by Renée Jaggér
He turned, not waiting for a response from her, and opened a rather crude and ragged portal with a hasty swipe of his hand.
Bailey hugged Roland, and they shared a quick kiss.
“Come back,” the wizard instructed her.
“I will.” She ruffled his hair, then dashed into the glowing gateway, ready to fight destiny itself.
The shoreline was bleak and cold. It was nothing like the sorts of beaches people went to on vacations. Rather, it reminded Bailey of the ends of the earth, which in a fashion, it was. The Other ended here. What, she wondered, lay beyond?
The waters stretched past the horizon, deep, treacherous, and as blue-black as a clear night’s sky in summer.
The girl looked around. There were footprints in the sand, but nothing else. Fenris was nowhere to be seen; that, at least, was a relief.
But Thor was not in sight either, nor was there any sign of a giant sea-snake.
“Dammit, Loki!” The werewitch sighed. “Did you finally crack under the pressure and make a mistake? Am I in the right goddamn place?”
She hoped not.
The other possibility, of course, was that she was too late. That Thor had already been devoured and the sated serpent had moved on, pursuing whatever unholy business came after its killing of the thunder god in the sequence of the prophecy.
And she was tired. She’d recovered somewhat from the lengthy struggle against the stone giants, but she needed a proper day off. Still, there was nothing she could do for the moment.
She tried to draw energy from the realm as Coyote had taught her, but the section of the Other beside the World Sea had hardly any vitality to offer. It helped a little, but not much.
There was a splash far out in the ocean. Bailey squinted. The waters were roiling and bubbling about half a mile in front of her and off to the left. Rolling waves appeared at the spot and moved toward the shore. Bubbles rose to the surface, and whitewater crashed into the air.
The girl hoisted her sword and levitated twenty feet into the air, intuiting that she’d need to be mobile.
“Shit,” she groaned.
The sea split and erupted. A colossal black shape, serpentine and hideous, burst from the waves, its size momentarily confounding Bailey’s ability to perceive what she was seeing.
Jörmungandr looked somewhat like a typical snake, somewhat like a limbless Chinese dragon, and somewhat like a nightmare abomination that had no analog in anything she’d encountered. The sky was half-filled by its head and neck alone, so the creature had to be miles long.
It whipped its head around and opened its jaws, revealing a throat like a cavern and fangs the size of trees. From its mouth, an object emerged as if thrown or spat. It spun toward a lumpy promontory above the beach, and it took Bailey a second to realize that it was a humanoid figure.
Her eyes bulged, and she jetted toward it. As it drew closer to land and she drew closer to it, familiarity set in. The figure was a burly man with salt-soaked red hair and beard and armor stained with brine and blood. A short yet mighty hammer was clutched in his fist.
“Thor!” Bailey cried, picking up speed as she flew laterally toward him. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, conscious or not.
Behind her, the World Serpent let out a deafening, air-splitting, and disturbingly high-pitched roar, the kind of earth-rending shriek she associated with kaiju films, though stripped of any semblance of charm or camp. Here, with the world’s most powerful monster right before her, the sound was terrifying.
Bailey conjured a lattice of thin strands of moving air and shield matter, making a magical net where Thor was about to land. He plowed into it and slowed but still crashed into the ash-colored cliff with more force than she would have hoped.
The girl halted her advance, allowed her feet to touch the ground, and ran to the thunder god’s side. “Thor! Are you all right? Talk to me!”
The red-bearded deity twitched and rustled, spitting water out of his mouth. “Yes! Bloody hell and damnation. Is that Bailey? Curse Fenris for this! Help me stand.”
Bailey put her arms under his shoulder and slowly raised him to his feet. She examined him at the same time, grasping that he had nearly drowned, been severely banged up, and had taken a further battering from his impact with the cliff, though not as bad as it would have been without Bailey’s net.
As the thunder god regained the ability to stand, both their gazes drifted to the ocean. Jörmungandr was swimming toward them, its tunnel-like maw hanging open and its flat, cold, hideous eyes staring at them with hatred and hunger.
Bailey asked, “Can you fight? I can, but—”
“Yes!” Thor growled. “Not as well as I’d like, but that drooling worm hasn’t beaten me so quickly. Side by side! We should have rid the universe of this beast long ago, I say.”
Staring at the abomination bearing down on them, Bailey wondered how many gods would have been a “safe” number to attack it.
I’m guessing about a dozen, she surmised, as a conservative estimate. But we’ll have to make do with two, or more like one and a half.
Then again, is this fucking thing really any worse than an entire army of smaller critters? Hundreds of elves, trolls, and giants are nothing an H-bomb-style explosion can’t solve.
“Okay,” she told Thor, “shield your eyes and yourself.”
She thrust her hand toward the serpent and nuked it.
The air, land, and sea all turned white as a sphere of pure fiery death erupted at the point of Jörmungandr’s upper throat. Together, Bailey and Thor conjured an intensely powerful shield around themselves as shockwaves of force, heat, and overtaxed sound rippled past them, devastating the area. They closed their eyes.
When they opened them again, much of the land had turned black, and the sea was a couple of feet lower. So much of the water had evaporated that the brief slope-point between land and water’s edge was gone; there was now a lip of land that plunged into the watery abyss.
Jörmungandr still lived. It blinked, and smoke rose from its scales, then it glared at them with a fury that made Bailey want to turn around, run, and pretend none of this had ever happened.
No, she ordered herself. We don’t do shit like that. We stand and fight, no matter what.
“Bah!” Thor roared, waving his hammer. “Come on, then! Let us tussle with this thing like men!”
With a long howl that faintly resembled a cheer or a laugh, Thor launched into the air, straight toward the lord of monsters.
Bailey sighed and followed him, her sword at the ready.
Jörmungandr’s head, the size of an apartment building, snapped toward them, its motion creating a wind. It wasn’t even moving all that fast, the girl realized. It was so big that it didn’t have to.
She thought of how easy it was for her to reach out and squash a tiny bug that was desperately scurrying at top speed away from her, and she shuddered.
Thor wheeled around, narrowly dodging the biting strike of the serpent, and his hammer whacked it in the chin. Sparks crackled from the point of impact, and the monster’s head jerked aside enough to suggest that the blow had had some effect.
But not much.
Bailey had dodged the attack by shooting upward and in the other direction, and she swung her sword at the side of the serpent’s neck as she flew past it. The blade, to her horror, bounced off the creature’s scales like a nail file against plate armor.
What the fuck? She was on the verge of panic, and since she rarely panicked, that scared her still more. This sword can supposedly kill gods. What in the name of all the worlds is that thing?
But the impact of Thor’s hammer had done more than nothing, so it wasn’t invincible.
However, Thor had faltered and stumbled after his successful strike. His wounds had reduced him to fifty or sixty percent of his normal fighting ability.
Bailey flew into the air, trying to think of what might hurt the beast as she kept a close eye on its movements. It seemed more interest
ed in Thor than in her.
The thunder god bellowed and launched a stream of lightning at it. Jörmungandr twitched, and its movements became irregular. The bolts didn’t exactly stun it, but they interfered with its ability to attack.
Bailey breathed, “Okay, then.” She commanded the clouds overhead to discharge a sequence of six columns of lightning, five of which struck the black serpent directly. The sixth landed in the sea and electrocuted the water enough that it likely contributed to the effect.
Jörmungandr squawked in a way that rattled the pebbles on the beach. It froze in place for a second or two, then it shot a hateful glance at Bailey. It turned back to Thor, but a huge loop of its body crashed out of the ocean to whip toward the girl.
She dove away from the gargantuan coil, wondering if the monster’s apparent susceptibility to electricity had to do with it being an elemental creature of water. Perhaps it was something more mundane.
Thor and Bailey began a game of cat and mice, each of them harrying the abomination with concussive blows or lightning bolts, trying to wear it down as it thrashed and snapped at them with movements that could have leveled half of Greenhearth.
Soon, though, the World Serpent started to demonstrate intelligence. Rather than attack them with its body, it attacked them with huge waves of water, which also absorbed their lightning strikes.
And each time they were disoriented, it moved in for the kill with its hideous jaws. Bailey noticed venom dripping from the fangs.
Thor called, “Don’t let it swallow you either! It tried to do that to me. I lodged myself in its throat until it had to spit me out, but if the beast gets you down its gullet, you’ll never get back out.”
As if on cue, Jörmungandr snapped its mouth toward the thunder god, who barely escaped the fate he’d warned against. Instead, the side of the serpent’s lower jaw bashed into him and sent him splashing and rolling back onto the shore.
Bailey threw lightning at the dragon’s eye to distract it for a second as she rushed to Thor’s side once more.
The red-bearded deity was weaker still. “Bailey! I’m having trouble lifting my hammer. Link with me, and I will give you a portion of my power so that you can heft it.”
She frantically recalled the lessons of Loki and Fenris on how to share magical ability between deities and an invisible siphon-tendril emerged, locking into Thor and establishing a conduit with him.
A surge of strength entered her, and it made her want to fight. It was like a rolling storm within her heart.
Jörmungandr was bearing down on them again.
Bailey let out a loud war cry and seized Mjölnir, imbuing the hammer with an entire storm’s worth of lightning and then hurling it straight into the serpent’s face. The weapon ricocheted off the beast’s nose and lips, lighting its face with flashing sparks, and it trembled in pain, immobilized.
The hammer flew back, landing in Thor’s hand instead of Bailey’s, but the thunder god’s infusion had given her an idea.
“Thor,” she said, “lightning hurts it more when it’s out of the water, and it can’t move as fast, and I think our whole problem is those damn scales. If I can slip my sword under one, I might be able to drain some of its strength and give it to you, and then we can barbecue it with the biggest thunderclap in known history.”
Hope and vitality flowed back into the heavy, bearded face. “Haha! That might work. Let us try then.”
They linked arms, Bailey helping Thor move as they levitated, coming eye to eye with Jörmungandr. Thor hurled his hammer again. It moved in an irregular pattern, striking the serpent’s chin despite its attempt at dodging, though it landed with less force than Bailey’s blow had.
Still, it was enough to stun the monster for a second or two. The werewitch moved them around the side of the creature’s head, and they planted their feet against its neck. Bailey found the edge of one of the huge black scales and inserted her sword’s point beneath it, then stabbed hard.
Jörmungandr tensed, and she knew it was about to throw them off. The sword was little more than a pinprick to it, but it still represented a breach in its defenses.
“Thor!” she exclaimed, “help me hold the sword!”
“Aye!” he agreed. One of his big hands closed around the handle beside hers. As the earthquake-like force of the monster’s sudden whipping of its neck threatened to dislodge them, their combined strength held them in place.
Bailey began to steal Jörmungandr’s essence, funneling it not into herself but into her companion. The effect was instantly noticeable, and the werewitch could feel her share of the burden diminishing as Thor drove the blade in still deeper.
The girl cast a quick spell to fuse the flesh beneath the scale to her blade, then she shouted, “Up!”
Both gods gripped the hilt, wrenching upward with the full reserves of their respective divine strength. Jörmungandr, shrieking horribly, resisted with its considerable physical might, yet somehow the two humanoid deities prevailed. The serpent was slowly dragged upward, more and more of its unimaginably huge body emerging from the sheltering waves into the open air above the sea.
Thor raised his hammer. “Lightning!” he bellowed. “Power of the storm—of all storms—come forth! Bailey, help me invoke it. We need as much as we can imagine!”
Thunder crashed around them, and white flashes appeared in the roiling dark clouds overhead. Soon, despite the World Serpent’s intense thrashing, the clouds began to close around them like a dense bluish fog.
Bailey struggled to hold onto the sword and control the wrenching movements of the monster, but she spared as much of her willpower as she could to aid Thor’s spell. She spread her mind across all of the Other, seeking out every neutron and electron of power she could find and bringing them all to the point of their battle.
Sparks and bolts leapt through the clouds around them, and the flashes became more frequent, to the point that they resembled a strobe light.
Jörmungandr, its primeval brain grasping what was about to happen, bellowed in fear and rage and committed its full strength, enough to split the world asunder, to trying to break free of the sword and the deities who held it.
Bailey’s mind was stabbed with a note of panic as she almost lost her grip. She had to abandon the lightning conjuration in order to focus everything she had on not letting go.
But it was too late for the serpent. Thor had control of the storms that were his purview, and Bailey had done her part by channeling half a dimension’s electricity to where he could use it.
The wrath of the heavens was unleashed. A column of lightning a quarter-mile across fell from on high, striking Jörmungandr square atop the head. At the same instant, a thousand other bolts struck the beast across the half of its body that was exposed above the World Sea. The electrical energy coursed through its form and reacted violently with the water where the other half was still submerged.
The werewitch screamed in pain and Thor did likewise as both struggled to repel the incredible power surge that threatened to leap through the sword into their forms, overloading them.
But they held firm, finally withdrawing the blade from the serpent’s neck once its death scream faded and its colossal body went limp.
The flashing lights in the clouds faded as Jörmungandr fell, its head and neck flopping sideways to impact the ocean below in a mile-long line. The sea exploded, and a tidal wave rose from the impact, flooding and overwhelming the shore. After some moments, the waters retracted, and the ocean was once again calm as the World Serpent sank forever into its unfathomable depths.
Bailey and Thor drifted earthward from the sky, landing on a blasted hill a quarter-mile or so back from the water’s edge. Pools of black water lingered in low places around them, left there after the great wave receded.
Despite the dose of stolen strength Bailey had given him, the thunder god did not look good. Bruises were visible everywhere there was exposed skin, and the non-bruised parts of him were pale and sweaty. He also s
eemed to be succumbing to severe exhaustion.
“I’ll live,” he assured her before she could ask. “I’ve had a bad day, you might say, yet it was also a great day, was it not? We defeated the monster said to be nigh undefeatable!”
He laughed, though the sound transformed into a cough. “My wounds are merely from the pounding it gave me. I escaped its fangs. The prophecy stated that I would overcome and slay the monster but be bitten and die of the venom. That isn’t what happened. We have defied destiny.”
The girl blinked as the magnitude of what he’d said sank in. “Shit. Not bad. I suppose that means we can also defy the End of the World.”
Chapter Fifteen
Loki, to his credit, responded to Bailey’s summons within about forty seconds.
He took her and the thunder god in at a glance, dismissing the portal behind him and surveying the now-scorched heath that abutted the World Sea.
“What in the universe happened here?” he marveled, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “Did you conjure up a forest and then burn it down?”
Bailey scowled. “I tried to nuke it. The World Serpent, I mean.”
“Oh.” Loki sighed. “Well, I’ll assume it didn’t work, yet both of you live, so you must have done something right.”
Thor raised his head. “Indeed. We live, and Jörmungandr does not.” He wheezed and fell back into semi-consciousness.
Bailey locked eyes with the lord of mischief. “He needs help. He’s gonna make it, but you can care for him better than I can or get him to those who can so he can recover his strength. Right?”
“Yes,” Loki confirmed. “I will stabilize his condition myself—beyond what you’ve, er, attempted—and then take him back to Asgard for further healing.”
“Good.” She scowled again. “How come you couldn’t help us fight that thing? I’m amazed that two gods were enough to take it down.”
The trickster deity knelt beside Thor, not looking at the girl. “As I mentioned previously, Jörmungandr is—or was, pardon—one of my children. Confronting it myself would have caused complications I don’t wish to discuss at the moment, and it’s best if you don’t ask again. Or think about it too hard.”