Curse Of Blood: Gods & Monsters

Chapter XLIV - Brenna

He gave an imperceptible inclination of his head, therewith accepting the appellation boldly, if a little stiffly. 

Finn appeared that moment to nudge his way between Heida's legs, falling into her lap as he would have done to his mother. Brenna felt the lump of sorrow well into her throat instantly and as easily as it was wont to do of late. She had loved Frida. Her death had not only struck renewed fear into the clan, but would likely now precipitate them into war. One of Thorgny's doing.

But that was only hearsay, for the time being; nothing more than spurious rumormongering doubtless spawned by Thorgny himself and carried here by tale bearers to unsettle their people further. She could not think of that now.

Perhaps her friend's demise effectuated and intensified the dolor she still bore over Renic's death. There was no nepenthe in the world that would dispel his memory from her mind.

With the return of Eirik, sans his nephew, and his hand, her own hand had stopped aching of a morning; but the ague within her heart, contrariwise, had thenceforth only been exacerbated. Time, she was coming to find, was not the panacea her mother had assured her it would be.

Heida had by now lifted the little, motherless creature all the way onto her lap and sat stroking his head as Ragnar began telling the story of how Odin lost his eye.

"There is nothing the Alfather would not do in his search for knowledge," said Ragnar. "Even sacrifice an eye, for no oblation is too great in the quest for wisdom."

"How did he lose it?" asked Finn excitedly from his his aunt's lap. How content the boy looked.

One would not have guessed that he'd lost his mother just before the winter snows had come. Brenna wiped a tear surreptitiously from where it settled on her cheek, wholly envious of the resilience of children. Would that her pain was just as easily overcome; would that she too had lost Renic by her fourth winter instead of her eighteenth.

"Tis known that Odin hung himself from Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights, wounded by a spear-"

"Who speared him?" Finn looked askance at Heida.

"Shh, it was self-inflicted." She kissed his brow.

"Weak from fasting," Ragnar went on, "he stared down into the mysterious depths of Urðarbrunnr in the hopes that he might be deemed worthy of knowing its secrets."

The Well Of Urd, over which Odin hung staring into the waters of destiny, was the pool out of which grew one of the roots of the Great Ash Tree. And at her base was where the most powerful of all the beings in the cosmos dwelt, like Mímir himself, at his own well, Mímisbrunnr.

Amongst those beings were the Nornir, Past, Present, and Future, the most omniscient and preeminent of all creatures, and it was they that lived in the Well Of Destiny. It was they that carved the sacred runes into Yggdrasil. 

It was those very symbols that travelled throughout the World Tree into each of the nine realms to influence all life; even the lives of the gods.

"On another occasion, Odin met Mímir at Mímisbrunnr and requested of him a drink from his well so that he too might know the secrets of the universe. The gift of knowledge, howbeit, came at the cost of Odin's eye, and the price was fair, was it not?  To relinquish the use of a depthless sight in favor of that which could stretch across the microcosms — to be all-knowing — is priceless.

"At all events, he gouged his own eye out and did so gladly, dropping it into the well. Henceforward was he able to decipher the mysteries of the runes that shaped the world. He could chant the magicks that healed all wounds — those of the body and those of the spirit."