The next day passed in the same manner as the day before: the þrællar preparing the Great Hall and Hrafen standing about with a permanent look of concern adorning his face. The þrællar finished their work late in the night, and as Hrafen finally laid his tired bones to sleep, he found that he wasn’t accosted by frightful dreams that night. He did, in fact, have one of the best night’s sleep of his life, and he had to drag his body out of bed when the late morning sun hit his face.
He looked about and no one was in the bedroom. He assumed the children were getting ready, as was his wife. He needed to do the same himself, but his body wasn’t cooperating with the requirements of his duties. He felt slothful and old as he walked to the balcony overlooking his Great Hall. The fire was still roaring as he had ordered it to always be, and he saw the immense piles of treasure laid upon their key points by the newly-dug trenches. Farther down the Great Hall was his table with many guests already sitting at it and eating the drink and meat that his þrællar brought them—he needed to get down there and present himself as the king which he was about to be proclaimed.
Hrafen alighted the stairs after he had readied himself and walked amongst his guests. He noticed Vargr and Hákon—the only Jarls who had been missing—sitting next to each other at his table, talking in low voices and their dark, shifty eyes darting around all areas of the Hall. Hrafen approached them and they stood when he stopped before them. They greeted their king with a clasp on the arm each. “What was your delay in arriving when I called for you?” Hrafen matter-of-factly said.
Hákon was the first of the two to speak up. “The business of my lands kept me, Lord, but I made as hasty an arrival as possible.”
Vargr shook his head in agreement with Hákon, as if the same delay had afflicted them both. Hrafen wouldn’t let him use the same excuse though. “Vargr, what delayed you?”
“The things that always delay a busy man, Lord—the Law of Loki: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. But I am here now, Lord, and just in time it seems.”
Hrafen thought them both to be asinine excuses, but he allowed it. He would forever keep a watchful eye on these two, for his instincts were never wrong and his instincts were telling him that these two were up to no good. He continued walking throughout his Hall greeting guests. His children ran up to him with happy smiles glowing across their faces, followed closely by their mother, and after he greeted them and gave them his love, they took their spots next his throne on the raised platform. The Twelve Jarls from every isle had arrived and Hrafen could commence the ceremony whenever he wished—and he wanted to get it over and done with as soon as he could.
Hrafen motioned to Ulf, then he ascended the platform and took his throne. Ulf sounded a horn that rang throughout the Great Hall, the castle, and the town surrounding the castle. People continuously flooded into the Great Hall for twenty endless minutes, shuffling and bumping into each other until the Hall was packed from side to side, with some hanging from the pillars and others from rafters. Ulf sounded another, smaller horn and the Great Hall fell quiet.
Twelve priests in flowing white robes walked in from the outer rooms, following the path made by the trench. They arrived at the center of the piles of gold, stopped, and formed a Star of Freya. The twelve priests then started chanting incantations of the forbidden knowledge held only by them, the Secret Sect of Odin. The crowd around the room was so quiet that one could hear the faint sounds of rainfall hitting the streets and walls of the castle as they strained to hear the mysterious words.
As they chanted, a great white bull was brought in and forced down in the middle of the Star of Freya formed by the priests. The priest with the longest beard took the guide rope of the bull and, as his incantations grew louder and louder till it seemed his was the only voice to be heard by all, he swiftly drew a dagger from his robes and slit the bull’s throat. The bull’s blood sputtered out and ran into the trench. Great fires were immediately lit in the castle’s basement beneath the piles of gold. In a few minute’s time, the gold began melting and running into the trench, mixing with the bull’s blood. The priests continued their chanting but moved to the outer boundaries of the Valknut. The Twelve Jarls assumed their spots inside the Valknut. Each drew their great longswords—the Longswords of the Isles, each of which held a powerful, magical gem in its hilt—and held them up in front of them.
Hrafen rose from his throne and began his speech as the priests continued in their chanting. “People of Týrborg and of the Isles of Midair…because of the evil my father brought upon us all, I slew him with my own hands. Because of the dark magik which he dealt in, I gave his body to the waves. Because of the shame caused to his lineage, I forever denounce him as my father and henceforth change my name to Hrafen Skýsson. I and all my children will from this day forward be known as Skýssons, and I give myself to my new father, Odin, the All-father.”
The floors of the castle began to shake. The people who were previously hanging from the rafters fell to the ground and the crowd was on the verge of stampeding from the premises. Only Hrafen Skýsson’s brave, shouted words worked to calm them and give them faith in their new leader. He had joined the priests in their chants, knowing the incantations by heart for he, too, was an initiate of the Secret Sect of Odin. But unlike the priests, the chants that Hrafen shouted began to emit a black, flowing spirit or force from the Golden Valknut and its melted piles of golden treasure—the treasure that had been the offering to Odin to appease him and convince him to intercede on their behalf. Hrafen was taken aback; the chant was supposed to emit the force of Baldur the Beautiful upon the Isles of Midair to crush the dark spirits thrust upon them by old King Knífrsson, but this force was surely not the work of Baldur. Hrafen forced himself to stop the chant—a sublime, primordial power was forcing its way upon Hrafen to continue the chant, and it was all he could do, if even for a brief moment, to look at Ulf, his trusty Thegn and utter the words, “Run. Take the children and run.” Hrafen knew they had performed the ceremony too late and that Baldur had already been killed by the mistletoe, destroying their chances of saving Midair along with Baldur. He looked at his twelve Jarls who still held the Longswords of the Isles stoically in front of them…wait…he counted again…all but two are here…Hrafen identified the missing Jarls immediately…
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The castle walls began to crumble; the frightened people ran every which way they could, looking for any possible means of escape. Ulf had thrust himself into action before the words to run and save his family had even left Hrafen’s lips. He had a new purpose in life now—a new duty—and that was to guard the Skýsson children with his life. He gathered all the children and hurried them to a secret passage built into the castle’s walls long ago. He picked up the three youngest—and slowest—children and rushed the rest onwards to and into the secret passage and beyond.
Hrafen was aghast at the betrayal of Vargr and Hákon. What had possibly compelled them to betray the ceremony and all of Midair? What could be gained?! Without those magical gems in the hilts of their longswords, the ceremony was doomed from the start. They were given to the lords of Midair long ago by Odin himself, carved from the jewels of the earth that had carried the magic runes to Odin on the ninth day of the sacrifice of himself to himself. Midair was always supposed to be protected from evil because of those magic gems, but there can never be enough protection in the world from the evil scheming of men.
The stony slabs before Hrafen split open in the same manner which Hrafen had seen in Thorsborg when he had gone to fight the demons at the head of his father’s army. He knew what was next—and he didn’t have to wait long for it. Hundreds of black hands dripping with tar and brimstone appeared from the ever-growing schism in the floor of Hrafen’s castle. The black hands were followed by terrible black bodies of the most frightful creatures from the darkest depths of Midgard, banished eons ago when Odin and Tyr gained control of Midgard from Ymir. Their slimy, grotesque hands were slowly followed by their equally atrocious heads and torsos: seven eyes wrapped around their heads, seeing in all directions; the tar and brimstone conglomerated at the torso, dripping off it in large chunks and falling into the fires below. But these were only the foot soldiers of the dark power—the harbingers of a worse evil. The true enemy had yet to appear.
Hrafen swung his axe back and forth, lopping off a demon’s heads and then eviscerating their torsos, which held the seat of their power. Many of his warriors still stood with him, including the ten Jarls who hadn’t betrayed him. Hrafen looked over and saw a demon jump on the back of one Jarl, melt through the Jarl’s skin until the demon fully occupied the Jarl’s body, and a moment later the Jarl exploded in a spray of blood, flesh, and black ooze. Upon witnessing this, Hrafen called his warriors together—as much as they could through the schismatic floors—so they could fight as a group and not allow the demons to surprise them from behind. A group formed with Hrafen on one side of the schism, and a separate group formed on the opposite side. They fought long and tediously, trying to do all they could to push the demons back into the hell they had come from. But no matter how many they beheaded, maimed, or pushed back to hell, the horrible nightmares continued to pour into Týrborg.
Hrafen was losing men quickly. New schisms were opening in the floor threatening to swallow them all. He was expecting more demons from the fires of Earth, but then the castle began to shake: a deep, long, powerful quake that caused the stones of the wall to dislodge and fall onto the warriors below. From the depths emerged the great and awful darkness—a great black cloud that consumed every corner of the castle and slowly worked its way beyond.
Hrafen held his ax before him, unable to see at all—as if all the light of the world had retreated in fear of a greater power. He relied on his senses: he felt a gust of wind to his right—followed closely by the familiar sound and feel of a sword narrowly missing its mark, in this case, his head—and he swung his body towards that direction, crouching low and holding his ax strong and straight to block any further potential blows. He heard the cries of men falling, but no sounds of warfare—no metal-on-metal clashing, no blades penetrating flesh, no skulls caving in from the weight of a heavy mace being swung at it. There was only the sound of death. And then the smell came; the putrid, foetid stench that nearly caused Hrafen to puke. As the smell circulated through the ruined castle, the miasmatic dark cloud receded, and light returned to the killing room.
In place of the cloud stood a monster—a monster which words could never do justice to, but to which one needs still try as a warning to others—: the hands were gargantuan with blood dripping from its fingertips; upon each hand were eight “fingers”, each in the shape of an instrument of war that the beast was able to change at will to whatever pleased it; the body was composed of hundreds of bodies entwined and intermingled in the most horribly bent positions, to the point where the body was a solid mass of bodies; the creature’s tail was of an unknown metallic substance that Hrafen had never seen before—a dark substance that flowed with a red tinge; the tail ran up the creature’s back to form it’s spine and atop the spine rested the thing’s head…the head of a Dökkálfar—a dark elf—with the face of Hrafen’s father, old King Knífrsson.
Hundreds of arms reached out from the body of the creature—the arms of the bodies comprising the creature’s mass—each with a weapon in hand, flailing it wildly. The creature moved forward and attacked the scarce remnants of the group opposite of Hrafen, a group with only seven remaining survivors. The creature whipped its metallic tail at the warriors and the multitude of arms protruding from the creature’s body stabbed and lashed out at the fallen men of Midair. The creature then skewered each man, lifted them up, and consumed them in a horrible, bloody fashion—clothing, weapons, and all. Hrafen could see the beings of his consumed warriors presently join the mass of the creature, as the creature grew larger and larger.
It then set its sights on Hrafen and his surviving band of warriors. Many of them had been frozen by the horrendous visions their eyes were presenting to them up until this point, but when the creature turned, Hrafen snapped out of his shock, grabbed a spear sticking from the corpse of a demon a few feet away from him, and hurled it at the head of the creature—the head that wore his father’s face. The spear pierced the creature through its jaw, cutting clear through the back of its head. The creature chomped down and split the spear in half, leaving the remnants protruding from its skull. The creature rushed Hrafen and his men, lashing out with its weaponized claws and bodily arms. Hrafen tried to parry and shield himself from the creature’s onslaught, but his weapons and shield were turned to splinters by the creature’s claw-weapons and before he could react, he found himself and all his remaining men skewered like the others. His last thoughts were acceptance of his fate and the prayerful hopes that his wife and children had escaped, for they were now the only hope of Midair. The creature held the skewered warriors high above itself and consumed them, one by one.
Hrafen became one with the Midair Destroyer.