Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Draghi #95 ==

the rattle of runestones announce the presence of an oracle. A pale, beardless young man sits cross-legged in the corridor between a fishmonger and a carver of strange, wooden trinkets. Before him, a circle of runes carved into the concrete promise truth, insight and binding fate. The young man is slumped a little, an elbow on his knee, idly pushing the stones around the circle with one finger of the other hand. He looks up, right at you, and his mouth is bruised and bloody. "You seek your fortune?" he says, a little hopefully.

"Er, yeah." He shows the scrap of cloth that Surtr had dropped. "The one who carried this troubles me. I would learn whether his wyrd is entangled with mine, but I'm not.." he lets the sentence trail off for fear of offending the other. "Can you guide me?

The boy looks a little unprepared for an answer in the positive, but he recovers well. "Yes! Yes, certainly." He waves for you to sit, turning and shuffling aside to make room for you out of the corridor's occasional traffic. Scrabbling among the pouches and rune-carved boxes, he produces a cheap scrap goblet with a little cry of triumph. The other hand opens towards you. "Fire?" he says hopefully. "For me, and for the knowing."

Dragi holds out a bit of treasure -- some matches, a lump of amber -- for the boy to see, then closes his hand when the boy reaches for it. "Know this. I have danced without legs and slept in lost cities and driven a thousand clicks with a corpse for a passenger. Do not think to impress me with rolled-up eyes and foaming mouth. I will know, and I will beat you, and I will name you to the market boss as a fraud and cheat and watch them crush you beneath cold stones."

Dragi isn't actually confident of any of these things, but he likes to make a first impression. "But for a true seeing, fairly given, this is yours, and more later as may be." He opens his hand again, warning given, and lets the boy take his payment. "Are mushrooms involved?" The little red fly-cap mushroom was a staple of religious life in Tyrs Hafn, and he emphatically doesn't miss it.
To give the boy credit, he seems to take the threat in his stride. "I'm no charlatan," he says, with a hint of pride in his raspy voice. "I learned the runes from Gosti Finehair, who learned them from Skoffir Twice-Burned, who learned them from Magda the Crone, who learned them hanging from the Ash. My seeing is true if you are."

He drew himself up as he spoke, and now slumps a little, coughing. But he nods and takes the payment, making most of it vanish.

"Mushrooms," the boy's eyes widen, as he strikes a match on the roughened side of the scrapweld goblet. "Damn. What I could do with some mushrooms..."

He drops the match into the goblet, and fire flares up with a puff of sharp, resinous smoke. He breathes deep of the fumes, and thrusts the cup in your face for you to do the same. The stink makes your eyes water, and as you breathe deep the flames of the candles around you seem to start to twinkle and dance like stars above. "Spit," the boy commands, and when you look at him his pale hair seems to bristle and glitter like gold. 

He spits into the goblet after you, then shakes in a pouch of pale, rune-carved knucklebones that clatter dully as they fall. "Hear me, Odin," he begins to chant, stirring the woodash and spittle with a gnarled finger of yew that seems to flex and writhe slowly in his hand. "All-Father, I name you. Wanderer, spear shaker, thronesitter, wise one, gallows-lord, drinker of the draught of knowledge, rune-singer, one-eye. I name you with your names. I call you with your names. Odin! Woden! Wednesday! In Hel's silent hall - hear my song! Throw off death's veil, Lord! Call down the shaking rainbow! And let. Us. Pass!"

With that he casts the runes clattering across the floor between you.

Right after inhaling a lungful of the intoxicating smoke, Dragi remembers how much he hates this mystical shit. Life is not so beautiful that one needs to see it laid out in front of the eyes like a map, but here it is, staring back at him from the runestones, Fehu the fire and Uruz the Ox, and most of all Tiwaz, the god's rune, pointing at his heart like an arrow shot from the bow of justice. He hears people talk about what they see in the great blizzard of the world, and some joke about ice maidens and white bears, but Dragi has travelled the blizzard many times and he knows. It is a long cold wandering among the dead, with only one's sins for company and no prospect of rescue.

The bones rattle across the cold concrete, skittering to a halt. The boy leans forward to study their pattern. There is Raidō, the journey, nestled close beside Tiwaz. Here are Kaunan and Hagalaz, flanking a face-down stone as though in escort. The boy reaches down dreamlike and turns over the stone.

Ūruz. The lamentation of the clouds. The ruin of the harvest. The abomination of the shepherd. 

"Curious," the boy says, and his voice is strangely doubled. When you look up at him, another face is looking down at you. A face impossibly old, stern and noble. The boy towers over you, you realise. The hand that holds the runestone is a mailed fist, clenched tight, thrust into the mouth of a wolf. There is a sword in the other, held hilt-up like a cross, blood running down the blade from too tight a grip. The point rests heavy on the ground, sunk deep into the earth.

There is chanting, voices in the swirling blizzard. 

''—an axe age, a sword age
shields are riven
a wind age, a wolf age
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another''

Molten fire is bubbling up through the wound in the Earth, smoking around the point of the sword. Dark figures rise up with it, marching beside the flow of fire, directing its sweep across the land. Fish Hold burns. Splitsville burns. The nine towns become furnaces, places of raging flame, swirling smoke - ashes, only ashes. Nine worlds and all their people all burn, all the world. In Forge Surtr sits laughing on a throne, and he too holds a sword, but this one is burning, burning bright. Its flames lick at the fringes of the shadowed woods.

The wolf catches your eye, and bites down hard. The boy screams, pulls back a torn and mangled wrist. "We see you," the wolf declares, licking blood from scrapweld fangs. "Run all you like, there's no escaping Fate."

It grins, and shimmers like heat haze. "Where is Summer?" It says, in Surtr's voice, and its face is Surtr's now. Behind steel spectacles, fire burns in his eyes. You reach for the sword in the boy's bloody hand, but it withers and is consumed by frost. "Too bad," the Jötunn says, in a voice like the crackle of a diesel engine, and he raises his flaming sword.

The blade sweeps down, and you feel its heat.

You feel the heat. Around you, shouting, chaos. The boy sat across from you is a column of flame, writhing silently. You can smell him cooking as you scrabble away. The charm-carver is wailing, begging for the gods protection. The oracle's other market-neighbour, the fishmonger, quick-thinkingly empties a bucket of ice over the boy, dousing much of the flames.

The boy collapses, and the fishmonger beats out the last flickering fires that play over him with a heavy oilskin.

The boy groans weakly, blood and meltwater pooled around him. His shirt has melted, fused with his skin. His face is turned away from you, which seems a mercy, but his hair is all but gone, his scalp red and black in equal measure. His right arm ends at the wrist, in a mess of soot and blood. 

You become aware of a throb in the palm of your hand. One of the bones is clenched there; it crumbles to hot white dust as you open your hand, and falls through your fingers like the softest snow. Your whole palm is a blister, but burned into the web between thumb and forefinger are three dark lines. The rune Fehu; fire of the sea.

"What in Hel's name happened?" the fishmonger challenges you. A small crowd has gathered to observe the spectacle. You can still smell the boy's burning flesh.

"I saw it!" The woodcarver says. "He burned like the wrath of god!"

"Bullshit," one of the crowd snorts, a woman in fire-stained leathers. "A lamp or something fell on him. From up there." She points at the ledge hacked into the wall above your heads, every inch of it filled with candles and other lightbringers. 

"There was no lamp, fool," the woodcarver snaps at her. "His blasphemies have displeased the gods!" He fixes you with a wild eye. "You! The eye of Odin is on you now! Cower! Cower!"