Chapter 896: The Guardian’s Surprise [Bonus - ]

Chapter 896: The Guardian’s Surprise [Bonus Chapter]

Silas rolled his neck once and listened to it crack, then looked up at Thor, though he didn’t have to look up nearly as far as Kara had.

“Better?” he asked, and his voice came out low and calm.

“Much better!” Thor walked a full circle around him inside the sphere, looking him up and down with the frank satisfied air of someone inspecting a good warhorse. “Good shoulders… Good height… Strong jaw… Father’s going to approve of that jaw.”

Then she stopped, leaned down and sniffed loudly at his collar like a hound on a scent, and her eyes narrowed.

“You smell like forest, Silas. Wet leaves, river water and some woman’s perfume made out of flowers… That tall one down in the snow, the one with the staff, she was wearing one of your shirts, it isn’t hard to know since it has your scent too…”

“That’s Lara,” Silas said. “She protects the Amazonian forest… She was naked, and Valeria’s coat didn’t fit her.”

Thor stared at him, and her storm-blue eyes went wide with interest.

“Is she strong?” She demanded.

“Very.”

“How strong? Strong enough to fight me?”

“She knocked me flat and sat on me,” Silas said dryly. “I’d say she’s in the conversation…”

“Oho!” Thor’s whole face lit up like a child’s on a feast day. “Then I want to fight her! After the festival, Silas, you’ll take me back down to that forest, and I’ll challenge her properly!”

She clapped her hands together with a crack like a thunderbolt.

“Ah, this is turning out to be a fine day!”

’Of course that’s her takeaway,’ Silas thought, and found he couldn’t quite stop the corner of his mouth from twitching. ’Not the shirt, not the naked part… Just whether she can punch her.’

“Now, stand back!” Thor stepped to the far edge of the golden sphere, pulled Mj?lnir from her hip and held the short-handled war hammer out at arm’s length by its leather thong. “I need room to swing…!”

She began to spin it.

It started slowly, one lazy loop and then another, the heavy head of the hammer cutting through the thin air with a hum.

…Then it went faster, and faster again, until the hum became a whine and the whine became a scream, and the hammer blurred into a solid disc of silver light whirling at the end of Thor’s arm.

Lightning crawled off it in long hissing arcs, licking out into the void and curling back again, and the air inside the sphere grew so heavy and hot and charged that every hair on the back of Silas’s neck stood up and the gold ring around his pupils flickered on all by itself.

VWOOOOOOOOOM!

The stars outside the sphere began to bend.

Silas watched them warp and smear across the blackness like streaks of paint on wet glass, curving inward toward the spinning hammer as though space itself were being dragged down a drain.

Through the gold ring around his eyes, he could see what was really happening, and it made his breath catch.

Thor was winding the fabric of the world around her hammer like thread around a spool, layer after layer of it, pulling it tighter and tighter until the whole sky around them was straining like a drawn bowstring.

’She’s building up enough force to punch straight through the wall between realms,’ he thought, staring at it. ’With a hammer… How overpowered is she?’

“Hold on to something, Silas!” Thor shouted over the scream of the hammer, and her grin was wild and bright and full of teeth. “This next part’s a bit bumpy…!”

“There’s nothing in here to hold on to, Thor.”

“Then hold on to me!”

She swung Mj?lnir up over her head in one huge arc and brought it down on empty space.

KRA-KA-KOOOOOOM!

The sky shattered.

A jagged golden crack split open in the blackness directly in front of them, then another, then a hundred more, spiderwebbing outward through the void with a sound like every window in the world breaking at once.

Light poured through the cracks and Silas threw up an arm to shield his eyes as the broken sky caved inward and the sphere was yanked forward into the gap by a current he couldn’t see.

FLASH!

For one long strange heartbeat, there was nothing at all.

There was no up and no down, no wind and no sound, only a rushing river of light pouring past them in every direction, and through it cheerfully came Thor’s voice.

“Oh, and Silas, one more thing!”

He turned his head, squinting through the glare.

She was standing beside him in the middle of the torrent, completely relaxed, with Mj?lnir resting on her shoulder and her golden hair streaming out behind her, and she was grinning down at him as though she were about to mention the weather.

“If Father approves of you,” Thor said, “we might as well get married once the festival’s over.”

Silas stared at her.

“It saves time,” Thor explained helpfully. “Otherwise I’ll have to drag some poor fool up here again in three hundred years, and I really can’t be bothered. You’ll do nicely…!”

Before he could find a single word to say, the river of light swallowed them whole.

WHOOSH!

The river of light spat them out onto soft grass.

Silas landed on his feet, because he’d been expecting the drop, and Thor landed beside him with a heavy crunch of silver armor and a satisfied grunt, as though she’d just stepped off a short flight of stairs.

The golden sphere flickered once and dissolved into drifting sparks, and for a moment, all Silas could do was stand there and breathe.

The air was warm and smelled of wildflowers and morning dew, so clean after the burning cold of the Northern Corridor that it almost hurt his lungs.

He looked up, and the sight in front of him wiped every thought about marriage straight out of his head.

They were standing in a garden that went on forever.

Silver-barked trees taller than any tower in Nova Manaus arched overhead, their branches heavy with leaves of glowing gold that chimed against each other in the breeze like tiny bells.

Below them, emerald lawns rolled away in every direction, broken by crystalline ponds so still that the golden canopy reflected in them perfectly, and the light falling over everything was soft and warm and seemed to come from everywhere at once, with no sun anywhere in the sky.

Scattered across the endless garden, standing alone on the lawns like the ruins of some forgotten temple, were the gates.

There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, free-standing archways of white marble and dark runic slate, each one tall enough to march an army through and each one swirling with its own color of light.

One a hundred paces to his left burned a deep angry crimson, and heat rolled off it in waves that made the grass around its base curl and brown.

Another hummed a deep cool azure, and the sound of distant surf drifted out of it along with the smell of salt.

Some glowed green, some violet and some a strange shifting silver that hurt to look at for too long, and many of them stood dark and silent and covered in moss with their stones cracked and their runes worn smooth by time.

Silas let the gold ring around his pupils brighten, and the garden changed.

Through his soul sight, the gates looked less like doors and more like wounds, deep tears in the fabric of the world that had been stitched open with thick glowing threads of runic work to keep them from healing shut.

Some of the stitching was fresh and bright while some were so old and frayed that the light leaking through the seams flickered like a dying candle.

’So this is how the realms connect,’ he thought. ’Somebody cut holes in everything and sewed the holes open…’

“Ha! Look at your face!” Thor’s laugh boomed out beside him, and her big hand landed on top of his head and ruffled his hair again. “The little Princess made that exact face the first time I brought her here… She cried a little, too but don’t tell her I told you.”

“I’m not going to cry, Thor.”

“Of course not! Warriors don’t cry at gardens!” Thor declared, and then added thoughtfully, “Warriors cry at funerals, and at very good roasts. Mostly the roasts…”

Silas decided not to touch that and turned toward the center of the garden, where a tall spear-shaped obelisk of white stone rose out of the grass with a man standing at its base.

He was tall and broad, with a completely bald head and dark skin etched all over with intricate tribal markings that glowed a soft steady white and pulsed every few seconds like a slow heartbeat.

A massive spear tipped with obsidian rested against his shoulder, and he watched them approach with the patient timeless stillness of someone who’d stood in that exact spot for a very long time and fully expected to stand there a great deal longer.

“Hm?”

He’d watched them all the way across the lawn, and as Thor came to a stop in front of him, he lowered the spear slightly and gave the two of them a long strange look.

It was the look of a man who’d seen the Daughter of Odin come through his garden a thousand times, usually covered in blood, sometimes covered in mead and once covered in a live octopus, and who had never once seen her arrive with a man at her side that she was smiling at.

“Greetings, Executioner of the Deities,” the Guardian said, his deep voice carrying across the grass without ever rising. “The crossroads welcome the Daughter of Odin home…”

His glowing eyes drifted to Silas and stayed there, and something in them sharpened with quiet interest.

“And she has brought a guest.”

“He’s not a guest, spear-man, he’s my candidate!” Thor announced, and threw her arm around Silas’s shoulders so hard he had to brace his feet. “For the festival! Strongest mortal I’ve ever met, and he cooks like a dream…!”

The Guardian of the Outer Gates had stood at the crossroads of the realms for longer than most kingdoms on Earth had existed.

He’d watched gods march through his garden on their way to war and come back on their shields, and he’d seen whole peoples flee through his gates with their cities burning behind them… Nobody had ever seen him change his expression.

His left eyebrow rose by about half an inch.

“Your candidate?” he repeated slowly.

“Aye!”

The Guardian’s eyes moved from Thor’s radiant grin to Silas’s calm face and back again, and the white markings on his skin pulsed a little faster.

“He is… very composed,” the Guardian said at last, with enormous diplomatic care. “Most mortals who arrive in my garden on the Daughter of Odin’s shoulder do so screaming…”

“There’s really no point in screaming, it’s fun visiting new places after all.”

“Damn right it is!”

The Guardian looked at him for another long moment, and then, very faintly, one corner of his mouth moved.

“I see why she chose you,” he said, and dipped his head a fraction. “Welcome to the crossroads, candidate… Mind the eastern gates as the weather beyond them is unkind.”

Thor wanted to show him everything, so they didn’t go straight to the Asgard gate.

She marched him across the garden with her arm still slung around his shoulders like they were two old soldiers coming back from the tavern, pointing at gate after gate and talking the whole way, and Silas let her, because every word she said was something nobody on Earth had ever been able to tell him.

“That one’s the infernal planes,” she said, jerking her chin at the crimson gate as they passed it, the heat rolling off it making the air shimmer. “Fire demons, lava rivers and very bad tempers… Don’t go there unless you enjoy being on fire. The blue one’s the oceanic rifts, where the sea people live… Their queen’s a fine woman, but she cheats at dice like a sailor… That green one’s a hunting realm with beasts the size of mountains.”

She grinned.

“…My little sister would live there if Father let her off the chain.”

“Your sister’s on a chain?”

“Fenri. You’ll meet her…” Thor’s grin grew distinctly evil. “She’ll probably try to bite you but it’s how she says hello.”

“Of course it is,” Silas said. “I’ll make sure to bring a spare hand.”

“And the dark ones are dead,” Thor went on, waving at a row of silent, moss-covered archways, and her voice lost a little of its boom. “Some lead to realms that fell while some lead to realms that were eaten.”

Silas glanced up at her.

“Eaten?”

“That’s Father’s story to tell, not mine… He tells it better anyway, with more shouting.” Thor shrugged her huge shoulders. “But you’ve lived down in the Umbral Basin, Silas. You’ve seen how the Sovereign Realm works. It grows, it drags in new worlds, and it drops Lords on them to see who survives.”