by Matt Larkin
And there was.
Always … watching.
Down below, he could feel Nidhogg stirring, writhing in rage at his escape. Just as he knew without explanation or guide that somewhere, down below those roots, lay a path to Niflheim and to the iron gates of Hel’s stronghold.
Light flickered above him, and he looked up. A great pool spread out over the uneven ceiling, held aloft by uncertain means. It stretched on and on, upward. Was it … was he somehow beneath the Well of Urd? Yes. He stood at the bottom of the well, and that distant shadow above … that was his own hanging body.
Odin rose. Something else lurked in the darkness of the waters. Symbols carved into the sides, the walls. What were those markings? Runes, like those on Gungnir’s shaft, like those the ghost had branded into his skin. Runes he had never been able to make sense of. Some part of the ghost’s curse on his soul, yes, but what? The answer must lie inside the well.
He craned his neck, staring deeper. Deeper.
Like falling into the sky, embraced by the goddess Nott. Embraced by darkness and eternity, just as Audr had been.
Odin stumbled forward, catching himself on a root. As he did so, a sudden warmth exploded in his chest. Life surged through that root, coursing through him as well. The life of a fallen soldier, a Vanr man slain by … by Vili. In Odin’s mind’s eye, the man’s final moments played out, the werebear tearing him down. Before that, the man had not wanted to charge the beach, had not wanted to fight anymore. Frey had commanded him. What was his name, this dead man?
The man … was just a soul. And a soul did not have a name, not exactly. It had a sound, an intonation that vibrated through creation. And a mark, a glyph to represented it. That soul now pulsed through Yggdrasil, passed round and round. It would be spit out into one of the worlds.
Eostre was wrong. Souls did not end. They returned to the World Tree. Returned … for eternal rest? No. There was no rest, either. Souls were born again and again. Vaettir were ghosts of those trapped in the Spirit Realm.
We are all dead …
Even the spirits, the gods of beyond, were but the dead. But given enough time … a soul would again be drawn back into the World Tree.
Drawn back into the World Tree. And then?
Odin broke contact with the root. Then what? His mind was surging faster than anything the Sight had ever inflicting upon him. His temples throbbed, his eyes ached. He fell, lying on his back and staring up at the runes above him.
He was inside Yggdrasil. Inside the center of creation.
We called it the Wheel of Life.
Not Audr speaking—the voice was soft, feminine. And everywhere. In his head, in his heart, echoing through the chamber.
We believed the dead would return to the Wheel only to be spun out again. Given another chance at life, another chance to make better choices.
Born again. Reincarnated … another chance to get life right.
Figures danced in the mists until Odin was not certain whether his Sight played tricks on him or Yggdrasil itself revealed further visions. It no longer mattered which, for he had come to this place, this state in search of truth. And now it was there before him.
In the ruins of some foreign temple, a black-haired man with eyes like sunlight fought against Hel. That was Naresh, fighting a battle that ended the world. That began this world, the world covered in the mists of Niflheim.
A battle ending the world. That was his Ragnarok, even if he had never called it that.
“The battle never ended. It only changed forms.”
He turned to the dark-skinned woman who spoke. “You are Eostre’s mother, Chandi.”
“He never saw our child.” Her voice sounded on the edge of breaking, her eyes cloudy, as she reached a hand toward Naresh. And the man grabbed Hel and vanished, up into the sky. Somehow, he knew the man had carried Hel away.
Chandi spun on Odin. “You never saw her!”
Odin reeled back, not certain how he had gained his feet. Or how this phantom had even seen him. Did he speak to a ghost now? The foreign woman reached out to grab him. Odin moved to knock her hands aside. She snared his wrist, flipped him over her shoulder and pinned him to the ground in a single fluid move. He hit the ground hard, lying on his back. What the fuck had just happened?
Chandi ripped open his shirt and thumped a finger into a rune over his chest. “You never saw her!”
“I …”
From the mists, Naresh walked toward him. As he drew near, vertigo swallowed Odin, and the whole chamber began to spin. He wanted to retch, though he knew his stomach was empty; regardless, Chandi still held him pinned. More figures drifted out of the shadows, a dozen men. A hundred. A thousand hidden forms advancing as Naresh advanced, converging on him.
Each one jerked away his shirt to reveal a glyph over his heart. A rune. The same rune as Chandi had touched on Odin’s chest. Each subtly different, and yet, always the same lines, the same arcs. Only the flourishes changed. Names and memories and lifetimes changing. But something deeper, the underlying soul remaining ever intact. Always, always fighting against the encroaching urd, against the inevitable return of utter chaos.
Souls. Souls of a thousand men. A thousand lifetimes.
Odin’s lifetimes.
Souls born into a life. And in death, returned to the Tree of Life. To be born again, time after time. Given the chance to set right the most terrible wrongs in all the realms. To stand against the encroaching chaos.
Odin was on his knees, tearing at his hair, his cheeks, his chest. His flesh burned. A thousand lifetimes of memories cascaded through his mind, beating away his senses and his self and binding him to a cycle of destruction stretching back more millennia than even the Vanir had ever imagined.
He was—had been—Naresh. And Matsya and Herakles and Suiren and so, so many more. And he had defeated Hel. Had won victory for mankind, defeated chaos, even if the cost was the annihilation of an era. The end of one era birthed the dawn of the next.
“You didn’t even see her,” Chandi wailed, shaking him.
“I died?” Odin wasn’t certain whether he was asking her or telling her. He had used the power of the sun god to carry Rangda—Hel—so far away she could not reach any other host. And lacking a host, she had been forced back to Niflheim. Simmering in icy rage until … until she began to suspect the mortal soul who dared defy her had been born again. And she had sent Ymir to kill him. Or, if Gudrun was right, to test him. To see if he was her nemesis walking Midgard once more. And he was. So she sent the Niflungar to try to control him. Grimhild had demanded Gudrun seduce him. Gjuki had tried to bind him with sorcery. And when those efforts failed, they had sought to kill him.
“We all died.” Chandi’s face and voice gave way to Freyja’s. “Everyone dies.”
Odin slapped a hand to his mouth to try to keep from crying out. Tears welled in his eyes.
“A long time ago … someone promised me I would see you again. In every lifetime.”
But Freyja—the real Freyja—didn’t know him now. Didn’t remember the life they had shared. The countless lives they had shared as so many different men and women. Because … because even urd was not so cruel as to expect him to stand against chaos alone. He always had someone by his side, walking through the ages together. A mate, to his own soul.
Odin wept then, embracing his image of Freyja. Oh. But he had seen his and Chandi’s daughter. He had met Eostre and liked her immediately. And Idunn … was his soul’s granddaughter. Odin laughed through the tears, for once glad he had never lain with the Vanr woman.
He wiped his eyes, suddenly alone in the chamber. Alone, as he always had been down here, save for a wraith left speechless. He had stared deep into the well and seen naught but his own soul. And within it, his soulmate.
Now he looked up at the runes. And with the ineffable clarity born of lifetimes united, he understood. Through the tree he understood and saw the sorcery Freyja had wrought to protect Vanaheim. Saw the winding roads that
bound the worlds together through the roots. Saw the Art the Vanir had used to banish the First Ones who had lost themselves. At long last, he understood everything.
And he knew what he had to do.
55
Carnage covered the beaches—vast stretches of them, strewn with viscera and stained with blood, littered with hundreds upon hundreds of bodies. Sigyn had seen Frigg while she flew overhead and had wanted to go to her. Her sister held a last desperate defense against the Vanir. A fair number of those warriors seemed as mortal as the Aesir, but not all. Too many moved with the speed of wind and strength of falling waves, crashing over the Aesir as relentlessly as the tide, cutting down Sigyn’s people with each press forward.
By nightfall, the Aesir would lose the beach and, having nowhere left to retreat, would be crushed, annihilated. The end of her entire race loomed on the horizon. And Sigyn could have landed and joined the doomed defense, maybe helped buy them a moment. But Loki had begged her to get the chain to Odin, and the king was not among those defending the beach. That meant he had gone deeper into one of the two islands. Sigyn prayed this one, but she could not well track him in either case.
Instead she flew low, sneaking glances between the canopy. Other skirmishes dotted the island, and more and more Vanr war parties continued to converge on the beach or toward the mighty tree. That, she had seen long ago, in a vision carried from Loki’s memories into her own. Yggdrasil, which he had stood before in some forgotten era and become immortal long before the Vanir. The puzzle pieces of his enigmatic past had begun to fall into place, but she had no time to savor the mystery this day.
Perhaps Odin was with the other group, by the tree, and Sigyn needed to—
An arrow shrieked through the sky and pierced her wing. A red flash of agony hit her the moment the shock wore off. Her wing refused to beat, and she plummeted, crashing through tree branches that stripped her feathers, scraped her arms and legs. One branch snagged her cloak and tore it from her. It caught her, jerking her to a sudden stop by her neck.
Couldn’t breathe.
That lasted enough time for a single thought—thank Freyja her neck hadn’t broken—and then the clasp broke. Sigyn pitched down, hit her ankle on a lower branch. She heard the joint snap an instant before she felt the blinding agony of it. Her vision blurred as she fell. Her spine slammed against a lower branch, then she toppled off that one, too.
Leaves and branches scraped her face and arms raw, but she almost didn’t feel those after the other wounds. And then she hit the roots below. And all thought fled.
Sigyn woke to torment. Her ankle was broken. Every movement sent fresh ripples of pain through her. Several broken ribs, for certain. And she was damned lucky if her spine wasn’t broken. Most breaks would heal in a few days, thanks to the apple. A broken spine? Who knew.
She tried to sit and only managed to groan in pain.
The chain beneath her was digging into her back. The chain she was supposed to get to Odin.
Well, fuck.
She grasped the pneuma, using it to block the pain. Which was like the difference between drowning in a lake and drowning in the ocean. Everything hurt … especially …
She retched as she saw what remained of the arrow shaft sticking from her left upper arm. It must have broken in her fall, but a section as long as her arm remained there, crusted with her blood.
“Damned archer.”
She grabbed the shaft and pulled. And screamed, immediately giving that over.
Would it have done the slightest bit of good, she’d have wept. How was she to do aught for Odin when she was more than half dead herself?
He would have to make do without the chain for now. She could do naught else until she managed to get the arrow out. She was still losing blood … It was hard to think. A normal person … one had to cauterize the wound. But the apple might let her heal without that.
So.
The shaft had to go.
She gritted her teeth. And she yanked.
A scream tore from her throat at the same time the shaft ripped free. Sigyn let it fall, even as she too, collapsed back to the ground.
For a long time she lay there.
And then she forced herself to rise, limping and pathetic though she was. Odin, Loki, Tyr—they had all forced themselves to fight through injury and torment to do what needed to be done. She could do no less.
Mundilfari had said Loki was lucky to have found her. Well, Sigyn would earn that.
56
Of its own accord, the vine around his neck loosed, dropping him. Odin slipped free, colliding with the lip of the well and rolling onto the dirt floor, moaning. His crushed windpipe hardly let any air in, despite his gasping. A long time he lay, trying to suck down a full lung of air and failing.
He rolled over and looked up to see the Norns there, staring at him. He knew them now, knew their names—Urd, for whom the well was named, as well as Verdandi and Skuld. He ought to know more, but those memories were now clouded through the haze. Some things, though clear below, were now hidden from him, locked away, or rather, buried beneath the thousands of years of memories. The further back he tried to look, the more confusing his insights became. His life as Naresh, that was easier to focus on. It tied him here.
He wanted to rage at the Norns for all they had clearly known and not said. But then, they would have known his arguments and fury as well, and it would have amounted to less than naught. They were like forces of nature, answering only the questions it pleased them to. And he had naught else to gain here, at least for now. Oh, but the Vanir had been right to guard this place. Most men could not handle the knowledge of the terrible chaos consuming the base of the world, nor of their own storied pasts. Odin was now forced to carry the burden of the sins and mistakes of so many lifetimes that the weight of it felt apt to break him beneath it.
But with that weight, he also carried the memories of a thousand loves. Or one great love. The Norns had claimed all mysteries were one great mystery. And all love was one love.
One day, perhaps, he would ask Loki the truth about the Norns. Did they watch the past and future, or did they actively manipulate it? If so, even Hel seemed like a pawn in their game. Odin favored them with a final scowl. More like than not, they knew what he thought, or suspected.
His knees trembled and gave out as he tried to rise, and he pitched forward, catching himself on his palms. His body had grown weak from his ordeal. But the Aesir and Vanir were dying, slaughtering each other so that their corpses could feed Nidhogg and their souls be a feast to Hel. He had to end this. The Vanir were not evil people, indeed he liked them. But they were wrong. They had failed Midgard and had continued to fail it for countless years. Any hope that would have ended with Njord was lost now. No, Odin was left with only the final option. To remove the Vanir entirely.
As if his urd had ever truly granted him options.
He crawled toward the stairs, gathering his strength, before finally drawing on his power to give himself the endurance to stand. He ascended one aching, painful step at a time, pausing every third stair to catch his breath.
He had not reached the top when Tyr appeared, placed Odin’s arm around his shoulders, and led him above. “My lord. I thought you …”
“Nine days,” Odin said. Or rather, rasped, his voice sounding ancient and hollow even in his own ears.
“Yes. Nine days and nine nights. How did you …?”
“Ask no questions … to which you do not wish the answers. Mead.”
Tyr deposited Odin on the floor and rushed to comply, coming back a moment later with a skin of it. He held it to Odin’s lips and let him drink. Odin reclined against the wall, sucking down the welcome brew, though it scorched his throat.
Before he had finished, Idunn appeared, her face pale, eyes wide with concern. Idunn. Odin’s—or Naresh’s—granddaughter. His granddaughter, well over a hundred times his age. Or perhaps, not anymore. Not with Odin now holding memories from even before the comi
ng of the mists. In a sense, he was older than even the First Ones like Lytir.
Odin embraced Idunn, to her obvious shock. After a moment, she returned his gesture.
“Where is the priest?”
“I had to restrain him,” Tyr said. “He tried to interfere with your bo—with you.”
Little surprise there. “Tyr.” Odin swallowed again. “The war does not go well.”
“No, lord. We cannot hold against the Vanir, and every night the wolf takes more of our number. We have no means to defeat such a monster.”
“We will deal with him in time. First, I want you to take Idunn and find Freyja. Take them both … and leave Vanaheim.”
“My lord?”
“Tyr, I ask you to trust me now. I love Freyja and I cherish Idunn, as I think, do you. So heed me and take them far from this war with all swiftness.” He meant to ask the time, but somehow he knew. “It is nigh to noon, yes? Find Freyja and be gone from these shores before the next dawn.”
“What?” Idunn demanded. “Who do you think you are?”
Odin chuckled, his voice still sounding dry and decrepit. “I am rather a lot of people. It’s a long story. You would have made me King of the Aesir and the Vanir both—yes, Idunn? Well then, as your king I command you return to Andalus. Find Loki and shelter with him until the war is over. And Idunn … I’m proud of you.”
She cocked her head like it was the oddest thing she had ever heard.
Tyr locked his eyes with Odin’s, searching for something. He must have found it, for finally the thegn nodded. “I hope you know what you’re doing, lord.”
