This piece is shorter fiction and my interpretation of the norse myth of the progeny of humankind. It takes place after the fabled 'Ragnarök', the end of days and worlds foretold in norse myth. If you would care to read more in depth about any of what I have written, follow the link below. Norse mythology is a deep and extremely interesting well to fall into, and one that I can encourage you to read more about.
Artist: Feliks G.
His Artwork: https://www.deviantart.com/fel-x
Excerpt from the journal of Lifthrasir
The first history of the world,
The tale of the second beginning of humankind,
And the birth of a new age.
23rd of Solmanudr, 1AR (After Ragnarök):
I am Lifthrasir Hafthlir, daughter of Ragar Hafthlir, chieftain of the Stone Raven clan; or what it once was. I am the last of the Stone Ravens now. I float alone on a rowboat, navigating the still seas atop what once was Midgard. I eat what I can catch with my fishing rod and drink the water I float upon. Somehow it tastes as fresh as a mountain stream. Somehow? I still second guess everything, but during the end of days, all alone, it is all I can do to keep from accepting the world that has been torn from me.
My father should have listened to our seer. The moment that old woman came out of her stuffy home he should have known. She came one day, crying to the village square as if she had a gutting knife stuck in her throat. By my father's command, she soon did have one, lodged so that her screams were muffled. Her cries carried horrors and nightmares, but my father did not listen. He was a rough man, but I suppose he ruffles none but the slick salmon that swim deep in the sea that has become all of Midgard.
In some sick twist of fate, her prophecies were true. I have witnessed the twilight of the gods in a flurry as quick and as ruthless as a hard winter's snow, taking with it all I have known. All that anyone has ever known.
I have spent weeks cursing Loki for breaking his suffering chains and ushering in the first prophecy of the destruction of the world. Skoll and Hati, the wolves of the sky, have finally caught the sun and moon. Fenrir howls from the freedom of his chains. Jormangandr has risen from the depths of the sea and loosed his clutches on the world.
If it was all inevitable, why did it have to be during my time? Mortals live quick lives, but unlucky ones it seems.
The gods we worshipped and invoked before a battle, dedicated meat and wine and glory to are all gone.
It came first by earthquakes as Jormangandr rose from the sea. Tremors upturned the ground underneath our feet. First, crops failed and a storage hut outside of town fell, then the world ended. It drew away and towards itself in vast tumbles of rock and stone, shaking great trees from their deep roots and reducing mountains to silt and pebble. Even the great tree Yggdrasil moaned.
We should have prepared. We should have known. By Odin, we should have known. 'By Odin.' The words feel wrong. They don't invoke the same wonderment they once did. I write it by habit; the name is no more than an archaic thing that invokes nothing but painful memories.
3rd of Heyannir, 1AR:
Time drags on in the boat longer than a day filled with work. Stone Ravens were not meant to swim, we were meant to glide through the air, to soar and pillage and live. Now I feel as though I am a piece of driftwood, already dead and rotting. I never thought I would have wished to be back tending to the crops for long hours under days of hot sun, but I find myself longing for that now.
It has grown colder, much colder, even overnight. It has only been a week and a half since I have written, and the cold came sooner and much faster than any natural winter. I fear Fimbulwinter is upon the world.
Ice floes have cropped up around me in the water seemingly overnight. I avoid them as best I can, but I was never a rower. Sometimes the ice shatters against the sharp edge of my boat and I fear a leak, but the water stays outside of the boat. I wonder how much time I have before the ice freezes over and the fish go too deep for my rod to reach. I will catch as much as I can.
As nighttime rises and fills the empty water with stark white light, I look to the sky. Though all is gone, Asgard and the gods forced to the unchanging permanence of myth, I cannot help but look up at the stars. Before, the sky was decorated with a gentle light like specks of quartz sitting atop black cloth. My mother always called it the sky quilt. As Ragnarök raged, it was all we could do to watch the stars wink out, threads of divine light pulled from their patchwork, one after the next.
There are fewer stars now, but there are some left, few enough that I can count on both hands. One winked at me tonight. It flickered like the sun off of a wave.
I think I will follow that one.
5th of Heyannir, 1AR:
The air is still as it has been since the earth stopped rumbling and the water ruled over the land, but that does not make it any less cold. Ice has formed all around my boat, trapping me. I have tested the ice and it is solid, as solid as the ground would be. It has frozen my boat like roots to this icy earth. I must continue on foot. I still do not know where I am going, but I will continue to follow the star. It still blinks at me at night, harder now as if a candle flickering in wind.
9th of Heyannir, 1AR:
My hand is stiff as ice on my quill. There is no wind so the cold hangs in the air like stale death.
I broke all the wood from my moored boat that I could carry and have used flint and the steel of my dagger to light sparse fires, but I am on my last few planks. I had to warm my ink from frozen under my armpit.
I have been able to drink what I can scrape from the ice with my dagger, now dull from fervency, and I have eaten the last of my salmon rations.
It is night now, or what I judge to be night. I am tired. There is still no moon or sun. The long days are grey. The star has stopped winking; it holds a steady light almost as bright as I remember the moon being. That I have to remember the moon is still a raw, painful feeling. Either way, I think I have found what this star has been leading me too. There is something blurry in the distance, reaching above the horizon of flat ice.
I will not name it as true, for I am hungry and tired, and my mind sits heavily in my head. How can I be sure that the star was blinking? The gods are dead, there is no one in Asgard any longer, certainly none that would reach out to the frozen waste of Midgard. But there is no hiding the truth of it now. It has led me here and it continues to lead me somewhere.
My stomach aches from hunger and I must sleep with that pain. When I wake, I hope the blur is still there. I will pray tonight, for the first night in a month. There is someone, something else alive, in this world or another.
There must be.
10th of Heyannir, 1AR:
By Asgard, the gods are not dead! Midgard is not forgotten!
I will name it as true now, without doubt, it is Yggdrasil. I can see its branches, large as mountain tops even in the far distance, reaching into the sky farther than I can see with roots deeper than the earth itself. One root flows to Asgard, one to Niflheim and one to Jotunheim, and it is here.
Around the base of the tree, encircling the roots seems to be a forest. It is still a few days off. I am so hungry I could eat my arm and likely would if it were not for the great tree. I can last. I can make it there. I will make it there.
12th of Heyannir, 1AR:
I have made camp and on the edge of Yggdrasil. Even as I write the words it seems, even to myself, that I am writing an old wives’ tale, but this great ash can be no other. Through habit, I was about to make a fire, but calming warmth billows from the forest. It seems that I can wear whatever clothes I want and feel comfortable.
The ice floes that cap all of Midgard reach tentatively near to the base of Yggdrasil, but carry none of the cold and seem to melt nearby the flatlands that surround the tree, feeding the vast ash with lakes of water each day. I have found no food, but dew rests on trees amongst everything. It is sweet and feels thick as honey on my tongue, though light as air. It fills my stomach to fullness with a single taste, yet when I reach for more, I feel no fuller.
I have spent the evening exploring the nearby area around the outset of the tree trunk. This is a truly wondrous place.
Before bed I pray to whoever guided me here, to whichever god sent me along my path, living amongst barren Asgard as I live amongst the waste of Midgard. No, I pray for them. I must remember it is not only my world that has been levelled to waste by Ragnarök.
13th of Heyannir, 1AR:
There is another human.
I was stirred away deep into the night by a pair of bright blue eyes. I almost did not hear him approaching. If there were any fallen leaves or stale twigs for him to step on I would not have allowed him to get nearly as close, but this is an undying tree. He could have killed me, but he does not seem the kind to want to.
He woke me with a gentle prod and, after convincing me to pull my blade from his throat, we sat at opposite sides of my camp and talked.
His name is Lif, son of Olav Ingerstone of the Bear Mount clan. He has been at Yggdrasil for not much longer than I. He says he also followed a flickering star. He claims it is the god Baldur who survived Ragnarök. I asked him how he knows. He claimed that it was just a feeling, some story his mother told him long ago. He cried in my arms thinking of his mother. I cried thinking of mine.
I am not yet sure what to make of him, but he is gentle, even kind, though his broad shoulders are as vast as a rune-stone. He would not make a bad companion, and he is as beautiful as the world around us. If I did not know better, I would have guessed him to be a god, Thor or Loki come down to play at their boyish games, but I know better than that.
The gods are dead. Lif is alive. We are alive.
21th of Heyannir, 1AR:
It has been several days since we have met. Lif and I have explored much of the vast forest that surrounds Yggdrasil. He truly is gentle, not just with me, but with the sacred forest around him. He steps over and around thickets of flower and thorn alike, being careful not to let his broad arms scrape the bark off any tree or letting his boots drag and poke too deep into the forest floor.
I feel a pang of strange guilt to admit it, but I have laughed more in the past few days than I can recall ever having before. It may be this divine land getting to my senses, muddling up my reason, but I seem to forget the waste of Midgard when I am here with Lif. I still miss my family of course and I wonder what will become of the world, but it helps that Lif is here. It helps that someone shares my concerns.
We slept together last night. I have only known him for a week, and I know that it is improper to do so before marriage, but there is no one to marry us and everything improper was swept away along with the rest of the world. All else left to survive was frozen by the bitter Fimbulwinter.
I hope we have a child.
28th of Harpa, 1 NB (New Beginnings):
It is a day that marks a new age for the world. The Sun has risen with the birth of my daughter. It is a beautiful sight.
Our daughter is born today. Silfë. She is beautiful: blonde of hair, blue of eyes, strong muscles, but her true beauty comes from the hope she brings to this empty world. I suppose there are no more wise ones, no more thinkers to tell which season it is, or which year for that matter. Lif and I have named the new year, the new age, an age of 'New Beginnings'.
31st of Harpa, 1 NB:
It is summer in Midgard now. True summer. The ice at the edges of Yggdrasil has begun to melt, now further than ever before. Lif and I have seen the first flower outside of Yggdrasil's blessed forest.
The world is returning. Midgard is returning.
By the time Silfë is grown, she will know lands far beyond the forest of Yggdrasil. She will know Midgard as it has been known for thousands of years before.
Ragnarök was an ending, but it was also a beginning. Our daughter will grow in the light of the Sun and play in the night of the moon. Humanity will be reborn. The world will come again.
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