the gods.”
“We will not kill him,” said Kvasir. “Tell me, Vali, what is the worst thing that one brother could do to another?”
“For a brother to betray his brother,” said Vali, without hesitating. “For a brother to murder a brother, as Hod killed Balder. This is abominable.”
Kvasir said, “It is true that Loki is a blood brother to the gods, and we cannot kill him. But we are bound by no such oaths to you, his sons.”
Kvasir spoke words to Vali, words of change, words of power.
Vali’s human shape fell from him, and where Vali had stood was a wolf, foam flecking its muzzle. The intelligence of Vali was fading from its yellow eyes, to be replaced by hunger, by anger, by madness. It looked at the gods, at Sigyn, who had been its mother, and finally it saw Narfi. It growled low and long in the back of its throat, and its hackles rose.
Narfi took a step back, only a step, and then the wolf was on him.
Narfi was brave. He did not scream, not even when the wolf that had been his brother tore him apart, ripping open his throat and spilling his guts onto the rock floor. The wolf that had been Vali howled once, long and loudly, through blood-soaked jaws. Then it sprang high, over the heads of the gods, and it ran off into the cave-darkness and would not be seen in Asgard again, not until the end of everything.
The gods forced Loki onto the three great stones: they put one of the stones beneath his shoulders, one under his loins, and one beneath his knees. The gods took Narfi’s spilled entrails, and they pushed them through the holes they had made in the stones, binding Loki’s neck and shoulders tightly. They wound the entrails of his son around his loins and his hips, tied his knees and legs so tightly he could barely move. Then the gods transformed the intestines of Loki’s murdered son into fetters so tight and so hard that they might have been iron.
Sigyn, Loki’s wife, had watched as her husband was bound in the entrails of their son, and she said nothing. She wept silently to herself for the pain of her husband, for the death and the dishonor of their sons. She held a bowl, although she did not yet know why. Before the gods had brought her there, they had told her to go to her kitchen and bring the biggest bowl she had.
Skadi, giant daughter of dead Thiazi, wife of Njord of the beautiful feet, came into the cave then. She carried something huge in her hands, something that writhed and twisted. She bent over Loki and placed the thing she carried above him, winding it about the stalactites that hung from the ceiling of the cave, so that its head was just above Loki’s own.
It was a snake, cold of eye, its tongue flickering, its fangs dripping with poison. It hissed, and a drop of poison from its mouth dripped onto Loki’s face, making his eyes burn.
Loki screamed and contorted, writhing and twisting in pain. He tried to get out of the way, to move his head from beneath the poison. The bonds that had once been the entrails of his own son held him tightly.
One by one the gods left that place, with grimly satisfied looks on their faces. Soon only Kvasir was left. Sigyn looked at her bound hu
sband and at the disemboweled corpse of her wolf-murdered son.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Kvasir. “You are not being punished. You may do whatever you wish.” And then even he left that place.
Another drop of the serpent’s venom dripped onto Loki’s face, and he screamed and threw himself about, writhing in his bonds. The earth itself shook at Loki’s threshing.
Sigyn took her bowl and went to her husband. She said nothing—what was there to say?—but she stood beside Loki’s head, with tears in her eyes, and caught each drop of poison as it fell from the snake’s fangs into her bowl.
This all happened long, long ago, in time out of mind, in the days when the gods still walked the earth. So long ago that the mountains of those days have worn away and the deepest lakes have become dry land.
Sigyn still waits beside Loki’s head as she did then, staring at his beautiful, twisted face.
The bowl she holds fills slowly, one drop at a time, but eventually the poison fills the bowl to the brim. It is then and only then that Sigyn turns away from Loki. She takes the bowl and pours the venom away, and while she is gone, the snake’s poison falls onto Loki’s face and into his eyes. He convulses then, jerks and judders, jolts and twists and writhes, so much that the whole earth shakes.
When that happens, we here in Midgard call it an earthquake.
They say that Loki will be bound there in the darkness beneath the earth, and Sigyn will be with him, holding the bowl to catch the poison above his face and whispering that she loves him, until Ragnarok comes and brings the end of days.
RAGNAROK:
THE FINAL DESTINY OF THE GODS
I
Until now I have told you of things that have happened in the past—things that happened a long time ago.
Now I shall tell you of the days to come.
I shall tell you how it will end, and then how it will begin once more. These are dark days I will tell you of, dark days and hidden things, concerning the ends of the earth and the death of the gods. Listen, and you will learn.
This is how we will know that the end times are upon us. It will be far from the age of the gods, in the time of men. It will happen when the gods all sleep, every god but all-seeing Heimdall. He will watch everything as it begins, although he will be powerless to prevent what he sees from happening.
It will begin with the winter.
This will not be a normal winter. The winter will begin, and it will continue, winter following winter. There will be no spring, no warmth. People will be hungry and they will be cold and they will be angry. Great battles will take place, all across the world.
Brothers will fight brothers, fathers will kill sons. Mothers and daughters will be set against each other. Sisters will fall in battle with sisters, and will watch their children murder each other in their turn.
This will be the age of cruel winds, the age of people who become as wolves, who prey upon each other, who are no better than wild beasts. Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruins, flaming briefly, then crashing down and crumbling into ash and devastation.
Then, when the few remaining people are living like animals, the sun in the sky will vanish, as if eaten by a wolf, and the moon will be taken from us too, and no one will be able to see the stars any longer. Darkness will fill the air, like ashes, like mist.
This will be the time of the terrible winter that will not end, the Fimbulwinter.
There will be snow driving in from all directions, fierce winds, and cold colder than you have ever imagined cold could be, an icy cold so cold your lungs will ache when you breathe, so cold that the tears in your eyes will freeze. There will be no spring to relieve it, no summer, no autumn. Only winter, followed by winter, followed by winter.
After that there will come the time of the great earthquakes. The mountains will shake and crumble. Trees will fall, and any remaining places where people live will be destroyed.
The earthquakes will be so great that all bonds and shackles and fetters will be destroyed.
All of them.
Fenrir, the great wolf, will free himself from his shackles. His mouth will gape: his upper jaw will reach the heavens, the lower jaw will touch the earth. There is nothing he cannot eat, nothing he will not destroy. Flames come from his eyes and his nostrils.
Where Fenris Wolf walks, flaming destruction follows.
There will be flooding too, as the seas rise and surge onto the land. Jormungundr, the Midgard serpent, huge and dangerous, will writhe in its fury, closer and closer to the land. The venom from its fangs will spill into the water, poisoning all the sea life. It will spatter its black poison into the air in a fine spray, killing all the seabirds that breathe it.
There will be no more life in the oceans, where the Midgard serpent writhes. The rotted corpses of fish and of whales, of seals and sea monsters, will wash in the waves.
All who see the brothers Fenrir the wolf and the Midgard serpent, the children of Loki, will know death.
That is the beginning of the end.
The misty sky will split apart, with the sound of children screaming, and the sons of Muspell will ride down from the heavens, led by Surtr, the fire giant, holding high his sword, which burns so brightly no mortal can look upon it. They will ride across the rainbow bridge, across Bifrost, and the rainbow will crumble as they ride, its once-bright colors becoming shades of charcoal and of ash.
There will never be another rainbow.
Cliffs will crumble into the sea.
Loki, who will have escaped from his bonds beneath the earth, will be the helmsman of the ship called Naglfar. This is the biggest ship there will ever have been: it is built of the fingernails of the dead. Naglfar floats upon the flooded seas. The crew looks out and sees only dead things, floating and rotting on the surface of the ocean.
Loki steers the ship, but its captain will be Hrym, leader of the frost giants. The surviving frost giants all follow Hrym, huge and inimical to humanity. They are Hrym’s soldiers in the final battle.
Loki’s troops are the legions of Hel. They are the uneasy dead, the ones who died shameful deaths, who will return to the earth to fight once more as walking corpses, determined to destroy anything that still loves and lives above the earth.
All of them, giants and the dead and the burning sons of Muspell, will travel to the battle plain called Vigrid. Vigrid is huge: three hundred miles across. Fenris Wolf pads his way there also, and the Midgard serpent will navigate the flooded seas until it too is close to Vigrid, then it will writhe up onto the sand and force itself ashore—only its head and the first mile or so of its body. Most of it will remain in the sea.
They will form themselves into battle order: Surtr and the sons of Muspell will be there in flames; the warriors of Hel and Loki will be there from beneath the earth; the frost giants will be there, Hrym’s troops, the mud freezing where they stand. Fenrir will be with them, and the Midgard serpent. The worst enemies that the mind can imagine will be there that day.
Heimdall will have seen all this as it occurs. He sees everything, after all: he is the watchman of the gods. Now, and only now, he acts.
Heimdall will blow the Gjallerhorn, the horn that once was Mimir’s, and he will blow it with all his strength. Asgard shakes with its noise, and it is then that the sleeping gods will wake, and they will reach for their weapons and assemble beneath Yggdrasil, at Urd’s well, to receive the blessing and the counsel of the norns.
Odin will ride the horse Sleipnir to Mimir’s well to ask the head of Mimir for counsel, for himself and for the gods. Mimir’s head will whisper its knowledge of the future to Odin, just as I am telling it to you now.
What Mimir whispers to Odin will give the all-father hope, even when all looks dark.
The great ash tree Yggdrasil, the
world-tree, will shake like a leaf in the wind, and the Aesir and with them the Einherjar, all the warriors who died good deaths in battle, will dress for war, and together they will ride out to Vigrid, the final battlefield.
Odin will ride at the head of their company. His armor gleams, and he wears a golden helmet. Thor will ride beside him, Mjollnir in his hand.
They reach the field of battle, and the final battle will begin.
Odin makes straight for Fenrir, the wolf, now grown so huge as to be beyond imagining. The all-father grips Gungnir, his spear, in his fist.
Thor will see that Odin is heading for the great wolf, and Thor will smile, and whip his goats to greater speed, and he will head straight for the Midgard serpent, his hammer in his iron gauntlet.
Frey makes for Surtr, flaming and monstrous. Surtr’s flaming sword is huge and it burns even when it misses. Frey fights hard and well, but he will be the first of the Aesir to fall: his sword and his armor are no match for Surtr’s burning sword. Frey will die missing and regretting the loss of the sword he gave to Skirnir so long ago, for love of Gerd. That sword would have saved him.
The noise of battle will be furious; the Einherjar, Odin’s noble warriors, are locked in pitched battle with the evil dead, Loki’s troops.
The hellhound Garm will growl. He is smaller than Fenrir, but he is still the mightiest and most dangerous of all dogs. He has also escaped his shackles beneath the earth and has returned to rip the throats of the warriors on the earth.
Tyr will stop him, Tyr the one-handed, and they will fight, man and nightmare dog. Tyr fights bravely, but the battle will be the death of both of them. Garm dies with its teeth locked in Tyr’s throat.
Thor will finally kill the Midgard serpent, as he has wanted to do for so long.
Thor smashes the great serpent’s brains in with his hammer. He will leap back as the sea snake’s head tumbles onto the battlefield.
Thor is a good nine feet away from it when its head crashes to the ground, but that is not far enough. Even as it dies, the serpent will empty its venom sacs over the thunder god, in a thick black spray.
