Author Games: Ragnarok

Task Six Entries: Gods

Loki

DID NOT HAND IN

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Balder

I breathed in the scent of the forest air around me. The familiar scent of blood hung on the wind; even if gods and humans bled different things, they smelled exactly the same. Birds chirped in the trees, seemingly oblivious to the most recent death. The sun hung in the sky, its rays peeking through the forest canopy. A stream gurgled as it wound its way through the forest, it would continue even if it was filled with blood.

The forest always behaved this way after a mortal's death. After a battle, after Odin chose the winner, after the Valkyries took the worthy to Valhalla and left the rest to rot, nature continued on in exactly the same way that it had before. Birds ate the dead bodies, nothing more than an easy meal to the creatures. The sun continued to move in the sky, bringing dusk and night and dawn and day exactly as it had before. Babbling brooks either washed over dead bodies or found their way around them.

Nature never stopped to honor a mortal's death, but I'd always thought it would honor that of an immortal. After all, we were the ones who controlled nature, while mortals were only subjected to its whim and ours.

Somehow, though, nature had forgotten that we were its masters. Anymore, it only treated us as akin to the weakest mortals.

The sun should have stopped in the sky, bringing rain to mourn the death of a great immortal. The birds should have wailed, bringing songs of mourning to the whole world. The stream should have stopped in its path, diverting itself to carry a mighty being to their final resting place.

What had happened?

*

Visions took over me as they always did when I slept. Little more than blurry images sewn together by sounds and scents and feelings, I never knew what they were hinting at until they came to pass in reality. What was the use of prophecy if it could never be interpreted until it had already come to pass?

My wits stayed about me as the visions came over me, the familiar sight of a forest, seemingly untouched by any human hands. An overwhelming sense of dread overtook me in this vision, although I couldn't figure out why. Weak. Empty. Invisible. Feelings as impossible as these compounded themselves upon me. The image of a stream moving over a dead body stayed still in my mind, accompanied by the immovable impression that this being was no human.

With a sudden jolt, like all the cold water from the stream had been dumped on my face, I woke up. The room around me was nothing like my surroundings in the dream, that alone was enough to help calm myself down. Within moments, my heart beat was back to normal, I'd stopped panting, but I was still left with the overwhelming sense of dread.

The image of the woman laying in the stream stayed imprinted in my head, as surely as if she were still in front of me. The lingering reminder stuck with me as well. She was immortal.

My wife lay in bed beside me, just as motionless as the woman in the stream, besides for the steady up and down motion of her chest. She was immortal too, yet I could see her just as surely replacing the woman in the stream. Nanna's golden hair replaced the woman's reddish-brown, Nanna's just barely longer. Besides that, the two women were nearly identical in their slight build. The thought that Nanna could die as easily as any human shook me to my core.

Shaking my head, trying to rid myself of the though, I turned over to the other side of my bed. A golden apple was sitting there, waiting to be eaten in the morning. Just to calm myself, I took a small bite. Strength rushed through me again, and the woman in the brook was gone. As easily as I first saw the woman laying in the stream, I could see her standing up, water dripping off of her.

She was immortal. She always would be.

*

We had forgotten what it meant for our power to be taken away from us, certainly without the promise of its imminent return. The image in my dream, prophecy thousands of years in advance, had warned me of this upcoming moment. Yet, my power, my position, my immortality has blinded me to see the truth.

I didn't dare near the brook, and see the goddess who had lost her immortality. I knew she wouldn't get it back.