by Matt Larkin
When even the animals were gone, they strung up and burned lower ranked soldiers, wives out of favor.
Mother had wept and Idunn had wished that she could, but found herself neither physically nor emotionally capable of the act. Still, she had looked away when they began to lead children up to the walls, some of them flailed, crying out for their parents, many of whom had already burned themselves.
The sacrifices worked, Idunn supposed, for the wild eldjotunn armies of Surtr bypassed those cities, perhaps considering them sufficiently cowed.
For their part, she and mother had avoided drawing too close, for when a city was willing to sacrifice their own, why would they hesitate to offer up foreigners? Instead, Idunn had gathered information from the shadows, past caring that relying on such powers might reveal her to Volund. Given the state of things, she seriously doubted the svartalf prince would have any desire to visit the Mortal Realm for years.
“How can they do these things?” Mother asked, her eyes dry now, and her face blackened with soot she no longer bothered trying to wipe away.
They walked between cities, drawing ever southward, toward the Straits of Herakles, hoping, somehow, they could make the crossing and find a land not consumed by these devouring flames. Idunn cast a glance at her mother, not knowing what to say. That cruelty was well within human nature? Empathy was a learned skill, a kind of enlightenment some would have said, though she knew Volund would have called it self-indulgent and deluded. The svartalf would have said, rather, that empathy was a lie perpetuated by those without the strength of will to remake the world as they desired, while still deluding themselves into thinking everyone else ought to forego such a will as well.
Idunn, though, no longer knew what to think. How was she to explain to her mother the apathy of Alfheim? The active malevolence of Svartalfheim? Moreover, whether because of her long sojourn in those worlds or not, Idunn could no longer say with utter certainty that either outlook was inherently wrong. Once, living in the Mortal Realm, she’d believed as her mother did. Once, her heart would have broken to see such cruelty.
But … if fate was cruel … history was cruel … death was cruel … life itself was cruel … Should the living not draw some conclusion from the examples set before them by the cosmos? Volund would have claimed that, in indulging so-called altruism, one did no favors either to oneself or even the supposed beneficiaries of the kindness. Strength was forged from suffering, he had told her oft enough, while torturing her. To deny this was no better than a parent who so shelters his child from the world such that the boy grows to adulthood utterly unprepared for the indifference and oft malevolence of existence in life, much less beyond life.
Only, Idunn didn’t want to believe it. She hated herself—as she so oft did these days—for finding herself drawn in by Volund’s arguments. Wanted to believe that those claims were the self-indulgent ones. A petty excuse to justify whatever actions suited even more petty beings. That was what she wanted to believe.
If only she could make herself align that way.
With the mists burned away, Idunn could see clear across the Straits, to Serkland itself, the landscape rough and hilly, but naught compared to the impressive promontory that rose up on this side. Idunn had never seen it without the mists. A town lay in the rock’s shadow, lit with numerous effigies along the walls, in obvious supplication to the army of eldjotunnar they surely believed closed in on them.
Still, in this town was their only chance to gain passage across the Straits of Herakles, and the battles had not yet come here, so far as Idunn could tell. So they pressed on, and were not turned away. Maybe the locals did not want to turn anyone away, fearing how they themselves would fare if caught outside.
They had begun to head toward the harbor when they heard it. A sound, like thunder, rumbling through the ground. The march of an army immense not only in numbers, but in the size of its leader.
Though she had no doubt what she’d see, still, Idunn could not stop herself from running up toward the walls. Any moment, she expected some soldier or warrior to bar her passage, but none did, so focused were they upon readying every arrow, rock, or other missile, and upon manning the now-tiny seeming wall.
It seemed, this time, those effigies were not enough to propitiate Surtr.
And he came. The eldjotunnar themselves, most of them, stood perhaps a head taller than the men around them. Some had eyes that simmered like liquid flame. Some had skin black as charcoal and seeming to pulse with inner heat.
None of them compared to the behemoth that strode through their ranks. They parted around him like waters breaking upon a boulder. Surtr, as hideous as she remembered, like a nightmare striding right from the bowels of Muspelheim, coming for her. For them all.
The creature—an eldjotunn possessed by Surtr, she had no doubt—towered over the wall, twice its height or more. In the jungles of Alfheim, Idunn had seen the most fearsome of dinosaurs, a bipedal monstrosity of fang and fury. It would have seemed puny and weak beneath Surtr. His sword stretched out, so bright it looked to scorch the sky. His fangs dripped with magma.
And those dinosaurs would have shat themselves at his roar.
Idunn screamed—not that she could hear it—and collapsed against the wall. Men around her dropped their bows, fell to their knees. Some wept openly. Streams of urine dribbled over the back of the battlements, so prevalent Idunn could not have judged their source had she cared.
She had her hand to her mouth.
Her heart was trying to beat out of her chest, like it too wanted to escape.
In the harbor behind her, people had begun to flock to the boats. They trampled one another, crushed women and even babes beneath their heels in their mad flight. She watched in mute horror as, in the tumult, men fighting over a boat managed to accidentally scuttle it. In desperation, hundreds leapt into the sea and began the nigh impossible swim for the far shore. Even those with the endurance for such a swim would risk deathchill. It was madness.
But still better than staying here to watch Surtr and his brethren immolate the town. Determined to find her mother and make the swim themselves—as immortals, they might survive it—she cast a glance back at the monstrous eldjotunn.
As she looked on, a single man vaulted the wall and landed below, before advancing toward the army of flame and destruction that closed in upon them all. A man, sandy-haired and tall, bearing a flaming runeblade.
Loki.
As if their lord had offered some silent command, the rest of Surtr’s army paused in their advance, and their massive prince strode forth to meet Loki alone. Surtr finally paused, some distance before Loki, cocked his head to one side, and laughed, the sound somehow worse than his bellow. For his laughter revealed that, even in mirth, he was an incarnation of destruction.
When the eldjotunn finally fell silent, not a sound passed among the town—save for in the harbor when men and women continued to fight one another for escape—or out on the battlefield. All who could see Loki and Surtr no doubt found themselves helplessly enraptured by the spectacle, unable to look away or do aught save stand there, breaths held, barely willing to give rise to hope.
Who was this man, perhaps they thought, who would go and stand alone against the Lord of Flame? Who was he that stood there, before their walls, defending them when no other army remained in Midgard?
Idunn had always thought she’d known the answer, drawn from her grandmother’s tales. The man who thought to weave fate. Perhaps, even the first immortal in the world, or among the first. And he’d had some fell, inexplicable connection to fire. He shared it with others, yes, though some piece of the flame remained ever hidden away. He revered it and taught others to do the same, even as it sometimes seemed to frighten him.
“I should have known you could not control your boldness.” Surtr’s voice was like an avalanche of molten rock, and tiny plumes of smoke billowed from his mouth as he spoke. “You, who dared defile the blessed power of Muspel. You, foul wretch, wh
o ought to have died so very long ago. And now, instead of having to hunt you down, you present yourself to me, in audacious madness.”
Loki spread his arms wide, the point of his flaming sword high. “As you say, prince. I stole into the heart of the conflagration, and I took the first flame from Muspel. I stole you, and held you in my breast as if you were my own child. For the benefit of man, I took the first flame that they might ward themselves against darkness and cold. And now, for man, I shall take it back.” Loki took a mad step toward him, as if to threaten the behemoth. “I am the Firebringer.”
Idunn could not see the battle for the cloud of smoke and dust it had thrown up, nor had she long remained. Loki could not win this, she knew, which meant he sacrificed himself to buy the town time. Had he known that she and Eostre were here? Once, he had claimed to have cared about Chandi, and thus perhaps he had cared for her descendants.
Either way, Idunn rushed through the streets, relying on alf strength to shove aside any who tried to block her path, while holding her mother’s hand. The two of them threaded through the crowds. Everyone was bound for the harbor now, knowing this place was doomed. Whatever remained when the eldjotunnar were finished, it would be a world for their kind, and Idunn was no longer sure whether humanity would even survive.
Someone jostled her and she jerked her free elbow out to the side, earning an oomph from whoever had hit her. She didn’t bother looking. The press of bodies had grown so tight she felt she could scarcely breathe. Growling, she shoved someone else—only the man hardly moved. Not for lack of strength, but rather, because there was simply nowhere for him to go. He’d rammed up against a cluster of townsfolk ten people deep.
Howling in frustration, Idunn broke off, dragging her mother down a side street. Suddenly, the wall had become more of a hindrance than a defense, denying her easy access to the sea. What she needed was—
Ahead of her the wall blasted apart in a shower of stone and flame and dust.
Idunn drew up short, coughing. Perhaps she ought to watch what she wished for.
An instant later, a swarm of eldjotunnar charged in, bearing torches and shamshirs and axes, faces mad with bloodlust. They came forward like a wave of violence, hacking at everyone, setting fire to buildings, destroying with fanatical zeal. One paused to kick over a fence even though it wasn’t in the way and barred naught. Another Idunn saw stop to rip the limbs off a corpse.
Frantic, she dragged her mother back, into another alley formed by the town wall and a building. Surely, if she followed the wall long enough she’d be able to reach the sea, and they’d try swimming for it.
All they had to do was keep heading south, until they reached … An eldjotunn surged up before her, blocking the alleyway, a shamshir in one hand and a flaming brand in another.
No!
No, she refused to give up like this.
Idunn cast a furtive glance back at her mother. The way they’d come … led to an army of these bastards. “I’m going to distract him and you slip by.”
“Wait, Idunn—”
No. It no longer mattered if Volund might find her or what became of her for embracing the dark. Idunn was simply not going to surrender to this. And so, she reached into the shadows, tickled them with her mind, felt them writhe and lengthen in the setting sun. Growling, she lunged at the eldjotunn.
The shadows lunged with her.
Tendrils of them, like manifestations of Nott’s power, drawn straight from Svartalfheim, formed up in octopus-like tentacles. They wrapped around the jotunn’s limbs and throat and waist and pulled him to an abrupt stop. His eyes widened in sudden terror at the Otherworldly power grasping him. He would feel it, the wrongness, the vileness seeping through the world and pulling him down.
Into shadows that would feast upon his very soul.
Yes.
This was what Idunn really was. This, was Ivaldi’s power, manifested in her. Volund was a dark prince, a grandson of Ivaldi. But Idunn was his direct child. His tainted blood coursed through her veins and she was tired of denying it.
Grinning—Mother did as she’d asked and raced around the bound jotunn—Idunn advanced. Licking her lips. “I didn’t want to become this, you know. You … You’ve made me look into places where I would have chosen to avert my eyes. I would have tried to walk in the light and be the goddess of spring others have always wanted me to be. You came here, intent on war and death and carnage. You came here, and you brought this out of me, forced me to become …” Idunn spread her hands as if to indicate the swarm of shadows now forming all around her. “… To become this. And you shall pay for that as I spend the next hundred years slowly wrenching your soul out through your arse.”
The jotunn’s fear, so plain and delicious upon his face, seemed to spread into the air until Idunn could taste it upon her tongue and revel in it, intoxicated by the heady scent.
She knew then, with a sudden, inexplicable certainty, that she would not be joining her mother in the harbor. Mother would, Idunn hoped, make the swim and survive. If, as Odin had claimed, the world was ever bound to revolve in these circles of creation and destruction, then humanity might yet thrive again, and perhaps Mother—as Eostre, Al-Uzza, or whoever—might aid them.
But Idunn would not be here. Some things could not be undone. Some changes, wrought deep inside, were irreversible. And now, she would make the same choice Volund had made long ago. Better to live in shadow than die in the light. Better to embrace the power to enforce her will on the world than whine about the inequity of those who refuse the lies of altruism.
The dark was calling her.
And she could no longer deny it.
35
Though no one had said it, Sigurd knew they must be drawing perilously close to Naströnd. There was a foulness in the air, beyond the bitter poisons of Niflheim. A taste of corpses and decay that had some part of him squirming inside. The domain of the dark dragon was close at hand and, Sigurd knew, he ought to have focused on his war band.
Róta was gone. Without the valkyrie, a number of Sigurd’s einherjar had vanished. Perhaps some had fallen in battle—many had—but he was fair certain others had simply disappeared on this walk. No one spoke of it, and Sigurd could not recall actually seeing anyone melt into the darkness of late, but even a glance showed him his numbers had fallen too low.
And he could not bring himself to worry over it. Such things ought to have terrified him, for it jeopardized Odin’s mission. Sigurd loved Odin, his god. At least, he told himself he loved the god, whenever he caught himself nursing feelings of hatred and betrayal for what Odin had made of his life.
He told himself that Odin bore a burden no others, least of all him, a mere man, could understand. Even now, the Ás had spoken of the utter dissolution of not only Midgard, but all creation. Against such stakes, how petty was it for Sigurd to dwell upon wrongs done to him in a life lived in years now long past?
But.
But, Brynhild was still missing, taken from him and never returned. As though a piece of himself, a strip of his flesh had been ripped off, and a wound left to fester. Over the passing of centuries, it could not heal, and thus it only grew worse.
Because she suffered. Not only was she not by his side, but she was tormented by the very abominable serpents they now plodded toward. Tortured for crimes Odin had known she would commit based on actions he had taken and caused her to take. For supporting Sigurd’s own father, no less. Brynhild was an oathbreaker, the foulest of the foul. But she had become thus because of Odin.
How was Sigurd to forgive that? Was it hubris to even think a god should need forgiveness from a man? But here they were, and the god was as dead as Sigurd, and walking beside his lover, while Sigurd’s wife rotted in eternal torment.
So, desolate and silent, Sigurd made his way through the ice caverns, neither hearing nor caring about whatever his warriors may have said. Perhaps they quaked in fear of their destination. Perhaps they gave in to the ennui and let themselves surrender th
eir free will. Some, he vaguely suspected, may have even drifted back, drawn toward the gates of Hel as the uncounted dead always were. Sigurd could not have bestirred himself to save any of them.
These caves went on and on, but with every passing mile he swore the intensity of his foreboding increased. A sense beyond mortal senses, one that told him he drew nigh to a place that at once held reality together and yet, in so doing, created a venue where the laws of that reality began to warp or crumble.
No sooner had he thought this, than he spotted the first roots. Like colossal worms they burrowed through the glacial walls, cracking ice and digging their way in all directions like a thicket of branches—ones thicker around than most tree trunks.
Most predominantly, they seemed to gather around a hole—an enormous abyss in the distance—that Hermod had described as leading down to Naströnd. Before that hole, however, the Queen of Mist stood, clearly in the process of carving runes not only into the ice surfaces, but into the roots themselves. The latter act seemed so profane that Sigurd stumbled over his own feet, gaping at the sheer audacity of one who would defile the World Tree.
The cavern here was massive, and filled with Hel’s legions, among them Mistwraiths and snow maidens and dead jotunnar. A seething horde barred the way.
Odin strode to the fore and banged his spear upon the ice. “Cease this!”
Surely the Ás knew the command as meaningless. Did he think that Hel, after all she had done, would agree to submit, simply because Odin asked it of her? No, it was a formality, and one Sigurd had little time for.
Other war bands began filing in, hundreds of warriors forming a ring around Hel’s legion. It seemed they outnumbered Hel’s forces, though Sigurd did not much care for the composition of Hel’s army. The greater vaettir would tear through the ranks of einherjar with uncanny ferocity, he had no doubt.
