When the threads of time had begun to weave new tales, she’d become relentless, finding new ways to orchestrate our story.
Her fingers remained in my life, manipulative, self-inserting, jealous, persistent.
Perhaps she’d only meant to teach me about obsession and its double-edged sword. Then she’d kept me from my human for hundreds of years while Love was tortured; convinced me it would undo prophecies projected upon us. And when I finally returned to the surface, I played along in name alone.
I put no seed in mortal bellies. I fathered no children. I kept the final semblance of our connection to us.
She should have fled.
Instead, she’d fed information to Heaven and Jarovid alike.
Izi loved the sound of her own voice. If I gave her the chance, she’d grandstand before the battalion, monologuing her grand intentions, taking the spotlight one final time.
I wouldn’t allow her the luxury. Her intentions were twofold, both boring and transparent.
On the one hand, if she fed information to Heaven and they won, their claim to Love would delay the Apocalypse. In her eyes, she’d save Hell, sparing the civil bloodshed of demon versus angel. If she got her way, she could delay the End of Times and the lost lives that went with it for decades, centuries, or possibly forever, should Love choose their king and his afterlife.
But Izi was too strategic to put all her eggs in one basket.
She drifted between Jarvid and the angel, feet not touching the snow, hair a darkened cloud around her as they grew closer, closer, closer. Seeing her beside an angel was an absolute joke. What honor could they have if they’d allowed their pawns to be moved by the dripping talons of someone I’d once called family?
Her other motive wasn’t hard to guess.
If Heaven failed to convert Love, she’d force my hand. I’d attach myself more ferociously, more violently, inevitably jumpstarting the prophecy I’d been avoiding.
She was so desperate for relevance that she’d dug herself a grave of delusion.
I almost felt sad for her.
Almost.
A crack of thunder. A stampede of feet. A battalion of?—
What the fuck?
A feminine shape tore my attention from the looming throng.
A flash of silver and red, a smattering of freckles, and the wicked glitter of wide, doe eyes that delighted in destruction broke from the tree line.
A legion could hide. Their shadowy, spindly nothingness disappeared, undetected, no matter who was looking, but this?
She’d giggled as the Viking age collapsed. She’d welcomed Hell without knowing my title or purpose. I thought Loki was the Nordic god of chaos, but there was something in this entity drawn to downfall rather than mischief.
Who the fuck was she, and why was shehere?
I knew the Slavic gods, and she was not among them. In fact, I recognized her from the flaming villages along the fjords. She’d been chaotic even then, but here, with her red and silver streaks, her speckled face, her face-splitting grin, there was no hiding. We were too far south from the Nordic empire for her people to pay their visits. But she wasn’t walking with the throng. She was walking toward them.
“Wait!” I called out to the flame-haired Norde.
She twirled. “Hey, Prince! Thanks for a shot at the end of the world!”
I coughed through my surprise. “Are you?—”
She lifted a dainty hand to her brow in a salute. “Team Ragnorok.” A flash of pearly whites, a glint of joy, a swish of forest-green skirts, and before I could guess at her name, she offered her battle cry. “I don’t give a fuck about Heaven and Hell. I’m here for the end of the world. I don’t know if you’ve read our Prose and Poetic Edda, but we’re not about to let Heaven have the last word.If you help us to the finish line? I’m on your side.”
I was ready to fight this battle with my legions. I searched the tens of thousands of hours of tutelage for rhyme or reason an entity from a neighboring pantheon would prance gleefully into a battle that most definitely wasn’t hers.
“Norde!”
