Chapter Text
20. O'er the spacious earth Huginn and Muninn both,
Each day set forth to fly;
For Huginn I fear, lest he come not home,
But for Muninn my care is more.
It is so dark . . .
Briefly, they wonder if they have gone blind. The pitch black that surrounds them is so suffocating, they wonder if– perhaps, somehow, they have been cast into the unappeasable maws of ginnung; a black hole, where no stars and no suns could ever hope to reach. A pit where every last comet and planet and nebula comes to die. No sound, no life - they are completely and utterly alone in this void.
“Blood . . .”
There comes a voice, so far away and muffled as it is. As if they are separated by some vast ocean, with no sight of land on the other side. No sight of each other. They don’t immediately recognize the voice, but something in their waterlogged brain tells them that they should have.
There is a great anxiety that accompanies this dull realization.
There is a great pain, also.
Every inch of them is alight with it; an unbearable agony that they have never felt before. And they fear the sudden urge to cry out, lest they open their mouth wide enough for the water to rush in and drown them entirely. Or, perhaps, it would allow ginnung space enough to needle its claws down the length of their throat and steal away what precious little air their lungs still hold fast to.
“Hound!”
The voice, again.
A frantic whisper this time. Or perhaps it is shouting after all, and they simply cannot hear it beneath the vicious waves that threaten to engulf them, that promise to drag them under. It is struggle enough to remember to hold their head above water and breathe.
But– there is no water, and there is no empty vacuum of ginnung. And, with great difficulty, they realize they have not gone blind.
Their eyelids are simply to heavy to lift without some great, conscious effort; weighed down by some force more incumbering than gravity itself. And pain. There is always the echoes of pain, howling back at them in the wake of every thing they do or do not accomplish.
Should they breathe, the pain responds unkindly. Should they hold their breath, the pain does not withhold its answering strike. Their eyes hurt when closed, and they are certain that agony will increase tenfold should they ever manage to get them open again. They have yet to even move– they do not even know where or how or what their body is in existence; whether it is still whole or upright or missing or completely torn asunder.
They only even know their name because this distant and enduring voice seems to.
And despite, motionless as they are, subsisting within their own body is so insufferable, they cannot imagine how it will be once they gather all the pieces of themself together again and will their body into movement once more.
The voice speaks again, but its language is lost on them.
Muffled words drone and melt together into nothing more than a discontented hum. They feel something warm against their face– their cheek?– and a weighted pressure is lifted from where they think their neck might be. The pain swells, brief and blinding, but then quickly settles into something more tolerable. Their head is being held aloft, they think.
Straining themself, they manage to slowly pry open one eye, and then the other; blinking drunkenly and off-synch as their eyes roll around haphazardly within the sockets, trying to take in all of the room at once. The voice becomes a blurred figure standing just before them and it’s still speaking, they can tell, but their brain still fails to take in the sounds and translate them into anything intelligible. It’s nothing more than a low, rumbling purr.
It is comforting, but something in their subconscious says that it shouldn’t be.
The figure– the voice– is built of shades of red.
They attempt a name, but all that comes out is a useless slur of sounds. Their tongue is a sponge soaked in lead; hot, heavy, entirely uncooperative and taking up too much space within their mouth. The world tastes of copper.
Something warm is congealed to the side of their head, to their neck, their torso, to so many parts of themself that they lose track in trying to catalog it all. The throbbing in their shrunken skull becomes more apparent, and their vision remains glossed and impotent; nothing clarifies beyond vague shapes and fuzzy colors.
There might be bodies on the floor, behind the figure speaking to them. They cannot tell.
The walls are slate grey and possibly windowless.
There are things, objects and furniture, in this cavernous room. They do not know what any of them are.
Where they are, how they got here, they cannot say; they can barely remember who they are, let alone anything that happened before the darkness.
The figure before them kneels and begins to do something at their back, reaching around them to undo something they cannot see. Their arms scream in agony, and they think they hear themself let out a muffled cry.
“I know,” the voice says, patronizing in its sympathy, and they understand.
It soothes them, inexplicably.
When they try to speak again, their tongue still refutes cooperation, the words are drowned, and the world still tastes of copper.
“Quit,” the voice tempers them, “before you rip your whole mouth apart.”
Understanding evades them.
They cannot begin to question why, or attempt to hunt down the meaning themself. Their world is upheaved– they are upheaved; lifted so preciously by living steel. Pain blinds them with the movement, sending them careening briefly back into ginnung's suffocating maw. The voice coos its understanding but offers no apology. When their foggy sight returns to them, it is a brief thing:
“Relax,” the voice commands, and something like a cloth is draped delicately over their head, shrouding them in a kinder darkness– not ginnung's mouth, but something at once softer and more terrifying. Dauði’s shadow cradles them, swaddles them in crimson, and hushes once more, “Sleep.”
They smell smoke. They hear the crackling of embers and cannot make sense of the palpable comfort that washes over them.
They close their eyes and breathe in deep and feel . . .
Nothing.