The Burning Man

9

Tom felt the full weight of his age as he ran. His knees protested, his chest burned, his heart pounded so hard he thought it would burst. He felt as if he had lived with fear from the moment the queen of the Court of the Yearning Heart had taken him from the world. Always running, always scared of the past, the present, the future. He hated himself, but he couldn’t stop running.

The blood continued to drip from the fruit overhead. He had avoided every splash so far, but it was only a matter of time before he was tainted. Behind him, his friends were dying, like the others he had left behind to their fate at the Court of the Final Word.

The irony made him sick. Across his homeland he was known as a great hero: Thomas the Rhymer, who would return to save the land in its time of greatest need. In truth, he was selfish and weak and scared. Worthless.

Tears stung his eyes. He tried not to think of Church, who had befriended him and shown him so many valuable lessons, and of the others who each in their own small way had made his dark life a little brighter.

He drove himself on, but after nearly eight hundred years of sickness and self-loathing he had finally reached his limits. He crashed onto the soft loam and cried out, ‘Take me, damn you! Take me and let them go!’

For a long moment he lay face-down, his head reeling with the insane rush of emotions. When his mind finally began to clear and he realised it was not all over, he slowly looked up to see Freyja standing next to a tree, her smile teasingly sexual, but her eyes dark and unfathomable.

‘Mortals can never resist the golden apples,’ she said.

‘Save them,’ Tom pleaded.

Freyja plucked one of the apples and held it before her so that the glow illuminated her beautiful face. ‘You are offering your life in exchange for theirs? Of what value is that to me?’

‘The All-Father ordered you to give us safe passage,’ Tom gasped.

‘And so I did. But this is a new matter. A transgression greater still. The golden apples are the very power of the gods. To steal one is a crime that demands the highest penalty.’

‘You set a trap. You knew once we were in the grove it was only a matter of time until one of the apples was taken.’

Her laughter was soft and gentle and contemptuous. ‘Your little sister has a great mastery of seior, but she is far beneath me. After all, I brought seior to the gods. When she conjured here in our Great Dominion, she presented an … opening.’

‘What do you want? Revenge?’

‘Revenge implies some notion of equality. You are mortals, for all your great abilities, and consequently barely worthy of my attention.’ Holding the apple delicately, Freyja sat on a fallen tree. As she examined the fruit’s gleaming skin, Tom had the strangest feeling that it was not an apple at all, but something sentient.

‘This is the axe-age, the sword-age,’ she continued, ‘that precedes the great catastrophe Ragnarok. The seeds of this destruction were sown in the beginning, when this flawed existence emerged from the fire and the ice.’

Tom was struck by how Freyja’s mythic account echoed the Gnostic beliefs that Church had come to understand as the truth: of a flawed universe ruled by the Void.

‘The one your people know as Loki has a part to play and now he has already joined the forces of dissolution. Will the World Serpent curled around Midgard with its tail in its mouth soon burst forth? Will Asgard fall? Will Bifrost burn? Can such wonder and beauty ever fail?’

Her haughty expression faltered. Tom instantly recognised the familiar emotion.

‘You think you know what this means, but you do not,’ she said. ‘Fenrir will break free and roam the Fixed Lands with his savage brothers, spreading death everywhere. The wolves will swallow the sun and the moon, and Yggdrasil, the Life-Tree, will shake to its roots. Hel will rise from misty Niflheim with her armies of the dead and sweep across the Vigrid Plain. And all the worlds shall burn, and Earth shall fall into the boiling ocean.’

A silence followed her words that extended far into the forest. The images she had conjured reminded Tom of the biblical Revelations he had read as a youth. There was only one story, filtered through different cultures, different beliefs.

Freyja stood before him, and her face was almost too fierce to look upon. ‘If you wish to live — if you wish to save your comrades at this moment — you must make a bargain with me. Even though it could mean the betrayal of your own and all they stand for.’

Tom steadied himself against a tree, fighting the deep chill of desolation rising through him. ‘What do you want?’ he said.