Throne of Scars (2 page)

T
his is the story of Ulrich’s journey to regain the Gjallarhorn, the Lax Guardian’s lost treasure, Heimdal’s key to the Nine Worlds, and the one artefact that might restore the gods to the Nine Worlds. It is a story of friendship, as Ulrich supports Shannon, the undead Hand of Hel seeks to give the mighty horn to her mad goddess Hel, who would bargain for her freedom from the plague of being the Queen of Helheim, the caretaker of the dead and the charge she hates.

And yet, Hel might be in no hurry to do so.

She has ages of suffering and pain to pay back, and the war she once released on the Nine Worlds is once again burning through the lands, after Shannon released the Seed of the Dead.

And so it is also Ulrich’s desperate quest to save his friend the undead Shannon, the Queen of the Draugr, the Hand of Hel, from the evil pact she made with goddess Hel.

To do this, he must brave Svartalfheim, the Dark World, the land of the dark elves and wondrous beasts, and risk the unfathomable brutality of the land. He must endure the terror of what Shannon has become, and seek a way to keep his own humanity. He has to gain the Horn for Shannon, and he has to find Dana, Shannon’s rogue sister. To do so, he must defy gorgon Stheno, the ruler of Scardark. She is a First Born, the mighty gorgon sister of deceased Euryale, who was once their mistress. And there is also the Masked One, the mighty dragon, who wants the Horn for his own unknown ends.

How will Ulrich fare with his quest? Will his loyalty to Shannon endure?

Listen.

“There are high and mighty kings in that city, powerful and beautiful queens. But only one Throne of Scars.”

Ittisana to Ulrich

I
t was a dreadful sight. It filled one with loathing, unreasonable fear, shortness of breath from the reek of decay, and denial they could even exist.

              But they did.

              The draugr. The stinking dead. They did exist. There they flowed, past us. The night could not possibly hide their sinister, inhuman nature. They walked, but there was nothing human or elfish in that deathly gait. The shadows could not cover the oddly efficient, crude stomp of their march. And it was not only the march. It was more. Their multitudes, the black heaving mass below was partly shrouded by the fog that pushed up from the Straits, but one could see the pale, gleaming eyes, the rotten wounds on some, the drying, decaying features of the once powerful, beautiful elves, and even the men who had fallen in the Shining City the day everything changed. Their weapons were lifted high, their armor clanked like any army’s, but their movements were different. Everything they did was smooth, uncannily fast, and effortless.
No
, I thought,
purposeful
. Where the living fidget and waste energy in needless movements, the draugr do not. A draugr could sit still for a week, more, looking down at you, and I knew Shannon had many such dead keeping an eye on us—the few living servants in her besieged dominion—in the Citadel.

I looked around and tried not to cringe at the company we had.

There were many kinds of dead. Hel’s Seed, that Shannon had released in the midst of the horrible battle in the Shining City, had twisted the dead, torn their souls back from Helheim, from Asgaard and Vanaheim, wherever the dead go, and it had corrupted them.

They were rotting, and yet able to hide their nature under a mask of the living. They were magical, able to tap into the great molten fires that cascaded from Muspelheim and mixed in the Filling Void with the ice of Niflheim. They could release spells, some better than others. And they were frightfully intelligent, driven by their desires and goals, both from the time they had lived and after they had died, and all were rebellious. Only Shannon’s will held them in line. They had some sort of hierarchy, a chain of command that forced them to obey, and it was very, very hard for them to resist.

Shannon was their Queen.

My Shannon. My friend.

I took a deep breath and kept staring at the dead. The draugr I could see. I knew they were there, masked or not, hovering around the northern Himingborg. Other dead, few, but still there, we had seen glimpses during the night the Seed spread. They were spirits, evil to their core, terrible to behold. They scattered across the lands, shrieking their joy of having been released and they never served Shannon. They would plague the land, nay, the lands, all the Nine Worlds, since Hel’s Seed had torn through them, and even the closed Gates could not contain
that
spell. It was Hel’s curse on the worlds the gods cherished, even if she finally had regained her stolen Eye, thanks to Shannon.

Now she wanted the Horn.

She wanted to be rid of Helheim, to be the First Born girl, happy and innocent, beautiful as the stars. She wanted to be that
young thing
that danced in the fields of the Nine Worlds, trekked in the untouched mountain woods singing her happy songs. She wanted back what she had lost, though I, a simple human, was willing to wager she would never forget the punishment of Odin, the High One, the lord of the Aesir who cast her to Helheim and made her a rotten, ugly and mad demi-god, as a punishment to Lok.

The draugr chanted below. It was a chattering voice, one to answer their officer’s commands, and they readied and checked their weapons. They were protected by the armor they had died in, so it was very hard to kill one, unless you caused massive damage. Yes, the armor still helped them. The weapons they took meticulous care of. They could wound a god.

Gods, I thought and grimaced. I wiped my beard angrily, a habit I had grown into since I joined Shannon in her quest. I tugged it and the pain helped, oddly, to calm me down.

Gods caused it all. Odin, punishing Lok by punishing his lovely daughter, his only lovely child, where others were monsters and omen-carriers of terrible proportions. No, he had to take the pretty girl and make her the ugly guardian of the dead.

Shit god that. And our only hope was to restore them to the Nine.

Lok had not stood idle. He had sent Baldr to Hel, murdered the son of Odin by poison and trickery and there, looking on as the fool Baldr came to Helheim, stood before Hel, the First Born, and the mighty gorgons Euryale and Stheno had seen an opportunity. They had stolen the Eye of Hel, and made Hel believe the gods did it in retaliation.

War raged in the Nine. Hel wanted the Eye back. It was the one thing that allowed her to see the lands she had once so loved. Oh, she had hired armies across the Nine, and released them, and the gods had dithered. They had sat in Asgaard, in Vanaheim, and sent out generals, but did they take action? No. Did they take the war seriously? No. Did they underestimate Hel? Yes. And did the Regent of Aldheim, Cerunnos Timmerion, the keeper of the Eye of Hel, in his greed to keep it, also steal the Horn of Heimdal? He did, he managed that. And so, the gates were closed, Hel’s war simmered down, the gods were lost, and then came Shannon, who rescued the Eye, made her a servant of Hel in her quest to defy the gorgons Euryale and Stheno who wanted to take Aldheim for their own. And Shannon’s sister, Dana, who stole the Horn and fled to Svartalfheim through the one gate that was still open, in the Shining City.

The Horn was lost.

Shannon gave everything for it. And so, I, Ulrich, the last Ten Tear to love our friend, would help her with her quest. I was to go and regain it.

The dead cheered. They sang. The bastards sang. It was an old elven song, and I couldn’t make out the words, but it was both chilling and bloodcurdling, and beautiful in an elfish way.

What did Shannon expect me to do? Find the Horn? What if Stheno had it? What if the dragon had it? She had sent scouts, and none had returned from the portal.

The Horn. It’s all about the Horn. I shook my head. Shannon wanted me to kill Dana, who betrayed us to Stheno and Euryale. She took the Horn for herself. She was the cause of all of the misery I witnessed in Aldheim. I frowned. I
hated
Dana. She had killed my brother, Ron, the day we arrived from the Tenth, our own world. But my brother had been an evil thing, always had, and so I wasn’t as angry as I should be. I once tried to kill Shannon for Ron. I had, nearly. But I had not been able to. Could I kill Dana? Perhaps. Perhaps not. After witnessing the horrors of the draugr, I was not nearly as mad as Shannon was at Dana. She had loved her when they had both been alive. Now she was dead, and perhaps it was her undead goal, and the dead could never ignore their goals. Perhaps she would hate herself later?

Shannon. Hand of Hel. That dagger of Hel, Famine, she held it. She was a lich, or something like that, but that dagger made her almost unconquerable, and sometimes, when I saw her clutching it, I thought it was more than an aid.

Perhaps it was a master.

Did it make Shannon cruel? Did Hel wish to see her wreak havoc in Aldheim, even if she would
one day return the Horn for the Nine? Would Hel laugh in her hard-won freedom, as the gods discovered the true extent of death and misery Hel left the Nine in?

And Shannon, with her dagger, was to both save and destroy the Nine? Perhaps. Were not the dead marching below, to war against the living, no matter how cruel and arrogant the elves were, especially to the humans of Aldheim?

Poor girl
, I thought, rubbed my face and tugged at my beard again.
She is fighting to remain human, she must be
. Hand of Hel. I don’t know what that even means. Power? Slavery? Some of the dead were more powerful than others. She had killed Euryale, after all. Euryale had been a
First Born
, mightier than most living beings. Ittisana, the snake-headed minor gorgon ally of ours, the one gorgon kin we could trust visited her often.

She said Shannon feasted with the draugr. And they served the dead blood. Blood of the elves.

Blood. The girl I had seen weeping when she had killed for the first time sat with the dead, and drank blood. She feasted with her dead. Ittisana said that. And Ittisana had snakes for hair and that didn’t make me nearly as cold than Shannon’s undeath.

I draped my robes around me as I thought about her. She had been warm, kind, loving, and weak in her belief in Dana. She had been
damned
brave. She still was. But not so warm, kind and loving. She looked human, though her undead state was clear as rain. Her left hand and arm was all bones, where the Bone Fetters had once held her. Now, her skin was pale, nearly white, her hair uncannily lustrous and thick, red as blood, and her mood was often cold. She could be horribly murderous, pragmatic after butchery, but perhaps such mood suited a Queen as well as a dead one? No matter if her throne was self-declared.

I knew not. But I knew she had changed.

She called herself a lich, a magical thing, living beyond death by Hel’s curse and here, in Aldheim she was to punish the elves for their treachery, for their haughty disdain for humans. She had so many goals she probably didn’t know what to do first.

But she knew she wanted Himingborg.

She had the best part, the key to the Holy Continent, the foothold to the Regent’s lands, and she wanted the city on the south shore as well. And that’s what the dead would try again that night.

I shuddered and gazed at the mass that kept marching for the harbor.

I heard a clacking sound as shadows moved near us.

She had powerful allies. I turned to look at them. They were terrible, merciless, power-hungry creatures, and they accompanied us on the rampart. The ancient ones around Ittisana, Thak the fire giant, and me were also different from the draugr. They were bones. Just bones. Their faces held no secrets, you could not read displeasure from a raised eyebrow; their voice was a rasp that reached out from their chest, and they were all adorned in fine silk, the garments clinging to their bones. They loved finery, as if being deprived from such ornaments had been the sole thing they had craved for in their long death. Coodarg, an ancient Bardagoon, raised the night Shannon released Hel’s spell, was Kissing the Night, as they called the act of touching the magical powers of creation, the same powers most elves and us few humans saw and felt, but their knowledge in the might of magic was far beyond ours. Few humans could see the fiery molten rivers mixing with Nifleheim’s icy torrents in the Filling Void, but I could, Shannon did, the Ten Tears all had, because of Euryale and Stheno’s meddling with our ancestors.

The ancient ones saw these powers and more. They could reach into the thicker, deeper fumes and colder, hidden streams of ice. Their long undeath had not made them weak. No, they were much more powerful than most living.

I embraced the powers. I wanted to. I was cold, and yearned to feel the comfort of the mysterious power. I felt the fire. Never the ice, again thanks to Euryale’s and Stheno’s meddling. I saw the roaring fiery rivers, felt the strings of power, could touch and pull at them, combine the fires, the heat, the vapors in numberless ways and I could make spells out of it. I let my mind caress them, the fantastic, incredible powers, and thought of a million ways of braiding it all together. The heat, the flames, the molten stone, falling to the Filling Void, where all life was born, where it mixed with the ice of Nifleheim. I felt that ice somewhere, but most humans, the few of us, only saw Fire. We were made weapons and fire was the best weapon. And being a novice, I knew but few spells. Braiding one together was a risky thing, and had to be done just right. Few spells were identical and we had been taught some, knew a few on our own but we could learn many more, if we risked all without mentoring, but the creatures around us?

They knew thousands.

One of those spells was evident while we stood on the wall. We were staring at a sphere of fire, and Coodarg controlled it and we could see whatever it was he concentrated. I could see long, sturdy ships, the harbor and the dark waves, the commanding draugr in dark chain mail hissing and spitting orders at his legions, spears, and then a raven, croaking somewhere. I turned my head to the dead one, but his skull gleamed and gave away nothing. Where was this place that Coodarg was
looking at?

Thak rumbled, the shape-changing giant man-sized as he often was, his dark skin glistening. The Citadel didn’t accommodate for his twelve feet easily. He spoke. “They’ll see the dead coming. Probably have spies and magic to scout us. Don’t know what Shannon is doing. Why are they marching like this? Didn’t we try this already?”

Thak rarely had a cross word to say about Shannon. I thought he loved the girl, in his beastly way, and would probably go fight Hel herself for her.
Though never fairly
, I thought and chuckled. “They are preparing across the water, no doubt,” I said. “I have no idea what Shannon’s about.”

“They are,” Ittisana agreed in her strange, singsong voice. She put a hand on my shoulder and I wasn’t sure how to react to that. Her hair, snakes the length of her shoulders were brushing my back and I shuddered with dislike. She was friendly, perhaps more. I had a reason to hate her, but couldn’t quite force myself to. The gorgon was the one they had infiltrated into the Ten Tears. She had taken the place of one of us, a girl we never knew, Cherry, who died the night we arrived in Aldheim. Ittisana had stayed with us, mute, her body that of a human girl thanks to our guard, a gorgon called Cosia and her special spell, the shapeshifting one, and Ittisana had suffered with us, watched us, and utterly failed Euryale as Ittisana learnt to admire Shannon. I partly wished she would feel closer to Thak, since Thak was also a shapeshifter, an inherent ability of many of the jotuns, but no, she hung on to me. Perhaps she deserved the right. There were not many live ones with Shannon, and she was faithfully stuck with us in this trap called Himingborg.