Chapter Text
They had never been wrong. Never failed to predict what would happen and never imagined that, one day, they would. Not that it was impossible. After all, they did not see the future. All they did was calculate probabilities and, from that, conclude the most likely course of events.
Fate did not exist. There were no great plans or scripts that could not be altered by people’s choices.
It was only a word, deliberately created by gods and supposed prophets so they could not only manipulate men, great or small, with enormous and fragile egos, but also guide the course of history toward a more... interesting future.
The giants had done this when they “prophesied” the end of the Aesir’s reign. And they had also done it when they wrote the story of the protagonists who would bring Ragnarök to the doors of Odin’s Great Lodge.
At least, that was what they had thought. But they were wrong.
The reason, of course, had nothing to do with a calculation error on their part. But with the cunning of that Jötunn who had turned her back on her own people, hiding the prophecy that would lead her man to his tragic end.
Kratos should have died, the three knew that, all the giants knew that. But he was alive.
And the three were not irritated by it. On the contrary, when they learned that the Spartan had survived Ragnarök... they laughed into the four winds. For the future they saw with his death was tediously bleak. But now... it was deliciously mysterious.
They needed to start from scratch. Unravel and analyze the new variables. Not only the protagonists and antagonists. But also the minor characters — those no one paid much attention to in the first chapters of the stories... or did not even know existed.
“Hmm...” Urð murmured.
She was not in her retreat, as usual. Like Verðandi and Skuld, she had spent most of the days of the last few months wandering discreetly through the realms, observing, cataloging, and studying the variables. When night fell over Midgard, Urð would gather with Verðandi and Skuld to share her knowledge and write their scripts.
But something strange was happening at that moment. Urð had just arrived at the hill near the lake beneath whose cold waters her retreat lay. Seated at the edge of the slope, leaning on her staff, she observed the curious sight below.
Upon the lake... there was a stranger. A young man who walked upon the waters, freezing them with each touch of his boots. He had a strange, pale sword at his waist, without a guard, and a shining cerulean ring on his right hand. His skin was fair, his hair black, and his eyes mallow-violet.
Urð narrowed her eyes. Verðandi and Skuld, at her side, did the same. They analyzed the wanderer’s features. Even as far away as they were, they should have been able to recognize him without trouble. But none of the three did. The young man was a complete unknown.
Which was nothing unusual, mind you. They were not omniscient, did not know every character. Even so, they were surprised. No ordinary human should have been able to see through their illusions and find the lake...
Urð brought her sight even closer, suspicious. There was something familiar about the young man. In the thin lines of his face. In the purple color of his irises.
“The Past frowns, intrigued,” Verðandi said. “She does not understand how she could have let the young wanderer escape her scrutiny.”
Urð gave a short, amused laugh.
“Much less you,” Urð and Skuld said, in unison.
The three continued observing the young man as he walked, in short steps, toward the little island in the middle of the lake — an insignificant piece of land which, until recently, had had nothing special about it. Besides, of course, the dead tree from which Odin had once hanged himself.
“Had we not established that no one knew the location of the sword up to the present?” Verðandi asked, bringing her fingers to her chin. “Not even the protagonists?”
Urð and Skuld nodded and answered at the same time, “Indeed.”
“What shall we do?” Verðandi asked, staring at the eldest.
Urð focused on the young man for another moment. Then she tapped the tip of her staff against the ground. A loud, shrill sound echoed through the surroundings, similar to a bell. The young man reacted immediately, turned in Urð’s direction, and his shining eyes met hers.
Urð entered. She traveled through his violet gaze as an eagle flies through the sky. Then came the past. His memories, clear and accessible, completely open to her curiosity, even the recollections forgotten with the passage of time. She saw who he had been, from the day he left his mother’s womb, to the instant that had just happened, when he stared at her and froze in fear beneath the amber, penetrating gaze of her wrinkled face.
Midgard. Asgard. Niflheim...
Urð returned to the present only after exploring every aspect of the young man’s life. Only when the mystery of his identity had been resolved.
She sketched a smile. One of the widest smiles she had ever sketched in her long life.
The young man below touched the pommel of his pale sword and brought a hand to his temple while he blinked and shook his head, dazed by the journey Urð had dragged him through. When he stopped, he searched anxiously for the Norns at the top of the hill, but did not find them.
To him, they had vanished. But Urð, Verðandi, and Skuld had only changed places and now stood on the shore, watching him.
“‘What was that?’ asks the young wanderer, confused,” Verðandi said. “‘Who in Hel...?’ He pauses, the memories of that bizarre and terrifying event fading little by little, until nothing remains. He tries to hold on to them, tries to remember, but fails, and the fragments slip through his fingers like mist.”
Verðandi crossed her hands before her waist and fixed her gaze on the eldest.
“The Past continues to smile, maliciously.”
The young man removed his hand from his sword and scratched the back of his neck, looking confused. Then he shrugged, climbed the slope of the little island and went to its center. There, beside Odin's hanging tree, a black, ancient sword, furrowed with incandescent cracks, rested, delicately driven into the earth. The blade, however, was weakened. Its residual heat, which distorted the air around it, was nothing compared to what it had once possessed. But, even so, that sword... should not fall into anyone’s hands. Much less those of an Aesir.
The young man stared at the sword for several moments, looking thoughtful. Then he stretched his arm to the side, opening his ringed hand. In the next instant, ice sprouted from the tips of his fingers and climbed up his forearm, enveloping it in a crystalline gauntlet that would freeze everything it touched. Or rather, almost everything.
“Are we going to let him take it?” Verðandi and Skuld asked in chorus.
Urð gave another small laugh and shared, in the blink of an eye, all the past she had just seen with both of them. They blinked.
“Oh.”
The three Norns arched the corners of their lips into broad smiles.
With his hand and forearm now completely covered and protected by the purest, most freezing ice, the young man swung his arm with resolve and, in a single pull, tore the Sword of Surtr free and took it for himself. The same weapon that had put an end to the long reign of the Aesir. The same blade capable of destroying an entire realm.
The Norns laughed.
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