by B. C. James
Thor spun the thing in a tornado that meteorologists would probably term as an EF5, burning the monster with electricity the whole time. Then, as the clone was traveling several hundred miles an hour in the spinning funnel, Thor stopped the wind. The creature disappeared over the dark horizon.
He followed the creature’s flight path. The momentum had carried him over the nearby military base and into the rocky hills that led up to a mountain range. From the sky, Thor could see the crater where the monster had landed. The red-headed aberration was nowhere to be seen. As he circled above looking for the creature, he saw the entire top of a hill lift off its stony base. It was then tossed straight up in the air.
The hill was not thrown at Thor, rather it was like a baseball player tossing a ball into the air and then taking a swing at it with his bat. The clone swung Surt’s flaming sword at the section of hill, and it shattered into millions of flaming shards of rock. The monster then raised its hand into the air, and every fiery projectile locked in on Thor like heat seeking missiles.
Control of the sword had apparently given this creature dominion over fire itself. Thor spun his hammer and blocked as many of the projectiles as he could. Still a few got past. While most just grazed his skin and left cauterized flesh wounds, one buried itself in his thigh. Thor grimaced in pain as he pulled the shard out of his leg.
The monster had another piece of mountain and planned to repeat the attack. This time when the flaming meteor came his way, the Thunder God climbed high into the sky. Predictably, the creature forced the burning shards to follow him.
Thor looked back and saw an entire hill’s worth of broken and jagged rock hot on his heels. The heat from the living flames was intense. They stayed on his tail no matter where he went…and that is exactly how Thor wanted. When he was high above the clone, he put Mjölnir out in front of him and went into a power dive. The Thunder God headed straight for the creature with a fiery meteor shower following close behind him.
At the last second, the Thor pulled away. He delivered a savage blow to the head of the creature as he sped past him. Being a demigod did not make him immune to physics. Trying to pull out of dive while, smack the creature and safely fly off to the left or right put him at all sorts of odds with speed, mass and common sense. Thor then hit the ground hard and went bouncing across the craggy hill. He sat up, cut, bruised, but still alive and watched thousands of burning rock shards falling upon the bluff like a proverbial rain of fire.
He limped over to where the monster was standing and saw the bloody body of his own half clone partially buried by the rocks. Thor moved in closer to confirm that the creature was truly dead. Quicker than the eye could track and much quicker than he could get his hammer up, the monster had snatched Thor by the legs and was back on his feet. The clone started to swing the Thunder God into the rocks and bash him against the ground. It threw him back towards the encampment where the monster had emerged from its sarcophagus.
Thor flew over the military base, which was now showing a lot more activity, and hit the ground hard near the table where Freya was raped. His landing left a long, deep, and scorched crevasse in the ground. He felt half dead, but he now fully appreciated how much stronger Mjölnir made him. Before being reunited with the hammer he never would have been able to survive such a beating without the symbiotic sharing of energy between himself and the hammer. Of course, on the other side of the coin was the fact that nothing he had done to the beast seemed to do anything more than piss it off.
In the distance, Thor could see a pinkish dot in the sky. The clone had leapt into the air like a giant, mutated tick and was following him. Nothing he was doing was making a dent in Odin’s creation. His father was far more successful than he originally thought. He would have told Odin so, but his father had predictably split when things got hairy.
Thor looked around the encampment for anything he could possibly use. He was already holding the most powerful object possible, but there had to be something else here that could give him an advantage. Then he saw it—the sarcophagus. It wasn’t the sarcophagus that interested him, but one part of its exterior connection…the root of Yggdrasil.
He limped over to the root and looked up at how impossibly high it climbed. He ran his hand across it. Yggdrasil was powerful and life-giving: the thing that fed, nourished, and kept the nine worlds in balance. He felt the warmth of the root and tried to work out some of the ramifications of his next actions.
The ground shook as the clone landed behind him. It howled in anger again as it trudged toward him. Thor didn’t have time to second-guess himself. He just hoped he was doing the right thing.
He raised Mjölnir and struck the root with all the strength and power he could muster. It quivered and splintered at the impact. Thor saw the cracks in the root go all the way up as it began to bleed sap.
The entire Earth felt like it was shaking, as its anchor to Yggdrasil was shattered. The shock of having a root die sent a violent chain reaction up the entire tree. Yggdrasil suddenly shuddered, dropped a few ocean liner sized seedlings, and then dissolved. The great tree was no more.
Thor glowed with power as Mjölnir absorbed the life essence of the tree. He rose into the sky as the light coming from his body lit the ground below him like the noonday sun. It was more than just power he had gotten from the tree. He gained awareness and understanding on a multi-dimensional level. He could see and feel what was going on in all nine worlds. For the most part it was panic, and he found himself pleased by it.
There was absolute terror coming from the little things that crawled about on the worlds. He found that he wasn’t concerned with their little lives other than for his own entertainment. He was no longer just a god, one of many who would perform like a trained seal for the rush he got from the worship of his inferiors. He was simply God.
As he contemplated his new role, he became aware of things striking his body. The creature was below him chucking flaming rocks in his direction and getting really mad when they didn’t seem to hurt him.
Thor floated down to deal with this small, pink gnat. He stood at the feet of the clone and let it have a go at him with Surt’s sword. This began to bore him, and he tapped the monster’s toe with Mjölnir. The clone fell over dead and Thor felt his essence add to the hammers strength.
Thor rose into the sky once more; the rush of power was the most intense feeling he had ever felt. Thoughts and visions began to collide in his head. He saw the horror of those who were aware of Yggdrasil’s absence, and the new God reveled in it.
He saw the worlds of both the living and the dead. Thor witnessed the greed and apathy of those who were condemned to just crawl upon the planet’s surface and scratch out a life as a terrestrial, non-divine, being. He saw Surt plotting in Múspellsheimr and watched the souls in Hel exist in a world of misery and boredom. He looked at all the worlds and all their flaws and mulled over the notion that he could now wipe it all out and do better.
“No, you can’t Thor, you’re not God.” The voice came from a beautiful woman sitting on a rock in Hel. Her hair shown like spun gold.
“Death gives some people a wonderful perspective on life. I spent my last years in misguided hate…mostly for you. Well, that’s not true, mostly for Odin and Surt...and that wasn’t misguided, but a lot of it was for you. Now I just regret wasting all that time, but I can at least be happy that I now know that there is something better out there than us in charge.”
“Sif?” Thor almost tripped over his jaw when he saw her.
She rose and walked over to him. The hug started as the type one would give a casual acquaintance when arriving at a party. It soon became something more intimate as Thor held his wife close, his arms tightly around her back and stroking the back of her head. They continued this embrace as Sif told him all of what had happened over the years, and about her death at Odin’s hands in the Nevada desert.
“I’ll bring you back Sif, I can do that...I’m God now.”
She cradled his face in her hand
s and spoke as gently as possible. “Honey, you’re not God.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You’re going insane. You’ve taken in too much and it’s fracturing your mind. I know it doesn’t feel like it to you, but it is. I’m dead and it would be wrong to bring me back. Just like it was wrong for you to contemplate wiping out everything and making the universe in your own image. All you would accomplish is winding up here, in Hel, with me.”
Tears welled up in Thor’s eyes as he looked at his wife and wiped a smudge of dirt away from her cheek with his thumb. “Would that be so bad?”
“It’s not your time my love. You have much more to do and it will start with a very hard choice you have to make.”
“What choice?”
“You can pretend you’re God, and let the insanity of it destroy you, or you can let it go.”
“When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound like a hard choice at all.”
Sif smiled at him. “If these sorts of choices were easy the Betty Ford center would be bankrupt. Power is an addiction. Think about it. You have only had this much power for a few minutes and already you’re declaring yourself God and thinking of destroying the fabric of creation only to remake it in your image. If that is what goes through your brain in less than a quarter hour, imagine what thoughts will be ping ponging inside that little red head of yours a day from now.”
Thor looked around at his surroundings. “You don’t belong in Hel, Sif.”
“There are a lot of people who would say otherwise. The Valkyrie who forced me here was pretty insistent that this was the right place for me.”
Thor hugged her one more time and the dark sky and craggy landscape of Hel melted away. The air took on the scent of jasmine and Sif could feel soft grass tickling her feet. The sky was blue, and a hawk circled lazily above her head. The landscape was dotted with grazing cows and in the distance was a shining city. On the nearby road, smiling people greeted each other as they met, and they waved to her.
“If my career as God is going to be a short tenure, my one and only act will be to commute your sentence. Welcome to Valhalla, Sif. See you soon.” He kissed her and let his hand linger in hers as he walked away.
“Not too soon!” She shouted after him as he disappeared.
Chapter 39
Thor was savoring the ability to appear where he pleased, he was not going to enjoy giving this up. Of course, with Sif’s words and advice to keep him focused, he realized that the longer he had this power, the harder it would be to walk away from it. That’s just what happens with an addiction. The power would eventually consume him, and all he would be was a divine Fentanyl addict. The words from a funny YouTube video he had once seen came to mind, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
He had noticed that Surt could move between places and dimensions at will as well. That might be something he would need to worry about in the future, but at the moment he had a task to perform.
Thor appeared inside a large hanger. On the wall was a map of Nevada with a circle around a base that was marked Area 51. Another sign with an arrow pointing to the base simply read, “You are NOT here.” It was nice to know that the Air Force had a sense of humor about itself.
He was standing in front of what looked to be a massive helicopter seed. This was the one that fell from Yggdrasil and took out the President of the United States. Thor had felt its presence nearby as soon as Mjölnir absorbed Yggdrasil’s essence. It would have been hard to ignore the potential offspring of the great ash tree.
“Might as well get to it,” he muttered to himself.
Thor touched the seed with his hammer and let all of Yggdrasil’s power flow from Mjölnir into it. He felt the strength drain out of his body and got rubber legged for a few moments. Once the power transfer was done, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but he figured it was best if he was far away when it did.
Thor raised his hammer and took to the skies. He quickly made his way back to the place where he had killed Yggdrasil. Freya was still bound to the table and was not looking well at all. Thor searched through the wreckage of one of the trailers until he found an inhaler. He hoped this was the one that Baldr had used to heal him. If it wasn’t, all he would do for Freya is temporarily fix any asthma symptoms she may be having.
Thor squirted the inhaler into her mouth. Seconds later, Freya’s eyes fluttered open. They focused on his face for a few moments, and then she passed out. Her breathing became stronger and more restful, like that of somebody in a deep sleep. He freed her from the table, picked her up and flew over the desert with her, away from the horrors.
As Thor looked back he saw an eruption of light from where he had found Yggdrasil’s seed. A colossal sapling burst out of the ground and into the sky. Watching it grow was like seeing a time-lapse movie of the life of an ash tree. As it became more mature, it also became more transparent—existing in our dimension, but not completely. It wouldn’t be long before the tree once again bound all the worlds together.
Epilogue
Thor looked out over the Mediterranean Sea from the balcony of the tasteful home in Toulon he had purchased three months prior. He didn’t particularly like France. Good cheeseburgers were hard to find, and nobody seemed to work. Whenever he took a walk, a line from an old Too Much Joy song came to mind about small people living in big houses. The biggest advantage to living in France, though, was the fact that they didn’t extradite to the United States. Thor was still a wanted man on the ridiculous charge that he was somehow a terrorist.
After he had left Nevada with Freya, they showed up at the back door of one of the Raiders’ assistant coaches. It didn’t take much to convince the man that Thor wasn’t just an overachieving lineman, but an ancient and extremely powerful deity.
Not only wasn’t the coach surprised, but he informed Thor that most of the team thought it was something like that. The perpetual rain that followed the Raiders everywhere they went was a dead giveaway. They were just happy that Thor was on their side.
Between the coach, a number of very creative accountants, and some guys who wore a lot of black and preferred to not to deal in real names, new identities were successfully created for Thor and Freya. The millions of dollars he had stashed away in overseas accounts were all converted to these new identities. He and Freya had gone into retirement—and exile—in style.
Freya’s recovery from her ordeal was slow. From his bedroom, at the opposite end of their sprawling maison, he could hear Freya wake up screaming in the middle of the night. For her, that was progress. At first, the screaming had been accompanied by hallucinations and hours of self-loathing. Thanks to a lot of work from a very specialized therapist, she could now go to sleep without the use of a Propofol drip and was able to venture out in public without seeing Surt’s face reflecting back at her from every mirror or store window.
Currently, she was out looking for someone in this country who would be willing to put some damn bacon on a hamburger patty without acting like it was the culinary version of Nazis marching under the Arc de Triomphe. They could do it themselves, but what was the point of take-out dinners if they fell under the category of “some assembly required?”
Thor sipped on a beer and continued to stare out over the Mediterranean. Off in the distance a massive head popped out of the water. He saw the noggin of a creature that would suck the Loch Ness Monster down like a bait worm on a hook.
The monster ignored the ships and stared straight ahead at Thor. The Thunder God stared back. He had wondered when Jormungand would show himself. Unlike Hela and Fenris, he wasn’t as loyal to his father, Loki.
Thor stood and raised his bottle in salute to the great dragon. He was grateful that Jormungand had sat the last encounter out, but he knew the two of them would eventually meet. It had been foretold long ago in the Ragnarok prophecy that he and the dragon would kill each other.
Jormungand winked at Thor, ate a fishing boat, and disappeared beneath the waves.
Freya had walked in
to the room with the carryout bags during this encounter and watched the two gods salute one another.
“Huh...I didn’t think reptiles had eyelids,” she said to him as she put the groceries down.
“That’s what you took away from that?” Thor retorted.
“Okay, so Jormungand is starting to sniff around. We can cram that in the ‘bad’ column and worry about it later. On the plus side, I found a café with an American chef who will stuff your burgers with as much cheese and bacon as your body can handle.” She smiled a charming little smile at him.
Thor looked at the water, then looked at the bag, and looked back to the water again. Lights and sirens were starting to go off as the local authorities did their best to respond to a situation that only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been intellectually equipped to handle. He shrugged and gave her a little hug.
“Let’s eat!”
About the Author
B.C. James was born just about of bullet range of Detroit and raised as a denizen of flyover country. While the popular vision of the rural, American Midwest is gangs of kids doing their damnedest to tip over a cow (a feat which still defies both physics and common sense), instead he spent much of his childhood reading, and watching movies.
He first got interested in writing after reading the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. He was fascinated by Dickens' ability to tell a story while leaving just enough untold that it allowed the reader's mind to fill in the holes. So fill in the holes he did. This led to a hobby of re-writing endings of movies he was particularly disappointed with, mostly for his own amusement. Eventually one of his high school teachers got a hold of his writing and was highly entertained (in a laugh out loud sort of way) by the changes James had made to the confusing finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He, like great teachers do, became the signpost to where his student should go and occasionally the prod to keep him on the path.