8. The Captor
Chapter eight
The Captor
OLI
I turned. All I saw at first was shadow, an ominous silhouette. He was silhouetted because all the light was behind him: a great gleam coming from the backside of Asgard, with even more light radiating from the white stone of the half-moon structure he stood within.
The small amphitheater was open in the direction it faced with no roof. It was simple in design with thirteen chairs, the one in the middle, with six on either side of it, being the tallest, just behind where Odin waited.
This was Gladsheim. I had seen the statue of Odin that marked its entrance from the other side of the city.
I saw now that a covered corridor connected it to the city proper, but the true “hall” of Odin’s sanctuary, where he sometimes counseled with the other gods, was open to the elements for a spectacular view.
I turned to look at it again before addressing Odin, to take in the plains of Idavollr, the stretching valleys and fields where the gods might frolic, ride horseback, or spar.
It was beautiful and private and peaceful here, this end of the universe.
The flowers, the expanse of land, were all different from where I’d left Loki.
There were more flowers, for one, in more colors, and the land seemed to go on forever into an unknown distance.
I wondered again if where Loki often snatched me to—his feasting hall with no doors, that private hot spring, that picturesque hill—was Jotunheim or just somewhere he’d conjured.
“I am sorry,” I said, returning my attention to the god at hand and ascending the mildly angled slope. As I stepped within the dome of Gladsheim’s non-roof that blocked out some of the light from Asgard, the true figure of Odin materialized from the shadows.
He was everything he should be. Too much so.
Like in the vision I’d seen of Loki, he was a striking figure in height and size, believable to be the father of Thor.
He was mostly covered in long dark robes with a large, wide-brimmed hat shadowing his face.
Long wavy white hair flowed down his back, blending with his long white beard, perfectly combed but otherwise unadorned.
He was old and wizened looking, and his right eye was covered with a dark brown leather patch.
The rune on the patch was identical to ones on his bracers, and he held onto a spear he used as a walking stick, as if he couldn’t remain upright without it.
The rune was Odin’s, one also meaning leadership, like a Roman F, but the shape of it was made with the silhouette of two ravens, a wing each making up its angled lines.
While Mimir had been the type of older man a young man could easily lust after, Odin was playing the part of frail grandfather, clearly on his last legs. And clearly playing the part , not the true Odin. Not like this. I knew my stories: this was the appearance he took to trick mortals.
But I was done being tricked.
“I feel in the worst state to be presented to the greatest of the gods,” I continued, cocking my head at Odin’s withered form. “But you aren’t looking that great for a god reborn. If I’m being honest, and I prefer to be, you don’t really look like this, do you?”
Odin regarded me with his lone, piercing eye. “You scoff at an old man’s desires? A father’s desires after losing everything?”
“I scoff in the face of tricksters and will continue to. No matter who they are or pretend to be.”
The light gleaming from Asgard coalesced into Odin’s lone eye like it might shoot a beam through me, rending me in two.
Then Odin laughed.
He clutched the edges of his robes, tearing them from him like a simply tied cloak. Then he twirled the fabric around his figure, obscuring himself for a moment, and what appeared when he finished and attached the robes like a cape at the back of his neck was a sturdier man of vibrant middle age.
His chestnut hair and beard had ample highlights of gold in them, mixed with a few grays and whites, and his eyes gleamed amber, a ruddy gold of their own.
The eyepatch and bracers remained, but his garb was kinglier now.
Richly dyed fabrics of purple and gold made up his tunic with added sashes, dark leather, and metal fastenings.
His cloak that had been his old man robes seemed like it had sprouted fur, but I realized instead that it was covered in raven feathers, like Odin might take flight as easily as his birds.
But there were no birds. Not real ones. I saw no sign of the fabled Huginn and Muninn, or Odin’s wolves, Geri and Freki, who awaited the meal of the many dead left in Odin’s wake as the god of war. Not even Sleipnir was stabled or grazing nearby.
“Loki said I would find you not as you were. I don’t know what I expected. You seem in good spirits, yet I find you alone.”
“Have you grown too used to multiple partners?” Odin regarded me.
He had been watching me too. “Are you certain you and Loki aren’t related, instead of Aesir and Jotun?” I teased. “I meant that you are without your ravens. Your wolves. Your steed. It was said you never went anywhere without them.”
“What use have I for wolves when there will be no more corpses to feed them? What use have I for ravens when they have passed me every whisper I ever needed to know? And Sleipnir deserves to enjoy greener pastures after knowing too many of blackness and death. The rest is unknown, and so I freed them all of any service to me. They run wild upon the branches of Yggdrasil and travel through the realms as they please.”
That answered some of it, but I also had to mention, “You weren’t reborn with your right eye.”
The observation, however painful I thought it might be for Odin, didn’t seem to faze him. “Some losses, some scars, some stories cannot be rewritten, even for gods.”
Like Loki’s scars.
“I wasted my time as a great god trying to hang onto something I never let myself enjoy,” Odin continued.
“I looked to the future, only the future, and how I might outlast it, rather than living in the moments I had. I failed my people instead of leading them and became a slave to wanting control while never truly having it. You can understand that, can’t you, thrall? ”
“If you’re telling me to accept my lot in life after all this, you can kindly fuck off .”
Odin laughed again. He should have been the god I was most afraid of, but I was more afraid of losing something I’d never had, of losing something I might never know, when I needed to know.
I needed to know.
What had Heimdall told Loki? What was my future? Was my assumption right? Was it wrong? If Loki did want me, why not admit it? What did he have to lose that he couldn’t admit that? Or was I chasing something, wanting something that could never be mine?
“Yes,” Odin said, and though it was to himself and not in answer to my thoughts, a part of me wondered if it was both. “You are perfect for this task, Oli. My ravens’ last message for me was to tell me of your coming.”
“Oh? How many of them?”
He didn’t laugh that time, but he did smirk and began to approach me in a way that reflexively made me back up and feel, finally, somewhat afraid. “Do you know why fate did not let me stop the war?”
“Why?”
“Because if I had succeeded in preventing the future, I would have been unstoppable. I would have been the tyrant the worst of my stories claim me to be. The All-Father should be more merciful, yes? A leader whose people want to follow him. I need some of that power again, some sense of control, but I do not need to be a tyrant.”
The feathers shot out from his malleable cloak like tendrils, like the branches of Yggdrasil, binding me like Mimir had been bound. Only these tethers lifted me, swinging me up and over Odin and holding me aloft above the high seat of the god of gods.
“I do not need to be all-knowing or all-seeing,” Odin said, “only to accept that some things are beyond the control even of gods. It was in allowing that truth to unravel me that I failed. I will not fail again.”
The same soft, feather-tendrils wrapped around my eyes, blocking out my view and any and all light. I tried to not tense, to not show my growing fear. Odin said he didn’t want to be a tyrant. He wanted to be a fair, merciful leader, and I could only hope that also meant toward me.
Once again, my conjured clothes, more magic than fabric, surely, melted like a lick of warm flames had fluttered across my body and burnt them—but not hot, not searing or painful. The flames fluttered because they were carried by feathers.
Blind, naked, and suspended as if in a spider’s web, I dangled, as Odin, the All-Father himself, reached high enough to cup my cheek and low enough to fondle my balls. He ran his thumb up my shaft, then down, down beneath my sac, lower along the space of skin right before my pucker and pressed .
“Ngn!” It was more heightened by not being able to see or guess what he might do next. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t resist.
“Shh.” Odin petted my cheek. “A father, a king, a god should be someone his people can rely on. I lost sight of that. I lost sight of everything. Do you believe I can be trusted, Oli?”
“S-should be? Yes. Can be—”
“I can. I can . If you agree to give yourself to me.” Odin pulled both hands from my body, leaving me to the feathers.
The lack of his touch made my cock throb, pulsing to further hardness at being denied. “How much of me?”
“Your soul is your own. Your freedom is Loki’s until your pact ends. I ask for your body for a time, but also for your trust. Can you trust that I will give us both what we need?”
If not for the tinge of desperation in his plea, I might have wondered why he asked. But in that faint waver of Odin’s voice, I understood.
He needed to believe he could still lead in good faith, even after he’d failed the other gods by failing to stop Ragnarok.