Oliver reached instinctively for the gun under his leather jacket, only to remember that he was unarmed as his fingers slid across the fabric of his shirt. Damn, he thought. He spun to pull the door open and escape into the hallway, but the sleek white metal door of the hotel had vanished, replaced with a heavy double door of rough-hewn oak, flanked by flickering torches held to the wall in iron-banded brackets. A gust of cold air blew in beneath the door, disturbing the filthy mat of straw and mud beneath Oliver’s feet, carrying with it the heady scent of wood smoke, animal dung, and human sweat. He turned again and saw the cloaked man, now lounging in a large seat made from stripped branches of white ash wood, bent, twisted, and pegged together into the form of a sprawling throne. 

The man laughed. His deep voice croaked out from the fold of his dark robe in harsh gusts. He reached down into the shadows beside his chair and hefted a horn tankard brimming with a foamy golden brew. He plunged the vessel into the shadows of his hood and raised it, drinking deeply with loud, slurping chugs that sent cascades of yellow foam dripping down the front of his black cloak.

Oliver slapped himself hard across the face and shook his head. He looked around, hoping that the hotel room would have returned, but still found himself standing at the entrance to a drafty longhouse built of hewn logs, mud, and straw. As his eyes adjusted to the smoky half light of the flickering torches he discerned the shapes of dozens of men, women, and dogs heaped together in gently heaving piles of sleeping flesh beneath thick rugs of wolf hide. 

“I’ve got to be imagining this. I’ve been knocked out, or drugged, or...” Oliver muttered. He staggered forward and poked tentatively at the thick pine slabs of the long table that occupied the center of the room. The wood was cold, rough, and as real as anything he had ever touched. Oliver placed both palms against it and leaned forward heavily. His head was pounding and, despite the seeming cold reality of the place, he was increasingly certain that he was hallucinating.

“Or what?” the cloaked man growled. He set the tankard down on the split log table beside him and swatted at the raven on his shoulder with a large, scarred and callused hand. “Perhaps you’re dead. Did you think of that? I might have welcomed you as a living man, but to tell you the truth, most of the mortal souls I have brought to this place have been close to death, so perhaps you are dead. Imagine that, you rogue, your body laying on the carpet of that miserable hotel room, blood gushing from a mortal head wound, hallucinating this whole experience as the thief who struck you rifles through your pockets for credit cards and cash.” 

Oliver shivered at the thought. He was certain that he was still alive, but the dark gravity of the man’s voice sent shivers of fear down his spine.

The man laughed again and grasped the hilt of his sword with one scarred hand. He slammed the metal-tipped scabbard into the morass of filthy straw at his feet and used the sword as a cane to lever himself upright. The raven squawked and flapped its wings loudly, turning a lazy circle around the rafters of the longhouse before diving down to perch on the man’s shoulder again.

“Who are you?” Oliver asked. His voice cracked half way through the question and he coughed, hating the weakness he had shown, stood upright, and demanded, “What is this place and why have you brought me here?”

“You do not recognize me, or know my home? Bah, what is the world coming to when a man can be plucked from the dreary sterility of his modern surroundings and carried to the most famous mead hall of all time and he can do nothing but complain,” the man growled. He stooped and lifted the tankard, which Oliver noted was once again brimming with a frothy brew, from beside his seat, then drank from it again. Thirst satiated, he strode forward and slammed the tankard on the slab tabletop, causing the dark yellow liquid within to slosh up and over the edge of the cup. It splashed out onto the waxed pine and sloshed outward like a puddle of liquid gold in the torchlight.

“I’ve never seen you before,” Oliver countered, “though perhaps I might recognize you if I could see your face. For all I can see, you’re the man who attacked me yesterday, though from your voice I’d wager that was another madman with a cloak and sword. Are there a lot of you about here in Munich?”

“Do not jest about such matters!” the man roared, slamming his fist down on the table with such force that another wave of golden brew spilled out across the table. “There are few enough of us left these days and fewer still who remember what they truly are.”

“And who are you then?” Oliver said. If this was a hallucination, it was a damn convincing one. The moment of panic had passed and Oliver was now beginning to grow angry. It was time for the old bastards across the table from him to provide some answers, or Oliver would walk out of this place into whatever cold dark night lay beyond. The worst that could happen, he supposed, was that he would slip out of whatever hallucinatory fit he was experiencing, die, and be found in his hotel room by the cleaning staff. Not the best option, to be sure, but it was there.

The man gave a dissatisfied grunt and raised his scabbarded sword. He held it aloft for a moment, pointed towards Oliver as if he we considering ripping off the scabbard and leaping across the table to skewer Oliver on the long blade, then he slammed the blade down on the table and sighed. It was the sigh that told Oliver what, if not who, the man was. He could not have explained it to anyone, but there was such a world weary quality to that sigh, such a tone of exhaustion and disgust with the entirety of the mortal realm, that something deep within Oliver’s soul recognized what he was dealing with before the man said another word. The man reached up then, with fingers so thick and scarred that it was a wonder to Oliver that he could even bend them anymore, and pulled back his hood.

The face that was revealed was not ugly. Nobody would ever have dared to call it beautiful, or even handsome, but it could not be called ugly either, despite the ragged scar that ran across the forehead and the drooping hole of dark, empty flesh where his left eye should have been. The man’s face was set in an expression of resolute self-determination and certainty, which was only enhanced by the scars and missing eye. His remaining eye was a deep, cobalt blue, which transfixed Oliver with a gaze that bespoke not a threat of violence, but a promise of utter annihilation if Oliver were to bring this man to anger. The face was framed with a beard of thick snowy white hair, which curled tightly against his chin and neck, despite being trimmed short. 

“Do you know me now?” the old man asked, his voice low and rumbling like the sound of a distant freight train.

Oliver shook his head. He had good idea of who, or what, he was speaking to, but he would not say it aloud. “I feel as if I should, but I cannot name you.”

The man sighed again and his expression fell to such a glower of sadness and world weary exhaustion that Oliver felt as though all the joy had been drawn out of his own soul just from watching the transformation. The man shook his head and sank to rest wearily on one of the log slab stools arrayed beside the table. He rested his elbows on the pine slab and reached despondently for the tankard that sat a few inches from his right elbow. He pulled the tankard towards him and lowered his gaze into it, long strands of white hair falling from the folds of his robe to surround his face. 

Oliver stepped hesitantly forward as the one eyed man slurped unenthusiastically from his tankard, which was once again full to the brim with a golden liquid. He settled onto a stool across the table from the man and watched him drink in silence for a while. A cold wind gusted in under the door, playing with the flames of the torches and bringing with it the bracing scent of pine and woodsmoke.

“Tell me who you are,” Oliver said.

The one eyed man looked up from his drink and now the froth of yellow foam around his mouth made him look less like a rabid dog and more the sorrowful terrier soaked to the skin in the midst of an unwanted bubble bath. “What does it matter to you, mortal fool?” he growled.

“It matters because you’ve brought me here and I have no idea how to return to my home. I want to know who you are and what use you would have of me, then I want to go back to my hotel room,” Oliver replied.

“If you, of all people, don’t know me, then what hope is there? In all the worlds, what hope remains for a wretched old man like me, when even an expert in the old ways doesn’t know who I am?” He took another pull from his tankard and looked as his he were trying to fix Oliver with that same piercing gaze from before, but his solitary eye wandered and soon he shook his head and gulped from his cup again. When he had swallowed and wiped the foam from his mouth with a filthy, craggy hand he said, “I bet you didn’t even know what you were doing when you set the bastard on fire.”

That got Oliver’s attention. He’d done a lot in the course of his relic hunting, destroying ancient traps, killing supernatural guardians, even shooting a few rivals in the kneecaps so they couldn’t chase him down, but he had only ever set one person on fire. “How do you know about that?” he whispered, leaning across the table and trying to catch the old man’s eye. 

His eye came to rest on Oliver and he squinted, the cavern of his empty eye socket drooping until it was nearly shut, and examined Oliver for a while. Oliver waited quietly, holding his breath in anticipation. Just when his lungs were beginning to burn from the effort the old man said, “He told me.” He nodded one head towards the raven, which had hopped down from his shoulder and was strutting across the tabletop, pecking at scraps of meat and bread that had been spilled by the now comatose revelers.

“The raven?” Oliver asked, his voice more incredulous than he had intended it.

“Of course. Munin tells me everything he sees, and these days that’s mostly gossip about what others like me are getting up to.” The old man sighed again and shook his head. “Makes me long for his brother. Old Hugin was always the wiser of the two.”

“You have a talking raven named Munin?”

“Used to have two of them. If you were listening to a word I said, you’d know that by now, but old Hugin vanished on me nigh on four hundred years back. Damn, but I miss that bird,” the old man muttered, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his robe. 

Oliver sat back and pounded a fist on the table. He pointed an accusatory finger at the old man and shook his head, saying, “No way. I’m not going to fall for this. You must have drugged me and brought me here.”

“And where do you think ‘here’ is, boy?” 

“I have not the slightest idea, but I am not going to sit here and listen to an old drunk tell me that he is Odin.” Oliver stood upright and looked down at the old man, his heart thudding in his chest as he tried to convince himself that this was all an elaborate hoax. “It’s really quite pathetic. Now let me go or tell me what the hell you want with me. You can start by telling me the truth about how you know about the explosion.”

“Finally, he gets something right,” Odin said to the raven, which squawked, turned away, and strutted down the table to peck at a chicken bone. Odin shook his mane and growled, “Yeah, you and your mother too.”

He looked back to Oliver and said, “I already told you how I know. Now, stop behaving like a child and sit down, we have much to discuss.”

Oliver obeyed him. Despite his tirade, he did not truly believe that this situation had been manufactured. Not that he had any rational idea of how he had come to be in this place.

“Good boy, now tell me: do you have any idea of the import of your actions on that Pacific isle?”

“I think I do, though your...” Oliver paused and glanced askance at the raven known as Munin, which was busily battering a chicken bone against the edge of the table with its beak, “...your raven might have told you less than the truth. I was on a certain island in the Pacific when an explosion occurred, and to tell you the truth I still don’t quite know how I survived it myself, but I did not cause it.”

“You can tell me the truth, Oliver. We’re both men here. I’ve killed more men in my lifetime than you’re likely to have met, and I’m not even exaggerating. Back when I was young I started counting the number of times I beheaded a man in battle with this very sword, and you know, I lost count somewhere over seven hundred. So don’t be bashful, boy, just tell me the story of why you torched that bastard Loki and then we’ll share a mead.”

Oliver frowned at that. He pursed his lips in thought, then shook his head slowly as he said, “I really don’t know what you mean. The other person in the cavern with me was named Leo. Leo... well, I never knew his last name. But I would have remembered if he was named after a Norse god.”

“Not named after, you fool,” Odin guffawed. He slapped the table, sending Munin flapping up into the rafters with an angry screech. “I’m telling you here that the man you torched in that cavern was Loki. The brother of lies. The husband of Hel. The mother of my own damned horse, if you believe that particular bit of myth.”

“I still don’t believe that I am talking to Odin, so I don’t know how you expect me to believe that the man I knew as Leo was actually a mythical Norse god named Loki, especially on your word.”

“Believe what you will, but I am Odin, and that was Loki down in the cavern with you.”

Oliver rose from the stool and glared down at Odin for several long seconds, then shook his head in disgust and strode back towards the heavy doors at the end of the mead hall. He pushed the locking bar up from its resting place and pulled the door open. 

Outside, the land fell away from the mead hall in steep angles of snow covered rocks, broken only by the upthrusts of lone trees, until the mountainside met the wide plane of a valley far below. Dotted across the valley were the dark forms of small cabins which stood out beneath the rising sparks and flickering glow of firelight from their chimneys. Looking up from the crude village, Oliver gasped at the sight of the sky, which shone like a jeweler’s table, with stars and planets twinkling brilliantly in gleams of white, blue, and pale red against a velvet black background. Oliver stood motionless in the doorway for a long while, uncomprehending of the cold wind that drove flecks of blown snow against his face, staring up at the sky in awe. He had traveled to the most remote parts of the earth on his quests to capture relics and track down shards of the mysterious mechanism, he had gazed up at the sky from deserts, glaciers, and jungles so remote that no other human was within a hundred miles of his camp. Never, though, had Oliver seen such a brilliant sky as he did standing in that doorway. 

A heavy hand fell on his shoulder and Oliver looked around to see Odin standing beside him. The flickering light of the torches behind them shone against his white hair, turning it to fire against the shadowy billows of his cloak as he gazed up at the sky outside.

“That’s my wagon there,” Odin said, gesturing up at the constellation Oliver had always known as the Big Dipper. “Traveled long in that I did, back in the days before trains and cars. Eventually I couldn’t get anywhere in it without attracting too much notice, so I gave it to a farmer somewhere in Bavaria and bought myself an automobile. That must have been, what, nineteen twenty or so by the Christian reckoning?”

Oliver looked from the brilliant stars down to the one eyed old man and said, his voice a barely audible whisper, “Are you really Odin?”

“That I am, boy. At least, I’m what became Odin, back when people believed in such things.”

“What about the others? Thor? Freya? Are they also alive today?”

Odin slapped Oliver heartily on the shoulder and growled, “It’s cold out here. Can I offer you a drink? Like I said, I may have use of you, and a cup of mead is good fuel for telling stories.”

Oliver hesitated for a moment, glancing between the stars and black landscape, swept with bitter gusts of wind, and the warm glow of the mead hall, then he nodded and followed Odin back to the rough-hewn pine table.

Next Chapter: Odin’s Eye