The Fires of Muspelheim

by Matt Larkin

  Idunn rubbed her face. Midgard did seem a dream. And so did this moment. Surreal, beyond her ability to wrap her mind around. “The Vanir were banished to Alfheim by Odin’s sorcery. We never found a way back. The Veil stops us.”

  Hnoss nodded, a mischievous grin on her face. “But some few of those descended from spirits have embraced their heritage and found a way into the Spirit Realm. Those, like Volund himself, who found his way here. And thus must know a way back. I may have followed him, once.”

  Idunn gaped at the other woman. “Y-you could have left at any time!”

  Hnoss shrugged. “And gone where? I told you, the shadows are part of me now.”

  “If you show me the way out, won’t he know you helped me?”

  She giggled. “Oh, yes. Volund will punish me.” She licked her lips and shuddered. “Oh, how he will punish me. I cannot wait to see what he will dream up.”

  Idunn suppressed a tremble at the other woman’s words. She’d lost her mind. And if Idunn stayed here, she would become like Hnoss. Even now, the thought of leaving this behind tore at her. Which meant, she had best flee Svartalfheim before she changed her mind.

  Before it became a part of her, as well.

  4

  A half dozen petty kings had shattered Reidgotaland into bloody civil war that had raged ever since the death of King Vigletus. All those old ambitions had flared up and Thor couldn’t think of a worse time for this bickering.

  Oh, the Fimbulvinter seemed to have forestalled the worst of the fighting. Hard to get men to march when they were starving. But the petty kings still gathered their levies, preparing for a summer that might not come, and a war they were too fucking stupid to avoid.

  Vigletus’s son, Vermund, ought to have had the rightful claim to the throne, so Thor had gone there to hear the man’s woes. And to get those damn spots flitting before his eyes at their squabbles.

  Here, they sat around Vermund’s hall, at his table, with thegns and carls and so forth, each trying to see who could shout the loudest.

  By Thor’s side, Gefjon drummed her fingers on the table in frustration. On the way, she’d claimed to have had a hand in establishing the first true kings of Reidgotaland, after the fall of the Old Kingdoms. Thor figured that was about as interesting as the color of his shit.

  Which still put it better than listening to this jabbering, spot-inducing, trollshit.

  He hefted Mjölnir.

  Still no one looking.

  He dropped the hammer on the table and it cracked the wood, carving out little splinters.

  Now, everyone cast a satisfying stare his way.

  “What?” Thor asked. “Were you having a fair time of it? Enjoying some boasting and insulting? Fucking imbeciles! We come here and tell you an army of Deathless bastards makes for your shores, and you can’t stop comparing cocks with one another long enough to mount a fucking defense?” Thor sniffed and rose. “Fine. I’ll settle it. I’ve got the biggest cock! Anyone need to see it?”

  Gefjon chortled. “Not going to refuse, if you really want to.”

  Other than a growl, Thor decided it best to ignore that.

  Frey and Nehalennia had gone to the far north of Cimbria, to scout the situation among Vermund’s enemies and, with luck, to get them to agree to travel here and combine their forces. Of course, Thor’s luck didn’t oft run that way.

  Thor ought to have brought more men, maybe, but Idavollir needed warriors to defend the place, and he couldn’t leave Magni without enough … ugh … what was that word? Reserves?

  “Look,” Thor said. “It’s time to make peace, because very soon, we’ll be making war.”

  “No one attacks in winter,” an insipid thegn protested. The man had a wart between his brows that looked like some damn third eye about to burst forth. Thor had heard his name twice already, but couldn’t remember aught save Warthead.

  Now, Thor fixed his gaze upon that bulging thing. “Maybe you didn’t hear about Ingjald Ill-Ruler hacking and burning his way up and down Sviarland a few moons back. Still going on, in case you don’t know. The Deathless legions just conquered all of fucking Hunaland, also. And if you think they’re not already either scouting a route through the Myrkvidr—”

  “No army marches through the Myrkvidr,” Warthead said.

  “Or else building ships to move in on yours,” Thor finished, “you’re even stupider than you look. And if you interrupt me again, you’re going to look pretty fucking stupid. Because I’ll shove your head so far up your arse the only thing men’ll see is that blister sticking out like a little ball of shit.”

  Gefjon snickered. “How colorful.”

  Thor cast her a glare. A brief one. “Whether in a fortnight or a moon, you’re going to have thousands of Miklagardian soldiers on your shores. Gardarikian mercenaries, Hun conscripts, and fucking vampires stalking the night. The world is ending and sticking your fingers in you arses and humming real loud is not going to stop it!”

  “In their arses?” Gefjon asked. “Don’t you mean in their ears?”

  Vermund rose now. “What, exactly, is a vampire? Some kind of cavalry?”

  “Nachzehrers,” Thor snapped.

  Most stared blankly at him and a few others scoffed at him invoking Hun legends.

  Thor threw up his hands. “Fucking draugar, only worse, all right? They’ll stalk the nights and kill and kill until you … ugh, grr! Until you …” Damn it! He hated his brain being so muddled. “Kill until you fucking die!” And he hated the way his words wheezed with no fucking teeth. He slapped the table. “So get the levies ready and make peace with the rest of your countrymen!”

  “Indeed,” Vermund said. “As soon as they acknowledge my kingship, I will welcome the—”

  Roaring, Thor now smashed both fists into the table, crushing it into kindling. His hammer clattered to the floor, and he paused only long enough to snatch it up before storming out.

  “That went well,” Gefjon said, when she found him sitting atop a hill, staring out at the mist. Somewhere out there, the Deathless legions were marching. And they’d win. They’d win because no one here seemed to believe they were even real, much less led by the undead.

  And these stupid trollfuckers deserved to die.

  They deserved it hard.

  Thor spit into the mist.

  With a sigh, Gefjon settled down beside him. “Men thought the world was ending when the Old Kingdoms fell. Everything went to savagery, people barely knew how to farm anymore. On Sjaelland, I helped those who remained recover the techniques. I love this land, Thor. I mean, it was hard times, sure, but those are good memories for me.”

  Why in Hel’s frozen underworld was she telling him this? “World wasn’t ending then. It really, actually is now.”

  “No one ever believes the end is nigh,” she said. “Almost no one, until it really hits them. No one thinks, ‘this is the last happy time we’ll have.’ People aren’t made that way. They always imagine a future. It makes me wonder, sometimes, where the first people came from, and who made us so damn stubborn? Was that supposed to increase our chances of survival? The unwillingness, even inability, to truly grasp the fleeting nature of existence?”

  “You and I are immortal,” Thor pointed out.

  “Right, sure. My life has hardly been fleeting. But not long ago I saw Bragi die. He’d lived thousands of years, and his life ended in a heartbeat. Why can’t mine? Any of us, we might be dead tomorrow. But most, they can’t … can’t really believe it would be them or the people close to them.”

  Thor rubbed the aching spot on his brow where the stone dug at his brain. “You got me confused with my father. Given the choice between philosophical musings and a pile of trollshit, I’d prefer a mug of ale.”

  The woman chortled, shaking her head. “You’re right about one thing. You’re not overmuch like your father, are you?”

  “Only in one thing. The way I see it, neither one of us breaks. Whether the world is ending or no, I’m going to keep fight
ing right up to the end. Past it, even.” Well, maybe that didn’t make overmuch sense.

  Gefjon patted his knee, then rose, and drifted back toward Vermund’s hall.

  Thor’s missing toes hurt. He couldn’t understand how, but they just kept hurting, out in the cold, as he hobbled his way along through the town, inspecting the paltry wall. How did something not there hurt, moons after getting cut off? How?

  It didn’t make a damn bit of sense, and that vexed Thor almost more than the pain.

  His toes were too stupid to know they were dead.

  It was the only explanation he could see.

  He had stupid toes.

  And this wall needed to be reinforced. Honestly, it needed to be torn down and replaced with a wall about twice as strong, but Thor doubted so much time remained to them. He’d ordered men out there, digging a trench around the town. They’d grumbled about having to move feet of snow.

  Well, when the Deathless legions showed up, they’d be grateful for whatever little bit of time those ditches bought them, wouldn’t they?

  “Riders!” a sentry shouted. “Men coming from the north!”

  North? Huh. Maybe Frey had done it and managed to bring some of the others to the table.

  Almost daring to smile—a slight smile, it wouldn’t do to let men see his missing teeth—Thor hobbled his way toward the gate.

  It was Frey and Nehalennia coming, leading a small trail of horses and a longer trail of men and women and children on foot. Dragging meager possessions, making their way across the miles.

  Thor glowered at the sight. He’d asked the man to bring back an army to reinforce southern Cimbria and stall the Deathless advance. Not to drag along more mouths to feed. Everyone was starving already.

  Even Thor’s belly grumbled more oft than not these days.

  Thor stood by the gate, not going out to meet Frey. With neither a horse nor toes, Thor didn’t much fancy trekking over hills. The Vanr would understand.

  Indeed, once he drew nigh, Frey hopped off his mount and trotted over to Thor’s side. “Get these people inside.”

  Well, Thor had known that was coming. Much as he might have wanted to turn away all those mouths, he didn’t see how he could do so. With a wave, he sent men out there, ushering the … refugees inward.

  Refugees. Huh. Not a good sign.

  “What in Hel’s icy trench happened out there?” he demanded.

  A hand on Thor’s shoulder, Frey guided him away. “Hel is right. She came to us, landed on the shore.”

  “What?” Oh, fuck. So now they were trapped between the Goddess of Niflheim and a vampire-led army? Trapped on a peninsula with nowhere to go.

  “She brought a ship, larger than any I’ve ever seen. Immense, beyond imagining. A … a floating city, almost. It burst through the mist over the sea like some skinless beast of bone and nails and raw, bloody tendons.”

  Thor fell short, and spun, turning Frey about to look in his eyes. The man was scared. The Vanr, liosalf, famed warrior, his eyes shone with terror. “A living ship?”

  “From it poured an endless army of the dead. Draugar … thousands upon thousands of them. Enough to swallow this land whole. Maybe enough to swallow the world. And led by a jotunn draug whose steps sent the land trembling.”

  “You jest.”

  From the pale look on the man’s face, though, Thor already knew better. “This is what remains of those I managed to get out from there. We cannot … we cannot survive this army. Not with the forces we have now. They … they were killing everything. Every man, woman, child, and animal they came across was slaughtered.”

  Thor found it hard to swallow.

  Frey, too, looked apt to faint. “They are coming for us, Thor. They’re coming here. Soon.”

  5

  While Hel might have descended through valleys herself and led the slaughter, she did not yet know where Odin was, nor her father. She would not make the mistake of overextending her reach, nor revealing the whole of her strength until the time was right.

  No, she waited behind the endless ranks of the dead as they swept over this land, a place her host thought of as Cimbria in Reidgotaland, though Hel cared little for mortal appellations. Whenever they came to a town or village, Hrym would lead Hel’s draugar to massacre every living being.

  Some souls Hel would feast on, while others fed her horde. The strongest warriors she raised with the mist, such that her legion only grew with each passing day.

  There would be no mistakes, this time.

  So many ages had passed since last Hel walked the Mortal Realm. Last time, she had grossly underestimated the Destroyer. Had thought, because he could not match her in an even fight, that he could do naught at all to stand against her. Instead, he had relied on trickery and treachery, and had cost her a host while depriving her of any other to claim.

  Well, that same trick would certainly not work now, no, and Hel would not afford the Destroyer any such chance again.

  Her intention, not so long ago, had been to use the ranks of the Niflungar to supplement her legions. As mortals, they would have provided ample replacement hosts if needed. Unfortunately, Odin had managed to eradicate their entire civilization through his ploys.

  Still, it did not mean Hel could not find other followers.

  A snap of her fingers had Hrym at her side, kneeling before her.

  “Break their lines,” she told the dead jotunn. “This time, bring me their so-called king alive. We will give them the chance to swear fealty and live, as did Naefil in ages past.”

  The jotunn lord rose without answer. It rarely deigned to speak. As was only fitting.

  Her draugar swept over this Reidgotaland like a relentless tide, crashing upon insipid defenders in wave after wave of undead warriors. They charged into shield walls, heedless of their own safety, caring not if they impaled themselves on the mortals’ petty thickets of spears. Against such relentless savagery, humanity crumbled in moments.

  And her forces plowed right through them, a shrieking mass of decaying bodies and creaking armor that blanketed the land. The tide becoming a flood.

  Mortals, they did not like to fight in the darkness of night, when the draugar armies came. In daylight, Hel’s forces would retreat out into the mists. Some buried themselves in snow. Others formed tiny enclaves in woodlands, in mountain passes, in chasms and deep places.

  And then the sun would set, they would congregate of their own accord, driving ever forward, pushing into town after town.

  They came up from the sea in a frozen harbor, broke through the ice, flung open doors. They hurled children into the frozen deep, they bit out throats with venom-laced fangs. They hewed bodies limb from limb and left the remnants strewn about the landscape as a warning to all who would oppose her.

  And some few, the warriors and would-be leaders, the draugar brought before Hel, to kneel, to worship, and swear unbreakable oaths of fealty with their own blood. For, Hel assured them, were they to renege on such oaths, Nidhogg would spend a thousand years devouring their souls in the depths of Naströnd.

  Thus far, none had dared break their oaths.

  Still, mankind formed their weak shield walls, even as their numbers dwindled, as their entire race died out. They hid behind blocks of wood and shaking spears.

  One of her draugar raced forward, climbing over the bodies of its fallen compatriots, to fly into the ranks of the defenders, eyes gleaming red. Its weight bore two men to the ground, disrupting the wall. Its Otherworldly strength seized throats and squeezed, even as its venom-laced jaws descended and bit off a man’s nose.

  Deep inside, Hel’s host squirmed in horror at the sight of draugar feasting.

  Hel chuckled at Sigyn’s disquiet, embracing the visions of mist, as her power spread.

  Every night, the chorus of screams would herald the arrival of darkness, as her draugar army marched. Atop a mountain, she watched, her vision unimpeded by mist that blinded mortals. She’d borne witness as they swarmed over a ci
ty her host knew as Arus, swarmed like thousands upon thousands of ants, while the wind carried the glorious screams of the dying up to the mountain on Hel’s command.

  In the hateful daylight, her draugar would shelter within the city, though not for long. No, they would move on, south, claiming to entire peninsula as her stronghold.

  To the north, her armies had claimed the mountains of Nidavellir and now laid siege to the buried dverg nations where they thought to hide. As spirits, the dvergar had power, and thus could not be allowed free reign over Hel’s new world.

  The mists themselves told her of the battles that raged amid those frozen peaks. The dvergar thought themselves well hidden from her wrath, but Hel knew better. Even now, frost jotunnar crossed Kvenland to join her legions, all having sworn fealty to Hel’s ineffable power and Hrym, their progenitor, risen from the grave to lead them to new glory. Together with her draugar, the jotunnar would tear the doors securing the dverg halls, and the hateful maggots would be crushed, driven from this world.

  Hel allowed herself a half smile at the thought.

  Long ago, fearing the sun, the dvergar had begun a project—a pale imitation of the orrery located in the ruins of the Astral Temple—to control the moon and block out the hateful rays of light. They had abandoned it for lack of power, but Hel’s power could fuel their device. Soon, her forces would claim the new orrery and she could remove the only obstacle holding back her draugar.

  Nidavellir was falling. Reidgotaland was falling. Bjarmaland. Kvenland.

  Already, jotunnar had begun to move into northern Sviarland.

  Names of places drawn from Sigyn’s mind flitted through Hel’s own. Meaningless names that would be forgotten before the year was out.