Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Miekke #597 ==

You prowl through Surtr's mansion, wincing occasionally as an unguarded movement tugs at the wound in your side; Eir clearly knows what she's doing, but even with expert care a gunshot is not to be dismissed. 

The suite where you were laid to rest is in the northern end of the villa, closest to the steel works and to the Scrapyard; you find a window in a stairwell which looks out north, across a slice of town that might seem almost picturesque but for the dull, ruddy glow of the steelworks, which gives the snow a hellish aspect - as if blood had been poured across the town, and pooled on the roofs and in the spaces between buildings. You look down on Forge, and wonder why you've never noticed before - is it the elevation, your new and lofty position? 

No, you realise, as you look further out. Beyond the light of the furnaces, and the occasional desperate trashfire in the Scrapyard. the world is utterly dark.

The sky is clear, stars twinkling like little touches of frost. Where is the moon? You frown, count backwards; no, it should be waxing nearly full.

Where is the moon?

The reflected glow of the steelworks on the snow paints a swathe of the stairwell ruddy, and Miekke's white skin canvas. It's a beautiful sight, though too reminiscent of Brokkr's workshop. 

Not really thinking about it, upon wondering at the missing moon Miekke lifts the flap of their eye patch up and gazes at the sky with their injured eye. It's only as they feel it between their fingers that they realize they were wearing an eye patch.... curious.

The ruddy light of the forge floods everything, making even the sky a crime scene. The stars twinkle red like bloody jewels, turning as the world turns. Simulataneously they inch across the sky and roar through the cosmos; simultaneously glitter prettily and burn with a power like nothing in all nine worlds. 

A great golden stag broaches the horizon, curling up into the sky and dimming the light of the stars. It is running hard, nostrils flaring, chest pumping like bellows. There's a note of wild panic in its eyes.

You hear the howls before you see the wolves. The hunters on its tail. The bigger of the two, black and vast and hungry-looking, a shadow against the blood-red sky, snaps at the heels of its prey.

The second wolf, muzzle bloodied with silver. Slower, weighed down with a full belly, yet its yellow eyes are bright and keen. And its teeth are just as sharp.

They will catch him, you know. In time. But today the stag escapes them, slipping below the horizon, and the blood-splashed stars prick the night again, twinking ruby and silver. The wolves slow to a trot, and the second raises its bloody muzzle to howl...

Then the first wolf turns, and notices you, and the force of its regard blasts and shreds you like the worst winter gale. It is all wolves, all monsters, all bad men, the destroyers and the ravagers and the enemies of hope. It is Fenrir, and Garm, and Sköll, and Hati, and Urdakott, and that smiling psychopath Loki, who left you out on the ice.

And then a face pushes forward, through the fading image of the wolf. Surtr.

He looks down at you, eyes flat behind the discs of his spectacles, and you realise you're on the floor. "When we found your bed empty," he says, in his bass growl, "We thought you had fled."

There's a question there. And perhaps, perhaps, something like relief.