Drip. Drip. Drip.

One drop, one second. Almost like clockwork.

Drip. Drip.

Sixty seconds in a minute, three thousand six hundred in an hour. Eighty-six thousand four hundred in a day.

Drip.

Impossible to be sure without measuring, but assuming one drop equaled a minim, that meant five milliliters a minute or three hundred in an hour. A thousand in a liter: three and a half hours, give or take.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Six hours: one point eight liters. Twelve hours: three point six.

Seven point two liters per day.

Drip. Drip.

About two thousand six hundred and twenty eight liters per year. For one thousand years. So two point six megaliters, give or take.

Or, to put it another way, about one Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Drip.

The bowl was maybe fifteen centimeters wide inside the rim and slightly less than half a sphere. So maybe it could hold two liters. Meaning it would have to be emptied about four times a day.

Or, six hundred and fifty thousand times in total. Plus change.

Drip. Drip.

The bowl was stone, thick rimmed and heavy. Say about one kilo. Plus about another two when full. So a varying weight of one to three kilograms, held up at right angles from the body, all day every day.

For one thousand years.

Drip. Drip.

There was no way of measuring time, other than by the filling of the bowl. Sigmund’s phone was in his pocket, but he didn’t trust his shaking arms enough to reach for it. He should have thought about that earlier.

But he hadn’t.

His arms were trembling and his feet ached, legs and lower back threatening to go next. Even a chair would’ve been an improvement. Or some kind of really huge retort stand.

Anything.

He’d been working out the volume of the drips when the . . . thing had noticed his presence. Thin, bony claws reaching out and snatching at the hem of Sigmund’s hoodie, fast enough to make him shriek and jerk backward.

He hadn’t spilled anything, but it’d been close.

“Sigyn?” The thing’s voice was raspy and thin, a cold wind punctuated by a crackling bonfire.

“Um . . .”

The thing had gone still at the sound of Sigmund’s voice, blind eyes blinking up at the roof, withered claw desperately trying to grasp him again. But Sigmund had moved, and the chains strung across the thing’s chest and hips didn’t give much in the way of mobility.

“Hvar ert þú? Hverr ert þú?”

“Um, man, I’m sorry I don’t speak, like, Viking.” Sigmund wondered about the sense of trying to talk to a hallucination. Because that’s what this was, right? It had to be, didn’t it? Because this wasn’t Lain. Sigmund didn’t know where Lain was, but this thing didn’t look like him, didn’t feel like him. Plus, Lain, like, spoke English with a pretty strong Australian accent.

Except . . .

Except if it was a hallucination, why was it speaking Viking? Sigmund didn’t know Viking, didn’t even really know what language Viking would have been. Ancient Icelandic, maybe?

The next words the maybe-hallucination spoke were different again. That strange tongue that Lain had used once or twice that felt like a broken speaker and left an itch at the back of Sigmund’s throat.

“Uh, I don’t . . . I can’t do that one either. Um. Sorry.”

Sigmund thought the thing looked thoughtful at that, though it was a little hard to tell, and, besides, Sigmund was trying really, really hard not to look at it too much.

That hadn’t stopped it talking, though, and it’d been going nonstop ever since. A crackling, sibilant hiss, and Sigmund didn’t have to be a linguist to know the words weren’t nice.

He’d pushed the words and, worse, the occasional bouts of unhinged giggling to the back of his awareness. Behind the ache in his limbs and the maths in his brain and the stench and despair and the niggling feeling that he was forgetting something.

How had he gotten here, exactly?

More important: Why was he staying?

Drip. Drip.

Loki stayed because he had to. Sigyn had stayed . . .

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

(out of guilt)

. . . to be with her husband. Sigmund was staying because . . . ?

And actually, maybe that was the entire point. Lok—the thing was chained up, and suffering, and Sigmund couldn’t just leave it. That wasn’t how it worked, wasn’t how the story progressed. He’d picked up the bowl and now he was stuck here, watching it slowly fill up, trying to figure out the right combination of items to solve the puzzle so they could make it to the next cutscene.

So. Step one: take stock of his inventory.

Sigmund figured he had one set of house keys, one key to Lain’s car, one wallet, one phone-cum-flashlight-cum-calculator-cum-whatever-other-apps-he-had-loaded, his clothes, a pair of glasses, and one stone bowl of poison.

The puzzle involved freeing Loki from three sets of iron chains, preferably while not causing him any more undue facial burning.

“Oh,” Sigmund said. “Oh!”

“Hvat?” Loki was looking at him speculatively, or at least looking at the place where he thought Sigmund was. He was off by about two feet.

This was going to be tricky. It was obvious, really, but tricky. Was going to require some mad twitch and an über micro. Fortunately, Sigmund had both.

Loki’s jaw felt fragile under Sigmund’s fingers. Sharp beneath skin like damp cellophane.

“Hvat ert þú—?”

“Turn your head and don’t move.” Loki tried to move back, maybe just to be contrary, but Sigmund turned his face away again. “Face the wall or . . . the darkness or whatever.” Loki looked like he was going to argue again, so, “Just trust me, okay? Please?”

The jaw underneath his fingers was tense for one eternal moment, before relaxing. “Eins og þú vilt.”

That sounded affirmative, so Sigmund pulled his hand back—his fingers were slightly . . . damp, but he tried not to notice—and said, “Awesome.” He put the bowl down on Loki’s sunken cheek.

“Hvat?”

“Sorry, man, just gimmie a sec . . .” The bowl wobbled a little when Sigmund took his hands away, but it didn’t tip and it didn’t spill. He didn’t dare take his eyes off it, even as he unzipped his hoodie and pulled it off. It was an old favorite and had seen the inside of a few too many washing machines. Sigmund folded it over a few times, ending up with a somewhat flat lump roughly half a foot thick. It’d have to do.

Holding it in his right hand, he picked the bowl back up with his left. It was heavy, hard to get a grip on one handed, and Sigmund ended up lifting it by the rim, one finger pinched dangerously close to the liquid inside. Loki had just enough time to turn his head before Sigmund covered it with the folded hoodie.

“Sorry, sorry!” he said in answer to Loki’s muffled protest.

There was no really good way to time the next part. The drips were coming too fast. Sigmund counted them anyway, getting a feel for the rhythm. Then two deep breaths, then go.

Drip.

One hand braced against Loki’s arm in case he got any ideas about moving.

Drip.

Empty the contents of the bowl onto the chains. They were iron, and for one heart-stopping moment they did nothing, then—

Drip.

—that horrible sizzling sound, cut with the metallic tang of rust and the acrid smoke of burning cotton as the still-dripping poison soaked into the fabric.

Drip.

It wasn’t going to be enough. The poison was caustic but the iron was thick and it wasn’t enough. A roar of frustration and a harsh clang as Sigmund brought the stone bowl down against the chains, once—

Drip.

—twice—

Drip.

—three times and there! One final ringing snap and Sigmund was jerking Loki toward him, even as the god was scrabbling twisted fingers against his eyes, burnt by the first fumes of poison-soaked fabric.

Sigmund dropped the bowl and helped pull the ruined hoodie from Loki’s face, tossing it aside into the dark. For a moment after, nothing moved. Then Loki threw back his head and began to howl. Laughing. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but perhaps if any time was a time for mania, this was. Sigmund took a stumbling step back as the god stood, steady and lithe despite his withered form, the remaining chains sliding from his hips and ankles. When they hit the ground, they were no longer iron, and the pile of gore glistened in the gloom.

It was about now that it occurred to Sigmund he hadn’t planned for this part. He’d figured solving the bowl puzzle would be enough, but real life—even this current weird, warped version of it—wasn’t much like a game. Here, even the FMVs required his player input.

“Dude, we should like, go or something. Before . . .” He trailed off with an abortive gesture, unsure.

Then not-Loki looked at him, and Sigmund’s stomach turned to ice.

Loki—real Loki, not this parody of a thing—was huge and monstrous and weird but, despite all that, Sigmund had never actually found him frightening. All glowing dead eyes and stitch-swollen lips and jagged fangs and still he had nothing, nothing, on the monstrosity standing in front of Sigmund in this moment.

The one that said, “You got this far, boy. What will you do now?”

“What the fuck?” Sigmund stumbled backward as the definitely-not-Loki advanced toward him, steps sure and precise on the slippery roots of the World Tree.

“What will you do when cunning is not enough? When loyalty becomes a vice? When they come for you as well as him? And come they will. They always come.”

The thing wasn’t speaking English, not exactly. Actually, Sigmund wasn’t convinced it was speaking at all.

“Who the hell are you?” Another step backward. Into air this time, and Sigmund was falling, tumbling to the cave floor, roots slimy and warm against the skin of his arms.

The fall was short, but it hurt. Curled in terror on the ground and, oh Christ, those footsteps were still coming, were stopping in front of his head.

“Get up, boy, and stop sniveling.” Fingers like iron clamped around his wrist and Sigmund found himself jerked to his knees. He looked up.

“Oh, no. No. No. No.”

The thing was changing, its shriveled skin filling. Like water into a balloon, revealing a proud, handsome face; broad, strong shoulders; round, full breasts—

“Oh fuck no, not you!”

—and hips, and thighs, and a cascade of hair like rotting straw, and eyes as ancient and cold as glaciers.

Sigyn, the Victorious.

“Get up, boy.” She shook his arm, not gently, from where she still held his wrist. He tried to pull back but her grip was as inescapable as time, and his skin burned where she touched.

“You’re hurting me!” he cried, ashamed by his own weakness. Ashamed that Sigyn could see it.

“Of course,” she said, raising one dark eyebrow. “And you will hurt a thousand times worse before this is over.”

“Before what is over? What do you want?”

“For you to be ready, boy. Nothing more. You walk a road between a sun and an inferno. You must be ready for it. If you are not, they will destroy you.”

And that was the thing, really. Sigyn’s grip was iron, the bones in Sigmund’s wrist grinding together from the pressure of her fingers. The skin on his arm burned like he’d plunged it into liquid nitrogen, and the agony forced him to his knees.

Sigyn stood above him, cold and merciless. She was a goddess, he was just some mouth-breather from the IT department. Not even one of the cool ones, the ones that did the R & D. The biggest, hippest technology company in the world and all Sigmund had ever managed was to ask people with multiple PhDs in computer science whether they’d tried turning it off and on.

He was nothing. A Joe Nobody, one of the faceless white-collar masses, gristle in the mill of the corporate world. He wasn’t brave, he wasn’t strong, and he was so unfit zombies could’ve outrun him. Not to mention that he applied video games and comic books to real life as if they meant something, then got surprised when they didn’t.

He wasn’t a hero and he wasn’t a goddess and most important—

“I. Am not. You!”

“Really?” said Sigyn. “Then prove it.”

So Sigmund did.

He stood up.