The only thing worse than waking up was staying asleep.
Sigmund’s head hurt. His head hurt, and his eyes burned, and his throat tasted like sour wine and rotten foie gras. Lying in someone else’s bed in someone else’s house, and he was pretty sure the room was spinning. Spinning and shrieking, a klaxon saw blade that dragged between his ears until his hand, flailing outward in the darkness, found the vibrating glass brick of his phone and somehow managed to fumble the slider across to “off.”
Then silence. Utter, abject silence.
Not the murmur of the television or the hiss of the shower, not the clatter of the kitchen or the hum of Dad’s electric razor. Just nothing, an empty, soulless void. Because this wasn’t home, this strange, too-big bed in this strange, too-dark room. This was Lain’s place, Lain’s apartment. Some huge sterile nest perched atop a glass-and-steel pillar in the heart of Pandemonium, filled with too-hip furniture shipped in straight from New York, hand-chosen to present an image, a persona. The shell in a perfectly executed three-card monte of seduction, one with Sigmund at its heart.
It was a nice apartment, but it was a con. The same con as Lain himself, crafted from a CEO’s money and a god’s single-minded cunning.
And now it was Sigmund’s, and Sigmund was alone.
“Hnnurgh!”
Sitting up was almost worse than lying down, but only just. A glass of water and a torn-off silver blister pack of Advil stared back at Sigmund from the nightstand. He returned the expression for a moment, then drank the water, leaving the pills behind.
Even with his brain trying to claw its way out via his eyeballs, it still took Sigmund until halfway to the bathroom to realize he was hungover. That was new. New and unwanted. Definitely unwanted.
He’d had a lot to drink last night. A lot. Sigmund had never really considered himself much of a drinker, and especially not a drinker of wine. It’d always tasted a bit the same before, sort of like kerosene mixed with wood chips. Last night it’d occurred to Sigmund, sometime between the third course and the fifth, that maybe he just hadn’t been drinking the right sort.
In the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror was the one he’d always remembered. Brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. Overweight, under-shaved, forgettable in every detail.
Except that somewhere, beneath the surface, lurked the soul of a long-dead goddess. Sigyn, the Victorious. Wife of Loki and reshaper of Ragnarøkkr. She was quiet this morning—hiding from the hangover, maybe—but if he closed his eyes and felt, Sigmund could find her. An ice-cold core of certainty lurking down beneath the postadolescent anxiety and mishmashed pop culture.
When he opened his eyes again, all Sigmund saw was Sigmund. So he pulled off his T-shirt and kicked off his boxers, turning on the shower and stepping in under the ludicrously oversized spray. Like standing in the middle of a hot, soapy rainstorm, the smell of sandalwood and citrus exploding out from the sort of shampoo that came from shops selling that and nothing else.
With his eyes closed in the heat, Sigmund felt his headache receding, just a little. He stood there for far too long, waiting for the water to go cold and knowing that it wouldn’t. Back at home—at Dad’s home—Sigmund would get twenty minutes in the shower, tops, before the spray turned to ice. At Lain’s place—at Sigmund’s new place—luxury was indefinite, an endless waterfall delivered at perfect temperatures and perfect pressure, all controlled by nothing so gauche as taps but rather a large touchscreen panel set into the wall just beyond the glass. Sigmund’s perfect shower was already set and stored and fav’d, ready to be recalled with the touch of a single button.
Sigmund’s new life. Welcome to it.
Shower, toothbrush, hairbrush, shave. Afterward, the face in the mirror looked damper and less hungover, but otherwise unchanged.
Sigmund’s clothes were still heaped in haphazard piles in the walk-in, upended from plastic storage tubs and washing baskets since repurposed to carry comic books and video games. Remnants of a dozen trips back and forth, picking up Sigmund’s life from one place and shifting it to another. He dug around in the piles, finding an old pair of jeans and a caffeine molecule T-shirt hidden beneath the beige slacks and button-down shirt Sigmund had worn exactly once, exactly one lifetime ago.
Last December, at his dad’s behest, Sigmund had worn those clothes to the LB office Christmas party. That’d been the start of it, all the gods and all the madness. The first time Sigmund had met Lain, in his guise as Travis Hale.
The jacket Travis had been wearing that night was hanging up not two feet away. Tucked between bespoke three-piece suits and a cascade of designer scarves. Sigmund ran his hand along the fabrics, then made his way out of the bedroom, heading down the stairs and to the kitchen. A large Mondaine wall clock told Sigmund he was late for work. As he rummaged through the breadbox, it occurred to him he didn’t care.
The bread was handmade, the toaster lacquered red. Sigmund found jams in the cupboard, labeled with brown paper, with strange combinations of fruit he’d never heard of. He picked something red. It wasn’t strawberry, but it’d do.
The toast popped, he put it on a plate, grabbed a knife from the drawer, opened the jam, plunged the knife in and
(carved wood beneath his hands and fear curling in his heart, the smell of blood and burning, the sound of cracking tiles as, across the foyer, the gods themselves battled for the fate of all the world, slamming one another into the ground again and again and again, rage and fear and loathing, a thousand years of agony bursting forth into this one and final fight that raged on and on just beyond Sigmund’s grasp but not beyond the bitter tooth of the spear he held within his hands, the spear he took and raised and plunged through Baldr’s heart, through blood and bone, Sigmund’s hands that were not his hands, guided by something ancient and terrible and victorious, and Baldr-who-was-not, skewered through and lunging toward Lain and)
somehow, Sigmund was on the floor. He was on the floor, and the knife was on the floor, and so was a big long smear of
(blood)
hipster jam. All across the big white tiles, all up the shiny brown vinyl-wrap kitchen cupboards.
“Sh-shit. Shit. Shit sh-shit shit . . .”
Two months ago, Sigmund killed a man. Now he lived in a multimillion-dollar penthouse with that man’s ghost, curled up shaking and crying in a jam-smeared kitchen.
“J-Jesus. Fuck.”
Sigmund’s voice echoed through the emptiness, bounced back at him in time to the ticking of a railway clock. Alone, all alone. Because Lain had to do business and Dad was elsewhere and that left just Sigmund, fending for himself like the adult that he was. Which meant cleaning up the kitchen and getting to work. Not huddled here, trembling, because the drip, drip, drip of the jam from the counter looked like—
Like—
Like something else entirely.
Slowly, Sigmund pushed himself up the wall and off the floor. Slowly.
It took him a few tries, but he got there in the end.
----------------------------------------
He got to work, too. In the end.
It wasn’t a long walk from Lain’s— from their apartment. Maybe ten minutes, across Torr Mall and Osko Park, beneath the three huge stones that loomed, ominous and ancient, in front of LB HQ.
When he’d been a kid, Sigmund used to play games around those stones, racing his dad to the base. Later, as an adult, it’d become a meeting place for Sigmund and his friends, standing around holding coffees.
Now Sigmund could barely look at the bloody things. Not without hearing the echoes of a scream behind his ears, the not-quite scent of piss and shit and rot clinging to his nostrils.
Those stones hadn’t always been Lokabrenna’s logo. They used to be a prison, the groove in the top worn down by Loki’s withered body, the holes threaded through with the guts of his son, turned to iron and rubbing ugly raw bands across his chest and hips and ankles. Poison dripping from a snake, suspended somewhere up above, the only succor a single stone bowl, held for a thousand years by Sigyn’s patient hand.
Here, now, in the present, Sigmund ducked his head and hurried into the foyer.
Not that inside was much better. The blood had been bleached out and the tiles replaced, but Sigmund could still feel the battle. Some burned-out malaise that clung to the back of his throat, guilt and pain and blood.
He’d killed a man. Right there, where the grout gleamed bright and new. Sigmund could feel rune-carved wood beneath his palms. The weight of it. The slight resistance as it popped through Baldr’s skin and—
And people were staring. Sigmund was gulping air like a racehorse on Everest, and people were staring.
(breathe in, two, three, breathe out, two, three, breath in, two, three, breathe)
It wasn’t like he hadn’t walked across the foyer with Lain since the . . . since everything. Lain, who was a little bit Baldr and a little bit Loki, but was mostly himself, and who and who loved Sigmund with all the fire of the sun. Sigmund had killed Lain twice over and Lain thought of it as a favor, cracking jokes about his black heart and his gold heart, grinning his too-sharp grin as madness warred behind his poison eyes.
He didn’t blame Sigmund for what happened. So why was Sigmund blaming himself?
(there’d been bones. ribs. the spear shuddering as it)
The elevator chimed, and Sigmund stepped out.
So this was Sigmund’s life, now. Gods and blood and death. And then this, the LB IT Basement, located on the seventh floor, because of course it was. Just sunlight and the lush green of living walls. Rows of neat cubicles decorated with lines of Nintendo figurines, frozen in vignettes along the partitions. The hum of computers and the buzz of conversation, and desktop wallpapers showing square-jawed grizzled men holding oversized weapons, standing proudly in front of shrapnel and explosions.
Sigmund’s cubicle was located down the end of a row, between the window and an empty desk that had, briefly, belonged to Lain. The official story was that Lain had transferred somewhere upstairs, into one of the business departments. A nice, vague fiction, designed around Sigmund and his inability to lie. “Lain” had gone upstairs, and he did do business. And if no one asked for more than that, Sigmund wouldn’t have to tell them that upstairs meant the CEO’s office, and business meant running the company as Travis Hale.
Lain may have been a front, but he still came down to visit.
----------------------------------------
The morning was agony.
Sigmund spent it staring at his monitor with glassy eyes, trying to think through the pounding in his head and wishing desperately he’d downed the Advil.
The work queue mocked him. The same mindless tasks he’d been doing his entire adult life, mailboxes and profiles and passwords, and for the first time ever Sigmund didn’t know how to close a single one. At nine thirty-six, Divya started up a support call, too-loud, too-shrill voice using too many words to explain too few things, bouncing off the roof tiles and straight into what was left of Sigmund’s fractured nerves. Headphones blocked the sound but made his skull pound, and by nine-forty-eight Sigmund’s head was in his hands, bowed over his keyboard, trying not to shake or cry or scream without even knowing why.
Fuck. What was wrong with him?
He needed Lain. Things had been okay with Lain around. Because Sigmund would start to shake or blank or tear up, and suddenly Lain would be there, all bright and grinning, wanting to go get food or make out or play Mario Kart. And it was okay, with Lain around, because even if Sigmund could still smell the stink of melting tiles, could still feel the slick slide of Gungnir as it pierced into—
Christ. Christ, he was a mess. He was a mess, and Lain wasn’t here, and it was only ten oh-four, but Sigmund couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit here and give a shit about mailbox-fucking-restores when he’d crawled through the roots of the World Tree and killed a god with his own hands. And what was enduring Divya’s shrieking and Boogs’s coughing to someone who’d tasted the ash of Múspell on his tongue?
Sigmund was a goddess, for fuck’s sake. Or at least he had been, once. So what the bloody hell was he doing having a panic attack in his fucking cubicle?
No one looked up when Sigmund stood, nor tried to stop him on the way to the elevators. At the doors, he swiped the White Card against the reader. Not his usual pass card, the one with his name and photo that got him in on the ground floor. The White Card was something else, blank and unadorned, a gift from Lain that would take Sigmund up to the CEO’s suite, miles and miles above.
Sigmund made it all the way up without seeing a single soul. Not even Nicole Anne Arin, company VP and god in her own right, whose office shared the top floor. Her doors were closed when Sigmund passed, and stayed that way when he pushed against the brass LB logo on Travis’s.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
As befitting a CEO, Travis’s office was wonderful. A huge, quiet space in front of an enormous plate-glass window, looking out over the city. Sigmund threw himself into Travis’s oversized chair, spinning around to face the view and trying to get his twitching hands back under control. They wouldn’t stop clenching, itching in some way. Like they wanted to gouge or choke or shake.
Sigmund let them flex, feeling something within him calm as his eyes blinked against the sunlight glinting off the lake. Or traced the distant curve of the mountains. The sun was bright, the sky was blue . . . and things were all right. They were. Really. All right. Travis’s chair smelled like him, smelled like Lain. All woodsmoke and loam, and it wasn’t Lain himself, but it was close. Close enough.
(okay . . . I’m okay)
Sigmund’s eyes fluttered shut and he sat there, long enough to feel the stillness settle back into his life.
(shit happens, it happened . . . but I’m okay)
His eyes only opened to the feel of pressure and weight against his leg. When Sigmund looked, he saw the dark coils of an enormous snake.
“Hey, Boots.” Sigmund bent down, extending his hands and picking the snake up, draping her across his shoulders. Once upon a time, Boots had spent a thousand years dripping poison on a god. Now she lived in a huge, glass-free tank in said god’s mortal office.
“I’m all right,” Sigmund told her. She was a good snake, and he wouldn’t want her worrying. “I’m just . . . things are a bit . . .” But that road didn’t go anywhere he could think to travel.
Boots, being a snake, said nothing in reply.
----------------------------------------
Sigmund spent the rest of the morning in Travis’s office, playing video games on the couch. Travis’s TV was huge and, more important, it was connected to a prototype alpha of the next gen Inferno console. Sigmund convinced himself playing it was testing. For the good of the company.
He was sure Travis wouldn’t mind.
For her part, Boots stayed wrapped around his shoulders, half dozing, half hissing at the screen whenever Sigmund died or the console crashed. And if the former happened more than the latter? Well. The only witness was a snake. It wasn’t like she could tell anyone.
Then, sometime just before lunch, Sigmund found himself saying:
“I mean, they’re not bad people, y’know? Still the same gang they were before.” He fiddled with the Inferno’s controller, watching as, on-screen, his overarmored space marine ran in listless circles. “I mean, Divya’s still a pain, but that’s not really her fault. I guess.”
Boots gave what Sigmund took to be a sympathetic hiss.
“It’s just . . . They’re all so— so normal. How’m I supposed to, like, relate to them anymore? Over beers at the Temple or whatever. What’m I supposed to do? Swap stories about the funny time Lain got his horns tangled up in the washing line?” Sigmund grinned, though it faded quickly. “ ‘Cause, like. That was pretty funny. But not exactly something I can share with the rest of the Basement, y’know?”
On the TV, Sigmund’s marine scratched his ass in eighty-inch HD.
“It’s not everyone else that’s changed,” he said. “It’s me. I have this thing now, this . . . this secret.” Even if it wasn’t really a secret, at least according to Lain. Mortals don’t see the Wyrd, he’d always say. It’s not like on TV.
Or in books, even. Because Harry Potter had never prepared Sigmund for this. Had never mentioned what he was supposed to do, when the letter came from Hogwarts, but his family wasn’t a bunch of dicks. How he was supposed to manage fitting back into the Muggle world between school terms, the place where cars didn’t fly and no one could throw fireballs with their thoughts?
Then again, Sigmund had never read beyond the fourth book. Maybe they dealt with it later.
Maybe not. Maybe that was the trick, as Lain would say. There was no going home.
Sigmund gunned down a few more aliens, running between stacks of conveniently placed crates. An ill-timed sidestep landed him face-first on a frag grenade, and as the screen faded red, then black, Sigmund had to admit his heart just wasn’t in it.
The aliens looked a bit like Lain. Tall and dark-skinned, with big claws and glowing eyes. Lain would hate the comparison, but once Sigmund had seen it, the mindless violence of their murder somehow lost its, well. Mindlessness.
“Fuck.” Sigmund sighed, flopping his arms out and his head backward on the sofa, Boots a long, firm bolster beneath his neck.
He stayed like that for a while, staring at the ceiling, listening to the death screen’s music loop on the TV. Eventually, Boots’s face appeared in his vision, her long, dark tongue flicking out across his nose and cheek. It tickled, and Sigmund laughed, rolling up and away to escape.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I get it. No more moping. Fuck . . .” But he was laughing.
It was a start.
----------------------------------------
At twelve thirty-six, he got a text from Em:
› Where are you bro?
Then, before Sigmund had even started typing his reply:
› Meet us at Wayne’s in 10.
Sigmund’s best friends, Em and Wayne, former valkyries and current goths. Wayne was over six feet tall, made of muscle and cleavage and clothes that would make a postapocalyptic Disney princess weep. Em was about Sigmund’s height and weight, and wore the kind of pants that clinked when she walked. She also, between the hours of eight a.m. and four p.m., worked across the floor from Sigmund. Wayne, meanwhile, worked shifts at a comic store in between studying.
Both Em and Wayne had been to Hel and back for Sigmund. Literally. Twice. Which meant he wasn’t going to ignore Em’s order to meet up for lunch.
So he ditched Boots with a, “Sorry man, gotta go!” Then made his way out of the office.
Wayne’s comic shop wasn’t far, across the road and through the park. Down Torr Row and into Diamond Square. Metaverse Book and Comic [sic], wide and open and brightly lit, filled with neat shelves of trades and neat boxes of back issues, decorated by T-shirts and action figures.
Sigmund had been fourteen the first time he’d stepped into a comic store, trailing along behind a determined Em. Back in those days, the place had been a dingy hole-in-the-wall filled with dust and cobwebs. Sometime between then and now, comics had gone mainstream.
“Sig! Over here!”
Wayne, her dark-skinned face grinning beneath an explosion of pink synthetic dreadlocks. She was gesturing to the back of the shop, through the staff door, so Sigmund followed her. Out into a chaos of books and boxes, and Em, sitting on a milk crate and scowling.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Playing video games in Travis’s office,” Sigmund replied. Partly because lies made his teeth hurt but mostly because it was Em and Wayne.
“Where is he?”
“He went back to Asgard last night.” Sigmund took up residence against a filing cabinet. Wayne, meanwhile, had perched herself on a desk, huge boots swinging even as her hands clutched an oversized sketchbook.
Em made a noncommittal noise. “That’ll end badly,” she said. Em and optimism were only the most casual of acquaintances, but, more important, she also knew more Norse mythology than anyone else Sigmund knew, Lain included. So he didn’t think she was wrong so much as he was hoping for her predicted damage to be done in degrees. Small ones.
“So why the secret meet-ups in the comic shop?” he asked instead. Whatever trouble Lain was getting into, Sigmund couldn’t do much about it.
Em looked up. “We have a proposal for you,” she said, “and want to hear your thoughts.”
(uh-oh)
“What are my thoughts?”
“You love it, but we’ll get to that part in a minute. It’s about Gangleri—”
“Saga,” said Wayne.
“—whatever. It’s about the game. You know the Spark goes obsolete in a few weeks, so we don’t think there’s much point continuing with the dev. We’ve got a better idea instead.”
Sometimes, less and less frequently as the years rolled by, Sigmund cut code for a video game of his very own. Em did the writing, Wayne the art, and the three of them had been pecking at it for years.
Probably still would be, if not for the fact the console they’d developed it for was about to be replaced.
“Show me your better idea,” Sigmund said, hangover scratching behind his eyeballs.
“Promise you won’t freak out,” said Wayne, fingers tight around her sketchbook.
“Uh . . .” Sigmund said.
Wayne turned the book around.
Sigmund blinked.
Then blinked again.
“Well?” said Wayne.
“That’s me,” Sigmund managed, when Wayne’s wide, pink, anxious gaze got too much.
“Girl you,” Em corrected. “Rule 63.”
Except Rule 63 Sigmund already existed. Or, rather, Sigmund was already Sigyn’s Rule 63. But Sigmund knew for a fact he looked nothing like his past self. Not like the way the woman in Wayne’s sketchbook looked like him. She was even dressed in the sort of clothes he’d be dressed in, were he, too, an inhabitant of a dystopian cyberpunk future.
“Tell me her name’s not—”
“Her name’s Sigga,” Em said, confirming Sigmund’s fears. “She’s a mechanic, working for the Intra-Solar Mining Company. They build spaceships to ferry mining cargo between Earth and the other nine planets.”
“Pluto isn’t a planet,” Sigmund muttered. He wondered when the catch was coming.
“Never said the ninth planet was Pluto,” Em said. Then, “The way the ships work is a mystery; some technobabble about the flight calculations involved being too complex for a human, blah blah blah. Everyone assumes it’s an AI doing flights.”
“It’s not an AI,” Sigmund guessed.
“Correct. Our heroine, Sigga, via some plot quirk, finds out what’s really controlling the ships: a powerful psychic, imprisoned and permanently plugged in to the system. And, moreover, said psychic turns out to be—”
“Oh god,” said Sigmund. Appropriately, as it turned out, Wayne flipping the page in her sketchbook to reveal—
“Sigga’s childhood sweetheart, Luke.”
Except it wasn’t Luke, it was Lain. Naked and thin, blind and plugged in, wrapped and chained and tied by an HR Geiger nightmare in rusty Cat-6. And for a moment—just one moment—Sigmund was back in that awful cave beneath the World Tree. A dank, dark eternity of pain and degradation, standing with trembling arms and a hardened heart, waiting for the world to end.
“He hates it.” Wayne’s voice slapped Sigmund back into the present. “I told you he’d hate it.”
“I don’t hate it,” said Sigmund. He looked at Em. “I just— the point of the game?”
“Rescue the prince, obviously. Free him, take down the evil empire, get married, and live happily ever after, roll credits.” Em’s eyes were bright green chips behind her glasses. Watching.
Sigmund looked back at the sketchbook. There were other, smaller pictures scattered around the large central image of Luke imprisoned in his machine. Head shots showing him healthy, free of wires and cables. Smiling and grimacing. Afraid. And, in one larger image, sharing a passionate kiss with Sigga.
Sigmund swallowed. “Why?” he started. Then, “I mean . . . I just—”
“For her,” Em said. “For Sigyn. Because some thirteenth-century asshole didn’t think she was important enough to bother remembering her stories. I can’t get them back. But I can write her a new one.”
Something curled beneath Sigmund’s heart, the flutter of a second beat, not quite in time with his own.
“All right,” he said. “What do I need to do?”
----------------------------------------
Em wanted to go big-screen, to move off mobile and into living rooms and into desktops.
“There’s been a lot of movement in dev kits and APIs,” she said, leaning forward on her milk crate, elbows on her knees and hunger in her eyes. “We’ll need to pick one, and you’ll need to learn it.”
Sigmund nodded, chewing on his lip. “It’s a lot of work.” Em was talking an action RPG shooter. Guns and powers and inventory and crafting. Dialogue and companions and morality choices. It was big. Real big.
“No,” Em said. “It’s a little bit of work we have to do real fucking smoothly. Get one level down perfect—gameplay, story, characters—then we go pitch it to your boyfriend. Then he gives us Utgard, and we’re home free.”
Utgard Entertainment, one of the most prestigious video game companies on the planet and, not so coincidentally, a subsidiary of LB.
“What makes you so sure he’ll agree?” Something about Em’s plan didn’t sit right. It felt . . . cheap. Even if Sigmund was an adult and he knew this was how business was done, out in the Really Real World. Not the what you know but the who, and Sigmund just happened to be dating one of the biggest whos around.
“C’mon, man,” Em said. “It’s about his fucking wife. Of course he’ll agree.”
“That’s no—”
“He’s sentimental.” When Sigmund looked up, Wayne was twirling one long pink dread around her finger. “Well. He is, right? He has that painting of Sigyn in his office.”
“Yeah. So?”
“ ‘So’? Dooder, the painting’s not for him. He’s blind. It’s for everyone else, for their reactions.”
Sigmund opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. It would explain why the painting was so god-awfully ugly, all soft-focus oils set inside a carved gilt frame. Totally unsuited to the rest of the decor in the room, but that would make sense. If being conspicuous was precisely the point. And Lain—Travis, whoever—couldn’t see per se, but the Wyrdsight gave him a different sort of vision, one of emotion and of narrative.
“He wants people to think about her,” Wayne was saying. “Even if they don’t ask and he never tells, he doesn’t want her forgotten. And, if we do this”—Wayne gestured to her sketchbook—“she won’t be. At least for a little while.”
Sigmund looked at the sketchbook and he looked at Wayne. Then he closed his eyes, reaching down beneath his heart to find the ice.
(“you . . . your life is your own. you are not beholden to my shadow”)
When Sigmund’s eyes opened again, he locked gazes with Em.
“I’ll do some Googling,” he said.
“See.” Em was grinning, triumphant. “I told you you’d love it.”
----------------------------------------
They left the back room about ten minutes later, Wayne showing Sigmund more of her sketches, Em talking excitedly about themes and foreshadowing and quest structure. Sigmund nodded and said “uh-huh” and tried not to think too hard about the giant wall of effort looming ahead of him, taunting him with all the things he didn’t know about game programming. Art was art and story was story, meaning Em and Wayne’s gear shift wasn’t really much of one at all, as far as Sigmund could see. But his, on the other hand . . .
Still. His friends believed in him. It was hard not to believe in them in turn. Meaning he was just as excited when he pushed open the staff door, head turned to Wayne and saying something about thematic color schemes when his foot stepped out and landed not on utilitarian tiles, but rather in a three-inch-deep pile of ash and rot.
For one terrible, awful second, Sigmund felt the gyre turn.
(no no no not again . . . )
Two months ago, during the end of the world, the land of the dead had invaded Pandemonium. Sigmund had been caught up in it, crawling through a crumbling nightmare of draugar, of fears and neuroses made into bruised and glistening flesh.
The Helbleed had swallowed the city, but Lain healed the Wound and had supposedly set things right.
Except not. Not when the lights in the comic store flickered and rivulets of black ink seeped from the covers of the trades. Sigmund’s heart shuddered and his hands clenched and he couldn’t. Not again. Not ever again, with the stink of meat in his nostrils and the grit of ash against his eyes and—
—and there was someone in the store. Something. A tall, dark shape, standing by the counter.
“Uh . . .” said Em. “Guys?”
“It’s real,” Wayne said. “Sig, what—?”
The dark figure turned at the sound of their voices. Sigmund saw twisted horns and black feathers. A rich brocade robe with sleeves that trailed to the ground yet left shriveled black corpse-flesh exposed on the creature’s belly and thighs and scaly, raven-clawed legs. A black silk veil—embroidered with a symbol that could’ve been an eye but might have been a barrow—covered the upper part of the creature’s face, obscuring eyes and nose and revealing only the broad, skeleton grin of jag-edged teeth beneath.
Frozen beneath the regard of those hidden eyes, Sigmund startled when he felt Em’s hand wrap around his elbow. “Dude!” she hissed, leaning close into his ear. “That’s Hel. It is, right? It’s her?”
Sigmund blinked, then exhaled. The crea— Hel was still there, looking at them from across the crumbling store. Because Em was right, it was her: the queen of the dishonored dead, in the black and twisted flesh.
Half beautiful woman, half corpse. That’s how the stories went. Sigmund couldn’t see any of the former, hidden as it was beneath black fabric.
Funny how everyone always assumed it would be the corpse-skin Hel would cover.
(“the living rejected her, and so she rejected them in turn”)
Sigmund swallowed down his fear and began to walk forward. As he did, Hel bowed, just slightly.
“Stepmother,” said a voice like the last light of midwinter. Hel turned slightly to Em and Wayne, repeating the incline of her head. “Honored valkyrjur. I am Hel Lokadóttir, keeper of the dishonored dead. You know me, I think.”
Sigmund had no idea how Hel was forming the words without lips. Yet there they were. It wasn’t magic; she was speaking heavily accented English, and he could see her jaw and throat work when she spoke. Could see the flick of her black tongue and—
He should probably stop staring. It wasn’t like he’d never seen a jötunn before, and up close, Hel didn’t even look that different from her father. Thinner, female. Ravens and bone instead of flames and vultures. But obviously related.
Sigmund’s heart slowed. “Um,” he said. “Yeah. Uh . . . hi.”
She’d called him “Stepmother,” and Sigmund felt the echo of Sigyn’s love at the words. Hel might’ve been a seven-foot-tall grinning fanged skullmonster who spread rot and entropy with her very presence, but she was family. Alive family, at that.
“You, um. You look . . . well?” Sigmund tried. The last he’d heard, Baldr had dismembered Hel and scattered the chunks across the city.
It was hard to tell, but Sigmund thought he saw Hel’s cheeks twitch beneath her veil. It might’ve been a smile. He hoped it was a smile. “And you,” she said. “Forgive me my intrusion, I would not normally come into your Realm, lest dire business drew me from my own.”
“Uh.” Sigmund pushed his glasses up his nose, wondering if he should offer Hel a cup of tea. “Lain’s, uh. He’s not here, sorry. He went back to Asgard last night.”
“Yes.” Hel nodded, a slight incline of her head that sent black feathers ruffling. “I know this. But it is not Father with whom I wish to deal.”
“Oh,” said Sigmund, and got halfway through wondering what Hel could possibly want with him when she added:
“It is your friends whose aid I seek.”
“Oh.”