~*~
Violet’s ship tilted forward as if a dirty hand had plucked a string from an otherwise tight and organized array. For some reason, her formidable piloting skills had been mysteriously com-promised by her discovery of Void; she no longer operated her craft from the same equations as before. She breathed deeply, focused on the silvery lines and soared into the sky of Asgard, a calm blue sea with a scythe-shaped storm front hanging in the north. She adjusted her course with a thought, her ship racing with silent speed over the emerald pools and tallow stones blasted to bits by warriors in training.
She was nervous, and the impression she had felt on entering orbit still hovered around her. Ever since the incident with the Icarus, the raven had followed her, appearing just now and then, never a fully focused creature but a shadow cast by the light of a faraway sun.
Each time the raven appeared, Violet looked away. After what had happened the one time she looked into the raven’s eyes, she did not dare to do it again. She had come to hope that the explosion in her consciousness created by her lovemaking would just wear off, over time.
It had not. But Violet Scott had a masterful imagination.
She leaned forward and looked up into the pale arc of the sky as something whispered across a vast distance. It came from the undersides, a sense of unease slithering beneath the lines. It grew as she focused on it.
Odin seized the Serpent and threw it far into the sea, where it grew to surround all lands, biting its tail.
It hit her in the gut, first. Her belly rolled over like a fish in a pool, stunned by an underwater blast. The lines in the hexagram shivered as a fist punched the matrix. The Void sang like a cramp in her womb. Her training told her to ignore it, as always.
Until a shining projectile spiraled towards her from the direction of Valhalla.
Cunningly, Odin tricks fools into war, a pleasure to him.
Violet stepped over the edge of Void. Her ship flipped to the side, and again, lines upon lines racing over the screen behind her eyes, structure holding the chaos as it whirred in infinite shades of probable defeat.
When the ship came to rights again, the missile was gone—replaced by twelve more in a killing formation shaped like a raven.
Only then did Violet realize that the Ministry meant to destroy her.
Not likely, you bastards. She arched her neck and rolled her eyes up into her head. The Light glimmered so high above her conscious awareness that she could not perceive it, though she knew it was there. She did not have to ask the darkness, or even to think of it; she became the thing. Like lovers rushing together in a confluence of divine need, Light struck the Void.
Violet cried out as the flash blinded her and threw her careening at alarming speed down and over the surface of the planet. The ship held her like a flexible suit of armor, but she felt every cell of damage it took, and it would not be long before it broke apart and either crushed her or sent her flying. She captured the spinning vortex of angles, gaps and structures in her mind and intended it to stop. It hovered over the black, primordial sea with a breath. The ship hummed and slowed, until it finally settled onto the ground with a sigh.
Violet let go of the image. She lay there, enclosed by the ship, her heart pounding wildly. Daylight streamed in; cool, damp air touched her face. She looked down quickly to make sure that her supple head-to-toe body armor was intact in case a laserfly—the second-most deadly scourge of this planet next to Odin Systems—found its way through the battered ship. Then she merged her intention with the unseen lines between her and the hatch, and opened it.
It was stuck. Breathing an expletive, Violet wriggled out of her pilot station, reached up and slammed her fist into the hatch. It shuddered and then sprang open with a bent-metal screech. It did not open all the way; something on the hull blocked it.
After procuring a supply pack, Violet adjusted her goggles and squeezed through the hatch opening, taking great care not to tear her armor. As she climbed out and slid to the ground, her thigh caught on a torn black sheet curling up from the outer hull. It rent the surface of her armor like a dull knife, cutting the flesh beneath. She caught her breath, feeling warm dampness. In a flash of anger like a spark from a high-tension wire, she wound up and hit the ship with a roundhouse kick that put another dent in it. A fragile thing, without the Light.
Odin blows wild as storms in the ecstasy of his furious madness.
The Ministry had summoned her here to kill her.
She backed away as her anger cooled as quickly as it had come. She envisioned her grandfather’s face, deep lines gathering around his eyes, twinkling blue. My little hotheaded Celt, he once joked, ruffling her fiery red hair with his hand. Do take care of that temper, now…
Unlike your parents, he had not said, though Violet had heard it so. Her parents had died young in the Colony Wars, in honor of their turbulent bloodline.
So would she, at this rate.
She knelt and dug around in her pack for something to dress her wound. She sagged with relief as she inspected it. Not too deep. As she went to it, a laserfly hit her back. Nasty little creatures, they could pass right through a human body like a knife through soft butter. She inspected the size of the gap in her armor and pondered the odds of a fly hitting that one spot over her whole body. She frowned. The patch kit had been used once and not replaced. Foolish. But she did have an awl and some wire thread, at least.
When she had finished, she stood up and looked over her ship. Once in the shape of a stalking wolf, now it appeared crushed by a boot. Feeling as if she had just lost a beloved pet, she squared her shoulders and rolled her head on her neck, cast one last glance at the remains of her erstwhile ambition, and started walking.
Only wine and mead does Odin consume; his food he gives to his two gray hunting wolves, true companions.
Violet had always wondered why the Ministry let her keep the ship. That never made sense, even after they disarmed it. So much good it did them.
She had seen wolves once as a child, in a three-hundred-year-old Earth film from her grandfather’s archive. There were no wolves on Earth anymore; they had all died beneath a different kind of boot, a much bigger one, though humans still wore it. At that moment, she felt like a wolf herself: lone, wounded, and starved, on the run from implacable hunters.
After quickly assessing her location, the time of day, and the presumably short time it would take for the Ministry to send their thugs to finish her off, Violet marched in a cruel pace over the battered landscape towards a ridge of outcroppings to the northeast. She had no intention of going to Gladsheim. Some ten miles east of the ridge stood the Hall of Valhalla, which contained a hangar that held ships like bees in a great honeycomb. She planned to steal one and escape.
A laughably fantastic plan, this. One did not simply sneak into an establishment capable of creating the Eye of Odin and take a ship. But what scant proclivity she had once possessed for abiding the rules was long gone, now. She would break every one of them if she had to.
Why had the Ministry summoned her here just to kill her? They could have accomplished that easily on Balor. Avoided all this trouble.
Through the three-dimensional star in her mind draped with stunning fractal patterns of awareness, she stared ahead at the towering outcroppings, seeing their beauty and loneliness. The Eye was strangely quiescent in the wake of her crash as if resting before the next battle.
His wolves and ravens feed upon the slain, rejoicing.
Was this her punishment for using an obsolete title?
The storm to the north cloaked the sky with a thin gray breath. Thunder rumbled in the distance. After an hour of hiking over the inhospitable terrain, feeling the laserflies slamming into her body, Violet began to entertain the pleasing idea that one day they too, like the wolves, would become extinct. It happens to everything, her grandfather used to say. Even the cosmos. Such were her childhood comforts in a darkened, half-frozen world where the only things truly living were the things tha
t could leave.
Maybe the Ministry had changed their minds about her ship. But they could have just taken it. Why blow it out of the sky with her onboard?
It was unclear, which came first: the shiver in the triangle between her eyes or the shadow that passed over the ground at her feet. She stopped, following the wings and wedge-shaped tail over the rocks until the raven dissolved in her stomach like a pill of foreboding. She saw nothing in the sky. Yet.
Violet closed her eyes. Time and space were structural; the heart of the stones and the intention of the planet, formless. Over the edge, in the underlying essence, ecstasy spread upward. The spaces between the outcroppings became visible as the rock itself faded to shadow.
As if dead Odin lay, until he changed and swam as a fish into darkness.
Violet resumed walking. She felt only mild concern as three black ships headed in her direction. They were shaped like bats. She could almost hear her grandfather laughing at the notion of a military defense contractor such as Odin Systems using the shapes of old-world Earth creatures, as if their purposes were somehow poetically aligned.
The bat ships slowed like ghostly, silent birds floating over the land. Pale green beams scanned for her. But they would not see her in the spaces.
They passed over once. She walked nearly a mile before they returned. The scan beams shone bright white this time, tuned to a different set of parameters. But no parameters would measure Void—she hissed a laugh—that was the point of it.
It did occur to Violet that she could not be in Void completely and still be aware of it. There had to be references. She was only getting away with this because the Ministry did not look into the darkness. This gave her a hiding place, a source of energy not on their radar.
The bats missed her once more and drifted eerily to the north, disappearing over the horizon. Violet let out a breath of relief, but maintained her illusion of rocks and space. She quickened her pace, thinking, Too easy.
She saw no shadows, felt no prickle or shiver when they came again. Her mind calm and aligned, she crouched like a warrior spoiling for a fight as a single ship, a Fenrir fighter this time, soared over the curve of the sky and came in low, black, gray and baring teeth. It headed right for her. She could almost hear the pilot’s killing cry as a slow-motion cascade of flaming rounds spiraled to the ground, blasting rocks and earth sky high. Violet forgot about her time-space distortion and dove into a gully as the air erupted with fire.
The Fenrir screamed over her, not fifty feet from the ground, and circled around. Violet would be ready, this time. She looked inward, staring into the pool as it opened to the magnificent Light. Lovingly, it came down.
The Old Man stood, and with a gray cry loosed many arrows as one, to kill a storm conjured by magic.
Several moments passed before she opened her eyes to silence. Nothing had happened. She stared around at the gully. Nothing around her had been disturbed. There was no Fenrir. No fire. Not so much as a pebble out of place. A chill crept over her, deeper than fear. An illusion? Somehow, they had gotten into her brain and made her think she had just been attacked.
She stood up and rubbed her eyes. What was real? If the Ministry could do that, then any of this could be of their making. All of it could. She felt sick. They could get into that chip and affect her perception…
…or not. Violet caught herself on the edge of a chasm. This was her body, her mind. It was a creation of her identity. She had discovered this when she broke the rules. So how to detect illusions? There had to be a way.
One variable stood out: she had not sensed the Fenrir before it came.
Knowing the Mystery, Odin laughs.
She did not have long to test her theory. Another wolf came, flanked by four more on either side. She stood very still, holding her mind in the serene spaces between the angles of the star. It shone out into the sky, seeing ships—but not feeling them. Violet closed her eyes as they fired on her, one after another. She stood in the fire and felt nothing. And then she laughed—
—just before her heart skipped a beat with a triple punch.
The ninth fighter cut away from formation and flew around, slowly and with deadly intent. Violet ignored the illusory tumult of destruction around her and focused on it, arranging it with an assassin’s calm into the path between Light and Void. And then she stared down like a witch into a scrying pool.
She hit the ground once more as the ship exploded and sent real fiery debris into the air, scattering it in a rush of heat to the east. The other ships vanished.
Violet never got the chance to celebrate this victory. Behind the glowing web around her eyes, in the very center of her head, she heard a metallic voice:
“INITIATE VALKNUT.”
The sky spun, the ground beneath her tilted upside down, and her thoughts whirled down like water into a drain. She tried to get up and fell. Her vision blurred. She got up again, staggered several paces to the edge of the gully, and stumbled headlong, knocking the breath from her chest. She rolled over with a gasp.
Treacherously, Odin’s knot binds the warrior, rendering him helpless and confused.
She could not find the Light. Her body grew numb and her vision faded like a lamp blinking out. She was blind.
In a distant memory of her grandfather’s library, she recalled a picture of Odin’s valknut, a knot of three interlocking triangles.
Then she lost consciousness.