Asgard's Heart

6

Inevitably, I fell straight into the grip of a dream.

I express it thus because that is precisely what it felt like. It was as if something had been there, forming and growing according to some inner process of its own, ready and waiting for whatever it was that constituted the essential me to lose its grip of consciousness. When I blacked out, it was as if a great cold pool of darkness sucked me in and gobbled me up, consuming me more completely than any mammoth-sized mantis-machine ever could have.

The sensation of falling didn’t last long, and there was no jarring end, but I found myself suddenly alone, standing on an infinite plain as featureless as the surface of Asgard. The stars were bright in the sky, and I knew that a cold wind was blowing though I could not feel it on my skin. It was as though it blew straight through me.

I looked down at myself, and was unsurprised to find that I was a phantom—a pale, glimmering, translucent thing. My ghostly form was clad in a phantasmal tunic cut in a style which I associated with ancient Greece, but the cloth was torn and stained with blood and I knew that I had been mortally wounded by the thrust of some savage blade—a sword, or the head of a spear.

I was dead, and waited for my journey to the Underworld to begin.

There came to meet me, riding across the sky on a great night-black horse with shadowy wings, a woman in quilted armour. Her hair was very pale, but there was no colour in her, and I could not tell whether her piercing eyes were blue. I knew, though, that something was wrong, and that the imagery was out of joint, for surely this was a valkyrie come to carry some fallen Norseman off to the halls of Valhalla, whereas I had been slain without the walls of beleaguered Troy, and was destined for a very different kind of paradise.

When the night-mare landed beside me, and she reached down her tautly-muscled arm to lift me up, I raised my own hand in protest, as though to tell her to go away, but she only gripped my arm in hers, and pulled me to the saddle behind her, as effortlessly as might be imagined, given that I seemed to weigh almost nothing.

I had no time to discover whether I could speak my protest aloud, because the huge creature launched itself forthwith into the firmament, and carried us up into the starry night, where we grew in size so vastly that the stars seemed mere snowflakes gently flowing through the wintry air.

I looked down, expecting to be giddy, but there was no particular sense of height—it was as though I looked through a godly eye which could capture all Creation at a glance, and I saw what I took to be the whole great world of men, which consisted not of one meagre Earth and a handful of microworlds, nor even all the worlds of the galactic community, but something immeasurably vaster, growing even as I watched in a futile attempt to fill the limitless expanses of the infinite and the eternal. I was inexplicably unmoved by the incalculable profusion of it all, but while I watched, and the winged horse soared above the very rim of the cosmos, I saw patterns of change which worked in me like pangs of anxiety and knots of fear.

Despite the vastness of everything there was no detail which I could not comprehend, and I might have seen a single sparrow fall if I had not been so disturbed by other things that tormented my attention.

I saw a land all a-tremble with the paces of a giant hungry wolf, which led a pack of dire shadows to a feast of blood.

I saw a world that was a mighty twisted tree, ravaged by a blight which ate up its vitality from within, desiccating its foliage and shriveling its multitudinous fruit.

I saw a great ship whose hull was made from the growing nails of the coffined dead, whose sails were their silvered hair, riding on massive waves stirred by the roiling of a serpent greater than galaxies, its crew of skeletons armoured for war.

I saw a traitor with eyes like red coals, making magic to draw the shadowy wolf-pack to the field of slaughter.

I saw a monstrous army whose troops were made of fire, which marched like glowing lava from a wound in the fabric of time, its banners of lightning streaming proudly in the radiant breath of countless dying suns.

I saw a bridge like an infinite rainbow, extending from the world below to some other mysterious realm outside the range of my miraculous vision, its colours livid as it cracked and splintered, presaging in its shattering the death of all the gods, the desolation of that Valhalla where—after all—I did not really belong.

And I saw a face, which stared at me from the starry firmament, and knew it for the true possessor of that godlike sight I had borrowed for an instant. It was a face full of sorrow and concern, a face where mercy was mingled with wrath, whose sight could penetrate every atom of my being, every secret of my soul, and I knew that this was a god which men had made, and a god which had made man in his turn, and a god which now faced destruction, and was desperate enough to seek his heroes wherever he could find them, whether they belonged to him or not…

And then the god who held me in his guardian hand was forced to let me go, and I fell again, and fell, and fell, all the way back to consciousness.