The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 43: A Norn's Moment: The Burden of Fate

Clarinda almost fell to her knees as the world froze around her. This feeling was more formidable in its effect on her than any vision she'd experienced. By opening her mind to the full capacity of Urd's power, she also quickly realized that she could navigate the entirety of the Nine Worlds, that she could observe and track all of the millions of lives, and locations, and pasts, and presents, and futures, and potentials, and regrets, and words, and thoughts, and—

BASTA! She shouted, but she simply didn't know how to stop her descent (or was it ascent?) into the Void, the Ginnungagap between worlds.

She thought she fell to a knee (or was she floating upside down?), and then she felt split from herself

as

TIME SPACE

and began

FRAGMENTING

around and around and around and around and around and around and around

HER

She felt dissolution begin, the complete loss of what had made her think of herself as Clarinda Trevisan. There was only Midgard, and the fixed constants of the Nine Worlds.

The Nine Worlds ... she sighed, the ancient part of her that was Urd soothed by the familiarity of the Norse cosmology.

The Nine Worlds: a shorthand way of understanding and describing the dimensional folds of the Multiverse whose contours Urd knew so well that reflecting upon them began a meditative state that existed within and outside of space-time.

For Clarinda-That-Was, a mariner's daughter from Venice, there was nothing in her experience to absorb the flight into the cosmic ether begun by her exertion of Urd's power over time and space. For the Clarinda-To-Be, Urd's shouts in her mind were whispers on the universal winds, a reminder of the one thing the Clarinda-Who-Is could never henceforth forget:

THE

NORNS CAN'T bebebebebebebebebebebebebe

Clarinda tried to hear the rest of the recurring sentence, but then realized she'd have to listen to Urd's advice in another life.

Then, she was past those billion years, and her mind began to burn as she bobbed on a cosmic tide to a place where time folded into space, then ejected her back to the solar system of her home, with Urd's voice whispering and screaming terms that she'd never learn (no, never forget), and she remembered when Urd was young and learning how to live in harmony within the arcs of the Eternal Triquerta.

That thought started her back on a moonbeam path to Mimir's Well, the Nexus of Worlds, where only the Norns, Mimir, and the Codices of Fate could exist without paradox or mind-death.

The Venetian girl started laughing at the end (or start) of madness, when, in the protective Cloak of Fate, she stood as/beside Urd at the edge of what the Norn called a "galaxy," and watched a star begin its life cycle, from inception as proto-stellar dust and gas, to a supergiant, to gravitational collapse into a black hole five hundred thousand million years later, or half an eye blink to the Norn.

Without body any longer, Clarinda finally heard the end of Urd's warning, warping into what was remained of her consciousness as she tried to find Earth in a field of unfamiliar stars.

goonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnellllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooonnnnnggggg

FROOOOOOOOM MIIIIIMIR'S WELL!

The thought of the Well was somehow enough to transport Clarinda across a million parsecs of space and into the grottoes beneath Mount Glittertind.