BOOK ONE: TIME IS
— TRUMBA’S LAMENT —
Ormr inn Langi, Imperial Yacht in orbit above Midgard
1969
How peaceful she looks.”
The Empress stared down on the world below, her face as blank and remorseless as the sun. She rested her head against the hollow and traced her finger around the vacuum seal—the membrane flinched, then recoiled more slowly, adjusting to the momentary change in pressure.
Iðunn Lind watched the woman intently, a mere slip of a girl, her face half hidden by a delicate linen veil, her sing-song voice incongruent in its innocence.
“The first time I saw her, I was amazed. That tiny jewel, wispy and blue, was Mother Jörð. I held out my fingers as if to pluck her from the sky. I thought I’d feel like a god, but I didn’t. I felt very, very small.”
The waif drifted from hollow to hollow, trailing her long, red woolen dress in solemn procession across the prow of the ship.
Iðunn felt sick to the pit of her stomach. She knew this going to be gruesome, but even so, she felt compelled to join the young woman at the viewpoint. She had seen the transmissions, of course. Everyone had. But this was different. This was gazing into the abyss. Perhaps she had ventured all this way to bear witness. Where were you when the world ended? It wasn’t a question anyone thought to ask, because it shouldn’t be answerable.
The hollow loomed from floor to ceiling, affording a dizzying view. She had no choice but to look out.
The pea-green pearl was gone. A violent red smog roiled from pole to pole, and beneath it the glaciers had already begun their deadly march. The planet was inside out, wet with guts and bone. The scale of destruction was immense, unimaginable. Iðunn thought she knew grief, but her long years of loss were nothing compared to this.
“Do they understand why this happened?” The question caught in her throat. She struggled to turn her head away, to regain her composure.
Beneath the walls of her skin, her mind echoed with anguish, floundering in the darkest of depressions. Who hadn’t drowned in the madness of it all? she thought, as the tears tumbled down her face. Who was there left to fathom?
Dómhild Trumba didn’t answer. There was no need. Midgard had fallen, her Empire of the Heavens reduced to dust and viscera. Explanations wouldn’t change anything.
Only the poetry of myth and legend could capture the catastrophe, the skalds would say. It was Ægir’s daughters who rose that night, pitching and surging and grasping at the cities of man. Hálogi had burst from the earth, seething with wildfire, a procession of Eldjötnar at his heels.
Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.
But no lay could truly describe the collapse of Gulrstein Caldera, or the clouds of splintered rock and ash that blanketed the West, choking crops and livestock. No wordsmiths could convey the horror of flash-flooded cities, ripped in two by boiling seas.
If only it had ended there. Mankind had been humbled, Mother Jörð broken, but together they might have fought on, out of desperation or defiance. Across the planet there were survivors, of course: in the forests of Markland, in the mountains of the Rus, in the vain citadels of Aztland. Even in the seas off Furðustrandir, where a hundred thousand vessels struggled against the blood-dimmed tide. The relief efforts were quickly underway, the fleet flitting to and from the Hinterworlds. The rich, the noble, the powerful: they were ferried to safety.
But that was just the beginning.
Those who witnessed the bayonet of light say it outshone the moon. Like the flash of the sun on snow, it was dazzling for an instant—then the bloom faded, leaving a tear in the ash-dark clouds. It wasn’t a solar flare, the seiðrmenn said. They could have predicted that, prepared for it. No, this was something much more powerful.
A collision.
A black hole, a wanderer, a vagrant that decided to settle down in the heart of a distant sun. The immense gravity ripped it to pieces, shredding it to vapor, then announced its presence with twin beams of unstoppable fury. Surtr’s sword had cleaved the heavens.
Hours later, the rains came. Scalding, boiling rains, each droplet a deceit, a disguise for the radiation that fell from the cosmos. Across Trankebar, Frederiksnagore, and Ny Danmǫrk, across the whole of Asaland, people dropped and died where they stood. Hindoo, Norse, or Chitai, it made no difference: a third of the globe cooked, bubbling into a soup of glue and protein.
Götterdämmerung, Ragnarök, the doom of the gods, the meistari called it, trying to protect the survivors with dreamlike tales, ringing their fading horizons with forts of the imagination. The destruction was preordained, they cried. In time, the earth would emerge out of the sea, and be green and fair again. The gods would return to their golden tables amid the grass.
But Iðunn Lind no longer traded in fiction. Her job was to speak truth to power. Even after all the horrors of the Jötunn War, she was still a Verðandi, the head of an ancient order of diviners and healers, tied to the warp and the weft of humanity.
She’d heard the Tree scream even before the first bulletins from Midgard. Iðunn had sent her mind thrashing through the greenways in a blind panic, driven by instinct, drawn to the carnage by duty and by desperation. And here she was, in orbit, above a world lying in state, with a Head of State who was considerably more alive than the rumours had suggested.
She knew enough to call it what it was.
Obliteration. The word meant to remove from existence, to purge from memory. That implied orchestration. The crime was immense.
Fuckers, she thought. Someone would have to pay.
The Ormr inn Langi hung above the troposphere like a shroud. The crown of the ship was a fly’s eye dome, a geodesic bubble with hollows all around, cradling the stars. There was ample room for the two women to stand vigil.
The old warship was riven with fungus. Iðunn could smell the decay, sweet and sickly. She wrinkled her nose. At least the dull hum of the GEM field was reassuring. Very… grounding, she deadpanned. With the world hung, drawn, and quartered, gallows humour was the only thing she could trust. She felt utterly flat—like a fragmentary tapestry rather than a living, breathing creature.
There was some comfort in holding tight to the ship’s bulkhead, in proving she maintained a grip on reality, however tenuous. The symmetry always struck her as beautiful. The Norse believed the first man and woman were born of trees, and that the universe was rooted around the great World Tree, Yggdrasil. Their warriors took to the seas in clinker-built vessels of oak and pine, shattering empires and claiming soil with blood. And when there were no more lands to conquer, the ancient forests delivered still more bounty. Iðunn’s own oh-so-illustrious great-grandfather had unlocked the greenways, gateways to the supposed realms of gods—other planets, flung across the heavens. It was inevitable that when the Norse sought out the cosmos, they did so in living, breathing ships, grown from the same stock as Yggdrasil. During her rehabilitation, she’d been proud to play shipwright, merging tradition with technology.
Trees were life.
And death. The Ormr inn Langi was a hulk, long since designated as the imperial tomb, preserved just to be blasted off into the Gap. It was easy to imagine the blue sphere of flames engulfing the ship’s crown, flickering in the vacuum, a votive offering to a silent void.