The Fires of Muspelheim

by Matt Larkin

  Oh, individual liosalfar died, on occasion. They grew too weak, had too few souls to feed on, and finally winked out of existence. But the court itself, and those strong within it, they had endured for … eternity?

  “I’m not certain we can succeed in this,” she whispered back. “By all indications, jotunnar remain all over these islands.”

  “Mmmm. Nearby, there’s a flooded gulley. Within that lie tunnels I think remain free of jotunn occupation. Tunnels that will carry us close enough to Yggdrasil.”

  How did he know all that? Surely it meant he was relying on the Sight, didn’t it? Still, Freyja held her peace. Arguing with him on the subject would not avail her.

  And Freyja had more than enough on her mind already.

  As Odin had predicted, they found the inlet and followed it into a flooded tunnel. The roof was too low to guide the ship in, so they hopped over the side and waded through chest-high waters into the darkness.

  Odin held a torch over his head, but the light barely managed to reach from one side of the tunnel to the other, and provided little guidance about what lay ahead.

  Sloshing along beside him, her mind raced. How could he move with such purpose? Such unaffected certainty? “Suppose we get all the way to the Tree. There will be jotunnar there. They won’t leave such a precious place unguarded.”

  “We’ll overcome those we must.” Odin cast a glance at her, his visage grim. “All that matters is stopping Hel. No, not stopping. Destroying Hel. I will not allow her to bring the world to the brink again.”

  As if one could defeat an Elder Goddess through sheer stubbornness. Please, Queen of Mist, let us kill you. We really want to. Freyja rolled her eyes. “You speak madness. Even if you bridge our world to Muspelheim and burn away the mist, defeat the jotunnar and draugar and everyone else, even if you somehow destroy Hel’s host, she’ll just claim another.”

  “Perhaps.” Except, his tone said he had more of a plan than he let on, or at least some fragment of a plan. Something he refused to share with her. Probably because he himself knew it would sound mist-mad if he uttered it aloud.

  But if he wouldn’t speak of it, she saw little point in prodding him.

  They came to a crevasse were the water poured down in a fall. Odin hopped over this, to continue following the tunnel beyond.

  After walking for several hours through the water, Freyja was just glad to get on dry land. She settled down and yanked off her boots. “Just rest a few moments.”

  Od turned back to her and slumped down against the wall beside her, pulling off his own boots and upending them.

  Freyja glanced back at the fall. It might have been beautiful, if it weren’t a muddy mess dropping off into who knew where. “You really believe we’ll be born again, after all this? I mean, not only born again, but in some way that matters?”

  Odin patted her knee. “Our souls are more than memories, though memories and actions, I think, leave impressions upon those souls. We are bound together, you and I, and others. Drawn to each other in lifetime after lifetime by forces as powerful as the web of urd. A … web of souls, rather. You once spoke to me of the idea of soul mates. That some souls were meant to be together. Forgetting, for the moment, any question of meant by whom or what, is it so hard to imagine that such souls, rent apart by tragedy, might …?” His voice broke. “Might refuse such a fate and … find a way to …”

  Now she turned to him. A single tear glistened in his eye. On impulse, she wiped it away. “You can share your burden with me.”

  “I am. You have no idea how much it means that you are at my side.”

  Perhaps, but certainly something else weighed upon him, something he could not or would not tell her. Some prescient vision of the future? Some certain knowledge that they would die, thus confirming her terrible fear?

  They rested there, Odin laying beside the fall, while Freyja lit a new torch and threw her runes. The pattern made less sense than she’d have liked, leaning over them, torch in hand.

  Certainly, they seemed to confirm her earlier throws that had predicted doom. Od was right about the era ending, and that ending costing the lives of most everyone. And the runes, too, showed their deaths. But what she really needed to understand was what would happen beyond those deaths.

  If Odin was right, and she might be born again, live again, maybe have another chance to—

  Odin lurched over and swept the runes aside with one hand before she could read more.

  Freyja rounded on him, scowling. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He shook his head, grim-faced in the shadows. “You use those as a medium to harness the Sight. It is … we have to be careful not to rely on it too much.”

  “You still fail to tell me quite what you learned when you were away.” His ravings about having fallen through time, into the past, had made very little sense … though he’d seemed to believe them.

  He laid a hand on her cheek. “I learned that some things cannot be changed. And some things must be.”

  14

  There exists a perfection for all of things, a form of a thing in its essence, of which all physical manifestations are mere reflections. If this could be true of substances, and man was a kind of substance, it ought to hold true for the emotional realities of men. A perfect form of any emotion, untainted by the myriad of factors that normally compose the consciousness of a person.

  Children could experience perfect joy, having not yet developed the capacity or need for viewing the world through a multifaceted lens. Those who had lived longer found, most oft, a hint of despair in even joyous moments, aware of the transitory nature of existence, and burdened ever by the knowledge that forces continually eroded at both the joy and its potential.

  And the longer one lived, the farther from perfect emotion one tended to draw, until, when centuries blurred into millennia and even those became fleeting, every instant became colored by the full spectrum of emotions. Perfection seemed almost impossible for a man like Loki.

  But now, leaning upon the gunwale of the Naglfar—slick bone and jagged fingernails writhing ever so slightly beneath him—Loki tended toward the perfection of despair.

  Of despondency so completely it would seem to devour creation and return it to the primordial darkness which had engendered it in the first place. And why not? Knowing what he knew, and further, what he had too much reason to suspect, how could Loki not suppose that despair and its perfection must represent the origins of humanity? Drawn from darkness, even if shown a fragment of light, and sundered from the aether, would not wretched forlornness have been the first of all human emotions?

  The purest.

  The very perfection of all emotion.

  Ah, but then, despondency warped the thought process, compounding upon itself and spreading like the most insidious of funguses.

  Even knowing that, though, he could not tear his gaze from the mists, as the Naglfar threaded its way through them, edging ever closer to Valland.

  Hel would not rest while Odin remained unaccounted for. Even in her arrogance in calling herself an Elder Goddess—those unfathomable monstrosities that sucked dry the cosmos with their ceaseless hunger—she admitted, at least to herself, that the Destroyer posed a threat to her. The sole threat, perhaps. He had defeated her before, and now, Hel would take no further chances. This time, she surely told herself, she would claim all the world with such an overwhelming force that Odin, if he failed to show himself soon, would find himself completely bereft of allies.

  Finally, Loki turned, looked to his beloved wife, her image now almost completely remade in that of his dead daughter. Only a hint of Sigyn’s beauty showed through. Far behind the red gleam in Hel’s eye, Sigyn was in there, watching him, he knew. Perhaps silently pleading with him to end her suffering.

  But how could he? How could he do aught, knowing it would mean Sigyn would be gone from him forever?

  Except, another thought had tormented him, wriggling through his mind like a parasitic
worm, devouring even this fleeting, self-indulgent moment of despair.

  It was the same thought that had dogged his every moment, waking and sleeping, for all the countless millennia of his life. The thought, now manifested in a particular aspect, true, but itself just a reflection of the perfection of causality.

  While the vast majority of men were afforded the pleasant illusion that the future might be predicated solely upon the past—and moreover, that, at any moment, they remained free to make whatever choices suited their whims—those cursed to glimpse the chains of fate knew the shape of the universe to be infinitely more complex.

  Loki was not free. Maybe he never had been.

  Urd, the future, history, they all demanded he act upon information obtained within a paradox. All prescience, naturally, was paradox. All sojourns through time—bodily or mentally—were, in the strictest sense, paradoxical. A cursory observation by an enlightened mind might reveal a reversal of the normally conceived flow of causality, the past predicated upon the future. This, alone, might have terrified those enlightened minds, even had they never looked deeper, and found the direction not linear, but rather a web of intertwined dependencies.

  A universe of paradoxes, barely holding itself together.

  Redeemability, as he had come to think of it, remained the key. If all of time existed, chains of causality could maintain this web and hold it together. Paradoxes thus posed no real threat … until they evoked real change.

  And if Loki gave in to despair, refused to fulfill the chain of events as he expected he had done in the future, he risked snapping one of those chains. Would the universe adjust? Was it possible that, in some variation of the cosmos, creation had existed without these primal paradoxes? Had he, himself, introduced some of these chains and become unaware of the fact as history rewrote itself to redeem his paradoxes?

  Or, rather, as he feared, had history always been the complex web he now saw?

  Always. As a being within the timeline, he lacked even the words—and thus the conceptions—for discussing events without reference to their place in time.

  So.

  His lost daughter.

  His stolen wife.

  His self-indulgence, yes, because the thought of tearing himself from them—even to do what the chains of fate demanded—it ripped out pieces of his heart in the process. This hardly represented the first time, though. He might live forever—or at least until the dissolution of the cosmos and thus the unraveling of time—but he’d died bit by bit over the eons.

  What was one more?

  While the better portion of the Naglfar’s passengers were draugar, still, a good many frost jotunnar served as the crew. Beings not so different than men, really, but they bore a stain, an anomaly of blood that pulled them toward the mists of Niflheim, and thus made them rather disinclined toward the powers of flame.

  Stealing away Frey’s runeblade, Lavaeteinn, had served as Gridr’s greatest achievement, one that had won her a place at Hel’s side. None of them wished to wield the blade, really—not even Hel wanted it overly close at hand—so they had strapped it to one of the masts as a symbol of their conquest over the powers of light and fire.

  Having lost the flame of Muspel, Loki could find little better with which to arm himself.

  Now, he pointedly avoided looking at it while strolling the deck. And even more pointedly not looking up to the quarterdeck where Hel stood, looking tiny next to Hrym’s bulk at the tiller.

  How to steal a blade in front of the eyes of thousands of sleepless, wakeful dead?

  The answer, as with most things, relied merely on waiting for the right time to provide the perfect alignment of circumstances.

  Those circumstances arose when Valland at last drew into view, and the draugar began to pour from the Naglfar, an army unspeakable not only for its size, but for its perversion of the so-called natural order of life and death. Great ramps opened belowdecks, maws of the ship releasing tongues it almost seemed, and, like a torrent of bile, the undead flowed forth.

  They did not speak, but rather a collective moan competed with the clank and clatter of their rusted armor and equally worn weapons.

  And Hel watched them, no doubt fair overwhelmed with pride—Loki doubted she could still feel joy, as such—thinking this tide the herald of her victory.

  Such a preoccupation made it almost easy to slip against the flow of jotunnar and loose the bands holding Lavaeteinn to the mast. Almost simple to sling the runeblade over his shoulder.

  His daughter did not even look at him when he drew nigh to the gunwale. Part of him wished she would. To see her one more time, as she had been, his precious little girl marveling at the sea. And beyond, past her eyes, if he could but see Sigyn again, say his farewell to her …

  No.

  Loki had offered Sigyn his goodbyes before her death and urd would not afford him another chance at it. If it had not been enough—it never was—still, all that remained to him was one more death. One more piece of himself ripped out.

  And as with removing an arrow lodged in flesh, these things, drawn out too long, became only more painful.

  So, in a single fluid motion, he mounted the gunwale and dropped down into the sea far below.

  15

  Arms locked around Gondul’s waist as she flew, Hermod had watched the miles of shadow lands melt away. She’d carried him up, out of the desolate, alien landscape beneath the ocean into the even emptier sky. Once, she needed to rest, and they had alighted back down on the seafloor.

  The valkyrie spoke little, despite his prodding for stories of his mother from her youth. Gondul confirmed that Mother had originally lived in Valland, but not much more.

  So, Hermod had told her of Olwen, the liosalf who’d claimed to have taught her songs of the alfar. Gondul had nodded along, perhaps having already known these things, or perhaps simply out of weariness.

  After a time, she’d taken flight once more, carrying him onward, until at last he saw shores he knew well. The beaches of Asgard. Two glorious islands of paradise, beyond the Straits of Herakles. In the Mortal Realm, rainforests covered the mountains, but here, Hermod saw naught save desolate rock.

  At least until they drew round the mountain and came to the plateau where Gladsheimr had once stood. Vanr ruins, so old and powerful they had persisted into the Penumbra, and which Odin, against any logic Hermod could understand, had somehow managed to raise into glory once more. A glittering hall, with a roof of gold-plated shields, and many great, broad doors.

  Valhalla.

  Gondul deposited Hermod on the plateau’s edge.

  One set of the mighty doors lay ajar, and from within streamed the sounds of drinking, boasting, laughing. Clanging of mugs and shields. Men and women, spared from the ennui-inducing forces of the Astral Realm by more of Odin’s strange and fearsome powers.

  Hermod had come here, oft enough, stopping by whenever he’d returned to Asgard in order to check on the einherjar. He’d come here to ensure they remained themselves, and remained loyal to Odin, though the king had been away so very long. But Odin had trusted Hermod with this task, and so he’d walked among the einherjar, unable to share their feasts, but still partaking of their humor, from time to time.

  Never had he truly considered that he might one day count himself among their number.

  Hermod spared a glance back at Gondul.

  “Frightened?” she asked.

  He didn’t bother to answer that. Valhalla was a refuge from the terrors stalking through the Penumbra. Most of all from the Lethe, that stole men from themselves. He was not frightened … save of his own desire to stay here for eternity and find his solace. He did, however, clap her on the arm. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  Considering the countless, empty miles he’d crossed in her arms, who knew when or if he’d have ever made it here. Time might not mean much for him in the Penumbra, but it still passed in the Mortal Realm. And time had begun to run short.

  Odin had gathered the ein
herjar for a reason, and it fell to Hermod to see that reason through, whether or not he’d ever see the king again.

  So he strode boldly through the gates, taking in the army of warriors gathered within. Odin had dedicated this place as a veritable monument to war. The rafters were thick, reinforced spears. More shields hung on the massive columns, beneath mighty ever-glowing sconces that almost cast out the shadows of the Penumbra.

  Here, and here alone, a hint of true color seeped into this Realm. Into the existences of the fallen shades. The warrior dead.

  They looked to him, and someone raised a toast. “Skål!”

  Others, they began to look at him now, and they would see the difference. The change in him. No longer a being of the Mortal Realm, but a ghost, like the rest of them.

  Gondul drifted from his side to greet another valkyrie, Kára.

  Sigmund was the first on his feet, his stride almost uncertain as he approached Hermod, trailed by his sons. Volsung’s son offered Hermod an arm and a nod, and Hermod returned both.

  He did not get the chance to speak, though, before Syn came charging at him. His wife leapt into his arms, driving him back into one of the pillars. They crashed together with a thud, and then she was planting kisses on his forehead and holding him close.

  “I didn’t … I didn’t know you’d be here,” he managed.

  “Kára.”

  Well, Hermod would have to thank the valkyrie, then. Odin had claimed, once, that Kára was Sigrún reborn, and because of it, he’d told Hermod to give her leeway. To let her have her indulgences which had included a mortal lover. When he’d died, Hermod had encouraged Kára to continue her relationship with him here, in Valhalla.