After the outburst of Loki, Lifprasir and I kept quiet. I could understand why he was angry if what he had told us was true, but I didn't want to risk his anger being directed at me. Loki seemed positive that Lifprasir and I were there because of fate and that fate was infallible but I didn't share his belief. Fate, I doubted, would protect me if Loki wanted to harm me.
When we got to the ocean I broke my silence with a swear word, not because of anything bad but simply out of awe. When Loki had said that there was a ship waiting for us I hadn't thought it would be a yacht or anything, our group was too large for that. What I had thought of was something like an aircraft carrier. What was waiting for us was completely outside of anything I could have imagined, it was a giant version of something in a painting of vikings. There was even a giant at the helm, not a large man, literally a giant, he made even the huge ship seem like it was a normal size. It was the material the ship was built out of however that truly caught my attention. It was the oddest thing I had ever seen.
“Is that made out of...” Lifprasir whispered, though not low enough for Loki not to hear her.
“Fingernails and toenails, that's right,” Loki sounded proud. “Thousands of years in the making. It was the completion of this ship that was the sign for all of us to gather and march against Asgard, that was agreed on many, many years ago. Or I should say it was decreed by Odin, who gave up his eye to see the future. We had thought that it would take much longer to complete, back in the times when people clipped their nails so they wouldn't die with them long, wanting to prolong the time before Ragnorak. In more recent times fashion has become to wear nails long and more people have been dying with lengthy nails, speeding up the building of the ship.”
I shuddered as I stepped onto the ship, I had no idea how it was that all of the nails were held together to make the ship seaworthy but that wasn't actually what bothered me. After all of the odd things that had happened that day I wasn't bothered by the hint of something slightly unnatural and probably magical. It was the thought that was stepping onto a floor built of centuries of dead people's nails that bothered me.
A wave rocked the ship almost as soon as we stepped on and a huge snake's head appeared over the side of the ship. Loki was almost instantly there, putting his head on the snake's head. Then the snake truly surged out of the water and I could see the waves covering the land, it was a typhoon I realized. The waves didn't harm our ship though, which simply gently rocked on it's moorings.
“My son,” Loki said gently and then turned and walked away, his wife by his side.
Once we were all on the ship the giant cast off and we started our sail. We only sailed a few feet on the ocean before I realized that we weren't rocking anymore and I pushed to the side of ship. Our ship was no longer on the ocean, it was very slowly rising into the air, most likely by whatever magic was holding it together. Lifprasir came to stand next to me and looked down.
“I had no idea this was what was what I was going to wake up to this morning,” she commented. I felt a sudden feeling of comradeship with her, I was starting to suspect that she was the only other living human on the ship with me. It made me more willing to open up to her.
“This morning I woke up on my way to death row,” I admitted to her. She showed the same lack of shock she had shown to anything else that day. I might have said more, or she might have responded but there was a shape that headed down towards us from the sky that grabbed our attention. Once it was closer I realized it was another wolf, as large as the one that had eaten the sun.
“Fenrir, you freed yourself,” Loki shouted up at the wolf that came to hang in the air next to us.
“Your imprisonment ended as well,” the wolf said, his voice almost a snarl but recognizable speech that entered the brain just like Loki's. “How long have we been imprisoned, Father?”
“Centuries, long enough for us to plot our revenge anyway. Your brother is here too,” Loki said, and the giant snake by our ship reared it's head it recognition.
To be continued...
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