Another Day, Another Gotterdammerung…

Odin squatted on one side of the ritual fire, and the spirit of the seeress, the volva, swirled and shifted on the other, a smokey sketch of a woman, hollow-eyed and hollow-voiced.  She had been torn from her rest in the dim and misty reaches of Helheim by Grimnir’s runes, to answer his insatiable need to know.

“What do you see, witch?  What is the wyrd of the Nine Worlds?”, the Allfather demanded.

The volva slowly closed her empty eyes, and began to rock back and forth gently, keening to herself.  Odin ground his teeth, but knew he could not interrupt.  The gathering of knowledge took time, as he well knew, and knowledge of what was to come, even more so.  But it galled him.

At last the volva ceased her keening, her head titled back, her unseeing eyes turned toward the stars, arms spread as if in supplication to infinity.

“It will be a wind age, a wolf age,” she moaned, her thin, distant voice even more eerie and unsettling.  ”It will be a sword age, an axe age.  Brother will turn against brother, and nation against nation.  The dead will rise and march to war against the living, and the son’s of Surt will rage out of Muspellheim, to set fire to the Universe.  The Twilight of the Gods will fall, and all that was will be no more!!!”

Her voice trailed off, it’s last wailing echo snatched away by the ceaseless wind.

Then her eyes popped open and she shrugged.  She dropped her arms and scrounged in her pouch for a ciggy.  She blew smoke across the fire at the the AllDaddy, and shrugged again.

“You know,” she said in an ordinary, matter-of-fact voice, “The usual…”