The initial shock was tremendous. I wondered if I’d lost my mind. So many sensations all at once, crammed into this jacket of flesh. I couldn’t breathe. My vision swam. I fell to my knees on a hard wooden floor that smelt of dust and beeswax. The sounds of battle rang in my ears; the brassy taste of blood filled my mouth, and once more I was falling from Asgard’s broken parapet. . . .
I lay on the dusty floor for a while and listened to my deafening heart. Slowly, the panic receded; the nausea became bearable. I opened my eyes and saw a room that was dimly lit by a glowing box. Discarded clothes lay on the ground. There were pictures on the walls of a man whom I thought looked vaguely familiar. The bed was unmade; the curtains were drawn. I realized that it must be night.
I held up my arms. They were skinny, but functional. For a moment I thought I saw the silvery gleam of a runemark—
—but it was only a pale scar that just happened to look like a runemark. There were other scars there too, braceleting half the length of my arm. I knew they were not accidental, although I didn’t know how I knew. And suddenly, there was something else, something that had me scrambling to my feet and heading full-tilt towards what I knew to be the bathroom. There was a mirror over the sink (no time for me to marvel yet at how I knew these things), and I turned on the overhead light to scrutinize my features.
I know. It’s a cliché. So shoot me—but I was a little afraid of what I might see in the mirror. What if I’m fat? I thought. What if I’m ugly? Call me shallow, if you like, but I’ve always been irresistible. The thought that my current Aspect might not be as pleasing filled me with a nameless dread.
Oh.
Well, I wasn’t fat. That was a relief, for a start. In fact, as the impact of seeing myself for the first time began to wear off, I was even inclined to approve. Eyes grey; hair nondescript (but that could be changed); a mouth that looked more serious than the one I had become used to (still, I sensed that this was mostly due to lack of practice). The skin was reassuringly good; the cheekbones average; the general appearance somewhat gauche, but with a little effort, I felt that maybe I could work with it. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking that there was something important that I’d missed.
And then it struck me. Yes, of course. I should have seen it straightaway, except that I’d been a prisoner in Netherworld for centuries, and my mind had been on other things. But now I saw it clearly. The hair, the shape of the jawline, the absence of something significant in the trouser region—
I stared at my reflection again. No doubt about it.
I was a girl.
5.
Well, it could be worse, I thought. In previous Aspects I had already been a horse, a bridesmaid, a gadfly, a hawk, a snake, and an old woman. I’d even given birth—not an experience I was keen to repeat, but at least I wasn’t entirely new to the concept of gender fluidity. And scrutinizing my reflection, I was inclined to believe I’d been lucky. I was young, I looked healthy; I was even passably attractive, although the short hair seemed a little severe compared to what I was used to.
I was wearing some kind of shapeless black hooded garment over a pair of leggings (Jeans, whispered a distant voice in my mind), and boots of sturdy leather. On my left arm (the one with the ladder of rune-shaped scars), I wore a stack of bracelets made of some braided material in a number of bright colours. My ears were pierced in several places, as was my left eyebrow, and small diamond studs inserted. My breasts were disappointingly small, although, as the offspring of a fire demon and a combustible, I’d never found mammaries particularly fascinating. I was just starting to investigate my rather more promising nether regions when the whispering voice that had spoken to me identifying the jean-things spoke up rather more sharply.
What the hell are you doing? it said.
That must be my host, I thought. I’ll admit, I’d been so busy exploring my current Aspect that I’d hardly given any thought to its original occupant. Frankly, I’d been expecting them to vacate the premises. Apparently, they hadn’t.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said aloud.
If anything, my host seemed more upset than ever. Who are you? What are you doing?
“I don’t want you to panic,” I said. “But—remember that computer game? The one you were playing a moment ago? The one with the silver-tongued, handsome dude, and the big, hairy psychopath?”
Now I’m hearing voices, said my host. Marvellous. That’s all I need.
“No, really,” I said helpfully. “That was me. I’m Loki.”
Oh God. I really am going crazy. That, or Evan spiked my drink. That’s right. He must have done. Come to think of it, it’s precisely the kind of thing he would think was funny. I’m going to kill him. Where’s my phone? I’m going to kill him for real this time.
I made a mental note to myself to remember this Evan person. He sounded cool.
I tried again. “You know, ‘crazy’ is such a negative word. I prefer ‘disordered.’ Order’s so dull. Chaos is where the party is.”
For a moment, there was no coherent response, just a kind of mental squall. Then, the clamour seemed to recede, and my host was addressing me.
You’re saying I’m not crazy? That I’m not tripping out at all?
“For all I know, you’re mad as a fish. But everything that can be dreamed is real, at least on some level. You dreamed me. And here I am. Simple as Fé, Úr, Thúris.”
What?
“I’m sorry. Simple as A, B, C. It’s going to take me a while to adapt to your local idioms. Plus, there’s the genitalia, which, frankly, may also take some getting used to.”
Stop it! Let me get this clear. You’re telling me you’re Loki? As in Loki, the Trickster of Asgard? Son of Laufey, Father of Lies, Sire of the Serpent, Blood of the Wolf, yadda yadda yadda?
“Absolutely, in person,” I said. “Well, actually, not in person. Or at least, not in the person I’m accustomed to being in, which doesn’t mean to imply that I’m not very grateful for your hospitality.”
Yeah, said the voice, sounding calmer now. I’m totally not buying this. This is all a crazy dream. That, or a trick. Or maybe I’m just zoning out, the way I sometimes do in class. Or it’s a virus, I dunno, something like sleeping sickness. Doesn’t that affect the brain? Or is that just the zombie plague? Is there even a zombie plague? Or did I make that up, as well?
I tried to explain about Dream, and the gods, and our long incarceration in the dungeons of Netherworld. I dwelt upon the paradox of what we call Reality: its infinite possibilities, the Aspects of ourselves we leave scattered across the Nine Worlds. I explained how even Death is subject to the rules of Order and Chaos, how nothing ever really dies, but our volatile essence can be distilled into Aspects of ourselves like perfume into a bottle, all of them separate, but equally real, equally true to the formula.
There was a long, long silence.
Then the voice said, very calmly: When I see Evan, I’m going to kill him. And then I’m going to kill him again, just to make sure.
For a moment I wondered whether Thor had managed to follow me into my host. The sentiment—even the words themselves—seemed eerily familiar. Then I thought that maybe my host had simply played too many games of Asgard!™, and had thus acquired some of the Thunderer’s less appealing mannerisms.
She must have caught my train of thought. But Asgard’s just a game, she said, made up of light and pixels. It isn’t real. How could it be?
I shrugged. “You say ‘pixel,’ I say ‘ephemera.’ Dreams are made up of them, sweetheart: millions of tiny particles. You pulled me out of Dream, and as such I’m as real as anything else that can be imagined. More so than some, in fact,” I went on, thinking of some of the stranger ephemera I’d encountered on my travels through Chaos. “You may not be aware of this, but there’s actually a theory that those particles make up everything, and that even Dream is only a part of an even greater reality.”
I waited for my new host to process this information. I could feel her struggling?
??against me, Reality, you name it, the whole Nine Worlds.
This is total bullshit, she said. This is all a figment of my overdeveloped imagination. I mean, why would a god choose me? And why would it be Loki, rather than—
“Rather than who?”
Nothing. No one, she said. God, now I’m arguing with myself. That’s what comes of reading too much instead of being on the netball team. Just close your eyes. He’ll go away as soon as he sees you’re onto him. He’s just a part of you, you know. A fragment of your subconscious. There’s nothing he can do to you that you haven’t already done to yourself. Just close your eyes and count to ten. One. Two. Three—
I waited. I had plenty of time. Slowly, I felt her resistance collapse, her disbelief and panic recede. Then the inner voice said, Are you still there?
“ ’Fraid so.”
When will you be leaving?
That was inhospitable, even rather hurtful, I thought. “You know,” I said, “some people might feel privileged, being the host to a god of Asgard.”
The inner presence seemed to shrug. No offence, she said. But I have enough identity problems as it is without having to cope with a Norse god living in my mind. And besides, how do I even know you’re Loki at all? I mean, you don’t sound like Loki to me.
I was offended. “What do you mean?”
Well, Loki was in the olden days. Shouldn’t you be saying things like: “Come with me unto Valhalla, brother, wherein we shall feast with our ancestors?”
I briefly rested my head in my hands. “Where did you get that rubbish from?”
Everywhere. Films, books, games—
“Oh please.” I could see that I was going to have my work cut out with this one. “How old are you, nine?”
A blast of resentment from my host. Don’t be ridiculous. Seventeen.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
At least I’m not a has-been from a bunch of stupid old legends. And if I’d known you were a dick, I wouldn’t have bothered reading them in the first place.
I sighed. “Oh gods. You are seventeen. I’m sorry—er—what was your name?”
My host gave a sniff. They call me Jumps.
“Okay. Okay, I’m sorry, Jumps. We started off on the wrong foot. Could we maybe start again? It isn’t easy, dying, then being tortured for centuries, then finding myself in the body of someone who doesn’t want me around. I mean. Just give me a break, okay? Think of me as—” I searched for a concept that she might understand. “Think of me as a refugee. A refugee from a war zone. Would you really turn me away? Knowing all I’d been through?”
A sullen silence. Then, Okay. I’ll give it a try. You know, I loved those stories.
“Well, I guess that’s a start. I have to admit, the legends are cool, although they don’t exactly show me in the most flattering light. I’ll have to put the record straight. Remind me to do that sometime. Still, if I was your favourite, they must have got some of it right. Right?”
I never said you were my favourite, said my host, with a pinch of amusement.
“What?”
I thought you were okay, but you were never my favourite.
“Oh.”
Well, that really did hurt my feelings. I’d kind of assumed that the reason I’d ended up in this body was because its original owner and I had an intimate connection. And now she was trying to tell me that I wasn’t even her first choice?
Instinctively, I searched her mind. It felt a little like searching through a complex storage system. There were many galleries, archives, and directories filled with all kinds of information: memories, facts, vocabularies, fantasies, feelings. I sensed that some of these would be hard to access—locked doors, leading to unlit places—but there was enough in the well-lit, open section for me to find what I was looking for. I found a gallery devoted to the gods of Asgard—comics, books, posters, games, you name it. Oh, she was a fan, all right, even if her version of us was almost absurdly far from the truth. And now I suddenly realized why those pictures on the wall had seemed vaguely familiar.
I sat down in astonishment.
“Thor? You’re telling me Thor was your favourite?”
My host gave a kind of mental shrug. Well, you know—
“That animal? The guy who used to pick me up by the hair? The man whose favourite party trick was necking fourteen barrels of mead and then killing all the guests? A man so tragically incompetent that he once actually mistook the World Serpent for a cat?”
You may be inside my mind, said Jumps, but you’re not going to tell me what to think.
“Okay. Okay. You’re the boss.”
There followed a lengthy silence, during which my stomach growled lustily. “I think that’s a call to breakfast,” I said. “I take it we agree on that.”
Jumps just gave that shrug again. I’m not hungry.
“Are you insane? I’m starving!”
A shiver of denial, the sense of something buried deep in one of those directories. It was odd, and rather disturbing; my previous incarnation had never once resisted any kind of pleasure. Besides, it had been centuries since I’d experienced as much as a dry crust, let alone a jam tart or a cup of wine.
“Come with me unto Valhalla, Jumps, wherein we shall feast with our ancestors,” I said.
No, we can’t—began my host.
“Come on, live a little,” I said.
And then, with the same instinct that had driven me to rifle through my host’s mind, I stepped forward and took control of the body.
6.
It felt a little like taking the reins of a speeding chariot. For a moment I sensed protest, but I simply pushed harder at the host mind until the resistance failed. Then I just followed my instincts and hers—bedroom, passageway, kitchen—until I found myself in front of a large white box, which, when opened, revealed an exhilarating quantity of all manner of victuals.
Fridge, said Jumps’s voice in my mind. She sounded very far away. To be honest, I didn’t really care: there was a plump roast fowl, and cheese, bread, milk, various unidentified (but nevertheless delicious) sweetmeats, and best of all, something like beer, in strange cold metal cylinders, which I took some time in prising open, but, with the help of my internal handbook, eventually discovered the little cantrip (Ring-pull, whispered Jumps) that sealed its foaming contents.
Full disclosure: I might have gone a bit overboard. From time to time, I heard Jumps’s voice, saying things like: calories, and saturated fats, and But I never drink beer, but to be fair, I wasn’t really paying attention. I moved from the fridge to the pantry, then on to a series of boxes and tins, containing something flat, brown, and unexpectedly delicious.
Chocolate, oh no, moaned the voice of Jumps in my head—then suddenly she was back again, struggling hard to regain control.
“Ouch!” The door of the pantry slammed shut, rather hard, against my hand. The pain—that very corporeal pain, so unlike the existential kind that tortured us in Netherworld—was like plunging into a bucket of ice. “What the hell was that for?” I said. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t feel it just because I was in her. In fact, I could sense her pain and distress, though much of the latter seemed mixed up with the fact that I’d eaten the chocolate, which, from a quick search through the mental directory marked FOOD, seemed to be some kind of poison that would instantly change my appearance into that of a bloated troll.
I glanced at my reflection in the kitchen window. I couldn’t see any difference. I’d survived the chocolate easily—the harder challenge now, it seemed, was surviving Jumps.
You were completely out of control! I heard her scolding in my mind. I had to stop you somehow. My god, when my parents see what you’ve done—
I pointed out the supreme bad taste of invoking one god whilst serving as host to another. “Besides, I was hungry. You were too.”
She laughed. I’m always hungry. So what? That doesn’t mean I’m going to just stuff my face with doughnuts and cheese whenever I happen to fe
el like it.
“Why not?” I was genuinely curious.
Because—she began. Oh, what’s the use? You’re a guy. What do you know? I sensed her struggling to explain, so I opened an archive marked HUNGER and reached for a series of images. A blonde not unlike Freyja, standing on a sunset beach; another woman wearing nothing much but a pair of very unconvincing wings; a kind of box with numbers on it; and a memory, not so far away, of children, chanting: Land whale, land whale, Josephine the land whale.
“Who’s Josephine?” I said.
I am, said Jumps.
“Weird name,” I said. “What’s a land whale?”
I felt her response as a kind of shrug. Just what they used to call me, she said, when I was in junior high school. Look, it doesn’t matter. Okay? Just step away from the chocolate.
I did. To be honest, I was feeling a little sick. Centuries without corporeal food had slightly tipped me over the edge, and besides, I was never a creature of moderation.
And you’ll have to tidy that up, said Jumps, indicating the mess on the floor. Well, I’d dropped a couple of things, including some chicken bones, a lot of packaging, and some slimy stuff (Yogurt, said Jumps) that had looked more promising than it had tasted.
I took a moment to envision a world in which I was supposed to clean the floor.
“You don’t have servants to do that?” I said. It occurred to me with an unpleasant start that perhaps my host was a servant, but her laughter at my question was enough to quell my doubts.
Servants? You must be joking, she said. We just clear up after we eat. I mean, what are you, an animal?
“Not currently,” I told her. “But not being entirely used to this, I’m on a bit of a learning curve.”
She gave a dismissive kind of shrug. Let’s just get this done, she said. It’s really late. I need to sleep. And then, when I wake up—
“Oh no, you don’t.” I didn’t need to be a genius to catch the thought she was trying to hide. She was thinking that if she went to sleep, I’d be gone when she awoke. “I’m not planning to move out just yet. You let me in, and I’m staying here. So pull up an extra chair, Jumps. I’m going to be around a while.”