by Matt Larkin
She knew then, with a sudden, inexplicable certainty, that she would not be joining her mother in the harbor. Mother would, Idunn hoped, make the swim and survive. If, as Odin had claimed, the world was ever bound to revolve in these circles of creation and destruction, then humanity might yet thrive again, and perhaps Mother—as Eostre, Al-Uzza, or whoever—might aid them.
But Idunn would not be here. Some things could not be undone. Some changes, wrought deep inside, were irreversible. And now, she would make the same choice Volund had made long ago. Better to live in shadow than die in the light. Better to embrace the power to enforce her will on the world than whine about the inequity of those who refuse the lies of altruism.
The dark was calling her.
And she could no longer deny it.
35
Though no one had said it, Sigurd knew they must be drawing perilously close to Naströnd. There was a foulness in the air, beyond the bitter poisons of Niflheim. A taste of corpses and decay that had some part of him squirming inside. The domain of the dark dragon was close at hand and, Sigurd knew, he ought to have focused on his war band.
Róta was gone. Without the valkyrie, a number of Sigurd’s einherjar had vanished. Perhaps some had fallen in battle—many had—but he was fair certain others had simply disappeared on this walk. No one spoke of it, and Sigurd could not recall actually seeing anyone melt into the darkness of late, but even a glance showed him his numbers had fallen too low.
And he could not bring himself to worry over it. Such things ought to have terrified him, for it jeopardized Odin’s mission. Sigurd loved Odin, his god. At least, he told himself he loved the god, whenever he caught himself nursing feelings of hatred and betrayal for what Odin had made of his life.
He told himself that Odin bore a burden no others, least of all him, a mere man, could understand. Even now, the Ás had spoken of the utter dissolution of not only Midgard, but all creation. Against such stakes, how petty was it for Sigurd to dwell upon wrongs done to him in a life lived in years now long past?
But.
But, Brynhild was still missing, taken from him and never returned. As though a piece of himself, a strip of his flesh had been ripped off, and a wound left to fester. Over the passing of centuries, it could not heal, and thus it only grew worse.
Because she suffered. Not only was she not by his side, but she was tormented by the very abominable serpents they now plodded toward. Tortured for crimes Odin had known she would commit based on actions he had taken and caused her to take. For supporting Sigurd’s own father, no less. Brynhild was an oathbreaker, the foulest of the foul. But she had become thus because of Odin.
How was Sigurd to forgive that? Was it hubris to even think a god should need forgiveness from a man? But here they were, and the god was as dead as Sigurd, and walking beside his lover, while Sigurd’s wife rotted in eternal torment.
So, desolate and silent, Sigurd made his way through the ice caverns, neither hearing nor caring about whatever his warriors may have said. Perhaps they quaked in fear of their destination. Perhaps they gave in to the ennui and let themselves surrender their free will. Some, he vaguely suspected, may have even drifted back, drawn toward the gates of Hel as the uncounted dead always were. Sigurd could not have bestirred himself to save any of them.
These caves went on and on, but with every passing mile he swore the intensity of his foreboding increased. A sense beyond mortal senses, one that told him he drew nigh to a place that at once held reality together and yet, in so doing, created a venue where the laws of that reality began to warp or crumble.
No sooner had he thought this, than he spotted the first roots. Like colossal worms they burrowed through the glacial walls, cracking ice and digging their way in all directions like a thicket of branches—ones thicker around than most tree trunks.
Most predominantly, they seemed to gather around a hole—an enormous abyss in the distance—that Hermod had described as leading down to Naströnd. Before that hole, however, the Queen of Mist stood, clearly in the process of carving runes not only into the ice surfaces, but into the roots themselves. The latter act seemed so profane that Sigurd stumbled over his own feet, gaping at the sheer audacity of one who would defile the World Tree.
The cavern here was massive, and filled with Hel’s legions, among them Mistwraiths and snow maidens and dead jotunnar. A seething horde barred the way.
Odin strode to the fore and banged his spear upon the ice. “Cease this!”
Surely the Ás knew the command as meaningless. Did he think that Hel, after all she had done, would agree to submit, simply because Odin asked it of her? No, it was a formality, and one Sigurd had little time for.
Other war bands began filing in, hundreds of warriors forming a ring around Hel’s legion. It seemed they outnumbered Hel’s forces, though Sigurd did not much care for the composition of Hel’s army. The greater vaettir would tear through the ranks of einherjar with uncanny ferocity, he had no doubt.
“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 it 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.