Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Solveig #670 ==

You go limp in your hazmat suit, eye working back and forth like the brushstrokes of a frenzied artist, not just perceiving but painting the soul of this place onto your brain. You see yourself, prone and twitching in the dark places beneath the hall; see Been, all numbers and guilt, muttering in math as he diagrams and annotates the flow, the pipes and valves and cisterns that have tamed the roaring cauldron, the untamable torrent, Hvergelmir, from which all other rivers flow. That holy water, bound by iron and runes, churns and boils up from the underworld, and is funnelled and channelled and put to use - yoked and tamed by the works of those who came before.

Up from the spaces beneath, your mind's-eye travels. And here is all life, all its mysteries and contradictions. Love and hate and song and war and death and birth, laughter and sorrow; these walls are steeped in the stories of mankind, drenched in them. In the tales of the gods, who are dead. It is an echo chamber; the howl of the blizzard, the maelstrom, reverberates and resonates in these halls, in Ragnhall, as history and myth are retold, again and again, layering anew each time until the world-as-it-was is buried, vanished, swallowed up by the remix and reinvention of how-it-was and how-it-is. Have things always been like this? You sense the earth beneath you fighting back, trying to reassert itself, but it is... so weak. It can barely remember what it was - only that it was... otherwise than this.

Your mind's eye soars, up and up, through the elegant hammerbeam roof of Ylva's hall, and the petty settlement of Logger Town spreads itself about you, a pitiful huddle of warmth and life against the encroaching cold. And you sense it is encroaching; implacable, patient, the blizzard grows in strength, Fimbulwinter will not be denied... yet the gods are dead, Ragnarok has been and gone, and still this little patch of defiance, huddled in the lee of a woodland so ancient and strange that even the alfar, deep to the south and deep in denial, burning themselves out to hold back the blizzard, would shudder to set foot there. 

Up and up and further up, until the clouds glint around you with held-back frost. And here is a fine view - all of Midgard stretched out before you, as you rest on this highest seat. You settle in Hliðskjálf, feel the imprint of Odin's backside on that ancient stone, and look out as the Allfather might; yet you have two eyes to his one, and you see a world encased in ice. The giants have won, and only here, in this farthest corner of the world, does life remain.

Protected? Or simply left 'til last? 

From Hliðskjálf you look up, and see a sky flecked with blood-red stars. The wolf stands over its celestial prey, gorging on silver flesh, and the eye of the doe is black and sightless...

You plummet. Down, the wind howling about you, or is that howling the wolf at your heels? Down and down, straining to return to your own self, to tether your spirit...

And you open your eyes with a start, and a strange stab of pain in your leg. Already the details of your vision are fading, rendering into abstracted impressions. 

But one thing remains clear. The howl of the wolf, silver heartsblood staining its jaws, as the pack descends.

Something is coming. Coming here, you're sure. And chaos follows in its wake.