The crowd is roaring when I step down from the stage. Crying, cheering. Demanding more. It’s been a while since I played, and never in front of such a big audience, and feeling all that energy—that worship—directed my way is . . . intoxicating. I want it. I want to bask in it, to sing my passions to the sky, to beat to the pulse of the crowd for eternity, because what god could ever ignore his people?
Well. This god, for one.
“You were pretty good.”
Sigmund greets me on the ground, arms going around my waist and lips pressing against my cheek. I grin, accepting the affection, sweeter and better than the cheering of a thousand audiences.
“What is that?” Þrúðr catches it first, sitting up straighter on her horse, eyes squinting into the dawn.
“What’s what?” I say. In my arms, Sigmund’s head keeps dropping to my chest and jerking back. If I weren’t holding on to him, he’d have fallen off miles ago. It’s been a long couple of days.
“Shouting,” Þrúðr says. “In the distance. And . . . a horn?”
I tilt my head, trying to catch the sound. Jötnar don’t have great hearing but, even still, I think I can just about make out what Þrúðr means.
“It’s coming from Ásgarðr,” I say.
Þrúðr doesn’t respond, just spurs her exhausted horse onward.
“Shit,” I say. Then, to Sleipnir, “Well. Feel up to a bit of a race?”
Stupid question, I know. An instant later Þrúðr is eating dust, and I have my arms full of a suddenly very awake and very startled Sigmund.
Sleipnir isn’t a horse, but he’s still the fastest thing in all the Realms. We make it to the Wall in no time.
Munin clicked its beak, hopping from foot to foot, exhaustion eating at its bones. Two days it’d been flying, ahead of the kids coming back from Sindri. It was a long trip, and Munin was about ready for a soft nest and a good nap, followed by a fresh corpse and a birdbath full of mead.
Forseti, however, wasn’t coughing up any of it.
“A day,” Munin said. “Maybe less.” It hopped backward again as Forseti paced. The kid didn’t look well. Sort of gaunt and pale. Haggard and washed out. And Munin would’ve sworn he was favoring a single eye.
Not to mention he was still holding Gungnir. Munin wondered if the kid even put it down to sleep.
Getting back was easier than getting out, thanks to some fancy dvergar magitek Uni had brought along. They looked sort of like glowing poles, and the dvergar set them up in a ring around the group, themselves and the jötnar and the æsir and Sigmund standing inside.
To say things were tense would be an understatement.
Uni’s brother had surrendered quietly enough, though he had objected when Uni handed over the much-contested gauntlets to Þrúðr. The pair said some words, stiff and formal, and when they were done, Þrúðr was crying, though she wasn’t sad, exactly. Just . . . crying.
“Annulment,” Lain had explained. He was sitting on one of the weird hexagonal columns of rock, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, looking damp and miserable. Which, good. He kind of deserved.
There were whispers in the corridors now. Æsir and ásynjur who would not meet his eyes. Mother’s doing, Forseti knew. Weaving rebellion and discontent amid Ásgarðr’s bright and shining halls.
“You must call the þing.” Víðarr had said, seated beside Forseti at morning meal. “This cannot go on.”
But it could. How else could anything go? How could Forseti, god of law and justice, be seen to be brought low by the gossip and conspiracies of women? Of Hel and her foul beasts, who danced and wailed every night beyond the Wall, brewing madness and discontent.
The halls of Gimlé had been empty last night, the endless feast of the einherjar abandoned. Today, when Forseti walked the Wall, many of the warriors turned from him, stiff-backed and defiant, gazes fixed out across the Line. Behind the shields and banners, the runes and signs, Forseti heard laughter. Singing. The beat of drums and the strumming of the strange modern lyres the new dead brought with them to the grave.
In contrast, Ásgarðr was cold and empty. Anger and sadness dripping from its gold-lined eaves.
From across the table, Þrúðr’s eyes were cold, hard chips of stone.
Sigmund, meanwhile, was getting sore fingers from rubbing at his own.
“This mess is Loki’s. It was he who wove this wicked plot.”
Meaning Loki—meaning Lain—had been the one who’d suggested trading Þrúðr to the dvergar. For a belt and some fucking gloves.
“I’m going to kill him.” Immortal god or not, Sigmund was going to do it. Again. A spear through the other heart, this time.
“He is a beast.”
Þrúðr was not sympathetic to Sigmund’s plight. Not that he could blame her.
The five of them were assembled around a table. Þrúðr and Uni on one side, Sigmund, Valdís, and Eisa on the other. Everyone else was somewhere outside, under orders of cease-fire.
“He’s not . . . not that bad, really.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but Sigmund could see how Þrúðr may have had a different perspective.
Morning, and Forseti stood atop the Wall, staring out over the writhing black morass of Hel’s army. So many damned and rotting souls, thieves and cowards, oath breakers and murderers. Dancing mad dances beneath the scythe-clawed talons of nightmares made flesh, chaos-spawned get of Loki, folly of Odin, betrayer of Ásgarðr.
Fingers curling tight around Gungnir’s haft, Forseti swore he would not make his grandfather’s mistakes. Whatever the cost.
The einheri beside him huffed, rubbing a hand across his clean-shaven chin. One of Ásgarðr’s newer warriors, dressed in strange and flimsy greens. He’d introduced himself as Private Johns, and Forseti did not know if this was a name or a title. Modern mortals could be . . . confusing.
“Well,” Private said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were protesting.”
Over the Wall, a thousand voices chanted, sound carried on the wind. The words spoken in the mortal’s modern tongue, saying:
One. Two. Three. Four. Release our boys from Odin’s war.
I don’t know how long I’m out. Long enough that when the world comes once more into soft-edged focus, it’s Magni and Móði I can feel looming over my shaking form.
“Hnnnrrrhhh.”
Everything hurts. Everywhere. The curse is gone, but the effects linger. In cramped muscles and healing bones, shattered from the ugly contortions my body forced itself into in its desperate and futile attempts to escape a pain coming from within.
“What did you hope to achieve by this folly?” Móði’s voice, much too close. I hiss, pulling away from it. “Did you think to hide from us in this woman’s skin?”
I don’t answer. Somewhere up above, Magni spits. “Will it live?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” A thick, gauntleted hand grabs me by the neck and hauls me upright. The movement sends new lances of agony out through my twisted limbs, and I cry out.
There were a lot of þursar in the forest. A lot. Like, a whole army’s worth, Sigmund following along behind Skinnhúfa, stumbling over roots and running into branches the whole way.
When they got to the camp, Skinnhúfa barked at Sigmund to stay put, left six huge jötnar to guard him, then vanished off into the crowd. Valdís followed, Eisa and Sleipnir stayed behind.
It occurred to Sigmund, as he sat himself down beneath the watchful gaze of his excessive detachment of guards, that he was a prisoner. Again. He’d never been a prisoner before all of this. The closest he’d ever gotten was detention once at school for calling out his year-seven comp sci teacher, Mr. Hennessey. That’d been a long time ago, and sort of how he’d become friends with Em. They’d gotten back an assignment, Em’s had been marked wrong in a way Sigmund’s hadn’t, for more or less the same answer. Em had tried to argue her case before the class. Mr. Hennessey had told her she was wrong, and Sigmund had known the guy’d been lying about it. So he’d said so, and wound up in detention.
I fucking hate the ocean. Hate it. Hate hate hate. Almost as much as I fucking hate caves. I’m a thing of fire and of air, of movement and chaos and light. All this dark dank plodding bullshit makes me twitchier than a roo on a highway.
Being stuck in a cave on a boat in the ocean? Surrounded by a bunch of dvergar and the bratty sons of Thor? Not my idea of a great holiday.
I spend most of my time smoking. The cigarettes aren’t real, but with one hand free I’ve got enough narrative trickery in me to conjure up the memory of ash and nicotine, if only for a little while.
It all started with Sif’s hair. Specifically, her lack of it, on the morning she woke up to find it shorn. Being understandably displeased with this state of affairs, Sif summoned her husband, Thor, and the pair determined the haircutting prankster to be none other than one Loki Laufeyjarson.
And so it was that Thor found Loki, took him by the shoulders, and threatened to break every bone in the jötunn’s body. Unenthused by this possibility, Loki swore to Thor that he would seek out the services of the dvergar, the greatest craftsmen in the Realms, to make Sif a wig to cover her stubbly scalp. And not just any wig, Loki claimed, but one with hair made from solid gold, and enchanted such that when Sif placed it on her skin, it would become part of her, and the hair would grow as if it were her own.
Sif was pleased enough with this promise, secretly thinking Loki would never be able to keep it, and so Thor released the hapless jötunn, in order that he may make the long trek through the Myrkviðr, to the placed called Niðavellir, where the dvergar made their home.
Meanwhile, somewhere else, dawn broke over Ásgarðr.
It brought with it a remarkable sight. One that had Munin cawing laughter, from where it circled high over the Wall.
The Wall, which this morning was a flurry of activity, enough distraction for Munin to land on the battlements without fear of a cold iron welcome from Forseti’s misappropriated thugs. Ásgarðr had more fat and lazy ravens than the Tower of London, and if one extra happened to blend in with the flock, then who was going to notice in comparison to what Hel’s brood had been getting up to in the night.
“What is it?” That was Forseti, scowling and angry after being woken too early by an overeager einheri. He was still holding Gungnir. Munin wasn’t sure what it thought about that.
The band had stopped playing deep into the evening, guitars going silent and mics hissing themselves to sleep. This morning, náir swarmed all around the place that had been cleared for the impromptu concert, erecting what looked like it was going to be a much more permanent stage. Meanwhile, the entire army had fallen back a good few dozen feet, and it was the vacated space that was currently putting the lines in Forseti’s brow.
They crashed sometime just before the dawn. Figuratively speaking, even if Sigmund’s dismount from Sleipnir’s back had been less than elegant. He’d been lying on a damp mat of moldering leaves and spine-cracking roots when it’d occurred to him he’d brought absolutely nothing useful for a long hike across the country.
“Fuck.”
They were in some creepy-ass forest. Full of gray, twisted trees more hung with beards of moss than leaves. A low mist rolled along the ground, roots winding and protruding and cracking through the halfhearted path and, all in all, Sigmund thought the placed looked like a film set for a particularly unsubtle horror movie. He half expected zombies or cannibals to come lurching out of the shadows.
Þrúðr’s sleep was a restless thing, fitful pits of exhaustion punctuated by tear-filled hours of wakefulness. Her stomach churned hard enough to force out the feast the dvergar had provided, and even that was an awful, humiliating ordeal. One that saw Þrúðr stumbling around the chambers she had been given, eventually walking into a room tiled in bright mosaics with water running beneath the ground. She hoped desperately she had intuited the function of the facilities correctly. That she had not relieved herself within the bath nor washed herself atop the privy.
Nothing in the place was as it should be, least of all Þrúðr.
Em called it Operation Hearts and Minds. She hadn’t given any more detail than that, just grinning a sly and dimpled grin, enthusiasm practically oozing between her teeth.
Sigmund was in trouble, and he needed their help. No surprises there, which was why they were currently standing outside of Hel’s tent.
The word didn’t really do it justice. Marquee would probably have been better, or maybe yurt. Wayne had never been clear on what a yurt was, exactly, but Hel’s current office would’ve been Wayne’s first guess: a sort of round, felt-covered building, mostly black, and decorated by a variety of skulls and glossy feathers that looked to have been shed by the Lady herself.
It also had two enormous Helbeasts curled around the outside, guarding.
Was Þrúðr right? About Nic? Because, fuck. Nic. Nic is great. She is LB, literally, but Travis is the face of the company and . . . and maybe it shouldn’t be like that? I mean, this is the twenty-first fuckin’ century right? Nic can do the bread and circuses stuff just as well as I can. She deserves to do it and—
And, fuck. This really isn’t the time to be thinking about succession plans. Not those ones, anyway.
Because it's the first "Universal Game Engine" released under the free #ORC license, the new #BasicRoleplaying is poised to become the #Linux / open source software of the #TTRPG world. You can do almost whatever you like with the text of the book, including copy it, subject to the license.
I love #GURPS too, but it's not free & open the way #BRP is - yet.
The closest I get to #BRP these days is #DeltaGreen. I keep eyeing up Pendragon again, and also #FriaLigan’s #Dragonbane which is plumbing the same roots.
Nanna had escorted Sigmund through the corridors of her hall, smiling patiently whenever his attention got caught on the carvings in the woodwork or the tapestries on the walls. Wolves and ravens featured prominently in the art, as well as stylized figured of men with spears, and winged beasts Sigmund realized were most likely jötunn. A whole history and culture of a whole . . . Well. Alien wasn’t quite the right word, but Sigmund couldn’t think of a better one, either. Because the æsir were definitely humanish, and Vikingish, but it was the ish that was fascinating. Sigmund was a geek. He loved video games and shitty fantasy novels with half-dressed women on the covers. He lived for the ish, and now, suddenly, here he was. Soaking in it.
The final day’s march was interminable, silent and strained and grim. They made Lain walk ahead, stumbling too fast over roots, with Magni riding the stallion on his heels. Þrúðr came behind on her mare, Móði’s arms held loose about her waist.
As they rode, they did not see the wolf, nor the girl, nor hear the cries of bird or flight of beasts.
Valdís, Lain had called the beast, and Þrúðr had seen the anguish in his eyes. Saw now the broken slump of his shoulders, even as he was forced to run on all fours to keep up with their pace.
Magni called cruel words as they ran, taunting Lain as he drove his horse to catch the edge of feathers beneath its hooves.
Þrúðr was starting to believe she did not know her brothers.
Unusually for one of the gods, Thor was sparing in the number of children that he sired. He had three, all—despite some rumors to the contrary—mothered by his wife, Sif.
Magni, the middle child, was all too eager to follow in his father’s footsteps. Besting jötnar as a toddler, with all the arrogance of a firstborn heir. Meanwhile Móði, Thor’s youngest, grew soft and uncertain. No match for his brother in physical prowess, he instead turned to magic to make his mark on the world. Magic, it must be said, is a woman’s art, but Móði’s grandfather, Odin, was its master and so, too, was Móði able to learn with only a minimum of disapproving gossip.
Thor’s eldest child, his daughter, Þrúðr, inherited her mother’s hair. Sif’s hair was not the hair she had been born with. Instead, it was a magic wig of sorts, rooted in her scalp and growing strands of purest gold. Literally gold. Unlike her mother, Þrúðr needed no wig, and rumor was her hair was even finer for it.
They’d watched every single Die Hard and half of RoboCop by the time Hel’s arm-scort made it to the gates of Ásgarðr.
Actually, if he thought about it, Sigmund really couldn’t be sure how long they’d been traveling. Time seemed to work differently here, outside of Miðgarðr, fading in and out until even the trudging of the náir and the bellows from the Helbeasts became routine.
Maybe Sigmund was just too desensitized to the extraordinary, raised by a lifetime of comic books and video games. And Hel’s army—Sigmund decided to give up trying to pretend it was anything else—Hel’s army really was something straight out of a game, monsters and undead and tattered banners, flapping in the breeze. The golden road glimmered beneath their feet, and when they passed, the land around them fell to blight and rot.
When Þrúðr Þórsdóttir had been very young, Váli Lokason pushed her into a river.
She’d been sitting on the edge when it’d happened, studying the shine of her hair in the water. The only warning she’d had was the sound of wicked laughter, and a single flash of red across the corner of her eye.
The next thing she knew, she’d been wet, some very startled salmon brushing cold scales against her cheeks. By the time she’d struggled to the surface, Váli had been nowhere to be found.
Another day, another interminable ride, this one slow and awkward, the horses picking their way over roots and fallen logs along what used to be a path. Probably. At some point.
Above us, the trees of the Myrkviðr are living up to their reputations. Dark and tangled and strange.
“A story?” I turn to look at Þrúðr. She’s stiff-backed and stern, eyes focused ahead and knuckles white around her reins. Still, this is the most she’s said to me since we left, so: “Uh, sure. What kind of story?”
“Of Father,” she says, still pointedly not looking at anything. “I wish to know . . . something the skalds do not sing of.” She’s especially not looking at her brother, and the way he’s trying to catch her eye with an expression even a blind jötunn can read as What are you doing, fool girl?
Sigmund never did manage to figure out the logistics of their flight, not really. Because the Earth was round, and huge, and hung in the vast black void of space. Not to mention Sigmund had been on airplanes before and he knew—empirically knew—that everything above the clouds was cold and bright and empty.
It certainly wasn’t full of leaves. Or branches. Or . . . was that a herd of deer?
“Where the bloody hell are we?” he asked, hands gripping the edge of the gondola window as he peered out beyond Hrímgrímnir’s feathers.
“Passing between the boughs of the World Tree,” Hel replied.
“Oh. Right.”
The drop below was . . . long. Oddly, Sigmund wasn’t frightened of it. Yeah, falling would suck, but a dragon wasn’t an airplane. It was alive, and thinking, and it would catch them if they fell.