This, like so many others, was a story of the sealight.
The locals in this coastal village of Norway, which hung on the precipice of a cliff, had noticed the phenomenon almost since the first moment of their settling. At the close of day, as the sun descended behind the line of the horizon, there was a single moment when the light appeared to shine from under the waves themselves, as if the ocean had swallowed the flames and for a fierce instant provided all light in the world. This was called the sealight. And, as is wont to happen when the people of Midgard discover what they believe to be a reflection of the divine, it became a source of festivals, holidays, and mysticism in the village.
At some point now lost to the records of history, the village elders decreed that the sealight was the working of the gods and ordered a shrine be hewn out of the most jagged cliff that faced west towards the setting sun. And so the shrine was erected, a structure of granite so expertly worked that the vines which framed the doorway looked as if they would flutter in the next strong wind. A hut was built nearby, so that a guardian might ensure the sacred flame placed in the belly of the shrine in honor of the sealight would never go out.
And so this continued for centuries as generations of guardians observed the world from the doorway of the shrine. This tradition remained unbroken, even as empires rose and fell and men turned away from the old ways, dismissing them as stories for children. But the guardians ensured that the flame never went out and went to the shrine every morning to greet the dawn and every dusk to bear witness to the sealight, because eight hundred years ago, the golden-haired one had appeared in the village square, eyes flashing, hammer clenched in his right fist as if his grip were the only thing tethering him to the earth. Casting about, his eyes found the first guardian of the shrine, which had so recently been finished that there was still a fine dusting of powdered granite on the carvings in the walls. In a quiet tone that somehow enhanced the power of his presence, Thor had proclaimed:
"Prepare yourself. I will return. And you will be needed."
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The present guardian of the shrine had once been named Erik, but no one had called him by that name in so long that sometimes he half-forgot that he had been born someone other than the guardian. The village people, when they spoke to him at all, called him Vorðr, from the Old Norse word for guard, and bowed their heads and averted their eyes. To be guardian of the shrine was to hold the highest position in the entire village. Little children were taught that they would never come close to the level of guardian, and that this was a post that was to be feared and respected. In some of his less reverent moments, the guardian thought to himself that it was a position that was good for the ego, if not for the soul. He would catch himself before traveling too far down this path of thought, cursing his own blasphemy and reminding himself of the importance of post, how his work would pave the way for the return of the gods. But after fifty years of serving as guardian, there was a small part of him, growing larger every day, which doubted the gods would ever come.
And so, on this particular morning, the light spilled across the hearth, and the guardian got up to see the sun illuminating the fjords and to hear the puffins calling to each other from across the bay. He massaged his shoulder, working the stiffness out of his joints. Groaning, he went inside to fetch a poultice that Ingrid the shopkeeper had pressed into his hands last time she saw him shuffling in town, saying it would help his sore joints. Although most of the villagers had embraced modern medicine in all of its creamy promises of eternal youth, Ingrid still created her own remedies from the herbs grown in her garden. The guardian had accepted the package gruffly. The gruffness stemmed partially from habit and partially from the embarrassment he felt because, even fifty years later, he did not know quite what to say to a woman who, as a girl of sixteen, had pledged her heart to him until the sealight went out, as the saying was in the village.
This before he was called up to be the guardian. The process of how the next guardian was chosen remained almost as much of a mystery as the sealight itself. All that the villagers knew was that when a guardian came to be so old that the trip from hut to shrine (a distance of only a few hundred meters at most) became nearly impossible, all the men, women, and children of the village would begin a nightly pilgrimage to the cliffs to witness the sealight, until one of them was marked by the gods as the next guardian. And there, one night, as the sealight blazed forth, Erik had heard the murmurs of his fellow villagers and looked down to see that his skin was pulsing with the same light that shone from the sea.
But his first thought was not how honored he was to be chosen by the gods, or how humbled he felt by the weight of the role that had just descended on his shoulders. No, his first thought was of the slight gap between Ingrid's front teeth, and the freckle that was so close to the corner of her eye that it disappeared into a small wrinkle every time she smiled. For the guardian of the shrine, whether male or female, was to live a solitary existence in the hut, preparing for the return of the gods, and could neither wed nor have children. For the first time, Erik tasted the acrid tang of destiny in his mouth, the way it could change your life in a single instant and leave your sweetheart staring after you in disbelief, in mourning, as you are led away to don ceremonial robes and begin your training.
So the guardian could hardly be faulted, when Thor, Loki, and a strange woman materialized out of thin air that dawn, that his first reaction was that of faint resentment. Fifty years of repressed bitterness has a way of calcifying the soul.