There was a throne, a massive throne of no stone nor metal, every inch of it was occupied by the face of a man or woman, wide mouthed as if in an attempt to scream. Distended jaws and eyes wider than they should be, caught in a cyclic rotation between old and young. One would be gray and wizened, hitting the point by which their biological clock would fail, freezing there for a moment and the face would suddenly smile in calm relief. And then the process would begin again until he was looking at middle aged adults, young adults, and even children. The ends of the spectrum were the most pleasant, but everything in between was agony for the things these people had been made.
They covered the walls, the bodies those heads belonged to suspended in the air. And Tyr, weak in the knees and feeling all of those plans for wrath leaving his mind, was left staring up at Astrid. What had once been Astrid, rather, but he was no longer sure.
She lounged, legs over one side of that ghastly throne and staring down at him with an apple in her hand, an unnaturally vivid shade of red, looking relaxed as if all of this were normal.
He flashed between that and a mad daydream of her leaping on him and showering him with affection, pinning her legs around him and alternating between hugs, touches, and a knife by which she peeled the face from his skull. A dream? It felt so real, but he hadn't seen her move from that throne of hers. Dominating this house of black and white. It wasn't of the charnel variety, none of these corpses were rotten. If anything, it was a bit too sterile, the blood didn't pool in the way that it should – everything would return to the main before falling yet again in an endless cycle.
Some odd metaphor persisted here, existential dread made manifest.
Tyr would have been happy if she'd turned out by some contrivance to have been alive all along, but she wasn't. He'd thought her an undead at first, she certainly felt like one, but she wasn't that either. Astrid was unliving, in the same way that Tyr was. An undead could not exist from something that had never perished, and despite all information suggesting otherwise, she had been alive, and now she bore the suffix of 'un'. Disturbing, something that a biological death couldn't explain. The most reviled form of all necromancy in a process that left a living thing damned and haunted. The penultimate evil that darkness magic and its related disciplines were capable of.
Yet, despite all of that, she appeared so relaxed up there, staring down at him with a look of amusement. Still wearing that armor he'd forged for her, that spear he'd gifted her leaned up against the throne of warped faces. Looking like she was on vacation. Completely normal in all respects, if not for the pallor of her skin and changes to the eyes. One midnight of sclera with a white iris, the opposite in the other, streaks of black tears marring her otherwise perfect features, her hair gently tousled about as if she were underwater. The lady of black and white. Life and death, the warden and observer of the cycle. Valkyrja, the goddess responsible for whatever had bound Tyr's origin to the endless cycle of suffering – and it had been in her all along. Just as Orpheus had been within Alex, before that particular celestial had been expelled by Ragnar.
It was enough to make his head hurt, as pieces fell into place.
“You came,” She hummed with two voices. One was soft and haunting, mournful and incredible sad. The other was bright and warm, communicating nothing but the deepest love. Every breath she took and words she'd spoken hung in the air, a dual aura splitting the room with such force that mana and spira couldn't possibly compete with her. From one breath came decay, life from another, an impossible thing that was too significant for the world to possibly expel. Her arcanum fully manifested and making her about as close as one could get to a god on this world. 'Realer' than Alyx, the red woman he'd encountered in Lyra. One born from a bounty of life, the other from the opposite.
“I came,” Tyr replied, standing again. Bolstered by the energy she was giving off, life and death, both aiding him in inexplicable ways. Like the spira and mana that dominated their world was just a pale reflection of a greater thing. That's exactly what it was, stripped of the contrivance and rules that made things weak, perfectly complimenting his own duality. They were akin to twins in this regard, but she was a god, a true celestial entity manifesting inside her like a parasite. He was just a man that claimed to come from the corpse of one.
“You failed her,” Valkyrja said, letting the apple disappear and seating herself properly on the throne as Tyr continued his slow approach. Boots clacking sharply against the floor, he nodded, drawing Aska and preparing for the inevitable.
“You abandoned her,” She said, “You left me to die, gave the order.”
“I did the best I could.”
“But only ever for yourself,” Valkyrja, for she was Astrid no longer, chuckled. One side of her face mirth and crescent moon eyes and the other glaring, stone cold. Ageless and unabashedly psychotic in a way only the Aesir could be, those High Ones and Old Gods. “You are so selfish in this place, my love. It has made you weak, never have you been so lustful for the wants of the self.”
Tyr paused, feeling conflict rising up within him. Everything had felt so simple not long ago, everything just a tool to him and now he'd been forced to confront the fact that this had never actually been the case. And when she'd 'died'... He had felt genuine regret, profound loss, Tyr had loved Astrid deeply – he just hadn't known how to express it. “What did you do to this city?”
“Me?” Valkyrja arched a brow. Even in that state of blatant insanity that only duality of nature could reflect, she was so elegant and... Perfect. Like this was her truest expression of self, who and what she was supposed to be. Without a host these things were half, but Tyr had very little doubt in him that the creature inside of Astrid's body would make a mockery of all primus'. A kind of power that defied common sense, and the entire region was beginning to fray beneath it. Eventually, it'd be pulled into her plane – he had no idea what would happen beyond that, likely the end of the world, and he'd be the one responsible for it. “I killed them all.”
“...Them all?” Tyr arched a brow, “You killed everyone in Taur?”
Half a million people.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“You know as well as I do,” She looked down at him, leaning forward and half-smiling, “They are unclean. We are both judges, O husband of mine. You who sends, me who keeps, has this not always been our way?”
“I am not your god Tyr, and you are not my wife – creature,” He stood there, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. Could he kill her? Free her from her suffering? Was there any of her still left in there? If this thing got out into the wider world... Tyr still had access to that soul bond, the tiniest shred of it that had brought the roses to his nose, he could use Tyrfing – it was a long shot but this was his fault to begin with. Without an awakening catalyst, his blood... this wouldn't have been possible.
“Oh, relax,” She laughed wildly, standing up from her throne and floating forward to rest her hand on his shoulder, twin wings of light at her back giving her an angelic appearance. “As if I am some ghastly predator. I have only ever been... Well, I suppose that's all arbitrary. I killed them because I wanted to, and because they deserved it.”
“My friend and my wife is still inside there, somewhere, and so you'll give her back or I'll kill us both.”
“Ah, well,” Valkyrja moved around his back, walking now, squeezing him affectionately until deciding to tear one of his arms free with the same hand. Slapping it back into place and healing him all in one bizarrely smooth motion, studying the way he came apart. “Your false Heralds will not be enough, even now. There were four hundred thousand souls in this city and I have taken them all. Perhaps your gods could come and attempt to return me to my prison, but they never really cared. Even as a shard, they still fear Hel. I wonder what that other piece of me is up to...”
“What are you, exactly?” Tyr asked, overcome with curiosity. He couldn't seem to focus on one emotion in particular around her, but all of them were positive. Not quite so maddening as his reaction to Alyx had been. She wasn't a villain or some great evil, just an incredibly powerful celestial capable of breathing life and reaping death with each hand. If she said that they'd deserved it, as a man he was inclined to believe it.
“Ah... Mythos is always so confusing,” She frowned. “I was once Valkyrja in the truest sense, the personification of the distilled cycle, with you and your brother alongside me. All equals, before the curse, back when we were simple laws. I became Valkyrja, Hel, and Alyx. The keeper of cycles, myself, and my other pieces representative of the more mundane mechanisms of life and death. Death, life, and the place in between. It is difficult to put things into terms you could understand, there is no chronology in the infinite, we beyond time, there was no time back then. And yet I say 'back then' to actively articulate the concept of time's passage, thereby contradicting myself. The only place balance can truly exist was beyond time, hence why we needed to split ourselves to measure and control, hence the shardlings that we are.”
“And who was I?” Tyr asked, “Do I have others?”
“No, there has only ever been one Tyr – all others are fakes. Your sons in a more literal sense, people who carry your blood so fiercely that they become you – but they are not you. They do not hold the arcanum rex,” Valkyrja shook her head softly, “Samael was the maker, and you the shaper. Active creation and destruction, the doing of things rather than the observance of it. I was merely a watcher then, and you were the great destroyer. Devourer of suns, the ender, the angel of the bottomless pit. You frown as if this was fel but it only became so when He gave thinking things that so-called blessing of his, the apple, such a symbolic fruit in all things. You just were, we all were, you did not split as I did and yet you were changed more than all the others, until it drove you mad and you broke yourself. Tried to redefine your purpose, and you did for a time, in your madness, only to be broken again. So I shattered myself in turn, joining you below and making you eternal.”
“Why?”
“There is not a word for the love and companionship I felt with you, it was far beyond the pittance of common romance. We need one another, as all the Twelve do, but I needed you in particular most of all. The ender. There can be no beginnings without ends, but there was only ever one beginning for us. Ends are eternal, a thing cannot begin twice but it can be ended more than once. Everything that came after was a flawed repetition and I saw that far sooner than the others. We were damned for it. Locked away and kept apart, I was cursed and imprisoned, Samael slew Wotan and was banished by the others. Without the end, I had no purpose, attempting to make us one. But you refused me and destroyed many in the process, creating what you might call the nim and forging them into a weapon of balance. One repurposed, put to better ends for those of our lines.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“You're right,” Tyr grimaced, “That is confusing.”
He was aware that nephilim were the remains of 'dead' gods, or 'fallen' perhaps was the most appropriate term. There had been four shapers, of which he'd been gifted the grace of this 'destroyer' as his vocation and purpose. Through some tragedy involving the gift of sentience to mortal races, Tyr (as in the celestial) had been driven insane and began to destroy more than was intended. Throughout the quantifiable era, he was the one who prevented life from running amok and out of control, and from the ashes came the things stars were made of. A snake devouring it's own tail, with Samael to the fore and Tyr to the rear, chasing one another through the stars.
But somehow, he'd come to stop in the cleansing, developing a nascent awareness of his own as the others had. Tyr the celestial was not gifted as the others had been, benefiting from the faith, he was damned and cursed by it – now aware of his own existence... If something was the distillation of destruction, perhaps even of nothing, this was a paradox. Nothing could not be something, it could not have a name and eventually they had found him. The other gods came to stop the balance from being destroyed, and Tyr had devoured a great many of them.
To simplify, Tyr, Tiwaz, or however many names he'd had in the past, had lost a great war in the heavens and been altered by it. For many eons he'd been the shepherd and tool of civilizations beyond counting, forced to watch as they fell into degeneracy. Either forgetting him, or being wiped out by something else. A tool, because he'd been giving succor through the faith, obeying their prayers and requests, but eventually Tyr had buckled under the strain. Anguish, something that couldn't empathize whatsoever but could still feel, a mad god.
He'd tried to devour Samael for this, and he'd won. Samael couldn't destroy, just as Tyr could not create. Another paradox, as Tyr had stared down at his brother and sworn partner, and Samael had begged him to stop. Tyr did as he was asked, as he always had, and Samael had risen from the heap and put a sword through his heart – shattering him and breaking the cycle for the first time. That's how it occurred to him, and yet in other dreams Tyr had been the one to pause before making the kill and doing it unto himself. Refusing to kill his own brother, which he supposed made sense considering 'it's all happening at once' and all of that unhinged nonsense tracked well with things involving deities.
In any case, Tyr had to exist. He wasn't a simple world breaker, he was the lord of entropy, without him the universe would eventually run out of control. Nothing would end, infinity would turn over onto itself, no decay, no heat death, or simpler – particles and matter could not slow. Energy would run rampant and overcome the great project. Thus, he'd been revived – but Samael had chained him to a mortal existence in order to make his brother 'see' that he was right. One life to live, and then he would die and pass on truly – an end to his suffering.
Samael only cared for the love he felt for his eternal partner and complete opposite, let the universe burn, Samael only wanted his brother to agree with him on this bizarre and surely more complex philosophy than what Tyr could actualize in his head.
Valkyrja, however, had been responsible for making his rebirth recurring. Ensuring Tyr, and therefore universal law was eternal. In the only way she knew how, and it was from this that the first nephilim were born. Tools of war designed to fight the slow withering of the tree – after Samael had departed, and creation along with it. Infinity had become finite, paradox after paradox. Iconography and infinite contrivance, filtered through the mind of a young man that wanted nothing more than to live in a cabin in the woods and be left alone.
Now, as always, he was a weapon – the eternal warrior and bringer of calamities by one means or another. It would've been a tragedy, if only it'd been a bit easier to understand, perhaps that's why it was romanticized so in Edda's literature.
“You are thinking to yourself, 'what happens now?' Yes?”
“That would most assuredly be what the people are waiting for. I expected a fight sequence, this is boring.”
“There is no 'fighting' amongst high ones as you might understand it, we weigh our laws against one another but we do not swing and cut. And no matter what the case – even should you strike out against me, I could not harm you. I, and we, my greater wholes gave you that curse that prevents any from annihilating you, until such a time as Hel relinquishes her hold on you. Our hold, as we are and always will be one in the same, though we never will. Nor can we, because as with all the others you are necessary. Even He is necessary, Samael, though he is a filthy traitor and lord of the Ordering now, betraying his only purpose.
“In any event...” Valkyrja sighed, scowling a bit, “Tell me what you want and be quick with it. Boredom is an appropriate word, this place is dull and I no longer like it...”
“I want Astrid back,” Tyr replied.
“...That's it?” She arched a brow. “Your wife that you left to die, to be defiled and defaced by foul hearted men? You do not wish for power overwhelming, for me to reshape you into a primus as the fated serpent once offered? I could give you anything you wanted, I could even kill a god or two for you. You hate them, do you not?”
“I'll be doing that myself.”
She arched a brow at that, before laughing shrilly for a time at his stupidity, “I see. Make a wish, then, I shall be as a djinn unto you,” She chuckled happily, too happy for the atmosphere around them, surely.
“Give me the power to bring people back from the dead at will,” Tyr pursed his lips, he saw no humor in this. “I don't want to lose anyone else.”
“You know I cannot do that. She once allowed you trespass because you already belong to us, but it has a cost on the form that you've taken. If I did this, you would last for maybe two or three more claims on a soul before it tore you apart and warped this shard entirely, making you something monstrous. Instead, you should accept my arcanum and bond with me.”
“How?” He asked, he knew what she meant, but how in the world would that work? Bonding with no only a god, but a high one?
“You already have it, you are sworn to Us in this iteration. You, the boy who is sworn to death, the boy who is promised to die eternal. I want you to kneel before me, accept me as your goddess if only in this life. Become my true paladin, swear your oath, I will be here regardless and now that she has awakened to my shard I cannot leave – only return to rest... It's almost funny, actually...”
She sighed, flicking her fingers and sending all the bodies falling back to the ground where they belonged. Filling the throne room with carrion corpses, the throne she'd built for herself scattering into a tumble of rolling decapitated heads. “The very measure of life and death is dying... What a silly world you live in.”
That doesn't make any sense...
“What do I get in return, if I do this?” The obvious question asked. How he would benefit.
“I will return the girl to you, she cannot truly die just as you cannot. You are sworn to me, but I am me, as is she. Impossible to explain, as we are all one. The extent of this power is unclear... But I'd avoid any 'real' deaths, the duality this shard is predicated on is a double edged sword. Without my presence she would've most assuredly risen as a banshee, quite an interesting young woman. You'll also experience a full awakening of the cyclic arcanum, as my Branded, and it will give you might equal to what you currently possess, in a far more versatile form. No more limits.”
“And where do you stand to benefit?”
She shrugged, the goddess, “I will get to hear you say it. You never did and never have, this world is already doomed – a passing dalliance. While you are a flawed, temporary thing, only one shard of many that will come to be in the blink of my eyes – it will perhaps help to enliven my time. You have been blessed by my junior of sorts, the Thanatos that is here, but he could not accept your pledge. I, however, will gladly do so. Christen you in my image, bind you in souls to this girl and ensure she does not perish. In all honesty, it is no more than you could've done yourself, but with the true origin spark of life, it will force you into a progression cycle beyond what you've experienced before.”
“You'll make me a Hero, then?”
“More of a saint, as you'd consider it. With none of the detriments, or binding your consciousness as a proto-celestial while you soul passes on,” She nodded, “I will not become your true master, I will only be permitted to watch you and remain awake, effectively... Well, you'll be giving me permission, quite simply.”
“I feel like this would've been much easier to just say 'you'd get a lot stronger'.”
“That would be a poor excuse for dialogue, and I like speaking to you. We are more 'human' than you'd expect, and ultimately that is the problem – changed by conscious things and made lesser for it.”
“I see,” Tyr grunted, “What was your plan all along, did you orchestrate this?”
She frowned at him, that 'I'm so happy to see you' face of hers warping into pursed lips and a squinted glare. “No I did not, I was not here. I am an arcanum, a shard of a god, no different than the one inside your deepest core that defines your appearance and general demeanor. Arcanum, Soul Arms, True Grace, there are many words for it on many worlds. We do not have individual wills of our own in the strictest sense, but I will admit it is nice to get out once in a while and stretch my legs. All of this... Well, I already told you, once I'm out I'm going to get a bit of satisfaction out of it. It's not like we eat, sleep, or do much of anything else nim are wont to do... This could be fun.” She shrugged with finality.
“Alright...” Tyr conceded this fact. He had seen his arcanum many times, the handsome old man in the robes, but he'd never come out. Said he 'didn't want to' when Tyr had asked. As all things with agency, they were bound to have personalities, including the accompanying quirks. “How do we do this?”
It wasn't complex. All he needed was to kneel and swear on things and oaths he'd always kept to. Dipping his head in supplication, telling her that he loved her. And how odd it was... How true that claim felt, how real it all was to say such a thing to someone or something he'd never met before.
To not suffer the sinner, to purge the so viciously unclean and send them to the Black. That place of purgatory and the gates of death. Amidst a mountain of corpses he swore this and more. Lifting the unconscious and returned form of Astrid and striding from the city of the dead, even as they became to rise and twitch beneath the fell light of a moon. It had all seemed to happen so fast, but he'd been in that citadel for days... Doing something he couldn't remember.
But he could feel it, the shard – one more to add to his collection. A slave with a collar, dragged forth on endless chains, each pulling in their own direction.