Year 1, Month 2, Week 1, Day 10

Azrael

Azrael was out of rations. It would have been more of a problem if he hadn’t purchased a hatchet and a tinderbox at Thor’s Threshold. Nice enough city. Only five people had tried to murder him in the street, there, and after Azrael had horribly maimed the fifth attacker in a row, the people of that city seemed to get the twofold message: he was holding back, and it was either unhealthy or expensive to continue to attack him.

His instinct to purchase a tinderbox while he was there was spot-on, it seemed, as now, when he was out of food, he could simply hunt and cook his food. He wasn’t the greatest cook in the world and it was difficult, picking bits of shattered bone out of the animals he killed, but all in all, he was surviving, and doing so quite comfortably. The wilderness didn’t feel so terribly wild, anymore, but he reminded himself that he hadn’t come across anything terribly monstrous, yet. Just animals. The wolves pushed the envelope, but he hadn’t come across any other dire wolves. In passing, he wondered if dire wolves were innately solitary creatures, or if the one he encountered was a sick animal.

The sun hung overhead, almost cresting noon. The town he was looking for was just over the next hill, he was sure of it. Despite the number of years that had passed, this area looked the same. Another half-hour, and he crested the hill, his eyes falling upon Jeriong, the town of his childhood. The yellow oak houses looked just as rustic as they used to, and the tilled earth just outside the town hadn’t changed. It was out of season for the crops, so it was just plants in neat rows, but it was familiar. The town itself was little more than a cluster of houses; there couldn’t be a hundred people living here.

Azrael walked into town, feeling the eyes of all the humans on him. The humans stopped and stared at the silver of his eyes as he moved past them. He had forgotten what it felt like to live in a human settlement. The constant stares had weight; the relentless gazing continually spoke, “different,” and the weight that settled on his heart was almost tangible. He shook off the feeling; it shouldn’t matter. He’d leave after letting his parents know he hadn’t perished in Almaz.

One human stepped into the path, squinting. It looked to be the town head. The people in the town knew that they were a small settlement, so they didn’t elect a mayor, but this man, a short and wide human named Elm, with hair the color of mud, was the person they all looked to, to settle disputes or make important decisions.

“Azrael BarDumah? Is it you?” Azrael stopped, feeling his sword on his back and the bones in his body more and more as each second passed.

“It is. I’m here to see my parents. After that, I will leave again. Please don’t stand in my path.” The man winced at Azrael’s tone, and gave a visible shudder at the sword across his back, but held his ground.

“Your parents aren’t here, Azrael.” What? Where had they gone? A light went off in Azrael’s head.

“What did you do to them?” He demanded as plates of bone surfaced from his skin, making a sort of armor. There were gasps around him as the humans collectively and involuntarily took a step back. Not Elm, though. Elm stayed in place. Shaking, but in place.

“We didn’t do anything to them, honest!” the man cried, almost frantic. Your mother got sick and passed, I’m sorry to say, and your father left. They were good people who contributed to the community.” Grief shot through Azrael unexpectedly. His mother? Dead? She got sick? Azrael softened his stance and Elm took that opportunity to speak again. “The house is locked, so I wanted to save you some effort. Let me go get the key for you, and you can let yourself in. I think all of your parents’ things are still there, where Asbeel left them.” Azrael nodded, utterly defeated.

Elm asked him to wait while he went to his house and retrieved the key for him. Azrael obliged, and the man was back almost as quickly as he left, placing an iron key into his hand.

“Again,” Elm said, “I’m sorry your parents aren’t here. I’d take a happy reunion over… well, whatever this is.” Azrael quietly took the key and walked past everyone, until he came to his parents’ house on the far side.

The house wasn’t in disrepair, but it looked like it hadn’t been touched in a year. He slid the key into the keyhole, and turned it, hearing a soft click. He walked in.

Inside, almost everything was the way he remembered it. Roughhewn walls, three rooms–two bedrooms and a common room–, and a furnace that doubled as a stove. Various pieces of furniture were neatly arranged. Azrael tied open the curtains in the common room, letting the daylight in. He moved to the back of the house and held open the curtain of the window to the back yard. Fairly close to the house, and not quite out to the farmland proper was a solitary gravestone that read,

Here lies Ariel BarDumah

Loving wife and mother

There was no date. Azrael grimaced. He didn’t even know when his mother died. He could ask the townsfolk, but they were the last people that he wanted to speak to. His mother was gone. When he was in Almaz, there was a feeling of constant irritation, that his parents were waiting for him to come back home, were waiting for him to fail, that if he had come back home after the words he spoke to them, then he would be riddled with shame. Now… now that his parents weren’t here to come home to… he felt… empty.

A tear rolled over his cheek. Where was his father? Azrael had told his father where he’d be. Why didn’t the old man seek him out? Why did he just… leave?

Another tear rolled down Azrael’s other cheek.

With a growing feeling of lonesomeness, he realized his father probably had similar thoughts when Azrael left. He probably wondered why Azrael abandoned them. His father probably felt unwanted and alone.

Tears now streamed freely down his face.

His mother… his poor mother. He wasn’t there to give her a proper goodbye and it was his own fault.

His shoulders shook and he gritted his teeth, trying not to let any sobs escape. He couldn’t let anyone hear this.

Azrael was alone. Any chance he had to tell those who bore his presence that he loved them was gone with the wind. No Eden, no Sael, no father, no mother. All that was left to him was an empty house and a future of blood.

He let the curtain drop back into place, forcing himself to breathe normally and wiping away his tears. He wandered over to his room and opened the door. The room was perfectly tidy; the bed made, the dresser drawers closed, the rug perfectly centered in the room. Azrael closed the door and moved on to his parents’ room.

Unlike his room, his parents’ room was only mostly neat. The bed was untidy; it seemed his father didn’t bother to make it on his way out.

Well, that, and there was a dwarf leaning against the far wall, looking like he was expecting Azrael. The young elavis found himself essentially face to face with Grenfert Stonekilter, an impossible person he met just before the fall of Almaz.

Azrael drew his sword. “What are you and what are you doing here? What do you want with me?” he asked the dwarf, his voice shaky with anger.

“Put the sword down, Azrael. You likely won’t be able to do anything to me with it.”

“Answer me! Now!” he said without blinking.

The dwarf sighed. "I’ll answer some of your questions, but in exchange you’ll answer some of mine.”

“Fine. Spill.” Azrael replied, still not lowering his sword. Before his eyes, without a sound, the dwarf in scholar robes was no longer a dwarf in scholar robes, but was instead a tall man with close-cropped black hair, wearing a bright red suit with black pinstripes over a solid black button-down shirt; the red necktie looking suspiciously like a serpent.

“Eh? Did you like that form? I tried to choose one that would make you comfortable when we had our little talks. I’m Loki, by the way, of the Aesir. And you, sir, are more vexing than you know.” Azrael lowered his sword, but didn’t let go of it.

"A... god?"

"Very much so, yes."

“A god of the Yggdrasillian pantheon?”

“Yes, it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Just Loki will do.”

Azrael had some trouble forming words. “There’s an Ydrasillian god standing in front of me?”

“Just say ‘Aesir’. It’s easier to say. Have a seat, by the way.” Two chairs were suddenly behind Azrael and Loki. Loki slumped into his chair and Azrael gingerly and sheepishly sat down, leaning his sword against the bed.

“How do I know that you’re actually a god? You could be a particularly sadistic shapeshifter.”

“I am a particularly sadistic shapeshifter. But I understand what you mean. Would you like for me to perform a miracle? I might be persuaded. Or I could turn you into a newt. But some witches can do both of those things, so I guess you’ll have to decide what you believe I am through the course of our conversation: ‘does what I say match what a god would know, or am I a base boogeyman that’s talking out of his ass in order to get his jollies?’.” Loki replied, almost smugly.

“Okay. Um. So you were pretending to be a dwarf? Why?”

“More on that later. Let’s start with what you really want to know, which is Almaz.

“The whole thing with Almaz,” Azrael said, nodding, “what was that?”

“I wish I knew, my dear elavis.”

“...You don’t know?”

“Nope.”

“You’re a god–”

“Yep.”

“--aren’t gods supposed to be omniscient?”

“Compared to mortals? Yes. But that largely has to do with us having access to either powers or other gods that allow us to see the flow of time.”

“Time?”

“Is there an echo in here? Yes, time, fate, destiny, whatever. The large and heavenly graph that shows that we get from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’, often how we do so, and what ‘Point B’ is likely to be, at which point it becomes not a matter of fortune-telling, but literally a matter of sight.”

“So you…have lost your sight?”

“Not as such. But I had no clue that the fall of Almaz was going to take place. In fact, I only left because I was causing some damage to you. It gave me some time to find out where you came from.” Loki pointed in a circle, indicating the residence they were in. “Here. The scheduled line of fate projected that Almaz would stay put for centuries to come”

“Wait, ‘find out’? You mean you can’t see me, either? Then how were we able to speak at all?”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Well, of course I can use mortal senses to see you, hear you, feel you, even,” he winced, “ew, smell you. Obviously, you can affect your surroundings. But to my godly senses, and to the threads of fate, you don’t exist. A blank patch of reality indistinguishable from the ground you walk on, should the ground be undisturbed. I don’t see you, and I’m willing to wager something very valuable that none of the other gods can see you, either.”

“What’s causing that?”

“I would very much like to know that very thing. I have several theories, all of which I will test out in due time. Also a point of interest: if the gods can’t see you, where does your soul go when you die? Anyway, my turn for a question. Most elavis have single-word last names. In fact one of the noble houses in Almaz was House Vehemens. You, on the other hand, have the last name ‘BarDumah’. In a few other languages, none of which are known to you, I’m sure, ‘Bar’ would usually be in reference to one of your parents, but you don’t refer to yourself as ‘BarAsbeel’, even though your father’s name is ‘Asbeel’. What’s up with that? Was there a mailman named Dumah? Were there several?” Another pang of grief shot through Azrael.

“We’re named for an ancestor on my father’s side. I’m assuming one named Dumah, but my parents never spoke of that person. Just that the person did exist.”

“And where did your family come from, that I might find evidence of this ‘Dumah’?”

“East. I was always told that our family moved here from far east, that they moved west. They said that there was trouble with the family as a whole.”

“Ah, well that does give me a bit to start on. I can find written documents at the very least of your family. If my hunch is right, your family should become visible starting at least three generations prior to yours.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Experience. Likely one of the other gods, probably an evil one, has decided to make a move for more power or to try to take down an adversary, and decided to use you as a pawn, and therefore has cloaked you and your family. If I can find traces of your ancestors, I can, through process of elimination, find out which god did it.”

“And put a stop to it?”

“Ordinarily no, but as the destruction of an entire city was also cloaked, it moved up from being a curiosity to being a threat. The city had been cloaked for a couple days prior to it, now that I’m thinking about it. That made my second meeting with you all the more important: my situation literally went from investigating a lone elavis being cloaked to an entire city being cloaked. Turns out, you didn’t know crap. Anyway, Odin already has Baldur investigating. That oaf won’t turn up anything, I’m sure; after all, I’m the crafty one. He just holds a shield and looks heroic. Your turn for a question.”

“Does the name ‘Garm’ mean anything to you? Draeg mentioned the wolf-thing with the axe as ‘curious’.”

“Yes, it does, but if you would indulge me, I would give better answers if I knew everything that you know regarding the incident. Ordinarily I would already know, but, as I’m completely blind to the events at Almaz around that time, I have to rely on eyewitness accounts, and, judging from your sword, you had a front-row seat, courtesy of Draeg.”

“I’ll tell you what happened, but why can’t you ask Draeg? Is he a god, too?”

“Hardly. But he’s vanished. His font of souls has been moved and disappeared, also, as well as Orlaith and her font of souls. I figured Fext would be the next target once everything cooled down, and, sure enough, I was right. I tried to look at the town of Frolis, but found I couldn’t see it, either. So I traveled there to see if it had been destroyed. As it turns out, it has been so far unscathed, and Fext is… well, let’s just say that Fext is permanently a noncombatant. His spirit was entirely corrupted in a way that’s almost impossible to reverse, so now he spends his days helping people find their way through the forest near the city. Strange, strange. I took it upon myself to change Fext’s degradation from a situation of near impossibility of reversal to absolute impossibility for reversal. It would take another god and a half to break the binding I put on old Fext. Or three particularly determined demigods. Either way, Fext wouldn’t know anything and there was nothing of interest in the town. But, please, tell me what you saw, and don’t leave out any details.”

Azrael recounted for Loki everything that he witnessed at Almaz, which, as he spoke, suddenly didn’t feel like a lot, even though it certainly felt like a lot had happened to him. Loki listened loudly, making his own commentary with almost every sentence that Azrael spoke. Azrael found the whole experience quite tiring.

When he was done, Loki made a long hmmmmmmm sound. He did so three more times until he stood up and said,

“Stay here, Azrael. I have some inquiries to make.”

“But I don’t–” and Loki opened the air behind him, stepped through a doorway, and the doorway closed with a flash of iridescent, rainbow light. Azrael immediately stood up. There was no way he was going to sit alone in the house for… however long Loki planned to be gone. Azrael walked out of the house and began looking for Elm; he would know who would want to barter for rations.

***

Azrael was violently yanked inside his parents’ house by an unseen force, from three-hundred feet away. The good news was that all of the preserved food he had bought was safely in his pack. The bad news was that most of Azrael’s coins fell out of his bag in front of the lady he had just bought food from. She apparently got a good deal. He fell back into the chair so hard the chair splintered, then launched him a couple feet up, and re-formed; he fell back into the chair, which gave a stubborn creak. Azrael realized Loki was two inches from his face.

“Greetings.” Loki said. Azrael just blinked, unsure if he was going to be punished for not waiting. Loki didn’t broach the subject, but instead continued, not moving from in front of Azrael’s face, “I made the necessary inquiries, and, boy was it fun!” Azrael did not feel that being this close to Loki was fun. He did, however, note that Loki’s breath, while hot and damp, like most people’s, did not have any scent, good or bad.

“Fun, sir?” Azrael asked, timidly. Loki turned around and sat in his seat.

“Sir? Ha! How quaint! Anyway, fun. Loads of it. Buckets full! A bit of background, here, Garm is a minor deity in service to Hel, my daughter, and he helps guard the entrance to her domain, like a good little puppy. Well, I say that, but perhaps he’s not been such a good puppy, hm?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, the fact that you saw Garm in Almaz, means that Garm wasn’t devoting his full attention to guarding Hel’s borders. The fact that you saw helwolves in Almaz means that the borders are not being guarded effectively. So I popped over to my lovely daughter’s domain for a chat.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Well, initially it was ‘What are you doing here, you no-good- deadbeat of a father; I ought to toss you in this conveniently placed vat of boiling ice–’”

“You mean water?”

“No, I mean boiling ice. And I might be paraphrasing my sweet child a bit. After she got through with that, I asked her if she had seen Garm around, and she said that yes, she had! We travel to his cave, and lo and behold!”

“Garm?”

“No Garm! In fact, it looked like Garm hadn’t been around for a while. Maybe a month, maybe a year. Hel searched her entire domain, and, poor thing, she just doesn’t have time to clean her rooms like she should, these days, and after much ado, we established Garm was not in Hel’s realm. Which is also called Hel. Hey, don’t give me that look; Hades did that, too, and it’s not a bad idea. You want to establish a realm that’s entirely yours, you don’t name it “center-placed plot of land”, you name it Azrael.” Azrael raised an eyebrow, wondering when Loki was going to get to the point. “I expect you to do exactly that if you end up buying your own plot of land.

“Suffice it to say, Garm has flown the coop and taken an army of helwolves with him. Now, one of the issues we’ve run into here is that Garm and every single blasted helwolf has been cloaked. Not only do we not know where Garm and his merry band is, but I know for a fact that Garm just doesn’t have the juice to cloak everything that has been cloaked. That, coupled with your statement that the helwolves glowed green instead of Garm’s orange tells me that someone else is controlling the helwolves and Garm is currently going on some sort of godly-rampage equivalent of a joyride. So, there’s another god involved, and instead of acting him or herself, that god is using pawns, such as yourself.”

“I beg your pardon, Loki,” Azrael interjected, “but I don’t feel like I’m being used for anything, aside from my employment under Draeg.”

“Ah, yeah, Draeg’s twisted pyramid scheme likely isn’t tied into this, but you most assuredly are. When something is hidden from even the gods, you can bet that there’s an enormous amount of divine power being spent. Which doesn’t make the most sense in the world, because if the god wasn’t being sneaky, then he could use all the power he was spending on the cloaking to just destroy his adversaries instead. So, either this god is a god of secrecy, and the cloaking method he’s employing isn’t costing him as much as I’m assuming, or–Oh.” Loki stopped for a moment and brought his hand up to his heart. then continued. “There’s also a strong possibility that several gods are behind this, pooling their resources. That’s an idea…

“Anyway, Garm’s in the wind. Second thing I found out. You told me of a dragon fighting Garm. Your description matches, almost exactly, the sun god Ra, albeit a particularly obscure form that’s almost never mentioned. His dragon form is used exclusively to chase Apophis, the darkness dragon, out of the sky. Most people think of Apophis as a snake, and, honestly, she does have some very serpent-like qualities, but in all technicality, she’s a dragon.” Azrael had never given Apophis, or Ra, for that matter, any thought, and knew nothing of their forms. He nodded, encouragingly, nevertheless, hoping upon hope that Loki would start bringing his ramblings to a conclusion that made some form of sense.

“I went to Ra’s domain–pleasant fellow, by the way; you wouldn’t think so with a hawk for a head, but those intense eyes do show kindness very well–and asked him about the situation. According to him, he wasn’t there at Almaz, and neither did he send any aspects there. He was as stumped as I was. Honestly, I thought this was the case, because if even an aspect of Ra had fought Garm, he would have torn Garm to bits without any trouble at all.”

“Oh.” Azrael said, loudly, before Loki could get in another word. “And that, altogether, means…?” Loki stared at Azrael for a moment, squinted for a while and said, letting his shoulder’s slump,

“Well, there goes that.”

“There goes what?”

“I was hoping, by showing off my powers of deduction, that I could convince the god who might be listening through you to speak to me and threaten me or something. But not even a single minion has shown up.” Azrael’s eyes widened.

“Listening through me?”

“I mean, I don’t think so anymore–he would have made his move by now–but, yeah, I was hoping for some glowing eyes and unearthly voice modulation, at the least. It looks like whoever cloaked you isn’t worried about you. So, like I said earlier, you don’t know crap, and it’s quite vexing. Then again, I could use you to my advantage.”

“Well, I still have a couple questions.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

"You said earlier that during our last conversation you were doing damage to me. Would you mind elaborating on that?”

Loki stroked his chin, thoughtfully. “Do you remember the large headache you had during our last conversation?”

“That one’s hard to forget.”

“I was replicating the effect that Huginn imposed on you. I was attempting to speak with you as a god does while simultaneously speaking to you with mortal speech. Unlike Huginn, however, I adjusted my output to barely a whisper, so I wouldn’t incapacitate you like our mutually-known heavenly raven did. There was still a jotun-copulation’s worth of feedback resulting in the headache, and even though I stopped broadcasting, your head was still resonating like a tuning fork simply by my continued presence. So, in order to stop the effect, I decided to look into your past for a little bit and give you some space, so the headache would stop. Little did I know that when I returned, the place would be completely gone.”

“That…makes some sense. What about the Raven? What was the raven saying to me?”

“I’ve got no idea. That’s a mystery that’ll linger for a while.”

“You didn’t ask Odin while you were out?”

“Odin and I don’t have the best relationship, so unless it’s really important, I don’t bother him with it. He’s as likely to skewer me as not.”

“One more question, if that’s okay.” If this was a god, Azrael didn’t want to push his luck too much.

“Proceed.”

“From what I’ve heard, aren’t you some sort of trickster god? Just as likely to hinder me as help?”

“In the overwhelming majority of the lore that’s out there for me, in all the historical documents and magical scrying into past events, I’m shown mainly to trick, deceive, and otherwise bamboozle other gods. I don’t have a huge history of wasting my time tricking mortals, who, by the way, are easy to dupe. No, Azrael, I aim higher than that. Mostly.”

“I think that’s everything I had. If that’s everything you needed, I think I’ll be on my way, now.” Azrael said, choosing his words carefully.

“Do you know where you’re going to go?” Loki asked.

“Away from this town, for sure. I was thinking north. Maybe joining a trade caravan as a guard. I hear that they face their fair share of monsters.”

“A good plan, I think. Here, catch.” Loki tossed a silver coin to Azrael, who caught it in both hands. He looked down at the coin and saw a depiction of a serpent; turning it over, there was a depiction of a horse with eight legs; a third turn revealed, instead of the snake like Azrael expected, was a picture of a skull that had hair flowing from it like lightning bolts. Yet another flip showed a wolf with its mouth held open by a sword; turning it over again showed the serpent he saw at the first. “Ah, yeah, I didn’t think that’d work, either. It looks like I won’t be able to track you unless you join up with other people. I can keep track of them, and, by proxy, you.”

“How will you know who I join up with?”

“I have a couple favors with Vidar I can call in. He’ll find some people. In the meantime, join the caravan guard company known as The Earth-Clad Shovel and move heaven and earth if you have to, to get assigned to the Gryphon’s Pinnacle region. From there, all I have to do is summon their rosters and find you in the location you’ve been assigned; once you meet up with the people you’re supposed to find, it simply becomes a matter of traveling to them. If you are assigned to a crew in Gryphon’s Pinnacle before your party joins you, just stay with them until otherwise directed. Make sure you keep the coin with you.” Then he said, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and don’t try to clean up spills with any heavenly items I give you, hm?” Azrael’s eyebrows shot up. “Anyway, I’ve already planted some coins for a couple individuals, but Vidar will certainly have some leads.”

“You had coins ready before we had this conversation? Did you time-travel?”

“No, I don’t wish to burn that much divinity. I simply guessed how this conversation would turn out.” Azrael gave him a skeptical stare. “I am a god, after all.”

“That sounds like a plan, then, I suppose.” Azrael, feeling like somehow he didn’t have a choice in the matter.

“Also, my dear elavis, there is one more matter to which we should attend.”

“What’s that, then?”

“I’m going to attempt a miracle, just like you asked!”

“I didn’t a–”

“Hush, you don’t have to thank me; I’m seeing if I can still affect you, even though it seems to me like you aren’t really there.” Staring straight at him, Loki lifted his hand and after a couple seconds, Azrael realized he could feel the right side of his body. He clenched his hand into a fist a couple times and reached up to prod his shoulder. Loki lowered his arm and said,

“Judging from your reaction, I’d say that was a success!” The god grinned smugly. Azrael thought about it. Getting feeling back was a good thing. Maybe meeting other people would be a good thing, too. He remembered his feeling at the beginning of the week, when he killed the dire wolf–that feeling of success, like something had finally gone right, and he could improve from there. That feeling came back to him and burned like a fire in his chest.

He was alone, but only for a moment. Things were going to get better.