The Descendants of Thor Trilogy Boxset: Forged in Blood and Lightning; Norns of Fate; Wrath of Aten

by S. A. Ashdown

  Why? I asked the silence. Why that memory? I’d been five at most, young enough to call my father ‘Daddy’ without meaning to mock him.

  Whispers filled my head. Ask and ye shall receive. It reminded me of Lorenzo and his fondness for quotes, and I imagined him reading, somehow making it cool as he lounged on a windowsill in the dead of night, waiting for quarry to pass beneath. Lorenzo: Literary Assassin. I chuckled, choking on the imagery as I let it spiral away, Lorenzo tossing his book aside and leaping onto his beautiful victim, the girl with soulful eyes and rainbow hair…

  The Thing listened. The air hummed, saturated. I’d asked for an instruction, and it had replied. What if ask and ye shall receive meant your wish is my command? I axed Ava from my thoughts. A stray daydream could send a wordless spell into the cosmos, one I’d never want fulfilled.

  My body isn’t my own anymore. I’d died. Something had slipped inside me, resurrecting me with it. Filling my marrow with a cancer that drew on my life force until I could provide it with a suitable replacement. Scary enough, let alone that it seemed to be sentient, my suddenly not-so-silent passenger, watching everything I did.

  Only one of us can touch the book. I paced down the length of Yggdrasil, one foot in front of the other, walking over the golden trunk like a living Hieroglyph peeled from papyrus. Which means it’s special, connected to the Clemensen bloodline… Only one of us…

  ‘One Clemensen ever, or only one at a time?’ I whispered my musing into the book-stacks.

  My secret passenger answered. Only a Gatekeeper.

  I peered up to the second-floor gallery, considering the possibility that the book was one of the mind-boggling manuscripts stored beyond the ladders. No, Father had given up making me study those infernal languages – it was not my special talent – so I doubted such a book lingered up there. Then again, he hadn’t told me anything about this book as he’d promised in my memory.

  A pinch of Sherlock Holmes deduction pointed to the aforementioned hidden room filled with locked drawers, and the undercroft below it, crammed with ancient ‘junk’. It hadn’t looked all that useful during the moments I’d spent down there, curious after my father and uncle had confessed to its existence.

  Passing the curio display cabinet and rounding the bookcases towards the hidden room, I slipped through the semi-invisible door. Golden symbols flecked the panelled wood and vanished from view upon examination – Father had included a proviso within the wards, allowing me to enter.

  The room, with its stained-wood lockers, imitated a tiny bank vault. Previously the old buttery, a staircase dropped into an undercroft that once stored barrels of beer.

  My eyes flew to a little cabinet on my left; a mysterious key I’d only ever seen in the hands of my father hung out of it at a slant, indicating it didn’t belong there. To be accurate, the key didn’t belong in this century; it was a rough bronze cast, about three inches long, with a decorative handle reminiscent of a dream-catcher. Viking for sure.

  The cabinet squeaked open, and a note, written in Nikolaj’s swirly Elven scrawl, read: I’d conceal this PDQ before Espen notices it’s missing. He wants to protect you too much sometimes.

  Just perfect. Yes, Nik had passed on some rightful inheritance, but what the hell did it mean, and what was the key even for? Perhaps some weird ceremonial item?

  I folded the paper, stuffing it into the pocket of my drawstrings, and for the hell of it tested the key in some of the other locks. No use; it wasn’t generic but designed for a specific mechanism.

  My fingers ran over the bronze stem, visualising the lock to which it belonged. Why hadn’t Nikolaj slipped it to me whilst I was in my bedroom, or left it in my bathroom cabinet? He thought I’d find it here tonight. Once again, my motives were clear to my family before I’d grasped them myself.

  Feeling thoroughly transparent, I bounced down the stairs, getting a second wind, another undesirable – or desirable, depending on when it strikes – Gatekeeper side effect. The wrought iron steps rang under my bare feet, echoing through the expansive vaulted cellar, which stretched across the breadth of Hellingstead Hall, divided into sub-pockets. It took some fumbling to find a light switch, illuminating distant walls in a chain reaction. The damp air, still infused with the remnants of old beer and candle wax, prickled my lungs. I shivered.

  I picked my way through the eclectic selection of furniture, including a flaking Kas Dutch wardrobe overflowing with quilts, the patchwork crimped by a nibbling mouse, while scouring for a big book that said, ‘Only you can touch me’ on the front cover.

  Call me a magpie, but I was side-tracked by a jewellery chest full of gold and silver chains and rings, many inscribed with our family crest, the Hammer of Thor encircled by runes. A fractal flower – the crest of Nikolaj’s clan through his Elvish father, known as the Swift Arrows – stamped the rest. These days nobody calls them anything but Sarrows. Nikolaj said they’d been dubbed Swifties during the Elven-Fae war but they’d tired of the appellation, keen to distance themselves from the hostilities of the past. Considering they were masters of weaponry using pointy sticks, no one argued with the name change.

  I recognised the crest from Nikolaj’s necklace, a silver disc he wore on a finely knotted cord of hair – his father’s hair. Maybe these trinkets came from Nikolaj’s father. I’d heard tales of Nik’s childhood, but he’d been vague about the details. It amazed me that the Clemensens accepted Nikolaj into our lineage – as the story goes – without question, despite him being the lovechild of his mother’s affair.

  Nikolaj never had any children, so the gene activated in my father instead when he turned twenty-one, skipping my grandmother, as it prefers a host that doesn’t expend energy giving birth.

  I shut the chest of Clemensen and Sarrow trinkets, trying not to think about having my own brood, despite it being my sacred duty. Unless I intended to damn the Pneuma faction of the human race, or at the very least give them a serious existential crisis. What is a warlock without magic, what is a vampire without self-healing blood? A shifter that cannot change his face becomes less than the skin he was born in. If I die, will all Pneuma become sapien, or drop like flies? Explode into dust? Be sucked through a wormhole to be drowned in the Lífkelda itself? I hoped the book I hunted for held the answers. I wanted the facts presented before me, a source I could call my own.

  Near the middle of the undercroft, stood a full-length mirror. My reflection glowed, a pulsing, electric aura on its shiny, dust-free surface. The cauldron that clung to my soul, sparkling with gold and streaked with purple, roared in full glory. I wasn’t curious. I knew what enveloped my corporeal form, it had wrapped around me, a searing liquid, when I’d dived into the pit of fire in my dream. It had ripped me apart and I never wanted to face it again.

  I found an old blanket covering a high-backed chair in desperate need of repair, and threw it over the mirror. Something caught my calf when I stepped back, and I tumbled onto my arse for the second time that evening, bringing down a table lamp as I cast my arms out to break my fall, only to get my elbow caught in the lampshade.

  ‘Ouch.’ Untangling myself from the wire, I scrambled upright, cutting my foot on the smashed lightbulb. The thing that had tripped me, a dull, tin chest pocketed with dents, provided a seat to assess the damage and pick glass from my heel.

  ‘What the…?’ My foot was stained with blood but I couldn’t find the injury.

  I suddenly felt very alone, staring at my foot again as I had in the library, moments before that strange memory launched out of my head, a firework lit by a distant fuse. Did you heal me?

  You are the Vessel. Was that viscous snake rolling its reptilian eyes at me?

  I’ll take that as a yes. So where’s this book?

  You’re sitting on it. The back of my legs hummed with warmth, weird considering I sat on a metal chest in a frigid room. I gave the lid a fierce yank, but it wouldn’t open. I crouched and located the inevitable keyhole, jamming in the new key with a blast of t
riumph. It didn’t turn. I gave up wiggling it, unwilling to get the darn thing stuck.

  ‘Fiddle sticks,’ I said, returning the key to my pocket with the note. I kicked the chest in frustration, rubbing my cheek as it twitched with renewed gusto. The box slid a fraction, revealing part of an iron ring embedded in the flagstone. My key sat useless in my pocket as I heaved the stone aside. Bullseye.

  Swaddled in velvet, and nestled in a nondescript, wooden chest, in a hole about three feet deep, I found my prize. I sensed the book’s history before I unravelled it. Shaking with trepidation, I picked it up, fumbling with the clasp on the side. It remained tightly sealed until a drop of blood rubbed off my hand, melting like wax on the exposed edge of paper.

  The ancient manuscript dropped open, revealing immaculate parchment – rough papyrus. Vertical runes dripped like stalactites over the leather, reminding me of the indecipherable green code running down the computer screens in The Matrix, quite possibly my favourite film ever. Just saying. Appropriate I guess; like that code, these runes also held secrets crucial to the Pneuma world. Whole families, clans, covens, were living out their lives, with no idea someone was out there trying to keep magic from destruction. In these runes, millions of expectant faces turned to me across continents, holding out their arms, pleading. We are nothing without magic. Don’t let us wither.

  Easier to pretend they didn’t exist at all.

  I was in no mood to freeze, lost in the mysteries of the universe. Hopping over the chest, I weaved through the mess in the undercroft and shot up the spiral-staircase, exiting the room of troubling locks, and strode into the blissful warmth of the library.

  My plan had been to sit by the fire and digest the ancient text pressed against my chest, but thanks to Nikolaj unburdening himself of the baffling key without consent from my father, I wasn’t comfortable hanging out bold as brass in his domain. Not while reading a book he chose not to tell me about, with the key in my pyjama pocket.

  But I wasn’t finished yet. I grabbed a generic Pneuma-varmint encyclopaedia from the east corner, a hefty book familiar from my home studies. Father’s idea of an education placed the National Curriculum on a tiny, irrelevant island in the distance, although thanks to my uncle’s patience, I had a talent for maths.

  On my way out of the library, I tucked the thinnest guide on psychic protection under my arm, pretending as if I wasn’t wishing my uncle was my father instead. Tears stung as I imagined Mum’s reproach, but I ignored it, and summoned a cloud of water above the fire to put it out. I crept upstairs and over the tartan rug that led to my chambers, dumping the load onto my four-poster bed.

  The Eye of Horus – aka The Evil Eye – woven with blue and gold thread, dominated the heavy, brown curtains drawn round my bed, yet another addition to my father’s ubiquitous security system. I swear I couldn’t have been more smothered if I’d lived in a bubble-wrap factory. I angled the reading-lamp attached to a little shelf above my pillows down and dug out ‘the untouchable book’.

  It started ominously:

  Gatekeepers of the Lífkelda

  You are the Vessel. You are the Anchor. Your flesh is the weight of Mjölnir.

  You are the Protector of the Veil.

  Rip it aside and magic is cast asunder.

  Chaos ensues.

  The Life-Spring runs dry and the World Tree crumbles. Death rides the earth.

  That’s bloody fantastic. My inner ears resounded with sarcasm. I got some of the references, to Thor’s hammer, ‘Mjölnir’, obviously – no Clemensen could miss that one. And my tumultuous piggy-backer had called me a Vessel. The Veil I’d heard about, and let’s face it, thought about since my mother died. It divided the living from the dead, the physical realm from the non-physical, the timeless and unbound region contained within the Orlog — the original and primal consciousness that preceded all things. Witches and warlocks worshiped its many offspring, namely the nurturing figure of the goddess, or Mother Earth, and as Clemensens – and heathens – her son, Thor. I read on.

  The Orlog’s primal fire animates the inert matter of the physical realms, it’s dynamic essence threading unseen through the fabric of the world. It is in every way dark matter, except it is from the realm of light. The Gatekeeper is in every way dark energy, except his magic blazes through every soul it touches. Beside the text was a column filled with complex mathematical equations that made my head spin.

  Wait – dark matter? Dark energy? I thought about emailing a physicist at Hellingstead University:

  Dear Professor, guess what? Orlog = dark matter (+) dark energy = Gatekeeper. You’re welcome. Just let me know when we’re collecting the Nobel Prize.

  It turned out I hadn’t quite finished with the physics.

  The Orlog imposes the rules of physics onto the random chaos of atoms. But life must syphon energy from the Orlog to grow and function. But if life draws too much energy from the Orlog, its fire will swallow the world. If it draws too little, life’s essence will wilt and disintegrate under the pressure of matter.

  Essence, I thought. That’s what ‘Pneuma’ meant – Vital Spirit.

  The Gatekeeper anchors the vital spirit and distributes its energy evenly across the earth for the Pneuma to direct, sapiens to intuit, and lower-animals and plants to feed upon, in exactly the right quantities for all to thrive.

  That meant everything on Earth required the primal energy of the Orlog, which according to mythology, fed the springs nurturing the roots of Yggdrasil. All Pneuma depended on the oxygen produced by plants and trees to live, like regular human beings and animals. Without the Gatekeeper – without me – not even that fundamental level of life could function. I worked my way up the food chain. No bacteria, no plants, no oxygen. No critters, no birds, no fish, no land-mammals. No humans. Period.

  Nothing.

  My body was a cosmic wormhole funnelling essential life force from the Lífkelda, the same life force that became active, magical, in the bodies of Pneuma. If I died before the magic inside me found its new home in my future children, the door would be slammed shut. With no energy to manipulate, there’d be no fuel for our souls. Hearts would stop beating. Minds would crash, thoughts tumbling away like carriages flung from a derailing train.

  It wasn’t only the existence of supernatural beings, such as myself, at stake. If I screwed up, wasn’t a well-behaved little Vessel, the whole flipping planet was doomed, right down to the tiniest amoeba. Suddenly, Malachi and Lorenzo didn’t seem so scary. They only lived because I did, which gave me a crazy power rush when I thought hard about it. No one could touch me unless they wanted to exterminate everyone else, including themselves.

  Maybe mass murder is just what someone out there wants. Someone powerful enough to pull it off. Or maybe they think they’d only be killing Pneuma. I imagined a mad dictator, finger hovering over a big, red nuclear button, smoking and laughing hysterically. At that exact moment, thunder rumbled overhead, beating the sable sky like a cosmic drum. Each blond hair on my body sprang up.

  What had Father said? For every person who rejoices in the idea of magic… there’s a thousand others who’d light the pyres with their own hands. I imagined a demented rabble chasing me out of Hellingstead with pitchforks and assault rifles.

  Get a grip, Theo. Don’t you dare become a paranoid mess like Father.

  My jaw tightened. I lived with two ex-Gatekeepers, but other than keep shtum until I borrowed some gal’s uterus to pop out another Vessel – oh, and wait for twenty-one years – they had no game-plan to offer. They certainly hadn’t explained the connection between magic and all life. They should have told me that. But then again, I’m not sure I’d have come back to life if they’d dumped that level of responsibility on me all at once.

  My heart throbbed in my mouth. Could my omniscient relatives be clueless about how the Gatekeeper should proceed, beyond surviving to reproduce? What was I meant to do, except not die?

  I flipped pages, squinting at the diary entries of previous Gat
ekeepers, funny letters scrawled in old ink. Forced to summon up my basic knowledge of ancient Northern languages, I slogged through, and gleaned a couple of things from the text.

  1) It was quite hard to die, at least while the Anchor’s Friend existed, but no one appeared to trust divulging what that was in these pages, or whether it still existed.

  2) Several mentions of a key that tended to drive people a little doolally if they weren’t meant to handle it. I stopped reading to give the one in my pocket a nervous poke. If Father had been reluctant to give it to me, maybe he lacked faith in my worthiness.

  On the last page was a simple runic sentence. ‘Where Thor drives there is a storm.’ I read it aloud. Someone had written the same statement in a modern, readable form below the original: Þar er Þórr ekr, er stormr.

  I really needed to do in-depth research about Thor. Were the myths surrounding him more literal than I’d assumed? How did Thor link to the Gatekeepers and the Clemensens? Why our family? An unbroken line of men stretched into time immemorial, my ancestors, before society possessed the sophistication to transfer knowledge through written symbols.

  Still, I’d doubted Uncle Nikolaj’s tales of ancient warring clans, epic dramas he regaled me with as a child. He re-enacted those stories like a game of charades, and I remember his arms flying about wildly, the constant motion across the rug as he sought objects to demonstrate battle formations, the point of his ear brushing back and forth under his blond hair. Was he preparing me for my destiny when I sat by the fire to let my hair dry out? Did my mother know?

  She left me to face this alone.

  I felt ashamed; she died. Not her fault.

  The same old questions circled. Why was she in the woods in the middle of the night? Why wasn’t Father with her? She knew those cliffs; how could she fall?