Years of memories, flowing past like a river. Reginleif, pushing her for admissions of wrong-doing. Of wrong-thinking. Of being rebellious against the gods. Pushing her into the admission that she would question the wisdom of the gods, if she were seemingly unjustly punished. Mikayel’s suggestion to Adam that they were being punished by the god of Abraham for Adam’s sin of having married an unbeliever. The sneaking suspicion that had wormed into her mind, over the years of silence from the Odinhall, that she was being punished. Without a trial. Without a hearing. Without a chance to muster a defense. This is not justice! part of her had railed.
Reginleif’s suggestion that the two of them might have more in common than Sigrun understood. They both, after all, had mortal husbands. The slight insinuation that sooner or later, Sigrun would rebel. The self-doubt it had brought to her. Though doesn’t that suggest that Reginleif, too, is a rebel . . . ?
Freya leaned back against the couch and put her hands to her face. Loki, she said, simply. Master of a thousand disguises. He spilled the drink on you, and with it, his poison. It entered your veins, and carried his spell with it. He was the waiter. The child, Frittigil . . . she has passed out of our sight for some time. We did not know why.
Sigrun’s head jerked up. “But . . . I receive letters from her once or twice a year,” she objected, trying to be tactful. “And is she not subject to the Evening Star, as well?”
She vanished from the sight of Baldur and the Evening Star both, some six years ago, Freya admitted, quietly. We have looked, and we were aware of her letters to you, but every time we sent someone to find her, she had moved on. She is . . . hidden. Or hiding.
Sigrun swore, deep inside her mind. Sophia had told her not to be angry at Fritti. Oh, gods, child, what have you done? “The bear-warrior who trained her?”
Brandr, one of your teachers, was meant to teach her. Freya’s eyes shifted to the side. He tells Thor, even as we speak, that he remembers traveling to Marcomanni to teach her. Clear memories. Perfect ones. But . . . there are suggestions that they are illusions. Tyr and Thor will find the truth in him.
Sigrun’s mind raced. “If she thought she saw her teacher at the wedding, but he vanished . . . ” She looked up. “And it was someone who healed like a god-born . . . could it have been Loki, as well?” She swallowed, hard.
That is my fear.
Sigrun put her hands in front of her face for a long moment. Hearing the highest goddess of her faith admit to fear was not an everyday occurrence. After a moment, however, she found that past the shock, past the fear, past the sensation of walls of illusion falling down around her, there was rage in her. The kind of rage she’d felt when Mamaquilla had confirmed that the curse was beyond her power to lift. The kind of rage she felt at any injustice, but somehow much, much worse. Before, she hadn’t been able to direct the rage. Now, she had a target. A path. A clear line of action. “Every one of our people,” Sigrun whispered, hoarsely, “may call a king to account. Every one of our people, may call out for justice, even against a god. If a god is found to be unjust, he must be punished.” She lifted her head, feeling something pounding in her head. “I do not cry for blood-feud,” she went on, the words cold and precise. “But I would hold Loki to account for this.”
It didn’t matter that Loki was a god. It didn’t matter that he could bat her like a fly off the face of the earth. What mattered was justice, and she and Adam had been wronged, and for no better reason, apparently, than to amuse Loki, who had a long and bitter history with Tyr. Sigrun’s temples throbbed.
Freya raised a hand, and put it on her shoulder. The waves of anger diminished a little. Sigrun could think more clearly. Therein lies a problem, child, Freya admitted, quietly. We do not know where Loki is, any more than we have been able to sense Fritti. Even Hel, his daughter, purports not to know where her father is. This is . . . troubling. Freya regarded her, her golden eyes wide and wise.
“You fear he will begin Ragnarok?”
I fear he may begin it unintentionally. If you take nothing else from your memories, daughter of Tyr, remember what Fritti’s mentor told her . . . the mentor that we now suspect was Loki. What were his words?
“That none of the gods truly wishes Ragnarok to happen. There is no victory in Ragnarok.” Sigrun murmured, blankly. The words were horribly clear in her mind. “Only destruction.”
An hour later, with her world reshaped around her, Sigrun left the Odinhall, and was sent fleeting through the Veil itself to the apartment she shared with Adam in Rome. She always exited the Veil, midflight, somewhere over the city, and had to fly back to their apartment; she typically entered through a window, if it was night when she arrived, as it was now. Adam flicked on a bedside light, took one look at her face, and his smile of welcome faded, even as he started reaching for a gun. “Sig. What’s wrong?”
“We have to find Frittigil Chatti,” Sigrun said, very quietly, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “After that . . . Reginleif is missing, too. So is Loki.” Her lips twitched and worked. “I have no idea how I’m going to do it, Adam, but I will have justice for this. He will undo his curse on me. Even if I have to drag him before the rest of the gods in chains.” She put her hands over her face, and just rocked. The enormity of it, the futile nature of her threat, hit her.
“Sig . . .” Adam was at sea. He didn’t have any context for her words, and her rage was so great she couldn’t take the time to catch him up.
“He did this to me! He probably thinks of it as a jest!” It was a shout, and it echoed back off the walls. Sigrun rarely yelled. She usually didn’t have to, in order to make herself heard. She raised her head, and stared at Adam. “Either he removes the curse, or the conditions of the curse must be met for it to end. And do you know what the conditions are, Adam? Freya found that much out, through studying it today.” She stood, and began to pace back and forth, and Adam, perhaps wisely, didn’t try to touch her. Electricity snapped in her still-loose hair, crackling around her like a long, heavy corona. “The conditions,” Sigrun spat, “are that the world will end before I bear a child.” She looked around, wildly, spotted the telephone on the nightstand, and picked up the receiver. Stared at it.
“Sig. Do not call your sister right now. You’ll say something you won’t forgive yourself for later.”
Sigrun very carefully picked up the bottom half of the telephone. Delicately settled the receiver in the cradle. And then hurled the whole thing into the wall, tearing the cord loose as she did so.
Chapter 3: Binding Ties
I realize that the topic of this paper is difficult to verify, quantify, or substantiate, and that all of the evidence attested in it is of a personal nature. Thus, it may sound less a scientific effort to explain magical phenomena, and more of a religious revelation, but such is not my intent. My intent is to discuss the Veil and what it means to cosmology. And by this, I mean the study of the universe, or, more properly, universes.
I have two major types of evidence to consider in this work. I’ve been privileged to speak to gods on the nature of the Veil, though again, this sort of evidence might be considered ‘revelatory,’ and therefore suspect. Certainly biased, as we all know that the gods tend to reveal truth cryptically, and only in the amounts that humans can comprehend at that point in time.
The second type of evidence is personal experience. I have visited the Veil at least three times, twice through an interface analogue in the Odinhall, and once through an accident that, while probably replicable, I certainly do not encourage anyone to attempt. I should admit that the latter experience seems to have opened me to the Veil in ways I could not have foreseen. At any rate, here is a brief summary of the information I have obtained, through the years:
The gods derive from the Veil, as do spirits.
Where our universe has four dimensions that we humans can verify experientially—length, width, depth, and time—the Veil has no time, though I believe it has other dimensionality, but that a human brain is incapable of
processing or understanding.
This lack of time makes it, fundamentally, an aentropic space. There is no entropy there. No, or little, causality. No death. Few consequences.
Thus, the Veil is a space of boundless, unlimited energy and creation, because there is no entropy. However, a human mind, trapped there, perceives no order. Effects can precede causes. Effects are impermanent. Imagine time in our dimension as a series of points along an endless line. Image time in the Veil as all of those points on our line, overlapping each other, in one single location.
And while this is a place of creation, paradoxically, something new there is almost impossible, because once it has been created, it has already always been there. Consider that, for a moment.
If an agent from an entropic universe entered the Veil and retained his or her sanity, they would be both fundamentally new, and yet, would always have existed there. A being of sufficient power might be able to create causality in that space—not by introducing death, but by creating order in an unordered space. That order would, paradoxically, always have existed, as well. It simply wouldn’t have been . . . perceived . . . by the inhabitants of the Veil, until now.
Everything is always now for the denizens of the Veil. Only by entering our reality do they come to a sense of past and future. Our reality has consequences. Many spirits crave consequences. Not necessarily because it gives them power; they already have as much power as they are capable of absorbing and re-emitting . . . but because it gives them complexity. Which is a road to power, certainly, but also to novelty. It gives them the chance to think new thoughts and savor new experiences. And that being said . . . I think it entirely possible that, in spite of the fact that the Veil is a place of boundless creation—it was a fundamentally sterile place. Or is. Tenses are imperfect, in dealing with this dimension.
There is no such thing as successive reality in the Veil . . . except in areas where order has been created and maintained as a direct consequence of spirits who have come into contact with our reality. That may be the key difference. At any rate, spirits that wish to create that which is new can do so by dividing themselves, and allowing part of their essence to go free, as a child-self. This does, however, create a net loss of power for the original entity. An example of this is how Hera birthed Hephaestus by parthenogenesis. He is no son of Zeus, or so the legends say.
In the Veil, spirits can join with one another and combine fragments of essence into a ‘new’ being (but I am not sure that it can be truly called ‘new,’ but rather already-always existing, just not yet realized); they can be consumed by one another; they can be torn apart, limb from limb, but in the Veil they cannot die. In order to create, ironically, a god or a spirit may be required to come to the mortal realm, or exist in an ordered space within the Veil . . . or a mortal must cross into the Veil.
We have always understood our relationship to the spirits to be a symbiotic one. We teach them, and they teach us; we shape them, and they shape us. What they learn from us, creates ‘newness’ and complexity in them, for good or for evil; they take that complexity and knowledge with them when they return to the Veil to replenish their power, as all spirits must. The power that they take with them from the Veil is finite, in our entropic universe, unless they have a conduit of some sort, to the Veil. A permanent, established one. Gods, it seems clear, have these conduits. Lesser spirits do not.
And whatever they learn from us, once that knowledge enters the Veil, becomes always and ever known. Spirits perceive our ‘future’ but dimly, in most cases, as what they call a type of memory. Some of them appear to have better memories than others, just as some humans have better recall than others. And because all the points along our string of time touch their single point, technically, once they know something in our future, that knowledge exists, already-always, in the Veil.
That does not mean that the future is predestined, however. And no spirit has infinite knowledge of the future. They have infinite time in their moment of nowness, in which to evaluate the information they have at their disposal. But some spirits have a greater fund of knowledge, complexity, and understanding. They have better networks, alliances, with access to knowledge within the Veil. And thus, they can provide predictions with accuracy based on what they know/will know, if they’re given power or sacrifice enough to motivate them. Asking an air sprite bound to a mountain in Caesaria Aquilonis for the future will probably tell you what the local skiing conditions will be tomorrow. Asking a god? Might get better results. But the gods have their own agendas, of course, and very often, the answer seems to be this: Live, and find out.
Now, in all of this, there are fundamental questions, to which I do not have answers. If ours is one universe, and the Veil is another, how many other universes are there? If quantum physics is correct, and every major decision—and I don’t mean, ‘what we had for breakfast this morning’—creates a new universe, there would be billions. And that’s just the decisions of people on Earth, let alone whatever other life might exist out among the stars of our universe.
Does the Veil touch every single one of these realities? I’ve never met a denizen of the Veil that seems aware of these other potential realities. Some would say that this is evidence that there is only one quantum reality: ours. There is another alternative, which is that for every universe of ours that splits off, there is another quantum reality of the Veil, attached to it. This seems unlikely to me, however; why would the decisions of a cause-and-effect universe have the effect of splitting a universe in which cause and effect do not necessarily follow, or even relate? While the realms are symbiotic, this theory seems to give this universe far too much agency over the Veil to be credible. But I have to offer it as a possibility for discussion.
The denizens of the Veil, have no answers for us in this regard; they seem to be only aware of their universe, ours, and one other, a place they fear, and term the Aether. If there are billions of other universes out there, spirits have no contact with them. Or at least, they will not have knowledge of them, until we have knowledge of them.
And then they will have already always known these facts.
—Trennus Matrugena, Peering through the Veil: The Nature of Aentropic Universes. University of Londonium Press, 1967 AC.
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Aprilis 15, 1970 AC
Trennus dreamed, but for him, no dream was ever really just a vision, anymore. Every night, for ten years now, he spent in the Veil. He always woke up with his body rested, but there were mornings when his eyes snapped open, that his mind was exhausted from his night’s sleep, and all he wanted, really, was ten minutes to put his head down and rest.
. . . running through the trees of the Caledonian Forest, sunlight so dim through the thick leaves that it might as well have been twilight, but he knew that it was noon. A few breaks in the canopy let in brilliant golden shafts of light, and Flamesower vaulted over a fallen tree, never breaking stride. He was chasing an intruder, and he knew this forest. Intimately. He ducked under a low-hanging branch, which scraped his bare back, took another long stride, and landed lower on the hill, planting both feet. His eyes scanned the dark environs, and he pulled his bow off his shoulder with smooth movements. This particular intruder had been through here before, and he knew it had many shapes. At the moment, however, it had been a flicker of shadow that had stolen into the central glade of this place, where the firepit that Lassair liked to dance in, when she manifested here, burned with dimly glowing coals.
He’d caught motion out of the corner of his eye, and seen a shape like a fox with nine tails. A kumiho, the legends of Korea called this kind of spirit. Malefic. In the mortal realm, they took the forms of beautiful men and women to try to trick mortals into marrying them. And once the humans were bound to them, with words and rituals and the exchange of essences that was sex, the kumiho inevitably killed them. Devoured their spirits, and disappeared once more. You don’t belong here, Trennus had shouted, and had taken off in pursuit, a dozen o
ther spirits at his heels. Some had stayed back to protect the glade. But the hawks and wolves and the monkey-spirit he’d met in Tawantinsuyu had all gone with him to the hunt. He’d outpaced them all, however, and somehow, he found himself alone. Near the edge of the wood. I can’t leave the forest, Flamesower knew. That’s the limit of the realm I’m building. The limit of my power. I go past the trees . . . and it’s the wild Veil once more.
Flamesower sighted down the shaft of the arrow, and, to his surprise, the creature formed just in front of the arrow’s point. A beautiful creature, to be sure, the kumiho was clearly feminine for the moment, though her human body was covered in soft, silver-gray fur, and her eyes were liquid and black. Her lips were human, though there were sharp white canines behind the soft pink curves.
Do you find this form beautiful, mortal? She reached down and cupped her breasts, smiling.
This is not your place. Begone from here.
Would you like to wrestle with me? Perhaps even pin me? Exchanging essences with you would be . . . intriguing. Just a little of your power. Your fireling’s power, too. Just a taste.
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