Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Ylva. #354 ==

You walk in a valley of dust and ash, and the snow is falling softly. No, not a valley, a riverbed; long dried up and gone. To the east, far to the east along the length of the riverbed, where the mountains rise, the scar of a once-great torrent is clearly carved. At its base, where a pool once glittered deepest blue, a vast dark emptiness.

Ahead of you a wall, as tall of the mountains. Scarred and torn by weapons of war. Its highest battlements crumbling. The great gate hangs open, not broken but unlocked. 

You pass through, and the hall stands before you. Beneath the ash and snow, still it glitters – but the roof is long collapsed, the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it up rotting at the edges of a great dark hole.

Each of the 540 doors is flung open, and you enter in. The hall is dark, the floor thick with ash; the ruins of one last great feast still mouldering on the tables. Among the rotting benches, rust-ruined breastplates are strewn all about.

From the throne at the high table, a figure watches. Broad-hatted, cloaked in grey, a spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders – a mockery, you somehow sense. Trembling, you approach. Shadows hood his face, but his beard is long and grey.

You step up onto the dais, raise the broad brim of the hat to look upon his face. The dead flesh is withered, a dried husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisted in shock, dismay. As if faced with a fate unplanned for.

“Who’s there?” a voice rings out, quavering and weak. “The einherjar have marched… and no valkyr remain to choose.”

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might.

“Hel? Have you come to torment me again?”

Ylva feels strangely calm and speaks without fear.

"I'm not Hel, though I may be due to meet her soon."

She touches the place where the exit wound should be.

"I think I've been murdered for greed and pride, and I don't know if I'm coming back from it."

"You are dead?" the huge man says, in his quavering old man voice. He shuffles closer, emerging into the dim grey light that enters the hall through the broken-backed roof overhead. He is huge indeed, vastly muscled despite his age. And blind in truth, eyes white and staring. He shakes his head. "No. The dead no longer come to this place. The bodies of the einherjar lie where they fell, out on the field. There are no more - and none to choose them. Until..."

He tails off, and you can read a thousand sorrows on his face. "Come here," he says finally, and raises one massive hand - strangely gentle - towards your face. "Come here, and let me get a look at you."
Ylva hesitates, as a very early swims to the surface, a drunk man (her father?) whispers "Never trust the fucking gods". Is this man a god? Aren't they all dead? Either way...

Either way he seems harmless enough, and she's already dead. Or...

"Dead, or dying. Got my insides on the outside and enemies all around in any case."

Then she makes a decision and crosses the distance between them, leading his hand to her face.

The blind man - the god? - brushes your face with heavy, scarred, slablike fingers. Each of his hands is big enough to wrap around your whole face. He pauses as one finger explores the scars around your eye, and you see something like fear on his broad, craggy face. "No," he mutters finally, and his hands move on. "Hmm."

His hands brush your neck, your shoulders, your breasts - it should feel like an outrage, but somehow there's no sense of violation, of malign intent, to it - and move on. One hand pauses at your side. "Here," he says, pressing a huge palm hard into your abdomen, and you give a gasp of pain. "Mortal indeed."

The other hand traces back up your spine, to the nape of your neck, running clumsily through your rough-cut hair. He pauses, heavily lips pursing. "Wait." His fingers move round to the unmarked side of your face, above your ear. His face is grave. "This ain't right..."

And you scream as he pushes a heavy finger into the hole in your skull. Again. You feel him fishing around in your head, in your mind. Memories from what passed for your childhood. Your first love. "Almost..."

You remember laughing with the others as your brother raises his spear. The whisperer at his shoulder, always with that sly smile.

You don't have a brother.

"Wait..." the blind god in Odin's hall is pale as he draws out... something, pinched between two bloody fingers. You nearly sag to your knees, but his other hand grips your arm tight. He's wiping the thing on his ash-smeared tunic, blood. 

A spearpoint. Fire-hardened wood.

The god is pale, staring at the thing he holds. "No, no, no." He releases your arm and you drop, forgotten, head and guts alive with pain. The hall swims around you, gloom deepening into true dark.

"Baldur?"
In the dream, you lie in a ship with a great curved prow, the fire all around you. A dead man stands at the helm, his eyes on the horizon. Behind you, on the beach, a score of figures; hooded, cloaked, weeping.

Ahead, far ahead across the storm-tossed sea, a grey and dreary shore.

Hel is waiting.