The stone tunnel carried on for a time in a natural silence that was only interrupted by my boots scuffling along the floor, the faint thump of the staff hitting astride them, and my own breathing.

Then that noise began to fade off, as if swept up by an unseen wind and spirited away.

Nothing about the tunnel seemed to have altered any on a visible range and I took the time to extend my senses out further, to try and feel through any kind of illusion that would be in place. In the end it required me to open up my Sight once more, and what an illusion it was. The bleak stone had been replaced by blood-saturated earth and dirt, and only fiffy feet or so out rested a massive crumbling hole. The tunnel ended at the back of it despite seeming to go on far further to my natural eyes, and carefully tapping my staff against the floor again showed what had happened to the rest of the noise - waves of sound rippled forward and were sucked down and swallowed away by the gaping void.

Looks like I've found the entrance to Hel. Great, I thought unhappily and began to stride forward again. Counting out the distance to the hole I stopped just short and looked down at the flared and rough edges leading down into the sticky red flume.

I opened my mouth to utter something akin to 'Geronimo', maybe even a nice 'bombs away'. Anything particularly witty just to try and take the unease out of my mind right then, dancing up and down along my spine. Instead my voice was swallowed whole before the sounds could even finish forming in my throat, and with a grimace I took the last step over the edge, gripping my staff tightly. For a long moment my body teetered in the open air as if refusing to go any further, a foul wind brushing against my skin, and then I was falling at an even more terrifying speed than the descent from the Dragon's Domain.

I saw brown-red, rotted bony faces decorated the interior of the vertical passageway, eyes alight with haunted yellow foxfire and jawbones moving as if screaming their agonies, and it spurred me to grip my staff tighter still and focus in preparation for whatever boogieman was dwelling at the bottom if this was just the opening.

For once my expectations were not met, let alone surpassed, however.

There were no half-formed beasts, no slavering demons itching for the chance to taste mortal flesh again. I just accelerated again until the tunnel was all a blur, and then my feet touched down softly to burning ground as if such was commonplace. A bit of vertigo was the worst part of the experience, really. There were a good amount of ghastly figures shambling back and forth in varying states of misery before and around my own form, but they didn't so much as spare me a hungry glance. They seemed content to just wander endlessly around, and I was just as happy to oblige them and get out of the way, quickly browsing the pathways available to make sure there wasn't another abrupt pitfall, and then I slammed down on the concentration needed to maintain the third eye.

Painfully, blissfully, it shut down and while I was still left staring at unpleasantly decaying men and women, at least the environment had settled down into an innocuous, plain brown and shadowed cavernous appearance. Striding uneasily ahead and keeping a wide berth of the condemned shuffling along lazily, I soon found myself approaching an office-desk settled down next to a stone map. Seated behind it, naturally, was what looked like a lawyer despite the advanced state of decomposition to his overall body and ragged suit.

A zombie-lawyer. Lovely. I warily approached what I assumed was a man, and his head turned a full one-eighty to face me.

"And what can I do for you, Mr... " he paused and reached down to open a drawer and pull out a thick red file. The rotted eyes perused the details rapidly and with many an awkward glance back up to me with one of them as the other continued reading.

I shuddered a little. Eyeballs were not meant to move like that even in a hellish afterlife.

At the end as I stood there in silence he set the file down. "You do not seem to belong. Parts of you, yes, and parts of you, no. But a unified whole tethers you together. What business do you have in this place?" he asked at last in a grave tone.

I filed that information away for later. He might have been detecting Lasciel's presence, or the Hellfire she had brought. But if I was being honest, I had the uncertain sense that just maybe I had crossed the line once too often over the last few years to end up with a cushioned white cloud and harp when my time was up.

"I need to get down to the roots of Yggdrasil." I told him. He just stared blankly back at me. "Okay, I need to talk with Loki," I clarified. Still nothing. "About the end of the world?" I tacked on with a frown.

At that he nodded suddenly, as if putting together something he hadn't quite been seeing clearly before. "Ah! You are the next Ragnarok Spokesman." He thumped the file with his good thumb. "Very good, that clears up many of the inquiries in here." Nodding to himself the lawyer ducked down to open up another drawer, and I saw an odd assortment of broken relics jangling around his bony fingers. In a few moments he found what was needed and rose to his feet in a precarious lean to one side, pointing at the stone map with a rusted dragon tooth.

"Down the stairs and across the Bridge of Judgment, carrying ahead until you reach the river. Just follow it over the edge and use this key to unlock his chains - but I feel it necessary to remind you against removing his shackles altogether until you are both back in Midgard; the last Spokesman didn't and Madam Hel is still roasting him over the coals for it after rebinding Loki for another ten thousand and one years in punishment for the damage to this realm," he explained.

"Ah... got it." I had no intention of freeing Loki, whatever this guy thought, though I was beginning to feel nervous about the way everything was going so far. He nodded smartly, dropping his jawbone to the ground with a curse, and bent down to grab it. While he finagled with reattaching the hinge with one hand he pressed that dragon tooth into my own hands and waved goodbye.

"Off with you, sir Spokesman." I shrugged helplessly at the situation and shoved the object into my jeans backpocket.

As I walked toward the aforementioned stairs I began to appreciate the size difference in the realm I was now striding through. Hel was smaller than I might have imagined the realm to be in previous years. The whole of it was condensed into the cavern by a stage of multitudes; the entrance and, if one had the means to escape from here, exit back into the tunnel in Midgard took up the first tenth of a mile, and those roaming around in a daze therein were the purer souls. These guys up near the entrance had no eternal suffering and no glory either, forced to simply wander endlessly until the time to return.

Valhalla got the warriors and courageous men and women, while Hel was home to all those others who passed away in these realms. Didn't die a grand death? Murdered somebody for a piece of their property? Hel didn't differentiate between the cause when it came to arrival, only the sorting thereafter.

The next two-tenths of the cavern suddenly gave way to a downward trail of earthen steps that were just a little too spongy for my liking; they literally oozed viscous red fluid each time my boot made contact.

A vampires paradise. I thought uneasily.

At the end of the hundred and eight steps the path branched off in eight different ways, and several of them angled down for where the condemned would spend the rest of their eternity here according to the sin in question that they had died under. A whisper of wind carried up from those places toward where I now stood to deliver their haunted misery, telling of the anguish they suffered and the regrets committed toward life. With a gulp I blocked the almost-white-noise out and began to trek forward.

Three of the pathways stretching out to the sides and before me tugged at my body like a firm ocean current as I passed, oozing over my flesh like some kind of disease as I walked and sending a note of further unease dancing up and down my spine. It was far harder to ignore that than the faint wind had been, and in thinking about the former I focused upon the noise once again. What the half-rotted lawyer had told me before was starting to make a very unpleasant sort of sense as my stride slowed, and I knew that if I stayed there for much longer that my feet would begin to drag me down into oblivion. I managed to shake the feeling away and push on with a hastily lengthened stride by focusing onto the eighth and final path that lead straight onward.

Still, a faint whisper followed me until I was well away, and I learned that glancing over the sides of the apparent-wooden rail running on either side of the last path only amplified that calling, as if somewhere deep inside of me a yearning desire to turn back and go down was making itself known.

The sooner I'm done here the better, I thought warily and concentrated on reaching the end of the way only a short distance off, running over what the stone map had displayed. According to it the river would soon appear thereafter and it only ran one way, namely out and as a constant feeding of the roots at the depths of the Norse realms.


A series of bone-hued boats were moored on the edge of the river, tied in place to stone grave markers in the damp ground by what appeared to be sinewy rope.I just shook my head and continued. I didn't see anyone else around keeping watch, so I clambered into the nearest boat and flicked the rope loose with the end of my staff, then sat down and waited for the currents to do their job.

Over the next few unerringly silent minutes the boat rocked all over the place and nearly threw me out more than once, and I had to hold on with my elbows and knees gripping the sides just to keep my staff from being lost, ducking my head down into my chest for more balance. It was this that prevented me from seeing the waterfall until the boat was upended right on the edge as if some invisible tether had been tied around it, and I was pitched out into thin air with a shout.

Mist obscured what lay ahead and below, but I managed to slow my descent in much the same way as I had on the way from the Dragons Domain toward the land of the Jotunn, spitting out a hasty "Veni chi!" and making a light splash as I sank up to my chest in water. My staff flew out of my hands and was swept up immediately. I spat out a mouthful of murky liquid and began wading hastily after the wooden foci until the slow current pushed the both of us out of the mist and up onto a tiny isle of stone lodged in-between two literally behemoth-sized roots.

Want a perspective on what I mean? You could fit an oil tanker length-wise within the body of one and still have space to either side. I was briefly held up by awe that something like this could exist even within the Nevernever, but that passed fairly soon as the stone beneath my feet began to shake and rumble violently.

"What the hell?" I had to plant my staff firmly against it and lean heavily into the worn wood to keep from being knocked down into the lengthy expanse of brown water at my back, and after several jarring moments I picked up the cautious tone of a feminine voice calling across the distance toward me.

"You should not be here." She said and slipped out from behind one of the folds, a small woman of no great beauty and built rather like a figure of stone than something more easily soft and appreciable. She seemed to have no trouble as the land shuddered and rumbled terribly, and I began to carefully slip over toward her- until she upended a wooden bowl of venomous red and yellow fluid into the path before herself.

That sight reminded me of the myth of Loki, and that in turn told me to hightail it away before any of the stuff could make contact; the ground wasn't just shaking by accident, it was being rocked back and forth beneath the wild thrashing of the chained-down frost giant, unable to control himself for the pain of the very venom now drifting my way that was dripping down into his eyes.

I gave her a sharp look before calling up a gust of wind to lift myself out of harms way and then tumbled ungracefully a few feet to her side. She looked down at me with squinted eyes. "Why do you bring this misery onto yourself?" She asked.

"What misery?" I questioned her in turn through the continual shaking. Without answering she turned and retreated back behind the fold in the root that she had come from, which I could now see from my new angle had been carved open in the far-flung past and led to a set of stairs. Wearily I pushed myself up to follow her in.

What I found inside was the massive form of the chained Jotunn, bound by wrist and ankle through the bones in a trail that seemed to have sewn itself down to the elbows and up toward the knees. His flesh was dark brown and knotted in many places, and like the one that I had first encountered Loki was rougher and larger than any creature I had previously encountered.

His motions had ceased before I entered the room due to his wife once more collecting the venom in that bowl, seated at his head patiently and whispering what I assumed was comfort.

"Do you favor Hel's treatment, Harry; Copperfield; Blackstone; Dresden?" Loki asked in a carrying whisper, licking his lips in-between each word of my Name, and in the process re-pronouncing it almost tense for tense as I had in years past. I felt a strong allure well up within me to Listen clearly to his words, which flat out scared me more than everything else so far had been able to.

Stars and Stones, how does he know my Name so thoroughly? I wondered, briefly stunned and leaning back.

Loki stirred restlessly on the stone bed, stretching his bound limbs and the chains sinking beneath the surface of the roots tautly, as I collected my thoughts and took a wary step away.

"Who have you been talking to to pronounce my Name like that?" I demanded, using anger to offset fear.

The Jotunn craned his neck to look at me with his yellow-crusted eyes, maw stretching upward into the cheeks in a grin with far too many pointed teeth. "My unbinder is weary and wary, yes he is." Speaking almost as if to himself, Loki tilted his head back again and rested it down tiredly.

"Shall I answer you, Harry; Copperfield; Blackstone; Dresden?" He repeated my Name even more clearer than before. He said all of a sudden almost as soon as the previous statement was through, "A game. For each riddle you answer proper I will answer your own doubts, ah! And for each you fail you will undo a chain. If you fail utterly I will go free, slip through history, and do that which the Dragon has spoken of!" He promised with that same grin in place.

A sense of ill grew in me at his words. "What do you mean?" I asked, but he shook his head and thrashed once, shaking the relatively small location terribly for an instant.

"No free questions, mortal." He said in a completely different inflection of voice. "I ask a riddle, and you answer. If you stay silent the game is over and you get nothing." He told me.

This had all kinds of danger written across it, but stars and stones, I had less than twelve hours left and every single person I had dealt with so far had only pushed me further and further into the deep end. It was about damn time I pulled free and started swimming on my own.

"No." I told him flatly. He managed to crane his neck again and look toward me, grin still in place.

"No?" He repeated back at me in question. I extended my staff toward the bound figure and focused, not on him, but on his wife just above his head. Normally I wouldn't direct a spell at a woman unless she was one of the monsters, and regardless of her living in the Nevernever this woman was definitely still a human on some level. As such I didn't attack her, I shielded her. The same diamond-hard focused-shield that Elaine and I had created and that had once saved my life so many years ago came into being around Loki's wife and knocked the bowl of poison from her hands in the process.

The Jotunn thrashed again in terrible pain as his entire face and parts of his upper chest were splashed in the foul miasma, throwing me off my feet and into a hard wall, and for once knocking her off her feet as well. She crashed down and rolled around inside of the shield helplessly as the earth continued to rumble, and I knew she would be stuck until I either broke the weak point in the shield or she happened upon it by chance in this ruckus.

I felt a splitting headache develop the longer I stayed there like that, and scrambling as best I could I scooped up the bowl and thrust it back over his face to capture the thick drops of venom. My knees smashed painfully into the raised stone he was stretched over and more of the stuff spilled over the edges, but he soon settled down before I lost my grip over it entirely.

His skin darkened further and grew a sickening shade of yellow where it was burned, and he stared up at me in a look that many of my former enemies once had when they came up against me.

"I'm on a schedule here, Loki. I asked you politely before, and I'm going to do so again. Who taught you to pronounce my Name like that, and what do you know of Oberon?" I asked with a sense of calm I didn't really understand.

He spat a mouthful of slimy muck at me. In response to the hideous stain now coating my clothing I dumped the gathered poison down his throat.

Ferrovax had sent me here on a suspicion, and the way things were going I'd run out of time following this ghost trail. Either I'd get the answers I needed, or I'd do what I always did: Fuck somebody's day up until I finally did.

The world's going to end if I fail, and dammit if I'm not going to do whatever it takes to keep it nice and healthy for my daughter to grow up in.

I dropped to the ground but kept the bowl as carefully positioned as I could manage through his wild rocking, sloshing more of it out than I wanted. Loki would probably die if I kept feeding him poison, and somehow I didn't have it in me to care. I poured what I had left down his gullet again and spilled most of it down his face and across his chin. From nearby his wife began shouting at me to stop. I forced her words from my mind, looking down at the chained and bound frost giant. The question and non-answer session carried on like that for a time, before his body stopped struggling. Most of the damage was spreading through his veins. "Enough!" He gasped dreadfully, anger apparent through the blood that gushed out of his mangled lips.

"Her name was Kumori!" He spat out agonizingly. His features were slacken and dissolved, his body shuddering now and again of their own accord, and I knew that he was dying. "She will slay you! I will be freed as promised!" His words were beginning to slur together before a wave of black energy enveloped his head and crushed it flat. The force of it threw me back toward the doorway, my staff slipping out of my fingers as I hit my head against the floor and began to see stars. The crack of the shield fading dimly registered as Loki's wife rose to her feet, veil crumbling with her ascent.

I found myself staring up at Cowl's apprentice hazily as she spared the dead Jotunn's body a long look. As I lay there on my back staring up at her in disbelief she spoke up. "I think that is quite enough of your time spent in discussion here, Harry Dresden." She told me quietly.

"W.. how in the hell are you still alive?" I asked her slowly, remembering the details somewhat hazily of that Halloween night several years ago, if that. She had been swept up in the aftermath of the Darkhallow's ritual hurricane as it came apart like the remaining zombies that Grevane had awoken.

She looked down at me, then toward her own gloved hands, and answered in a tired voice. "I am not." And with that she reached up to draw the hood back from her face. I flinched at the skeletal appearance beneath, thinking for a short moment that it was Mavra staring at me. "A fate worse than death, Harry Dresden." She told me in that same tone, and I could honestly agree that she was right. Whatever happened after her mentors Darkhallow was undone, Kumori had paid a sharp price for it.

"It does not matter. I may better serve our purpose in such a state of being, and for that alone I am accepting of it, if not satisfied. Enough of such talk! I can sense you gathering your will!" She snapped out suddenly and then brought one hand forward, the index finger pointing to just beside my head.

A flicker of the same black energy that had engulfed Loki's head and crushed it in like a tin-can soared from her extended digit and drilled a hole into the root and rock nearby almost instantly. I flinched as the tainted aura about it crossed my senses; it felt like a brush with death itself, and about as pleasant. I instantly let go of the power welling up inside of me.

The last guy who had that kind of a presence was Shagnasty.

"I would have preferred to simply kill you quickly and emptily, Harry Dresden. I know that you do not involve yourself in these kinds of affairs of your own resolve in most situations, but you have developed an unnerving knack for completely undoing our plans when you do interfere. I am afraid your death must come to pass before the final hours of Oberon's return." And with those words spoken, she struck.

And so did the body behind her.

As Kumori brought one hand up again to destroy me Loki's body gave a terrible posthumous thrash. I was already on my hands and ass when it happened, but she was on her feet and this time around not expecting the assault to her center of gravity.

Kumori tumbled forward and the burst of death energy smote the roots over my head, and I threw myself forward to snatch up the staff while she took a moment to recover. I had just laid my fingers on it when I felt that same presence and barely slammed my nose to the ground in time for it strike directly overhead; and I mean right above my skull, so close that the hairs along the back and top were shaved almost flat. My poor hat took the brunt of it and died a pitiful death. So now I'd not only lost my protective duster from Susan in the Dragons Domain, but my only fucking hat that had survived everything else to come my way in the last decade and change that I've been fighting these assholes.

Enough is enough.

Kumori was now a Black Court vamp, and she had already been tough as a mere wizard. I had very little available to me that could sucker-punch her strong enough to save my skin, but what I did have was something that she could not possibly predict I would possess. I threw my staff back in the direction she had been at to buy myself enough time to flip over onto my side and focus, and sure enough that action prevented her from consuming me with another burst of black energy as the wooden aide was caught up instead.

Normally at this point the opponent might be snarling in frustration, and I might just be snarling back in desperation. Kumori was something else altogether. Her dead expression barely conveyed anything at all, and I knew from Mavra is was definitely possible to show your emotions despite the seemingly lack of muscles and flesh.

She was calm and in control even as I kept dodging her intended assault, focusing instead on the next motion in determination. I'm hoping I ruined her mood with what I used next.

The smell of sulfur filled the environment as my staff was undone, and the next pulse of energy flew from her fingers at about the same point the Hellfire erupted from my own hands, the kinetic energy of Forzare shrouded in it.


Chapter Nine concluded.