1. The Master #3
With my and Thorsten’s releases now on the cloth, and some already on the altar, I smeared more of it across the slab’s surface. How much had the porous stone absorbed of me over the years?
“Was this enough of an offering?” I growled at the absent gods.
How could Thorsten not have fought to keep me? Had he tried? We were friends once, practically brothers, but friendship across classes was a young boy’s luxury. As soon as Thorsten was taught he was above me, he started acting like it. I was just a thrall, a slave, property.
“Fucking nobles.” I kicked the altar so hard, I immediately bit back a cry. Real smart, Oli . Start off your new servitude by having a broken toe and being seen as useless. The tears springing to my eyes made me even angrier. “Fucking gods .” I smeared more of our come across their names.
Fuck the gods. Fuck the nobility. Fuck free men too. They all had it better than my lot in life, and why? Because of luck? Fucking luck? Better to be obliterated during Ragnarok than live as less than nothing.
I tossed the cloth to the ground and traced through the smear of come over the names carved there as I cursed them.
“Fuck Heimdall , so impotent he can only watch.
“Fuck Frier , whose own wife didn’t want him.
“Fuck Balder for being no more than a pretty face, dumb enough to die from mistletoe.
“Fuck Thor for having no brains at all.
“Fuck Tyr , who probably fucks with his stump instead of a limp dick.
“Fuck Mimir , who doesn’t have a dick to even fuck someone with.
“And fuck fucking Odin for not being able to stop a future he saw coming . No better than a fucking… mortal… a fucking thrall.”
I dropped to my knees at my final utterance because cursing gods that didn’t exist wasn’t going to save me or change my fate, and I felt so… helpless.
“What good are you to me?” I pushed at the rock like it was an enemy to shove, like the names of the gods were real beings who might actually answer.
“False deities,” I snarled. “Figments of a lesser people who needed to make up stories to feel like they mattered.” But they didn’t.
I didn’t. I was just unlucky with how I’d been born, and I could never change that.
The come was all dried now, but I traced my finger over one more name.
“Fuck Loki too, for only tricking the easily duped. He probably resorted to cheap tricks because his dick didn’t work anymore either after fathering so many monsters and fucking horses,” I finished.
“ Ouch . I don’t think I could have blasphemed against me and my brethren any better myself.”
I whirled around with a leap to my feet at the unknown voice and—
I wasn’t in the wood.
I whirled back to the altar, but it was gone, as was the tree, the wood itself, and any semblance of being on the land I’d grown up on. I was somewhere else. Somewhere so foreign to me that I stared in mute shock.
I was at the gates of some impossible city. Impossible because it was… floating, or at least suspended on what at first seemed to be clouds, but through that misty whiteness I could see the winding of tree branches beneath the cityscape, holding it aloft.
Holding me aloft, for beneath the bridge I stood upon, I could see those same winding branches. I could see through the bridge because it was practically translucent. It shimmered with shifting colors like when a rainbow is seen as sunshine pierces through the last drops of a downpour.
I was standing on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge that connected the mortal realm to the realms of gods.
But I couldn’t be. I couldn’t be. Bifrost wasn’t real!
Was it?
“This is all very real, Oli,” the same voice whispered in my ear, and I stumbled away from it, spinning around again to face…
But my eyes focused beyond my abductor because I could see the other end of the bridge in the distance, arching downward toward what I could only assume was Midgard below us.
I could make out its mountains, valleys, terrain I was unfamiliar with as well, but any people were too tiny from this distance to make out, and the bridge itself eventually faded as if to nothing, reaching a point where mortal eyes could no longer perceive it.
Nearer to me, suspended on clouds above where I stood without the assistance of branches, was a building like a watchtower, poised here at the top of the universe to look down on everything, on every realm beneath it, connected by Yggdrasil.
I was at the gates to Asgard.
Was I dead?
“You get used to it.” My abductor gestured behind me toward the gate. “It’s just a city.” He gestured beneath us. “Just a bridge.” Gestured behind him. “Just the mortal realm.” And finally, he raised thin, willowy arms to encompass what connected it all. “Just a tree.”
“Loki?” I gasped, for there was no doubt now as my scattered thoughts reconfigured and my racing heart could no longer deny that I was in the home of the gods I had been certain a moment ago didn’t exist.
But this had to be Loki, for even without his glibness giving him away, he was exactly how the stories described him.
No taller than me, but long and lanky, fair in face like a woman—and who it was said oft transformed into a woman, among other things—with long red hair like it was made of fire.
One side had multiple braids tight to his scalp, almost like the effect of it being shaved.
The rest hung wavy and loose, casting that side of his face in shadow.
The roots were black like burnt-out embers on a bonfire, his long locks almost blood-red in their depth, and continuing to transition to fire-red, then sunset orange, all the way to their tips that were as blond as Thorsten’s fringe.
Loki’s blue eyes were so pale, they transfixed me, reflecting everything in their bright color, like flickering flames.
His garments were green, with accents in the same fire-like colors as his hair.
He wore elegant, laced shoes that looked as though he could beat anyone in a footrace.
The stitching of his garments was also green but shimmered as if somehow golden too.
It wasn’t simple stitching either but formed runes and figures of snakes, wolves, and grinning faces.
“Does my prominence precede me?” Loki bowed dramatically. “How marvelous. And I certainly hope so, considering how splendidly you cursed my name.”
Fuck.
Fuck . I’d cursed Loki. I’d cursed all the gods.
“I—”
“You might be just what the healer ordered.”
“The… what?”
Loki leapt over me as if he weighed no more than a bird or could fly with an eruption of wings. At this point, I’d believe it.
He landed behind me atop one of the pillars of the gate. It had two pillars with an arch connecting them, but no real door.
“Go on.” Loki crouched low and waved a hand toward the home of the gods. “Peer within. Tell me what you see.”
As if drawn by an invisible tether, I neared the gate but didn’t dare cross its arch.
I had never been off Thorsten’s family land.
The land itself was beautiful, expansive with hills and farmland and the wood, but nothing like this ethereal city, something only ever imagined in my mind from stories.
What any city would look like was a mystery to me, but this was like some fever dream in alabaster and gold.
There were people, distant from me but definitely people, down the long stretch of the rainbow bridge continuing into the city like a main street. Minor gods? Aesir. Maybe Vanir. Maybe others too. The abodes and buildings they walked between were massive and majestic.
Then I realized, the greatest of the old gods, those with the most stories and supposed power, had monuments to themselves at the entrances to their halls, which made it easy to guess who lived where.
One statue held a great hammer. The Hall of Bilskírnir, home of Thor. It spanned large enough to be its own village.
Another statue, near the center of the city, had an eye covered as if missing and was the most richly adorned and kingly looking. The Hall of Gladsheim, Odin’s private sanctuary.
Next to that was the statue of a winged warrior woman. A Valkyrie, clearly symbolizing the entrance to Valhalla.
While not all the halls were marked with statues, and not all statues had immediately discernible identities to me, there was no rejecting the truth of where I was. Or who I was with.
Loki leapt down beside me, making me flinch. He leaned in close to my face, so close that I trembled, wondering what he might do to me. “Well?”
“A-Asgard?” I shrugged in answer.
“ Obviously . What else?”
“Um… minor gods? Homes and halls for the greater ones, but only minor gods in the streets. Not that you’re minor, of course—”
“No need to flatter me now.” Loki waved a hand. “You know, me , fucker of horses and father of monsters.” He grinned.
I was dead. Or, if not yet, I would be soon.
“Don’t look so frightened!” Loki slapped my shoulder like a joshing friend, though I half expected to be transformed into a horse—or something crueler.
“After all, I am those things! Although, in my defense with the horse, I was also a horse at the time. However insane it may seem to you, is it really fair to judge?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that . I supposed he did have a point.
He’d been a female horse actually, all to seduce a male workhorse to prevent a builder from getting one over on the gods.
Insane wasn’t the half of it.
“I prefer a man’s cock!” Loki announced as if this weren’t the most baffling conversation I’d ever had, “but we work with what we have when the need arises.”
“Your… need to be fucked?”
“Not that! Come now, Oli.” Loki linked arms with me and began to lead me away from Asgard’s gate.
He was very warm. And handsome. And terrifying.
His nails were long and pointed, like the start of claws.
“Judging by your excellent cursing of me and my brethren, I assumed you knew our stories. Why was I a horse?”