Chapter 897: Asgard [Bonus - ]

Chapter 897: Asgard [Bonus Chapter]

“I’ve noticed,” Silas said quietly. “It’s hard to miss when the welcome gift is a horde of monsters at your front door…”

“Asgard’s up there.” Thor pointed straight up at the soft golden sky, where there was nothing but light.

“Above the clouds, in the higher planes… Father built it there when he was young and stubborn, to get as far away from the mud as he could. We don’t touch the lower realms except through gates like these and a few hidden bridges.”

She lowered her hand.

“Every territory strong enough to live up there guards its gates like a dragon guards gold, because the gods of the high planes are always at war with someone… Usually several someones.”

“And the Guardian?”

“He belongs to nobody. He was here before Father, and he’ll be here after the rest of us are dust… He keeps the crossroads open and the peace in the garden, and nobody, not even Father, starts a fight on his grass.”

Thor scratched her jaw.

“Though I tried once, when I was young and foolish…”

“Eh… What happened?”

It was interesting

“I woke up three days later in a pond,” Thor said, completely unashamed. “A very nice pond, though since there were fish inside.”

Silas looked back over his shoulder at the tall bald man leaning quietly on his spear by the obelisk, and decided he was going to be very polite to the Guardian of the Outer Gates for the rest of his life.

’What if he decides to send me to a world where there’s only men…?’

They walked on toward the far side of the garden, past a gate that hummed with violet thunder and another that whispered in a language Silas didn’t recognize, and then Thor slowed down without seeming to notice she’d done it.

Silas noticed, and he followed her gaze.

Off on its own, far from the others, in a hollow where even the golden trees seemed to lean away from it, stood a single gate made of stone so black it looked like a hole cut out of the world.

…No light swirled inside it.

The archway was sealed shut, packed from edge to edge with a darkness so thick it seemed to drink the light around it, and wrapped around its pillars in heavy coils were chains of dark fire, burning a deep sullen purple-black without giving off any heat at all.

The grass around its base was dead and grey for twenty paces in every direction, and the ponds nearest to it had frozen over with a thin skin of black ice.

Silas let the gold ring flare around his eyes, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Through his soul sight, the black gate looked like a scar that someone had burned shut, and underneath the scar, very deep and very far away, something was still there.

…It was cold and terribly alone, like a single candle flickering at the bottom of a frozen well.

He let the gold fade from his eyes and found Thor watching him, and for once, there was no grin on her face at all.

“Leave that one be, Silas,” she said, and her voice had gone low and quiet. “Even the Guardian won’t look at it… Whatever’s on the other side of it isn’t any of our business.”

“I wasn’t planning on knocking, do I look dumb to you?”

“Good.” Thor’s grin came back, though it took a moment longer than usual. “Come on, then! Asgard’s this way!”

Silas looked back at the black gate once as they walked away, at the burning chains and the dead grey grass, and then he let it go.

They walked in silence for a while after that, which he’d never imagined was possible with Thor.

The golden leaves chimed overhead, and somewhere far off, a gate let out a low mournful hum like a whale singing in deep water.

“Can I ask you something, Thor?”

“You’re my candidate, Silas! Ask me anything you like!”

“Why me, really?” He kept his eyes on the path ahead. “I believe the parts about the wall, but there are gods up there who’ve been alive for thousands of years… Some of them must be able to hold a hammer without fainting.”

Thor thought about it, frowning at the grass with the honest concentration of someone working out a difficult sum, and when she answered, it was plain and completely unembarrassed.

“Because you’re good company, Silas,” she said. “That’s the long and short of it… Every god in those halls looks at Mj?lnir first and me second, and then they spend the whole evening agreeing with everything I say in case I hit them.”

She snorted.

“It’s dull but you don’t do that… You tell me to wipe my chin and you yell at me when I eat the whole pantry.”

She shrugged her massive shoulders.

“I like being around you so you’ll stand next to me at the festival. It’s simple.”

Silas glanced up at her.

She meant every word of it, plainly and without a flicker of embarrassment, the same way she’d tell him the sky was blue.

’She has absolutely no idea what that sounded like,’ he realized. ’None at all…’

“And the part about getting married?” he asked.

“What about it…?”

“I haven’t agreed to it, Thor.”

“Bah!” Thor waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll come around… Everyone likes me eventually.”

She thumped him on the back, nearly knocking him into a pond.

“Now listen, because there are rules up there, and you’ll want to know them before we go through.”

“Rules,” Silas repeated. “At a party you described as the best in the nine realms…?”

“The best parties have the most rules, Silas!” Thor counted them off on her fingers. “First, you’ll stand beside me in the Great Dome, and you’ll let the old aunts stare at you until they’re satisfied you’ve got all your teeth… Second, somebody’s going to challenge you, probably several somebodies, because a mortal Lord from the lower realms standing beside the first heir of Asgard is going to make every young god in the halls want to know if you bleed… Third, don’t hit Father, he enjoys that far too much… Fourth, don’t eat anything Loki hands you and fifth, if Mother asks you a question, answer it honestly.”

She lowered her hand.

“Mother always knows, I think she has an ability to sense the truth or something… Just don’t test her.”

“That’s a lot of rules.”

“It’s a lot of family!” Thor grinned. “You’ll be fine… Anybody who wants to bite my candidate has to get through me first.”

She reached over and patted his head, firmly and with great satisfaction.

“Mmh~”

Ahead of them, the Asgard gate came into view.

It was bigger than all the others, an enormous archway of white stone banded with gold, carved from top to bottom with runes that glowed a soft warm amber.

Standing beside it with his spear resting on his shoulder, having somehow crossed the entire garden ahead of them without either of them seeing him move, was the Guardian of the Outer Gates.

Silas didn’t let anything show on his face, but he took careful note of it.

“Daughter of Odin,” the Guardian said. “Your gate is ready.”

His glowing eyes shifted to Silas.

“One more thing, candidate… Word travels through the crossroads, and the latest word is that a Lord in the Umbral Basin called Vespera has been telling the World Council that the All-Father personally invited her to Asgard. The All-Father heard it last week, and he’s been asking every traveler who passes through my garden who she is.”

His gaze rested on Silas’s face, calm and patient and unreadable.

“You came from the Umbral Basin, I believe. Have you heard of her?”

Silas met his eyes without blinking.

“I’ve heard of her,” he said. “From what I understand, she’s very hard to pin down, and not above a little exaggeration.”

“So I’ve been told.” The Guardian held his gaze for one more long, quiet moment, and the white markings on his skin pulsed once, slowly, and Silas had the feeling that the man had seen exactly what he was and decided it wasn’t his business. “If you happen to cross paths with her, tell her the All-Father has heard what she’s been saying in his name. He’s very curious to meet her…”

“I’ll pass it along.”

Still who was spreading this information…?

Beside him, Thor was making a strange strangled noise deep in her chest and Silas stepped on her foot without looking.

“Ow!”

The Guardian turned to the great archway, lifted his obsidian spear and touched its point gently to the keystone at the very top.

The runes blazed.

One by one, from the top of the arch all the way down to the grass, every carved symbol flared from amber to blinding gold, and the stone began to hum, a deep resonant note that Silas felt in his teeth and his bones and the Gold Core beating behind his breastbone.

The space inside the archway rippled like the surface of a pond, brightened, and then burst open all at once.

FWAAAAAAASH!

Light poured out of the gate so bright that Silas threw his arm up over his eyes, and even through his sleeve and his closed eyelids, it was like staring into the sun.

Warm wind rushed out over them carrying the smell of roasting meat and woodsmoke and honey as well as something sweet and heady that could only be mead, and with it came sound, the distant roar of a vast crowd, the clang of hammers on anvils, music and laughter and the deep booming toll of a great bell somewhere far away.

Thor stepped up into the light beside him, and he heard the grin in her voice before he could see her face.

“Welcome home, Silas,” she said. “Welcome to Asgard…!”

When the light faded and Silas lowered his arm, he was standing on a bridge made of rainbows.

It wasn’t a figure of speech.

The bridge stretched away beneath his boots in a long gentle arc, wide enough for twenty riders abreast, and it was made of solid light in bands of red and gold and green and blue and violet that shifted slowly from one color to the next as he watched, as if a prism the size of a mountain were turning somewhere far below.

Beneath the bridge, there was nothing at all except an endless ocean of white cloud, so far down that the bridge seemed to be hanging over the edge of the sky…

At the far end of it, rising out of the clouds like the crown of the world, was Asgard.

Silas had imagined it.

He’d lain awake in the Keep at Blessed Land with Tales of Asgard open on his chest, picturing golden spires and mead halls carved out of mountains and streets paved with sunstone so he’d thought he had a decent idea of what to expect.

…He’d been wrong about almost all of it, and the parts he’d been right about, he’d thought far too small.

The city climbed the side of a single vast mountain that floated in the sky, its roots trailing away into the clouds below like the hanging roots of an upturned tree.

From the base of the mountain to its peak, Asgard rose in tiers, terrace after terrace of halls and towers and walls of pale golden stone that caught the light and threw it back so brightly the whole mountain seemed to glow from within.

The spires were real, hundreds of them, tall and slender and capped with gold, and between them stretched more bridges of rainbow light, linking tier to tier and tower to tower in long glittering arcs.

Waterfalls poured off the edges of the terraces and fell for miles before they dissolved into mist above the clouds, and the mist caught the light and threw a thousand smaller rainbows across the sky.

At the very top of the mountain, above everything, sat a single enormous hall with a roof of gold so vast that it caught the sky’s light like a second sun.

And everywhere, on every tier, the city was moving.

Even from the bridge, Silas could see the crowds swarming through the streets and terraces, thousands upon thousands of figures in bright colors, and the noise of them rolled down the mountain in a warm endless roar.

Banners hung from every tower, enormous lengths of crimson and gold and deep blue cloth embroidered with ravens and wolves and hammers, rippling in a wind that smelled of woodsmoke and roasting meat and honey.

Silas stood there on the rainbow bridge, and for a long moment, he didn’t say a word.

’Well,’ he thought, and for once, he didn’t have anything dry to add to it. ’That’s… a lot better than the drawings in the book.’

“Well, Silas?” Thor said beside him, rocking back on her heels with an enormously smug grin. “Better than your dusty little book?”

She knew Silas was reading a book about it, but why read when you could experience…?

“It’s better than my book,” Silas admitted quietly. “Don’t let it go to your head… You’ll be unbearable for a week.”

Thor threw her head back and laughed so loudly that the guards at the far end of the bridge flinched.

“GWAHAHAHA! I knew it!” She crowed, and slapped him on the back so hard it echoed. “Come on, wait until you see it up close!”