The Fires of Muspelheim

by Matt Larkin

  In the hand of one of those people, a flame danced, as though he held a large candle.

  The Art of Fire.

  Odin forced himself to utter stillness. More Serks?

  “To control the flame is become both master and slave,” Loki said. The man had his back to Odin, but Odin would know that voice anywhere. “And to look into it, to see beyond our clouded perceptions of linear reality, presents both a greater gift, and a greater danger. You will be tempted to rely heavily on the insights hidden within the patterns. Tempted, and compelled, for our world grows direr than ever. Fire is life.”

  “Fire is life,” the others repeated in unison.

  Loki nodded, closing his hand and allowing the flame he held to wink out. With his other hand, he beckoned to a woman at his side.

  At his command, she reached toward the flame. Hesitating. Fingers trembling. Odin could not blame her.

  “It is in you already,” Loki said. “But you will not be able to harness it if you cannot accept that, at times, you will be burned. You have already suffered burns. You will suffer some few more while you learn to control this.”

  The angle of her back concealed her face, but from the set of her shoulders, surely she must have turned grim. The woman reached into the flame and hissed, whimpering, as she jerked her singed hand back.

  “You can do this,” Loki said. “If you wish to become the guides of your people, you must do this. You know what power Naefil and his heirs wield. Have you the strength to combat them?”

  The woman clenched her fist a moment, then shoved her hand back into the flame. When she withdrew it, a tiny speck of fire leapt and danced around her fingers. A candle so faint a sigh could have blown it out. But it lived there, on her fingertips. A beginning.

  “Fire is life,” Loki repeated, and then the others chanted it after him.

  One by one, each of the other two had their own test. All suffered burns, but all came out, in the end, holding a fragile flame in their hands.

  These weren’t Serks, and this place, this temple … Odin had seen structures like this. In the ruins of the Lofdar. These were Odin’s own ancestors, the heirs of Lofdi and predecessors to Loridi himself.

  “You have taken the first steps now,” Loki said, “and there is no turning back. You must become the bulwark against the darkness, against the cold. You are the Firewalkers of Midgard.”

  Midgard, yes. Though, in an earlier era, Prometheus had first given the Art of Fire to man, before the world was split into Midgard and Utgard by Mundilfari.

  Odin waited in silence until Loki’s disciples had at last departed. Then he shifted, allowing himself to rise and crawl over to the fire pit where his future blood brother awaited him.

  “I suspected it was you,” Loki said, fire glinting off his crystal blue eyes. “It’s been so long since I saw you …”

  “You didn’t know I’d be here.”

  Loki’s faint smile was his only answer.

  “It’s … what, Loge, at the moment, right? Not Loki. Not Prometheus.”

  “Huh. Well, that last one I haven’t used in many eras. Was that the last you saw me, from your perspective? I suspect it must have been.” Loge folded his hands atop his knees, staring at Odin as if trying to file all his thoughts away.

  “What do you do, when you stare like that?” Odin asked.

  Loge sighed. “Calculations of probability in accordance with information gathered over a long period of time, supplemented by prescient insights drawn from the flames.”

  Odin folded his arms. “Is that all?”

  Another of those damn smiles. “You and I, we are on constantly intersecting voyages through time and fate, in some ways quite alike. One of us, effectively damned to live a life forever, while the other is damned to live innumerable lives that so oft find themselves drawn in similar patterns.”

  Audr cackled. Fate’s jaws are upon your throat … You will die … as you have died … over and over …

  With a groan, Odin leaned forward and grabbed Loge’s wrist. “Once, we were brothers. In that vein I ask you now, give me what answers you can. I implore you, Loge. If I … If I finally make it back to my time, I don’t think the world has long left, and I have this terrible feeling we shall not have many more chances. If there remains aught you need to tell me, then tell me now. Tell me, without the riddles or obfuscation.”

  For a moment, the man looked almost forlorn. “Where you see riddles, I see attempts to distill complex topics into comprehensible metaphors, or at least into the simplest possible explanations that do not lose crucial aspects of meaning, especially during lifetimes in which you lack certain academic foundations that might allow me to explain in other terms.”

  Odin released the man’s wrist with a groan. Even his answers as to why he couldn’t give straight answers seemed convoluted. Worse, perhaps, because Odin could begin to understand them. “I understand now that Ragnarok will continue despite my efforts. I think … I think I even understand why you started this cycle. I guess … I guess I’m just left with one, terrible, lingering question, Loki. How do I protect those I love?”

  “Are your loved ones not part of mankind, and, if they are, does not preserving mankind effectively serve those loved ones, as well?”

  Odin glowered, now looking into the flame. “You mean that, even if it leads to their death, it’s better than the alternative? To let Nidhogg bring down Yggdrasil? That is what this is about, isn’t it?”

  Loki’s tight smile made Odin want to squirm. Years back, he would have, uncomfortable in the man’s utter certainty about the twisting paths of urd.

  An avalanche of urd, Odin had once thought it, these forces driving him ever toward a future he would not have chosen for himself. The web of urd held time together, yes, and perhaps he could not allow a paradox to creep in if doing so meant risking all he cared about it. But he’d already seen those he loved die. How could he allow this?

  “Because there could be fates worse than death,” Loge said, apparently having read Odin’s hesitation off his features. A rather vexing talent, that one.

  But … even if Odin could not break the cycle of destruction and creation, it did not mean he could not affect it in any way. Solve one problem, even if he could not solve them all. Was that possible? To fix one error and allow himself more freedom—even if in future incarnations—to later attend to others?

  He opened his mouth to say so, but the temporal currents swept in and bowled him over, left him lying on the fire temple floor, gasping for air. Struggling to hold on to aught. Just a little more … A little more … a few more questions for Loki … A chance to say that, even if he could not forgive what the man had done, he could at least understand it now.

  Loki leaned over him, grasped his wrists. He was speaking, but his voice was above the waters, distant and muffled. The man leaned closer, desperately speaking.

  “… control this, brother! Not so different from how you have learned to harness your visions with the Sight. No stronger oracle … Because you can … Odin! Focus. Narrow your focus to a pinpoint, to what you need, in order to reach the …”

  Focus.

  He’d said that before. Focus on what he needed to get back to.

  On what mattered most.

  Freyja.

  He needed Freyja. He had to reach her.

  He pictured her in his mind, her soft cheeks, her golden hair. Her crooked smile. A torrent of waves rushed over him, tearing him apart, but Odin refused to let go of that picture in his mind. Refused to allow that darkness take him this time.

  He was screaming, without doubt this time.

  Screaming, then groaning, kneeling in snow. Hoarse. His throat hurt.

  Outside, it was night, and the mist was thick, chilling, leaving no doubt as to what era he’d made his way to now.

  Finally able to catch a painful breath, he pushed himself up. Wobbled as he gained his feet. Stumbled a few steps, shaking his head. Snow crunched beneath his heels, tugged on them
, and made him feel even clumsier than the sudden change in location—and time—had already done. Yes, he was weak. Weary, too.

  But had he made it back to his own time? Back to his love that would now so need him?

  Back, to whatever small amount of time was left to them before the end he now knew he could not avert.

  Give in …

  No. He would not surrender to death and despair. He would fight Ragnarok, as he had fought it before. Yes, the world would end. Yes, few if any of mankind would survive this. But a new world would rise, and this time, this time, he swore man would never again have to suffer under Hel’s chilling shadow. He would destroy her, once and for all.

  Death alone is real … We are all dead …

  “Silence,” Odin grumbled under his breath. He had no interest in debating Audr’s nihilism or despondency.

  He’d appeared inside an evergreen grove, the trees seeming whispering shadows beyond the mist, hidden and strange. Chanting carried on the wind, and Odin followed the sound of it, until he reached a hollow.

  She sat there, around a tiny fire with three other women. Freyja’s skin did not glow, though her golden hair held a luster in the darkness. The chanting had stopped and now she spoke in Old Northern, talking to the women of the Otherworlds.

  After a moment more, Freyja threw runes before her, and her students leaned in to peer at them.

  Odin wanted to cry out to her, to embrace her. Or to bemoan urd for having placed him, once more, outside his own time. This was not the Freyja he knew. No, and those fur-clad women with strange patterns painted on their faces, they were not his people. Rather, these were the seidkonur—the first völvur, whom Freyja had trained in the Art some time after she’d helped Mundilfari raise the Midgard Wall.

  In his desperation to find his lost love, Odin had pulled himself to her, but not to her as he needed her. Rather, some part of him must have been thinking still about the past, about the rise of pyromancers among the Lofdar, or the foundations of his era.

  In silence, he crouched and watched their lesson. This was not for him, of course, and did him no good, and yet, he could not tear his gaze from her. Watching her as she was, long before his birth, a teacher, still filled with hope that she could aid the beleaguered mankind. Before they would take her gifts to the Old Kingdoms and give rise to nations of sorcerers who would invite far more dangerous, chaotic beings into the world than those jotunnar Freyja had so long fought to overcome.

  Yes, Odin pitied her for her plight, as it would soon unfold. But the misdeeds of the past meant naught, really. He knew enough, now.

  Knew what role was left to him. Knew what he must do.

  Careful not to attract attention, Odin crawled away from the women’s circle, until he managed to find a sheltered tree within the grove. Beneath the evergreen, he folded his legs, closed his eye, and embraced the Sight.

  Loge had promised him he could control his movements through time. The Norns had sparked something within Odin, his blood brother had told him, something that had allowed him to see the things he most needed to see. Well now, all that remained was the end.

  And he would focus himself to get back there. Focus his Sight inward, first, then find the threads of the web of urd, and trace it back to the last days of this era. He would control this. He had to.

  One last fight lay before him.

  8

  Reality was governed by necessity. To the undiscerning eye, the causal chains appeared to run linearly, the future predicated entirely upon the past. Loki, however, knew all too well that those chains formed not lines, but webs of infinite complexity. The web of urd, others called it, these chains of fate. It was enough to make a man like him feel helpless before the procession of history. Damned to know so many of the dark futures ahead of him and the darker still truths that underlay reality.

  Of course, he’d always known he would one day lose Sigyn. And when she had begun to delve into the Art he’d looked on with horror as she wrought her own undoing and, with it, the downfall of all mankind.

  Inevitable necessity, without the barest hint of mercy.

  What did fate know of morality? The Norns could not have understood the subject had he spent centuries trying to explain it to them, any more than most men could begin to grasp the scope of their duties in holding together this fragile reality while outside forces gnawed on the fringes.

  Bundled in furs, he trudged through the snows on the northern shore of Valland, where the Naglfar would soon land. Hel knew the Aesir’s great stronghold had become Idavollir, and she would not brook delays in sieging that place. She was intent, no doubt, on depriving Odin of all his allies, while wondering where the man had gone.

  Loki could guess, of course. So little time remained to Odin, and Loki had always known his blood brother would sooner or later have to begin his last, farthest trek. The one that would serve to crystalize urd before his gaze, almost as much as these chains had become clear before Loki’s own.

  It was effectively meaningless to ask where Odin was in the timeline, given his flitting between the past and future would not line up with aught in Loki’s perspective of the present. Time travel, even more than prescience, must naturally unravel absolute conceptions of now and replace them with relative ones.

  In the distance, the massive, grotesque ship threaded through the mists and drew up as close to the shore as it could without running aground. Though Loki could not see the draugar leaping over the sides and into the sea, he knew they had already begun to do so. A swarm of the hideous ghosts, trapped in their own rotting flesh, and caring naught about the icy chill of the waters, nor needing to breathe.

  Loki had given over any attempt to conceal himself from Hel’s gaze, and so, no doubt, she would detect him in the mist, sooner or later.

  His daughter.

  Taken from him so very long ago. Damned, for her pursuit of the Art, to an existence of eternal torment and fathomless hatred as a wraith. Except, poor Hekate had thought to challenge fate, and had thus arranged another end for herself, enlisting the aid of other sorcerers. He ought to have seen her plan more clearly back then, but Loki had been caught in the tides of history himself, and torn by the grief of the things he’d lost and would lose.

  Perhaps it didn’t matter, as the Norns were not like to have allowed him to change aught, regardless. Time existed, predicated upon itself, in an endless weave. A knotted tapestry. Immutable, or so very close to it.

  Was that why he’d come here? Because he’d seen it in the flames, and given in, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or had the flames shown him the desires that already lay within his breast, the need, having lost all else, to look upon whatever remained of his love, taken from him so many times?

  Hands behind his back, he stood motionless as the draugar lurched from the sea, ice-cold waters dripping down over their rusting armor. They surrounded him but did not advance.

  For she had sensed him now, surely.

  There, walking on the sea—or rather, on ice sheets forming beneath her feet as she made her way to him—Hel came to him. Hel … Hekate. And Sigyn. His precious, beloved Sigyn.

  Both the women he loved more than aught else in the world.

  When Sigyn was torn from him, in the intervening ages of separation between them, Loki would delve into his memories, run them through his mind over and over until they had become embedded in his very being. And still, still, somehow he would almost forget how keen her edge ever was. The wit, the cunning, the incessant curiosity that proved her most endearing, most damning of traits.

  That, and the hope.

  Hekate had wanted to torture him by taking Sigyn, he knew, though Loki had to imagine his daughter also wanted the connection to her mother. That some part of her, some deep part she probably could not admit even to herself, craved the one she’d lost. Hekate might come to the Mortal Realm, might look upon her father, but her mother … her mother always bore a different face.

  And Hekate perhaps failed to see
the depths of the soul within, of the mind born of that soul, of its … grace.

  She chuckled, as she walked unto the beach, shaking her head ever so slightly. It was Sigyn, but half of her had rotted away, leaving exposed muscle and bone, and it took all of Loki’s will to hold himself to stillness at seeing his beloved so destroyed by their own daughter. Hekate had not done that to Sigyn willfully. Surely she had not … and that ought to have offered Loki some semblance of comfort.

  Hel paced all the way up to him, then circled around him once, before coming to stop a few feet from his face. Already, Hel’s presence in Sigyn had begun to stretch her form, growing taller. Not so much longer and she’d be eye level with Loki himself. “Have you come to surrender at long last, Father?”

  A ring of draugar surrounded them, their armor creaking as they shifted and shambled, ill at ease. Again, little surprise, given their own eternal torment. They reeked of brine and decay.

  Loki kept his gaze focused on Sigyn’s eyes. One was gone now, just a hollow pit with a fell red light inside, and the other gleamed red as well, no longer looking like his wife. But she was in there. Deep inside, looking back. He could almost feel Sigyn pleading with him, begging for release he could not offer her. How could he, when the only possible release from this torment would be to free her soul?

  Her body was dead, but it was Hel’s presence that kept Sigyn here, looking at him. And the thought of her being torn from him once more, of having to wait ages again before he could look into her soul and know his own soul mate, that thought crushed Loki. It swallowed him whole and left him falling into the depths of despondency.

  “Do you want my surrender?” he finally managed to answer.

  Hel cocked her head from one side to the other, before a slow smile spread along the one side of her face with flesh. “Oh. Oh, Father. After so very long … you’ve come to stand by my side, haven’t you? You’ve come to watch me win.” She chuckled, a hollow, distorted sound that would’ve made most men flinch.

  But Loki had heard that empty laughter before. Too many times. She was, after all, still his child. He could not abide her actions, perhaps, but nor could he deny the bond that drew him back to her, as well. Such a bond defied any attempt to fully sever it.