7. The Inert #2
I was barely aware of my feet moving when we continued around the tree, and we were back at Mimir’s well before I knew it. “If that was all I am allotted from the Norns, what do you offer?” I asked him.
“I thought you were here to aid me?” Mimir smiled.
Handsome as he was, this was the first time I felt put off by another coupling with a god, even if he was more than a head. “Then why did you show me all that?”
“You needed to see it. But I do offer knowledge.” He gestured to the well, but then proceeded to walk out past it again, as if returning inside his hollow was only a detour. “Once we are done.”
I followed like before, wondering if we would circle the tree once more, but Mimir went to the side of the hollow and pressed a hand to Yggdrasil’s trunk.
The tree glowed with its rainbow iridescence where Mimir’s palm and fingers touched, and some of the roots near his feet parted, opening a different kind of hollow.
“Done?” I asked. “Is my price for that knowledge the whole of my body, like how you asked for Odin’s eye? ”
“The price is my body.” Mimir turned and began to disrobe.
I was still enough in my right mind to enjoy the reveal. He had a nice body. But what did he mean?
“Sometimes there are phantom pains all through me,” he said, “as if this body is not mine. I had grown too used to being nothing but a mouthpiece, not quite conscious, but not quite alive. I do not know how to be whole anymore. I need to be used as the head I was, but with my mind intact to know I am more.”
I felt a pit in my stomach larger than when Balder had wrapped my hand around his throat. “Then I am to fuck a head?”
“You are to use a mouth, young Oli, lips, tongue, and throat, to remind me that there is more.”
I was suddenly very aware of Mimir’s scar. “While I think I understand… how exactly? Please tell me you do not intend for me to behead you again.”
“No. Ygg can give us all we need.” Mimir climbed into the hollow beneath him and leaned his head against the tree’s trunk. “Do this for me, and I will give you your greatest boon yet.”
Knowledge. Of what, I didn’t know, but to be allowed to drink from Mimir’s well, I might see anything. Including what Loki wanted from me.
If he wanted me.
“I feel a bit useless though,” I admitted. “You know what you need from me more than I do.”
“It is my nature. And yet, admittedly, one I must be free of.”
The roots of Yggdrasil moved again, winding around Mimir’s body until he was engulfed, with the head that remained left in such a position that, if I knelt upon where his body was hidden, I could rock between his lips with ease.
The gods were mad. All manner of perverse. Or perhaps I was the perverse one that my loins stirred as I neared the head.
Branches shot out from the trunk at my approach, startling me as if these were whips for me to avoid, yet all they did was aid me in removing my clothes.
As the branches peeled my clothing from me like attentive hands, I had to ask, “Mimir… is Yggdrasil sentient in and of itself?”
“Of course. How could the source of life not be?”
The caress of the branches, of their ends like a sea creature’s tendril, like hands, like fingers, reminiscent of a lover’s touch, was suddenly more worrying.
And intriguing.
A few paces from Mimir’s consensual encasement, I stood, newly nude again, while those branches brushed over nipples, dragged down my stomach, around my thighs, and eventually, delicately, around my hardening prick.
Clearly, I was the mad one, the perverse and needy one, for as the branches stroked me, bringing me back to the arousal I had feared I could not find with Mimir, he gazed upon me with a curious tilt of his otherwise stationary head.
I gasped as a tree branch, as soft as a human or godly hand upon me, twirled around my cockhead, spreading its wetness, which Mimir watched rapturously. “Wh-what are you thinking down there?” I asked.
“That I would like to encase you in my arms and feel all of you the way Ygg is now.”
The tree was feeling all of me, for more branches surprised me from behind, caressing my shoulders and back and down between my cheeks. “Th-then why don’t you?”
“Not yet,” Mimir said.
“Is Ygg … joining us the whole time?”
“Naturally.”
I wasn’t sure how natural it was to be shared with a tree. And here I’d thought a trio with Tyr and Lady Thor was a new one.
Yggdrasil was life at its most primal and original state, branching out to create more, to literally support and nurture the realms like, well, like an embrace.
And the tree branch tendrils, vines as much as something made of bark and smooth like skin, did not feel unpleasant.
Not even when they twisted firmer around my cock and played at my pucker.
Then the branches urged me closer to Mimir, and I dropped to my knees with ease upon the twisted roots covering him.
Mimir licked his lips at my approach. I could see beneath the gaps in the branches between me and his covered body. Smaller roots like winding vines were there, stroking him. I wondered if some were where I couldn’t see them, preparing to enter him too.
The hold Yggdrasil had around my thighs tightened and brought me ever closer to Mimir’s mouth, while my bud was caressed and probed by tendril tips, until one finally breached me, just as Mimir’s lips closed around my head.
Mimir’s head. I was fucking Mimir’s head like another hollow in the tree, while Yggdrasil fucked me.
I might have gone limp from the strangeness of it all, but the other vine-like branches had hold of me.
I gave in to Mimir’s sucking and rocked to his rhythm, yielding to Yggdrasil’s rhythm too as it helped my motion and supported me.
I needn’t anchor myself on anything, yet I sought Mimir’s hair and gently tugged it, dropping my own head back.
What a spectacle Yggdrasil was looming above us, and under us, and all around us. And we weren’t alone, never alone here, for even besides Nidhogg, there were many creatures that lived upon and around Yggdrasil more connectedly than those of us in the varied realms.
I saw Ratatoskr, the squirrel that scurried up and down the great tree to deliver insults between Nidhogg and the eagle that sits at the top of the tree, with Vedrfolnir, the hawk, perched upon the eagle’s head like a sentry to warn of Ratatoskr’s next slander.
I always wondered if Ratatoskr made up what he passed between them, provoking a fight that would shake all of creation, or if real messages were being sent.
Only Nidhogg had nothing to say, slumbering now, and I couldn’t see high enough to know if the eagle and hawk were still there. I only saw the squirrel, running up and down the trunk like the kind in Midgard when winter approached, fearing they hadn’t gathered enough food to survive.
The stags of Yggdrasil were present too, like mountain goats up the trunk with no sign of falling.
Dvalinn was reddish with autumn leaves adorning his antlers.
Dainn was a black skeleton of a stag, with his antlers reminiscent of Hel's dead crown.
Durapror was a pale tan, covered in spring flowers.
And Duneyrr was rich brown and had such full summer leaves in his horns that he looked almost part of the tree he ate from.
They were all there, but because spring was becoming summer in Midgard, it was Duneyrr who ate of Yggdrasil’s leaves.
I grunted, hips stuttering, as Mimir continued to devour me.
Having been little more than a mouth piece for so long, he was quite adept at it, drawing me from my surrender to present action.
The beasts, the tree, everything around me was miraculous and would have seemed impossible to bear witness to when this adventure started, and yet, now, I was not in awe.
It was worth awe, but my mind strayed from the beasts around us to a beast, any beast, I would have preferred to see that might secretly be Loki.
Yet there was nothing.
A second tendril entered me, I thought to fuck me deeper, but it seemed to part my entrance with the other like scissoring fingers, opening me wider for… a third?
My knees sank, and I looked behind me. The branches covering Mimir were retracting, revealing his body and more of the smaller tendrils stroking him. They lifted me higher and lifted the lower half of him, bending him in half until—
“Ah!”
Not a third tendril, but Mimir’s cock pierced me. The branches opened the way for me to accept him, while his mouth’s fervent work increased in rhythm. He was bent in a way that should not be possible to suck and fuck in tandem, yet he did, his body as pliant as the branches themselves.
I continued to surrender. Even, almost, enough to let thoughts of Loki go.
When we came, I couldn’t say who did so first. After the initial spurts left us, Yggdrasil detached us from each other, so that the rest of our spillage fell upon its branches.
“Thank you,” Mimir sighed, as he was lowered to lie flat again, and I was lowered to drape across him—all of him, torso and arms and legs and all.
“I think Yggdrasil directed us more than I did anything,” I said.
“Perhaps. But thank you all the same. Resurrection was… unpleasant. Reanimation hadn’t been nice either. But with this rebirth, I think I can finally feel like me again.” He reached a quaking hand to my face. “You were right about something else, Oli.”
“That you know better what you need than I do?”
“Yes, because I need to stop living through visions. Through knowledge gained from the well.”
“I think more than one of the gods has learned that lesson. That living doesn’t mean knowing what comes next.”