The Goddess Embraced Page 2

  Before they can move on, they’re hailed by Vidarr Lindgren and his wolf, Ima; Vidarr takes them to his camp and reveals that he was once a mercenary who volunteered for a “super soldier” project. He thought it would involve vitamins and some magic. Instead, he was fed a diet of noble grains and then drowned in a bog. He was aware for his entire painful gestation in the earth, and when he emerged from this new womb, he was a giant. Ima, his companion, was once human, as well, and retains enough self-awareness to scratch her name on the ground with a paw.

  Someone is manufacturing an army of god-touched creatures. Jotun regenerate almost as well as bear-warriors, have internal scutes of bone armor, and are almost as strong as god-born. But their sanity and attrition rate are horrible, and Vidarr himself barely remembers his insane period, and where he was held captive and subjected to experiments. He and Ima accompany the others to Lieksa, where a ‘local shaman’ spins them a tale about being attacked on a nearby island. Kanmi finds inconsistencies in her story, but Brandr and Erikir Gifol, a former bear-warrior classmate of Sigrun’s, decide that they’re the ones to spring the obvious trap. And that if they find evidence of Loki, they’re to call for Hel from the Odinhall to come as backup.

  Sigrun is forced to decide if she’ll obey the commands of her gods, and decides no; she can’t let Brandr and Erikir walk into that trap alone. She and the other lictors head to the island, which is heavily masked in illusion, and find the jotun-processing area, where dozens are held captive in cages, forced to fight against ‘failures’ such as the ettin and grendels, more degenerate versions of themselves. Lassair pushes Sigrun to help return more of the jotun to sanity, and Sigrun’s nose bleeds from the effort. She doesn’t know how she’s doing such things.

  Reginleif seems to betray Brandr and Erikir’s presence to the soldiers all around them. The bear-warriors call for Hel, who arrives on Niðhoggr, and Loki reveals himself, inviting them all into his humble abode, masked by more illusion. There, Sigrun calls him to account for himself, on behalf of the jotun, the fenris, Fritti, and last, herself. Loki states that he did mean to create an army to fight in Ragnarok. . . but on behalf of humanity. He notes that he loves the mortal world, and that intelligence, subtlety, wit, and finesse are all modern virtues. And why would he begin a war he’s doomed to lose? He’d told his mortal accomplices to only use volunteers, however, and they perverted his purpose by using convicts. He freely admits to having cursed Sigrun. . . so that when the final battles of Ragnarok come, she won’t be held back by emotional commitments.

  How can such a deceiver have been deceived? Reginleif had begged for her divine spark to be given to her husband, to save his life, and Loki had refused. Hel refused, too, but told her that if she agreed to be soul-bound to her, and her servant, she might be rewarded with his life. The double soul-bond let Reginleif hide her intentions from Loki, but because she failed Hel in a task, Hel caused her husband to die of a wasting disease. Thus, Reginleif used her bond to Loki to hide her intentions from Hel, as well. . . and while Hel is here to try to kill her weakened father, and absorb his power, Regin is here to see them both die.

  She tries to sacrifice herself to bind Hel here; Sigrun saves Reginleif’s life by taking the wound on herself. Hel, infuriated by Sigrun’s interference (the sacrifice would have actually empowered Hel), demands that Niðhoggr kill Sigrun, and the dragon refuses, turning on Hel, instead. Adam uses Inti’s god-touched weapon to wear down Hel’s defenses, and the dragon finishes her off, sending power through the ley-lines, and destabilizing a weakened Loki.

  The sorcerers and Regin intended to spread Loki’s power out through every human in the north. To give every human a touch of the divine. Loki cannot hold his power together, and transit to the Veil safely; Trennus, Saraid, and Lassair begin to open a portal for him, but he must lessen his power to go through. He gives part of himself, freely, to Saraid, telling her to give the fenris voices. And he slips part of himself. . . seiðr, or magic. . . into Sigrun, little though she realizes it.

  Loki takes Reginleif with him into the Veil, telling her that she will understand much more in time. In the wake of his passage, and Hel’s death, people from Gotaland (Sweden) to Raccia (Russia) alternately die, or are transformed. Their power has entered their people, and some people become jotun, and stay sane. Others become grendel, or two-headed ettin, and run mad. Millions become fenris, voiceless until Saraid or other gods can intervene with them, and some become lindworms (this is not known at the time).

  The gods of Valhalla appear, expecting to fight the opening battle of Ragnarok, and instead find that Loki was trying to avert that war. Freya tells Sigrun that she’d encoded training in seiðr in post-hypnotic suggestions during Sigrun’s visits to the Odinhall to try to block her “othersight.” Sigrun refuses to use these powers, on the grounds that she’s a sword, and trying to turn her into a gun will destroy her; Freya tells her that she will use them, not because she commands it, but because Sigrun is incapable of failing to help someone in need.

  Social disruption ensues. Massive waves of refugees from the north swamp southern cities, resulting in ghettos of northerners, some mutated, some normal. Sigrun spends three years mostly in the north, along with hundreds of other god-born, trying to achieve equilibrium there once more, and then is sent home to Judea, where Adam has become head of the regional Praetorian office, Trennus has taken a position in the Counter-summoning department, and Kanmi and Minori are trying to start a Technomancy department at the local university. All of them feel out of place in their new jobs, as if their desks are too small, and everything is something of a comedown from the titanic events they’ve previously engaged in.

  Erida tells Kanmi that Persia is apt to start another war to try to retrieve Chaldea, and the Magi that make up the backbone of Chaldean society. She wants to move the Magi Archives to Judea, to keep them out of Persian hands. Kanmi calls Livorus to try to warn him about the Persians stirring up in the east, but Livorus has other concerns; the roof he sponsored on the Colosseum in the 1930s has collapsed. Kanmi has never heard Sophia’s prophecy to Livorus, which was “don’t shake hands with the man who hates your roof; he’ll boil the blood in your veins if you do.”

  A few years later, Livorus is assassinated, by a former Legion battle-sorcerer whose wife died in the Colosseum crash. Not long thereafter, Kanmi is investigated by a young and hungry Praetorian who demands a the names of every researcher who’s asked for access to the Magi Archives, as part of his supposed research into the man who killed Livorus. Kanmi refuses. The same day, the Carthaginian Liberation Party (CLP) stages a riot in Carthage proper. Kanmi’s eldest son, a doctor, is shot while trying to help an injured woman in the riot, and paralyzed from the waist down. Kanmi retrieves his son, and Lassair begins healing him.

  Adam asks a favor of Kanmi. The gods of Rome have been told that two Carthaginian gods have “gone missing” as Loki did. The CPL has a high number of sorcerers in it, unusual for a populist group. Adam notes extremists have tried to recruit Kanmi in the past because of some of his anti-Rome notions. . . and that they need to get ahead of one of these groups for once. So he asks Kanmi to let himself be recruited.

  Kanmi sets himself up, seeming to break from all his friends and Minori in his bitterness over his son’s wounding. But during a mission in North Africa where he was supposed to meet with the next tier higher in the group, he vanishes, and not even Lassair can find him for three years. When he resurfaces, he reveals that he was forcibly bound to Baal-Hamon, to control him. The CPL wishes to divide Baal-Hamon into themselves, and are using computer-designed spells to do so. The old, semi-senile god both wants to be divided, and fears it. His confusion transmits to Kanmi, whose mental condition is only buoyed by visits from Minori, heavily disguised.

  At last, the CPL is ready to make its move, and requires him to summon his first-born son for sacrifice, his ‘final’ connection to the god. Adam, Sigrun, Trennus, and Minori move into position to stop the sacrifices. Sigrun wi
nds up killing Baal-Samem, and Adam shoots the idol into which Baal-Hamon has been bound (like an efreet in a bottle), fragmenting the god as he’s already partially inside Kanmi and fifteen other sorcerers. Kanmi, a fully-surrendered servant of the god, receives the largest piece, but the others all receive some of his energy, and Kanmi, as prophesied by Sophia, lays down his life to save his friends and Minori, turning the Chott el Jerid, the saltwater lake in the middle of the Sahara where the ritual was being conducted, into a hydrogen explosion, destroying the bodies of the CPL sorcerers. Unfortunately, their mortal bodies gone, they are just vortexes of semi-sapient energy now: the mad godlings have been born, and Kanmi’s death is, apparently, for naught.

  Adam retires from the Praetorians in guilt over Kanmi’s death, as another natural disaster and waves of transformations change the world. Dryads, centaurs, and harpies appear in Hellas, warped from human originals, because the weak Hellene gods, who only have power because they are twinned with powerful Roman ones, are absentee landlords, and don’t divert the loosed energies from their people. Leonnes, half-lions, half-humans, appear in Carthage itself. Sigrun becomes unable to sleep at night, and drowsy during the day, as she continues to help her aging husband attend to his retirement jobs and hobbies, while remaining a Praetorian herself. Minori mourns for Kanmi, but as a Shinto, hopes that her belief in him, and his powerful spirit, might recall him from death.

  As the mad godlings spread over the world, Hecate fights one of them in Hellas, and loses much of her energy destroying it. Some of her energy finds its way to the tomb of Prometheus the Firebringer, the foresighted titan who told Zeus that he’d be killed by one of his own descendants, and who was locked in chains for being a trickster god who was friendly to humanity. . . and who may have been released by one of the ancient godslayers before Zeus had him executed more permanently. The titan is confused to be alive, and delights in the modern world, with all its technology and understanding. His vision of the future is not like Sophia Caetia’s; it is probabilistic, not deterministic, and he becomes an immediate asset to them as they try to stave off more destruction.

  Minori goes to Nippon, where the mad godlings are wracking the land and the native kami, and tries to evacuate her family; her father refuses to leave, but Amaterasu finds her worthy enough to make of her a minor sort of avatar; she puts a small amount of herself into Minori, so she will have a fallback position, and tells Minori to evacuate as many of their people, quietly, as she can, giving her the Imperial Regalia, including the Mirror of Truth and the Grass-Cutting Sword along the way. More ancient monsters, such as the kraken, awaken. Minori and Sigrun fight it, Sigrun bringing Niðhoggr with her once again. Sigrun is injured, and Nith reveals to Minori that he can speak, but that Sigrun refuses to hear him, because she is busily denying everything that she really is.

  Sophia Caetia has always known that in 1991, she will be assaulted and raped by centaurs outside of Delphi. She doesn’t resist her fate, because to resist one aspect of fate might disrupt the whole of it. But she does wish that this cup might pass from her. She takes refuge in the past and the future, away from the intolerable present during the assault. Sigrun gets her message too late, and returns to Delphi on Nith’s back, in time to kill the centaurs, but her sister, while alive, is devastated in mind and body.

  Mad godlings attack Jormangand in the Arctic Sea by, and his retaliation causes the ice sheet to crack. Any attempts at communicating with the god-beast seem in vain without Loki, but Hecate suggests that she, Sigrun, and Trennus meet with Prometheus to see if linking his mind with the shattered remains of Sophia’s will give him enough information to make good predictions on their course of action. Sigrun refuses at first, and tells Prometheus to take information from her mind, not that of her broken sister. Prometheus evaluates all the information in her past, and explains that he’s about to do what Zeus hated him for: He’s going to tell her the truth.

  Prometheus removes every layer of self-denial Sigrun has pulled over her own eyes for decades, and brutally shows her that she absorbed fertility from Tlaloc, death from Supay, more death from Hel, absorbed Loki’s gift of seiðr, and took night from Baal-Samem. She is a goddess, and she’s refused to use her gifts, to the detriment of humanity. Sigrun is horrified, but can’t reject the truth, no matter how she’s warped herself denying it. And she’s only denied it, because she knows that Adam, her husband of over thirty years, as a Judean, won’t be able to accept her as a goddess. He will, inevitably, reject her. He will grow old and die, and refuse being bound to her, though he might otherwise live.

  Sigrun hears Nith’s voice for the first time, but it’s a barren comfort. Because she also hears in her mind, her sister’s decades’ old words: I’m sorry, but you’re never going to get what you want.

  Part VII: The End is the Beginning

  Europa, 1992 AC

  Chapter 1: Ascending

  Something that often gets lost when people train young soldiers is that everyone needs something to fight for. Raw patriotism, a fervent belief in a god, will get traction from an ideologue, but most people find it difficult to risk their lives for an abstraction. They can, however, be highly motivated by concrete reality. By seeing say, a central symbol of their civilization going up in flames. If a Judean saw the Temple attacked, a Roman saw the Senate or the Colosseum going up in flames, an Egyptian saw the Great Pyramid leveled, or if a Gaul from Britannia saw Stonehenge destroyed by a bomb, they would grasp that it was a building. But they would also see it as an attempt to destroy their identity, their people, and their way of life. That can be highly motivating, in the short-term. Seeing hundreds or thousands of your own people die? A particularly vicious attack can be a rallying point. “Remember Gazaca!” “Remember Ecbatana!” “Remember the Day of Transition!”

  But what happens when entire populations are displaced? What happens when the second generation is born, out of their homeland, and no longer remembers Gotaland, Gazaca, or Ecbatana? What happens when the memories of these places are dull, even for the people who once lived there? How do you motivate a population that is weary of war unending?

  A soldier has to make the abstract concrete. If the notion of a lost homeland is too abstract, he or she must find a concrete reality that is acceptable as a reason to fight, beyond mere duty. Some people get by on a pack mentality: “I’m fighting to protect people to my left and my right. These are my family, now. Together, we will endure.” Others put the focus, as I have always done, on the home reality: “I’m fighting to protect my family and home, the sanctuary in my mind where my spouse, my children, my parents dwell, that golden place where I can return when the fight is done.”

  It’s actually very important to have that reality, that stable home-life. Otherwise, all you will be, is the fighter, the soldier, the killer. And you will awaken one morning, and realize there is nothing at all left inside you but death, and all the high ideals and abstractions for which you fought are meaningless, without a reality to which they apply.

  So what happens to a soldier for whom the home has been lost, who has nothing left to fight for, beyond mere survival on the next battlefield, and the next, and the next? What happens to the soldier who has lost that feeling of fraternity with those around them?

  I can’t cite statistics. But I think it’s fair to say that if they don’t find another motivation, those who are already dead of soul will quickly find death of body as well. A leader needs to be aware of these issues, find those affected, and help them deal with the problem, before the malaise of spirit spreads. Unfortunately, most commanders I have met, do not see this as part of their responsibilities. That’s a mentality that has to change, because I do not see this war ending inside the next ten years. Unless the world happens to end first. Please. Save your laughter.

  —Adam ben Maor, “Leadership vs. Command.” Speech given to the Judean War College, Februarius 14, 1993 AC.

  ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______________________

  Martius 19
, 1992 AC

  “I have movement.” The words were a hiss over the radio in Solinus Matrugena’s ear.

  “Where?”

  “Three o’clock. Behind the wrecked cars.”

  Solinus edged forward around the side of the commercial building he’d taken cover behind, his assault rifle in his hands, secured over his back by a leather strap that showed scorch marks here and there. His fatigues, gray-green-khaki, were theoretically designed to blend in with the desert and scrubland around them, as well as urban settings like this one, and he wore a flak vest over it, in similar colors. A round helmet, with a small black rank insignia on one side, and a Roman eagle on the other, covered his head, and unlike the rest of his men, he wasn’t wearing night-vision goggles. He didn’t need them.

  Typically, as a primi ordines centurion, he’d have had command of eighty men, or a century, and wouldn’t be out in the field much with them. He was spirit-born, however, and therefore considered far too valuable to waste in an administrative position; in addition to which, he was in the special forces operations wing of the JDF levies in the Imperial Legion. Which meant that his rank was mostly there so that he could deal with fools behind desks, and he genuinely did spend most of his time in the field.