In the shadow of the serpent wall, the junk rose in high mountains plagued by falls and avalanches. Asmundre followed his father down a crevice, ducking beneath a protruding spar of metal that his father strode under without hesitation. Life in the junk did not come easy. Asmundre let the metal fingers on his gauntlet trail along the sides of the crevice, tracing over broken and burned plate armor and the discarded remains of countless machines. In distant lands, where the shadow of the wall didn’t fall across the land, people grew their own food in open dirt.
Or so he’d heard. How they could gather enough dirt in one place to grow more than Lilian’s little tomato plant, he could not fathom. Here on the junk, dirt was the grit that caught in the tight corners, and even a handful meant a dangerous trek into the depths of Valhalla’s junkyard. What arrived from those distant lands went to the wall above. Only the scrap they recovered from the junk could buy he and his father and Lillian enough to eat.
“Watch here,” his father said, pointing with two fingers to a wedge of metal on their left that protruded from the crevice wall, one lattice work arm stretched across their path. The bulk of it loomed over them, a chunk of deteriorating sheet metal full of wires and cogs and black hoses, made taller by the man standing beside it. His father was short and stout, made rounder by the powered suit that encased him. The suit was a blood mech. Not a big one, of course. Barely bigger than the man himself. But it gave his father a strength no ordinary man should have, and it was heavy as hell. “Rust,” his father said. “Cheap iron. The core of this machine will be modern. Useless.”
Asmundre nodded. He had come to the same conclusion when he saw the shape of the machine in the rubble a dozen paces away. Too blocky, too regular. The mech couldn’t fix his father’s eyes though. Good iron was hard to come by, and only found deep down. The real prize - the scrap - would be at the bottom, the same place as the dirt.
“Some kind of excavator, I think.” His father scratched his chin with a metal encased hand. “Would have been useful here, you think? Shame they just throw them out.”
“Wasteful.”
His father clambered over the extended arm of the excavator and pushed on. “Aye, wasteful. But their waste is our life. Good iron is hard to come by. This stuff - well, there’s plenty of it. Think of how much is up there in that wall. These scraps at the bottom hardly seem significant compared to that, do they?”
Asmundre resisted the urge to look up at the wall, keeping his eyes on the path instead. He used his gauntlet to steady himself as he climbed over the excavator’s arm. The path narrowed, pitched upward, their course taking them closer to the sheer steel face that divided the homeland from the realm of the Jotnar. They might find the ancient scrap at the base of the metal mountains, under eons of discarded machinery, but the fresh junk could also be valuable if they got to it first. Sometimes the new machines even still worked, and something had fallen off the wall early that morning with a crash that echoed for miles.
“You know what made the base of this wall?”
Now Asmundre could not stop himself - his gaze climbed up, and up, until the steel and the clouds faded together. The serpent wall. “You’ve told me,” he said, voice small in the shadow of that construction.
“Jormungandre,” his father whispered, as if daring the utter the name of some ancient deity. The great serpent, long enough to encircle the world - and he had, and where he lay, the ancients had built the wall. “His spawn still stalks the world out there. All manner of beasts and monsters. Monstrosities of metal and blood. The Jotnar.” His father said the last with the same suspenseful tone he used when telling Lillian a story at night. She would pull her blanket up to hide her face, quivering in pretend fear - but Asmundre had grown out of such things.
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Besides, he’d heard the story before.
“Well,” his father said, turning back toward their path through the junk. “I guess you already know that one. They’re on the other side of this wall, anyway, and aren’t likely to get through. One did, once - long time ago -”
Asmundre had heard this one too and tuned his father out. Someday he wanted to see the top of the wall. How could anyone live in its shadow for so long and not want to see the top? He wanted to gaze out over the lands beyond - were they really as desolate and blasted by the rampaging Jotnar as the stories claimed? To do that, he would have to join the midgard. And to do that, he would have to prove his blood was strong enough to drive a mech. He flexed his gauntlet, biting back a grunt when it dug into his arm and drew power forth.
“Asmundre.” His father grabbed his arm. “Asmundre!”
Asmundre snapped back to reality. His father had his arm and pulled, but his father’s gaze was somewhere behind him. Asmundre stumbled the direction his father pulled, but craned his neck to look - something massive plunged toward them. Something enormous. Something with four flailing limbs, pinwheeling in the air, rockets blasting behind it, with a massive oblong head and a spear clutched in one fist. It dipped into the junk, metal scraping through metal, then burst upward and plunged again and vanished with a screech and a muffled explosion.
Tremors ran through the junk. It shifted below them. Asmundre steadied himself with his gauntlet upon the crevice wall. In the distance, out over the plains, a dark speck grew larger.
“Come on,” his father bellowed, hauling Asmundre higher along the crevice.
Asmundre turned and ran. His father huffed ahead, metal clad feet slamming into the old crushed machinery as they dodged between protruding spires of jagged metal. Asmundre stole glances over his shoulder. The massive thing did not reemerge, but the junk below them rippled and flowed like the clouds on a windy day, the disturbance rolling outward in a ring, growing closer by the moment. The speck became a man. A blood mech, roaring closer on bright blue jets, another bulkier shape behind it.
His father brought them to the cab of some old machine. The door hung by one hinge, but the cab itself, half buried in the rubble, remained intact. Asmundre clambered in without being told and his father climbed in behind him, pulling the door shut and blocking it with his armored body.
“Hang on,” his father grunted as the ground began to shake more violently. The cab pitched, then slid, and groaned as it shifted through the junk.
Asmundre locked his gauntlet onto a metal bar protruding from the ceiling and braced his feet against the floor. The ancient metal had survived a fall from the wall, had survived other junk quakes. It would survive this. Wouldn’t it?
The cab shook. Outside, visible through gaps in their metal shell, chunks ground past. Sparks jumped where metal caught metal. “Father,” Asmundre asked, quiet compared to the roar of tearing steel outside. “Did you see that thing that fell?”
His father grunted as something banged against the outside of their cage.
“It was a blood mech. A big one.”
“It wasn’t a blood mech.”
“I saw it.”
His father shook his head. “They don’t throw out blood mechs.”
That bipedal frame. The jets. The sheer size of it. “No they don’t,” Asmundre agreed. “It crashed.”
The cab shifted, pitching Asmundre forward, and only the groan of his gauntlet held him in place. Then the motion stopped, and the sound faded to only the occasional creak and groan. Dust filtered through the gaps in their shell, caught in bright beams of sunlight as it settled around them. They had come to rest tipped sideways, with the door above them.
“Is it done?”
His father furrowed his brow and pushed at the door, then put his shoulder against it. His suit let out a whir as he pushed, and with a crash the door fell free and small bits of debris tumbled down into their haven. His father hauled himself out first.
The junk had changed. Their path up was gone, and they would have to find a different way home.