The Fires of Muspelheim

by Matt Larkin

  “You know what dwells in the darkness beneath us,” Hel said, her voice hollow and mocking. She seemed to see no one but Odin, though her forces watched Sigurd and the others as they stalked closer and closer. “It is the last of the great linnorms. Or perhaps the first. An emissary of the abyss, a manifestation of the darkness to which we must all return. You and Father have grown so very attached to the cycle, but you were right … one way or another … it ends now.”

  Odin pointed Gungnir at her. “You have given in to utter madness. What do you imagine will happen if you succeed in releasing Nidhogg? If it brings down Yggdrasil, where will that leave you?”

  Sigurd continued to close in on that hole. Her sorcerous marks extended even to the ice walls of the pit itself, and the roots therein, though how she’d managed to carve aught so deep, he could not say. Lessons Brynhild had taught him long ago warned him of the fell power of these runes, like some kind of inverse warding or … or an exorcism performed by a madwoman.

  Gramr in hand, he closed in on a jotunn draug, one that seemed to fair salivate as if it thought to feast on Sigurd’s flesh any moment now. They could all feel it, the warriors on both sides. They could feel the dam about to burst and release the flood of battle. A chaotic press toward the end of the world. While Hel and Odin argued over eschatology, the rest of them surely felt poised upon the edge of a precipice, felt they looked over that edge and saw naught but swirling darkness.

  Even Hel’s legion, enslaved to her will, must have felt this liminal space they had entered, teetering on the edge of annihilation.

  Sigurd bared his own teeth at the jotunn draug. Let him come. Let any of them come to him. Sigurd had seen little use for fear in life and saw even less for it now. How could aught that might befall him now be worse than the passing of ages alone in darkness, knowing his beloved lay in worse torment?

  Right. Down. There.

  Odin had all but cast Brynhild into the corpse sea below them.

  “Do you know,” Hel said, “that this transitory place lies closer to some manifestations of reality than others? Close to the deepest reaches of the Roil, to Niflheim of course, where we stand on the threshold. Close to Svartalfheim, where you might taste a hint of the fathomless from which life arises. But imagine, if you will, a darkness beyond those shadows, a complete chaos, from which the likes of Nidhogg arise to reclaim the bits of itself that have escaped out and become our reality. I shall but expedite that return to Ginnungagap.”

  Odin strode toward her now. The dam would break any moment. This would all end. “For crimes dating back eons, I sentence you to oblivion, Hekate.”

  The goddess tensed at the strange name, then twisted her hand. A sudden shift, and a wave of icy mist lanced out from her. It shrieked toward Odin and he evaded it by rolling under it, and Sigurd was already too far to the side. Others behind him were less fortunate. The mist struck many in the front ranks like a solid blast. It crystalized their breath an instant before it engulfed them, encasing flesh in a layer of rime. Sigurd heard it crunch and form up.

  It caught his father, and valkyrie Kára. It engulfed Frey and Heidrik and a dozen others.

  They froze solid.

  And then they exploded, shards of ice and frozen flesh blasting through the next rank, impaling many. Bloody slivers of his allies lanced into eyes, throats, guts, arms. Two score fell in that first wave, the valkyrie Sanngridr among them, a shard of ice the size of Sigurd’s forearm jutting from her throat and others wedged into her wings.

  Father …

  Sigurd gaped for a bare instant. A single, agonizing moment in which everything fell silent.

  And then, finally, that dam broke. Hel’s legion surged forth, roaring, slavering, hissing their fell whispers.

  Sigurd hesitated as the jotunn draug closed in on him. Was his father now in a better place? That seemed doubtful, but perhaps oblivion was his reward, and a blessing. So many times Father had tried to reach out to him, to find some semblance of joy in Valhalla …

  The jotunn’s cleaving axe forced any further musings from Sigurd’s mind as he had to dodge, duck, and dive to the side. He danced around the mighty swings, then hewed Gramr into the jotunn’s thigh. That sent the creature stumbling forward, past Sigurd. Another swipe of his blade took the thing’s head off.

  Other draugar raced at him.

  Sigurd parried one and kicked it in the chest, sent it careening down into the gaping hole below. He ducked another’s blow, caught a third’s on his shield, and twisted to engage a fourth. Round and round he went.

  He knocked an attack wide with his shield, parried low another one, then stomped on the flat of his foe’s blade, stripping it from the draug’s hand. Growling, Sigurd swiped his blade into the knee of another draug, then back into the face of the disarmed one when it bent to reclaim its fallen weapon. He bashed his shield into the chest of the last, dazing it for a bare instant. Enough to ram his blade into its gaping eye socket.

  With a roar, Sigurd wrenched his blade free, taking off a chunk of the draug’s skull in the process. Two more he cut down as they advanced on him.

  Seeping toward him on a cloud of mist, a snow maiden came, her wail at once maddening and seeming to call him to her.

  But Sigurd … he needed to … had to get to …

  His body tried to respond on its own, tried to answer the snow maiden’s call. Before he could think better of it—or lose control completely—Sigurd dashed toward the pit and flung himself into it, landing on a root ten feet below.

  The distance seemed to break the song’s effect and he felt like he’d come up too fast from underwater. A sudden lightness filled his head and, crouched on the root, he swayed, struggling to regain his equilibrium.

  He tossed aside his shield to free one hand and the thing clattered on a lower root before disappearing into darkness. He didn’t hear it land on aught else.

  Huh. Well.

  Then it was down again himself, leaping to a lower root, and another after that. And then, he could see no further roots below him. Just a fathomless abyss were reality bled away. This world ended and a transitory space between realms coalesced into a place of empty horror.

  She was down there.

  Now, staring into the darkness, he could feel her. Almost, she seemed to warn him away.

  Do not enter this place. There is no return.

  Sigurd hadn’t come this far to fail now. Brynhild needed him.

  She was trapped there, writhing in her torment, as serpents feasted upon bits of her soul, stretching out her agony over the course of millennia, if time even held true in this place.

  Do not enter. He could have sworn he could hear her voice, coming up from the blackness.

  And how could he turn back from that voice? What did he care about Odin’s battle with Hel? The god had betrayed Brynhild, and in so doing, had betrayed Sigurd himself. Let Odin war with the Queen of Niflheim. All Sigurd sought was his wife.

  He leapt into the darkness.

  He fell free, limbs flailing and unable to catch onto aught. Putrid wind shot up over his face and tore at his clothes. And then he plunged down into a pulpy body that seemed to explode into goo on his impact. The corpses around him gave way and dumped him into the waist-deep filth where Sigurd flailed a moment.

  “Brynhild!” he shouted into the darkness. Being dead, he did not oft seem to need light to see, but here, he could make out only a dim radius of a foot or so around him. As if shadows of this place were so deep they defied even the Otherworldly sight of the dead, condensing it into what he might have seen while bearing a candle. Everything was cast in hues of sickly green, as though the air itself had begun to putrefy.

  “Brynhild!”

  Something sinuous brushed his leg. Then again.

  Serpents.

  “Brynhild!” Sigurd shouted, waded through the muck. “Answer me!”

  A sudden doubt seized him then—what if she could not speak?

  I’m here …

  Was i
t her very soul calling out to him? Was she—

  A coarse band of muscle suddenly wrapped around his legs and torso, engulfing him in its crushing embrace. The thing coiled around him and sent him splashing into the muck for a moment—fortunately he needed no breath unless trying to speak—before he managed to get back above the waters.

  It rose up, black and slick, scales dripping with decaying flesh. Frills flapped beside its head, and a series of ridges jutted from its spine. The serpent’s eyes held a faint green luminescence, lit by some ancient loathing of life. It must have stretched sixty feet long.

  It squeezed, constricting, and Sigurd felt bones crack. His rib crunched beneath the serpent’s coils, though his right arm remained free.

  The serpent leaned in, close to his face. Its maw opened, revealing fangs like curving spearpoints, dripping with acidic venom. Made of eitr, he would guess. It hissed, a chittering, vile sound more loathsome than even Fafnir’s cries, for the linnorm Sigurd had slain was but a pathetic shadow of Nidhogg’s vile brood.

  So close the serpent leaned in, until Sigurd could smell its toxic breath, and the stench of rot inside its maw.

  Sigurd rammed Gramr up into its open jaws, the blade embedding in the monster’s soft palate. At once he released the sword, and the serpent lurched away. Its coils loosened and Sigurd scrambled out of them, then doubled up over with the pain of having so many broken or cracked bones.

  He wanted to cry out, but could scarcely seem to suck air down into his lungs.

  For a brief instant, he stood there, almost under the putrid waters, struggling with his agony. But it didn’t matter. He’d come here for Brynhild, and he wasn’t leaving without her.

  You must leave! Flee this place before it finds you!

  “No. Where are you?”

  You cannot save me! You do not understand what true torment is, my love!

  She was here, and he could feel her presence, following it as if she had spoken aloud. Sigurd focused on his self image and Gramr appeared in his hand again, no doubt vanishing from the slain serpent’s maw. Few other einherjar had managed such a feat, but Sigurd had mastered it long ago. He could never be disarmed. And he would save Brynhild if he had to destroy Nidhogg itself.

  Oh, my love, you do not understand what it is. Something more ancient than man or god. Something cosmic.

  Sigurd didn’t fucking care. Only Brynhild mattered! He’d defy eldritch horrors and cosmic entities if need be, but he was getting her out.

  He kept pushing, striving ever across the sea of rotting corpses. “Keep talking! Tell me where you are!”

  I am here … My poor, lost love … What have you done …?

  A hand closed around his wrist, and Sigurd spun to look down into the sea. So dark, he had to lean down to look closer. There, her face floated in the waters, though it had bloated and stretched to hideous size as if no longer attached to her skull. Her shoulder and half a torso bobbed there, as well, while the rest of her seemed to have sloughed off in the sea. Sigurd gaped in mute horror at the wreckage of Brynhild’s form. His beautiful, radiant wife had become a splattered stain of gore. Her eyes were milky white.

  Some vile worm burrowed out of her nostril and then wriggled down, back inside her flesh.

  “No. No! I will save you! There has to be a way to get you free of this! There has to …”

  He felt it then, the presence behind him. Immense beyond measure, rising up from the muck. Filth streamed off Nidhogg in grotesque waterfalls, spilling back down into the corpse sea.

  Slowly, a pit opening in his chest, Sigurd turned to look upon the dark dragon.

  A horn jutted up from its snout, and others behind its head. Its opalescent eyes gleamed with the same green luminescence as its brood’s had. Its maw, half opened, exposed twin rows of blade-like fangs dripping acidic eitr in pestilent showers.

  And somehow, though he could not see it, he could feel its bulk, caught within Yggdrasil’s maze of roots, the serpent went on and on, immense beyond measure. Even, Sigurd realized with inexplicable insight and greater horror, seeping deeper, beneath the corpse sea, into some chaotic darkness below them. The roots had seized a part of the serpent’s bulk, but still left exposed hundreds of feet, giving it room enough to maneuver. To gnaw on its prison and thus erode away the fabric of creation.

  The World Tree bound it, and thus all the worlds would come crashing down when it freed itself. And it would free itself.

  “I just want Brynhild,” he said, though he knew, if he failed to kill this abomination, one day all the cosmos would collapse back into the chaos and be consumed by the darkness.

  The serpent’s answer was to stretch wide its maw, snake-like and yet more hideous. If one thought Nidhogg smaller than Jörmungandr, it would only be because they had not glimpsed the horror of its hidden bulk, bound for now. For a short time more.

  And suddenly, Odin’s war no longer seemed so petty. Hel sought to release this vileness and unmake reality. Sigurd might aid his god and save his beloved … only by slaying this dragon as he’d once slain a dragon in life.

  Sigurd Fafnirsbane, they called him. The dragonslayer.

  Roaring, he lunged at Nidhogg, bringing Gramr to bear. The muck slowed his advance, but he had to try. He had to win this and save them all.

  Nidhogg shook its head, releasing a pestilent cloud of yellow-green gas that swept over him. Choked him despite his not breathing. It hit him like burning, searing acid that set all his flesh aflame and sent him into convulsions.

  Gramr fell from his hand and splashed down into the muck.

  Growling, Sigurd reasserted his self image, forming up the sword in hand again.

  His arm continued to throb, feeling like it was being eaten. The flesh on his arm pulsed, as if some worm now crawled beneath it. And then a great chunk of his forearm broke loose, skin and muscle just sloughing off and splashing down with a slurp.

  His sword pitched from limp fingers once more, as Sigurd gaped in utter horror at his dissolving arm. More and more flesh slipped and fell off. Bones beneath were scrubbed clean as if by acid, then began to crack and chip and fall away themselves. Sigurd raised his other arm before his face only to find the acid had begun to dissolve that as well.

  His legs gave out from beneath him and he pitched over, sideways into the muck. After a splash, he rose to the surface again, limbless and left staring up at Nidhogg in rapt horror, eyes now wide and unable to shut, as if his lids had dissolved.

  The gravity of his mistake struck him all at once and left him teetering over the abyss of madness, knowing he was a speck before that infinite void. All-consuming horror seized him and he tried to scream. His tongue had melted away into putrescent goo now filling his throat.

  Nidhogg lowered its maw into the sea and slurped down great heaving gulps of decaying flesh—and decaying souls—and Sigurd imagined his own limbs being so devoured and sent spiraling down into oblivion.

  And all he could manage was an endless, wordless moan.

  36

  Smiting ghosts forced down the spots, same as smiting the living. Father had said the whetstone still bothered Thor, even dead, for the same reason he didn’t get his eye back. The further back an injury, the less chance of seeing yourself without it.

  Thor didn’t see why. Wasn’t like he could see the damn stone anyway.

  Regardless, he cracked fake-Mjölnir on a draug’s skull, roaring in the process. If he roared loud enough, it kind of made up for the lack of thunder. Thor missed the thunder. It made the smiting better.

  He spun around and slammed the hammer into a ghost’s chest, send the fucker flying. “Thunder!” he bellowed.

  Except shouting thunder just wasn’t the same as hearing a peal of it with every strike.

  Just. Not. The fucking. Same.

  Sif charged past him and shoved her spear into a draug’s face.

  Yes. Getting his wife back was worth losing the thunder. Even if she growled and hissed and had those red glowing eyes like
a draug herself.

  Sif bore the impaled foe down, grabbed its skull, and smashed it to smithereens on the ice.

  Actually, Thor liked smithereens, too.

  And then a snow maiden was drifting in on him, pale white as … ugh … as snow. Except her fingers ending in razor-sharp claws kind of spoiled her beauty. She shifted about, one way and then the other, like a flowing cloud, mist wafting about her feet. Drifting from them to Thor, trying to slow his steps as he closed in on the snow maiden.

  Growling, Thor swung fake-Mjölnir.

  The snow maiden broke apart into mist and reformed on the other side of the blow. Her claws slashed into Thor’s side gouging him straight down to the ribs and drawing a howl out of him.

  Grabbing the hammer two-handed, he swung straight down on her, intent to squash her to pulp. She broke apart again and formed up behind him. Her claws rent between his shoulder blades, tearing muscle and scraping his spine.

  Thor stumbled forward, gasping in pain, and spun around. “Stop fucking cheating, you bitch!”

  Another swing of his hammer and once again she poofed.

  Except this time, Sif’s spear took her in the chest when she reappeared by Thor. The look on her face was almost as satisfying as smiting her himself.

  Except, then the snow maiden lunged at Sif, heedless of how it further impaled her on the spear, and caught Thor’s wife by the throat. Sif’s flesh froze and blades of ice exploded out of her throat in all directions.

  “No!” Thor bellowed, swinging fake-Mjölnir once more. The hammer splattered the back of the snow maiden’s skull and she lost her grip on Sif’s throat, pitching to the ground.

  Swaying, Sif dropped down beside her, then crawled over to the snow maiden, and mounted her.

  Huh.

  What exactly was she …

  Sif pried the snow maiden’s jaws open with both hands and leaned close, like she intended to offer her the most grotesque kiss imaginable.

  The snow maiden wriggled, and Thor lunged, grabbed her wrist, and pulverized her hand with his hammer. “None of that.”