Page 46 of Last Thrall of Asgard

LOKI

This time, I wouldn’t watch.

I couldn’t.

Fuckprophecy. Fuck all who see them and spout them at others and still allow those fated paths to be followed! This pain was what I was meant to feel. It was all I was meant to feel from now onward, and I couldn’t escape it.

This time, I would not watch. I was still outside the hot spring hut, watching the heavens—the opposite direction of where I’d sent Oli.

The following chapter contains:

Bondage and Dendrophilia (sexual interest/practice with a tree).

Chapter seven

The Inert

OLI

Iwas no longer naked. My tunic had been restored, complete with all previously added stitching, and now bearing Thor’s hammer and Tyr’s arrow-like rune. Loki had clothed me before sending me across the realms, silently, petulantly, because he wouldn’t admit that he wanted me. I was being granted anaudience with all the male gods, yet the one I wanted didn’t seem to want me back.

But he did.

I knew he did.

He had to.

And it had to be one of Loki’s jokes that my next god was nothing but a head.

I found it unnerving as I approached. Unblinking. Silent. As I entered the hollow, I touched the arch of it above me. My hand tingled, as if infused with energy. Life force. It glowed inside the otherwise natural looking bark. Within that glow was the same prism of rainbow color as Bifrost.

The same was true of the well seemingly growing out of Yggdrasil, with that head, Mimir’s head, on its edge. Long after Odin had traded his eye for the knowledge of drinking from that well was the Aesir-Vanir War that led to Freyr and his family being traded to the Aesir. The Vanir were sent Mimir, considered the wisest of the gods, in exchange, but the Vanir felt cheated and chose to behead him. Odin reanimated the head purely for its knowledge, but it was not seen as living after that. Was it?

As ethereal as it was to be here, where there was no visible sky outside the hollow, but a natural nighttime sparkle like the minerals in the walls of a dark cave, this was also the most frightening place I had found myself in, even more so than Hel.

A head? I was supposed to fuck a head?

“Loki can’t be serious,” I said.

“He usually is,” Mimir answered.

I jumped. I knew the head could speak, but I still wasn’t prepared for it.

More shocking still was that he was handsome. He looked the eldest of the gods I had encountered so far but not unattractively so or heavily wrinkled. He looked wizened. Distinguished. Hislong gray-white hair was tightly braided with half of it bound back and the rest dangling along the edges of the well, with some even in the water. His short beard was well-trimmed, and cerulean eyes like the water beneath him shimmered from the sparkles of Yggdrasil.

“I know why you are here,” Mimir said. “Will you not approach?”

I started to, but that didn’t mean I was any less wary. “Honestly,I’mnot certain why I’m here.”

“Despite your travels thus far?”

“I knowwhybut… you’re a head!”

Then the head moved, and I staggered backward, losing the step I’d taken, as it rose like a phantom from how Mimir had beenkneelingbehind the well. Kneeling on knees attached to legs and feet and a full torso.

He smiled cryptically.

“I got better.”

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