Page 79 of The Fanged One

She reached down inside herself for her wolf and found it pacing and silent, like she was trying to figure something out as well. They were restless and frustrated.

This place is a bad place, her wolf said and went quiet again. It sounded confused as Linnea felt. There was no color now, no smell of water or smoke.

Don't look at the nothing. Focus on your exit strategy.

The plan was simple now, and Linnea held onto it with everything she had. Find Loki, because she had given Freya her word, and a promise to a goddess was a debt you paid. Get out of Niflheim.

After that, back to her cabin on the edge of the woods, with the winter wind that had nothing in it that could break her heart. She would be a völva. She would do her work. That would be enough, and her parents' shades and their poisonous words would fade with time as they had before.

Linnea didn't know how long they had been walking and didn't try to keep track of markers. Time didn't behave down here, and they only had to keep walking until the next trial presented itself.

Like the river of blades, the next trial announced itself with sound. It was a wet grinding, slow and tireless, like a mill wheel made of teeth.

The trees gave out at the lip of a hollow, and at the bottom of it, the world ended in a wall of rock and one pale root.

It was wider than a longhouse, climbing up out of sight into the dark. It was the great taproot of the whole World Tree, gone down into the deepest place there was.

Coiled around its base, gnawing, was a monster. It looked at the approaching group with glowing green eyes, and the chewing stopped.

The body was serpentine, scaled and endless, looping back into the mist so Linnea couldn't find where it stopped. Folded along its length were wings, huge and feathered, that had gone ragged and gray. Deep fang marks scored the root and wept a thin, pale sap.

"What in the fucking fuck is that?" Layla whispered, her bow already free.

"Níðhöggr," Von replied, keeping his voice low. "The Malice-Striker. He has been eating at the root of the Tree since before Midgard was made, and he will be eating at it long after it's gone. They say he flies up over Náströnd sometimes, with corpses caught in his feathers."

Linnea stared at the slithering monstrosity, the stench of dead things rising from where part of a great wing peeked through the root and stone.

Great. As if today couldn't get any worse.

39

"Are we meant to fight it or what?" Tor asked, looking at the thick coil of scales.

"No. This is another trial. There's no killing that," Arne replied and pointed. "That is the only way I can see to get past it."

Linnea squinted and spotted a narrow opening between the root and the cliff, and the serpent's coils lay across it. Set before the gap, on a squat stone altar, was a wide, shallow bowl. It was carved from the same black stone as everything in Hel's country.

A voice came up out of the hollow, the green eyes gleaming. "Each must pay until the bowl is full, and then you may pass."

They all stared at the bowl, confused.

"Any ideas what we are meant to fill it with, shaman?" Fenris asked.

Von looked at the bowl, and his frown deepened. "In the old stories, it has to be something that matters. Not coins or trinkets. The kind of thing you only have one of. A memory. A name. A piece of what makes you you. You speak it into the bowl, and he feeds on it."

"You are wise," the voice hissed in the darkness. "I look forward to tasting your offering."

"You're not the first one to say so," Von replied, with only the smallest crack in his bravado.

"Guess there's only one way to find out," Tor said. He rolled his shoulders, the way he did before a fight, and stepped up to the altar. He stood over the bowl a long while before leaning down and saying into it, "I offer my first memory. I see my mother in a sunlit doorway, laughing. This was before she shattered into the woman who could abandon her family. It's one of the few memories I have from that time, and it is the most beautiful."

Something in Linnea's chest tore. She had no sweet memory of her mother. Now all she could see was Inga's face across the table, telling her that Linnea was the reason she left.

He bent his head and said the rest of it too low to hear, the memory going out of him in a golden wisp into the stone. Tor's face was blank as he lifted his head again. He walked into the gap, and the coils drew back for him, just enough, and let him by.

"Me next. I can't leave him alone," Ciara said, blue eyes staring at where Tor had disappeared. She put both hands on the rim of the bowl. She said one word into it, soft, in Gaelic, a small sound Linnea didn't know and would never get the chance to learn, because the second it left Ciara's mouth, it was gone from the world.

"That was the name my mam called me," Ciara said, to no one, her voice gone strange. "I… I can't hear it anymore...." She laughed a small, broken sound. Tor reached back through the gap and pulled her to him on the other side.