by T L Greylock
The flinch was almost imperceptible, but Raef was sure he saw it in the muscles around Loki’s eyes, in the tightening of his mouth. It seemed Loki, for all his eagerness to destroy the Allfather and the nine realms, was not so impatient to face his fated battle with the other god, the battle that would kill them both.
“The shieldmaiden is badly wounded, Skallagrim. Do you think you can save her?”
Raef’s heart skipped.
A smile played across Loki’s face. “Let me look after her for you.”
And then the god was gone and Raef was left to scream at nothing but the sky.
**
How he came down from those hills, Raef could not have said. He ran, sliding when his feet got too far ahead or behind, but when he reached the place where Siv should have been, he found only the horses.
There was no sign of a struggle. If Siv had seen Loki coming for her, she had not had a chance to fire, for her quiver was not missing a single arrow. The knife and sword had not been disturbed and the bow lay alongside them, placed with care.
Raef dropped to his knees and stretched out a hand to touch the smooth, curved bow. Once he might have hurled his anguish at the sky, shouting at the gods, cursing Odin and Loki both, but he did not have the will now.
He collected the weapons and strapped them to his pack, then mounted his horse, leaving the other behind rather than slow himself by tying the horses together. Casting a glance to the hills, he saw only darkness and no sign of Vakre, no fire in the sky.
“Alone, then,” he said. “Let it come.”
With a shout Raef urged the mare onward, west now, to the sea and the hole in the earth that might give him an answer.
Thirty-Six
The coast was white with foam. Waves, released by Jörmungand in the deep, crashed against the shore, spewing salt spray high into the air. The Old Troll stood tall, stone eyes facing the sea, waiting for the flood that would come to swallow the land.
Raef’s mare, breathing hard, reached the top of the lone hill and came to a halt, legs trembling with exhaustion from the hard race through darkness to the sea. Raef swung out of the saddle, then patted her neck and thanked her for her swift legs and strong heart. With steady fingers, he loosened her saddle and freed her from its weight, then removed the bridle as well. Steam rose from her back and she snorted at him, blowing hot air on his neck. Leaving his pack alongside the saddle, he stroked her nose once more, then turned to the sea that he had dreamed of so often, that had called him westward in search of unknown lands. The sea road was as lost to him as Vakre and Siv. Closing his eyes, Raef turned away from that distant dream and faced the hole the lightning strike had made in the top of the troll’s skull.
Without a means to lower himself, Raef was forced to brace his back against one side of the tunnel, his legs against the other, and slide in halting, grating bursts down through the earth. Then the small cavern opened up beneath him and Raef fell, striking the stone floor hard, the impact jarring through his bones. Wincing, Raef righted himself and strained his eyes for a sign of something, anything, but darkness reigned uncontested by the stars.
But he could hear. The sound was faint, but Raef knew at once what it was. Water. Tiny ripples lapping against stone. There had been no water in the cavern when he last visited, when he saw the strange, glimmering image of Yggdrasil fade from the walls and ceiling. Lowering himself to his hands and knees, Raef felt his way across the cold stone floor until he felt water at his fingertips.
Raef dipped his hand into the icy water and lifted it to his lips, testing it. Clean. Better than the best mountain streams Raef had drunk from in the high places of Vannheim. This gave him courage, though had the water tasted vile he still would have unfastened his cloak, set it to the side, and stepped into the pool.
The water dragged him down. There was no bottom. It filled his ears and nose, it tumbled him around, and just when Raef ran out of air in his lungs, the current vanished, leaving him suspended in water that threatened to freeze his blood.
But there was light above him and Raef kicked to the surface, breaking through at last, sucking in air.
He was in a lake. The surface of the water was smooth and flat around him, the ripples made by his limbs dying away almost instantly. Above him were stars, but they hung low in the sky, illuminating the lake in bright light. In one direction the lake extended unimpeded, stretching away into a flat horizon, but it seemed to Raef that there was an edge, and that the water there must form a waterfall large enough to swallow all of Midgard. There was a shore, though, and it was close to Raef. And it was green, impossibly flat, just as the lake was, but vibrant and rich even in that strange starlight. Raef swam to it and only when he climbed onto the grass did he see the tree.
It stood away from Raef and the lake, but he found he could not guess the distance. The trunk was wide and straight, the limbs curling and twisting into the stars. And three roots burrowed into the green earth at its base.
“Yggdrasil.”
The name came to his lips as though placed there by some force other than his own mind, and he could taste it. It was soil and summer fruit and lean venison and silver fish and root vegetables. Sunshine and mead. All the bounty of the earth.
Raef began to walk across the endless green meadow but he had not gone far when he sensed something following him. He stopped and turned and saw the lake was lapping after him. It did not frighten him, for there was no malice in the water, and by the time he reached the tree, the water had closed the distance, too, coming to rest by the roots. Perhaps there had been no distance at all. He peered once more into the lake and in that moment he saw Odin’s lost eye, the pair to the one he had looked into when the Allfather had come to him in the labyrinth of Jötunheim.
The eye covered the entire lake and yet was also a tiny thing hovering just below the surface, so close that Raef could have reached in and plucked it up.
“Then this is Mimir’s well,” Raef murmured. Odin had sacrificed his eye to the well in return for ancient knowledge. The borders between the realms must have weakened a great deal for Mimir’s well to reach to the Old Troll.
The bark of the great ash tree was covered in carved runes, some orderly and neat, others scrawled in haste or maybe pain and falling at angles down the trunk. But as Raef paced around the trunk, he saw that one part was rotten, the bark oozing with decay and slime, though he could see it had been smeared with wet clay from the lake in an effort to stave off the rot. There were scars in the trunk, too, and Raef was certain he was seeing the marks left by the ropes Odin had used to bind himself to Yggdrasil for nine days and nights. A squirrel chattered at him from a low branch as he passed underneath. Raef wondered what message he was passing between Nidhogg, the serpent in Yggdrasil’s roots, and the eagle perched in the ash tree’s highest branches.
He had passed around the tree at least three times, he was sure, before he found those who had scooped the clay from the lake and spread it across Yggdrasil’s wounds.
The Norns were sitting between two of the roots. One was dressed in white, her hair almost as pale. The second wore black and her raven-colored tresses fell across her face. The third was ready for battle in gleaming armor made of fire and moonlight. She had red hair and it was her eyes that found Raef first.
“You should not be here.” The red-haired Norn’s voice was no more than a whisper.
“Did your runes tell you that?”
“The stars are falling, child of Midgard.” It was the Norn dressed in white who spoke next. Raef looked up and saw that it was true, almost as if her words had begun it. The orbs streaked across the sky, plummeting into the lake or beyond the edge of the green plain.
“The battle has begun. Fenrir has come for Odin. Jörmungand has slithered from the seas to face Thor. Even now Black Surt sets a fire to the walls of Valhalla.” This from the dark-haired Norn.
“The long-told fate has come.” The red-haired Norn rose from her seat on the root and Raef saw the
serpent Nidhogg was curled around her waist.
“And you think you can undo what was made when Yggdrasil was no more than a seed.” The white-blonde Norn spoke again.
“You are Urda.” Raef was not sure how he knew this but she did not correct him. “I have met your son.” He turned to face the dark one. “And you are Verdandi.” She gave a slight nod, though he thought it was against her will. “Then you are Skuld.” Raef said to the third as he reached out and ran a hand up Yggdrasil’s ancient trunk, his fingers sliding among the runes. He heard one of them hiss at his boldness. “I have not come to save Odin. The Allfather knows his fate. But I do not know mine. And so I have learned to hope.”
“It matters not.” The Norns spoke as one and then they were gone and in their place was a three-headed creature. Its body was that of a massive wolf, but the wings of an eagle had sprouted from its back and the heads were all different. A dragon bristled in the middle but the other two creatures were too ancient for Raef to name.
The beast came for him but Raef was ready, eluding the three heads as they sought to snatch him up. Diving first out of the reach of one, he slashed into the tendons of the second just as the dragon’s teeth snapped over his head. Whirling, Raef threw his axe, catching the dragon in the throat. The creature wailed as Raef lunged forward, his sword stabbing into the wolf heart. Writhing, wings beating the earth, the creature dropped to the ground, but it was Siv who fell, who curled up in agony, hands trying to stem the flow of blood from the gaping hole in her chest. She called out to him, her pain taking life in the air Raef tried to breathe.
He knelt by her side, fear and horror reaching into his heart with cold fingers. But there, just at the edge of his vision, the blue of Odin’s eye flashed from the depths of the well and his mind steadied. “You are not Siv. You are here to break me. Know this: I was already broken in the labyrinth of Jötunheim. My mind is my own and belongs to no other. You cannot take it from me.” Without thinking, Raef drew the dragon-kin talon from where it rested in his belt. It was warm to his touch and seemed to pulse with the last heartbeats Raef had felt in the smoke-colored kin’s chest. The thing that was not Siv cried out, begging him to help her, pleading, but Raef, as the stars fell around him, buried the talon in her chest.
When he drew it out again, hot with blood, the form of Siv vanished, leaving behind only a spreading stain to darken the green grass at the edge of Mimir’s well.
Only then did Raef feel how his heart raced, how his breaths came shallow and short, how his limbs were weak and unsteady. He sank to the edge of the lake and rinsed the blood from the talon, and as the water touched his skin, as his hand was swallowed up by Odin’s eye, he was able to catch his breath.
“You are watching me still, Allfather,” Raef said.
Rising, Raef turned and took in the great expanse of Yggdrasil, larger, it seemed, than ever. Before it had been merely a tree, ancient and carved with runes, but nothing more than bark and limbs and leaves. Now he could see eight realms cradled in Yggdrasil’s strong arms and one, a dark, cold place, nestled between the roots. This was Niflheim. The green plain was gone, leaving only stars above and below Raef. They were fewer now, the expanses of dark sky between them larger and threatening.
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 bli
nked 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.
