Addictive Rimeshade

by Poppet

  His madness makes sense, and it does soothe me. He sounds as persecuted as I feel. His inflection is one worn smooth after years of bumping against ragged edges. His timbre that of peace, of resignation, the frustration polished down after an eternity of aggravation.

  It's wisdom. It's the tone of a wise sage who has nothing left to prove because he found his essence when he lost his ego. An ego perceives competition, where there is no rival there can be no ego. Pride, and therefore ego, is the enemy of unity, of wholeness.

  No matter who views you as competition, if you don't enter the race they cannot better you. Competition is petty and it's also reliant on perspective to exist. A wise pacifist sees no reason to engage in any form of conflict, certainly not one where the net result is discourse.

  Mentally you have to be in it for it to matter.

  He's the Norse version of an evil angel, a fallen brother no better than the worst devil, yet he's down here riding the flow of life - meanwhile everyone else is fretting about him, and he couldn't give a toss. It's brilliant, classic, and ice-breaking.

  Good heavens, I fell chin first for Yoda.

  “Huh?” I mumble, needing him to keep talking, to break the isolation of this hot tunnel and our weird ride.

  There's a strange sound rubbing at the periphery of my hearing and oddly it reminds me of the dulled shake of the seeds inside a dried calabash. Somewhere in the veins of this catacomb is a witchdoctor shaking fates over bones, or a voodoo priest is renouncing his religion, or the hoodoo are dispersing the evil eyes focused on our location, stalking our souls through Valhalla's ether...

  He speaks over the subconscious heartbeat of this place and the subliminal alarm bells we're setting off, when he says in answer, “They are all alike, which is why they think they are white, pure, perfect. They think in their sameness they have power, but it's not so. Our power only matures and develops when we are cast into despair. That is when we have no need to fit in, no need to blend, no need to follow the pack and perpetrate the same lies. Their values cease to be ours. In order to know yourself and be yourself, you have to reach that point where survival is all that matters. In that moment a man knows himself, inside and out.”

  I nod, in that case I know myself better than most.

  Leug continues, his wisdom coating fear with a velvet cloak of comfort, saying, “I could see the obvious because the slate in Asgard was so bland, and such an anomaly compared to the rest of creation that I wondered why the gods and brethren sought to live in plain white light. Even the nebulae are colorful and striking, so why then would the gods choose one shade, one hue, one banal and bland tone as a representation of their holiness? They do so to flood out the grays. In complete light no one can pinpoint their sins, or target them individually. Most cunning really. To weigh a god's spirit, put him in the dark. If he shines, then you know he is of love and truth. But they, they'd become inconsequential down here because they are as black as the edge of outer space. The dark would expose them as the liars they are. They have no light. They cast out light because truth threatens them. Do not be afraid of this darkness, it's not here to persecute you, it exists only to accuse them.”

  Why am I only meeting you now? I needed your wide shoulders and words of wisdom when I was alone in the dark without my sister and best friend. I know despair, its taste is familiar to me. I'd bet my tarot collection that I've known it far more than I've ever sampled joy.

  Joy is warm and effervescent, anguish and suffering is the flavor of desolation. It has a powdery residue that coats everything in black and white, them and us, fulfillment and destitution, approval and dejection. It's sharp, leaving splinters on the tongue, prickling corneas with tears which distort in frenetic urgency to change the lenses of the eyes back to harmony. It's so cold it burns the nasal cavity and aches ears. It is the Maine winter to a Bahamas summer. Comparison is the mother of cruelty.

  I think I've found my soulmate.

  The big question here, is, who are they? How many of them are there?

  He nudges his head next to my ear, jarring me, saying, “We're here. Still need to take a break?”

  “Where is here?” I gasp, tension still squeezing my throat tight.

  “A view to the ribbons of unlimited ethereal potential.”

  I nod, needing the respite to again gather my courage. His answers are like riddles. Have you noticed how the immortal and wise like to do that to answers? They are fashioned to fathom and deduce meaning, as if every answer is some sort of test and a display of aptitude. It also has the nasty knack of amputating every answer into a question, until you're lost inside the riddle's maze.

  I'm grateful for him, even if I think his idea of an adventure falls far short of Narnia. I've yet to spy a hedge (or a hedgewitch), a real maze, a nemesis, or an oracle. Perhaps the brothers Grimm have colored my irises with diabolical water - where falling down roots is an elevator to the imagination's door, where opening a book is an enchantment where we are compelled by spell-ing, and how truthfully once upon a time every book was a spell, a binding spell, and the reader merely a victim of alchemy.

  Perhaps my lover put the romantic into necromantic. When we raise the words, are we not truly raising the dead? Repeat them at your peril. Fall in love with the hidden side. Why are words written in black ink on white pages? From the pale grade of papyrus to the faded shades of parchment, we do not write white on black, because then we'd be evil witches indeed.

  Black on white, dark on light, because only darkness sets us free, empowers, breaking the rules inside its own book. The most written words in the world are religious tomes, they lock and bind, they trap the reader, the binding spell so old no one can smell the sulfur originally used to bind the ink to the page. The mordant, the fixer. Ironic, iconic, and educating indeed.

  Hide the obvious in plain sight and no one will ever question it, yet here I'm faced with the obvious, black is right, it's powerful, and I am walking its macabre path. The blind read the wind, they read the scars, they read the tones behind your voice.

  Sight renders you vulnerable, and blind.

  Only those who can see can read black writing on a white page, and when they do they become blind.

  Oh my gosh, he's turned me into a riddle, I'm one of them! My education has merely rendered me ignorant.

  How can one man's influence, his unspoken suggestions, expose so much without commitment, without speech, without utterance. A master of shadows would indeed use them to convey meaning, to test potential.

  Looking around, I believe he has, mastered these shadows that is. He is the master of the shades, the coldest, iciest, rimeshade.

  Slipping down the curved side of the tube we ride like a long lace of licorice, I let him hold my hand, walking down an off-shooting passage where the wind whistles so cold and shrill it's disturbing. The contrast is vast.

  Chaffing his palm over the stubble on his head, as if agitated, he twists to face me while we're walking with our hands intertwined, him muttering, “You're not dressed appropriately. This will be a shock to you.”

  I'm not dressed appropriately? I'm so overdressed I feel like I'm in a fat sweatsuit.

  The passage narrows, the end in sight because the piceous ambiance has surrendered to twilight, the opening coming closer with every footfall, the breeze so chilling it's etching the skin off my face, my eyeballs are stinging, and I can't feel my nose.

  Stepping onto a wide ledge, I'm awestruck. We're high up in a mountain, the world scrolled out before us in the silence of night. The sky is glazed with festive aqua, gleaming bright bands in long wakes across the cosmic vista, ribboning the night with wide swells of aurora borealis. It makes the snow glisten and glow, mirroring the sky. It's an alien world, one where the earth is blacker than coal, the underbrush and stones scarring the perfect white with black, turning the ground as far as the eye can see perfectly and depressingly monochrome. The only color is in the sky, and it's glorious.

  I'm accustomed to cities and towns
, where when you look down from up high, at night, every place looks like a constellation of stars. Our planet shines as luminously as the galaxy does, but we're too close to see the beauty, to map the constellations of city lights, to read the roads in between the way a sorcerer reads fate and personality from the blisters and lines on a palm.

  The sky has a fever and she's burning down the night, she's the pyre on the sea of dreams, she's the daughter of Elysia and she's breathing her qualms over the spectrals of calm, ravishing the darkness with radiance so vivid it fires the imagination while simultaneously dousing passion.

  It's soporific, better than strong ale after a wet cold day. It's like watching our own dream spun out like a treatise of energy, left to unravel across the utopian fields, planting seeds for the next light harvest.

  And I think I've been hanging out with Yoda for too long. I'm not a minstrel, I'm the broken string. And I'm staring at a landscape scorched black with rage and powdered over with snow the way talc once was sprinkled to mask the stench of a sweaty wig.

  “Where are we?” I ask, finally sucking my focus away from the bitter environment to look up at my companion, back in his guise as a black haired hunter.

  “You're looking at the Valley of Doom,” he smiles, and it's wry.

  “Beg your pardon, where?” I've never heard of it.

  “We're outside of Reykjavik. This valley is harsh, almost impossible to traverse, and it ends right here. We're standing above the Torfajokull glacier. This is a region of fire and ice. The land is deathly black because it's volcanic sand you see down there underneath the snow. It's alchemical to watch lava flow into ice.” Stepping closer, closing his arms around me to cradle me against his front, he tucks his chin in the crook of my neck, sounding like a proud father when he says, “We have ice caves created by the steam of the hot springs bubbling up from below. The hot springs of Hvergelmir. This plane is covered in ash from the eruption of Mt Hekla, and we call the Valley of Doom, Dómadalur.”

  “And you live here?” I ask, aghast.

  “Sometimes, yes. It is one of my homes. I brought you here to keep you safe. There is much to tell you, but that's a tale for another day. Right now we need to get you warm, grab some shuteye, and we'll cover the rest after. First you must master ice the same way you have adopted my fire. Then you'll be ready for the tales of old, and new.”

  I'm not sure what to make of that statement, other than he's right. I'm cold and could seriously use a strong drink or a scorching cup of coffee. He's warm, but he's not enough to stave off the iciness in the air.

  It's bizarre to see lines and ranges in the snow, so black they are an anomaly to the powdered perfection masking its lack of the painter's palette. But the sky is glorious, the aurora having a wind buffering sound. It sounds angry which is at odds with its mesmerizing flares.

  There's a tale here - here the magic is evil, the white writes on black, and once I cross that bridge there's no going back.

  Chapter 9

  Snake oil is slippery indeed

  Use it as ink, not to drink

  ~ The Gemini Journal

  Leug:

  Watching her eyes, it strikes me that she's cried so much she has bleached her irises.

  How much pain has she weathered to stare at this world with eyes rinsed of color? Is she so desperate to go unnoticed that instead she's turned herself into an anomaly through sheer willpower? Or are her eyes the living testament to her heritage, or perhaps to the pain she endured at the hands of Steven and Marcy Smith?

  My life suddenly has more questions than answers. I must get her to slumber as I require time alone before introducing her to the rest of the family. Fenrir has located the desecrator of the temple and I'm keen to deliver karma directly, without a messenger to ferry my ire.

  And yet, like my kindred (and familial nemeses), I hear her musings. She thinks ahead, she sees right through all illusion and glamor, and of that I am both jubilant and wary. It means I cannot hide a thought, a feeling, no slight or nuance will go unnoticed, and she records it all with eyes as faded as time.

  She called me the master of shades. How did she know that? Master of Skadi to be exact, the master of every monochrome shade, both black and white. Skadi means shade, to cast shadow, to shield from light, from harm. I am her addictive rimeshade.

  My soul is a black and white checkered board where the valkyries play hopscotch. They damned my children, they damned me, and now they send me this one. Why overlook a goddess because of patriarchy? Was that prudent, or was that the most fatal maneuver in this game yet?

  If Fenrir is right, I'm currently looking into the eyes of the Trojan horse. She is living subterfuge, a live grenade thrown into the fray to destroy the son's system from the inside.

  She speaks of books being spells, she is more right than wrong for it once was alchemy reserved for the elite few. Odin's book of the living is truly a book with consciousness, and regardless of the rumors you've heard there is no book of the dead.

  The Egyptians attempted that one, instead they simply ended up creating portals to stare into psychotic fear. They found no peace in their knowledge, and all of it was to prepare for a god who is a zombie, raising his army of dead after he raises himself from the dead. If the gods cannot die, why then do they fear Ragnarök? Because they know I know they can die, but only by my hand or that of my bloodline. I am the balance they've sought to nullify. Hush money might have worked but they never did try to bribe my silence, instead they chose to obliterate my family and cast us all out of their precious Asgard. I'm æsir too, lest they forget.

  My god, my progenitor, he was the second. No one remembers the first. How convenient this propaganda is. How much more convenient is it that humans are so terribly susceptible to reverse psychology and propaganda. I alone am your god.

  Odin refused to be superseded or preceded, the masses recall only him as almighty. He is 'alone' as the heathens god, before the Christians burned down our holy churches to build theirs over the ashes, adopting our portals, our psychic signatures, renaming the same.

  Odin being mankind's first god is partly true, but everyone forgets to ask, if you are ours, then pray tell who is yours? For to be god you'd first have to know a god to consider yourself one. Otherwise you'd just exist, and be happy in your existence, not requiring to enforce a pyramid scheme with you at the top, the one all look up to.

  It stands to reason that you can only call yourself god if you've been forced to recognize one greater than yourself, one more powerful and omnipotent. Everyone forgets to ask, if you are ours, then pray tell who is yours?

  I know this answer, I've already won this game of truth or dare, but I cannot educate or illuminate until it's into my enemy's eyes I stare.

  And he comes.

  The wrath is wretched, the wind is taunting, and the bones of this world shake their shields in the rattle of change.

  She follows him. Why would an owl fly after an eagle?

  When she comes, who will I be? Victim of fate, or player of her cards? I'm a gambler, and I've not lost yet. As they love to point out, I have the luck of the devil.

  My children were cast out with me, yet Skadi hurt me with the toxic venom from my own son Nari. I know her kin come with the harii-shadow warriors, but again I surmise I shall not lose. This time I win. Not because I will engage in conflict, but because this time Odin can't stop me from revealing the truth.

  Ewan, I lost my home and my status when your grandfather ousted me from his kingdom of 'heaven'. Asgard is reserved for the gods, even his legion do not enter it, they're forced to reside in Valhalla outside its gates, and nary were they pearly. They are gold. Gold and glorious like the fruit keeping the gods alive. Taking away the keeper of the læraðr golden apples was my first transgression against 'god'.

  I'm not sure quite how I got the blame for that one because I'm the one who got her back. It was Skadi's father who abducted Idun, he ended up dead because of it, Skadi was icy with rage, and I ended up alon
e in a cave with her feeding me poison. How she could marry Odin after that is beyond me. He left her without a father, tricked her into a marriage she didn't want, and in the end she found love for him even though we all knew she secretly had a thing for Baldr. My one consolation is I got to fertilize her first, before any of them ever did. Maybe that's the real reason why Odin had her torture me, to break that bond.

  I was always so eager to please that it made me a good scapegoat. How much wisdom is in hindsight...

  Odin doesn't forgive and he doesn't forget. That's why he has the book, it's not used by him to know the past or the future, it's his scorecard.

  True to his name, wrath is his game. He yoked me with his own shame, and they chose to believe him. He's a pathetic god who doesn't warrant the title, except he gains it by default due to his lineage. It's a story the world knows too well, yet still they're afraid of hel. Ignorance is not bliss little bird, it clips wings and prevents flight. Why so? To keep his seidr might, and of it he's most possessive.

  I must educate my vargynja or she'll believe Ewan's warped version of the 'truth'. It's only truth because he thinks Odin is capable of telling the truth; if that's truth then I'm the galaxy and you all live in me.

  Exactly. The cruel narcissist makes the devil look like a good guy. Why does this pathetic population, his creation, believe he is benevolent and loving, that he has their best interests at heart? How did time twist his visage into that of a saintly guardian?

  And now I'm worrying a hole in my head for fear that the liars and distorters will turn her eyes away from me and to his kindred. That when faced with the truth she won't want to hear it, instead deafening her ears, embracing lies simply because they are familiar. They'll slay her to wear her fur for battleskin; they can never protect or respect her as I will. They're the Úlfhéðnar-berserker legion and they have no business touching a she-wolf.