As I crawled through the tunnel in the form of a dog-sized centipede – a shape Gia had made an undignified squawk over, and clung to Mayari even before I added the extra eyes down my back – I had to remind myself I couldn’t stay in Yggdrasil for long. It had been different when I’d expected a formless haze or otherwise abstract concept. Now that I could see it in the receding glow of the temple behind us, I wanted to know more.
Mayari summoned a new light along the length of the passage, and it lit up in eerie silver.
Gia breathed a sigh of partial relief and let go of the moon goddess for the first time since I’d sprouted my sixth pair of legs. The tunnel wasn’t especially solid. It formed a mostly traversable path, but one with frequent, uneven gaps between twining roots. Easy to put a foot or an arm through if you weren’t careful – or fall in if you got unlucky. In the moonlight, I could see a different material through each gap. Dirt, grass, sludge, or less intuitive materials like sky and something that looked a lot like bone. Mayari eyed a patch of dubious brown wisps wafting through one of the holes, and for the next few seconds we found ourselves walking up one of the walls out of its way before returning to our original orientation.
Contamination from the openings seemed mostly contained, however, through methods I didn’t understand. I confirmed this when a patch of fiery death I presumed to be lava dripped from above our heads to a root below, made a distinctive splat, and vanished before it could do any damage.
I made a note not to try carving anything into the roots.
Improbably, I felt physically real. The wood under my feet; the displacement of air as my companions walked past; the crumble of snow when I stuck a leg through one of the safer gaps. The last one told me it was more than just sensation.
I shifted back to human to the tune of another of Gia’s sighs of relief, and dipped my hand in for real. It emerged cupped with white cold.
I ate some. Definitely snow.
I dropped the rest on the roots, where it stayed, slowly melting.
“Hmm,” I mused.
“Figure it out la –” Mayari swung her hand, motioning for me to catch up. I wasn’t being dragged back to the penthouse, either.
I wasn’t sure I could get back from here. Since entering the tunnel, my ability to sense the runes and other members of the Vatican Concord had dwindled until only Gia’s and Mayari’s remained.
“– ter,” the goddess finished, eyes wide. She stared intently at my other hand, which it occurred to me was holding something, where the thing in question was the Spear of Destiny.
“Oookay,” I replied after a brief moment. “This saves us some time.” I nudged the end of the shaft in her direction, the tip hovering back over my shoulder. “You’re probably here for real, too. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Give that to me,” she said, bypassing the obvious question. “Unless you know how to use it.”
I handed it over with a shrug, and peered ahead down the tunnel. A distant light lurked through the murkiness at the not-so-distant end, which may or may not have been my imagination, much like the brief flicker that passed over it.
I felt my back straighten. Neither of the others noticed.
“Maybe you could tell us what to expect from Yggdrasil,” Mayari suggested, gripping the spear one-handed as she reclaimed the lead. “It is from your pantheon.”
Gia had fallen back beside me, well out of accidental spearing range, and gave me a quick nod.
“Twigs,” I answered, not taking my eyes off the tunnel entrance. “It was the mortar holding all realities together, and Providence fed it through a wood chipper.”
“It seems alright to me,” Gia remarked. “The wood looks healthy, at least. Not sure about the stuff coming through the windows.” She paused, seeing my face. “When Yun-Qi said it might be guarded, what did he mean?”
“Hah,” I said. “Natural defences, rogue hazards and divine possessiveness. We need to be able to expect anything.”
I’d already seen the natural defences in action, and there might be others. I was mainly worried about the latter option. For a place connecting all places, the Aesir had kept Yggdrasil locked down tighter than a wedding ring after fifty years on a finger. They’d destroyed the Bifrost themselves to keep Providence from getting its hands on it, but even my own pantheon had been barred access since long before the war. It was entirely possible we were the first visitors apart from Odin since that last battle.
Another shadow passed over the light marking our destination. Mayari saw it this time. She added her other hand to the spear grip.
I shifted into gas form, making short work of scouting past hundreds more miscellaneous terrain blobs. Some pulled at me; others burnt as I passed, though without a nervous system it was more of a curiosity than anything. The root made a subtle turn upwards, the light I’d seen turning out to be an indirect artifact of the real opening above.
Smooth vines curled down near the exit, which I dismissed for a split second until one of them moved.
Not vines, then, but snakes, ranging in size from tiny to ‘probably ate humans for breakfast’. Easy enough to deal with.
I pushed past and up, eager for a sense of what lay beyond. The end of the tunnel was circular in shape, too perfect to be natural, and expanded into open sky – where I immediately found myself assaulted by some kind of intangible force. Or forces. Swept in five separate directions, including into the sky, I was being pulled into multiple pieces.
Without traditional senses I was operating blind, and getting separated from myself in this form had possible consequences I didn’t want to deal with. Acting fast, I transformed once more into a large boulder before I could become completely disconnected.
I fell back into the root, crashing hard. My impact sent a shockwave of tremors through the timber, but I didn’t wait, and bounced back into gas to survey the damage.
The roots had held. I’d taken a couple of snakes with me on the way down, whose insides were splattered all over the interlocking fibres. The outsides were mercifully dead. The rest of the hissing den, no longer performing vine impersonations, moved in agitated alarm across the exit, their tongues flickering in and out as they reared and writhed.
Crap.
Loki? Mayari’s voice prodded me distantly.
A few tremors still lingered from the impact, which seemed excessive. Everything’s fine, I lied. Except for the pit of angry snakes. They look like they need trauma counselling.
A pit?
We’re at the bottom.
Is that a problem?
Only for the snakes. There’s something else at the top, but I didn’t catch a look.
Mayari responded with a wordless exclamation of surprise and pain. The root’s doing something. I don’t like it. We’re headed your way. Coordinates?
Around me, the timber continued to shiver in the granted wish of a thousand cursing pirates. It was getting stronger. I dropped out of gas form for a better look, taking the shape of a dragonfly.
As soon as I had my hearing back, I heard the cracks. Low, deep, crunches sounded from all sides, extending back along the tunnel. A chorus of hisses and growls accompanied them in the soft green light filtering down from above.
Noticing the movement of my wings, one of the snakes lunged at me from the wall, missing by a fair margin. I darted out of reach, only to feel a brush against one wing as another had its turn.
Loki! Mayari’s voice was closer now. The tunnel’s attacking us. We’re coming through.
An instant later, the pair appeared near one edge of the pit. Both were covered in detritus from the gaps between various roots. Gia’s face was half-plastered with what looked like black oil, and Mayari had burns down one leg and most of her back. Mayari’s foot came down on one of the dead snakes and slipped. The moon goddess flailed and righted herself, but not before the Spear of Destiny raked into the wall of roots.
She pulled back the tip, but it was too late. The mighty weapon had sheared a thin line through the bark across two of the roots. Sap welled up from the cuts.
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The roots shivered.
“Holy ever-loving fucksticles, I just stepped in –” Gia’s head came up, her hands wringing out the worst of the oil. She saw the snakes, and the words died in her throat. “This is worse. This is so much worse.”
Mayari’s hand came up, and the nest collapsed back as one, flattened along the walls of the opening in a rainbow of species and colours. “We need to get out of here.”
Wait, I ordered, then landed back on two feet in the centre of the pit. “Wait,” I said again, holding up a hand. “Whatever’s up there might be worse. It tried to tear me apart.”
The roots Mayari had cut shuddered, more violently than before, and parted like curtains to expose the substance between: a light blue pocket of sky at stark odds with the green cast overshadowing everything else.
“No you don’t,” Mayari snapped at it, raising her other hand, the one with the spear. A high-pitched whine escaped the gap. Its neighbour, a colourless liquid, hissed louder and began to bubble. “Ozone,” she concluded, looking at me. “We need to get out of here, before they all start up.”
I glanced around the tunnel. Other roots were moving now, some gaps closing to make room for others widening. Whatever rule had kept the windows bound in place had evidently been relaxed. The snakes above us, already distressed, had started to panic and flail, some falling limp as they burnt, drowned or were sucked through the holes. Mayari’s field had trapped them and the hazards in place, but the walls were starting to ooze with a variety of substances rapidly merging into a dark sludge
“Alright,” I agreed. “But take it easy.”
“Guys,” said Gia. She stared down the passage we’d come by. “Please hurry. I’m too young and fabulously successful to go out like this.”
All along the tunnel, individual roots rippled to the side, contracting and expanding. Cascades of water, mud, leaves and ice poured through, a flash flood in the making.
My stomach dropped out from under me as my balance shifted. The tips of my hair rose, followed by the rest of it, dangling skywards. My heels left the ground at the same time as Gia’s, and we fell upwards at a third of the usual speed.
The flood hit the pit below us and surged back against itself in a bouncing ripple, rising visibly. Everywhere I looked, I found snakes gasping for breath and growling in fear, and felt a pang of pity. We were the invaders here.
“Mayari,” I said.
She looked at me, then at the venom noodles. The pressure loosened, allowing the mass to untwist itself and flee for the sky.
Its departure revealed stonework adjoining the roots near the exit; large, irregular slabs caked with white mud and heaped on top of each other to form the basis of the crude ring I’d noticed earlier. I kept my eyes on the serpents, but no more reptile innards came flying back over the rim. Whatever I’d run into wasn’t harming them.
“We can get back, right?” Gia asked, wiping more of the oil from her face as she blinked down at the terrain soup we were outpacing. Her skin looked faintly green, the effect becoming more pronounced as we drew closer to the sky.
I nodded. “Yggdrasil connects every place that exists, and since Earth is only ever running against itself in the ‘best universe’ contest these days, I’d say our chances are good. There’s always a way. Besides, Tez would have said something if we didn’t.”
Without other seers around creating prophetic interference, the chance he’d have gotten it wrong was negligible. Of course, we had been using a gateway Odin had configured, and if anyone could find a way to set up anti-seer measures in his absence, it would be him. I tried not to think about both Apollo’s and Tez’s assertions that I was also capable of affecting future outcomes, though I still didn’t understand how.
“You do realise Earth isn’t a universe, don’t you?” Gia asked in the tone I recognised as generally reserved for professionals suspected to be operating above their level of competence.
“Midgard, then,” I amended, seizing the opportunity to stop thinking about my personal tormentor. “Semantics. Seeing as the name you lot gave it is just ‘the universe’, I can’t say your titling conventions are any better.”
I turned my attention to the opening rapidly approaching. Green patterns formed in the light that might have been broad clusters of leaves, but far away. The ever-present sense of Not-Bifrost I’d felt since entering the root was stronger than ever.
Most dimensions had a distinct feel about them, but one available to mortal senses. A quality of the light or smell, the local culture or lack of it. Stepping back into Valhalla’s fresh air had left me newly accosted by bittersweet nostalgia paired with unwanted reminders of being outnumbered by dead Vikings with the self-reflectiveness of Vantablack.
Yggdrasil was different. I could feel it. It felt oddly familiar, which was probably the Bifrost similarity talking.
Gravity shifted again as Mayari brought us up over the edge of the lip, the last of the snakes slithering to safety ahead of us. My hair swung forward to fall in my face, and I shortened it with a thought.
The first thing I realised was that we’d risen out of a well. It looked a lot like the one on Jötunheim, one of three, though that had been full of water and under Aesir occupation ever since I could remember. The wells had supposedly fed the great tree, scattered throughout the realms. I’d never paid them much attention. As long as reality wasn’t falling apart, I hadn’t cared how it got it done and had been fairly convinced the ‘tree’ was a convenient metaphor Odin had used.
Apparently I’d been wrong, although not about everything. If Yggdrasil was suffering from the lack of water now, it certainly didn’t show it. My feet touched down on a bed of vibrant, grass-like moss whose tendrils reached to my knees. Patches of timber lay exposed beneath it; a branch the width of a runway strip, gently curved until it dropped away into a backdrop of verdure. Everywhere I looked, more green answered, dotted by the multicoloured jewels of departing serpents. They and the vegetation each glowed with inner light.
Vibrant, flourishing… and alien. No hostile entity had torn me apart, but rather a feature of the environment. Now that I could see it, it was obvious.
Yggdrasil was a tree, yes. One sprung from all the madness Escher could esch. The distant leaves directly above the well didn’t match the wall of immediate foliage just to the side of it, nor the seedpods dangling upwards in reversed gravity on the other, shorn into view through a spatial distortion of the kind in Providence’s crowded Helpdesk floors. My sense of it was like walking through a chaotic gardener’s mirror maze, with portal-like transitions where mirrors would be and no floors or ceiling to impose a limit on the effect. I’d crossed several of those boundaries as a gas simultaneously, too blind to know what I was doing.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the anarchic input, and focused on what I could sense through other means. As far as I could tell, the general shape of it resembled an enormous ring, curving off into the distance and in on itself in directions that made my head hurt. That was before I started accounting for the innumerable fractures, displacements and loops within loops. I gave up after a few seconds, lest I be rendered too useless to carry out the rest of the day’s mission.
I had no idea if it had been broken by the restructure or had simply always been this way.
“Wow,” Gia breathed next to me, seeming to have forgotten about the snakes. She stepped forward a few paces, slipping a bit on the moss, and squatted next to a nearby rift where clusters of bright golden apples hung almost within reach. “This is incredible. Magnificent. I wish Sil could see it.”
“Wow indeed,” Mayari agreed, hefting the spear as she scanned the vista for threats. After determining nothing was immediately coming after us, she peered down into the depths of the well, where the sludge had stopping encroaching and had settled into a thick brown pulp. She reached a hand forward and pulled it up in a rapidly collapsing fountain, tossing it over the side of the branch. A few seconds later, part of it fell past us again in the distance, sideways.
More of the stuff flooded up in the well to replace it.
“I should be able to unclog this enough to get us back,” Mayari said, heaving another batch of grime out into the pristine landscape. A third wave followed it up, a little slower this time. “But we’ll have to hurry.”
“Can’t we stay just for fifteen minutes? Once we turn off the system, we won’t be able to get back to the entrance. No one will. All of Xiānfēng’s research – the hundreds of years that led to this moment – will have been for nothing. I know I said it’s not my battle, but, well – just look at it.”
I looked. Above our heads, branches dripped with round, hollow nuts. Birds chirped and scattered from twig to twig, swooping through rifts like everyday highways in pursuit of colourful insects. On a distant branch – too distant, I suspected, for the others to make out – I thought I could see the crumbled columns of a structure. It didn’t look Aesir or jötnar, or even Viking. It looked Roman.
Suspicion crept over me, and I glanced across at the timber near our feet. Ash wood, like the stories I’d grown up with. But the bark near the apples was subtly different, and near the gumnuts notably so, taking on a smoother and redder appearance. Ripe figs spouted from the wood one more branch over, and through another rift, the pink blossoms of tamarisk. Plus a hundred more varieties I recognised, and many I didn’t.
I searched the canopy for species from Jötunheim and found none. Not the fiery flora of Muspelheim, the crooked gnarls of Niflheim, or even the tangled vines of the worlds of the Tuatha de Danaan.
Only Midgard’s influence remained, like the dimension itself.
“We just got here, and we’re not only turning our backs on the greatest discovery in history, but closing it down to never be found again. What are we doing? What’s wrong with us? What we’re doing is a crime, and I don’t know if I can live with it.”
“This was always the plan,” Mayari reminded her. “Get you in and out, fit for what comes after. Yun-Qi thinks it’s enough that you make it here for the effect to take, so that’s all we’re doing. I hate it too, but it’s what we have to do.”
“I’m not a fighter,” Gia protested. “I’m a systems analyst.”
“And Envy,” I added. “The whole point of your power is to see something you want and take it. So take it back later.” I crouched beside her, extending an arm through the hole to the golden apples. I picked three and handed them to the bewildered demon lord. “It doesn’t have to be a complete waste. Civilisations have gone to war for these things. Give one to Yun-Qi and I’m sure you’ll be forgiven.”
Mayari craned her neck back to look over her shoulder as another sludge heap shot out of the well accompanied by an ominous creak. “Wait. I want one. I can use those samples in my hydroponics lab.”
“What about the third?”
“Have your friend Ponytail eat it. You want to save him, don’t you?”
“It’s a cure?”
I shrugged, reached back through the rift, picked a fourth apple, and bit into it. Sweet flavours trickled down the back of my throat. “It’s delicious.”
“But a cure?”
The expression on Mayari’s face told me this would be the final sludge excavation. As she tossed it into the air, I aimed the apple at it and watched it collide with the goop in a violent explosion. “I think it’s whatever you need it to be,” I said with a grin. “Lot of apples in a lot of stories. Usually golden, always heavily guarded, even against other gods. Because if there’s one thing dictators love to do, it’s to keep power from falling into the hands of the people.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Mayari. “I want ten. Then let’s run.”
I made more arms and snapped off the entire branch. A second rift lay just behind it, sneakily lurking. Through it, a woman peered through, searching for the source of the explosion. She wore a tattered skirt and torn blouse more brown than its original white, and her curly hair was tangled with leaves.
I didn’t wonder who she was; I recognised her. Although the version staring at me was younger and significantly less dead than the one I’d dropped in the volcano. For a split second, our eyes met.
Then Mayari touched my shoulder, and we were back in the tunnel.