Page 5 of Last Thrall of Asgard

“Take your time,” he said again, and walked down the path away from the altar.

I almost considered fleeing. But where was a runaway thrall to go? I couldn’t survive on my own in the elements, and no free family would take in an escaped slave.

There was a cloth among my clothes, one I brought with me to wipe away the dirt and leaves and other messes left on the altar. It worked well for cleaning myself too, which I did so numbly before donning my trousers and tunic.

With my and Thorsten’s releases now on the cloth, and some already on the altar, I smeared more of it across the slab’s surface. How much had the porous stone absorbed of me over the years?

“Was this enough of an offering?” I growled at the absent gods.

How could Thorsten not have fought to keep me? Had he tried? We were friends once, practically brothers, but friendship across classes was a young boy’s luxury. As soon as Thorsten was taught he was above me, he started acting like it. I was just a thrall, a slave, property.

“Fucking nobles.” I kicked the altar so hard, I immediately bit back a cry.Real smart, Oli. Start off your new servitude by having a broken toe and being seen as useless. The tears springing to my eyes made me even angrier. “Fuckinggods.” I smeared more of our come across their names.

Fuck the gods. Fuck the nobility. Fuck free men too. They all had it better than my lot in life, and why? Because of luck? Fucking luck? Better to be obliterated during Ragnarök than live as less than nothing.

I tossed the cloth to the ground and traced through the smear of come over the names carved there as I cursed them.

“FuckHeimdall, so impotent he can only watch.

“FuckFrier, whose own wife didn’t want him.

“FuckBalderfor being no more than a pretty face, dumb enough to die from mistletoe.

“FuckThorfor having no brains at all.

“FuckTyr, who probably fucks with his stump instead of a limp dick.

“FuckMimir, who doesn’t have a dick to even fuck someone with.

“And fuck fuckingOdinfor not being able to stop a future hesaw coming. No better than a fucking… mortal… a fucking thrall.”

I dropped to my knees at my final utterance because cursing gods that didn’t exist wasn’t going to save me or change my fate, and I felt so… helpless.

“What good are you to me?” I pushed at the rock like it was an enemy to shove, like the names of the gods were real beings who might actually answer. “False deities,” I snarled. “Figments of a lesser people who needed to make up stories to feel like they mattered.” But they didn’t. I didn’t. I was just unlucky with how I’d been born, and I could never change that.

The come was all dried now, but I traced my finger over one more name.

“FuckLokitoo, for only tricking the easily duped. He probably resorted to cheap tricks because his dick didn’t work anymore either after fathering so many monsters and fucking horses,” I finished.

“Ouch. I don’t think I could have blasphemed against me and my brethren any better myself.”

I whirled around with a leap to my feet at the unknown voice and—

I wasn’t in the wood.

I whirled back to the altar, but it was gone, as was the tree, the wood itself, and any semblance of being on the land I’d grownup on. I was somewhere else. Somewhere so foreign to me that I stared in mute shock.

I was at the gates of some impossible city.Impossiblebecause it was… floating, or at least suspended on what at first seemed to be clouds, but through that misty whiteness I could see the winding of tree branches beneath the cityscape, holding it aloft.

Holdingmealoft, for beneath the bridge I stood upon, I could see those same winding branches. I could seethroughthe bridge because it was practically translucent. It shimmered with shifting colors like when a rainbow is seen as sunshine pierces through the last drops of a downpour.

I was standing on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge that connected the mortal realm to the realms of gods.

But I couldn’t be. I couldn’t be. Bifrost wasn’t real!

Was it?

“This is all very real, Oli,” the same voice whispered in my ear, and I stumbled away from it, spinning around again to face…

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