Wayne tried not to stare. She really, really did. Not in the rearview mirror and not directly, either. And it totally wasn’t her fault if she had to take a lot of left turns, and that meant a head check via the passenger side. Just because they were stuck in some grotesque, depopulated hellscape didn’t mean she was free to forego all the rules of the road. And if, during said head checks, she just happened to linger over the . . . being in the passenger seat, just a little. Well. Who could blame her?
Holy crap, she was driving in a car with a god.
Like, an actualfax, (dis)honest-to-himself, blood and fire god.
As a little girl, Wayne’s father had told her the stories of the land, of the Dreaming and the spirits and the ancestors. Of mighty Wollumbin and wise Dirawong. Her mother, meanwhile, taught her yoga and meditation, chakras and karma, yin and yang and the Horned God and Triple Goddess.
Growing up in Nimbin, New Age neopagan religious syncretism was in Wayne’s blood, and she believed it. All of it. But there was a difference, she was learning, between believing in the abstract and having a seven-foot-tall personified force of nature sitting within arm’s reach.
Wayne wasn’t too down with the Norse mythology—that was more Em’s area of expertise—but she did know enough to know that Loki was kind of an asshole. And dangerous. Flame and earthquakes all the way down, and he felt it, in some indescribable way. The faint scent of smoke and earth, and the way his feathers (feathers!) seemed to flicker in the gloom.
Also, he was dating Sigmund. What was up with that? Not that Wayne was ragging on Sig or anything. He was a nice guy, and cuter than he gave himself credit for in a chubby, adorkable sort of way. But still. A god? Really?
The next time Wayne didn’t quite look at Loki, he was grinning, leather stitches pulled tight against dark lips, sharp white canines peeking through the gaps.
“Next left,” he said, his voice somewhere between the rumble of a cave-in and the roar of a bushfire.
Wayne obliged, watching the car’s headlights slice through darkness that seemed almost like a living thing. The streets were hard to recognize, some mad artist’s dream of bleeding signs and dead trees carved from obsidian, hung with bones and feathers. When Wayne caught sight of houses, they were squat and ugly things, too close and too identical, a copy-paste nightmare of windows like black sockets and doorways shattered open in silent screaming.
Wayne had given up asking where Loki was taking them. There were only so many times she could deal with his smug grin and cryptic bullshit answers.
The thought that this may have been a terrible idea had occurred to her, multiple times.
Following Loki’s directions, Wayne took two more left turns, then a right. Out onto a two-way four-lane highway that she almost recognized, bar the garlands of rotting viscera hanging from the streetlights.
From the backseat, Wayne heard, “Why Sigmund?”
Em, who did not believe in gods or monsters or spirits or magic, and had been looking sick and pale and hollow for a while. This was the first thing she’d said since getting in the car.
Loki replied: “He’s my wife.”
“Bullshit. Sigyn’s your wife.”
Which earned Em something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “She died. Sigmund has her soul.”
(wait, what)
“No,” Em replied. Her voice was still thready, but Wayne could hear the strength creeping back into it. “No, that’s not how this works. Sigmund is Sigmund. Don’t try to tell me this is all some predestined star-crossed-lovers crap. What’s the real reason?”
Loki was silent for a moment, claws drumming on the car door. Wayne could see the end of his tail, flicking where it was curled awkwardly over the dash. Finally, he said, “He makes me honest.”
(did he just say that Sig is a)
Wayne heard Em shift in her seat. “If you hurt him,” Em said, “it won’t be just a goat you’ll find your balls tied to this time.”
“Duly noted.” Loki gestured for Wayne to turn right.
“And all of this?” The sharp staccato of Em’s rings, tapping against the window, echoed the sound of the car’s indicator.
“Bad timing,” Loki said. “Ásgarðr wants me dead, and their king is prepared to break reality to do it.”
“Odin?”
“No. The next one.”
The conversation seemed to make sense to Em, and she said, “You fucked the Ragnarok?”
“Sigyn did.”
“Go her.”
From the corner of her eye, Wayne saw Loki smile.
Then Em asked, “Who is she? Sigyn, I mean. None of her stories survived.”
Loki closed his eyes, their faint glow vanishing behind dark lids. “No, they didn’t. She was a girl, a mortal. That’s all,” he said, in a voice that meant anything but. “The motherless daughter of a shipbuilder, who grew up doing the chores of ten men and dreaming of the lands along the trade routes. Places she knew she’d never get to travel as wife and mother. One day she found a falcon in the forest, broken and fallen from the sky. She nursed him back to health, and in turn he made her a goddess.”
“Did he take her traveling, too?”
“At first,” Loki said. Wayne heard him shift in his seat. “Not as much as he should have.”
“And this time?”
When Wayne flicked her eyes to the mirror, she saw Em’s face lit from below by the pale light of her phone. Taking notes, and maybe Sigyn’s story wouldn’t stay so lost, after all.
Assuming they survived this. Whatever it was.
“This time,” Loki started. “This time . . . we’ll see. Turn left, pull up beside the fence.”
The latter to Wayne, and she obeyed. “We here?”
“We’re here,” Loki said. As soon as the car stopped, he opened the door and spilled himself out onto the street, groaning and stumbling as he unwound, cursing in a language that wasn’t English.
Wayne shared one last look with Em before following, stepping out onto asphalt that felt like taffy under her boots.
Loki was standing a short distance away, lacing his claws through a rusted, chain-link fence. It ran parallel to the road, indecipherable signs decorating it at regular intervals.
Wayne knew what those signs said. The roads had been hard to follow, but, now they’d arrived, the destination was unmistakable.
Golgotha Hill: the huge barren heap of gray shale, rising from the city, its only feature a lone dead tree.
It was a slag heap, or so the story went. Back from the town’s old mining days and stubbornly resistant to any form of rehabilitation. The city tried every decade or so; the last push in the late 1990s, spurred on by paranoia over toxic metals in the soil.
But the land wasn’t toxic. It was just . . . dead.
And creepy. Major creepy. Wayne had come up here in first year, jumping the fence and getting reference photos for a project. She’d felt the vibe in the air then, a hum beyond hearing and the taste of tin on her tongue. It’d been bad enough back in the real world, here it was—
“You . . . you feel that too, right?”
—bad enough to affect Em, even.
“Yeah,” Wayne said. “I feel it.”
They walked over to where Loki was threading his claws through the mesh. Wayne could feel the heat radiating from him, see the way the metal was glowing, white-hot in the darkness.
Wayne felt Em’s hand close around her elbow. “Look!” she hissed.
Wayne saw. And heard, a moment later when Loki pulled, wrenching a huge chunk of the fence free. He looked from the piece in his hands to the hole and back again, then grinned.
“Cool.” The still-glowing section clattered as he threw it aside. Then he turned and said, “Ladies. After you.”
The edges of the hole were also glowing, and Wayne could feel the heat as she dashed through, hoping nothing molten dripped on her skin.
Em was next, nearly crawling. When she made it she said, “I thought the fire thing was a mistranslation.”
Loki didn’t bother with the ducking routine, the tips of his feathers brushing hot metal. “It’s what people believe,” he said. “Where and why is less important.”
“Clap your hands if you believe in fairies,” Wayne muttered, getting a sharp-toothed grin in response.
They followed Loki up the hill, ground crunching under their respective boots and claws. There was a trail, of a sort, and they kept to it, weaving in and out as the ground got slowly steeper and more treacherous. It wasn’t quite like Wayne remembered, less rocks and dust and more fragments of something, pale and broken. And breaking further still beneath their feet.
Wayne figured out what it was after a good five minutes of silent trekking,when she saw her first skull. Crushed under Loki’s claw as he ascended.
“Dooder,” she hissed to Em, “we’re walking on bones.” Shattered and scattered in the darkness it wasn’t so obvious what they were. Until Wayne’s eye caught against the edge of a jawbone or a pelvis.
So many bones. An entire mountain of them.
“Very astute,” came Loki’s voice, too sharp and too loud. “The bones of the dishonored dead, to be precise.”
“We shouldn’t be walking on other people’s bones.” Wayne skipped her way around another skull, or part thereof. “It’s, like. Rude.” Desecrating the dead. That was bad business everywhere.
Loki waved a claw, a shrug flickering across his feathers. “If you know an alternate route to reach our destination, by all means, point it out.”
“Where is ‘our destination,’ exactly?” Wayne was climbing a hill made of bones and her patience for bullshit was wearing thin. They were supposed to be finding Sigmund. Not . . . doing whatever this was. Wasting time. “What are we doing here?”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“The man chasing me is very, very hard to kill,” Loki said. “We’re here to retrieve something that may help us do it.”
“Mistletoe?” Em suggested.
Loki huffed. “No. But close.”
“I thought mistletoe was the only thing.” Then, to Wayne, “The guy Firecrotch here is worried about, Baldr, mistletoe is, like, his kryptonite.”
Hero with one weakness, right. Except Wayne worked in a comic shop, so, “Superman’s vulnerable to magic, too.”
“Exactly,” said Loki. “Mistletoe doesn’t exactly grow on trees around here. But I stole something else, after Ragnarøkkr, and hid it up this way. If we’re lucky, it’ll still there.”
“What is it?” Em asked. “The sagas don’t mention it.”
Loki’s grin was bright and vicious against dark lips. “They do,” he said. “If you know where to look.”
----------------------------------------
Wayne wasn’t sure how long they walked. She tried checking her phone once or twice, but the screen kept showing things like 89:29 and 00:00 and he:lp. She gave up after the third or fourth time.
The hill got steeper as they ascended, the bones more treacherous. Em slipped a few times, once ending up with skinned palms and a bruised knee. After that, she steadied herself against Wayne’s elbow, breath coming hard and steps uncertain.
“I’m not cut out for this adventure game bullshit,” she said.
“Not long now,” Loki replied, featureless eyes peering into the darkness, his flicking tail sending little rockfalls of bones cascading down the hill.
Wayne was fairly sure he was getting more and more anxious the farther up they got. Down at the bottom, he’d been standing upright, striding forward. Here, he was hunched over almost, head scanning around, looking for something. After she’d noticed that, Wayne had tried to find it too, eyes straining out beyond the darkness. Light here was about as nonfunctional as time, a dull glow that seemed to come from nowhere and extend only a few feet out in all directions, centered on their party alone. It didn’t make sense, but at least that was consistent.
Things didn’t improve when Wayne started hearing shuffling in the darkness or seeing bonefalls not started by any of their feet. “I think we’re being followed,” she said eventually, voice barely a whisper.
Loki didn’t bother with the same in his reply. “Draugar,” he said. “They’re all around us, but they’re afraid. They won’t come close.”
“Afraid of what?” Wayne played video games, she knew what the word meant, even if she’d never heard it pronounced out loud quite like that before.
“Us,” Loki said. Then, “Look up.”
Wayne did.
At first, all she could see was darkness; just a featureless swathe of black. Then, when she blinked, when her eyes adjusted to the not-light . . .
“Are they . . . branches?”
Either branches or cracks, a different sort of shadow, crazing between the abyss that hung above.
Em said, “The World Tree.” Her voice was hushed, reverent. Wayne had never heard Em speak like that before. “It is, isn’t it?”
Loki nodded. “We’re close to one of its roots,” he said.
“Hel,” Em muttered. Then, louder, “This is Hel, isn’t it? That’s why it looks like this.”
Golgotha Hill, barren but for one dead ash tree, and the suburb around it that seemed cursed with some sort of malignant genius loci. A place where the veil between the worlds was thin, and not all realms were Narnia.
“Niflhel,” Loki corrected. “Where dead things too broken and forgotten even for my daughter’s hall come to rot.”
Above her, Wayne could hear the branches shift, hear the creak of ropes as a million hanged men swung for all eternity. Hear the flutter of feathers and cawing of ravens as they picked the bodies clean.
“Join us, sisters. Feast with us once more!”
A sharp tugging at her elbow. Em, stumbling on the bones, and Wayne caught her, pulled her upright again.
“Th-thanks, man.” Em’s eyes were wide, a thin sheen of clammy sweat covering her skin.
“Just hold tight. We’ll get there.”
Fear, that’s all it’d been. Too many gods and monsters, and Wayne was hearing things, was imagining things. She had to be. She couldn’t see the Tree, not that well. Not well enough to make out birds or bodies and . . .
And it’d been a long day, that’s all. Maybe it still was. Maybe Wayne’d fallen asleep in front of the Inferno, bowl of ice cream balanced on her stomach and Em sitting with the controller not two feet away. In a little while she’d wake up, maybe make a few sketches of Loki (he’d be great for her character-design class), then suggest they play Mario Kart. Wayne could really go for some Mushroom Kingdom right now. Fewer dead things.
This time, it was Wayne who tripped, the toe of her boot catching something solid. Em kept her from landing face-first into someone else’s skull, and when Wayne looked behind her she saw a dark shape, rising from the bone.
It took her a moment to recognize it as a tree root.
“We’re getting closer,” Loki said. “Be careful.”
The roots made the ground less even, but they also made it less prone to bonefalls. As they picked their way along the wood, Wayne realized she could make out a shape looming up ahead. A tree. The Tree, no bigger than the one Wayne had taken photos of, the last time she’d been up here in the real world. No bigger, and yet big enough to hold every Realm, cradled in its branches.
“Damn,” said Em, peering upward.
A moment later, they were beneath it, within touching distance of the trunk: no wider than a person, with the circumference of the solar system.
There were bodies hanging from the branches. And birds, silent and watching. Ravens, big and black and looming. Maybe a dozen of them.
Behind her, Wayne heard the sound of feet, crunching over bone.
“Uh,” she said. “Guys?”
Loki called them draugar, and said they were afraid. Wayne could see them, now, just outside the circle of visibility. A horde of not-quite-human shapes, shuffling toward them.
They didn’t look afraid. They looked like they were waiting.
“The Dead God comes! Our Lord returns, and all the living shall cower in his shadow!”
“What the fuck!” Em’s head whipped around. “Wayne. Wayne did you—”
“I heard it. It’s real.” When Wayne looked up, a dozen dead white eyes peered back down.
No, not a dozen. Eleven. Thirteen minus two . . .
“Em, what—?”
But it wasn’t Em who answered. Instead, Loki said, “Valkyrjur, choosers of the slain, bound to Odin.”
Wayne looked up again. The things that stared back down were, she thought, looking less and less like ravens as she watched. The only thing they looked less less like were busty opera singers in horned helmets.
“He wants what I’m here for,” Loki continued. “His weapon, Gungnir.”
Em said: “I thought Odin was dead.”
“He is.” Loki wasn’t looking at them. He had one hand against the trunk of the Tree, the other picking at his biceps. Reopening a wound there, then using the blood to draw runes into the bark.
Around them, bones shifted as malformed shapes drew closer.
Wayne felt her stance opening, her fists raising. “Odin’s weapon,” she said. “It’s a spear, right?”
“Yeah.” Em was very close. Wayne could feel her friend’s heat against her back.
“I’m pretty good with spears.” And she’d always loved King of the Hill matches.
She expected Loki to argue, to make some excuse about magic artifacts not being suited for mortal hands. Instead, he said: “Yes. Be ready.” Then he plunged his claws into the Tree, as if it were no more solid than a hologram, sickly light gushing from the wound as, all around them, the draugar howled.
Then pushed forward.
This was when it mattered, when the ten thousand hours counted. When Wayne’s fist sank into slimy flesh that popped like a pimple from the strike, reeking black filth exploding up her arm.
She didn’t have time to recoil in revulsion, because a second draugr was lurching toward Em. A boot against its chest sent it backward, but then the first was on its feet again, closing in despite the ruined mess that had once been its head. That had probably been its head. At least, the lump at the top of its body.
The draugar were like that. Misshapen men formed by a child’s hands, crafted out of rotted flesh. No two were alike, with some parts that could be limbs and some parts that could be heads and, worst of all, some holes that looked like screaming mouths or ruined eyes.
Some of them had bones, too, but protruding, shattered things. Spikes and claws and teeth. Nothing internal, and Wayne’s fists and feet tore off limbs and split open torsos with all the resistance of wet clay.
Still the draugar came.
At one point, Wayne heard a roar beside her and, when she looked, saw Em standing there, brandishing a black-gored femur like a club.
“There are too many of them!” Em took another swing, sending another draugr stumbling backward, head split open like a flower.
“Keep fighting,” Wayne replied. “Just a little longer.” She hoped.
Loki was behind them, chanting, still elbow-deep in light. Whatever he was doing, Wayne hoped he did it quickly. Her knuckles were stiff and her limbs ached, and she wasn’t sure how long she could fight. This wasn’t like training. Training was hard and it was brutal but it was structured. Safe. It wasn’t standing on a pile of bones, tearing apart monsters lest they do the same to her. Training was air-conditioning and water bottles and laughing with her friends. Not the stink of rotting flesh and the sound of a god slicing reality open like a surgeon.
Five draugar down. Seven. Ten. Dislocated parts squirming on the ground around Wayne’s feet, reaching for her even as Em darted in and out to kick them back. Still more came, a dozen at least that Wayne could see, and who knew how many behind that. An endless tide of black decay, as inescapable as the thing that made them.
And, somewhere out past the shadows, a single mad red eye. Watching.
On the twelfth draugr, Wayne stumbled. Catching her foot against a root and going down in a spray of teeth and flanges. She heard Em scream her name, then howled herself as an ill-formed limb slammed against her side. The world spun, jagged bone tearing her clothes and skin, and when Wayne skidded to a halt it was by slamming into a pile of severed, grasping flesh.
From somewhere else, Wayne heard Em cry: “No! Help her!”
She tried to struggle upright, but her ribs ached and her arm and leg were pinned beneath damp and stinking deadweight.
“If she’s your sister then fight for her! Odin’s dead, your oaths mean nothing.”
A draugr loomed above her, arms like clubs raising, ready to strike. Wayne kicked out with her free leg, and the thing stumbled—
“This means something! Your sisters mean something! Help us, please!”
—but didn’t fall.
Then its arms came down, and Wayne closed her eyes, bracing for the blow.
The blow that didn’t come. Instead, Wayne heard the shriek of war and drum of wings, felt feathers and wind against her skin. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was black. A writhing, flapping, living mass of black as the beasts from the branches of the Tree descended on the draugar.
Close up, they really didn’t look very much like ravens.
Helped by beaks and claws, Wayne pulled herself free from the flesh pile and stood up. Her side still ached and each breath was a lance, but cracked ribs were nothing new. She kept her breathing shallow, controlled, darting back around to where Em was standing, clutching her femur and watching the carnage.
“What did you do?”
Em blinked, pushing her glasses up her nose as if she hadn’t realized Wayne was there. She was staring at something else, something just behind Wayne’s head. “I think . . . I think I pissed off Daddy,” Em said.
Wayne turned, just as a sound like collapsing metal tore across the hill.
“Jesus what the fuck!”
The red eye, the watcher.
(the Dead God rises)
It wasn’t watching anymore. It was coming toward them, screaming its rusted scream, just the impression of tattered cloth and a broad-brimmed hat. And, somewhere underneath, the clicking whirr of a dozen metal legs, scrambling through the bone.
“Jesus Christ,” said Wayne.
“Nope,” said Em. “Guess again.”
The thing screamed a second time, then lunged, and when it did the raven beasts scattered, taking to the air and vanishing like smoke, leaving fleshy ruins in their wake.
In the distance, beyond the carnage, more draugar gathered.
For a moment, one single eye turned toward her, and Wayne felt herself freeze beneath its light.
“Return, daughters of death. Your flock awaits yo—”
It never finished, that awful, gallows call cut off midsentence by a cry of: “Motherfucker!” And a flaming ball of feathers, leaping overhead.
When Loki landed, fire exploded in his wake, sending flesh and gore blazing. His leap sent the Dead God flying too, and it scrambled to right itself amid the flames.
Loki was holding a spear. A huge pole, carved with runes and hung with feathers, the point made from what Wayne would have sworn looked like an enormous, sharpened tooth. A dinosaur tooth.
“Take it!” he said, eyes and tattoo burning in the darkness. “Take it and go. To LB, to Sigmund!”
Wayne’s fingers had just closed around the wood, words forming on her lips, when suddenly Loki was gone; thrown backward as the Dead God hit him, the scythes of its limbs raised and thrashing, the “fabric” of its robe burning with a stink that would see Wayne boycott bacon for a year.
Loki howled as one of the limb scythes punctured him through the side, and his voice became a firestorm, throwing the Dead God back.
Beneath them, Wayne thought she felt the ground begin to shake, bones cascading down on every side.
“C’mon! You heard him. Move!” Fingers closed around Wayne’s elbow, Em tugging them away from the Tree and the struggling gods. Out into the darkness, with the draugar, but Wayne had Gungnir now, and she could feel its power. Feel the song of war, coursing through the wood. She could feel the bloodlust rising.
“C’mon!”
“Right.” Wayne shook herself, head feeling hot and strange. Magic artifacts. There was always a price.
Dragged along in Em’s wake, Wayne fled. A mad half run, half slide down the shifting heap of Golgotha, lit now by the red glow of the corpse fire. A draugr lurched in front of them but Wayne was ready, striking it with the haft of the spear, popping its wet and fleshy sac. Behind her, she heard a howl of pain, and the ground shook once more. When Wayne turned, she saw Loki, pinned to the trunk of the World Tree by the Dead God’s blades.
“Move!” Em said again, but Wayne had hefted Gungnir and turned back toward the Tree.
“We can’t just leave him!”
“But—”
Then Loki raised his head, turned their way, and said: “Fly, you fools!”
“See!” Em was still clutching the femur, slamming it into the head of another draugr. “He said the Gandalf words! Time to go!” Her hand was still on Wayne’s arm, still pulling toward the bottom of the hill.
Pinned to the World Tree, quoting The Lord of the Rings. Wayne sure as Hel hoped Loki knew what he was doing. She hoped as she slid down the tumbling bones, ribs burning, draugar flying, Gungnir clutched between her fingers and Loki’s curses echoing in her ears.
Curses against the Dead God, not Gandalf things to say at all. Things more like, “Fuck you, you oath-breaking motherfucker! Fuck your oaths and your order and your golden fucking age. You’re nothing. A ghost, a memory. A half-forgotten legend. But not me. I won. I’m motherfucking Loki and I motherfucking won. I survived. You didn’t. So just. Fucking. Die.”
And then the last thing Wayne heard as she tumbled down the hillside. That awful, hollow corpse voice saying:
“No. You did not. You are deceived.”
Then nothing but the fall of bone.