He bites his lip, leans forward to oblige. Gets halfway before context comes crashing back. “Um. Maybe…not here?” he says. “It’s nearly dawn. People are going to start coming in for work soon.” He blinks, looking around. “And the Bleed—”
“Healing,” I say. One little Wound’s got nothing on the reboot of the Realms. Somehow, I get the feeling Hel knew that. I get the feeling she knew a lot of things. One day I might even get the courage to ask about it.
Sigmund slumps, relieved that things seem to be over. “Thank god,” he says, and I accept the praise. “Let’s get you upstairs. Um. Everyone’s up there. Dad and Em and Wayne. Your scary VP lady. I guess we should tell them we’re not dead. Can you stand?”
I manage, mostly by leaning against Sigmund. He’s cool under my skin, and solid, and there. Banged up and stinking of the ash of Múspellsheimr. Changed by the mists of Hel. But still Sigmund.
Me? I’m…someone. I’ll work out exactly who some other time.
A stray memory, mine but not mine. Of Sigmund stepping out into the foyer, Gungnir in one hand, mind a storm of anger over Star Wars. I’ll have to ask him about that. Later, once I’ve explained why I know it.
As we stagger back toward the elevators, one of them opens. Care of Nic, who watches eternal through the building’s cameras. She’s gonna want one hell of a debrief on all of this. Fuck.
“Urgh. I need a smoke,” I say as the doors close behind us.
Sigmund leans me against the mirrored wall, but doesn’t try to move away, hands ghosting over the skin of my chest. There’s a new scar there—healed and bloodless—from where Gungnir pierced two hearts, both of them mine, held in separate cages.
“I can think of something better than cigarettes,” he says.
“Oh?” I manage, right before he kisses me. Not for long, just enough to leave the taste of a newfound fearlessness on my tongue. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that’s much better.”
“You know,” he says, hands moving down to settle around my waist, “I can’t kiss you if you taste like nicotine. It’s way gross.”
“Duly noted.” I grin. “I don’t taste like it now.”
“No,” Sigmund says. “You don’t.” He doesn’t return my grin. Instead, his fingers tighten on my hipbones as he says, “Lain, you…Yyou died. I saw it.”
“Nah,” I say. “I was dead when you met me. Now I’m better.” That’s how these things go, the buffer overflow error of the reborn god.
Sigmund closes his eyes, moving closer, cheek over my hearts. “Good,” he says. “Stay like that. Please?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the plan.” When I nuzzle against his forehead, he turns his face up to meet me.
We kiss, and it’s better. Better than the last time, better than the first time. Better, always. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and I’m sure I’ll find it one day. Beneath Sigmund’s tongue, perhaps, or hiding in his hair. I’ll keep looking. I’ve got time; it’s a long way up to the penthouse, after all. When we reach it, there’ll be friends and allies, family, explanations. Fantales. One ruffled raven. And the first rays of dawn, exploring the remade world with all the wonder of a child.
Welcome to the Golden Age. An old end, but a new beginning.
Stick around. You’ll see.
Then comes the gloomy
dragon flying,
from below,
from Niðafjöll.
The bodies of men
in his feathers lie.
—“Völuspá,” stanza 66
—
It takes nearly three days to round up all the body parts, even with the memories of where I put them. Or…where Baldr put them.
Or Loki.
Whoever.
Look, point being it takes a while, but I do it, and because of that, the Helbleed pulls back from Pandemonium.
On the evening of the third day after the end of the world, I stand on top of my tower—Travis’s tower, whatever—with a box of ashes, looking out over the city.
“It’s, um. It’s a nice view from up here.” Sigmund shifts, nervous. He’s standing to my left and half a meter behind, anxious about getting too close to the edge.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it is.” Pink and orange light glitters off the lake and, in the background, the dark curves of Woolridge roll gently against the sun.
I look down at the box in my hands. Not a lot of ash in a person, as it turns out. Even a tall one like my daughter.
Loki’s daughter.
Jesus. I think I need to cry. Someone needs to cry, anyway.
“Are you all right?” I feel Sigmund’s hand, cool and gentle, settle against the small of my back.
“No,” I manage, voice choked and thready. “No, I’m not.”
“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t know what else to say. What else is there to say?
“Do not grieve, husband.”
The voice still makes me freeze. It’s Sigmund’s, but it isn’t. Because Sigmund, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t know how to speak Old Norse. He also doesn’t call me husband.
Neither does Sigyn. At least, not me me.
“What would you have me do instead?”
I let Loki answer his wife, because it seems like the polite thing to do. The guy’s kinda falling apart over the ashes of the daughter he murdered. The least I can do is give him a few minutes of talk time with the ghost of his dead lady.
I feel her—feel Sigmund—close the gap between us, resting her cheek against the skin of my back, tracing one hand across the faintly glowing whorls of the tattoo.
“I would have you rest,” Sigyn says. “Do not fret over your daughter’s dark designs. She is where she wished to be.”
“Dead?” Loki spits, his black heart aching, memories reeling with the feel of the sword as it pierced her breast. The gentle touch of her dying fingers, smooth and soft and pale.
Sigyn just laughs. “Do not underestimate your own, husband. Hel is her father’s daughter.”
Loki huffs, looking down at the box once more, thinking about an endless, flat gray ocean, and a shore made from the corpses of the dead.
It’s windy, this high up above the street, and maybe Loki calls down a little more. Just enough to catch the ashes he throws. To take them off into the night, the first stars of evening as their guide.
When he’s done, he tosses the box aside, and turns to face his wife.
It’s still Sigmund, of course. A little taller than Sigyn was, and softer, and darker. And we can still see him, with the Wyrdsight. But he’s hanging back, and the thing that overlays him now is cold and stern and endless. Victory and compassion, all rolled into one.
When Loki kisses his wife, I look away.
“Sigga…” he breathes after a while. Somewhere deep inside, I feel his pain. Resentment, maybe. He’s dead—the ghost of an old story, now retold—and he knows it, but…
“Hush, husband.” Sigyn lays a kiss on his cheek, holding his face between her hands as she looks up with a borrowed smile. “We will meet again.”
“Sigga!”
But then she’s gone, and it’s just Sigmund.
He pulls his hands away, taking half a step back as he says, “Um!”
(“tssch, take him”)
Then I’m me again. Whoever that turns out to be.
“Do you reckon that’s gonna happen a lot?” I ask.
Sigmund relaxes at the words, spoken in a language he understands, in idiom he finds familiar. Then he gives an awkward laugh. “Um. Maybe?” He can’t quite meet my eyes when he adds, “I mean. I don’t mind. Not really. Um…” He’s oozing fluffy pink clouds of embarrassment but also, I think, a smudge of anxiety. I don’t blame him; Loki is a little scary. Definitely a few logs short of a bonfire, if nothing else.
(“better mad than a spoiled, glass-backed fool”)
I guess we’ll both get used to it. Whatever it is.
I kiss Sigmund, mostly because I can, then go to fetch the discarded box. Loki might be happy litterin
g my rooftop but Nic will kill me if she finds out.
“Sig?” I ask.
“Yeah?”
Around us, the wind is picking up, and Sigmund has started to shiver. Out in the distance, the fat lazy orb of the sun burns on, uncaring, as the Earth slowly turns its face.
“Take this downstairs and put it in the recycling for me?” I hand him the box. The inside is still smeared with ash. I try not to notice.
“Sure.”
“I wanna do something up here for a bit. I’ll meet you at the restaurant in ten.” Tonight’s a date night. Nowhere fancy, just somewhere we can be together.
“Okay. You have fun. See you then.” He gives a little wave, I return it, and then he’s gone. Off the rooftop and down the elevator, heading toward the ground.
I’m heading down too. Just…not that way.
There’s a concrete balustrade around the rooftop. To stop people falling off. I jump onto it, claws digging into the concrete, and look over the edge.
It’s a very, very big drop.
When I open my wings, they catch the wind and nearly send me falling.
“Woooaa shit!”
I end up crouched on the edge of the wall, all four claws gripping the concrete, heavy tail held out for balance.
Beneath me, the city hums its static hum. Above, the wind dances through an endless, inky sky.
And me?
I let go of the edge, and teach myself to fly.
Afterword
On writing a queer modern version of the sagas
They always tell you to write the story you want to read. So, with Liesmith, I wrote the story I wanted to read. Simple.
Because, hi. I’m Alis and I like Norse mythology, urban fantasy, horror, feathered dinosaurs, technology, geek culture, all-too-human monsters, unreliable narrators, and fluffy romances featuring queer couples that don’t all end in horrible tragedy. Like, seriously. Is it too much to ask for a guy to kick some ass, take some names, save the world, and get his boy in the end? Why do we not have more stories like that? It’s not like there are no stories like that, but they’re still a tiny fraction of popular media compared to their straight-protagonist-featuring counterparts.
So, hey. Here’s me writing one tiny fraction more.
On “normal”
One of the most important things to me, when writing Liesmith, was that the romance element in it be mundane, even if Lain and Sigmund weren’t.
Sigmund might be a reincarnated goddess and Lain some sort of anthropomorphic fire-themed archaeopteryx thing, and those elements are important to who they are and how they interact. But what’s even more important is that they care for each other, desire each other, and respect each other as individuals. Particularly the latter, given the power imbalance and the whole reincarnated-lovers angle.
There are a lot of things that could go wrong between Lain and Sigmund, and a lot of ways they could hurt each other. They both fuck up (well, Lain fucks up, mostly), but it was important to me to try to show the core of their relationship as being healthy and consensual, despite the occasional imperfections.
At the heart of it, they are each other’s solace. I guess some people might think that’s dull; a lot of media does, after all, draw drama from unhealthy and toxic relationships. But I guess not every story has to appeal to every reader.
And, hey. That aside, there’s still plenty of blood and fire for the rest of it.
On Beastly and the Geek
It would’ve been easy to have the main conflict in the Wyrdverse be a huge angstfest over whether a man ever could truly love a monster, but, honestly? Those stories sort of bore me. And not just for the fact that they often seem to take as given who gets designated monster (hint: non-humans) and why (hint: because they don’t look/act human).
The thing is, Sigmund’s a geek. He’s grown up saturated in geek culture, surrounded by orcs and wookiees and klingons. He’s shown playing MMOs, a genre full of narratives in which so-called monstrous individuals are heroes and allies and, yes, even romantic leads. Sure, seeing something in the flesh is different from seeing it on the screen, but I still feel it would’ve been disingenuous to geeks everywhere to show Sigmund reacting to Lain’s jötunn-self as if the concept of sentient non-humans was completely (a-har) alien to him.
If being geeks teaches us nothing else, it should teach us that the only way to judge someone is by how they act. Not by how they look.
On the HEA (happily ever after)
I admit it, I’m a sucker for a HEA. They’re overdone, I know, but here’s the thing: HEAs are overdone only if you happen to fit a certain market. Straight and cis, mostly (with white and conventionally attractive running in close behind). Those are the people who get the big swell of music, the beautiful sunset backdrop, the kiss, the babies, and the marriage.
And everyone else? Particularly everyone who falls under that nebulous banner of GSRM (gender, sexual, and romantic minorities)? What do we get?
Well. It seems we get dead, more often than not.
Things are getting better, slowly, but angst and misery still seem to dominate pop culture depictions of GSRM characters. And, look, no one’s denying that it’s difficult to identify as gay or lesbian or bi, let alone trans or intersex or asexual or any of the other myriad of stops along the spectrum. Because it is difficult, very difficult. But that’s one of the great things about writing genre fiction, and about writing fantasy in particular. Because, really. In a story where reality is rotting and ancient blood vendettas are lurking in the parking lot, what’s the more fantastic element? Those things? Or two men finding love and being happy?
Defeat the bad guy, save the city, get the boy. One day it’ll be trite and overdone.
One day, but not today.
On queerness
There’s a line in Wyrdtouched where Sigmund almost, almost, manages to say to his father, “I’m not gay.” He gets cut off before he can get the whole thing out but, if you’re wondering, that’s what it was going to be.
Here’s the thing; Sigmund doesn’t identify as gay. But that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s straight.
Honestly, Sigmund’s not convinced English has an appropriate term to describe someone who nominally likes human girls, but who likes giant feathered monsters more.
What Sigmund does know is that he’s a man. No matter how anxious he gets over performative masculinity—“acting like a man,” as judged by other people—and no matter that part of his soul used to be a goddess. Sigmund is male, and he’s a man. That one’s easy, and the only one with the authority to define it is Sigmund himself.
Lain…is a little more complicated. Lain is heavily masculine coded in the same way that Sigmund is, in some aspects, feminine coded, and yet Lain is still based on a figure (i.e. mythological! Loki) whose own gender and sexuality are often interpreted by modern audiences as being fluid. Whether that’s historically accurate or not—you can probably guess that my answer here is “not really” but that’s another essay entirely—the guy is a mother as well as a father, and Lain’s attitude toward the gender (and sex, and species) of his partners can be summed up as apathetic.
The point is that people are complicated. They are who they are, and they love who they love, sometimes according to neat little labels and divisions and sometimes not.
We don’t see enough of that sometimes, I think.
On shopping to the mainstream
One of the questions I’ve been asked a lot is whether I think I would’ve sold Liesmith faster if Sigmund—and it’s always Sigmund—had been a girl. The short answer to this is no.
The slightly longer answer is that Liesmith’s sale was painless by almost any standard. The time between when I started submitting the manuscript to when I signed with my agent—the indomitable Sara Megibow, and may her contracts always come on time—to when said agent got me a deal with a publisher, was slightly less than a year. The time between signing with Sara to Liesmith appearing on the (virtual) shelves was about
the same.
Not bad for a debut author with an odd story in a crowded genre.
I won’t pretend that the queer elements in the book were never an issue. They were, but not, I think, in the way most people imagine. I was never told to remove them, for example, nor to downplay them. Actually the reverse; I’d originally written the book a bit too sexless, in a misguided attempt at guessing what mainstream publishing houses would be looking for (gay…but not too gay). On Sara’s advice, I strengthened the romantic plotline, and, bam! Signed and sold.
And, yes, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but, honestly? The story being horror-themed urban fantasy was more of a hurdle than Lain and Sigmund making out. So there’s that.
The moral here is that the publishing industry—from the very biggest New York houses on down—is not, in my experience, hostile to genre fiction with unapologetically queer protagonists. If anything, it’s probably a bit of an untapped market, and I think we’ll be seeing a lot of growth there in the next few years. Liesmith is one story by one author, and—for all my best efforts and good intentions—it’s not going to speak to every reader. But it doesn’t have to. All it needs to be is one drop in a slowly filling ocean.
Because the sand is warm, the water is blue, and there really aren’t that many sharks beneath the waves. It’s a great time for a swim, in fact, so c’mon.
What are you waiting for?
For the maggie, the moggy, and dino.
They gave me courage.
About the Author
ALIS FRANKLIN is a thirtysomething Australian author of queer urban fantasy. She likes cooking, video games, Norse mythology, and feathered dinosaurs. She’s never seen a live dropbear, but stays away from tall trees, just in case.
www.alisfranklin.com
@lokabrenna
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