Prologue - Blood Brothers
They would call it the Thousand Years War, and they would be overly generous in doing so. It hadn’t been a war, not really. It had been a genocide, stopped in its tracks by powers that lorded themselves above even the gods of Asgard; the rime and hoarfrost of Jötunheimr.
King Laufey had bled men at Asgard’s hands for aeons, until the nature of his frozen realm had turned the tides of these losses. Frost giants only ever grew stronger in the cold, emboldened by the howling winds, while Asgardians withered away beneath it like a crop of shrinking violets.
Odin Allfather, may the Múspellsmegir take his rotting hide to the bottom of their burning pits, had not set out to wage a war. His thoughts had not been of conquest nor of subjugation. His thoughts had been of revenge, and he had made no secret of it as he sought to paint the barren terrain of Laufey’s realm black with jötnar blood. He was washing an old wound with the blood of a foreign people, an abscess that had festered since his youth. Hel hath no fury like a tyrant scorned.
They had fought together, Borson and Ymirson abreast across seven lesser realms; young foolhardy men fueled by bloodlust and pride and a growing resentment of their fathers. The realms had been bigger then, more malleable, as if the clay of their creation had not yet been fired, and any foot soldier brave or fool enough to try could leave his fingerprints embedded in them. Perhaps it had been a vision clouded by the temerity of youth and fed by the blood of their conquests, but together the firstborns of Asgard and Jötunheimr could feel the branches of Yggdrasill weaving wreaths ‘round their heads. The age of their fathers was coming to a close in the cresting dawn of the time just after creation. They would clothe themselves in the skins of their fallen enemies and build a palace of their shattered bones, free to shape the world anew.
But the Norns are capricious things and their steady weaving fingers, spinning the threads of all eternity between them in a vast arachnid cat’s cradle, are unpredictable.
One day while tracking beasts in the dark forests of Jötunheimr, King Laufey received word that the mad general Bor had died in battle, as befit a warlord tyrant. His eldest son had seen him taken to pieces by the wind before his very eyes, the two of them alone on a distant snowy mountain scouting enemy terrain. Failing to deliver a corpse back to Asgard, whose people were forced to wail at an empty pyre, Odin had retreated into the darkness beneath the World Tree. He had climbed onto the upper branches that stretched into the gleaming city of Asgard and crawled towards its roots with his belly pressed against the bark. He hung upside-down, his golden hair falling over his face and his nails peeling away from his fingers with the strain of holding himself perpendicular to the earth. As he shimmied down Yggdrasill, dropping further from the glittering Bifrost and the echoing cries of a grieving people, the world began to change, and the force that pulled him down began to push him up. As he crawled down the side of the Ash at the center of all things, he felt a great and terrible shift and emerged in the Nornkeep rightside-up. For nine days and nine nights the realm eternal thought that it had lost not just its Allfather but his heritor, maddened by his grief. But the dawn of the tenth day brought forth a new Odin, Borson no longer, who had sacrificed himself to himself and so become the object of his own worship. He had gazed into the waters of life and hung bleeding from the branches of the World Tree to learn of runes and seiðr and to pry his fingers between the stitches of all creation.
What Odin’s ruddy, bloated face had seen reflected in the murky waters of Urd that had possessed him to relinquish a perfectly serviceable eye, Laufey would never know. When the new reigning Allfather had come to him in his great hall, bloodied wound in his handsome face on full display, arms open wide, and belly full of laughter, the jötun King had not thought to ask. He had barked out a greeting to his old friend and stepped into his arms, ready for their great work to begin. The windswept valleys and snowy forests of Jötunheimr had been his since the blood of his father had ferried Laufey and his kin to its shores. He had spent his youth away from it, as an absent king in the company of an impetuous prince. But now that he and the Allfather’s brows boasted the same deadweight of royal responsibility it was time to put away childish things. They could move forward now with their plans to weave the Nine into a shape of their own making. Their arrows would graze against the doors of Heven and rain down into the pits of Hel. Now was the time for a great and terrible conquest, to unite their realms in siege across the Lesser Seven and beyond.
But when Laufey turned from his grand posturing scheme, announced boldly into the howling wind, he’d seen the Allfather grinning on his knee.
Their realms were to be united by a hand tying. Their dealings were to be politiced in the hall Glitnir, amid its red and gold columns, beneath its silver roof. There would be no great raging conquest, no armies risen from the snowy mountains. This was to be a new era of alliance and fidelity, brought on by the Kings of a united realm at its head.
Odin’s face had darkened to a storming fury when the firstborn Ymirson had told him nay. He was content to be his blood brother, he would not be his bride. They had spent a lifetime at each other’s sides and had taken what they wanted by the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows. The waters of Urd must have beaten him soft, for the Borson he knew forced allegiance in blood and ash, he did not forge alliances in ink and sheepskin nor did he dwell overmuch on ceremony. This was an insult to them both.
“If you refuse my hand you refuse my friendship, and the realm eternal turns its back on Jötunheimr as it should have long ago, were it not for our misjudged boyhood dalliances,” Odin had spat angrily, rising from his knee with a hand on his hilt.
“You dare threaten me with the hand you used to pledge your honor,” Laufey had shouted back, raising his own palm towards the Æsir whose right hand bore the same old wound, cut a thousand thousand winters before this, that their blood could mix in streams of black and gold between them to forge a bond unbreakable. “I wish only to remain your equal, Borson, as I have been since the realms were first formed.”
The Allfather had denied his plea, and his turned back was the last Laufey saw of him for a hundred winters hence.
In time he heard from the leader of a troll armada that Odin had taken himself a Vanir bride; Freya Njörðrdottir, sister to Freyr. With their marriage a peace was to be brokered between the old gods of Vanaheimr and the new gods of Asgard who had fought a bloody, futile war since before the father of Bor’s father had walked the Nine.
Soon after, the first drakkar came to beach its hull upon the frozen shores of Jötunheimr, a dozen of its brother vessels to follow suit. The Allfather’s peacetime bride was to bear his first legitimate son, undisputed heir of Asgard. It would not befit an Odinson to be be born into an era of peace, not when Asgard’s armies were bolstered by the strength of all of Vanaheimr’s forces among them.
As the first flaming arrow struck the icy walls of Laufey’s keep, he thought of his own wife Fárbauti, with whom he had borne two sons in the time since his brother had turned away. Perhaps, having been born in a time of plenty, Býleistr and Helblindi would cut their teeth on this new war, and be baptized in glittering fountains of Æsir blood. He took no pleasure in raising arms against the one eyed stranger so beloved to him in his youth, but Laufey swore a vow that day that the Allfather’s heart would be his until his death, ripped from his chest by his own capable hands. He would see it mounted in his feasting hall, an iron nail driven through its center that it may rot off of it until Surtur arose from the flaming pits of Muspelheimr to burn away its remains.
The wind carried his vow, but the Norns’s tangled web did not see fit to weave it so.
The Kings’ armies bled themselves dry in stripes of black and gold across Laufey’s realm. Asgardian forces came in droves by sea or by the shining magic of the Bifrost and retreated home to their golden city to lick their wounds. Jötunheimr was bound to the east by fearsome waves that beat against black rocky shores, and to the west by mountains that scrapped against the storming heavens. Without the magic of the Bifrost and the aid of its eternal watchmen, the frost giants could not retaliate against the golden city. Laufey’s forces had no realm to retreat to as Odin’s war raged at their own doorstep. The jötnar could not advance, nor could they wield the magicks of Asgard and its embittered Allfather. But neither could they freeze to death, succumbing to the howling wind and to the storms that brought flurries of ice chips sharp as daggers. Whatever they lacked in resources and strategy they gained back in their size and in the sheer number and brutality of their armies, supported by the unforgiving elements of the home they were defending.
A third generation of gods came pouring out from Asgard to dash themselves against the jagged sea cliffs of Jötunheimr before the Allfather could see reason enough to stop his onslaught. No doubt it had been Freya’s lips that dripped this honey into Odin’s ear, as it was her neatly slanting script that wrote out a peacetime treatise, carried to Laufey’s hall by ink feathered Hugin and Munin, who nipped affectionately at Laufey’s fingers when he reached towards them, begging their old friend for scraps of meat from his table.
This is a fruitless effort, her letter had read, the wounds that fester between two mad kings will soon swallow up the both of our peoples. These violent times must find their end, lest they usher in that of all things. I grow weary of sending my brethren off to die to fulfill this Asgardian fancy. Your majesty and my husband must set aside the poison that has brewed between you and usher in prosperity for both your realms. I write to you on his behalf and as an ambassador of Vanaheimr, an old realm that I love and that has stood stoic before this conflict for too long. I write too as reigning Allmother, and it is my honor to submit to you this missive by power of the realm eternal. May you recognize my letter for what it is: a plea to spare the realms the madness that this conflict seeks to drive them to, carried on the wings of Thought and Memory that they may bring you rhyme and reason.
I have no love for Vanaheimr nor love for Asgard, and no investment in the prosperity of either realm Laufey had written, the hand tying of their royal lines means as little to me as the dalliances of our elven and dwarven neighbors. I would as soon swear fealty to the lawless halls of Helheimr where the dead carry out their own justice. Jötunheimr has defended itself against the slaughter raged by the mad Allfather for long enough. If his Vanir bride sees fit to broker peace between us, she will send her husband here to face me that I may lay out my terms. I shall hear his appeal in person if he is man enough to give it.
With reluctance, Laufey had tied his curt reply to Munin’s leg, and waited.