Stormbringer

Stormbringer
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Hydra eBook Original

Copyright © 2015 by Alis Franklin

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

H
YDRA
is a registered trademark and the
H
YDRA
colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

eBook ISBN 9780553394627

Cover art and design: Scott Biel

Cover image (woman's face): PeopleImages.com/​Digital Vision/Getty Images

readhydra.com

v4.1

ep

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Note on Eth and Thorn

Prologue

Hel

Þrúðr

Nanna

Glossary

Acknowledgments (Too Many Books)

By Alis Franklin

About the Author

A good portion of
Stormbringer
is set in Ásgarðr, the home of the ancient Viking gods. Because of this, I've used Old Norse spellings for most Old Norse names and words. This means you're going to be seeing a lot of the letters
ð
(
eth
) and
þ
(
thorn
), particularly given one of the main characters is named Þrúðr.

In English,
ð
and
þ
can be written as
d
and
th,
respectively.
Þ
is pronounced as a hard
th,
like the start of the word
this.
Meanwhile,
ð
is pronounced halfway between a
th
and a
d,
like the start of the word
them,
particularly as it's heard in James Weldon Johnson's well-known song, “Dem Bones.”

Enjoy your earworm!

(P.S. There's a glossary in the back.)

Everything is true. Some of it's embellished. That's the trick.

This is how it goes.

Once upon a time, a girl fell in love with a monster. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or both. Point being, there was love involved, that awesome, terrifying force.

According to prophecy, the monster was doomed to die in a bloody battle that would claim the lives of all the gods. He was, on balance, okay with this, because fate is fate and the Wyrd is the Wyrd, and everything needs to die at some point, even gods. The monster sighed, and shrugged, and got on with his life.

The girl didn't. Because she'd been born a mortal—not a monster, not a god—and the one thing every mortal knows, somewhere down inside, is that there's always another story. Always.

And so the girl conspired with others, her stepdaughter and her monster's not-entirely-ex-lover, and they rewrote and rewove and moved the stars themselves out of their orbits. Metaphorically speaking.

Literally speaking, the girl died. She died, and her monster didn't. Sort of. Because what she knew, and her monster didn't, was that by then he wasn't really her monster at all. He was someone else, or half of one. A blank canvas, an empty book with a scratched-out title, written and rewritten. And, somewhere beneath the scrawl, what that title said was:

LOKI

“Lain!”

Flashback. Night. Interior shot of the foyer of an office building. Big and open, spacious. Currently smeared with blood and stinking of smoke.

Three people. One is a boy. He's the one who's just done the yelling. His name is Sigmund Sussman. He's twenty-two, and this has been, without a doubt, the weirdest month of his entire life.

The second person is a man. He's got a thousand years and change on the boy, but doesn't look a day over thirty. He's got blond hair, pale skin, and is dressed in the sort of fur-and-leather outfit that went out of fashion in the early eleventh century. He's currently clutching his face, howling.

He just got bitten by a snake. One that was hiding in the bag the boy, Sigmund, had been carrying for exactly that purpose. Snake-infested laptop bags; next season's hottest antitheft device.

The man's name is Baldr. At least, that's what everyone's been calling him. Actually, he's really Loki. That's something he only figured out recently. He's currently pretty pissed off about that.

The third person is a monster. Seven feet tall, horned, skin like burned earth and feathers like bonfire and ash. This is me. I'm also a Loki, and a Baldr, but mostly, right now, I answer to Lain.

Things got confusing. Things always get confusing when a plot twist rewrites fate.

Loki doesn't really know what he's doing here, other than writhing in pain. I know this now because I'm him, even though I wasn't then. Back when he'd thought he was Baldr, and thought he'd been trying to kill Loki. By which I mean me. Now that he knows that he, in fact, is Loki, he's very slowly coming to terms with the fact he needs to die.

Loki is supposed to be dead. That was the prophecy, the Ragnarøkkr. All the gods would die, all their enemies would die, and the slate of the world would be wiped clean to start again.

What Loki didn't know—what
no one
knew—is that someone's already picked up the chalk and sketched an outline. That someone's name is Sigyn, and she was Loki's wife.

She'd dead now. Most of her, anyway. A part lives on in Sigmund, because stories are difficult things to kill.

Sigyn was a mortal, then a goddess, then dead. Now “she's” back to being a mortal again, because mortals aren't affected by the Wyrd in the way gods are. They
effect
it, not the other way around.

So Loki, who knows Sigmund is Sigyn, and knows he was Baldr, and knows he needs to die, also, currently, believes Sigyn betrayed him to be with me. Baldr. Or Lain. Or whomever.

He knows he has to die, because that's how the story goes, and Loki, despite popular belief, is
very
big on “how the story goes,” particularly where the fate of Ásgarðr is involved. He's okay with that, more or less. He's not as much okay with his wife's infidelity.

Of course, he knows only the half of it.

“Sigmund!”

That's me yelling. I was on the ground, having been knocked out and dragged on-scene by Loki. Now I'm standing up, or trying to. Forcing my claws to stumble over each other in a way that brings me closer to Sigmund. Sigmund, who's holding out what looks like a scarred old broomstick with an enormous dinosaur tooth strapped to one end.

This is Gungnir, the legendary spear of the god Odin. The point of it is that it can kill Baldr. Loki. Whomever.

My claws close around the wood. For a second, I feel it. The echo of Odin, a greasy black rotting stain of death and broken promises. Of love sold for power and blood spilled for gold. I hate this fucking spear. But, right now, I need it.

“Get to safety!” This is also me, and it's something of a stupid thing to say. Sigmund thinks as much, his eyes wide white rings that dart around. Looking for somewhere, anywhere, to hide from warring gods.

Behind me, Loki screams. Not to be outdone, I roar and turn to face him. Meanwhile, Sigmund lunges behind a potted plant. It'll have to do.

Loki says:

“You were supposed to care for her! Then die. We would be free!”

I say:

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Because then-me doesn't know what now-me knows, i.e., that Loki traded his name and memories with Baldr as part of some half-assed plot with Odin to prevent the Ragnarøkkr. The deal was he would pretend to be Baldr, then “die,” spend some time hanging out with his daughter, Hel, in her realm of the dishonored dead. Meanwhile, Baldr would be Loki, looking after a Sigyn, who'd be none the wiser. Like a kind of shitty dark-ages version of
Meet Joe Black.

Funny, in that film, how no one seems to care what the daughter thinks when her boyfriend suddenly changes personalities five minutes before the Happily Ever After is announced. No one asked her, but someone certainly asked Sigyn.

And this—this showdown with the four of us, me and Loki, Sigmund and Sigyn—is her revenge.

In the foyer, Loki explains this to past-me, punctuated by fists and boots. I'm trying to hold on to Gungnir as I'm both lectured and kicked unceremoniously across the tiles, cumulating in Loki's foot coming down on my hand. Hard.

Funny thing about tenth-century leather soles, though. They're actually not all that hard. Not like my horns, which I drive up into Loki's stomach.

For one moment, everything goes black.
Jötunn
horns aren't really supposed to be used as weapons. They're a sensing organ, for something called the Wyrdsight. Being blind, it's the only sight I have, and force applied to my horns blacks it out.

It also hurts on par with being kicked in the nuts. At least, I imagine it does.
Jötunn
don't have nuts. Not anywhere kickable, that is.

So Loki is winded, I'm blind and writhing around whimpering and clutching my head. Somewhere in all this, I'm dimly aware of the sound of wood clattering across the floor.

Gungnir.

I have just enough time to process this before rough hands grab me by the feathers, lift my head, then slam it back down against the tiles. And that?
That
hurts.

Past-me is too busy being in pain, so doesn't remember this next bit. Loki does and, since he's me now—or maybe I'm him, who knows—I remember it.

He stands. Hears footsteps behind him. He doesn't even get to turn before a strange pressure hits him in the chest.

When he looks down, the bloodied end of a tooth is protruding from the front of his tunic.

When he does manage to turn, he sees—

Well. For one second, he sees Sigyn. A slip of a woman, with hair like rotting straw and a face too broad and too plain to be beautiful. Her eyes burn like the arctic midwinter, and Loki's heart breaks.

Then he blinks, and Sigyn is gone. Instead, he finds himself looking into Sigmund's wide and panicked eyes.

“S-sigga?” Loki manages, feeling blood bubble up over his lips. “No…” He'd been prepared to die. But dying and being stabbed in the heart—in the
back
of the heart—by his wife's reincarnation are two very different things.

Loki doesn't know why Sigyn did it. He doesn't factor Sigmund into it much at all, because Loki never does.

Meanwhile, by now, past-me is together enough to realize something's going down, and a tactical retreat may be in order. I get approximately half a foot before Loki makes his final move: grabbing me into a massive fuck-you hug, impaling us both onto the same goddamn spear.

That's about the end of it. Somewhere, Sigmund screams my name. The world tilts as Loki turns to deadweight and crashes down on top of me on the floor. I cough up blood. Sig tries to do something, to save me. Except it's too late. This is the way the world ends.

I tell him as much. Then die.

And it does.

Like I said, everything is true. Some of it's embellished.

The world doesn't literally end, of course. It's a figurative ending, a narrative one. The full stop at the end of a prophecy—a story—penned a thousand years past. Baldr finally dies on the cold, hard tiles in the foyer of a twenty-first-century office building.

He dies, and Loki dies, and only one of them was ever supposed to come back. Except Sigyn had a different fate in mind.

In her happy ending, she gets to keep her monster.

Sigmund gets his, too.

As for me and Loki? Well.

Stick around. You'll see.