by B. C. James
The Asgardians enthusiastically bought into Odin’s idea, not for any higher ideal or even as a matter of survival, but rather for completely selfish reasons. Most of them desired worship in much the same way that a junkie craved his next hit. For them, nirvana was a state where they could bask in the intoxicating adoration of the human race and celebrate their own splendor in the paradise of Asgard. For too long they had existed in the posh surroundings without the rush of worship. It didn’t take much to shake those adoration addicts from their forced sobriety and get them back on the horse to chase that particular white rabbit.
So, while they were all on Earth trying to score worship like divine crack addicts, Odin put a spell on the Rainbow Bridge that prevented anyone from returning to Asgard. He then decided they would remain marooned on Earth to serve as his attendants, foot soldiers, and godly versions of human shields if needs be. He would only allow a return home when a way for him to avoid his preordained death was discovered.
The stranded gods settled into life on Earth with varying degrees of success. The Norns, who had been largely forgotten, continued to make inconsequential and occasionally spurious predictions.
From the breakfast table at the Berkeley Breathed Home for the Aged in Des Moines, Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld each sat in front of a bowl of Alpha-Bits, reading the future. Although it had been a long time since a prophecy more significant than declaring that the sun would come up the next day had crossed their lips, they had managed to maintain a steady income by frivolously using their gifts in the entertainment industry. They had carved out a profitable little niche for themselves by selling their divinations regarding the private lives of royalty and celebrities to gossip shows like TMZ.
“What is the future showing you, Urðr?” Verðandi asked as she stirred the letters in her cereal bowl.
“I…see…Tom Brady and Lindsay Lohan checking into a low-rent dive of a motel with some branding irons and a milk separator. How about you? What do you see?”
“I see Michael Jackson rising from the grave to exact vengeance on his father and win The Masked Dancer. How about you Skuld? What do you see in the letters?”
“BINGO!!!!”
“No, no Skuld dear, that isn’t till Thursday night. She’s gone off again, Verðandi. We won’t be getting anything of value out her this morning.”
“Let me try, Urðr. Skuld…try again…look deep into the bowl. What do you see?”
Both Urðr and Verðandi stared at their sister for a moment. Skuld just sat there staring blankly into the cereal bowl. When nothing happened, her sisters just sighed and gave each other a small, resigned shrug. Then without warning, Skuld sat bolt upright. Her face was expressionless with the exception of her eyes. It was as if she was focusing on something a thousand miles away. Then she began to speak:
“Ragnarok is at hand! The dragon, the monster, the slayer of worlds, Jormungand has smashed through his prison and Loki has slipped his bonds. The God of Lies has released his second son, the demonic lycanthrope, the cursed wolf, the big dog daddy, Fenris.”
“Big dog daddy?” Urðr muttered under her breath while raising an eyebrow.
“Shhh…shut up and listen, Urðr,” Verðandi said, “this is huge!”
“A hammer, THE hammer, Thor’s Hammer, Mjölnir, will destroy the world tree, Yggdrasil, and throw the nine worlds into chaos!”
Urðr and Verðandi looked at each other. Urðr nudged her sister. “That was oddly specific.” Before Verðandi could respond, Skuld abruptly started speaking again.
“A crown of true immortality and ultimate power will sit upon the head of the one who controls the hammer and a god will make a choice…a choice that will…”
Urðr and Verðandi leaned in to hear the rest.
“A god will make a choice that will what?! WHAT?!?!?!” they yelled in unison.
“PIE!” Skuld said. She then gave no more prophecies and started arguing politics with her Alpha-Bits.
Prologue
Ralph Lang felt the smooth round pole. He followed the metal shaft with his hand as far up as he could reach. His fingers stopped short of the top by at least ten feet, but he could see the spearhead that graced the summit of the pole. For some reason, it was red. Why was it red? Then his hand traced the rod to where it was protruding out from his belly. He poked at the torn skin around the object and swirled the blood with his finger as it pooled in the broken folds that surrounded the gaping wound.
“That’s right…” he muttered softly, “It’s red because of me.”
His eyes kept moving from the bloodstained spear shaft to the rupture where the tip of the lance had burst from his abdomen. His eyes were seeing this horror, but Ralph’s mind was not making the connection between what he was seeing and the grave peril he was in. Mentally, he was still trying to reconstruct his last several moments. There wasn’t much to go over really. Ralph remembered giving one of the Renaissance Center’s window washers twenty dollars in exchange for letting him ride to the top of the building in the worker’s swinging stage scaffold. This man was hard to forget. He smelled like asparagus and old coffee grounds and got a little overly excited when Ralph mentioned that once the Renaissance Center pictures were taken, his next assignment would be to snap photos of farm animals at the Detroit Zoo.
Some of the memories were beginning to fragment in his mind as the blood loss became more severe, but Ralph recalled ascending the outside of the building in window washer’s apparatus, cursing his job and wondering how he could leave the rigors of being an underpaid news photographer behind and settle into a nice, fifteen dollars an hour career at Taco Bell. After the memory of that though the events became confusing in his head.
They had traveled about four stories up the side of the Renaissance Center. Ralph was testing the light for his first picture when he began to detect a faint rumbling. It wasn’t anything that he was willing to invest any energy worrying about. At the time, Ralph believed that the rumbling was a result of the worker having trouble grasping the complexities of the swinging stage’s controls. The little handheld unit did have both an up AND a down button. His companion may have found this potpourri of options confusing.
The elevator began to quiver again, more violently this time. His lens cap gyrated across the wood planked floor and went over the edge. Ralph remembered being angry and wondering how he was supposed get a good picture of the Detroit River when the lift felt like it was one of the Magic Fingers beds at the King Richard motel. Before he could say anything about the operator’s bad driving, the glass exterior walls of the Renaissance Center shattered.
That was the last cohesive memory that his brain could latch on to. The moments after that were a mental and emotional train wreck of panic and fear. In his head, there was a deleted scene just after the walls exploded. He remembered a knot in his stomach, a sound that was like bag of wet sand hitting the ground, and then pain. It was no ordinary pain, either. This was a sudden and all-consuming pain. The agony flashed behind his eyes and all he could see was white light.
Ralph’s mind slowly trudged back to reality. It picked up pieces of the moments before he looked up and saw a spear jutting out of his stomach, stained and dripping with his blood. He raised his eyes and saw what was left of the lift, broken and shaking as the building violently shuddered.
“I..I must‘ve fallen!” he said out loud, as if somebody were listening to him.
His legs kicked in the empty air, and he was lying nearly flat. His face looked toward the sky and he could feel a knot at the small of his back supporting his weight. His arms flailed in the vacant space around him, partly because he was trying desperately to find something solid to hold onto, and partly from the convulsions as his body began its death throes.
Looking down to his left, he could see the Detroit River and Windsor’s Canadian shoreline on the other side. The river was bubbling and becoming frothy from the disturbance that was shaking the city to its foundation. He watched Windsor disappear into great
clouds of dust as its buildings crumbled and fell.
He tilted his head backward and suddenly stopped caring about the fate of the Canadians. Ralph found himself looking straight into the face of Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, the founder of the City of Detroit. Albeit, he was seeing it upside down, but that is whose face he was staring at.
He didn’t recognize the face; however, he remembered that General Motors, the current owners of the Renaissance Center, had commissioned the statue for the building’s grounds. This was done in honor of the intrepid Frenchman who founded the city. The media push around the statue’s unveiling was staggering. For months, stories about it had been all over the local news. It wasn’t the statue that terrified Ralph; it was one detail he remembered from the plethora of newscasts: Cadillac holding a spear. The weapon’s base was planted firmly in the ground with its golden head pointed proudly towards the sky.
Ralph looked at the bloody shaft that had gone through his body. He saw the golden point of the spear glinting in the sunlight above him. Despite the blood that dripped from it, the gold still shone proudly. His body convulsed and he could taste the result of internal bleeding and bile at the back of his throat. Ralph began to actively panic as his brain had finally gotten a firm grasp of what had happened to him. He had been impaled. Grabbing the spear’s shaft, he began to pull himself toward the point.
Panting and crying, he tried to verbalize his horror and fear, but nothing but incoherent sounds came from his mouth.
The adrenaline rush from his panic didn’t last long, and his grip on the pole went weak. His body slid back down the spear to where the bronze hand gripped the shaft. He lay, suspended in the air, impaled, with his arms and legs dangling in the empty space. Ralph’s mind was getting fuzzy as parts of his brain began to shut down. He looked at the city around him. He watched as the Renaissance Center crumbled and fell, sending its human contents to their deaths. Chaos reigned in the streets. People were running aimlessly, screaming out in anguish and confusion. People were fighting to the death over door jams they thought might shelter them from the destruction as gunshots began to ring out.
While the carnage was reigning in the streets, the ground shook and began to split. Those trying to flee began to fall into the fissures that were created by the quakes. Their screams were loud but ended quickly.
“Nobody’s coming,” Ralph said as his voice began to give out.
In the haze of his mind, his brain searched for a word that described what was going on. He needed to put a label on it. Eventually his failing synapses found the word: Earthquake.
“Earthquake,” he whispered almost inaudibly to himself. This word satisfied his need for an answer. He didn’t bother to ask himself why an earthquake was hitting Detroit, a place with no significant history of seismic activity to speak of. He simply accepted the word and went on with dying. The last thing his mind registered was the massive head of a dragon rising out of the Detroit River. It breached the surface for a few moments and then submerged below the polluted waters again. Ralph chuckled a little at the tricks the mind played on someone when their body was descending into its last moments.
He closed his eyes and let death take the driver’s seat.
Chapter 1
“Rude awakenings. An early hour’s earthquake tops our morning news. Hi, I’m Daria Quinn and this is the WRIF Rock and Roll Radio News. The biggest earthquake since...well, since ever, rattled the cages of Metro Detroit residents today. It shook Motown to the tune of 7.0 on the Richter scale. The quake paralyzed southeastern, lower Michigan, a state whose last geologic upheaval occurred when Kwame Kilpatrick slipped and fell during a court appearance for one of his many criminal proceedings. The destruction left in its wake, the earthquakes not Kwame’s, is estimated to be in the tens of billions of…”
The old man turned off the radio. Reclining back in his leather chair, he surveyed the carnage in his office. The quake had left its thumbprint all over the place. A vase had fallen from its stand. but was saved from damage by a thick, grey shag carpet that the interior designer swore the gentleman wouldn’t regret. Well, that…and the people of the Ming dynasty really had a knack for making a durable vase.
For a moment, he stared at it like he expected the piece of pottery to put itself back on its stand before finally picking it up off the floor. The decorator was right, for the first time he didn’t regret going with carpet instead of hardwood or marble. Putting the vase back on the stand he still wasn’t completely sold on the neutral colors though. While this tiny corner of the office was now squared away, a quick view of the rest of the room emphasized how truly small a victory this was. Most of the books had been shaken loose from the shelves of his library. A framed Presidential Medal of Freedom hung cockeyed on the wall. In smaller frames next to it were invitations to the inaugurations of the last six presidents.
Sitting back in his chair and stroking his snow-white beard, the gentleman looked up at the mural painted on his high-domed ceiling. It wasn’t exactly the Sistine Chapel, but it was more impressive than the drop ceilings and fluorescent lights most people have in their offices. The painted surface depicted a battle. To the world outside the walls of his office, this particular clash was only an obscure moment in the long bloody history of war. In fact, outside of a few Dungeons and Dragons fanatics, most would be unaware this fight ever happened. The painting depicted the battle of Bravellir and the death of King Harald Wartooth, a warrior who was favored by the gods.
Odin closed his only remaining eye, and let his thoughts drift back in time. “What a day that was,” he softly muttered to himself. It was one of the most exciting moments in his near-eternal life.
King Harald Wartooth of the Danes, fearing death by old age, arranged the battle with his nephew, King Hring of Sweden. They had amassed the two largest armies ever conceived of at that point in history. Carnage and glorious death were the rules of the day. Wartooth would not allow the battle to end until he had attained a worthy death at the hands of the Swedes. The thousands who perished so that he could experience a proper warrior’s end were given over to Odin as a blood sacrifice.
Odin smiled as the memory flooded his ancient mind. That day he bestowed upon Wartooth, one of his favorite disciples, a gift that only one who was beloved by the king of Viking Gods was worthy to receive. Odin, disguised as Wartooth’s chariot driver, revealed himself to King Harald as the battle reached its apex. It was by Odin’s hand that Wartooth was slain, and in his arms, carried to Valhalla, the hall of heroes. What a glorious day. The celebration of Harald’s arrival went on for days.
Odin opened his eye and looked back to the artwork. This time he noticed a large crack, obscuring his own face on the mural.
“Typical,” he snorted.
He straightened up in his chair and pushed a button on his intercom. “Agatha, get Simmons in here,” he said in a loud, booming voice. Odin made a point of always using a very loud voice. When he had the intercom installed, he also had a device put in to make sure the bass resonance of his voice was amplified. When he addressed his employees, he wanted them to have absolutely no doubt as to who was in charge.
He took a stopwatch from his pocket, activated it, and pushed himself away from his desk. Still holding the stopwatch, he got up and walked toward the framed medal. The award was given to him for his company’s many innovations as America’s primary defense contractor. Since its inception in 1947, Aesir Engineering had revolutionized the art of weapon making to a degree that companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics simply could not compete with. Most of their competitors were ultimately run out of business, absorbed, or kept alive by Aesir Engineering themselves to avoid the appearance of a monopoly. This success had left Aesir as the single supplier of weapons and defense technology to the United States of America. It had also made Odin a very rich man. His personal fortune put him in the conversation regarding who the richest man on the planet was, and that was just the money people knew about. He had sev
eral billion more hidden, laundered, stashed away in overseas accounts and physically buried all over the world. Wealth and comfort was a good byproduct of Aesir, but it was not the reason he had left Asgard, the home of the gods, in favor of life with the mortals.
The monkeys who called themselves human beings may be a lower order of life than the Asgardian Gods, but they had a certain knack for carnage that was unmatched anywhere else in the nine worlds. Only a human could look upon the jawbone of an ass and decide this was a proper tool to smack his fellow man with. The creativity of these shaved apes in the art of destruction seemed to know no bounds. In what seemed like only a blink of Father Time’s eye, the human race had moved on from beating each other silly with bits of skeletal material to lobbing laser-guided atomic weapons at one another. This skill with weaponry both confounded and impressed the gods. Back in Asgard, they were still swinging heavy pieces of sharpened metal at each other at about the same time Harvard scientists had accidently invented napalm while searching for a cancer cure. Left on their own, mankind would simply develop more and more deadly weapons and then one day accidentally delete itself from the planet. This would be a waste as far as Odin was concerned.
If this talent were harnessed and directed by the gods, it would be an invaluable tool in the defense of the Asgardians. And it was protection that Odin needed. The time of Ragnarok was coming and for the first time in his supposedly immortal life, Odin could feel death stalking him.
Back in its heyday, Asgard was plagued by the antics of Loki, the God of Lies. His presence among the gods was barely tolerated, but the situation became unbearable when his three children, Hela, Jormungand, and Fenris, were brought into the world. Hela became the mistress of the dead and damned. Jormungand was a massive ill-tempered dragon that had little love for Odin or anything else from Asgard. Fenris was a wolf the size of a building. His favorite past time was treating the Asgardian Gods like chew toys. Eventually Odin, by trickery, magic, and strength of numbers, had Loki and all his children banished. The peace had been short lived.
