It had always been said among the people that the Allfather did not dream when he surrendered to the Sleep. Since ascending the throne, Odin had, of course, learnt better, but he’d never felt the need to set the tales to rights. Let the people talk. The only one who had need of such knowledge would learn it for himself, in time.
Besides, it was almost true: part of him did remain among the waking. A shard of his mind had felt the shadow of his younger son’s hand pass over his own, and heard him crying desperately for the guards. This shard could see the healing chambers he had been brought to, the raven on his bedpost, and his queen guarding his side; and these things were what he would remember most clearly once he awoke.
But the far greater part of him had been swept away into chaos.
It could not be contained in words, in memories, in time. It was pure magic, writhing, seething potential rushing through him like lightning until he burnt from the inside out. It was truth stretching and shattering and slickly unfurling once more before his blinded eyes. It was the universe hissing unfathomable secrets in his ear in its many thorned tongues. It was madness. It was death, barely brushing its cold finger across his beating heart, and every time he slept he feared the fragile tether devised by his gambling fool of a grandfather would snap and he would never again awake.
Odin’s mind fractured, and he was everywhere.
He arced across a battlefield in the hand of a berserker and tasted blood on his blade.
He dug his open beak into a slain warrior’s skull and tore out a staring eye.
He swung below the gallows, his noose yawning and hollow like the mouth of a serpent, his coils trailing frayed threads like spiderweb in the wind.
He howled through forests and over fells. He smothering the sky in blinding white and turned rivers to stone with a touch.
He came to life in the depths of a palace and tore through its blackening halls as he grew and he roared and he burned.
He rode through a forest at breakneck speed, leaning low over his steed’s mane as a dark mass of creatures behind him bayed and snapped at his heels. He slashed his spear through the air behind him, feeling flesh tear and hot blood spatter his thigh, but he dared not look back.
The trees drew in closer, thorns clawing at his face even as he ducked, and the leader of the pack lunged so close that he could smell the old blood on its breath – then his steed leapt a fallen tree and the world fell silent.
Odin steadied his breath and dismounted.
It was sunset. He had come to a wide wooded grove – sacred, he knew by the carvings on the trees. This was a temple of sorts, favoured on Midgard at the height of Asgard’s presence there, just before the Jotun war.
The trees creaked and swayed overhead, their leaves murmuring in the wind, but the grove was silent of birdsong. A dark silhouette spun slowly in the heart of the clearing, hanging limply from a rope like a rabbit in a snare.
A sacrifice. To him.
Despite himself, Odin stepped closer.
The body was a mortal man’s. A boy’s, to tell the truth – wide-eyed and not yet bearded. His freckles blurred together in the dappled evening light, soft under the harsh black lines of his ritual tattoos.
He didn’t look like he had suffered. He looked like the whole business of marking and purging and bathing and drugging and finally slaughtering him had taken him by surprise.
“Admirable, is it not?” said a voice.
Odin turned, and found himself looking in the mirror. His own eyes gazed back at him from the less-troubled face of his more warlike days.
Even dreaming, the sight made his skin crawl. There was a simple, fundamental wrongness to it: meeting his own eye and seeing another mind look back. Encountering himself, but beyond his knowledge or control. It was every child’s nightmare that his reflection would continue to watch him even after he averted his gaze.
But he knew this was not the truth. There was no second him, only a conjured dream-thing inhabiting his skin. A memory, a revenant.
“The mortals of this place allow themselves one murder each year,” the revenant went on. “Just one, to keep them from destroying each other. To remind them who is above, and who is below. Brutal, of course, but this is a studied brutality, a necessary one. Without gods to worship… there would be no mortals left to kill.”
Odin sighed under his breath. “I would agree, were I still you.”
“You are.” The revenant drummed its fingers on its spear. “You haven’t changed. You just tell a different story, now. Even to yourself.”
Odin turned his head, but said nothing. He could feel the hanged boy’s eyes upon him. He could not pretend that boy would see the difference between him and the twisted thing that wore his face.
“You know why we have been brought here,” said the revenant.
“If I did, you would not be here.”
“It’s happening again.”
Odin stilled. “No,” he said. “I’ve sent Thor away. I will not allow him to become…” He trailed off, shamefully. But he knew his echo would understand, all the same.
The revenant laughed softly. “How is it that after so many years with but one eye, you still never fail to look the wrong way?”
Odin turned the shaft of his spear slowly in his hand. “Where should I look, if not to Thor?”
“Don’t lie to me, Allfather. You know.”
Odin’s mouth was dry. He could barely force the word from his throat. “Loki.”
“He is his father’s son.” The revenant levelled its gaze on him, harsh and almost amused. “You should have left him for the ravens.”
Odin closed his eye. “He’s my son. I’ve made him mine.”
“As I said.” The revenant stepped past him to gaze up at the hanged boy. “The fire is already set. This is the end.”
“No,” Odin murmured. “Not yet.”
The revenant slashed through the rope with its spear, and the sacrifice fell to the ground. The crown of his skull met an ash root and cracked open, his wide eyes still staring up in shock amid a seeping pool of blood and brain.
The revenant knelt to draw a fingertip through the dark, viscous liquid. It smeared it between its fingers with a remote curiosity before placing it on its tongue.
“You should get back on your horse,” the revenant said, “if you do not intend to join the feast.”
In the shadows between the trees, the pack began to howl once again.
Odin retreated from the grove. And although it tore at his mind to attempt it so soon after entering the Sleep, he retreated from his dreams.
He could not trust the words of his former self. He needed to return to his own senses and his own instincts if he wished to know the fate of his sons.
Even if his shadow had spoken true, he had a duty to fight that prophecy with everything he had. That was the true role of the Allfather, born of a nation of cut-throats in the bleakest wilds of Vanaheim: to defy all laws up to fate itself for a few more stolen moments of his people’s survival. To wield the barely-harnessed chaos flowing through him and hold off storm and fire and famine and Ragnarok itself.
He clawed his way through dreams and cast his mind over the waking world. He did not know how long it might take to drag himself free, but he would wake. He had no other choice. And there was so little time.
Far below on Midgard, Thor fell.
He would wake.
Odin’s old enemy leant over his bed and mocked him as he pulled open his eye.
He would wake.
Loki reached out and touched the heart of the Bifrost, encasing its raw power in a prison of ice.
He would wake. He would wake. He would wake.