7. The Inert
Chapter seven
The Inert
OLI
I was no longer naked. My tunic had been restored, complete with all previously added stitching, and now bearing Thor’s hammer and Tyr’s arrow-like rune.
Loki had clothed me before sending me across the realms, silently, petulantly, because he wouldn’t admit that he wanted me.
I was being granted an audience with all the male gods, yet the one I wanted didn’t seem to want me back.
But he did.
I knew he did.
He had to.
And it had to be one of Loki’s jokes that my next god was nothing but a head.
I found it unnerving as I approached. Unblinking. Silent. As I entered the hollow, I touched the arch of it above me. My hand tingled, as if infused with energy. Life force. It glowed inside the otherwise natural looking bark. Within that glow was the same prism of rainbow color as Bifrost.
The same was true of the well seemingly growing out of Yggdrasil, with that head, Mimir’s head, on its edge.
Long after Odin had traded his eye for the knowledge of drinking from that well was the Aesir-Vanir War that led to Freyr and his family being traded to the Aesir.
The Vanir were sent Mimir, considered the wisest of the gods, in exchange, but the Vanir felt cheated and chose to behead him.
Odin reanimated the head purely for its knowledge, but it was not seen as living after that. Was it?
As ethereal as it was to be here, where there was no visible sky outside the hollow, but a natural nighttime sparkle like the minerals in the walls of a dark cave, this was also the most frightening place I had found myself in, even more so than Hel.
A head? I was supposed to fuck a head?
“Loki can’t be serious,” I said.
“He usually is,” Mimir answered.
I jumped. I knew the head could speak, but I still wasn’t prepared for it.
More shocking still was that he was handsome.
He looked the eldest of the gods I had encountered so far but not unattractively so or heavily wrinkled.
He looked wizened. Distinguished. His long gray-white hair was tightly braided with half of it bound back and the rest dangling along the edges of the well, with some even in the water.
His short beard was well-trimmed, and cerulean eyes like the water beneath him shimmered from the sparkles of Yggdrasil.
“I know why you are here,” Mimir said. “Will you not approach?”
I started to, but that didn’t mean I was any less wary. “Honestly, I’m not certain why I’m here.”
“Despite your travels thus far?”
“I know why but… you’re a head!”
Then the head moved, and I staggered backward, losing the step I’d taken, as it rose like a phantom from how Mimir had been kneeling behind the well. Kneeling on knees attached to legs and feet and a full torso.
He smiled cryptically.
“I got better.”
I laughed. How could I not when this was a better joke played on me than any I could have guessed? All I wondered then was if Loki was smiling somewhere, pleased that his joke had paid off.
Loki…
“Come.” Mimir gestured for me to follow him outside the hollow. He was dressed in a simple tunic and trousers, with Yggdrasil stitched like an emblem on his chest, silver on fabric the same color as his eyes. Smaller stitched depictions of Yggdrasil were also on the cuffs of his sleeves.
And, along the length of his neck, was a scar, like a mimic of how his head had once been detached.
I followed him as he took me left around the tree.
He had an eerie calmness about him like Heimdall, like someone who had seen too much.
His well could supposedly see anything. He had maybe seen everything .
One didn’t ignore that kind of experience, and therefore, I walked.
I walked just behind Mimir until we reached another hollow in the tree, and within this one was a well not with cerulean water but water so dark, it bubbled as if boiling.
After my next breath, the water seemed to mist and become covered in frost. It rotated like that between boiling and freezing several times while I watched it.
“Without Hvergelmir helping balance the heat and cold from Muspelheim and Niflheim,” Mimir said of the well, the source of all waters, “the realms would burn and freeze endlessly, and only Yggdrasil’s roots would survive.” He looked to the well, and then up outside the hollow.
I followed his gaze, and in the far distance on two different branches of Yggdrasil, I saw the realms he spoke of, one of fire and one of ice, which I was grateful had not been rendezvous points for any of my encounters thus far.
To step foot in either realm or touch my hand to the waters of that well would mean instant death, I was certain.
Humbled by those nightmare realms, far though they may be, I reached a hand to steady myself upon Yggdrasil’s trunk.
“Careful where you touch. Nidhogg has sensitive scales.”
I jerked my hand away before the touch completed, and when I looked, I realized that this spot was not part of Yggdrasil, but dragon scales nearly the same color.
Staring up the impossible height of the tree, I recognized the great dragon curled around its trunk as if part of it.
Nidhogg was fabled to forever gnaw on Yggdrasil’s roots while never making the tree topple, save for a trembling moment during Ragnarok.
Far, far above me, where I could see Nidhogg’s head, he wasn’t gnawing any longer but slumbering, dormant.
“Though in truth, with Ragnarok past, he may no longer notice.” Mimir shrugged and continued around the tree.
I felt nauseated and very small as I followed, unable now to not notice the other realms around us on various branches, like distant mirages, yet all easily identifiable.
Besides the realms of fire and ice, I had visited them all.
Save maybe Jotunheim, but I still felt certain I had been there with Loki.
Before we reached the next hollow, I heard voices, feminine voices ahead of us. I knew what the third well would be, but seeing the high, regal chairs in an arch facing the hollow’s entrance confirmed it.
The Well of Urd, where the gods sat in council and cast judgment upon the realms, supposedly every day. Although, like most changes brought upon by Ragnarok, I assumed that was a thing of the past.
Within the hollow, around the actual well, would be the Norns.
What the Greeks called the Fates, who spun the threads of life.
My steps faltered, not even purposefully, but the humility and fear in me had begun to grow. The weavers of fate were not always known for their benevolence, and Mimir had not yet said why he was giving me this tour.
“Do not fear the Jotun maids,” he coaxed me from my terror, motioning for me to catch up to him. “They simply know more than most and have their parts to play like everyone else.”
He waited for me and then bid me to look upon the sisters three.
On the left sat a white-haired woman like a young grandmother. That must be Urd, eldest of the Norns, currently manning the tapestry of life and weaving new designs into it.
“Such lovely stitching upon your tunic, Oli,” Urd said.
As I watched, she moved aside, passing her turn at the weave to the sister on her right, who didn’t miss a step in the braiding of the threads. “As lovely as if you stitched them yourself instead of by Loki’s magic,” said the redhead. Verdandi, I guessed, being the more motherly type.
“It tells a story!” said the last, taking Verdandi’s place. Skuld, a raven-haired girl on the blossoming of womanhood.
They were not three frightening crones, hovering over a well, spinning the threads of fate while cackling.
To look upon them in their den was no different than seeing three generations of a family working on a tapestry together, while occasionally taking draughts from the well between them, and sometimes sprinkling the water on the roots at their feet.
But it was the tapestry that caught my attention most. It somehow told the story of creation in the simple weaving of colors and thread.
The time of the gods was all metallic and shimmering, while the lower the tapestry went, the more it devolved to colors, to violets, blues, reds, and more, like a rainbow of all humanity had and would accomplish.
There was never a moment when one of the Norns wasn’t weaving it. Even if another stopped to gather water, or another simply stretched, the third was always there to continue their work.
“What is my story?” I looked at the stitching that had been added to my tunic with each meeting of a god.
“It is what you make of it,” said Urd.
I scoffed, picking at Loki’s snake. How easily any fear turned to resentment. “Not according to some of the gods represented by these symbols.”
“We weave as the story goes,” Verdandi chided, “not ahead.”
“But there is a pattern you follow, isn’t there? You know what each stage of the picture will look like.”
“Knowing doesn’t mean we chose it!” Skuld giggled, and each time another spoke, they rotated who was weaving, again and again.
“Sometimes, fate is what you follow,” said Urd.
“Sometimes, it is what you fight,” said Verdandi.
“Either way, choice doesn’t lessen the path or outcome,” said Skuld, and the others joined her in saying the last.
“Choice merely shines a light on what you want and hope to keep.”
A glimmer from the tapestry brought my eyes back to its braiding, where I thought light must have struck the most recently woven threads, for there seemed to be a metallic one where I didn’t think there should be.
Should it?
“That is all you are allotted, I am afraid,” said Mimir, tugging me back from the hollow’s mouth. The Norns continued their weaving, their watering of Yggdrasil, alternating in a circle, like the infinite motion of time.
But what did they mean? My fate was my own, my choices were my own, even if the end results were inevitable? How, when my fate wasn't really mine with which to do anything, for wasn't Loki the one who held my future in his hands?