Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Freyr #772 ==
 
You're feeling it settle into and over you - not calm, far from calm, but a strange kind of separation from yourself. The noise, the acrid stink of cordite, the percussive snap of each aimless bullet. The howl, somewhere, of a wounded man. The foul smell of someone who's shat themselves, or maybe just taken a bullet in the guts and guaranteed themselves a slow and agonising death.

None of this is in the songs you sing. But this, this is the path to Valhalla - in blood and chaos and indignity. The rune carved on your chest is burning, burning like the wound were new. Your fingers are numb on the pistol grip. You rise to one knee, turning, lowering the rifle, keening a song of death and glory as your finger tightens on the trigger.

There is a moment. You remember Miekke dancing, long ago. A spear hurled high.

And you level your rifle across a vast, unending battlefield. A plain strewn with broken shields, shattered swords, discarded spears.

And bodies enough to end the world.

Overhead, in the moonless dark, you hear... no, feel... the thump of enormous wings. Something vast is circling.

One last breath escapes Freyr's mouth, a cloud of breath escaping rows of clenched teeth and rising to dissipate mere fingers above his brow. He holds it there and goes silent. The hunter rests on the bank of the iceflow. He looks for his quarry on the other side - the one who will receive his gift of death. Where is it? Horned, furred, caught by arrow from the bow? The rifle scans the battlefield, a circle of blood and bone and fire lost in the vast dark husk of Ymir, the cosmic man. And all along, it keeps flapping, the thundering wings of omen, vibrating into the hunter's very marrow.

Freyr, you hear the great flap of wings overhead, look out across the vast and lifeless battlefield, and know you are seeing Ragnarok. The end that was. Or will be? Where is Loki? Where is Miekke? Dead among the countless dead, you sense. Part of you is screaming, pumping the trigger in wild rage... but that part of you is hamr, just meat and muscle.

Your higher soul, your hugr, is gripped by something... strange. A sense of dread, as those great wings thump overhead and you look up to see the stars eclipsed by some huge, circling shadow. And for the first time in your short, strange life, you understand what terror is. You've heard others speak of it, but it's been until now an alien thing. A concept.

Now, though. Something vast is hunting you across this sea of corpses. Run, your hamr tells you. Abandon your hate, your mission, your charge.

Run.

Freyr, you're frozen a heartbeat too long, as your hugr and hamr war for control. And with a whump and a rush of stinking wind like a battlefield of decaying corpses, a vast reptillian shape crashes down heavy in a flurry of snow and bodies, claws pinning you to the frozen earth. 

A vast dark head descends, and Níðhöggr regards you with gleaming eyes. You feel the weight of its awful regard, near as crushing as the sheer physical weight pressing down on your chest. "Ah," the dragon purrs, and it sounds so horrifically pleased. "The one that got away."

You feel its claw start to pierce your side...

Then a deafening mechanical roar splits the air. The dragon's head snaps sideways, and light floods over it - giving you a moment's terrible sight of teeth and rotting scales, of the bodies that hang damned from Níðhöggr's foul wings - before everything becomes tangled and confusing. Pain from your side, brilliant light, . Something massive crashes hard into the dragon - or has it just become man-sized? - and it launches itself away skywards. Bullets are suddenly singing past you once again, and the orange firelight is casting everything in stripes of orange and black. Your rifle is in the snow beside you, its barrel steaming.

And Miekke - near naked, streaked with blood - is a couple of feet away, on the back of a roaring snowmobile.