4. The Pull of Niflheim

Absolute darkness coiled before him once more, yet the constant vibration of the triquetra and the glow of the Hagalaz rune upon the lyre whispered that the wheel of Fate was, at last, beginning a new turn. He was bidding farewell to the world of shades—that strange region where the voice of Hades still lingered like a dying echo—and the silence that bore him company was but the prelude to a new genesis.

The river Styx, which had dragged him into eternal durance, now shed its nature; its course became a path unto the unknown. The silver compass, which he felt warm against his breast, set in order once more the faltering beats of his heart, commanding a steadfast pulse where erst there was but bewilderment. He gave himself unto the current, suffering the flow of the waters to unravel the thread of his own destiny.

The tide, erst warmed by the eternal cauldrons of Tartarus, began to chill by degrees. The flow grew dense and dark, until minute fractals of ice began to crystallise upon the surface. The torrents plunging from the crags reflected a luminosity which—for reasons hidden from his senses—seemed hauntingly familiar to Eirik; a light that stirred an ancient echo within his weary memory.

A piercing certainty nested in my chest as I looked upwards. Those stars, that architecture of light in the grey sky, vibrated in harmony with my own pulse. It was a remote echo, a vibration in my blood that defied oblivion; the omen that my path had cast me once more upon the threshold of that sacred place where, every autumn, I sought the trail of my beloved.

'They dance amidst whispers by the sea…'

The echoes of the song mingled with the muffled beat of distant drums, a pulse that seemed born from the very womb of the earth. But they were not the only echoes in that cold. Eirik looked up and, for an instant, amidst the frozen mist, he discerned two dark shadows gliding through the sky like ink stains upon a grey parchment. They were no mere birds; they were the reflection of two eyes scrutinising him from a forgotten time, a fleeting vision that whispered a lost name to him, a name he seemed to have always known. The whisper dissolved in the wind, leaving him with the unsettling certainty of being observed by something far vaster than his own existence.

Shaking off the reverie and following the trail of the celestial signs, he remembered that, a few hundred metres away, upon a plain removed from the roar of the current, he was to plant one of the apple seeds. It was his way of ensuring he was near that which he so greatly craved. However, as he attempted to thrust his fingers into the ground, he realised his senses were still clouded: that portion of shimmering terrain was a desert of ice and snow, compacted to its very depths. There was no earth, nor any trace of the fertility he remembered; only a crust of impenetrable frost that allowed no plant to take root, leaving his hope frozen at his fingertips.

I felt a sharp pain in the centre of my chest that made me miss a beat. Two tears, heavy and burning, slid down my cheeks and fell upon the frigid surface; I watched as the snow smoked for a few seconds beneath their heat, as if they were acid. Beside them, the seed, half-germinated in a futile effort, barely managed to carve a dark furrow before blackening and withering instantly.

Yet, to my surprise, a violent crack rent the silence. From the spot where the seed had died, an immense rift began to serpent, making the valley tremble all around me until it opened the bluish entrails of a dark and eternal lagoon. I understood then, with a shiver, that the current had not taken me just anywhere: I stood before the waves of the Élivágar themselves, at the edges of the north, before the gates of Niflheim.

Seeking solace in his grief, Eirik brushed the strings of the harp. 'Play it always with balance and wisdom, and you may proceed forward on your sinuous path,' the warning of Hades still resonated. But barely had the first chords vibrated in the air when a brutal roar emerged from the depths of the lagoon. It was a primal bellow, an immeasurable voice that seemed to spring from the very throat of the world, pronouncing a single word that made his bones vibrate, 'Hagall!'

The great dragon Nidhogg, the Devourer of Corpses, burst forth from the frozen depths, emerging with an impetuous force that tore the calm asunder. His presence was a promise of imminent danger. The creature, born from the sombrest root of Yggdrasil, the tree that sustains the nine worlds, rose to deliver an enigmatic message to Eirik, as mysterious as the runes themselves.

The dragon, with his frozen breath that burnt more than fire, had brought the Hagall rune. Eirik knew that this rune was much more than a simple mark: it was the bridge stretched between the light he remembered and the darkness he now inhabited. 'It is the gateway to the depths of being and of time itself,' he murmured to himself, while the blue of his pupils dilated before the magnitude of what was revealed.

It was the call to return to the past, to the original nothingness, to the zero point of all that existed. The sound of Hagall resonated in his mind, a dull echo that clung to his thoughts even after Nidhogg disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.

From the frozen ripples the dragon left behind after his abrupt descent, a pointed and crystalline object emerged. Its ascent was slow, hypnotic, revealing the silhouette of a titanic forearm with an open hand. But the illusion dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. What truly emerged was the tangible form of the rune Nidhogg had invoked: a Hagall of ice. Before Eirik, floating upon the surface of the water, appeared the figure of a crystalline star, as fragile as oblivion and as ancient as destiny itself. That star shone with an opaque and lethal light, reflecting the cold of Niflheim in perfect needles. The rune, now visible and tangible, was the key Eirik had to decipher if he wished to find the trail of his beloved.

A profound and disconcerting strangeness took hold of him. It seemed inconceivable to him that a creature as abominable as Nidhogg should be the messenger of such a harmless enigma. However, in an instant, the veil of the incomprehensible was torn. The hidden message ceased to be a mystery, as if a frigid voice, dictated from the bed of the lake, resonated directly in his mind.

Driven by that certainty held by the vitkar through years of experience in the handling of runes, Eirik extended his left hand forward and closed his right eye. With almost ritual precision, he superimposed his extended fingers to match the five sharp points of Hagall, the crystal star floating ominously in the distance. The strangeness regarding Nidhogg, the messenger, merged with a dazzling and yet terrifying certainty: the Hagall rune represented the sovereign of the dead and her frigid kingdom. That knowledge, far from resolving the enigma, made it deeper and darker. 'If she governeth this place, my beloved is trapped in its roots,' he concluded with bitterness.


Just at that moment, the waters of the lake were torn with sudden violence. A perfect cleft, as if an invisible sword had cut them with a single stroke, separated the water into two halves, revealing an unfathomable abyss.

At the bottom, the darkness did not only blind Eirik’s eyes; it was a vacuum so absolute that it annihilated his other senses, robbing him of sound and sensation. All life around him was engulfed, as if the insatiable jaws of Fenrir had torn existence itself apart. In its place remained an immense silence, as primordial and vast as the Ginnungagap before the first breath, a mutism so thunderous it seemed the stifled howl of a wolf devouring the needles of time. Helheim. That was how it had always appeared in his dreams—not as a place, but as the shadow of a gigantic sundial, forever submerged in an eternal night where time had stopped.

And in that infinite hollow, suspended in the void, floated the nebulous fragments of his own history. Eirik felt that vibration was like the distant fluttering of two ravens flying through memory, carrying with them the distant and murky recollections of his childhood, which reached him like ghostly echoes in the silence of creation.

'The wind howled incessantly in Helheim, a glacial breath that licked the vast expanses of ancient ice and the perpetual mist. There, where life refused to take hold, in a corner more desolate than any other, three naked crags rose in the middle of an invisible ocean, like the broken teeth of an immense skull from a forgotten world. They were no simple stones; they were the landmarks of an eternal torment, the place where the wily Loki languished, bound by indestructible cords fashioned by the secret magic of the Aesir.

'His face contorted beneath the incessant dripping of a serpent’s venom, and each of his spasms, a primordial jolt, resonated through the void, a symphony of pain that altered the sepulchral stillness. A just punishment for his malice inflicted by the other gods. Among the Aesir, inhabitants of Asgard, the shadow of a parricide against the progenitor of a beloved was an inconceivable blasphemy, a transgression that no divine or mortal code could protect.

'But the torment of Loki, a sentence that resonated beyond the confines of all Niflheim, was an inscrutable truth, a forbidden echo that only the gods understood in its entirety. What mortals barely perceived were its shadows, distorted whispers, fragments of an ancestral power that leaked through the veil of reality.

'The mists told that, far away on the other side of the ocean—the remote "gannet’s path"—next to an island lashed by the Atlantic, towards the end of the world, two rocky islets rose, pointed and austere, like sleepless sentinels of stone guarding the coasts of those distant lands. And to there, mysteriously, the bouts of suffering from the punished god reached, manifesting in ways that mortal reason could not unravel. The essence of his condemnation adhered to that place.

'Legend murmured—a truth perhaps known only to those with divine vision—that his daughter Hel, sovereign of Helheim, the Kingdom of the Dead, had forged a risky trade with the Aesir to entangle her shame and that of her lineage. This pact, of cosmic consequences, linked the fragile existence of her domain with those two islands in the Atlantic, transformed into gateways to the realm of Helheim itself. If by chance any human should cross these thresholds, the goddess Hel would be sealing her own doom by being unable to prevent that human from entering realms forbidden to them.

'Sailors and labourers, unaware of the truth, tell that between those two rocks a third could be discerned, enormous, with the infernal appearance of the head of a terrible, gigantic stone troll, with a gaze as cold and cruel as that of a draugr in its nightly wandering amongst the mounds. It is said that this being emerged from the marine depths in the heart of autumn to sow terror upon the coasts, dragging with it echoes of torment and desolation. Some old skalds, with the glint of mystery in their eyes, whispered in song that this demoniacal being, of uncertain origin, was but a shadow, a reminiscence of an ancestral wrath and suffering that remained anchored at that point forever.'

Eirik’s arrival in Helheim had shaken him like a sudden threat through those thoughts. A cold sweat soaked his brow, and every breath felt laboured, as if Loki’s serpent venom had clung to his throat. What had initially revealed itself to him as the memory of a sweet and tender childhood inexplicably turned into a dark torment of a source closer to the present.

My mind, stunned and confused by all those inscrutable images, tried to cling to reason, but the distant bellows of that creature continued to resonate within me.

For Eirik, the vision had taken hold of his skin like the morning mist among the crowns of old leafless trees, leaving a palpable reverie, a veiled omen whose meaning still escaped his understanding, but to which he seemed inevitably bound for some reason.

It seemed as if his body had split at some poing when those images wandered free within his deep thought. Eirik saw himself as a distant echo, an ethereal body on the threshold of another dimension. The vision, a sombre enigma, cried out to be deciphered, its message hanging in the air like an incomprehensible warning. A buried guilt, cold and ruthless, rose from the depths of his heart. And with it, forgotten images of the past, like ghosts that refuse to rest, besieged his memory. The vision of a dagger plunged into the chest of that warrior in the inlet—a horror that had been left abandoned in a secluded corner of his troubled memory—now insisted on staying afloat in the tides of his mind. Each memory was an invisible bond and threatened to swamp his progress through the odyssey that now consumed him.

At some point in that state of hypnosis into which he seemed to have sunk, Eirik had been lying on the cold ground, covered only by the blanket of sadness and solitude. Forsaken by the weight of guilt. Rising with difficulty from the frozen floor of that shapeless chamber, with muscles stiff from that unknown and strange heaviness, he was able to gradually regain his balance and control of his body and return his mind to a full conscious state. However, that species of nightmare still clung with its claws to his being with tenacity.

He gritted his teeth as Sowil began to burn. It was not a searing pain, but an electrical vibration coursing through the three strokes on his cheek, marking a violent contrast against the gelid mist that escaped from his own lips. Something ancient had just fixed its gaze upon him.

The air froze suddenly, and from the unfathomable shadows, a vision emerged without warning. Suddenly, a face materialised in the densest blackness. Half of this countenance seemed to me to be shrouded in veils of darkness, revealing barely, beneath a faint and diffuse light, a skeletal, shapeless, almost inert surface, like that of something eroded by eons. The other half, in contrast, shimmered in an unnatural way, with reflections that danced without apparent origin, as if light sprang from its own essence. The lips of this apparition moved in a sepulchral silence.

Upon finishing that silent message, the goddess Hel raised a hand of long, frigid fingers. With a terrifying parsimony, she sharpened the nail of her index finger against her own gaunt and rough cheek, a gesture charged with an ancient and cruel memory that seemed to tear the very fabric of the air. From her throat there did not burst a voice, but an atemporal lament. An incomprehensible echo, woven with the sweetness of a whisper and the harshness of a groan, as if two souls, one alive and another dead, spoke in unison. This sound faded into the vast nothingness, consumed by the same silence from which it came, leaving no trace of its existence.

Slowly, the enigmatic figure lowered her gaze, and the face dissolved into the vastness of the gloom, withdrawing from Eirik’s sight. Only the immense and distant presence of a dark and hostile gaze remained, a depth as abyssal as the void of the Kingdom of Death itself. And instead of that disturbing countenance, in the distance, that giant crystal hand reappeared over the dark lake, but this time it seemed that its transparent fingers were moving slowly in a way he did not quite understand.

In its mutation, alternating with a hypnotic cadence, the luminous figures of Hagall and Yeadhr emerged. By exchanging their blades, they merged and transformed into one another, in an incessant cycle. With fixed eyes, I watched the spectacle in amazement, without understanding that dance of runes.

Hel, with her gelid apparition, sent me an indecipherable message, a sort of murky and distant riddle that I felt unable to unravel. I could find no connection whatsoever between those images, no matter how much my mind, accustomed to the mysteries of the runes, strove tenaciously in it. In the gloom of my thoughts, only one clear image broke through: that of the pendant I had lost on the night of the sirens. It was Yeadhr, the gift of my beloved!

The name of the rune resonated in his head, and thoughts began to parade with dizzying speed, emerging from the innermost part of his skull to dance vividly in front of his eyes. And it was then that understanding began to germinate. Did Hel want to show me the way to that inlet where I was to reunite with my love, just as my previous hosts had done? If her intentions were to help me find my beloved, why did she not do so more directly, without veils? But this possibility vanished almost instantly: the cold and hostile gaze of the figure told me quite the opposite. Was she then trying to deceive me? Or perhaps to reproach me for something?

'I know thou art still present, hidden in this cold vacuum,' Eirik’s voice resonated in the abyss, charged with a mixture of desperation and audacity. 'Manifest thyself and reveal the meaning of thy intentions!'

'Hæġl ofer Ġēaðr, Ġēaðr ofer Hæġl,' the voice of the goddess vibrated from the depths, barely breaking the sepulchral stillness with her duality of whisper and lament.

'Hagall over Yeadhr, Yeadhr over Hagall.' That sentence flourished in my mind with a clarity that chilled my blood. I understood the words, but their purpose escaped me, like a message written upon water. The enigma struck my chest, resonating in my bones before losing itself in the vast nothingness.

 

Doubt nested, deep and growing, in Eirik’s gaze. For a fleeting instant, the dark pupil of the entity shone with a spectral intensity before vanishing completely, leaving around it only a whirlwind of confusion and intangible chaos. That gesture, that silent farewell, suddenly felt strangely familiar to him, and a wave of foreboding immediately put Eirik on the defensive, alerting every fibre of his being to a danger he did not yet fully understand.

His harp, which lay some distance away upon the ground, came to life of its own accord. Its strings began to vibrate one by one, slowly, emitting a sound that seemed to arise from the very depths of his own mind, as if the voice of the muses from remote Hades whispered revelations to him that, at last, he was beginning to understand. Quickly, those profound and ethereal voices intertwined, intoning a chant that made the air vibrate around him, filling the space with an overwhelming resonance.

And then, the golden mark of Hagalaz upon the surface of his harp began to flicker with intense flashes, as if the instrument itself were responding to a distant call. I felt, with unwavering certainty, that this was the culminating instant: the Hagalaz rune had to merge immediately with Yeadhr; in this way, he could interlace their essences in a new symbiosis. The image proposed by Hel, which had persistently undermined his understanding, tumbled down piece by piece, like a house of cards. It was at that precise moment that I knew I had to intone the galdr of both runes, in unison, and that my voice had to be accompanied by the vibrating chords of the harp.

Eirik closed his eyes, knowing that when the galdrar sound in harmony, magic happens: doors open, walls crumble, and darkness gives way to the threshold of light. His fingers then began to traverse the strings, creating intricate filigrees of sound. The melody whirled around his body, forming a spiral of light that began to devour the shadows of Helheim. As he intoned the galdr of Hagall and Yeadhr, the sound was no simple harmony; it was a hammer blow against the foundations of reality.

I felt how the walls of the Kingdom of Death yielded without a sound. There was no need to understand the magic, for my body lived it: the end was transformed into the beginning once more. I turned the magical wheel of time towards the arche of the universe, seeking the exact point where darkness surrenders before the first spark.

Eirik’s heart beat to the rhythm of the chords, and the sound filtered through his pores like droplets of frozen dew. His whole being trembled, shaken by the vibration of that distant drum that marked the end of his stay in the ice. He drew those sounds in his head like transparent diamonds, and the landscape of Niflheim began to fade into a final and deafening silence.


Move on to the next chapter: 👇   
CHAPTER 4: The Pull of Niflheim
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_CHRONICLES of My Story:

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𝄞 MUSIC related to Chapter 4:

"Niflheim's Icicles" (Eirik's Roving)
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"The Whisper of the Galdrar"
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𝄞 ALL THE MUSIC of Eirik's Roving:

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