The Jekyll Legacy by Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Thirty-One Tomorrow is Another Day

Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?

Every new morning is a gift you’ve just unwrapped.
That’s why they call it the present.

 — Emperor Philip of Myriad, Year One

 

When Phil returned from Earth, he was almost beside himself with excitement; he’d not only solved the problem of temporal accuracy when using portals, he’d also discovered that time paradoxes were probably impossible, since the temporal process had an irreversible arrow. One could go forward, or return to the same instant one had left behind, but one apparently couldn’t go back to an instant that one had already experienced. The maths to prove this were still beyond him, but he had a very strong hunch that that theory would prove him right, so in that sense, he knew it. He’d also solved the problem of the weapon, and had a one-way portal set up that hovered just above the charged plasma ‘surface’ of the Sun, deep within the Sun’s gravity well and not in orbit, since as a magical construct, it wasn’t subject to the laws of ordinary physics, including any potential interaction with Solar prominences, magnetic storms, flares, and other Solar ‘weather.’ He saw Rhea and Selene walking toward him, both of them holding hands with Eir, but wasn’t surprised to see them still here, since he’d just left, after all. “Hey! Eir! Rhea! Selene! I have the new weapon ready to go, so you won’t have to depend on those dandelion things I made with Larona!”

Selene smiled and said, “It’s not a problem, Dearest! The war is already over! We won!”

Rhea gave him a ‘thumbs up’ and ran to kiss him. “Welcome home, Sweetheart! We knew that you’d succeed.”

“But….”

“Don’t worry about it, Phil,” Eir said. “In your world of classical physics, what you’ve just demonstrated about ‘time’s arrow’ is absolutely true, but you forgot to include the decidedly non-classical reality of the divine presence in our lives, such as, for example…,” here she smiled very prettily indeed, “…me. I exist outside of time, as you well know, since you and all your many wives had all the experience of six hundred and fifty ‘honeymoons,’ each lasting several weeks at the very least, and a few that extended over several months. When we returned, as you’ll recall, you saw that essentially no time had passed in the outside world, but the very pleasant and memorable reality of those many supposedly separate experiences remained.”

“But… how…?”

“Phil, sweetie, we’ll have many conversations about this over the years. In fact, your personal experiences with time will form an integral part of the basis for your doctoral thesis and later career, so I’ll ‘cut to the chase,’ as you like to say.”

Then she paused, looking deep into his eyes for some sign of comprehension which she evidently found. “I live” she continued, “as a sort of ‘standing wave,’ a seiche within the bounded fabric of ordinary reality.

“Just as your own sense of consciousness is a similar sort of wave driven by, but not synonymous with, your physical body. This signal has an independent existence beyond the mere chemical and biological reality of your brain. Just as, in dreams, you can visit your own past, or imagined futures, so I’m free to roam the totality of my existence, and have the peculiar power to carry others with me. Think back to the most wonderful moments you’ve experienced in your life, say…, your first night with Selene, or Rhea — to name only two — the two nights when you first experienced your twin realities of married life; are those moments simply gone? Are they even truly out of reach? Or are they perpetually recreated by the internal reality of your consciousness? My answer is, and I know that your own answer will be, ‘They are real, they exist.’ Our love for each other is a small portion of a truly boundless eternity, and has an eternal reality, just like the DeBeers diamond advertising says it is. Our marriage is forever, far more so than even the most spectacular diamond, which can burn to a cinder in a heartbeat, yet not affect the precious love that diamond represents at all.”

“You know about DeBeers?” he asked, amazed.

“Of course I do, silly. We’ll live together on your Earth for over fifty years before returning here so you can take up your duties as the sovereign of Álfheimr and the Nine Worlds. Our first grandchild will be born there, and our own first baby will be born in New York City, because your first two wives insisted.” She smiled at her sister wives, then took their hands. “Trust me on this, Phil; although you’ll be present at the birth, women make the very best and most reliable LaMaze partners.”

“Well,” he said, a little reässured, although still very confused. “I reckon men can usually afford to be squeamish about these things, and have a rather more personal and anxious interest than that of a mere dispassionate observer of the mortal struggle in which their wives are engaged. I hope I didn’t let you down by fainting or anything.”

“Not at all, although you will have to sit down for a bit. You’ll be fine for the next birth, though, and you’ll have to admit that being present for the births of two sets of twins in essential simultaneity is a quantum leap above what most new fathers experience.”

“You do know that this is a totally weird conversation, don’t you?”

“Of course. You forget that, from my perspective, we’ve already had this conversation… or will have it soon. It all depends on when I am at the time.”

Rhea patted his arm and said, “Don’t worry about it, Phil. We’ll all be very happy. Eir took us on a tour of our future lives already, and everything turns out great! You should see what we do for the twenty-one hundred election cycle.”

“Election?”

“Sure! You’re running for President, and you’ll win, of course, so don’t worry about it at all. Did you know that there were no US Presidents who were Nobel Prize winners before you?”

“Unh, none?”

“Exactly!” she smiled brightly. “We knew you were smart. Look, we just wanted to make sure that you didn’t worry yourself to death while we’re out there fighting the bad guys, but we do have to get back so we can catch up with our mundane timeline now, before anyone else sees us, of course, so we’ll see you soon, okay?”

“See’ya, Babe!” Selene added, and then they all three of them just vanished into the air, into thin air.

“Babe?” Phil said aloud.

“Phil!” Larona screamed in joy from behind him. “You were right! You just left a few seconds ago! Obviously the time thing worked, but did everything else work the way you’d predicted?”

Phil had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, so strong that it almost made him dizzy. “Unh, yes, it did, actually, but I can’t concentrate on that right now.”

“Of course you can’t, not with Rhea and Selene out there battling the Giants! Please forgive me for being so insensitive and crass!”

“No, it’s all right, they’ll be fine. They told me so.”

“Of course they did, my Darling!” She clutched him to her ample bosom in sympathy. “Both they and you are so incredibly brave! Never say die! Simper Fidel, as they said….” She stopped, with a puzzled look. “At least I think that’s what they said.” Her brows furrowed slightly in thought before she kissed him. “Never mind!” she said, instantly dismissing the issue as inconsequential. “You know,” she confided quietly, breathing slightly into his ear, “such raw masculine courage in the face of adversity makes me feel incredibly hot, so maybe we could retire to our pavilion to… cool down a bit. I’m sure some of your other wives are there as well, waiting for news of the battle against the Giants, and we’re all of us so terribly worried — not possessing your own bold audacity within our womanly hearts — and they’ll probably need comforting as well.”

“Unh, Okay. I’ll be right there.” He wished Eir would come back. The sooner he learned how to do that extra-temporality thing she did the better, as far as he was concerned.

Later, much later, Phil emerged blinking into the bright light of day. Rhea and Selene were idly chatting to Eir, while they lounged lazily on two of the long benches at the side at one of the tables near the edge of the clearing, but in the shade of a huge oak tree. Eir was standing, but seemed very relaxed as well, and a man who looked like he was vaguely related to Gefjon stood beside her, so Phil thought he must be Freyr. “Rhea! Selene! Eir!” he shouted, running over towards them. “You’re back!”

Selene raised one eyebrow and said, “Of course we are, Phil. We told you we won, didn’t we?” She furrowed her brows in puzzlement. “Did you forget already? It took you long enough to notice that we’re back from the front lines.”

“Well,” he blushed, “I was a little busy just now, but of course I didn’t forget,” he said in frustration, “but that didn’t stop me worrying about you.”

“Oh, Sweetie!” Selene and Rhea cooed. “How romantic, but quite unnecessary.”

Then Rhea said, “We were perfectly safe, mostly, and put that Surtr guy hors de combat straight away with those cute little dandelion things of yours. They worked perfectly on the blue trolls, so we took care of them right away! They even worked on Surtr, although we had to work a few tricks on him to finally scotch his little wagon, because he had a fiery scourge thing and he kept lashing at our dandelions, setting them off prematurely, which seemed more than a little swish to me, too girly by far for a rough-and-tumble Jötunn King. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Different strokes for different folks, that’s what I always say.”

Then Selene took up the story again, “Whatever he was, he hadn’t counted on a combination of ærial dive-bombing and sling-based artillery, though, so Rhea poked him in the eye whilst I discovered his Achilles heel, and it was all over after that.”

Then Eir said, “He stumped off toward Bilröst then, evidently trying to salvage his nasty operation, but his own friends were so irritated with him — after he’d put them through all that hoorah for nothing — that they killed him as soon as he showed up, since the Fire Jötunns don’t tolerate weakness in a leader. As invasions go — and especially as ‘The-End-of-the-World-as-We-Know-It’ — it was pretty much a dud, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the time I stopped by Bilröst to see if I could be of any help, there was hardly anything left to do for the guys defending it.”

“The Jötunns were already headed home by the time we got there,” Rhea said, “and we let them go, since they didn’t seem to have any further desire to fight. That Gjallarhorn thing of Heimdallr’s was cool, of course, but we’d hardly arrived before he stopped blowing it, so our part of the battle was really the whole thing, and that took hardly any time at all.”

“By the way, Phil,” Selene said, “this is Freyr, Eir’s uncle and Gefjon’s brother. He was at the bridge, practically in the front lines, and managed to kill Fenrir, the monstrous wolf that was supposed to eat Óðinn, one of Loki’s get, I think they said, but he’d already been skinned for his pelt by the time I saw him, so it was difficult to see any particular family resemblance.”

“Pleased to meet you, Freyr.” Phil said, ignoring the bloodthirsty reminiscences of his wives as best he could. “I’m very sorry there’s been bad blood between you and your sister, but perhaps we can clear up any misunderstandings while you’re our guest.”

Freyr laughed. “How diplomatic you are, Phil. I suppose that must come in handy, with the many wives my niece has been telling me about.”

“Well, yes,” he said, “but I’ve always been a friendly kind of guy.”

At that Freyr laughed. “I suppose that the word ‘friendly’ must have something of a double meaning for a man so seemingly irresistible to the ladies, but I was thinking about your encounter with your encounter with Óðinn, the Alföðr, and not too friendly there, I hear. You seem to have put paid to Ásagrimmr rather quickly, which turns out to have been a blessing in disguise.”

“Not so very well disguised, Sir. He was trying to harm your sister at the time, violating the rules of hospitality and common decency, both at once. Given the choice between living in a world with him still thriving, and one without your sister, I naturally took her side of the quarrel.”

“And herself as well,” he said, “or so I hear.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Sir, but yes, I did.” Then he added, by way of explanation, “You see, I love her.”

Freyr laughed in pure good humor and said, “Spoken boldly, like a man! I see my niece was right about you.”

“Pardon?”

“She said you were a very worthy fellow, and wouldn’t let me down.”

“Let you down? I don’t understand….”

“No need to worry, the place practically runs itself, but it’s been ages since Gerðr and I had a chance to really get away, so we’ve never had a proper ‘honeymoon,’ I think you call it, very clever, are you sure you’re not a skald?”

“No… I mean yes, I’m not a skald. What are you talking about?”

“A skald is a type of poet, but a very talented poet with more of a way with words than most. You see….”

“No, I meant what do you mean by ‘the place practically runs itself?’ I wasn’t aware of any place that needed running. Am I given to understand that I’m elected?” he asked suspiciously.

Freyr positively beamed. “You are clever! You really ought to take up poetry; you’d be much admired, and very many Kings are widely noted for their skill with words. Were you aware that the surest indication of one’s overall level of intelligence and mental acuity is one’s facility with words?”

“I was,” he said and looked pointedly at Eir, who merely smiled. “I take it, then, that I’m ‘volunteered’ to ‘look after the place’ whilst you and Gerðr flit off on your ‘honeymoon?’ ” He glanced at Eir again, and then at Selene and Rhea, who’d evidently found something to admire somewhere up in the oak tree above their heads. It must have been amusing, whatever it was, because they were trying not to giggle. “Well, I’d hate to prove your theory wrong, so I agree, whatever it is that I’m being agreeable about. Another indication of intelligence,” he confided, “at least in men, is an unwillingness to either argue with or thwart the obvious intentions of their wives.”

Freyr laughed, a little wryly, and said, “I quite agree. In fact, now that Gerðr knows about these ‘honeymoon’ excursions, she wants several, to make up for having missed the one she was evidently due when we married, and was a little miffed that I hadn’t thought up the notion on my own, which is why we’re going. So you see you’re a trendsetter already, which makes perfect sense, since you actually had the job I’m offering already, by right of conquest, the same way Óðinn had it, and my lovely niece, Eir Menglöð, has thoughtfully explained that you’re already an Emperor, albeit an Emperor temporarily embarrassed by an unfortunate lack of kings and kingdoms to rule over.” He grinned at that, then added, “So you see, of course, that this will do absolute wonders for your standing in the political world, as well as for your marriage, since wives tend to fret, I’ve observed, over husbands without a proper job that they can brag about to other wives. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, in fact, if this didn’t lie at the heart of this Elvi fellow’s… embarrassing… problems before his recent divorce.” He thought for only a monent before continuing, “Did you know that the male stickleback actually changes sex when defeated by a rival, a type of ultimate submission to the victor, to whom belong all the spoils of war.”

Phil blinked before he answered, “I did, though only vaguely. Fish were never all that fascinating to me.“ Then he thought about what Freyr had told him. ”So I’m the Alföðr now…, the All-Father,” he said glumly and, as if to match his mood, two enormous ravens flew down from somewhere up the highest branches of the oak tree, or perhaps from out of the sky, and perched on the table near him, looking askance at him, as birds often do, without the slightest hint of any reproach. “Jesus Christ!” he swore, utterly devoid of either irony or sense of blasphemy.

“Well,” Freyr observed with either respect or pity, it was rather difficult to say from his expression, “with six hundred and fifty-four babies on the way, and every one of them sanctified by wedlock, acknowledgement, and inheritance, I freely admit that I can’t think of any better appellation, just offhand.”

Philip Avraham Cohn was obsessing with a notebook and a pen in his two hands, an inkwell precariously balanced on one knee as he sat on a stool at the edge of the clearing, since most of their party was at lunch, in very good spirits, and all the available tables were packed with food and elbows.

His talk with Freyr had crystallised for him exactly how much of a responsibility the birth of many hundreds of children would be in real life, so he was making lists: what sort of care would be needed, and for how many women and children, diaper service, housekeeping help, babysitting, even how to provide suitable interactions with male rôle models, how much gold he’d need to leave to provide for all that, should he not survive any future conflicts. He didn’t bother deluding himself that their troubles were over just because the Fire Jötunns had — seemingly — all packed up and headed home.

He knew, for example, that at least two of the traditional opponents of the Gods were still lurking around somewhere, Jörmungandr, the huge serpent that encompassed the world, was one, and that giant phallic snake and Þórr were supposed to kill each other during the Ragnarök, but the wily beast had managed to avoid the battle entirely, by all reports. And then there was a dragon, Níðhöggr, which was supposed to kill almost all the humans, leaving Miðgarðr, Middle-earth, the world of Men, completely empty of human life.

Phil thought that the Þórr/Jörmungandr battle might be seen as an early metaphor, perhaps, for mutually-assured destruction, the policy that currently governs the world arsenal of nuclear weapons. In fact, the ancient trope could fairly easily be stretched to cover almost any sufficiently weighty situation in the present day, since Þórr is in some sense a personification of humanity itself, specifically the human art of war, and the dragon Níðhöggr, the other major player in the Ragnarök scenario, is also called a serpent, so it was entirely conceivable that from a modern perspective Níðhöggr and Jörmungandr were alternate ‘takes’ on the same underlying situation, the mutual dependence and hostility between the finite world and purely human cultures beset by overarching greed and limitless arrogance.

‘Níðhöggr was depicted as gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil,’ he thought, ‘the mighty ash tree which supports the worlds, whilst the serpent Jörmungandr poisons a metaphorical Earth in Þórr, and is in turn destroyed by the Earth itself (that is, Þórr) and also destroys the Earth when it sends the encircling ocean crashing over the Nine Worlds in its death throes.’ This last was as neat a naïve description of global climate change and the continuing rise in sea levels that Phil could imagine a Medieval monk in far-off Iceland conceiving. Maybe the world ends not with Surtr’s thermonuclear bang but a long slow whimper as coastal inundations and inland droughts destroy world food supplies and global resource wars ensue.

Both monsters are somehow related to the destruction of humanity and the world, but seen from different viewpoints, with Þórr the common thread. And then there was the infamous Heart of Virtue, which in Phil’s current opinion couldn’t have been created by the Jötunns — if Surtr was any example of their overall level of cleverness — so there must be some hidden player in the game, the secret mover behind both Jötunns and the various monsters, the true Dark God, or Gods.

Belatedly, Phil realized that some kid was standing in front of him, speaking loudly and trying to get his attention. Without really looking up from his writing, he said, “I’m busy right now, young man, so possibly you could speak to your troop leader…”

“Philip Cohn!” the kid yelled at him. “Look at me, you fool!”

Puzzled, he looked up and the ‘kid’ came fully into focus and he saw…. “Master Wizard Akcuanrut! I’m so terribly sorry! I didn’t recognize you!” As a teenager, the wizard was fairly nondescript, but Phil was terribly embarrassed to have been so oblivious to the lad’s obvious consternation.

“Obviously!” The wizard fumed. “While you’ve been dithering in your notebook, the world has been falling to pieces all around you! The Heart of Virtue has been stolen! Seventeen Wizards of our College are dead! And who knows what’s been happening back in Myriad!”

Phil responded with an air of serenity, secure in the knowledge that — with his new understanding of controlling portal transit temporality — at worst they could return to Myriad in the seconds immediately following their departure. “Calm down, Sir. Whatever news you’ve had, setting everyone to run around like a flock of chickens frightened by a hawk isn’t going to help. Whatever’s happened, we can now respond in force and with essentially no delay, however long we spend in gathering our wits.” He fell silent, considering. “Does your news source provide any details of the incident, other than the bare facts of the theft and fatalities?”

Akcuanrut seemed a little put out to be interrogated by his former apprentice, but said, grudgingly, “The information was obtained by scrying, but the Seer wasn’t terribly skilled, so the images were confused. She did say that children were involved, but I assumed that this referred to the relative youth of the perpetrators, or may have simply been a jumbled reading.”

“Or it may have referred to Dvergar,” Phil pointed out, “since we know that Dwarves have been used as tools in Myriad before.”

“But why don’t we simply open a portal and go see what happened?”

“Because that would commit us to a single space-time worldline, which means that if we overshoot the mark, our enemies’ plans will have already been executed, while if we err in the opposite direction, nothing will have happened for us to investigate.”

“But this is an emergency!” the young wizard said excitedly.

“No, in fact it’s not. Whatever damage has been done, is already done the Dark Gods, or their surrogates, have regained control of the Heart of Virtue, and since the events surrounding the Ragnarok transpire here within the Nine Worlds, involving at least two known monsters native to these worlds, it would seem logical that the Heart will arrive here if we simply sit around and wait. Before doing anything rash, we should investigate using psychic and magical means to the greatest degree possible before we actually do anything, because only when we have a better sense of what actually happened can we have a better chance of acting in such a way that we make matters better instead of worse. Right now, the diverse quantum timelines of our two worlds are still in a state of flux, diverging rapidly from the instant we left Myriad to go to Earth, and then here into the Nine Worlds, but will collapse into certainty in the instant of physical observation. We should consult with the Empress first, I think, both because of her position and because she is a Scryer of considerable power, so may be able to discover things that your previous sorceress was not. We might also ask Eir Menglöð if she might have any advice, since she deals with temporal ambiguity on a daily basis, and may be able to help us, even though Myriad is probably outside her sphere of authority.”

“Did I hear my name mentioned?” Eir said from behind him.

Phil turned to her and said, “You did, Sweetheart. Master Wizard Akcuanrut here tells me that the Heart of Virtue has been taken, and a number of Wizards of the Imperial College murdered — probably the crew who were guarding it — possibly by Dwarves. I was counselling caution, and recommended against an immediate response lest we inadvertently miss the opening and closing of a portal.”

“You’ve had Dvergar in Akcuanrut’s world? Did any of them die?” she asked.

“Quite a few in the first incursion,” Phil told her, mystified by her curious question “at least hundreds, if not thousands. As for this latest, I don’t know. Larona may be able to help us through sorcery.”

“She may, but if you can show me the way to your world, I’ll soon sort out who sent them, and whatever it is they knew.”

“You can do that?” Phil asked. “How in the worlds is that possible?”

“Because the Dvergar, the Svartálfar, are numbered amongst my people, and you are their lawful overlord.”

“I am?”

“You are, both as a result of my brother’s selection of you as his ‘temporary’ replacement in Álfheimr, and as the victor in a fair contest with Óðinn, despite his later attempts to use unmanly means to renege on his formal surrender after ignominious defeat. He was well-armed with a man’s sword, and other lawful weapons, but chose to use foul seiðr to attack both my mother and you after you’d overcome him in hand-to-hand struggle. The fact that you’ve thus far declined to claim the prize means nothing, since Óðinn himself was often absent for months or years. Who rules Ásgarðr and Goðheimr, rules the Nine Worlds, at least officially, or until an ambitious claimant chooses to contest your overlordship and wins.”

Phil had a sudden vision of an endless stream of would-be kings and wannabe ‘top guns’ dogging his footsteps like B-Movie ‘gunsels,’ or whatever it was that they were called. “Unh… What if I don’t want to fight?”

She looked at him with scorn. “First, they’d have to kill you before they could claim victory, so you might as well fight rather than be dead and branded as a coward. Second, your followers and wives would be the prizes of the victor, and we wouldn’t like that; so in short, you’d better fight, or any and all of your wives, at least, might feel more than simply murderous toward you, but betrayed.” Then she looked at him with something like pity. “You’re not on your Earth right now, Phil, and not living by Earth rules. Or, as we like to say on Earth, ‘Get with the program! Phil!’ lest you let your teammates down.”

“Our Phil? Let any one of us down? Impossible!” Larona’s voice came from behind him, so he turned to look as she and seven Selene döppelgangers came up on their small group, looking very refreshed after their afternoon sojourn in the pavilion.

“Oh,” said Eir, “not to worry. He’s just having a few qualms as he comes to grips with the obligations of a King, which isn’t nearly as much a bed of roses as some not to the manor born make it out to be.”

“True,” she said, nodding. “Amongst the many royal prerogatives are an even larger number of royal obligations, including the duty to cheerfully die for one’s people, if it comes to that.”

Hearing that from Larona suddenly made quite a few things clear to Phil. She came from a long line of Kings and Queens, and surely many of them had done just that. She lived in luxury, but that luxury had a price in her mind, one that she was ready to pay when the bill came due. “We don’t have all that much experience with royalty in my homeland,” he admitted, “so its traditions sometimes seem strange to me. I do my best to understand.”

“No royalty?” she said, bemused, “No real leaders? However do you cope? Surely this would encourage recklessness and profligacy in almost any society.”

He paused to consider her words and saw the wisdom in them. “You’re right, of course; it does. Those advisors and legislators temporarily ‘in charge’ rarely, if ever, have to face the real consequences of their actions, however rash or ill-advised, since they hold the people as a whole hostage to their personal agendas with no possible repercussions for them personally to moderate their rash actions.”

“I think you’re too kind,” she said, “since such ‘advisors’ would necessarily be open to bribery and blandishments of many kinds. Deeply offending an absolute monarch carries the risk of death, which tends to temper any tendency toward excess, where an utter lack of personal responsibility breeds contempt for those one supposedly ‘serves.’ If there is no one actually ‘in charge,’ then no one is in charge. Fractious children are in control of the ship of state, to run it onto the rocks, or into the storm, with nary a trace of parental supervision.”

He thought about the sandbox squabbles and posturing of the legislative process as he knew it, and said, “I have to agree. With no ‘skin in the game,’ it doesn’t matter what stupid plays you call, since someone else will run them out, and any casualties will represent other people’s losses.”

In the end, they decided not to investigate the theft of the Heart at all. It was done — however it was done — and the Wizards of the College were just as dead whether they clapped eyes on them or not, so the real issue lay not in figuring out which doors should have been locked, nor how the theft should have been prevented, nor whom to blame, but in who had it now, and what to do with the information — if one could discover it — and where they should go right now.

“Svartálfheimr!” Phil shouted. “That’s it! Where this all began!”

“What the heck!?” Rhea said grumpily. “Do you know what time it is?” It was the middle of the night, and they were lying in a muddle of sheets, blankets, and bodies, as messy and confused as a clowder of sleepy cats.

“What’s up, Phil?” Selene asked, herself in that dreamy state between sleep and waking.

“I realize now that we have to go back to the beginning, back to when we first entered this world, in Svartálfheimr, where we met King Alvís and his people. They’re the real key to this peculiar puzzle!”

“Why do you say that?” Rhea asked.

“It was something that Eir Menglöð said to me, that the Dvergar, the Svartálfar, are numbered among her people, and I wondered how this could possibly be true. Her brother Freyr ruled over the Ljósálfar, the Light Elves, after all, and the Dwarves were the ‘Black Elves,’ who seemed to be their exact opposite.”

“Well,” she said, “aren’t they?”

“No, and King Alvís himself gave me the clue, when he said that he’d be proud to fight beside me. Then I thought of that verse in Tehilim, ‘Praises’ what the Gentiles call the Psalms, ‘I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments.’ The King of the Dvergar, the Dvergar themselves, are not ‘Dark,’ nor are they of the Dark. They’ve gone astray, perhaps, but only that. They know what it is to be honorable, but have been ground down, I think, by poverty, and perhaps poor choices in life, but they still aspire to greatness, to nobility. That’s why they’re numbered amongst Eir’s people, not Surtr’s, nor are they at all like the Dark Elves, the dökkálfar, those who have embraced the Dark. The Dvergar are only ‘black,’ like night before the dawn, and diminished in size, possibly through genetic dwarfism selected for through living in a starvation economy.”

“I don’t understand,” said Selene.

“We took the wrong path, almost from the beginning. Every time we came to a choice, in seeking out the Dark, we chose the path toward light, always toward the Sun, like flowers tracking the day. Looking back, it seems so foolish, but every step seemed logical, almost inevitable, and of course it turned out for the best, in the end. I’m not sure how the Æsir would have fared at Bilröst without your help, or Freyr against Fenrir. Perhaps it was destiny, or something like it, but it took us far astray; the True Dark lay North, toward the cold, away from the light, toward Niflheimr and Hel, Sinmœra’s domain.”

“Sinmœra?”

He nodded. “The Queen of Hel, the woman who forged Hævateinn, the weapon intended to destroy the Gods and everything living, which I now believe to be the Heart of Darkness itself, perhaps deliberately conflated with Surtr’s fiery scourge, a bit of theatrical ‘flash’ meant to draw our attention away from the real danger.”

“The Heart is a weapon?”

“Yes, and a terrible one. We saw the frieze the centaurs left behind, which showed them running away in terror, but we never stopped to figure out exactly why they were running away.”

“But the Heart is terrible!” Selene said indignantly. “You saw what it did to my parents, and D’lon-ra, for that matter. It destroyed his body, and then corrupted his soul. I’m only thankful that it only destroyed my parents’ bodies, but left their souls untouched, so you could rescue them unharmed, at least in their sanity and love for each other.”

“I am too, Sweetheart, profoundly grateful, but the Heart never terrified any of us. It was dangerous, sure, and we had to be very careful when we were fighting it, but it had to sneak up on your parents through a trick, and Na-Noc fled in fear, frightened by one old Wizard, two young girls, a couple of powerful centaurs, and a very inexperienced Apprentice, hardly the terror weapon depicted in the centaur records of their epic battles.”

“But what is it then?”

“I don’t know, exactly, although I suspect that it has something to do with its power to subsume and twist both souls and bodies to its fell purpose. Perhaps, in the hands of an expert wielder of its powers, it can reach out and transform people at a distance, or possibly subsume people’s minds and souls so that they instantly turn on those they love most. I just don’t know, but I do know that it must be terrible to see, since the ancient centaurs were doughty warriors, and clever enough that the Heart of Virtue was trapped here for thousands of years before the meddling of the Imperial College of Wizards set it free. Not once in all that time did Na-Noc — whoever he was before the Heart took hold of him — nor any of his predecessors, discover the secrets that the centaurs wanted hidden, except possibly the hidden passage and cavern beneath the throne room, whatever it was originally, and even that seems to have been designed as a snare, to distract those who might seek to penetrate the true centaur secrets.”

“So, what do we do next?” Rhea said, stretching luxuriously as she thought seriously about getting up.

“We go to Hel,” he said, “and defeat Sinmœra, hopefully wresting the Heart from her grasp. If anyone knows how to use it, it must be her, but I’m hoping that she herself requires someone fit to use it, and that he or she isn’t there yet, since she evidently had the weapon in her hands, but didn’t use it for so long that it went missing. This can’t have been part of any overall plan.”

“Oh, great!” she groused, “Why didn’t you just say so the first time, Phil? It all sounds so simple when you put it like that: We go to Hell, twist the she-devil’s tail, and then rain her own Hellfire on her head. What could possibly be easier?”

He laughed at that, then said, “Well, it might be a little more complicated than that, but I’m quite sure you and Selene will manage to correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong.” He smiled winsomely in her general direction.

“Oh, heck!” she said grudgingly. “When you put it like that, I suppose we’ll have to.”

“Remind me again what we’re doing here,” Selene said quietly.

They were threading their way through a series of frozen cordilleras in Niflheimr, the closest thing to a very chilly Hell that one could possibly imagine. Whoever it was who’d coined the expression, ‘When Hell freezes over,’ had obviously had this place in mind.

“We’re looking for the gates of Hel, or something like them,” Phil whispered.

They were alone, the three of them, accompanied by three centaurs. They were dressed in heavy long white woolen robes, like an Arabic burnoose, over their regular clothes, in an effort to be inconspicuous, but the centaurs, of course, had to rely upon their own powers of disguise, which were considerable when they put their minds to it. They’d seen Hrímthurs, Frost Giants, stalking along in the distance, but none had turned to look, nor looked at much of anything, as far as they could see, since they mostly trudged along with their heads down, possibly avoiding the direct glare of the arctic Sun glancing low off of the endless ice plains and mountains.

And then he saw it, the glint of sun on metal, not ice, and knew he'd found it. Ahead was a mountain of ice, not all that different from the other mountains around them, other than that one flash of polished steel. Carefully, he felt the æther around them and found the telltale signature of a shrouded portal, probably the portal she'd used to send the Dwarves to ambush them in Myriad, although of course he couldn't tell for sure without a closer inspection. He raised his hand slightly, enough to attract Selene and Rhea's attention, which wasn't much at all, and hissed quietly through his teeth. “That's it!” he said, as much like a sighing breath of wind as he could manage.

They nodded, then disappeared, and their mounts with them, as the centaurs extended their own powers of disguise to make them look like slowly drifting flurries of snow.

Phil trudged along, making no further effort to conceal himself, since he now wanted to attract attention. Quickly, he approached the mountain, where he did, in fact, discern a polished iron gate set into the light grey rock of a cliff, half-covered in ice and snow. As the Gate of Hel, it left a lot to be desired. It was drab, small, and utterly devoid of architectural distinction, more like a sewer cover set on end than the entrance to an underground dominion

On the other hand, it was enough, just as a sort of decoration, because the most notable feature of the entrance to Hel was a glowing forge as big as garbage truck off to one side, as big as one of those behemoths with the hydraulic mangles that smashes up the stuff in the cans when the automatic levers pour the bins inside its gaping maw. Standing before that forge was a Jötun woman, as big as Surtr, but as black as night. Not black like she'd come from Africa, but as if she'd been formed from molten pitch, her naked breasts reflecting the glow from the forge with a deep and shiny dark amber glow somehow inside her, moving as her breasts swayed and she worked the forge, shifting whatever she held in the coals with iron tongs as thick as cast iron water mains. Then she lifted up her workpiece, it was the Heart of Virtue, surprisingly dainty in the midst of all the outsized blacksmithery, and it was on fire.

Then he noticed something else, half hidden behind the forge and its grotesque blacksmith, the head of a giant snake, Jörmungandr, just snaking around the corner of the mountain.

‘Oh, crap!’ he thought, as everything became suddenly, horribly, crystal clear.

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved