Bragi pulled his cloak tighter. In the dead of night, the ocean breeze would have a man dead in moments. An Aus immortal like himself fared much better, but still he shivered, looking away from the sea for his eye to not be frozen over.

Bragi turned on the rock he rested on, ice falling from long black hair. No green flaming eyes met his, no draugr. Strange, because Odin himself had said they'd be here in this wood on this day by the hundreds.

Could the King have been wrong?

Bragi scoffed. Odin knew all for he saw everything. Who was he to question him now? The mistake must have been his own and Odin would of course already know he'd make it, meant for him to even.

A gust of wind had Bragi ambling back behind tree cover. He still kept an eye at sea. No firelight burned yet in the distance but they would come in the morning. 14 ships the King had promised and a 15th to bring him home to Asgard.

Father would be on one of those ships; Vili Bor-son, Odin’s brother.

Felt more like a warning, the King’s message. Bragi could never be Aesir enough for Vili, like a man could choose his mother. And Eir, his mother. Well, Bragi looked too much like his Aesir father for a Vanir immortal like herself.

Do I even want to go home?

Asgard and Vanahiem both held warmth like no mortal could know being born in the age of mist. There would be no freezing one's arse off in those realms. The food was better too and Bragi was of the royal family. But there were the Aesir and Vanir, alway at each other's throats.

Bragi released a long breath, his less than enjoyable childhood coming to mind.

He hadn't known what to call himself back then. Vili wanted no child born from enemies, especially one with strange powers. Well if so, he ought to have not forced himself on so many Vanir women leaving one, Eir, pregnant. Eir wanted even less to do with her son despite his gifts or maybe because of it. Either way, Bragi was tribeless.

Bragi massaged the top of his mouth feeling the runes tattooed on his tongue then spoke. “COME TO ME!”

The runes, his throat, they all burned as magin flooded into his voice. The sound of disturbed snow came a moment later from every direction. Snow rabbits left their burrows stopping at his feet with a flock of birds. Just behind them a deer approached with its calf close by.

Bragi could kill them all without effort. There would be enough for a feast come morning as not one would flee once he ordered it. Beast had no hope of resisting his will, not like men who could at least fight back on occasion.

With a flick of his wrist, three snow rabbits fell, impaled by daggers. They would be his meal. Let the gods find their own food.

*****

Nergal took another great swig of mead, leaning back as he did until balancing on only two legs of his chair. He'd wanted this, waited a millennia or two, three… a few hundred years? Fuck, time was hard to track as just a spirit.

He took another swig regretting doing so when the bitter taste came to him. The drink was foul, far worse than any whine Nergal had indulged in. Strange as it had been, Saxa's potion had actually made it better. But still, the Witch Queen had to die for her last transgression.

Nergal had forgiven her for Aslaug’s murder. Of course, he had wanted to kill Saxa but her actions were all part of the story he wanted to see play out.

Would Halvar take revenge on the sorceress? Maybe Gry would be the one to end her. Saxa could also triumph in the end spawning a new empire of magic. Syn wanted her mother dead too, hardly being bothered by her death. Slaying the witch himself ended all possible endings he wished to see. But then the fool poisoned his mead with a potion, still hoping to ensorcell him.

With a wave and a pitch-black tendril of magin, Nergal had ripped Saxa’s heart from her chest. Never treat with spirits you can’t handle. She hadn’t known that simple lesson and now never would.

Nergal downed another mouthful of mead and sputtered. “By the godless abyss, that’s foul!”

“Then stop fucking drinking it!” Syn shouted in a whisper.

Nergal drank and scowled, then took another. “I know I should but I can’t. Flavor might be growing on me.”

“Then at least pay attention to the mess you’ve made!”

“Mess your mother made,” Nergal corrected. “Sloppy spellwork draws the dead like flies to shit. What kind of sorceress doesn’t know that?”

Syn’s eyes never looked away from Halvar, Gry, and her father making plans and forming strategies. Nergal scoffed, stood, and walked off. This wasn’t the part of the adventure he cared to see.

A rush of images came to Nergal soon after. A pack of shifters, berserkers and vargr wolves fighting off draugr. Nergal hoped they’d win and watched Nyarn charge through the horde only to find another and another, countless hundreds of walking dead, most of his own creation.

Nergal’s palm bounded across his face, taking him out of the vision and bringing strange looks his way from around the room. That was too close to seeing the future and there was nothing worse than spoilers. But there was something else in this place, a hand guiding the future, someone telling their own story and Nergal couldn’t have that.

“What are you doing?” Gry shouted as Nergal stepped over the long table.

“Don't mind me.”

Nergal climbed the steps moving past Jarl’s and Thane's until all were shouting at him like he was mad.

“Can't you feel someone's hand in this?”

His hand gripped a blade's hilt, a rune blade held to a tree with power he could almost respect. With a heave he ripped it free, sending the future he refuses to see into turmoil.

“Gramr,” Nergal said, the name offered by prescient insight. He looked to Halvar, the Jarl’s mouth agape. "You should take this."

****

Odin fell to his knees, one hand clutching his pounding head and the other pressed against the Midgard Wall. He forced his eyes open searching the darkness of the spirit realm for foes, finding none. His body then? No. It was still on Asgard hanging from a root of the world tree.

Another wave of pain had Odin on the ground screaming. And then he saw it, an image in his mind, one of many, vanished with the carefully curtailed future it promised.

The pounding in his head only worsened and more futures faded. More than one thousand years Odin had planned, shifting events in his favor to protect mankind. Now all that work was unraveling before him.

His hands reached out grabbing at naught, desperate to find an enemy to fend off. But the King of Gods could only watch as his life's work vanished.

“How could this be!” Odin raged feeling as if blinded. Not only had the future changed on a scale even he thought impossible, but his sight was being blocked.

Odin directed his sight to search for the source of this disturbance only finding Germa. Sigyn and Bragi were in that land, Loki too, but where?

More importantly was how his sight was being blinded. Midgard was his, every King and Jarl for the next thousand years chosen by him. Every war, he chose the victor, all to give birth to champions when the time was right and conflicts when souls were needed.

His vision shifted to Bragi taking the night meal on a shore and not facing a hundred draugr as Odin once saw. Events had truly changed and by something with more influence than himself.

Regardless, Odin had to right this wrong, kill whatever was blinding him, because one vision hadn't changed. The same one he'd seen before his ascension to King where a mammoth-sized wolf came at him with Nergal the Destroyer riding its back. So in a way nothing had changed. Ragnarok still marched ever closer and it had to be stopped at all costs.