“Ulla! Come join us!” Rikky exclaimed as she saw me. “Have a drink!”
Before I could respond, she flitted over to the table and poured a glass from a big jug. She thrust it at me, and I tentatively took it from her. “What is it?
“Omte sangria,” she said with a laugh.
Pan rolled his eyes. “It’s blackberry wine and eldvatten, which is a fancy name for Omte moonshine. It’s good, but pace yourself.”
I sniffed my drink, and the smell was a tart mixture of Jolly Rancher candy and kerosene, so I decided that I’d work up to it.
“We were talking about all the disturbing crap we learned today, including living sacrifices and helifiske.” Rikky did exaggerated air quotes around the final word.
“Helifiske?” I repeated. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that before.”
Rikky sat on the couch next to Pan and pulled her feet up under her. “Before today, neither had I. But you may know it by the more anglicized name—sacred recruitment.”
That clicked with me because I’d only learned of it recently. Calder had gotten a book for me about the followers of the Älvolk—the legendary guardians who protected the Lost Bridge of Dimma—and it had mentioned something. The book was mostly a series of commandments and a few simple parables and poems, and there were key phrases repeated throughout. Lots of references to blood, “magick,” supremacy, and getting to a magical land of riches and reward.
One of the ways to gain access to this utopia was to commit acts of service. Most of them were simple and made sense, like setting aside pursuits of gold and following the orders of the Älvolk leaders. But there was also talk of “payments in blood and flesh,” as well as the importance of “sacred recruitment” and “blodseider magick”—but neither of the terms had been specifically defined in the text.
“If you’re ready to get into it all, you might as well sit down and make yourself comfortable.” Pan motioned to a pile of cushions and ikat pillows on the floor, between the record player and the birdcage that housed the sleeping squirrel.
I peeked in the cage, checking out the fat gray ball of fluff, before settling down on the cushions. “Okay. I think I’m ready.”
“It’s sex,” Rikky said bluntly, then laughed at the shock on my face. “Helifiske. It’s the sacred act of using sex to seduce prospective converts into joining the cult. Or, I’m sorry—they prefer to be called Freyarian Älvolk or Guardians of the Lost Bridge of Dimma.”
“There is a lot more to it than that,” Pan admonished her. “Yeah, helifiske is a part of the teachings of the Freyarian Älvolk, but it is more than a recruitment. I read about a lot of rituals that mentioned sacrifice and sex with blodseider magick, but most of them had nothing to do with attracting new members or proselytizing of any kind.”
“What were the points of the rituals, then?” I asked.
I decided it was finally time to sample the “sangria,” sipping it slowly and inconspicuously. That turned out to be a very smart move, since it tasted like battery acid mixed with sugar. I managed to keep my expression neutral as it burned down my throat, and I forced myself to focus on Pan’s explanation.
“I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. “Pleasure? Power? Delusions?”
“It all starts with Frey,” Rikky interjected. “The Älvolk in general buy into the whole Alfheim creation myth. You know, the one that says ‘god’ or ‘gods’—depending how closely you follow the orthodoxy—all live in Alfheim. They either came from Alfheim and created the earth, or they lived on earth and created Alfheim as a paradise for the gods and heroes.”
Pan took a long drink of his sangria while Rikky was talking, and he shook his head as he swallowed. “No, no, that’s not quite what the Älvolk believe. I don’t think they know who or what created Alfheim and the earth and universe. They think that Alfheim is a better place to live with a higher quality of inhabitants. Whether Alfheim is another kingdom, continent, planet, or maybe entirely made up is anybody’s guess.”
“So maybe a real place or maybe a paradise of the gods?” Rikky asked with a teasing smile.
“Okay, it’s basically the same thing, but I want to be precise with my language. It’s one thing to believe a place is a utopia, and it’s another to believe that it’s an afterlife that you must do good deeds to gain entrance to,” Pan clarified.
She held up her hand. “You’re right, you’re right.”
“So how do the Älvolk and the helifiske fit into finding Eliana and the First City?” I asked.
“Áibmoráigi was built near the Lost Bridge of Dimma to guard and conceal it,” Pan said.
“Other stories say that the bridge was supposed to be a secret, and that trolls built the First City too close to it,” Rikky added. “And that’s why they ‘lost’ the bridge, to protect it.”
“No matter how you slice it, the First City and the Älvolk are connected,” Pan said. “Many of the legends diverge at certain points, but there is a lot that is similar. Trolls and humans lived separately for a long time—with the trolls alluded to as being on Alfheim, and the humans on earth. There was a bridge between the two worlds, although the exact descriptions of what the bridge looked like or how far it spanned are usually vague and frequently contradict each other.”
“Yeah, I read on Trollipedia that some historians thought that tales of the bridge were created to explain natural phenomena like the aurora borealis because of how often the bridge was described as bright lights that were gone in a matter of seconds,” Rikky said. “But then I read several passages today that described it as a dark tunnel that took forty years to pass through.”
“It could even be that they’re talking about two separate things but the folklore got all mixed up together,” Pan said. “But the main point is that there was some mystical bridge that connected the troll world and the human world.
“And also, just to be clear, they don’t use the words troll and human,” he went on. “Those from Alfheim are álfar, and those on earth are called ekkálfar, so really the bridge connected the álfar world and the ekkálfar world.
“A city sprang up around where the bridge met the earth, like many ports that eventually grew into bustling centers of culture and life,” Pan said. “And that’s exactly what Áibmoráigi did, eventually becoming the First City and the birthplace of troll society.”
“But then something happened.” Rikky’s thick eyebrows bunched together, and she stared up at the skylights for a moment. “There isn’t a clear record of what transpired, but something changed.”
“The most consistent explanation that I’ve heard is that old nursery rhyme,” Pan said. “The one with a bird and a fish and a bunny and, I don’t know, some kind of big cat or something. And they’re all pals until this giant worm, of all things”—he rolled his eyes at that—“messes everything up. It’s basically a Norse Tower of Babel.”
“Tower of what?” Rikky asked.
“My bad.” He laughed to himself. “I forgot you guys grew up so isolated from humans. I doubt that there’s a lot of copies of the Old Testament floating around in nightstands around here.”