The Fires of Muspelheim Read online

  The Fires of Muspelheim

  Matt Larkin

  Incandescent Phoenix Books

  Prologue

  From primordial darkness man had arisen, born into a world he did not know nor ever could, but had thought himself grand. And the greatest of achievements, civilization, had risen, perhaps in unwitting denial of man’s true inception—an illusion of light. A seed. But that which had come from darkness, must, one day, to that darkness return.

  Untenable, all civilizations must fall, brought down by the very nature of those who clung to them. A whole world, bathed in blood and reduced to naught but ash. This, Loki had witnessed time and again, down through the passing of eras. With each rising, man reached up from the dark once more, a desperate hand above the waves of chaos inundating existence. Men climbed over the corpses of their forebears and, sometimes, called them gods.

  This place, Idavollir, had once served as the capital of the mighty civilization of Brimir. Where the last Aesir now sat—caught in desperate quarrels over how to save that which might never be saved—once, long ago, the Elder Council of Brimir had also sat, arguing over much the same. Jotunnar, yes, though, in their own way, even jotunnar were, in fact, but a race of men.

  Loki had watched them fall, too, as he now watched the last days of the Aesir. Crouched in shadowed rafters high above his prey, he waited, listening. It would have been pointless to deny the same dark currents that guided humanity’s course did not also so afflict himself.

  They did, because Loki was, despite the passing of so many millennia, in effect, still just a man.

  And so … Rage.

  What was worse than returning to the dark? Losing that which provided a glimpse, however fleeting, of the light. Those few souls that might make existence more bearable stolen, sent where he could not follow.

  “There is one seal left,” Hermod said. “And that one lies in Muspelheim itself. I must go there.”

  Thor scoffed. “You want your arse roasted, go sit in the fire pit. Why waste the effort of traveling to that burning nightmare?”

  “The release of Achlys would weaken Hel’s hold over Niflheim.”

  “Hel is already here, on Midgard,” Gefjon argued. “You might throw away your life for naught. Besides which, you have no reason to believe Achlys, released, would even join our cause.”

  “She doesn’t need to,” Hermod said. “All she has to do is weaken Hel such that we can kill her.”

  “Let him go, then,” Magni offered. “Then Father can crack Hel’s skull. We win Ragnarok, reclaim Asgard. Throw a feast.”

  Freyja rose from her seat. “I’m afraid I have to agree with Thor. You cannot imagine the inhospitableness of the World of Fire. You’d never survive such an attempt, and we’d be left down an immortal warrior in this fight.”

  The truth was, Loki had heard arguments similar enough to this. Oh, different in aspect, yes, but analogous in kind. Faced with the inevitable end, with the impending return to darkness, some men would whimper and cower, while others denied the truth, and some few more simply defied the end. A man like that, Loki had once chosen for his desperate gambit. One who, despite all odds, simply would not give up.

  A man who was not here. Unfortunately, in the case of the Aesir. For that man alone could have stood against Loki and forestalled him in his purpose here.

  Loki had not come to listen to men bemoan the darkness.

  Surtr was gone from his soul, yes, but still, its fiery rage burned inside Loki’s breast. Given it had dwelt there for uncounted millennia, how could it not?

  Rage.

  Because he had lost something. Lost it—or had it stolen.

  Teeth bared, knife in hand, Loki slipped over the side of the rafter and plummeted, landing atop the mighty stone table just before Hermod. He dropped into a crouch, slamming the knife into the back of Hermod’s hand in the same instant, then lunged, flipping over the man and snatching the hilt of the runeblade hung over his shoulder.

  Roaring, Loki jerked Dainsleif free and rammed it down through Hermod’s shoulder, even before the Aesir had begun to move. The blade bit through stone even, pinning Hermod down.

  Then the screaming started.

  Loki leaned in close to Sigyn’s murderer’s ear. “Hard to shift Realms with a runeblade in your chest?”

  Thor leapt to his feet, hefting Mjölnir. “By the fucking Tree! Uncle, I’m going to enjoy flattening your face.”

  The prince lunged in, sweeping that hammer at Loki. Loki ducked, stepped inside and under the blow, and caught the hammer’s haft. Then he jerked it straight up, back into Thor’s face. The hammer broke the man’s jaw, and sent him crashing to the ground, bloody-mouthed where his front teeth had stood a moment ago.

  Freyja Sun Strode behind Loki, but he was already moving, twisting. He caught her leg, swept up beneath it and hefted her in the air, then slammed her down back-first on the table.

  The Aesir broke into chaos. Thrúd drew a sword and swung at him. Loki twisted backward, caught the blade as it passed, and kicked her in the gut, sending her flying. Continuing his spin, he hurled the blade into Bragi’s chest as the liosalf tried to close in.

  Loki kicked out another man’s shin, caught the back of his head, and slammed it into the table.

  He no longer thought about flowing from one fighting style to another. Thirty thousand years of practice had amalgamated hundreds of styles into instinct.

  Roaring, he twisted another man around, slammed his palm into Thrúd’s throat when she rose, and twisted an axe blow into Magni’s back. His fist snapped backward even as Frey appeared behind him. On crossed wrists, he caught a spear, then jerked the haft back into the face of his attacker.

  He flipped sideways over another thrust, landed on the table, and rammed his knee into Saule’s face when she rose against him. He spun around, leapt down beside Hermod and wrapped a hand around the man’s throat.

  “Did you think I would not repay her murder?” His breaths came in ragged pants. He rammed his fist into the man’s kidney twice, until he felt it rupture.

  Then, bellowing, he yanked Dainsleif free from Hermod’s back, whipped the sword around to parry Sunna’s attack, then back, to lop Hermod’s head off.

  Sweat soaked his shirt, a dozen scrapes and bruises had caught him. None serious.

  He caught Sunna’s blade in the crossbar, wended his own around, and jerked upward, sending her sword flying free. A single swipe disemboweled the liosalf and had her toppling over. Maybe she would live. Maybe not.

  Some in the hall fell back from him, their faces masks of fear, the screams still sounding out. Others closed in, trying to corner him. Loki took off at a sprint, made it a dozen steps, then had to drop to one knee and slide as Egzuki appeared in his way. His slice cut out her knee and sent her toppling to the ground in a wailing shower of blood.

  He caught himself with his free hand, burning pneuma, and shoved, pushing himself into the air to flip around sideways. Dainsleif sheared through a man’s skull, continued its arc and bit into another’s collarbone.

  Loki strove forward, slashing, kicking, and shoving his way past the increasingly panicked Aesir, many of whom no longer even tried to bar his passage.

  “Loki!” Tyr bellowed, finally managing to interpose himself between Loki and the exit. “Always knew you’d bring ill on us.”

  Loki swept his sweat-soaked hair from his face. “Would aught have stopped you from avenging your wife?”

  Tyr’s runeblade, Mistilteinn, dipped just a little. It was all the opening Loki needed. He lunged, swiping downward, knocking the runeblade aside, even as his elbow snapped up into Tyr’s face. The sudden blow hefted the man off his feet and sent him tumbling over backward.

  Lok
i leapt over him and made a break for the corridor, heading not for the closed main gate, but for the stairs up to the battlements.

  Startled Aesir archers spun as he came bursting up onto their level. Many didn’t even seem to know who he was. Loki charged the closest one, grabbed him, and hurled him over his shoulder into one of his fellows.

  Then he leapt the wall and fell, before landing in a crouch in the snow below the fortress.

  Before any of the archers could recover, he raced for the wood, panting, sweat streaming down his back.

  He had done it …

  Sigyn was avenged, yes.

  But she still suffered in torment, possessed by Loki’s daughter. That, he needed to attend to.

  Part I

  Year 400, Age of the Aesir

  Winter

  1

  An eagle cried, circling over the small boat Odin shared with Loki—Prometheus, rather. The other man guided them between numerous islands scattered around this warm sea, aimless, it almost seemed, though Odin knew better. Rather, he suspected Prometheus simply wished to have these conversations away from his followers at the Aviary, men and women who simply could not understand the burden laid upon two oracles.

  Now, with his consciousness flitting about through time, Odin found himself in the distant past, before Prometheus had done many of the things Odin would blame him for. Before, in fact, the man had even sired Hel, and a part of Odin had wrestled with how to tell Prometheus about his future daughter. Another part of him had struggled with whether to simply kill the man now.

  Once, long ago—or a long time from now—he had, and would, love this man as a brother. But Prometheus, enslaved to the Norns or Ananke or whatever, had also wrought such terrible chaos unto the world. It was a comforting self-delusion to imagine that, if Odin killed him in the past, the future might improve.

  Save for what Prometheus had told him, in elusive hints. The implication that something fed upon the Wheel of Life, that the cyclical destruction of the world served a purpose of maintaining a balance in the cosmos. That, had Prometheus not started this process—and Odin was fair certain that, for him, now, it had only happened once before—a yet worse eventuality would have unfolded. That, perhaps the world would have still ended—or at least become a place so terrible everyone would have wished it would—but, unless Odin perpetuated the cycle, that end would have become a final one.

  Where did that leave him? Buying time for man? Forestalling the inevitable?

  Prometheus, for his part, attended to the oars, drinking in sunlight and leaving Odin to his musings. This man was Loki, yes, and yet … he was at once both more haunted and somehow more hopeful. Loki, many millennia later, having seen the world end a good many times more, had become resigned to the trap of history.

  Some distance away, a pod of dolphins leapt up, chittering and splashing. Reveling, even. Happy in their ignorance of the horrors and death and destruction that must ravage the world over and over in an unbroken cycle.

  Odin groaned, shaking his head, as the animals disappeared back beneath the sea. “I find myself on the brink of utter despondency. At least when I could focus my wrath upon you, it served to abate the melancholy. Now am I bereft, and finding it hard to muster the will to continue this fight. Any fight.”

  Prometheus gave one more good heave on the oars, then released them with a sigh, leaning back against the bow. “I imagine that’s why I didn’t tell you sooner the things you now understand.”

  Oh, yes, Odin had already surmised as much. He tossed his hat onto the bottom of the boat and mopped his sweaty hair from his brow. In such a warm land, he envied Prometheus his loose, light clothing. Just not quite enough to ask for such clothes for himself. After all, he might not have much more time here.

  “Well,” Odin finally said. “You knew me when I met you early in my own era because you met me now. You knew who I was and what would become of our bond the first day I met you.”

  Prometheus held up a forestalling hand. “I don’t want to know any more than I already do. Prescience is a complex burden, and to know too much about the future would only increase the burden placed upon my future self.”

  “What if, by telling you what will happen, I gave you a way to avert the worst of it?”

  “Do you truly believe that would work? Have your experiences, thrust back and forth through time, truly given you reason to believe the timeline might so easily be altered, or more, that it should be? I have a delicate balance to walk as the guardian of history. Whatever end I might wish for, I cannot allow my personal desires to risk unraveling the threads of time. The web is all that holds reality together, and if you were to sever the wrong strand, we could never predict the outcome.”

  “So, because of you and the dísir and the Norns, the future becomes immutable.”

  “After a fashion, but the truth is more complicated than that. Time is … an aspect of the universe and the universe already exists. Prescience accounts for itself, and even your sojourns within time were always a part of this timeline. The web reaches in all directions, not just forward or backward.”

  “Then why should the web need a guardian at all? If it stretches in all directions and is thus self-reinforcing, existing already in spite of aught anyone might ever try to do, why should the Norns need a slave to maintain it?”

  Prometheus leaned forward. “Why do you think?”

  “Because … because some few beings must possess truly free will, or at least some semblance thereof.” Odin rubbed his face. “But I’m seeing less now. I tried blocking the Sight, before, and now …”

  “You draw closer to the end. No oracle can see past his own death.”

  Odin sighed. “Why choose me at all?”

  “I needed a soul, not only with the strength of will to overcome the odds I had to lay before him, but with a greater insight into the nature of reality. At the most basic level, this would manifest as an extraordinary capacity for psychic perception—the Sight. Properly harnessed, this might lead to shifts in the timeline subtle enough to avoid—”

  The tide crashed over Odin’s mind as if a gale had swept over their little boat. Its currents seized his consciousness and dragged him into an undertow that tore him in dozens of directions all at once.

  He needed to know. He needed to focus. Loki had said if he could maintain focus on an objective … that this was his own mind jerking him along nodes in the timeline …

  The roar of time’s ocean swallowed all other sound.

  It was still bright, when Odin once more opened his eye. Even hotter than it had been on the sea beyond Prometheus’s island, only now, he sat upon a beach.

  His stomach churned. He barely fought down the urge to retch.

  Madness. This was all madness.

  Loki or Prometheus or whoever the bastard was, he claimed it wasn’t really the Norns doing this to Odin. But … But all of this had already set into the timeline before …

  There was the piece that his mind kept refusing to accept. Like a blister he couldn’t help picking at. All of time already existed. Loki had implied that Odin might manage to create small changes—a glimmer of hope, or a pleasant self-delusion—but nevertheless, he had, apparently, always traveled back in time and met Loki in a distant era. Doing so must have even helped steer the man on the course that had led Odin here in the first place.

  And here was …

  Odin rose, and shambled along the beach a few steps. Not so far away, a trio of dhows—Serk ships?—sailed around the coast. Had he stumbled into Serkland? Why would his Sight bring him to the fire-worshippers’ shores in Utgard? Because he’d just been with the original Firebringer? Because …

  He faltered, kicking up sand as he turned about. Behind him, mountainous slopes rose, and rising above the ridge, that looked like the boughs of an immense tree. Of … Yggdrasil.

  He’d come back to Asgard? And there were Serks here?

  A nameless apprehension settled upon his mind, and, despite himself, he
almost wished Audr or Valravn would offer him some insight into his present circumstances. But neither vaettr much relished the harsh sunlight now above him, nor did either of them seem to know much about his uncontrolled movements through time. Almost, he could swear a hint of fear lurked in their perverse minds.

  Wary, Odin moved to the mountain rather than following the coast, and began a slow, painful climb amid the underbrush, trusting to greenery to keep him concealed. On the slopes, he made his way around, until he could look down upon a bustling port. One that certainly did not exist on Asgard in his time. Here, a veritable fleet of dhows came and went, and while people of varying origins occupied the harbor, the predominant look was that of the dark haired, deep-skinned Serklanders.

  Assuming they even called themselves that in this time.

  Careful to avoid detection, Odin continued along the mountain, until he came up to the edge of a cliff. A great, sandy-colored city decorated the plateau, a mix of graceful arches and elegant domes and stronger, crenellated walls. From his perch, Odin could look down into the city and see it just as abustle as the harbor had been, thick with far too many people, plying a multitude of wares in a great bazaar.

  Giant, blazing braziers sat atop many of the towers both along the wall and within the city itself, so he’d wager these Serks still venerated flame. And … shit.

  Down there, amid the bazaar, he spotted a simmering eldjotunn. His stature, his appearance—as though he might spontaneously burst into flame—it left no doubt.

  Odin slid down, onto his arse, and blew out a long, slow breath. How many times had this island changed hands?

  If they were here, they controlled Yggdrasil. They had become the new immortals in this era, whether it was past or future.

  Asgard had once been ruled by Serks. Had once … or one day would be.

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