The Mists of Niflheim (The Ragnarok Era Book 2) Read online

  The Mists of Niflheim

  Matt Larkin

  Contents

  Free novel

  Maps

  Dramatis Personae

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 2

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 3

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part 4

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Part 5

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Epilogue

  Keep Reading

  Did You Like This?

  Free Novel

  Author’s Ramblings

  About the Author

  THE MISTS OF NIFLHEIM

  The Ragnarok Era Book 2

  MATT LARKIN

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 Matt Larkin.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Brenda Pierson, Clark Chamberlain, and Fred Roth

  Published by Incandescent Phoenix Books

  incandescentphoenix.com

  For Robert Lane Larkin. I miss you, Dad.

  If you liked The Apples of Idunn, you’ll love the prequel. See the dawn of the Njarar War and the tragic adventures of Agilaz and Volund.

  Click the link to claim your free copy and continue the adventure:

  http://www.mattlarkinbooks.com/join-the-readers-group-ragnarok-era/

  Thanks for reading,

  Matt Larkin

  For high resolution maps, be sure to check out http://www.mattlarkinbooks.com/ragnarok-era-atlas/.

  Dramatis Personae

  Aesir

  A collection of nine tribes originally living in Aujum, all claiming descent from the great Loridi. Odin has made himself their king and marched them into Hunaland on his way to Vanaheim.

  Wodan Tribe

  Odin: King of the Aesir and jarl of the Wodanar

  Freki: Varulf boy adopted by Odin; twin of Geri

  Frigg: Odin’s wife and daughter of the former jarl of the Hasdingi; a vӧlva

  Fulla: Frigg’s maid

  Geri: Varulf girl adopted by Odin; twin of Freki

  Tyr: Odin’s champion and most important thegn

  Athra Tribe

  Annar: Jarl of the Athra, Odin’s cousin on his mother’s side

  Eir: Vӧlva to the Athra

  Bjar Tribe

  Moda: Jarl of the Bjars

  Didung Tribe

  Lodur: Jarl of the Diduni and friendly rival of Odin’s since childhood

  Friallaf Tribe

  Jat: New jarl of the Friallafs, after Odin killed Jarl Steinar

  Godwulf Tribe

  Hoenir: Jarl of the Godwulfs, former thegn to Jarl Alci, elevated by Tyr, despite not being a varulf

  Syn: Hoenir’s daughter and Hermod’s wife

  Hermod: Agilaz and Olrun’s son

  Hasding Tribe

  Vili: Odin’s brother and now jarl of the Hasdingi

  Sigyn: Frigg’s half sister

  Agilaz: Sigyn’s foster father; a master hunter and archer

  Olrun: Sigyn’s foster mother; a former shieldmaiden

  Itrmann Tribe

  Arnbjorn: Jarl of the Itrmanni

  Kory: Son of Arnbjorn; a warrior

  Skaldun Tribe

  Bedvig: Jarl of the Skalduns, now married to Zisa, for which Tyr hates him

  Zisa: Tyr’s ex-wife; a huntress

  Starkad: Zisa’s elder son

  Vikar: Zisa’s younger son

  Hunalanders

  Numerous small kingdoms dot Hunaland. As North Realmers, they speak a language very similar to the language of the Aesir, so the two people can communicate. However, a long history of animosity exists between them, largely due to generations of Ás raids into their lands.

  Volsung: A Hunalander king, beholden to the Niflungar through a deal made by his father, Rerir

  Niflungar

  An ancient people descended from Naefil, a son of Halfdan the Old. Naefil made a pact with Hel, the goddess of Niflheim, and his descendants are called the Children of the Mist. They are largely sorcerers. In ages past, they were defeated by the Lofdar and driven to the edges of Midgard.

  Gjuki: The Raven Lord, King of the Niflungar

  Grimhild: Queen of the Niflungar and High Priestess of Hel

  Gudrun: A sorceress and princess of the Niflungar; ordered to seduce Odin, but fell for him herself

  Gunnar: Gudrun’s youngest brother

  Hogne: Gudrun’s middle brother (younger than Gudrun)

  Vanir

  The people of Vanaheim, long worshipped as gods by the Aesir. Originally human, many have become immortal thanks to the apples of Yggdrasil. Because there are not enough apples to go around, some remain mortal. Though King Njord holds the final authority, the Vanir also have an aristocracy called the Aethelings.

  Bragi: God of poetry, husband to Idunn; patron of the Bragnings, a now fallen people

  Eostre: Goddess of the dawn and mother of Idunn

  Frey: God of fertility, sunshine, and war; when wielding the flaming sword, Laevateinn, nearly unstoppable in battle

  Freyja: Goddess of love, sex, and magic; twin sister of Frey

  Gefjon: Goddess of plenty, beholden to Lady Sunna

  Gullveig: An alchemist

  Idunn: The fabled goddess of spring, who gave the spear Gungnir to the Wodanar in generations past, and who gave Odin seven apples from Yggdrasil

  Lytir: Keeper of Yggdrasil and speaker for the Norns

  Mani: God of the moon

  Mundilfari: Former king of Vanaheim who abdicated the throne and then vanished

  Nerthus: Goddess of fertility and wife of Njord

  Njord: God of the sea, King of the Vanir, and father of Frey and Freyja

  Sunna: Goddess of the sun, daughter of Mundilfari

  Ullr: God of archery

  Others

  Aegir: A sea giant and husband of Rán

  Hel: Goddess of Niflheim, queen of the dead and the most feared being in the cosmos

  Hymir: A jotunn who raised Tyr and is p
ossibly his father

  Irpa: A wraith bound in service to Gudrun

  Loki: A foreigner who guided Odin to Ymir and who became Sigyn’s lover

  Nott: Primal goddess of night; feared by the Aesir, rather than worshipped

  Rán: Mermaid queen of the sea; wife of Aegir

  Sleipnir: Odin’s eight-legged horse

  Snegurka: A snow maiden bound in service to Gudrun

  Ve: Odin’s youngest brother; a skald; now the Troll King

  Prologue

  In the throes of deep meditation, the mind was left to wander, touching realms beyond the physical, much as beings from those realms touched such minds in dreams. Some, practiced in the Sight, sought to harness such sojourns by deliberately projecting their consciousness and soul into the Astral Realm. Loki found such an idea abhorrent, not least because it would reveal him to the innumerable enemies and otherwise hostile forces awaiting him there, and yet, still he practiced a meditation very much akin to projection. One which allowed him to walk in a space outside of time and between any realm, where lay darkness and a void in all directions save forward. There waited the Norns, standing before a well that itself stood nowhere and, in a sense, everywhere.

  Loki had sent Odin here once, in an attempt to goad the man toward his urd—a Northern word derived from the name of one of these very Norns. Urd—fate—demanded a great deal of Loki, but then it asked as much if not more from Odin. And if the Norns wanted to be found, one might find them in any number of liminal places separating the Mortal Realm from the Otherworlds.

  Neither hurry nor hesitation guided his steps toward them. They, of all beings, had patience, if such a term might even be applied to those existing outside of time. In truth, the further one travelled from the Mortal Realm, the less meaning time held. Or, perhaps, the more meaning, as the tafl board became the tapestry of history itself.

  “You wished to see me,” he asked when he finally stood but a few feet from the hooded women.

  “Who is—”

  “Who was—”

  “Who shall be your master?”

  Loki folded his arms over his chest, scowling at the exasperating women. “I am, as ever, a servant of history.”

  “Perhaps in the darkness—”

  “Blinded by the light—”

  “He finds himself mired in the delusions of Eros.”

  Loki kept his face expressionless, much as their comments made him seethe. These beings without time also existed without love or, in the sense the Aesir understood it, without even life. Thus they could not begin to understand the callings of the heart or the power it held over the living. They, in their self-superior ignorance, insinuated Sigyn was his weakness, when, in fact, she gave him the strength to face the ineffable abominations he had borne witness to in both the past and future.

  Without knowing she was out there, born again to sustain him, he might have crumbled under the weight of darkness.

  Such truths so far exceeded their comprehension as to not even warrant discussion. A better topic lay before them, in any event. “The Destroyer grows stronger more swiftly than we anticipated, barreling towards his destiny in great, perilous strides.”

  “Anticipation is—”

  “Was—”

  “Will be a limitation of the linear.”

  Loki spread his hands. “You speak of limitations, yet, as always, you still need me. It leaves one to wonder if you do not point out such supposed weaknesses to cover your own.”

  “We begin to believe—”

  “Indeed to know and to see—”

  “A man who grows too attached to the Destroyer—”

  “Whose fate remains ever unchanging and bound in darkness.”

  “All worlds end, taking with them the one who must bring them down.”

  Did they suppose he would try to spare Odin his fate?

  Would that he could, for Loki truly did love his blood brother. But the innumerable millennia of his life and bitter destiny had taught him that fate was implacable, and history could never be denied. It plodded forward in a relentless tide, oblivious or uncaring of lives it swept under its waves.

  As before, and as always, Odin was damned to his fate.

  As were they all.

  Part I

  Year 118, Age of Vingethor

  Fourth Moon, The Cusp of Winter

  1

  Waking or sleeping, it mattered naught. Odin could no longer tell the difference. Or perhaps he was caught between the two. His time with Gudrun and Frigg had blurred all lines while it opened his mind, until at last he could no longer say whether the things he saw were real or figments of his own tortured mind.

  But he did see them. The Sight tormented him.

  Borr. His father. Once the strongest man Odin had ever known. Head tall, the flicker of torchlight illuminating his short red beard as he wandered Unterhagen in the night. Odin had never known why his father had gone to the village that night—but he knew now whom he had met.

  Jarl Arnbjorn of the Itrmanni looked up sharply at a crash from outside. He and Borr stood before a fire pit in a small house. They had been debating something Odin had not caught.

  “Trolls?” Borr said.

  Arnbjorn blanched and fled from the house. Borr groaned and drew his sword. Outside, a pair of men waited for him, each staring off nervously into the thick mist, spear in one hand, torch in the other. “Arnbjorn and his men ran off,” one said.

  In the mist, a man screamed. Another crash echoed.

  Odin’s father had gone out into the night, into the mists, to protect the villagers. Gone out … and never returned.

  “Father …” Odin mumbled, half-aware he was talking in his sleep. On the edge of his mind he knew Frigg had placed a hand on his forehead, hoping to comfort him against visions she couldn’t see. He could shut them out, leave them behind. Gudrun had taught him such things—to close his mind to the Sight. But then he would never see his father again, not while Odin walked Midgard. And, given his newfound immortality, that could mean forever. A separation so final, so absolute, keeping Odin from reuniting with his parents and his ancestors, and he had taken the apple without giving it a moment’s consideration. Idunn had made him a god. But there was a price—solitude. He was a god doomed to walk the world without those who had shaped him.

  So he could not resist the vision, the call to see what his father had seen. The temptation to understand a life that wasn’t his own, but yet felt so close.

  Borr and his men were greeted with more screams as they trod into the village. The people no doubt feared a raid, unable to conceive that other men would come just to help them. No. Not simply other men. Borr. Odin’s father had been a hero, hadn’t he? Not just to his sons, not even just to his own people. To mankind. And Odin had failed to live up to his father’s legacy.

  Snow crunched under Borr’s knees as he knelt to examine a depression. In the torchlight, in the mist, maybe he couldn’t see it for what it was. But Odin could see. A footprint, one so massive his father’s whole body could have crouched in it. The footprint of the frost jotunn Ymir. Was any of this real? Or had Odin’s mind built this vision from the bits and pieces he had learned in visiting the remains of the village, and from the tales Loki had spun of these events?

  Odin’s heart pounded in his chest, apt to burst through his ribs. He wanted to scream at his father, shout a warning back to that time. A warning his father would never hear.

  Instead, the silence was broken by a crash like thunder as a house exploded, spraying splinters and thatch over Borr and his men. Through the mists, Odin could only see to the jotunn’s waist as he trod forward. But he knew the thing, the blue tint of his skin, the iron plates covering his legs. Borr spun, leveling Gungnir against a foe far beyond his ken. Ymir’s bellow drowned out the battle cries of Borr and his warriors. The jotunn surged forward, smashing one warrior with his hammer. Borr never hesitated, never backed down, charging the monster. Ymir batted the spear away, and it embedded its
elf in the same tree Odin had found it in days later.

  The jotunn snatched up Borr in one hand and hefted him to his face. From Ymir’s head jutted a granite horn, stretching nigh unto five feet long. His icy breath stung Borr’s face. Ymir kicked away another of Borr’s warriors, remaining focused on Odin’s father’s face, meeting his gaze.

  And then the jotunn spoke, his voice like the rumbling of a glacier. His words were foreign and unknowable, except … Odin could have sworn he made out one word—Hel. The dire goddess of Niflheim, mistress of the Niflungar.

  Ymir squeezed his fist, and Odin screamed, feeling his bones snap as his father’s had.

  He jolted upward, roaring at naught, suddenly feeling stifled by the tent above them. Dimly, as though he still dreamed, he knew Frigg had thrown her arms around his chest, leaned her head against his back. Their babe cried, wakened by his outburst.

  Odin shrugged free of Frigg, crawled over to Thor, and cradled him in his arms. “There’s naught to fear,” he mumbled.

  The two werewolf babes had sat up, watching Odin with wary eyes. Geri pensive, on the edge of tears; Freki with his head cocked to one side.

  Tyr stuck his head in the tent, but Frigg waved him away.

  “Tell me what you’re seeing,” she said as soon as Odin’s thegn had slipped back out.

  Odin couldn’t look away from Thor’s eyes, from the boy’s red hair. Hair the color of Odin’s father’s. “There is naught to fear,” he repeated, unable to still the tremble in his own chest. Because there was something to fear. The jotunn had come specifically for Borr. He had paid no mind to the villagers or the other warriors, at least not until he had finished with Odin’s father. Why? Could Odin have conjured such things in his mind, or had he witnessed the real finality of his father’s last moments? They had found his body broken and no one left to tell the tale of what had destroyed that village. Only later had Loki told him about the jotunn.