Fiction | Poetry | Mythology Retelling

Event Horizon

How the people grieved to lose such a king. Their laments chased at his heels as he strode the path to meet his Gods. His steps sure and true upon the narrow bridge that arched over forest, lakes, and mountains until, finally, it crossed over stars – awesome rivers of darkness and light.

Odin looked down past the flat, unguarded edges of the bridge. He saw depths never allowed to him through his living eyes: those of his body, now worn and weakened, resting, resting its way into the belly of Jord, the great Earth Goddess – impregnating her for new life.

Odin saw the stars sparkling – glorious suns roiling in their ignition of life. Comets sailed across – as Odin once, too, had sailed – ships charging into an uncharted ocean. Moons hung like jewels, swirling clouds cut and carved, shining silver around worlds of pregnant waters, around worlds combusting with colour and fuels holding the idea of life.

Odin strode on, and before him appeared a palace of grandeur no legend could have foretold. Taller, more beautiful, more gleaming than any witch, any bard, any king could have seen and known with living eyes, with a living mind. And never could have told with living words.

Odin stopped. He held a memory in his mind, a picture of Jord – of his body taken into hers, carried on the shoulders and the chants of his people. So much he had not known – could not know – life was too much, too overwhelming, too all-consuming. He had been a sun, shining with the force of life burning itself to its ending.

Odin closed both his eyes – he knew that now he was one with the dark sea, the profound black ocean all around him that births the phosphorescence. And all that held him, still, to the living was the touch of his feet to the bridge – a memory of the past, a desire for the future.

Odin listened, both eyes still closed, to his own breath – he heard it deep in his body, heard its pass through the drum beats of his heart. Odin kept both eyes closed – he lifted one foot and then the other. He did not try to breathe. The drum beats rolled out across the bridge into the distance, thunder across a sky far away – at the beginning, across the waiting fields of fertile Earth.

Odin was still, both eyes closed. There was no sound left to listen to – there were no more drums to feel. The dark sea was all he saw, all he heard, all that he felt, and all that he knew. The moons hung upon him, the suns blazed within him. The planets grew of him. The profound distance and the closeness of all was him.

A thousand days, a thousand years spun across Jord, across Earth. A memory began to flicker, awake, alight. A stillness in the heat began to melt into a river stream, flowing like blood through the vein – shaping what was into what will be. Odin’s mind awoke beneath this dawn – memory of his people, memory of his home, memory of beautiful Earth.

Odin opened one living eye. The bridge – its path shifted to stretch above his head like a canopy of silk. Lustrous with colours glistening like splendour for a king, now watching with a living eye the people who yet sing his name, watching the Earth his life was made of. The Earth floating in the dark sea – a sphere of cloud and of phosphorescence.

Odin saw it caught with a fine thread of light. He looked around himself at the dark sea and saw other planets – other spheres with light threading between them all as a fine net weaving them together. Twirling and plaiting and streaming into a pillar of light and forming the trunk of a great tree. The tree holding and feeding each sphere from its reaching branches, holding, too, the sun. And at the base of the tree, its roots themselves feeding and growing from a swirling coil of light moving fast and streaming from its circling of a black hole.

Odin felt this void pull on him, take part of him into it. He knew what it held, but he did not see it. It was another world – far deeper and wider than any of the nine spheres hung upon the living tree of light. A world Odin could barely understand – perfect and ripe and peace. He heard it like music, tasted it like a refreshing breeze. He felt it like a promise and like a denial without malice.

In one breath, he let the void take of him what it would – and it took his future. While the now still flowed like a river into the lacing capillaries of the tree, feeding the growth and the sustaining of each sphere, each world, and feeding of the king who keeps his one open living eye upon the movements and the reckonings and the fears and the hopes of his people who yet sing his name upon the Earth his life was made of.