The Beast of the North - one month out

In the elven world of Aldheim, the Jewel of the Nine Worlds, a battle was waged.

A slip of a girl fought a magical duel in the midst of a terrible war. She fought her former mistress, and she was losing. It was no wonder she was being overmatched, for she was a human and her former mistress was of the First Born, not a god, but a mistress of the old world and she was, but a human recently come to rare magical powers. In her desperation, she did what she had wowed not to do. She released a complicated, dark spell of a forlorn, mad goddess, Hel, the goddess whose war had sundered the gods from their prized Nine Worlds thousand of years ago. Was the legendary, ancient war justified?

That matters little.

The spell cast by the girl was Hel’s last attempt at gaining control of the worlds of the Aesir and the Vanir. It was perilous, the girl knew it was, but it was her only hope and so she saved herself, her friends and the worlds suffered instead. And Hel smiled, lying on her bed of rot.

The spell changed the ancient world of Aldheim profoundly, yet in truth it was a spell that would alter the fate of all of the Nine Worlds, for Hel had a long memory and she was ever seeking vengeance and her lost property, hating the gods for their freedoms and her sorrow and losses. While the spell and its consequences were immediately clear to the denizens of Aldheim, the spell wrought changes both unseen and physical to the unwary, seemingly safe lands far from Aldheim.

In one of these worlds, in Midgard, the hallowed home of men, that day had been unusually bright and warm in the Verdant Lands, the main continent of Midgard. Across the land, there was war, and there was peace. Death and birth marked that day and night as any. The night that followed was a beautiful one with a sky full of stars. They glittered like thousand diamonds hanging across the velvety curtains of space. The Three Sisters, the pale moons of Midgard lazily trekked the sky, their light promising the morning and light of the start called the Lifegiver. Millions of people slept soundly; lovers lay curled up in each other’s arms, babies were content in their sleep, people were leaving taverns, drunk and happy and life was unremarkably predictable.

A thick, ominous darkness shot across the sky from the west.

The night guards of the Midgard’s many realms screamed warnings; bells tolled as a peculiar, strange storm front seemed to materialize from the thick, dark air. Midgard’s humans were used to seeing all kinds of weather but the dark, devastating storm rushing from the grand Callidorean Ocean was vast and terrifying, driving waves and storm winds before it. Ships sunk with all hands, towns were swallowed by waves, walls crumbled, and fires broke out as people fled to the higher grounds. Hel’s spell danced across Midgard. Stone cracked. Flesh burned. Thousands died. Whole kingdoms were gone, and others changed forever.

Then, the storm abated. The strange darkness vanished as if it had never been.

But something had changed, in Aldheim, in all the Nine Worlds and so even in Midgard. Twenty years later, some of it would be clear.

Listen.