A woman with hair that matched the flames—no, it had to be a goddess, given the way she looked into my core—threw her head back in delight. With deer-like movements, she crossed the space between us in two strides and swatted my legion from my hand with an irreverent, backhanded swat.
My legion evaporated to join the throng before I locked onto doe eyes alight with a wild sparkle.
“Save that for later. This is a party!” She whipped her head to the side, a flash of red curls obscuring her face as she gestured for me to follow. “Join the chaos!”
Who the fuck was this person, fae, god,being, and what business did she have interfering with?—
“Hell, right?” she asked. She pointed somewhere over the charcoal. “Demons are all about the war until it’s time to burn shit to the ground. Your friend is somewhere over there.”
I reached for her wrist, missing it as she danced away. “My human?”
“Ha!” I didn’t understand the joke. I had no say in whether or not our conversation continued. She’d already turned on her heel, giggling as she disappeared against the sparks. Just before the bonfire road overtook her, I could have sworn she’d shouted for me tomake myself at home.
The others…how many of them were immortal?
Whisps of my legion traveled down the smoke. I caught the second closest and shook it for the parts of me that could understand what the fuck I’d fallen into. These fragments of my power, these extensions of my will, they could only tell me what I, on some level, already knew.
“My human!” It came out in a bark.
“She’s alive,” the shadow insisted. “We know she’s here. There’s so much power, Your Highness. The gods, the immortals…they walk among the people. We…”
It continued to speak, but my shoulders slumped as I took it all in.
This was truly the end, and Love was lost amidst the ruins.
The Viking age, it seemed, had come and gone in the time it had taken me to fight with a succubus whose moniker no longer deserved breath. The seafaring people, it seemed, had enjoyed their powerful bedlam as they exploded onto the scene, establishing trade routes from their frosty land of Nordes to Britannia, then Constantinople, on to the Caspian Sea, and eventually, the Silk Road.
From what I gathered, their gods were nearly as close to their humans as I was to Love. The Nordes answered the Viking calls, carving impossible paths, facilitating their progress, disregarding known possibilities, and laughing in the face of tradition.
I released the legion’s arm, absorbing the cinders, the inferno, the trees, the mountains, the gust of chilled, salty air swirling off the fjords.
I knew these gods, didn’t I?
The Nordic gods had wisps of power at the conclave.
One thousand years later, Odin, Frejya, Thor, and Loki laughed, swords drawn, as I joined their Valkyrie on the battlefield. A demon was just another spirit in a slew of chaos as their experiment toppled. Yet this was not the air of a defeated people. There was a thrilled cackle, an unrequited power, an unkillable delight to burning it all down.
I watched the city crumble, fascinated by an energy that said: we have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Try, try, try again.
I brushed past the highest of deities in the pantheon as they answered the songs and dances of their people. I didn’t understand the circumstance, nor the custom, but holy shit, the people called, and their godsanswered.
And for the first time in my existence, I was surrounded by gods who fucking loved demons.
I would have marveled forever, but I was on a mission.
I was here for Love.
If the milling chaos of deities were unbothered by my presence, then I wouldn’t trouble myself with proper introductions. A tip of a hat, a squeeze of a bicep, but my presence was little more than a fraternal passing amidst their calamity.
A chuckling soothsayer rolling on psychedelics met me outside of Love’s village.
“Fire at our door in more ways than one?” The human pulled their lips back to reveal blackened teeth, rattling in rotten sockets. She rattled the necklace of pearly white canines and incisors to replace those she’d forsaken to practices I had yet to understand.
Could the humans see me here, too?
Disoriented, I put one foot in front of another. I listened for a familiar voice, scanned for a shape, a color, a scent. My time within Northern Europe gave me a head start on their language, but before finding my human, I found something else entirely.
In a crowd of six-foot-something raiders was a taller figure. He was muscled, black of hair, with a strong jaw that could fit in with the crowd, but this was no human. In a sea of pallor stood a man made of slate with charcoal horns curling upward from his tousle of hair. He wore a thick, black fur coat, and a silver chain around his neck marking his sigil.
