Gods of the Ragnarok Era Omnibus 1: Books 1-3 Read online

  The Ragnarok Era Omnibus One

  Books 1-3

  Matt Larkin

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  For my family, those here, and those who have gone.

  Contents

  Maps

  The Apples of Idunn

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Epilogue

  Author’s Ramblings

  The Mists of Niflheim

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Epilogue

  Author’s Ramblings

  The Shores of Vanaheim

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Epilogue

  Author’s Ramblings

  Keep Reading

  The Saga Continues …

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  The Apples of Idunn

  Prologue

  Fire is life.

  That aphorism had spread through the North Realms as thoroughly as the mists themselves. Fire could hold those freezing mists at bay. But all fires dwindled, and still the cold remained, hungry, waiting to devour man and beast.

  And Loki was left alone to tend the flame. Fate bound him, hurled him ever forward toward a destiny of anguish and despair with only the barest ember of hope remaining. Hope for a better future than this dying world. The hope that for once, if he kindled the flame high enough, it might endure and offer a lasting bulwark against the cold and the dark. Likely, it was a delusion he clung to like a man wandering in a blizzard, convinced shelter lay just beyond the next pass.

  A figure drifted in on the mist and sat across the bonfire from Loki. Few among the realms of man still remembered Loki’s guest. Those who did called him the Mad Vanr. The sorcerer king who had walked away from his throne after looking too long and too deep into the dark and losing himself there.

  Loki could empathize with such a failing. Long ago, pyromancers had stared into flames such as these, seeking answers from the perilous future. Few remained with such talents, and those few, like Loki, felt the burden ever more keenly for it.

  The Vanr cleared his throat as he warmed his hands before the fire. “I passed beyond the edge of the Midgard Wall some moons back.” Mundilfari, his people had called him, in ages past when he sat upon the throne of Vanaheim. This wretched figure had once been the sorcerer who protected Midgard against the chaos and darkness—for which he lost his humanity and spiraled into depravity, falling ever deeper into the dark between realms. “I passed into Utgard freely. There are cracks in the wall, fissures that widen with age.”

  Loki poked the fire with a stick. “Naught lasts forever.” The Vanir—most of all Mundilfari himself—had raised a mighty wall out of the mountains, a barrier to encircle most of Midgard, separate it from the lands of the jotunnar. That very act, calling upon such forbidden depths of the Art, might have been the point that sent this Vanr plummeting toward the abyss of madness. Now, uncounted centuries later, the sorcerer had fought his way back from the edge. But to use his Art once again, he’d risk falling deeper than ever and, like as not, find himself becoming a vessel for some horror of the Otherworlds.

  So he had visited Utgard, perhaps needed to see for himself how the world had changed beyond the wall. In Utgard, chaos reigned. The very nature of chaos ensured all boundaries designed to occlude it would eventually succumb to entropy.

  “Maybe the jotunnar will soon pass through the wall.”

  Loki shook his head. “Some of them already have.”

  Mundilfari groaned and let his head fall into his palms. “All that I have done, all I wrought for Midgard is failing.”

  Every such salvation represented a temporary reprieve from fate. The Vanr may have bought mankind time, but that time had dwindled with each passing winter, just as the flames dwindled. “Naught lasts forever,” Loki repeated.

  Mundilfari stared up at the night sky as if some answer might lurk there, among stars hidden by clouds and mist. “I hear whispers from Vanaheim. A wind sweeps through my mind and claims that some few precious, perilous treasures have vanished from the islands. When is gold worth more than gold?”

  “Idunn has taken some of the apples with her.”

  Mundilfari might have gone mad, but the wind in his mind spoke some truths. The flames had told Loki much the same tale.

  “What will she do?”

  Loki crooked the hint of a smile.

  “Fine. What will you do, fire-bringer?”

  The flames danced, writhing as if in response to the Vanr’s question. Loki rose. “As ever, I will do whatever the future demands of me. I have to keep the flame alive.”

  Fire is life.

  Part I

  Year 117, Age of Vingethor

  Fourth Moon, Winter

  1

  Flames from the pyre leapt high into the night, banishing mist and preserving the living, even as they consumed the dead, as they devoured flesh and dreams and hopes.

  Father.

  Odin stood at the forefront of the gathered crowd, staring into the flames, unwilling to look at the mass of people who had come to bid farewell to Borr, the great jarl. All the nearest Ás tribes had come. The jarls decked in their fine embroidered furs and golden arm rings, their thegns clad in fine mail, and even vӧlvur—witches learned in secrets forever denied to men. All had come to pay silent respect to the greatest Aesir in living memory. The world was lesser now. The flames were a failing defense against the ever encroaching cold. One day, all fires would burn down to cinders. One day, the world would die.

  One day soon, most like.

  Odin’s two brothers looked to him now, looked to see what he, the eldest, would do, what he would say. He had already spoken in their father’s honor, his voice almost breaking. But his brothers, the rest of the Wodan tribe, and even the other tribes’ jarls all waited for more of his words. As if some speech, some feeble gesture or deficient sentiment, might preserve the tenuous peace Father had struggled to hold between the tribes. All words would fall short, so Odin had none to offer.

  How disappointed they would be to learn the son could not match the father. Would not, if he could. Father’s dreams of a united people smoldered and turned to ash around his broken body. Someone had betrayed him, murdered him. Tyr, his champion, had found his body rent asunder and crushed almost beyond recognition. A body left out in the mist might rise as a draug, damned to wander Midgard somewhere between life and death. Not Father. Too little remained of the man for that. His head, torn from his shoulders, had lain far from his body.

  And yet, his murderers had not claimed his spear, Gungnir. That had remained lodged in a tree trunk. The sacred weapon of the jarls of the Wodanar, granted to them by the Vanr Idunn during the Great March. It fell now into Odin’s keeping. When he held it, he felt both strong and unworthy, filled with righteous wrath and the implacable need to avenge this wrong. By Frey’s flaming sword and the spear of his father, he would do so! Odin would slaughter any and all who had so dishonored Borr and he would leave
their carcasses to the anguish of mist.

  Odin had borne Father’s head back himself, in trembling hands, unwilling to accept a litter for it, no matter how heavy it grew over the miles. Head and body both burned now, on a mighty pyre just outside the town wall.

  Fists clenched at his side, Odin stood motionless until that pyre had dwindled down to embers. The others had left, he knew, drifted away one by one, leaving him alone with the cinders. Only ravens perched upon the trees accompanied him in his grief. In the town, his brothers threw a feast in Father’s name. Odin had no mood to feast. Not this night.

  Footfalls crunched on the snow behind him. A hand fell on his shoulder. Jaw tight, Odin turned to see Tyr there. A powerful man with long dark hair and a trim beard, Tyr was taller than Odin—and Odin was a large man. Tyr bore the scars of a hundred battles, more perhaps. But he hadn’t been at his jarl’s side in the end. Odin fixed him with a glower and did not speak. Naught remained to say.

  “Valkyries have taken him to Valhalla by now,” Tyr said. “Borr feasts with the Vanir.”

  Odin shrugged the man’s hand off his shoulder and turned once more to the pyre. If only he could believe Tyr. But surely his father’s spirit did not rest easy, not while his murder stood unavenged. Thousands of ghosts dwelt in the mists, lingering just beyond firelight, wandering in eternal torment. Father would not rise as a draug, for such things inhabited their own corpses. But some other kind of ghost … perhaps. A fevered specter or wraith, watching as his son did naught to end his suffering.

  But then, whom could he take revenge against?

  No one in the village of Unterhagen had survived to tell the tale. When Father did not return from some secret meeting, Tyr had tracked him to the village. Odin followed with a small war band. The slaughter and savagery they found in Unterhagen suggested trolls—except trolls didn’t usually kill the women, preferring to claim them as wives. Men, women, children—all lay dead, battered and beaten, their corpses spread across the village.

  Odin had walked there in agonized torpor, fearing what he’d find. Unterhagen lay in a small valley, only nine homes cluttered in a wooded valley a few days from Eskgard. A snowstorm had swept in and blanketed the massacre, forcing Odin and Tyr and the others to dig through the snow to even find many of the corpses.

  And they had found them. No corpse could be left to rot, for fear of the draugar. So they had dug through the snow until at last they had found a severed head. Father.

  They burned the bodies of the freemen and slaves in three large pyres. But Borr was noble, of the line of Loridi, and thus deserved a funeral fit for such venerated blood. And so they brought what pieces of him they could find and waited. Waited while the other tribes braved the winter storms to come and pay last respects to the greatest of the Aesir.

  “You must speak to your guests,” Tyr said.

  Odin scoffed. He had questioned all he could, trying to learn who his father had gone to meet. Searching for an answer, searching for the path to vengeance. No one had those answers. Not the vӧlvur, whose useless visions told him less than naught. Not the jarls nor their thegns. No one.

  “You do not well remember the Njarar War—”

  “Of course I don’t fucking remember it. It was twenty winters back, I was four.”

  Tyr scowled at his interruption. “You may not remember it. I do. By the end, more than half the Ás tribes, the better part of all Aujum … it was drowning in blood. If not for Borr, Njord knows what would have become of this land. Your father ended the war. Brought peace between us.”

  Relatively speaking. The Aesir tribes still raided against one another, from time to time. Father did—had done—his best to direct their aggression back north, into Sviarland. Njarar was one of seven petty kingdoms there. Father had spoken more than once of turning from raids to conquest, of bringing the northern kingdoms under Ás control. He might have done it, too. But still, not all the Aesir cared overmuch for Father’s attempts to unite them. Some claimed the man thought he was Vingethor himself, thinking to be king. No one had stood as king since then, not in the five generations since the Great March out of Bjarmaland. Maybe no one would ever be king again. None of it mattered. Not compared to the weight on Odin’s shoulders. His first duty was to his father’s honor. Blood called out for blood, and he would bathe all Aujum in it to avenge Father.

  One of the other jarls must have planned this, tired of Father’s attempts to direct them—the slaughter, the barbarism, a mere ruse to distract from the truth.

  “Odin, you must see to the guests,” Tyr said. Persistent man, Odin would have to grant him that.

  Odin spat in the snow. “Yes. I will see to them, thegn.”

  “Hold them together. Hold the tribes together. Let Borr’s life mean something.”

  Odin lunged at him before he knew what he was doing, snatched up a fistful of Tyr’s fur cloak, and jerked the man closer. “His life meant something. It meant everything!”

  Tyr growled before he answered. “You are not the only one who loved him.”

  Oh. Oh no. Odin shook his head, almost choking on his rage. “He took you in. But he was not your father.”

  “I did not say he was. He was a great man. Many loved him for it. I ask you to be worthy of that legacy.”

  Odin shoved Tyr away and stormed off, back toward the town and his feast hall. The guests awaited.

  The jarls of the Hasding, Didung, and Godwulf tribes had come, though each sat apart from the others, surrounded by their own men and shieldmaidens. Smoke from numerous braziers choked the feast hall, mingling with the smell of roasting mammoth. Between the braziers and the press of bodies, the hall remained warm despite the freezing winds just outside.

  Lodur, jarl of the Diduni, clapped Odin on the shoulder and offered a solemn nod. Naught remained to say, really. Odin’s father had fostered Lodur for two winters, and in that time Lodur had tried often to best Odin in every feat of strength and arms. The Didung won oft as not, too. Lodur’s grief for Father was real, Odin had no doubt, but it was a candle next to the raging inferno consuming Odin.

  Odin wandered the hall, finding no solace in any who had once been his friends. He wanted neither friendship nor condolence. He wanted vengeance. He wanted blood. And to get it, he needed someone who knew something of Unterhagen and what had befallen it.

  Decrepit Jarl Hadding of the Hasdingi had no sons, so his daughter sat by his side, speaking to others about the great Borr. As if she might begin to imagine.

  Hadding’s long beard and longer hair had both gone gray, and Odin guessed the jarl had seen at least fifty winters, probably more. That was an age few men reached, and fewer still among warriors. A man of honor would have fallen in battle long ago. Hadding didn’t care for raids, always hiding behind his fortress walls. But that fortress, Halfhaugr, lay at the heart of Aujum. All the tribes came there to trade, to share stories, to take respite from the mist. And that meant many tales reached Halfhaugr.

  Trying not to glower, Odin stalked over to the table where the old craven sat. He almost tripped over one of the numerous elkhounds seeking warmth inside the hall. Grumbling, Odin ruffled the hound’s ears to show he meant no harm. Father always said, trust the hounds, that they smelled when aught was amiss—that’s when you brought out the iron. Iron to ward, iron to slay.

  Hadding lacked the stones to have betrayed Father. Ironic, that his weakness made him one of the few men here Odin had little reason to doubt. While the Wodanar—indeed, all the other tribes here today—migrated around Aujum every few years, the Hasdingi cowered behind their fortress, trusting in dverg runes and the goodwill of others to keep them safe. They had grown fat off Borr’s peace and would not have wanted that to end.

  Odin slumped down on the bench across from the other jarl. Hadding did not rise to greet him, instead clearing his throat with a thick cough.

  His daughter stood, though, and inclined her head. “Jarl Odin Borrson. You honor us.” She was young, clad in a vibrant green dress, h
er long, auburn hair worn in elaborate braids. What was her name again? Frigg?

  He inclined his head to her. He had imagined himself bedding her, at least briefly. But a jarl’s daughter was not like to give in easily, and he had no time for pursuing her. He had plenty of slaves to fulfill his needs.

  “We grieve with you,” Hadding said. Again the man coughed, slapping a hand to his chest. The thickness—it must already be filling his lungs. Odin pitied any man forced to endure such a death. One more reason to seek the end on a battlefield and find the embrace of valkyries. Dying like that, Hadding had naught to look forward to save the gates of Hel.

  “Thank you,” Odin said. The old man seemed almost sincere. Without Father’s watchful eye, other tribes might look to seize Halfhaugr for themselves.

  “Will you eat with us?” the girl asked.

  Odin motioned to a slave to bring him the drinking horn. He took a long swig of mead before handing it to the next man—one of Hadding’s thegns, no doubt, aging himself. The whole damned tribe would probably find themselves eating from Hel’s table within a winter or two. Odin cleared his throat. “Jarl Borr went to Unterhagen for a reason. Someone knows why, knows who he went to meet. I want information.” He thumped his forefinger on the pine tabletop. “I want it now. Father’s ghost has languished too long already. I feel his grimace cast upon us from the shadows.”