The Urd of the Vanir (ebook)

To see things other Men did not, to know truths they could not imagine, was both blessing and torment. Loki had once told Odin that the Sight carried with it many aspects, that he would see things he might rather have not. His blood brother could not have been more right, but he had neglected to mention the nigh irresistible temptation to keep looking, to keep striving to understand all things in the World. Unfolding realities of the past and future, the living and the dead, and the connections that bound them together—these visions taunted him, always just out of reach, always promising enlightenment but never quite delivering.
Rather than linger among his Men, Odin fled the hall they had built on the beach, trusting his instincts to guide him to Idunn. That much of the Sight he could rely on. Feelings and intuitions which, over the past moons, had grown ever sharper. Odin knew with uncanny accuracy where to find those he sought, sensed when vaettir drew near on the other side of the Veil, and felt it when those he cared for were in pain. Sometimes the cries of his children—of Thor, his blood, and of Geri and Freki, the varulf twins—would draw him from halfway across the camp. Frigg had asked how he always knew, but he had no real answer to give her, and she, a völva, had seemed to understand. Perhaps everyone touched by the Otherworld acquired some semblance of the Sight. Maybe that was how Loki always seemed to find Odin when times grew to their worst. Except now, when Odin would have given a fortune in gold for but a few moments of the man’s counsel.
The full moon silvered the Mist as it coiled about his legs, hungry, as ever, for his soul. He bore no torch, now; the apple he’d tasted fortified his Megin, made it too strong for the Mist to claim him. Besides which, the night was fast becoming a part of him, a perhaps inevitable change in one who spent nigh as much time hearing the dead as the living. As he straddled the spaces betwixt World and Otherworld, Odin could not help but feel himself falling, never quite certain onto which side he would land. Thinking himself part of this reality did not stop him from touching iron to ward it off.
The dead wandered here, aimless and forlorn, and Odin, as oft he did, pretended neither to see nor hear them. If he—necromancer as he was—were to acknowledge them, they would ask and ask of him, beseech him to contact those they had left behind, or revenge themselves on those who had wronged them. But the ranks of the dead were endless, and Odin could spend a thousand lifetimes trying—oft in vain—to appease them, without stymieing in the flood of suffering saturating the Otherworld.
The shriek of a distant raven had gooseflesh rising along his arms. One of Gjúki Raknison’s spies, mayhap, reporting Odin’s progress to the Niflungar. Aye, for Odin’s people now camped along the shore at the edge of Midgard, ready to make sail for the unknown west, where gods dwelt. The Æsir did not know what waited for them in Vanaheim, and it was a question even Idunn had not truly answered. Perhaps she could not. After all, if Odin was to risk the continued existence of all the Ás clans, what surety could the Vanr woman ever offer that would be enough? He could favour one clan by selecting them to send scouts and report back to him. But even then, he could not place absolute trust in such a report. There were some things he had to see for himself. Thus had he spent the past hours relaxing his vision, trying to open himself to an unfolding sea of possibilities, to look across the bay and see what waited for him.
He had failed.
Odin was far from a master of the Sight. He could, when necessary, gaze into the Spectral Realm. Such vision allowed him to see ghosts and alfar—always he heard them—if they ventured close enough to the Mortal Realm. At times, he had even been able to throw himself into the past, embrace his father Borr’s memories, and live another life. He had tried that tactic, too, to solve this dilemma but had found the only memories he could access were those of his parents, especially his father. He’d seen pieces of his mother’s life, though, had learnt she had been half-jötunn, which explained how the Mist had brought forth the trollish nature out of Vé. That blood coursed through their veins, made Odin a monster, shamanism and necromancy aside. His father had known, had not cared, had loved her and his children by her regardless. Odin supposed love was like that.
There were hints of other lives, other lands, people he felt connected to. But he could make no sense of them, could not place the occurrences in time or space. The rest of his visions unfolded in chaotic turmoil, a blurring of incomprehensible images. Once, he saw endless ice fells leading to a terrible iron wall. Another time, he saw a land of lush greenery that might have been Vanaheim. He might have been looking at the past, or the future, or a projection of his own desires. It was useless. He had too little control for the Sight to grant him what he sought.
And Loki, the one man who might have helped Odin control his psychic abilities, remained nowhere to be found. He and Sigyn had vanished in the wake of the battle with Grimhild and never returned, much to Frigg’s consternation. And without Loki, Odin had but one place left to turn, one source to help him make his decision.
Embrace the shadows …
Odin knew the wraith’s rasp came from within his own mind, yet it seemed to resonate with the Mist, to echo off the hateful vapour. He steeled his mind against Audr, whose essence resided inside Odin’s soul and stirred on painful occasions. Mostly, the foul shade waited for a moment of weakness in which to strike. The ghost hated Odin, hated everything.
Once more steady, he pushed on, threading through the Mist. The dead were in that brume, perhaps subsumed by it, and they flowed in with it, as if caught in a loathsome tide. Were the Mist to be pushed out of the World, Odin wondered, would the dead at last claim some peace? No, he supposed, denied ingress into the World, still they would wander the Otherworld.
Idunn stood with her feet in the freezing surf, staring out over the sea. If he was correct, then she too—perhaps all the Vanir—must see glimpses of things beyond human perception. The longer you looked at things Man could not understand, the further you became removed from Mankind. It was a lesson he could not afford to forget, lest he become no different than the Vanir themselves.
“Do you see your homeland?” he asked.
She shivered, though not, he suspected, from the cold waters of the bay. “I wanted to save the World, Odin. Yeah, I thought I could make Midgard a better place. How arrogant is that? I grew up on stories of my grandmother, tales of her and my grandfather fighting against Hel herself. And I allowed myself the hubris of thinking I could accomplish feats such as they did. Did you know, most of the surviving Vanir were born on Vanaheim? I was. Only a handful remain from the sojourn my grandmother led across our world, when the Worldsea receded and the land rose. We call them the First Ones, those few who came from beyond.”
“What happened to them?”
A few dozen paces down the beach, a vaettr, an alf of some sort, watched them. Odin kept the spirit in the corner of his eye. Alfar might study Men out of curiosity or malice, but either way, he’d not reveal himself to her unless he must.
Idunn sighed and rubbed her arms, and Odin wondered if she too felt the alf spying on them. “A lot of the First Ones, my father among them, died fighting the jötunnar. The jötunnar ruled our world till the Vanir drove them into the wastes of Utgard. And, over time, others died wandering this world, fighting each other in duels, on occasion in battles with other peoples.”
We are all dead … Audr rasped.
“People like the Niflungar,” Odin said, ignoring the wraith once again, as best he could. “You fought them.”
“A long time ago. My husband was the patron of one of the clans descended from Halfdan the Old. When the Niflungar began their wars of conquest, Bragi tried to get the Vanir to intercede on behalf of the Bragnings. Our new king, Njörd, refused. Such was … well, ’twas not the beginning of our isolation. That was deeper; there were never enough apples to go around, even for us, much less to share with outsiders.”
To ensure immortality for their own children, the Vanir had shut out the rest of Mankind. Odin could not truly blame them. What wouldn’t he do to protect his children? Loki had been prepared enough to save an apple for Thor, for when he was grown, but Odin intended Geri and Freki to get apples as well, even ere his jarls.
“The Old War wasn’t the beginning of our isolation, but that was when we began to completely turn our backs on the outside world. Yggdrasil is suffused with an unimaginable amount of Megin, connecting our World to the Otherworld. Because of this, we call it both the World Tree and the Tree of Life. And that energy kept the Mist at bay, diminishing the Niflungar’s powers. Njörd and his daughter, Freyja, they used the tree’s power to further fortify Vanaheim against any intrusion by the Niflungar or their sorcery.”