The Fires of Muspelheim

by Travis Simmons

  “Well, for starters why everyone calls my father Olik. There’s only one Olik that I know of, and that’s the trickster god. But that can’t be him. And then there’s the hammer my father stole. Fortarian said Rowan, Dolan, and he were all protecting the hammer, and then father stole it.”

  “But that could have been because Fortarian was a darkling. He’s been hunting the hammer, so that’s most likely why your father took it.”

  “Yea, you’re probably right. But why did Rowan change her name from Mattelyn?”

  “Who knows why she does anything that she does? Rowan is a strange woman.”

  “There’s something more to it. Fortarian said there was another reason he became a harbinger of darkness.”

  “He just doesn’t want to take the blame. Listen,” Skye said, coming to a stop in front of the two story white house she shared. “He tricked you into coming closer so he could touch you and infect you, right?”

  “Yea,” Leona said, casting her eyes to her afflicted hand. The collar around her neck chafed, and she honestly felt bad for Abagail when she’d had to wear it.

  “So maybe there was nothing to his words, and he was making it all up to get you riled up and closer to him.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Skye nodded and climbed the stairs. After a moment with trying to open the door with Leona in his arms, he finally managed and carried her in and sat her on the couch. The house was cold.

  “Where’s Rorick?” Leona asked. It was normal for him to be out a lot, but even then he kept the fire going.

  “He’s looking after a potential darkling,” Rorick said.

  Leona nodded. Her stomach swirled and she thought for a moment that she was going to be sick. “So we are hunting them now? We know for sure they are here?”

  Skye busied himself with breaking kindling for the fireplace. He piled the wood high and struck a spark that caught the first time. “Darklings are everywhere now,” he told her, setting a kettle of water on the hearth for tea. When he was done and Leona was nursing a hot mug of tea, wrapped in blankets, she asked, “So are you going to stay here with me?”

  Skye sighed. “If I have to,” he told her.

  Leona giggled and nursed her cup of tea.

  “It’s probably better than letting you stumble all around this house on your own,” he admitted. “But I have duties I have to attend to.”

  “Good, I can help you,” she said.

  “No, these are secret elf things,” he told her, cocking an eyebrow at her.

  “Ooooo,” Leona said. “Like what?”

  “Nope, not saying,” he told her, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Well, it’s probably just as well,” she said. “I want to try to scout out some of these darklings if I can.”

  “I’m sure the ravens will have you pretty busy,” Skye agreed. After a few moments of silence had passed he asked, “You’re sure nothing’s happened to your sister?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” she admitted. “All I know is I can still feel her. I can sense her fate.”

  “Can you get a sense of where she is?” Skye asked.

  “Whenever I think of Abagail, it’s only darkness and dread.”

  She held Leona’s hand in her own, staring down at the black smudge that marred her palm. The smudge that showed she was infected by the shadow plague. Abagail swallowed hard around the lump in her throat. The plague looked like nothing more than a smear of ink on her sister’s hand. She wished she could wipe it away with her thumb and a bit of spit like she could ink, but she knew it wouldn’t budge.

  Abagail looked into her sister’s eyes, blue and searching. Her own gaze was blurred with unshed tears.

  “I failed to keep you safe¸” Abagail said. Her voice was hoarse. She was speaking through a throat constricted with emotion. Her head throbbed with the effort not to cry. “I failed you.”

  Leona shook her head. “No,” she told her. She reached up with her clean hand and wiped away a tear from Abagail’s face that wouldn’t be held back any longer. “You didn’t fail me. I did this to myself. I knew what might happen when I went in there to see Fortarian. I shouldn’t have listened to him.”

  “But I shouldn’t have let you go alone,” Abagail argued.

  “Always so insistent that everything’s your fault.” Leona smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t control everything a person does.”

  Abagail closed her eyes and felt the ground beneath her shiver.

  “You need to learn control,” Leona told her, letting her hand slip from her sister’s face. “You’re worried about failing people, but the one person you fail the most is yourself.”

  “I need to keep you safe. You’re my sister. You’re the only family I have.”

  “There’s another.” A voice she knew said beside her. Abagail’s eyes fluttered open and stared at the careworn face of her mother.

  Abagail gasped awake. She sat up in bed, her head throbbing, tears staining her cheeks. She let out a sob and the ground beneath her shook.

  “Where’s it coming from?” someone yelled from outside her door. More shouts answered, but she couldn’t tell where they came from or what they were saying. There was a scurry of activity outside, feet pounding past her door.

  It was only then that she remembered about the barracks and how she felt every fiber of her body infused with fire; boiling with heat to the point that it spilled out of her flesh and tore her asunder.

  Remade by the fire, she thought. But then where am I?

  She lay in the corner of a blackened room on a pallet made of hay and feathers. There were no covers on her because it was too hot for covers. She gazed at the ceiling, only there wasn’t one over her head; at least, not a ceiling of her room. Somewhere high above there was a blackened, craggy ceiling, but it was much higher than the walls of her room.

  There was glowing from outside her room, high above the walls. The orange glow shifted and churned as if a great fire raged somewhere nearby. Presumably that’s where the heat came from as well.

  She looked to the floor, it too was black. It looked dry, covered with coal. Abagail thought if she were to touch the floor or the walls, her hands would come away smeared with coal.

  There was no light in her room save a silvery glow coming from her hand. Abagail looked at her right palm where the shadow plague resided. With the display of wyrd at the barracks and the outburst of anger that brought the fire, Abagail was surprised she wasn’t consumed with shadows and finally a darkling as she’d always feared.

  She could feel the plague crawling over her right breast, reaching for her left side. She could feel the reaching tendrils along the right side of her face, closing over her hazel eyes. Abagail wasn’t covered in the shadows yet, but it wouldn’t be long before she was.

  She remembered Fortarian and how half of his entire body was shadows. He was evil then. Had he always been evil or had the shadows made him that way? He hadn’t been consumed in shadows. In fact, he was just as covered in shadows then as she was now. Did that mean she was more darkling than human?

  Abagail focused on her palm once more. The sleeping eye was awake. Her right palm peeled open like lids of an eye. From within silver light like the moon glared back at her.

  She closed her fist over it, willing it to stop.

  The shouting outside had stopped as had the tremors in the ground.

  A section of the wall scrapped to the side in a series of screams and shrieks that put Abagail’s teeth on edge and chased away the last remnants of slumber that she might have had.

  A short shadow of a woman stepped in. Abagail thought she remembered moments of lucidity and this woman bending over her, whispering to her, telling her to be calm, and administering a sweet potion that chased her back down into slumber.

  The woman held out her hand and small tendrils of fire streaked across the room to several points along the walls. The fire found its home at the tips of wicks. The room was
flooded with light.

  “Having nightmares again?” the woman asked. Now that the room was lit, Abagail could see her well. She was short and thin; her hair long and black. Her eyes were clear and green. Strewn through her hair were silken scarves in oranges and reds that moved as if with a life of their own. They matched the orange toga she wore.

  “Yes,” Abagail said.

  “But you’re awake now,” the woman said, folding her delicate hands before her. “And the tremors in the Forge have stopped.”

  “Where am I?” Abagail asked. The Forge . . .

  “Muspelheim,” the woman said, stepping forward.

  “And you’re a fire-etin?” Abagail asked.

  “A dwarf fire-etin,” the woman said with a nod. “My name is Elyse. From the shouts in your sleep, I can assume you’re Abagail?”

  Abagail frowned. “What was I shouting?”

  Elyse waved her hand as if it didn’t matter. “Just stating over and over again that you weren’t him, you were Abagail.”

  “Him . . .” Abagail turned her attention to her clasped hand that hid the sleeping eye. Him who? The All Father, or Anthros?

  The thought made her head throb worse.

  “But that’s over now. You’re awake, and you’re alive.”

  Abagail scoffed. “Barely.”

  “I would say more than barely,” Elyse smiled at her. “We fire-etin are a strong sort, it’s in your blood.”

  “I’m fire-etin? How? I came from O.”

  Elyse shook her head. “You may have come from a different world, but your bloodline started in Muspelheim.”

  The conversation wasn’t helping her headache at all. She wanted to lay back down, but there were too many thoughts racing through her head. Father isn’t from Muspelheim. He’s a birth golem.

  Even that thought was too ludicrous for her to contemplate. Her father, the afterbirth of a god. Her father, the trickster Olik. She closed her eyes, as if refusing to see any of it as truth.

  “At any rate, you wouldn’t think a little fire would harm a fire-etin, do you?”

  “It was more than a little fire,” Abagail said.

  Elyse sat on the foot of the bed. She settled her toga around her. “It was just showing your soul. All of our souls are made of fire. At times of great agitation, our soul shines through our physical bonds.”

  “I’m sorry, this is a bit too much for me to handle right now,” Abagail said.

  “I understand. You’ve been through a lot lately, haven’t you?” Elyse looked at Abagail’s fist. Silver light was shining through the cracks in her clasped fingers.

  “I think fire-etin have a flare for understating things,” Abagail smiled. “You think the fire could have at least burned away the plague.”

  “It did,” Elyse said. “When you arrived, there was no trace of the plague. It was your dreams that made it spread.”

  Abagail didn’t know what to say.

  “The first days were too dangerous to even get close to you. We locked you up in this room and warded the stone so you couldn’t blast your way out. It wasn’t for a week or more that we were able to enter. A few more days before we felt safe enough to put bedding and furniture in here for you.”

  “My soul?” Abagail asked. “The flames?”

  Elyse shook her head. “The darkling wyrd feeding off your pain.”

  “Would you believe that at one point I had it under control?”

  “Control can be lost at any time. It’s important that we gain that control again. That’s what you will be working on while you’re here,” Elyse told her.

  “I have teachers in Agaranth,” Abagail said.

  Elyse sighed. “There’s no telling how long you will be here. Besides, Agaranth might not be safe for you once you go back. Training would be out of the question. Better to take advantage of the training we can offer. Fire-etin tend to be a little fierier, so we would probably be able to help you where others couldn’t.”

  “What do you mean Agaranth won’t be safe?” Abagail asked. Her thoughts raced to her sister again.

  “Don’t worry, you will make it back to Leona. The darkling tide is spreading. Hilda’s armies are on the march. We fear any day she will make her attack on Muspelheim.”

  “Was that why I heard so many people scurrying around earlier?” Abagail asked.

  “Yes,” Elyse nodded. “When you were blowing off steam and causing the earth to quake we weren’t sure if it was you or an attack.”

  Abagail shook her head.

  “But anyway, Surt has demanded to see you once you woke up,” Elyse said, pushing to her feet. She held out her hand for Abagail.

  Abagail stood on her own, the memory of her dream of the All Father and the giant, Surt spurring her to action. “What does he want with me?”

  “You’re in his home now,” Elyse shrugged. “He said he wants to see you, and we can’t refuse that order. Surt sees everyone who comes here, especially other fire-etin.”

  Elyse handed Abagail a thin black glove. It wasn’t the work glove she was used to, but it would do the trick. She slipped her hand inside the glove and flexed her fingers. It felt amazing to have a glove that actually fit her.

  “Better?” Elyse asked.

  “Much better,” Abagail said.

  “Then follow me,” Elyse said.

  Abagail fell in step behind Elyse. The fire-etin led her out of the room and to the right along a blackened hallway.

  “What is this?” Abagail asked, her hand trailing the wall, testing if her theory was right that her fingers would come back tinged with coal. The surface of the wall felt dusty, but her hand came away clean.

  “Basalt,” Elyse said. “It’s a product from all the volcanic activity we have in Muspelheim. It’s probably one of the strongest building materials you could find.”

  “Huh,” Abagail said, gazing up further and further until her eyes rested on the black ceiling so far above. When the flames flickered just right, and the orange glow tilted just so, Abagail was able to see a slight blue tint that raced across the surface of the blackness.

  Elyse led her down the hallway that spiraled outwards. There were cracks in the walls that Abagail thought might be other doors that led to other rooms. A few of the doors were open, and she looked in to see other people.

  “This is an infirmary?” Abagail asked. She’d stopped at one doorway and gazed in at an old lady on a pallet much like her own. The woman was sleeping, or she appeared to be sleeping. Around here were various people. One lady was checking the old lady’s wrist. Another person was feeling around her neck.

  “Yes,” Elyse said, tugging at the sleeve of Abagail’s orange tunic. “And it’s rude to stare.”

  “But the door was open,” Abagail argued, allowing herself to be led behind the fire-etin.

  Other fire-etin, Abagail thought.

  Elyse giggled at her.

  Eventually the spiral hallway came to an end, and Abagail looked across a great expanse. Muspelheim seemed much bigger than she’d ever thought it would be. It was so large that she couldn’t see the other side. A hot haze hung over everything, and at the entrance of the infirmary, it was hotter than she thought was possible.

  Sweat clung to her like a second skin. No matter how she mopped at her face, the sweat never let her be.

  A black road stretched from the infirmary and across several pools of fire and even arched high over a river of lava. Across the lava, where the road touched ground once more, was an island of sort, ringed by the lava. On the island stood a great building that towered high enough that Abagail thought it might actually join with the ceiling that hung over all of Muspelheim.

  “That’s the Forge,” Elyse said, pointing to the building. “That’s where we are going.”

  Abagail didn’t say anything. She didn’t know if she could have actually said anything even if she tried. There were giants there. Large, fiery giants and smaller figures she assumed were the dwarves. She had a fleeting wonder if there we
re elves in Muspelheim, but if the legends were true, Muspelheim was home to the giants and dwarves only.

  Elyse led her along the uneven road. Abagail had to watch her footing so she didn’t misstep and twist her ankle. On the few times she was able to look up she could see streets stretching off from the main road. Buildings lined the streets. In some of the black houses Abagail could see people working. Some of the buildings housed a steady stream of people coming and going.

  The number of roads that led off to other streets filled with houses and places of business were astounding.

  They paused on the bridge and Abagail had her first glimpse of the slow flowing river of lava that surrounded the Forge. She couldn’t tell where it came from, but the hot breeze it kicked up was enough to help dry the sweat on her face, if not the dampness that clung to her thighs and arm pits.

  “Where does it come from?” Abagail asked.

  Elyse pointed off in the distance. “There’s no real origin,” she told her. “Not a volcano or anything. Some say it comes from the core of all the worlds; a kind of liquid root system that connects all ways to Muspelheim, just as the Tree at Eget Row connects all worlds.”

  Abagail let her mind slip over the ripples of thick lava. It was strange to her the way it flowed almost like mud. She’d always imagined that it would be more liquid; less solid. Watching the lava filled her with a sense of ease as if she were looking at where everything began. The lava felt like home, and it seemed to welcome her back to the land she should never have left.

  Muspelheim might not have been the loveliest place in all the nine worlds, but Abagail couldn’t help but feel like it was the best of all the nine. In that moment she knew that Elyse was right. Olik might not be a fire-etin, but her bloodline certainly started in Muspelheim.

  There was an area in the distance, along the lava flow and to the right, just at the top of a ridge behind the towering Forge. She could see a shimmer of light, and a stream of people headed toward the light. If she strained, Abagail was sure she could see when each person disappeared into that light. There had to be thousands of them.