Part Two

Rebuilt Anew 2.1

Asynca

Note: Many Historical liberties / Screaming, I have taken them / Please don't hang me from Yggdrasil / Kthnx


I remember when I was a little girl, my father, without my mother to talk sense into him, used to take me spelunking in Czechoslovakia. I was probably about ten at the time, but I clearly remember two things about those excursions. Firstly, that I was absolutely terrified one of the bats would fly down and bite off my nose (at the time that was about the worst thing I could imagine would happen to me), and secondly, that for days after we got back I wasn't even able to lift my arms high enough to hold the banister on the stairs, they hurt so much.

What I had just realised was that any pain I thought I had endured as a result of spelunking at age ten was rubbish. The new definition of pain as I understood it was abseiling for an hour with an adult woman on my back.

By the time we finally reached the roof of the huge mechanism, the muscles in my shoulders and arms were visibly shaking. As soon as my boots hit the stone, I shrugged Amanda off and staggered forward a few steps, panting. I took off Thor's Guantlets and my gloves: in addition to aching horribly, the palms of my hands were covered with fresh, angry blisters. Some of them had already burst.

I went to reach behind me for a medical kit, but the movement strained my already sore arms. I couldn't even reach my straps to unclip the backpack.

Amanda had been watching me, and rather than assisting me to reach a kit, she simply laughed at my predicament.

I gestured at her with a bleeding hand. "Any more from you," I told her sharply with zero humour, "and for the rest of our trip through Helheim, I'm riding on your back."

She finished her laugh with a smirk and walked slowly away from me to stretch her legs. I scoffed at her, muttering as I gingerly tried to reach my clips. "Who wears high heels into a mine, anyway?" Probably the same sort of person who leaves their car unlocked in a foreign country, I thought. Certainly not the girl I used to explore digs with.

She glanced back over her shoulder, shrugging. "I always wear them. They're comfortable."

"They're ridiculous." I said, finally managing to unfasten my pack, and swinging it around my torso to unzip it. "You hit one kink in the stone and they'll snap off and break your ankle." I took antibacterial solution out of my pack and doused my throbbing hands in it.

"And I bet you're just so concerned about my welfare."

Unwrapping a sterile pin, I proceeded to lance my blisters. "Of course I am," I glanced up to enjoy her surprise until I continued, "because I have to carry you if you can't walk, and I don't fancy pulling my back."

She scowled and turned away from me, arching her own back to loosen it after the climb.

Once my hands were tended to, I took out sports tape and just wrapped it around each palm, looping it around my thumbs. I didn't want to waste time being overly prudent about what was essentially just blisters. I then slipped my gloves and the guantlets back on and very carefully refastened my backpack. "Alright, let's find her and get that stone back."

Amanda nodded grimly, and followed me as I jogged across the vast stone towards the other end of the platform. Now that we were closer to the distant floor of the cavern, a very dim blue glow was visible from much lower in the room. I could take a fairly safe guess that far beneath us the floor was a sea of Eitr, as I had previously suspected. I searched the edge of the platform for a way down.

"Wow," Amanda commented under her breath as she took an apprehensive peek over the edge.

I realised she was referring to the height of mechanism, and the distance to the Eitr. Heights were something I got over long ago, and I found it amusing she was still bothered by them. "It only takes twenty metres to kill you," I told her, lowering myself to the edge of the stone, "so the other several hundred are irrelevant."

"Was that supposed to be reassuring?" she asked me dryly as I dropped down to the level below.

I smothered a yelp as my arms bore my weight for a couple of moments as I dropped. I didn't know which hurt more: my muscles, or my blistered palms. However, I didn't want to give Amanda anything to bother me about, so I kept my mouth shut. Behind me, she dropped down more smoothly than I'd have expected her to in those boots.

The second level was a series of corridors. The surface of the floor would have once been paved with smooth stone, but over time the stone had eroded and much of the surface had accumulated against the walls, giving the floor a bowed appearance. It was also clear that fairly recently the corridor had been filled with fluid of some sort, as the dust had settled into ripples on the floor. My LED light bounced off the walls of each corridor and where it touched the floor the ripples appeared to move like snakes. It was unsettling.

We reached a central room, which, as far as I could see, was empty. I walked into the centre of it, examining the space around me.

Amanda rounded the doorway at a sloppy jog, looking like she was about three minutes from a heart attack. "God, Lara," she complained breathily, leaning against the stone. "Not all of us are tri-athletes."

I had hardly even been jogging. I suspected her poor fitness was a direct result of simply paying other people to do the legwork for her, and I wondered if she'd picked up that expensive habit off Natla.

"What's that?" she asked while I was looking around. I followed her line of sight to an iron plate on the wall.

We both approached it. Like the pillar, it was embossed with an incredibly intricate design that at first seemed like the pattern of skin in a fingerprint, but on closer inspection was line after line of runes. I'd studied the old runic alphabets in second year university, but as much as I was able to read them phonetically as I had the Thrall Stone, I had absolutely no idea what they meant. At times like this I'd always deferred to Alister; he would almost certainly have been able to read the plate. A nasty feeling of emptiness began to grow in the pit of my stomach, and I quickly dismissed it. This was no time to get sentimental about fallen comrades, regardless of how helpful they may have been.

Partially out of reflex, I unhooked my handycam from my belt and ran some footage of the designs. When the camera panned to Amanda, her lips were moving silently as her eyes traced over the surface.

I looked up from the screen. "You can read it?" I asked her, incredulously.

She stopped reading and glanced at me, a little surprised. "Of course, it's Futhark." When that elicited no recognition from me, she raised her eyebrows. "It's the alphabet that Odin is said to have received through self-sacrifice and self-torture."

I snorted; it made sense why Amanda had bonded with the concept.

She ignored me and raised her hand, tracing over the runes with curiosity. "It's from Hávamál," she told me, elaborating, "A long poem detailing Odin's trials."

"Well, translate it," I directed her, wishing I'd refreshed my memory about runes prior to coming to Svalbard, "maybe it's a clue about what this room is for."

"Downwards I peered / I took up the runes, screaming I took them / then I fell from there," she said carefully, and then shrugged. "It just repeats that, over this whole plate."

I glanced around the room; Amanda helpfully lit it for a few moments. There were no other features at all.

Hooking the camera back on my belt, I reached out and tried pushing the plate. When that achieved nothing, I tried pulling it.

"I'm guessing we're supposed to go down somewhere," Amanda said with some amusement, clearly making fun of my struggles with the plate.

"But where?" I asked, releasing it and gesturing around us. "The room is sealed."

While I crouched down to examine the surface of the floor, Amanda proceeded to read the plate again to herself. "Opandi nam...Ohk fell ec aptr þaðan..."

No sooner had she said the last clause, several runes on the plate began to glow. I stood, reaching out to touch them experimentally and in doing so noticed that my guantlets were also glowing. Looking back at the runes, I was able to read them as the sounds Ohk Fell.

Suddenly, I felt the ground liquefy beneath me. I shouted with surprise, but was cut short as I connected with the stone floor a level below. With the air knocked out of me I coughed weakly, staring up at the ceiling... which was completely whole. There was absolutely no sign two people had just fallen through it.

I stared at it mutely.

Beside me, Amanda groaned and put a hand to her head. "As great as it is to finally discover Odin's magic runes," she said dryly, "I'd be happier if we could do a lot less falling."