The Fires of Muspelheim

by Matt Larkin

  He dropped down atop her and grabbed the sides of her skull. And pushed. Felt her form breaking. Cracking beneath the force of his rage. “Die!”

  Hel broke apart, turning into mist that flooded over him. It seeped up his nose. It wriggled through his ears. It pried its way down his throat. It wormed up his arse.

  It sent him into freezing, agonizing convulsions.

  Vaettir did not prefer to take hosts of opposite genders. It proved more difficult. That didn’t mean they couldn’t.

  And now, Hel writhed within Odin’s body, struggling to subsume his soul.

  His mind filled with a chorus of damnation, as all-consuming cold spread throughout his dying body.

  26

  How many times had he wished for death? Never so fervently as when he lay here, impaled, suspended for eternity on death’s brink, while it remained forever denied to him.

  Wheezing breaths from his single lung struggled to pass his blood-choked throat.

  Opening his eyes was a clash between his will to do so and his body’s refusal to cooperate.

  Were it not for the temporal currents continuously endeavoring to stream his blood back into his veins, he might have lain there, allowing his suffering to win that battle. But peace would never come to Loki. The Norns would not allow him death, and thus lying here in self-indulgent pity served no purpose save to a momentary delay in returning to his pains.

  And he was already in pain, as his body kept trying to die and rebuild itself over and over, in unending torment not so very unlike what he’d endured suspended over the walls of Tartarus.

  Thus, he opened his eyes and took in the charred remains of the rainforest. He still lay upon a tangle of roots, pinned to them by Heimdall’s greatsword driven through his chest. Of the Watcher … only a blackened skeleton remained, with a sword sticking out from between its ribs. Lavaeteinn had reduced Heimdall’s flesh to ashes and rainfall had even washed those away.

  With a single working lung, and with blood trying to flow both out and in at once, caught in conflicting streams of time, Loki could barely manage a groan.

  His hands trembled as he raised them to Heimdall’s blade. The hilt lay out of his reach. In his current state, Loki couldn’t hope to harness pneuma to either suppress pain or give him strength.

  All he could do was press his palms against the flat of the blade, wrap his fingers around the edges—heedless of how the sword cut him—and push upward. A tug of pain.

  A gasp.

  Hardly any movement from the blade.

  Oh, how he hated this part.

  He was wrong, though. He could manage a groan, pathetic though it was.

  Again, he pushed on the blade. Heimdall’s strength had driven it deep into the roots below Loki.

  A faint creaking as the tip moved a little, further shredding flesh and bone. Pulverizing his already ruined lung.

  Loki collapsed back, letting his arms drop to his sides. A temptation struck him, an overwhelming urge to cry out, to beg for help or mercy. An absurd desire to voice pleas he could not make to powers who would not listen. There was no one to hear him, and, had there been, still no one who would care.

  He shut his eyes again, forcing down the temptation to indulge the pain and despair, forcing down all sensation. Most meditative techniques relied on a focus on breathing. Most masters thereof would not have expected even the most devout of pupils to have succeeded on breathing techniques with a sword rammed through one of their lungs.

  Instead, Loki tried to picture his chakras, spinning, drawing in ambient energy to convert it into prana—pneuma. Just a little bit of pneuma, channeled into his arms. Not daring to open his eyes for fear of losing focus, Loki again grasped the blade. Heaved.

  It edged free, one agonizing hairsbreadth at a time, easing out of the root. Then a pop, as it lurched from the wood.

  Another painful, bloody breath and pain crashed over him in a wave, sending him careening onto one side. Flailing in darkness to hold on, even as consciousness slipped from his grasp once. More.

  The agonies seemed as deep and broad as an ocean, and Loki, despite himself, tried to dive beneath their waves once more. To flee from thought and hide in the currents of physical torment, thinking it almost a reprieve from the anguish of grief.

  Petty.

  Foolish.

  Now, with bent elbows, he placed his palms on the blade’s flat, wrists close to his chest.

  He had to do this. It would not end any other way and allowing it to drag on did not avail him.

  Trembling, he began to ease the greatsword out of his chest. Back through broken ribs. Tip slurping through his back, into his innards. Easing through his lung.

  The pain!

  He wanted to weep from it. To hide within it.

  Agony!

  His vision trying to dim once more.

  He had to readjust his grip, closer. Almost … out …

  The tip slid out of his chest and the heavy sword landed with a splat on the muddy rainforest floor.

  Immediately, local time in his body began to reverse. Bones knitting back together. Blood flowing back into his veins, draining from his lungs in the process. His flesh began to weave itself into the state it had been in before his battle.

  Finally, he allowed himself to shut his eyes again, to breathe deeply—still painful, wet, slurping, as his lung tried to re-inflate itself—and to let his consciousness flee.

  The curious absence of pain, which ought to have allowed Loki deeper respite in the darkness of unconsciousness, instead drew him forth and forced him to wake once more. Knowing it was pointless, knowing all too well what he’d find, he still patted his ribs, inspecting for injuries that would never be there.

  No, his blood-soaked, lacerated clothes offered the only sign of his battle with Heimdall.

  Loki groaned as he sat up.

  Ananke’s blessing—or curse—insured he could recover from most aught he’d ever encountered, to his more than occasional chagrin. Time simply would not allow him to pass from its grasp, forcing him to remain as both witness and enforcer to the merciless procession of history down through the eras.

  Except … Heimdall had claimed that some forces had begun to doubt the efficacy of the cycle. If that happened, if not only the Watcher but those he represented truly wearied of the eschatons, how many more cycles could the world expect? Already, the World Tree was faltering, and Loki had never expected the repeating circle of history to carry on forever. It had been intended to buy time, to spare humanity and allow their continued existence at least a while longer before they were drawn back into the primordial darkness.

  But suppose Heimdall’s compatriots decided to take steps to further diminish the already dwindling number of cycles left? Suppose they managed to break the cycle completely? Such would herald the true end of time.

  The collapse of all the cosmos back into the darkness that spawned them. All to be consumed by it.

  And Loki’s gambit would have failed.

  He allowed himself another groan as he rose, pausing only to snatch up Lavaeteinn. The Watcher’s words left him more unsteady even than the torrent of pain he’d recently endured.

  After sliding the flaming runeblade back into its sheath, Loki plodded through the rainforest. He would need to attend to what Heimdall had said, true, but given the current state of the world, he could not attend to it now.

  No, too many other forces remained at play here, in the last days of the era. Those forces needed his attention now, to ensure naught would interfere with Odin playing his role.

  There would be time for investigating other threats later.

  Sadly, the one thing Loki always seemed to have in abundance was time.

  27

  There was darkness.

  An expanse of it, cold, and filled with mist, and ice beneath Odin’s feet, as he plodded through the wastes.

  He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, though he might credit the enormous pressure building inside
his head and ripping through his insides with distracting him from the circumstances. Or perhaps he dreamed or found himself lost in some prescient vision.

  Was this the future?

  “You have no future.” Hel’s voice carried through the mist, all-encompassing, laced with inhuman cruelty and ancient hatred.

  She was there, in the darkness with Odin, forming up like a behemoth of shadow just behind the mists. Towering over him, three times his size, her icy limbs reaching out as if to encompass all he was.

  Odin’s heart clenched. Chilled, feeling almost as if it would freeze solid in his chest.

  She was trying to take him. To gain control of his body and supplant his soul.

  Because he’d beaten her other hosts, destroyed them utterly. And now, Hel had come to claim his body for her own.

  “Inconvenient and unexpected, yes,” she said, her words a fell mix of sibilance and crushing cold. “I didn’t expect you would murder your own lover just to deny me her body. So … now will you kill yourself? You cannot hope to hold out against one such as I …”

  Her fingers—like blades of ice—broke through the mists and closed in, enveloping his arms. Crushing them. Pain that pneuma could not suppress. For it was not within his body, but his mind.

  She was in his mind.

  Odin’s hands clenched into fists. He grit his teeth. Fighting down a roar.

  And he flung his arms outward, driving away her hands.

  “How long do you think you can last against me, little man?” Hel said. Her stomach-churning face slowly descended out of the mist, empty eye socket gleaming red around bare bone.

  Odin swallowed, looking hard at her. “How long … do you think … you can hold out … against us?”

  Because Odin was not just one man.

  Hel’s hand reached out as if to engulf Odin’s head. And another set of hands snatched her wrist, bent it back with impossible strength, twisted, until the ghost’s bones began to crack.

  Odin’s attacker gaped, staring at Herakles. “You …”

  Another form raced in from the mist, a shadow, at first, then Naresh’s furious blows tore into her side, making the so-called goddess shriek.

  And then, a thousand more shadows formed up, stepping out, surrounding Hel in a cataract of surging warriors, screaming defiance. Their waves crashed over her, and she shrank, unable to retain even her stature under the assault.

  “You failed in the real world,” Odin said, watching the thousand facets of himself tear into Hel. Their blows landed so fast she could not even turn to mount any defense. “Did you really think you could overcome me in my own mind? I am not like the others. Not anymore.”

  Suiren’s foot caught her throat and crushed it.

  Laran wrenched her shoulder from its socket.

  Herakles’s fist shattered her skull.

  At once, Hel broke apart into mist and flew shrieking out into the darkness.

  On his knees, Odin pressed a palm into his splitting head, a vain attempt to forestall the pain. His throat was raw. His eye burned dry.

  And still, he forced himself to rise, unsteady, and to turn on her.

  Hel. She fled into the recesses of the Penumbra, darting around her draugar, no longer even seeking a host, but rather heading toward the deeper shadows of the Roil.

  No.

  “No!” Odin roared, racing after her.

  A draug stepped up to bar his path. Odin caught its wrist, flipped it over his shoulder, and stomped on its skull as it fell. Then he was running again.

  A dozen more draugar closed in on him. Odin bellowed defiance at them, fury at their insolence to slow him even for the few heartbeats it would take to dispatch them. He tore into his foes, flung them aside. Ripped heads off bodies and impaled foes with their own weapons.

  His einherjar rushed toward the melee, but they were already too late.

  Hel had vanished into the Roil.

  You failed …

  No …

  No, he couldn’t have. He’d beaten her! He’d done it!

  As you have done before, Valravn said.

  No!

  Slowly, Odin turned about, taking in the carnage of the battlefield. Through Audr’s power, he shifted back to the Mortal Realm. Amid the slush and blood and viscera lay the corpses of thousands. Men, draugar, jotunnar.

  A kingdom transformed into a charnel house.

  And Hel had escaped him. He had done so much, had been so sure he could …

  Just give in … Death awaits you …

  No!

  He had won!

  What have you lost? Valravn asked.

  No … Freyja …

  Odin sank to his knees, utterly bereft. The magnitude of loss bombarded him, imploring him to retreat into the tides of time, to go back, to find her again. To hope, somehow, he might change the past and this future, though he knew it for an impossibility. What was he, if not one to defy the impossible?

  He, who had just stood against Hel herself and won. And lived.

  Still death stalks you … and still you resist … denying the inevitable … Give in … die …

  Unable to contain the anguish a moment longer, Odin roared at the darkened sky.

  “My king,” Tyr said, helping him up.

  Odin scarcely knew how much time had passed. Wallowing in despair, he had watched, unseeing, the remnants of the battle, unable to bestir himself to care who lived or died anymore.

  He had failed.

  For a time, Audr had continued to taunt him on the matter, but, when Hel fled the Mortal Realm, the eclipse had broken and true night had settled. Dawn drew nigh, and both the wraith and Valravn had grown silent.

  “Are you well?” Tyr asked.

  Odin blinked. Looked to his thegn. “You weren’t here.”

  “No. Hunting the wolf. Still am. Heard the battle. Had to come to aid our people. Didn’t know you’d returned, though.” The man pointed at the sky. “We win?”

  Now, Audr cackled again.

  Odin rubbed his face, pointedly looking away from the carnage. He couldn’t bear to see it. To see … her. “Hel has retreated back to Niflheim.”

  “So it’s over.”

  “No!” Odin spun on the man. “If we claim victory and let this slide, she will only try this again!”

  “World has other problems now. Surtr. Kvasir. Fucking wolf.”

  Odin shook his head. True, such things were problems, and he would attend to them as best he was able, when the time came. But Hel … he had sacrificed so much to defeat her.

  And failed … Fate’s jaws are upon your throat …

  Paid such a price, and the one thing he’d sworn to do was make sure that at least she could not rise again to threaten another era.

  Odin groaned. “I must find a way to reach Niflheim. Hermod could have done so, but he’s lost, and Andvaranaut is gone. Still, there has to be some way I cross between the worlds and hunt her down before she regains her strength.”

  Die …

  Tyr spit on the snow. “Mist-madness. Want to fight Hel? In her own domain. Didn’t suffer enough this night? Want to see what else she can claim from us?”

  Odin suppressed his surge of ire at Tyr’s tone. The man himself looked worn ragged and had no doubt lost companions. Such losses weighed on anyone.

  But that was exactly why Odin had to make it to Niflheim, fulfill his oath, and destroy Hel utterly.

  Fate’s jaws are upon your throat …

  Odin held Tyr’s gaze. “I have to do this, old friend. Whatever price I pay, it will serve to grant meaning to these other sacrifices. All those who have died and suffered because of her. We will attend to the other evils of this world when time allows. Right now, I have to focus on finding a way to …”

  Yes … Audr’s voice teetered somewhere between a cackle and a grim satisfaction. Yes … Fate’s jaws are upon your throat …

  There was one way Odin could pass the barriers of the Astral Realm and into the Spirit Realm. The way all men did
, given time enough.

  Die …

  His stomach lurched at the thought of it. How many times had he felt the pain of his death at Fenrir’s hands? He’d known his doom so long, had run from it for ages. Yes, he’d tried to change a great many things about the future, but always this one had hung over his head, and always, he had allowed himself to believe he would avert this as well.

  Odin was not the kind to give in. Not to aught. Least of all death itself.

  Fenrir had stalked him through prescient visions and nightmares for the better part of Odin’s long existence. The wolf had always been there.

  No oracle can see past his own death …

  Which was why Odin had never actually seen himself succeed in destroying Hel. Indeed, perhaps it was a last, desperate gambit that she could never have imagined nor prepared herself for.

  An army of einherjar waited on the far side of the Veil.

  Odin could … could order Hermod to take them there and storm the gates of Hel.

  But Odin, not Hermod, was the Destroyer. The one who, through Loki’s machinations, had recovered the memories of a thousand warriors. A soul forged in lifetime after lifetime of battle, in order to create a weapon that could not be broken.

  And to join the einherjar, to lead them, he must truly enter into their ranks. He must …

  Embrace fate …

  Yes. Urd had him caught in its web, as it had done from the beginning, but it had shown him a path. A means of ending this, finally, for all time.

  If he but had the strength to face the pain and the terror. In prescient memory he had lived through his murder a good many times already. What was one more?

  Fate’s jaws are upon your throat …

  Yes. They always had been. But perhaps, he need not defy fate this time. It would draw him across the Veil.

  Yes …

  Tyr cracked his neck. “Seem lost.”

  “No. I think I have found my solution. Where did you say you hunted the wolf?”