Chapter Three
There is a place called Hel. By some it is called Nifl; it is murky, dank and stinking of venom, of old pain, of loss.
There is a creature called Hel, and she lives there.
O O O
“Why have you come, Susan?” The woman-like creature reached out a long blue arm and grasped a snake from off the dripping wall. All through the hall, deep into the cavernous recesses, the sound of echoing water drops plunked in air. The blue arm took the snake and brought it behind the creature’s head, then a flesh-colored hand went up to tie it around the long, black hair that flowed down. This done, the head turned to the First Sister, and Susan watched the figure, half midnight blue, half pale flesh. The marble-pink eyes inside the blue and white halves roved together and met Susan’s gaze. “It has been a long time.”
Hel walked over to a great table in the center of the hall. When she moved, she slinked, a thin and long and bony two-toned thing. With her blue right hand she indicated a chair. “Do sit down. Please.”
Susan nodded, slid back her hood, and then took a seat and rested an elbow on the table, her forefinger to her temple. Hel sat across from her and reached for an urn that seemed to be made of petrified snakeskin. She poured a liquid into two blood-red chalices that sat ready. Hel offered one to the First Sister.
“Expecting company, Lokispawn?”
The marble pink fluttered through blue and pale lids. “One can never tell. You know we are alone here.” Her words echoed in the dark recesses of Nifl.
Susan took a sip and set the chalice down. She cleared her throat and drummed her fingers for a second. “Where’s your father, Hel?”
Hel was looking down the hall and only the flesh side showed for a second. So long, so long she had been here. She turned back and the illusion of humanity was shattered as the blue half came into view. “Don’t you know?” She looked down at the table. “Loki is bound. Until the end of the world.”
“Can he be … unbound, do you think? I mean, theoretically.”
“Theoretically?” Hel chuckled softly, and the chuckle mixed with the constant, venomous dripping in the land of Hel. “Susan, don’t act like a fool. The First Sister does not travel across the nine worlds to ask a hypothetical theology question.”
Susan brushed back her auburn hair and tried a different tack. “Have you spoken?”
“To Loki? Since they took him and threw him into the pit and bound him to shudder for an eternity under snake’s poison? No. No, we haven’t kept in touch.”
“You have that in common; the great ones imprisoned you, as well.”
The voice of Hel was distant. “Yes, they did, didn’t they?” She seemed to be remembering it all, her birth by Loki and the giant he mated with, and her casting out, her banishment to the underworld, Nifl, to play her part. “But it’s not as if we have monthly meetings to keep our spirits up. Loki is bound, Susan. Forever.”
“Do you think he knows about the outside world?”
“What of it?”
“It’s different.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I think you do. I know you’re alone here, but …”
“But you can’t do a damn thing about it, I know. Even you cannot challenge an old Rule. Don’t be ridiculous.” She took another sip and poured herself another glass. “I’ve gotten used to the fact that I don’t get around much anymore.”
“The humans have well-nigh overrun the physical plane …”
“Humph. We used to call it Midgard.”
“Shop talk.”
“If you like.”
“The old gods are dead,” pronounced Susan. The Sister held out her chalice, as if wearied by immortality, and Hel poured her another round.
Hel sat the urn down. “They appear to be gone, that much is plain. I’m sure there are new ones.”
“There always are,” said Susan. “All those immortals, all those humans looking for guidance. And somehow, on some nexus between our world and theirs, images connect. And then there are things that are true.”
“Riveting. What are you here for?”
Susan frowned half playfully. “Are you always this bitchy to your guests?”
“I’ve forgotten how to be a good hostess.”
“Where have the old gods gone?”
“You know that question is impossible to answer.”
“Can they come back?” Susan asked.
“Why should they?”
“Oh, I don’t know. For the end of the world, say.”
Hel smiled, and the blue and white lips curled to reveal brilliant pink teeth. “A very big party. I should think someone would come.”
“For what?”
“To play out their parts, I imagine. To die,” Hel said, and then an almost wistful look came over her. “Finally.”
“Of course Ragnarök is a Norse understanding.”
“Of course. But the fact of it is that it affects us all. There is an end to the world, however it comes.”
“So if Ragnarök was set in motion …”
“You’re beginning to sound like a human, Sister. We are eternal. We are true. What we look like and whether or not a different set of humans calls us differently is incidental.”
“I know. We are the way we understand ourselves.” She looked into the liquid in the chalice and saw her face, her hair. Why had she chosen this, and not something else? “Who starts it?”
“Ragnarök?” Hel was trying to sound uninterested.
“Of course.”
“You don’t have to ask me that.” The pink marble eyes searched her carefully. “Loki. Naturally.”
“After he is unbound.”
“Right.”
“And how is that accomplished …?” Susan rolled her hand and inclined her head, as if trying to lead Hel along.
Hel mimicked her mannerisms. “I do not know. Why do you ask?”
“Why does he start Ragnarök?”
“My father? No one knows that, either.”
“Think.”
“Loki is hard to pin down. Even in the old days he played tricks on the gods, spitefully, maliciously. But he loved them in his own way, you know. He was a bastard; he may not have been truly one of them.”
“Does he know they are gone?”
“Susan.” The words were slow and deliberate. “Even down here, I can feel it myself. Certainly he knows.”
“But why does he start the end of the world?”
“All I know is that it is his role. I cannot say why. He is not like us, you understand. His binding was thorough. These forms of ours, the first ones—we grow attached to them.”
“Loki is without form?”
“Try to imagine it, Susan. Yes, the binding was upon his spirit. Loki’s old body burned away long ago.”
“Do you think he takes that …”
“Badly? Personally? Oh, yes.”
“We may have the opportunity to see for ourselves.”
“Oh,” said Hel brightly. “Do you think so?”
“I cannot be sure.” Susan finished her drink and set it down on the table, stood up and began to walk down the hall to her horse. “Thank you, Hel, you have told me enough.”
“Anytime.”
“Hel?” The First Sister turned around when she reached the smaller corridor that led away from the dripping gloom of Nifl. “Do you want the end of the world?”
“Susan,” said Hel, as she held aloft the glass in a deep blue hand, as if in a toast. “More than anything I can imagine.”
O O O
In the dimly lit kitchen of Mont Saint-Michel, Lucius-Loki stood, staring at the food that nourished the men of the monastery and the court of the Duke. And Lucius‑Loki said, as he looked at the food, when not a soul in the monastery could hear,
“A moon’s life do I allow,
A world’s death do I proclaim,
I play this trick and start the last,
The fruit, my seed, my name …”
And it is hard to describe how Lucius‑Loki suddenly fell forward as he spoke the words, and clutching at his breast, shuddered and gurgled and literally burst at the seams, how the head flew off as if it had been yanked by a cord, how the torso of him who had been the good Lucius of Avranches split open down the front and spewed forth a vomitus mass of worms.
And worms they were, maggot-like and glowing blue, squirming as they flew through the air and slithered on the ground, crawling with distinct and arcane purpose. Into the food of the pantry they fell, burrowing into the meat and the fruit, dissolving into the wineskins as they burrowed, puncturing and mixing with the figs and dates.
Lucius-Loki stood once more, the headless, tattered flesh hanging from the splayed ribcage. With his two hands he reached to his torn neck and touched his collarbone, and a change began. The blood of his neck spat and bubbled and soon a tendril appeared, and then another and another, finally taking the form of a coiled mass of long, thin, black serpents, and these flowed and slithered around one another, a stalk of serpents growing from the shoulders of Lucius-Loki. Soon four of the snakes joined and formed what would pass for a mouth, three rippled out and held in place in the slithering shape of a nose, and at the top of the mass, two snakes coiled around to form the suggestion of eyes. But his eyes were many, hundreds of tiny serpent’s eyes, splaying out at the top of the mass of snakes, viewing all to be surveyed in the world he would soon bring to an end.
Loki reborn had laid the seeds of Ragnarök.