Bodvar, Starkad, and Lodbrok, as they were called, came back to the longboat with the others and consulted with a Norn, a priestess of considerable age who wore a black cloak and ranted that they would be ambushed and murdered by proud men. They all laughed at the fortune she gave and scoffed at the dark news, not because they didn’t believe her, but because they weren’t afraid of death. She pointed them north and they continued forward.
Xenakis sat quietly on his knees, with his wrists tied behind him in complete submission, though he kept track of where they put his sword when they loaded the rest of the pillaged goods from the village. Behind of the barrels of mead, he saw a small hand reach from the shade, followed by a tiny hominid the size and proportion of a shrunken human. While the oarsmen went to work propelling them downriver, Erelim smiled at the Spiridus, who seemed non-threatening compared to the wily creatures he saw ransack the Archon campsite. Dressed in torn fabric, it offered the knight an apple, but was quickly swatted by Lodbrok and forced back into hiding.
The redheaded Viking sat on a crate and spoke in the words of his ancestors. “We’re not from your time. You bear a single god who does not speak to humans, though you believe that you have his protection.” The large man stroked his beard and sipped a cup of mead. “We have killed many of your kind along this river and we fear that we’ve passed into another realm. Perhaps this is the land of the Jotunheimr, but we have seen no giants of rock or ice.”
“I have seen both,” said the Templar, without consciously knowing the language. “But you’re not in a land of primordial elements, the nine worlds have just melted together.”
“The dwarfs,” Lodbrok scowled at the Spiridus, who peered curiously at them from a safe distance. “They were created from the maggots on Ymir’s rotting flesh.”
“Is that what the Norse believe?”
“When Odin and his brothers subdued the first being who rose from the yawning void, they split up his body to make this world. His skin became the Earth, his blood the rivers and oceans, his skull the sky and his bones the mountains. Ymir sweated man and woman from his armpits, but Odin gave us life.”
“And his two brothers gave us the mind and our senses...”
“Yes, the will and the sanctuary,” said the Viking.
“If you’re lost, where are you going?” Xenakis wondered.
“We decided to search for the Tree of Life. We must find Yggdrasil if we have come to the Age of Ragnarok and the boundary keeping back malevolent forces has fallen. Perhaps some of us will survive as foretold, feeding on the dew of the Ash Tree. It is, after all, the only thing that will not burn.”
Hagbard the new Chieftain was standing at the front of the longboat, surveying their course while his men rowed. He looked to the back and chastised Lodbrok for revealing too much to the slave, who continued talking nonetheless, saying that Scandinavian kings were chosen and by such means could be sacrificed as easily as lambs or maidens if the moment called upon it. There was no power on Earth that divided a ruler from his subjects, only a proximity to the gods by virtue proven by a mortal worthy of his fate.
“The Queen of Hel rules all nine worlds,” Lodbrok revealed.
“Why do you speak to me?” Erelim asked.
“Because her blood is on your sword.”
“Who told you this?”
“The old sage revealed it. You killed the Mother Goddess, therefore you must come from the land of mist. What did you see?” asked the Northman. “You would only have survived a journey through Niflheim if you were consecrated by Surtr, the Dark One.”
“I don’t understand,” said the knight.
“The Muspeli, both King and Queen, will burn the Tree of Life during Ragnarok, leaving only a few gods and humans to repopulate our worlds. If you were purified first by the Muspelheim, the land of fire, then you must contain within you the same spark that created the stars.”
“The Dark One,” Erelim ruminated. “If I was consecrated by Arca the brother of Horus, it was only by my devotion.”
“Then who is your savior?”
“I walk in Christ,” the Templar replied. “The Son of God.”
“You mean Thor?”
“Perhaps by my actions, since Christ was not a man of war.”
The Viking was confused. “A god who does not fight?”
“He was a mortal who became a god by fighting with his mind and his soul.”
Lodbrok nodded, believing Jesus to be a demigod born of Odin’s brothers. “If that is true, then perhaps Odin is already dead.”
“Or perhaps he serves the Demiurge,” Erelim said to himself. “Perhaps others have called him Zeus.”
The Northmen were called to attention by the Norn when the diviner of the future stood up and shook her hands at the sky. They looked downriver where one side was protruding high on a promontory that overlooked the area, a perfect place to stage an ambush. The entire group stopped rowing and fell silent as they coasted upon the calm waters of the Danube. The quiet was pierced by a sharp twang of a distant bowstring a moment before Lodbrok was pierced in the eye by an arrow, killing him instantly.
After the warriors dropped the oars and grabbed their weapons, a man jumped off the cliff above them and sank his axe into Hagbard’s skull. More Vikings followed their brave Chieftain against the slave-traders in a berserker rage, quickly filling the longboat with a ferocious battle. Once the leader was murdered, the sage priestess was beheaded, since she was thought to be their connection to the Goddess Freya. While the slavers were embroiled in war, the Spiridus ran from the shadows with a knife and cut the ropes that tied the Templar’s wrists. The little creature then gladly helped him find his sword under the stacks of loot and he touched the dwarf’s head in thanks.
The Chieftain of the attacking Northmen found himself surrounded until Xenakis came to his rescue, cutting Starkad’s legs out from under him. When Bodvar pushed him to the railing of the ship, intending to throw him overboard, he pulled the man’s dagger from his belt and stabbed him in the throat. As the longboat rocked from side to side, there was little introspection in the warriors of the north, but what they lacked in focus was made up for in sheer brutality. With no thought of death, there was no need to strategize extensively, and in their berserker trance they believed themselves to be impervious, since it was Odin’s gift not only of infinite wisdom but to never lose in battle that made him the King of the Gods.
The Northmen appeared more like animals at war than men, splitting bodies with their immense strength. The floor was soaked in blood and body parts as heavy axes cleaved the slave-traders into pieces as surely as the trees they felled to build the boat. When the last of them was dead, Ivar the leader of the ambushing Vikings thanked Xenakis for saving him. Welcomed as one of their own, he was introduced to Hedwig, Sigurd, Harald, and others who thanked him for his fearlessness. They then proceeded to mock him playfully about his foreign clothes with insults similar to the slavers.
After the Northmen gained control of the longboat, they took stock of stolen supplies. When the corpses were thrown overboard, Erelim looked for his Spiridus friend and found the little one dead among the others. The small creature had been trampled during the skirmish and his body was broken under the weight of war. The Templar showed him reverence and had to explain to the others why it was a somber loss. Still, Ivar tossed the tiny hominid into the river, saying that he had no time to mourn for those who would find their reward in Asgard.
While the younger Scandinavians took their places at the oars and continued rowing, the others opened the mead barrels and began celebrating. Xenakis remembered how the slavers had continued on despite the warnings of an ambush, as if fate propelled them into its gaping jaws. These other Northmen had waited for a chance to strike as if they knew the result as well, making the Crusader wonder if they had gotten similar news from their own sage.
There was no priestess among them, though one man seeme
d out of place. He wore the same chainmail as the Templar, but from an earlier period and likely from Spain. The stranger carried a brooding frown under a thick black mustache so different from the others that Xenakis asked Ivar about him.
“He’s like you, a wandering spirit,” said the blonde Chieftain. “But I don’t know whether we are in your time or his. All has blended together and we have no shamans to show us the way. Sisnero has seen much of the Underworld and the land of fire, so we protect his wisdom even if he’s as lost as we are.”
Erelim introduced himself to the Spaniard and was surprised to receive a response in Latin. “I’m looking for my daughter,” he replied. “I fought my way out of Hel to do so.”
“Why were you in Hel?” the Templar wondered.
“I was cast into the depths after I sacrificed myself to protect the great warrior El Cid during the reconquest of Spain from Muslim invaders. Our God accepted my blood, but I had committed the sin of self-defeat and the laws of the Universe are impersonal, beyond the will of any deity. These Northmen call hell a place of ice, but I fell into the Egyptian parallel, a lake of fire. The same Goddess rules both, I’m afraid.”
“Not anymore. Tiamat is dead, perhaps that’s why you were released.”
“Or it’s because I had a vision about the Age of the Child.”
“You know about the Archons and the Demiurge?”
Sisnero nodded. “I created the Order of the Will after I gained the knowledge in the Monad that the god of being and non-being were the same. Osiris set me free, but perhaps he had no choice. That might be why his son is hunting me.”
“Are you Illeana’s father?”
The Spaniard suddenly became curious. “Have you seen her?”
“She and the Order of Thelema saved me from the Rebel Serpent. Together we defeated Tiamat.”
“Good, I feared that the Asuras found her and took their hatred for me out upon my child.”
Erelim frowned. “I don’t understand, she was working with powerful Archons when I fought beside her.”
“The Order of the Will serves the upcoming age of individuality because the ancient Archons were a part of the highest God, serving the Monad until the Demiurge was born during the second eon, in separation from the Source. Through the structure of the Universe itself, God has delivered free will as a gift to the creatures that can achieve it. As a brilliant attempt to steal that energy for itself, the void created an ego within all conscious beings as a mirror to the eternal self, making them prone to become monsters in love with Ares and unrestrained power. This is when the elementals realized that a balance must be made and humanity was chosen to evolve to become vessels for the Archons.”
“So they walk among us?”
“Without knowing who they are, the same as all divine manifestations. They know that they are different than everybody else, and they know that their loyalty rests in something greater than perception, the light that brings pure hearts back to the effulgence of the Pleroma. Those who commit evil lose that spark and become lost in the afterlife. If they fail to find their way through the gates, they’re trapped in Tartarus, or as we call it, the abyss. Since no absolution can be found, the cage of non-existence is the only fate worse than hell, and it will be where I am sent if the son of Osiris finds me.”
“So the Asuras serve the Demiurge,” said Xenakis. “Or at least they use dark ages to spread his will. Not even Seth has control over such chaos.”
“Arca Anjety is one of the most powerful Asuras. Their foot-soldiers are what you call demons, eternally trying to destroy all that God creates by hindering the balance within us. As the demigod of pestilence, Arca is responsible for more death than war and genocide combined.”
“Then he must be one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It has always been the bane of monotheism that any man can declare to speak to God directly. The idea is insane, since Mary was told by an angel that she would bear the savior and even Christ himself was not comforted by God in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion.”
“When a human serves justice,” said the Spaniard. “All of Heaven supports them. When a person commits evil, they are left alone to tear each other apart like wolves. The revolution after the First Age gave Asuras power equal to the Archons, and now individual spirits must rebel against the Demiurge to become pure enough to rise.”
Erelim was amazed by the revelation. “So that’s why Christ was a pacifist, turning war against a society ruled by Saturn, the Roman name for Zeus.”
“Yes, but the Monad still requires someone to battle the enemy and nullify the illusion of duality, even if we face the result of a warrior’s sins after death. Nothing is achieved without sacrifice.”
“You may have died to bless your war against invaders, but El Cid was just a mercenary. He never really fought for anyone but himself.”
“God uses us despite our protests. El Cid was a cog in the wheel, fighting between Christians and Muslims who preach to serve the same deity. God cannot turn brother against brother, that is the fault of invaders.”
“The Muslims in Spain are no more welcomed than the Christians in Jerusalem,” Xenakis nodded, having seen their defeat personally. “Surrounding kingdoms make their alliances based upon survival. I hope you see your daughter again, you’ll be proud of how she fights the Demiurge.”
Ivar the Viking leader gave a harsh whisper to be quiet as he surveyed the river. He caught sight of something, and upon his word the oarsmen stopped rowing, falling silent enough to hear the birds and the lapping of the water’s current beneath them. While their tension mounted, a few men were overtaken by curiosity and started leaning over the side to get a look. They hadn’t reached a shoreline or bounced against submerged rocks, but the longboat shuddered and came to a stop.
The Chief of the Northmen was at the front, staring with resolve at something beyond their world. Sisnero changed position to see past the other men, then he jumped back as if a lightning bolt had struck him. “What is it?” Erelim asked.
“It’s Arca, the son of Osiris!”
Xenakis looked over the side and felt cold air lifting off the frozen river, locking them in the ice that had formed unnaturally. “Is he here for me or you?”
“Does it matter, he has found us both!” Sisnero desperately ran through his options with a sense of inevitable doom. “If I am caught, I won’t be sent back to Hel, I’ll be given to Tartarus and the lower infinite.”
“I have come for the golden spirit!” The loud voice seemed to be unrestrained by a body as it reverberated. The Vikings armed themselves along with their leader, who yelled back a defiant warcry more powerful than his mortal frame.
Sisnero crouched in the corner of the boat and collapsed into himself. “I should have known that there was no escape.”
“How did you fight your way out of Hel?” the Templar asked, knowing that he might need such wisdom.
“It was mere Hades compared to the true depths. Why do you care if you are protected,” the Spaniard said with a look of jealousy. “If you see my daughter again –”
His last wish was drowned by the sound of the warriors shaking their swords and axes in the air with screams to build their rage. Believing that Odin’s fury made them invulnerable, Ivar was the first to jump overboard, but when he landed he broke through the ice and fell underwater. A few of his men went to help as he was pulled downstream, pounding on the frozen surface of the river.
After the spell broke, they splashed into the water beside him. The longboat was freed from its position and the Vikings reached for their friends, who were scratching at the wooden planks in desperation to climb aboard. With a strict hierarchy in place for fallen warriors, Sigurd took over immediately as their new Chieftain and did what he could to bolster the confidence of the survivors. A strong wind caught the sail and the ship turned sideways, giving Erelim a look at the son of Osiris standing upon the water even after the ice h
ad melted.
In a leather tunic with metal latches, he looked more like a Greek hoplite than the demigod of pestilence. His forest-green hair hung before his eyes, obscuring the glow of his smile in shadows that should not have existed in the light of day. While most demonic spirits inhabited weak humans, he was a shapeshifter that took whatever form he wanted, despite being essentially formless. Xenakis realized that he had chosen to appear as an ancient Mycenean archer loading an arrow on his bowstring. Sigurd and his warriors stood tall and unafraid. Even when facing an unstoppable enemy, they held no concept of retreat or surrender.
The Templar saw Sisnero huddled in the corner, looking as if his soul was leaving him along with any hope of escape. The Chieftain was struck by the first arrow, an impossible hit from that distance, and the shaft fizzled into dust and disappeared. Sigurd looked dismayed by the lack of pain from the metal tip that should have pierced his chest, but his eyes sunk in and his body diminished from a sudden illness that hollowed him out. When his strength failed him, he fell against the railing and coughed his final breath as he died like an old man.
Another Northman was struck by a fading arrowhead and began to sweat feverishly with blisters and boils forming across his skin. The warrior dropped to his knees, vomiting at the feet of the others who took up their bows and arrows in defense. They fired erratically at the lone archer standing in the middle of the river, but their projectiles passed through him like mist. After Harald was struck by a disease that made him bleed from his eyes, Hedwig became the next Chieftain to realize that they were bearing down upon the enemy too quickly to alter their course.
Arca Anjety waited patiently as the broadside of the vessel hurried towards him, and Erelim was close to jumping overboard when the longboat collided with the stoic entity and broke down the center. The knight’s senses went black in the noise of splitting wood with his final fear that all had been lost to an insurmountable nemesis. He felt his lungs fill with liquid and he couldn’t tell which direction was up, but he eventually sank to the stones in the shallow water and simply crawled onto the riverbank.