Missives From Misrule
1.
Esoterica (I – Fragments of the Unwritten Diary)
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown. ~ The Ghost, Hamlet, scene V
Asgard holds a library within its palace boundary – and beyond it as well; vast caverns spiraling down into all-but-forgotten repositories, softly gleaming shelves full to bursting with parchments and vellums, tomes with dulled covers and wrinkled treatises. Miles of haphazardly organized secrets and legends, written in languages dead and living. They whisper 'come and see' to their rare passersby, lonely, untouched, unheeded since days of yore. They yearn in their silent way, bursting with knowledge to give. I hear them in their dusty sleep, but there's so little I could do, even with all the time in the world. Meanwhile, Asgard holds its warriors dear, and the books full of gladsome ballads and illustrations of mighty deeds are far higher up. Their covers gleam gold, azure, and alizarin. They are loved and never forgotten, placed on grand shelves in the center of that holy place of learning, pride shining on every spine. White pages, lively words. They are consulted at high feasts and sung – shouted mostly, discordant, tangling with themselves in a mad jangle of drunken sound – towards lofty spires, shaking the dust down on what's left beside.
I know those paths. I know the dusty, cracking steps that go from a drafty arch beyond recent folklore down into the depths that speak of beasts that made ancestors tremble. My mother gave me two gifts in my life, two more than any other source. The first was the long, slow teaching of magic; sorceries to befuddle and mesmerize. The other was another kind of magic. The way to seek more of itself; the key. The lessons of letters – of one language, and another, and the way to think as I taught myself several others yet. And when I was small, it was those lessons more than the other that made me feel ever larger than what I knew then as my brother.
She took me through the first of those arches, though I found dozens of others later on my own. There is no passage direct from my old room to the old librariums, but there are many close enough. The entrances and exits are their own delights, old architecture carved with pictorial mysteries to match the written ones within, and there is one such road that wends from a collapsing hall close to the audience chamber. My ear has oft been warmed by a slight crack to that golden room, my younger eyes picking out details of supplicants that the All-Father, closer with his one all-seeing eye, sees not. From where I hide, I can smell desperation, see fear, and watch despair in the lesser's eyes as Aesir stride on past their entreaties, our legacy spread on other's bones. Once I believed it was our due. Once.
I spent no small portion of my childhood in the cuckoo's dream. It's not merely a fantasy for beggar children alone, to crave a meaning for their xenogenesis and alienation. I dreamt once that I was not little and strange and dark, but only a different kind of brightness. A shadow's gleam, for are not the moons in their glittering dark liked near as best as our suns in legend?
I dreamt that I held some grand and secret destiny, and that someday, my own strengths, misliked by Aesir kin, would be valued. That I could be more than some darkling unfavorite half-prince. That I came from somewhere else. That someday, I would meet my real kin, regarded and blood-bound to a greater king than the aging one that spared me scant glance.
There is a far greater pain than not getting what you dreamed for.
There's the white-fire horror of waking into the reality behind the dream.
. . .
I don't dream any longer.
. . .
That is a lie, one I will spare for myself alone. There are dreams. They will not be spoken, nor written of.
. . .
I wear the All-Father's - 'father to all but none of mine,' I amend - shape like the skin of some massive chimera. It fits ill; my thinner form fighting to match the gait and buried stumbles of that old, thick warrior. Odin paces slow and heavy; his head must ever turn like some grand stone edifice, creaking and rumbling on its neck for the one eye to take in its surroundings. I re-learn to ponder before I speak, then give each word that trickling, snarling cadence that marks the man that raised me. The glamour itself never falters, even as my performance is learned with each step I take. I give this effort what pride I can, as I snarl in my power to einherjar guards as they attend me.
They do not question. It isn't merely that they see what they wish. They see his – my – grief.
Frigga.
In the lie there is a truth, and in that truth I feed myself a lie. She was not my mother. Let there be silence on that score.
. . .
Yes, she was.
Enough.
Damn the silent places that spread under fall of night, and damn their whispered words.
I sleep in his form, the enchantment stuck fast lest I am approached at rest. Does this mean I dream his dreams instead, in denial of my dishonored own? Does the lion dream in its lion sleep?
There is never refreshment in the dawn.
. . .
It's a bitter fruit that gleams the brightest, for it grows too grand at the expense of its lesser kin. Thor, you bright and pleasant fool. Is this what he held so prized for you? You do not want it. It does not demand your kindly, offensively well-meaning heart. It might take your dumber, warrior's soul.
The ground rises up heavy under that golden throne. It would crush lesser men, grind them to dust and scattered bone. There is no rest born from the needs of this title and duty, only glimmers behind the warrior's feasts, a moment's peace among books – so careful must I be, Odin would never travel the labyrinths below and so, again, I am teasingly close to that which I care better for, and far enough away to gain only their whispers now and again. And they do whisper to me, the sibilant sounds drifting to where I sit high above.
This gilded, malignant cage I fought, and killed, and fought, and lied for. I cannot touch the past through these bars; it might fall through my old man's fingers and show a lie.
Kings are worse than beggars, should you find me in an honest moment's speech, but the legends and lies are better here. The power is potent mead, however, muddling the spaces between where I sit unchanging and where lives are lived. It is a salve of sorts. I have been drunk on it in one way or another for decades.
Through the haze of the old lion's single eye, I am forgetting how to see through the cracks and spy what he did not. Three nights hence the supplicants came, some chance at praying their case to better Aesir hands, and I cannot remember their faces. I have no names.
There was a child behind a woman's draping skirt. I saw his narrow little face through that one fading Odin's eye, and he peered at me, afraid. In this king's chimera skin, I hold his future in my shaking hands. And I knew, whatever he dreamed, it would be meaningless when his life filtered into nothingness.
Power. As time passes, it might intoxicate less. The addiction will remain.
I ought be the people's servant. Is that not what a king is? In my demand for their servitude, their supplication, their submission is that not the silent bargain? As they prostrate before me, is it not my oath to find some measure of humility, so that lesser life may have some promise of peace?
I find these questions no longer have answers.
I am weary, I tell you. My lost, stupid, shining brother, do you hear?
In taking everything I have ever wanted... I will gain the loss of myself.
