Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Miekke #419 ==

(Gerda’s painting)
Gerda tugs, and the cloth falls in one heavy slump to the floor.

Below, a forest scene. Trees pressed in close on all sides, heavy and oppressive, rising beyond the frame of the canvas. Dark runes slashed into dark wood. 

Three woman gathered at the side of a pool, watching a fourth figure - pale, bloody of face and hand - as it kneels beside the water. Around one out-thrust hand, the water boils red.

Intricate ropes of gold wind around the pale skin, the bare head. The face lined with pain and weariness beneath a mask of blood. But in the one eye is captured... something profound. Realisation. Awareness. Horror. All of these are there, in the strokes of Gerda's brush.

Behind, from the shadows beneath the trees, something dark and massive watches. A suggestion of scale and claw.

"Not a death this time," Gerda says, and she almost sounds relieved.

"It's beautiful....," Miekke comments, made breathless by the painting. "I... that's just beautiful, Gerda. I don't even know what to say. You've made more of these? Why have I never seen them?"
Gerda nods plainly. "You have," she says. She seems strangely dissatisfied with your response, as if she was expecting something more... profound. Her eyes keep going back and forth between the painting and you, like she's searching for flaws. 

In which, you are not sure.

"You have," she says again. "My father hangs them downstairs, some of them at least. The violent ones. I think he likes to imagine what it would've been like to kill a god."
Miekke doesn't really hear Gerda's response. They're staring at the painting, and the eye within the face of pain and weariness engulfs them.
The first thing you know is pain; pain from the eye you plucked out. The second is the smell; the stink of the primal forest, the tall dark trees that gather inhospitable around you. A rich, loamy, leafy smell, undercut with the crispness of pine. There's snow on the branches above you, but down here in the shadows it's cool, not cold. And the water in the well is warm as blood.

The three sit across from you. Your one good eye is bleary, watering; each time you look at them they are sat somewhere different on the rocks. Their faces smear and judder as you try to focus, but you feel sure you know them. 

When they speak, their voices blur and blend as their faces do. You think one is speaking, but another's lips move; the voice comes from the place of the third.
"You have sacrificed-"
"-given half the light-
"-of the world;"
"washed yourself white-"
"-so pure-"
"-so pale-"
"-white as the membrane-"
"-the skin that lies inside-"
"-the shell of the egg-"
"-so holy-"
"-so wise you will be-"
"-tell us, far-rider -"
"-wanderer-"
"-yes, tell us-"
"-does it hurt?"
"-no, not that-"
"-no, no-"
"-we know it hurts-"
"-Mimmir told us-"
"-poor Mimmir-"
"-tell us instead-"

One of them is beside you, her hand cool on your shoulder. She draws a ladle forth from the well, brimming with water that seems to shimmer with an inner light. You look up into a face that is clear and dark, a face you recognise. "Do you think it will save you?" she says, as she raises the well-water to your lips.
Miekke looks into the woman's face, wide-eyed, searching for understanding. They're afraid to breathe.

There's a weird sense of discontinuity, of inhabiting another skin. You feel the bonds of fate growing tighter, tighter. Leading you down the path once more... to Ragnarok.

Part of you, the part that is Odin in this place, despairs. You are so weary.

The world must end again... but not yet. Not yet.
"Save me?" AllFather-Miekke croaks, their voice raw and unused. "Do you think that the point of this? It's to save us all."

"I have to try." 

That last is only a whisper, as their attention has shifted from speaking to more focused intent as they take the proffered water. Diving into it with the thirst of one seeking to avert Fate, the water is not drunk so much as it is devoured. Impassioned, fully exposed, seeking to digest it all in one raw, exposed moment, with no care for the protection of self. Diving into the deepest of pools, throat first, losing oneself in the sound of the splash as the rich water engulfs the entire person in its embrace.
The water of the well was warm to your hand; but it burns down your throat like magma, floods your being with heat and knowledge. You remember creation, Ragnarok, rebirth; Lif and Lifthrasir, man and woman, sheltering in the branches of Yggdrasill, the world ash, to emerge once more as the world begins again.

But mostly you remember destruction. The winter unending. The jotunn Surtr and his flaming sword. The Fenris-wolf, its teeth closing on your throat. The Nine Worlds descending into fire and death, collapsing into the cold wide void of Ginnungagap, over and over.

The death of everything. Over and over and over.

As fate has decreed.

But you struggle to your feet, lone eye blazing with knowledge. With one hand you reach out and carve a rune into the bark of the towering World-Ash.

ᛉ – Algiz, which means Life. A protection from enemies, a defense of that which one loves.

And Urðr, the weave of destiny... it trembles.

You come back to yourself, and to Gerda hanging onto your wrist, crying "Stop, stop!", and to pain. 

The hand Gerda is restraining - your fingers are bloody, and you can feel the mess your nails have made of your cheek, your eye; they pulse with fire with every heartbeat. 

You blink, and it's painful enough that you nearly shriek. But your vision clears some; you're not blind. Beyond Gerda, who kneels appalled in front of you, the painting.

The door opens; Urdakott is there. "Hel's black heart," he curses, and it seems aimed at Gerda as much as you. "Cover that damn thing up!" He vanishes back through the door, leaving it hanging open.

Gerda glances back at the painting, from it to you. She releases your hand, throws the patchwork blanket back over the canvas. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't expect..."

Your mind, though, is spinning. The pain from your eye is a little thing, inconsequential beside the revelations that course through you.

You have been here before, time after time.

The pain of the injured flesh is as nothing next to the pain of remembrance. They look at the young girl in front of them, and at the cascade of emotion that inhabits her face and her body. 

They stand.

"Show me the others," they command, with the force not of a mesmerizing sword-dancer, but that of... something more.
"I can't," she says. "He put some up, downstairs - the deaths. He likes those. But the others..." She shakes her head. "He burned them."

Gerda looks at you then, and it's clear she's afraid. Not of you, but of what might change. "I'm sorry," she says quietly, miserably. "I just wanted to paint you. What I saw inside you."