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There is a way that a story means to end. The strings of fate wound together and pulled taut like a seam in a soldier’s leg, disappearing back beneath the skin until they knotted at Belhalla. There is a place where a hero dies. He is betrayed by his own arrogance— by his own rash disregard for the laws he has been told— and somewhere under his nails or behind his eyes he feels it. He had looked up and witnessed the end of his life in a molten boulder, a star slashing through the air to bury him, and known that this was how it ended.
The most basic element of a story ending is that it does not continue. He dies here. He dies with a lurch of panic in his gut knowing he has been betrayed. He dies and his last vision is his wife’s eyes empty of his memory: Sigurd is deconstructed in the seconds before it all ends.
He should be relieved when he wakes up, heart pounding in his throat. The sun is bare over him and it aches. He can see nothing but a warm white sky. He has lived this moment a thousand times: near-dead on the battlefield only to awaken gasping to Lachesis or Ethlyn (Ethlyn, Ethlyn, had he thought of her before he died? had he thought at least I will see my sister again? ) over him with a glowing staff. It feels perverse. He takes inventory. His head throbs. His face— he knows even without looking that his body has flaked open with the heat. His entire body flashes hot to boiling.
It doesn’t strike him until he’s well back into the realm of consciousness that he cannot move his hands. His eyes dart across the bright arch of the sky. With a disgusting insensate shiver, Sigurd realizes he didn’t look.
How fitting. A man who never thought things through becomes a passenger in his own head.
His hands brace on the ground. When his eyes sweep down to take in the blackened-burned grasses below him, he sees that the fingers are charred. There is not a single unmarked section of his skin. He is a pyre to his own death. Is he dead? Does this count as living? And the final question, more pressing than anything he has wondered in his life, urgent like a snake above his eye poised to strike: What is in his body?
Sigurd’s body kneels, stands up, and walks.
This confinement draws out time to unbearable lengths. Sigurd has swallowed moments before, choked them down without thinking; now he tastes each one for so long it turns bitter before the next comes. He can measure time and distance only in his thoughts. His body’s eyes do not turn to the sky. How orange the grass beneath his melting shoes. How dark the pines. Once, he passes a flower, and his body lingers on it for an instant. The lightest purple, like a star alighted on the earth and bloomed, cumulus lavender— the name Deirdre drives through him and stays there. If he had his skin back, he would bleed.
Would she know him? He had thought, briefly as they locked eyes, that she’d caught a thought by the tail— that there was hope she could remember. But even if she did remember him, she remembers a prince, not a husk. He is truly lost now. Trapped behind eyes that do not blink, he recalls them one by one: Lex— Arden— Alec— Midir— Jamke— He loses the rest. He remembers them. He must remember them.
He cannot feel the wind in his hair, he realizes when it comes to stir him. With an act of will like climbing to the top of the Thracian mountains alone on water-weak knees, he pulls at the tendons in his arms, demanding movement (what was once subconscious now takes his full mind’s weight behind it); his limb fights him, but rises, and his hand splays along a cracked scalp. Every hair is burned beyond the root. Nothing left.
The voice that rasps into his mouth is almost his own. It is deeper; more primordial. It is the heft of his birthright, the warm gilt of Tyrfing in his weary palm, the name of the saint who precursed him. My son. Do not fight me. You were mine from the day of your conception and I knew, always knew this was inevitable. Remain still and quiet and it will not hurt so much…
For the first time since he woke up, Sigurd drifts into something like unconsciousness. The panic— he has no body, how is he meant to wake up again without a body, is this it, is this all dying is, like drifting into an abyss— is not enough to stop him.
He wakes and does not know if he is in a dream: his son smiles up at him with his very own deep-water blue eyes and says in a voice too old for a toddler, Papa, may I hold your sword? No, he responds, you cannot. It is too dangerous for you; you are so young; what has gotten in your head that you want it so much? They are the same blood, two answers to the same question. Seliph will differ from him, he hopes, but he cannot tear out his root. He will always be a swordsman first and a statesman second and a man last of all. Their whole line is made of steel. Of course he would want the blade; from the moment of his birth, he has known he must wield it.
Sigurd’s hands, cracked and charred, press Tyrfing into his son’s. Sigurd watches in horror. He is too small to hold it. It shrinks to fit him. What have you done? whispers a voice like Eldigan, like everyone who would warn him off his path before it led him here. What have you done? He cannot scream. He cannot give the direction to his mouth. Even if he could, it would not answer. He cannot move. He watches as his son raises the blade and then gracefully swings it: watches as its point comes to nestle in the opened strings of his heart, and watches, does not even blink, when it crushes forth to draw blood.
Sigurd wakes for the second time. Trapped behind his own eyes, he sees a familiar figure, and the sweet-water relief flooding down his throat is shocking for its intensity: Lewyn, man on the wind with a whisper like honey and a voice like dawn. There is something wrong with his eyes. There is something wrong with his bearing. Where once he favored one of his legs over the other, as if perpetually leaning on a doorframe— where once he smiled and laughed without smiling or laughing, bright lines sealed into his expression at all moments— now he is still and solemn. A minute: a shift. Sigurd’s eyes fix on him. He does not smile but looks, momentarily, like he once did. And then he blinks and it is gone.
Lewyn, he wants to cry. Lewyn, Lewyn, can you see me, can you see that I am still here beneath these burns and these immortal eyes? His mouth opens up and the voice inside of him states: “So you have made a pact as well, Forseti.”
Sigurd does not remember making any pact with the thing inside of him— Baldr, but just as easily a lying creature who named itself Baldr to trick him. “It cannot go on alone,” says Lewyn, says the shape of Lewyn in a voice too serene for any living creature. “We have known how it ends, brother. I have sought a way forward.”
“To guide the young heir,” Baldr answers. How strange it is to form words he does not will.
Lewyn observes them, Baldr and Sigurd underneath him. “You cannot reach him like this. He knows his father.”
“This shape is hardly his father.” Sigurd’s thoughts howl at those words. I am still here! I am not your shape! I am still his father, always his father! His left hand— his body’s left hand— winces inward as if it felt the protest. “It does not matter. I do not seek the heir. You will guide him. I will find who opposes him. I will smooth his way forward.”
“So be it.”
“So be it.”
The exchange of words is a handshake. Sigurd wants to twist, to keep himself in view of what was once his compatriot, but his body does not answer him. His body walks forward on its sooty legs, and as his remains brush past Lewyn’s unsullied form, he thinks: So be it.
Sigurd will not see the way it ends. So be it. Better not to be trapped behind his eyes. Better, still, to not walk as a carcass, but he is due some pain for his life of regrets. He does not close his eyes, because he has no authority over them. Instead he allows his mind to collapse inward. As it crashes down around him, he remembers.
Ethlyn in the garden with him when they were children. The day he met Quan and Eldigan. The first time he saw Deirdre, the shine of her hair like starlight. Seliph, his son, his life’s hopes in the hands of young Shannan and Oifey. The heavy warm weight in his arms the first time he had held him. His toothless newborn laugh.
Forgive me, my son. You are forgiven, Baldr; bring this body to my son’s aid. Rest; you have been through much. Though I do not deserve it, I will. They wait for you. I will go to them. But promise me— He will be safe.
Sigurd drifts away. This time, he does not dream.