Oliver sipped the cold, golden liquid from the horn cup, savoring the rich taste of honey washing over his tongue. The mead warmed his throat and brought a flush of blood to his face. 

“That’s from my own brewery,” Odin said, tipping his own massive tankard towards Oliver in salute. “I tried my hand at many things after the Christians arrived in my lands, but the most successful of all was brewing. There was a time when I served in their monasteries, teaching what I knew to the brewing monks and learning their own innovations. Those were good days, boy. Good days.” His eye drifted out of focus for a moment as his mind wandered back a thousand years or more.

“You said you would tell me a story,” Oliver said. He set down his cup and looked across the table to Odin’s rugged face. There was a story in that face, he knew. The deep wrinkles etching out from his eyes bespoke a long life of laughter. Above that his brow was crossed with deep scars, one of which cut down through a bushy white eyebrow in a jagged line.

“That I did. Let me tell you, boy, I’ve been alive on this earth a long while. There are not many who could live as long as I have and stay sane. I’ve known others like me who gave up and died as soon as their cults withered away. There were some who lasted a few hundred years, then went out the same way, or who let themselves get caught up in the wars, the crusades, a few of them even died in the plagues. Not that there are many like me. You need to understand, Oliver, I’m an anomaly. I actually get to live forever, and have a touch of what you might call magic, as you probably guess from being brought here. The others though...” he trailed off and sat in wistful silence for a while, then shook his head and took a sip from his tankard.

“The others?” Oliver prompted.

Odin blinked, set down his tankard, and continued, “Yes, the others. You asked about Thor. I knew a man who claimed to be Thor. For all I know he might even have been the source of some of the myths. He fought with a war hammer that must have weighed sixty pounds, drove around in a chariot pulled by goats, even killed a few giants, but all that lasted only about twenty years. Last I saw him he was near sixty, frailer than a dry bone, and was tottering around a small goat farm in what’s now called Norway.”

Oliver nodded and sipped at his mead. That was the way of things in the world of myths, he had long ago learned. For every bit of truth he uncovered in the tales of the ancient world, for every holy staff, living Norse god, or genuine fairy, there were a dozen half truths built on the deeds of stupendous, but ultimately mortal men and women. Still, he mused, assuming that all of this was really happening he had hoped that there would be more truth to the Norse myths than a single old alcoholic with a missing eye.

“There’s where things get strange, actually,” Odin continued. “Like I was telling you, Thor and a lot of the others were little more than mortal men who earned a name for themselves, or took on the names of gods that the common folk already believed in to exploit their devotion. Loki and I though, we’re special. Hel too, but she doesn’t come into this.”

“How so?”

“I’m getting there, boy. I’ve been on this blasted earth longer than whole empires. Damn it, the only things older than me are a couple of religions and philosophies that survived Christianity spreading out across the globe, and they don’t live, and breathe, and drink like I do. Which is to say, if I meander a bit in my tale, I think I’ve earned that,” Odin growled. Despite his tone, Oliver sensed that the old man was speaking more from a long rehearsed script of his role as an indignant grandfather than from actual frustration. 

“Sorry,” he said.

“Now, where was I? Oh, right, Loki. You see, Oliver, I was what you might call a warlord these days. I had over three hundred men under my command, with at least as many women and the Fates alone know how many filthy kids running about in the squalid mud holes we called villages back then. This was, oh, about four thousand years back, if I’m remembering right. Now, I wasn’t happy with the mundane things that warlords get up to, like leading men in battle, settling squabbles between farmers, and bedding any woman who took my fancy. Those pleasures carried me through my youth, to be sure, and it was my skills in both battle and the bed that won me, and kept me in, the throne of my people, but by the time I reached forty winters I knew that my best years were behind me. That’s when I turned my attention to seeking the thing that no man can steal from you in battle, and no woman can make you feel ashamed for as you grow old: knowledge.”

Oliver nodded solemnly and took a sip from his cup, but did not interrupt the old man’s tale. Meanwhile, Odin continued to speak, gazing into the shadows of the rafters behind and above Oliver, telling his story more as if he were speaking to himself than explaining it to another person sitting across from him. 

“For nearly twenty years I searched for knowledge. I consulted the witches who lived in the bogs to the west of our village, shamans who dwelled within my lands, reading entrails and throwing bones to foretell the future for my subjects, I even spoke with an astrologer who came back on one of our trading ships from the southerly lands, what you would now call the middle east. None of them could give the knowledge I sought. Then Loki showed up.”

At the mention of Loki, Odin grimaced and took a deep swallow of his mead, smacking his lips several times and shaking his head before he continued.

“I should have known there was something wrong with that boy from the beginning. All sly he was, speaking exactly what I wanted to hear and never once raising a breath of suspicion. That should be a warning to you, Oliver. Never trust a man who seems completely trustworthy, the bastard is probably just playing you for a fool, saying only what he thinks you want to hear, luring you in to trust his every deceitful, damnable word. If I had it all to do again I would have ducked that bastard in a pond the moment he performed a bit of witchcraft in my mead hall and been done with him, though I guess we didn’t really take to doing that until a couple of Monks showed up a few hundred years later, but if I would have just killed him then I would have died an old man. And I would have been happier for it.”

Odin spoke the last part in a softening tone, his head drooping and his eye flickering shut as he appeared to contemplate the distant, mythic past. 

Oliver waited, patiently, sipping his mead and still trying to decide how much of the old man’s story to believe. Even if he accepted that the man was Odin, or some other being with sufficient powers to conjure up this mead hall in Oliver’s hotel room, or to transport Oliver here from that room, it would be wise to take his words with a measure of skepticism. Though he had little experience with them, outside of a few undead guardians he had encountered, and generally killed, Oliver imagined that anyone who had marked time by the rise and fall of entire empires and religions might well have hidden intentions.

After a time, Odin stirred and looked across the table at Oliver, who met his gaze levelly and waited for him to continue. Looking directly into Oliver’s eyes with his one solitary eye, Odin growled, “That’s right. Look right into it, boy. Face down the endless maw of time and deny your own mortality. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a way to live a tenth as long as I have. Perhaps, if you complete the task I have for you, you may even gain immortality yourself, not that I recommend it.” 

He blinked, releasing Oliver from what he knew to have been a contest of wills. Though he had not surrendered, Oliver was sure that he had not won either.

“Loki proved himself a master of court politics, which was no mean feat back then I will tell you. Most politics then amounted to who had the faster sword or most voracious appetite, but Loki managed to insinuate himself into my counsel with neither. A master of words, he was, and it’s true what the stories say about him being able to change his shape, though the transformation was always slow and, so far as I could tell, quite painful. It was with words that Loki trapped me. He dropped just enough hints, into just the right ears, that I was able to find my way to the secret door, descend the steps to the roots of Yggdrasil, and drink from the well of Mímir. It cost me though.”

Odin drained his tankard and threw it to the floor before his ashen throne. He rose and leaned across the table until his face was mere inches from Oliver’s, fingers curling hard against the surface of the slab tabletop. He thrust his empty eye socket into Oliver’s face and jabbed a calloused finger at it, pulling down the scarred skin to reveal a gaping hole of pink flesh. Deep within the gaping flesh, Oliver saw the dull form of a shard of gray metal, encapsulated in tendrils of angry red flesh and glistening with a thin sheen of mucus, sweat, and tears.

“Oh my god,” Oliver breathed. 

“Ha!” Odin bellowed, dropping back on his stool and slapping the table a hearty blow that made his sword clatter. He continued to laugh, the table shaking with the force of his convulsions as tears began to streak down his face.

Oliver grimaced, glancing about them at the tangled bodies curled up beneath piles of animal skins. 

Odin wiped the tears from his face with the edge of his hood and said, “Don’t worry about them, boy. Not a one of them is even real, in what you might call the traditional sense. Most of them I dreamed up myself, just to give you a feel for how the old place used to be, though a rare few are genuine souls that have clung on to me throughout the ages, even after better offers came along.”

Oliver nodded and turned away from the surrounding bodies. He looked at Odin’s missing eye again, hardly believing what he had seen there. Eventually he said, “How did you come by that shard?”

“Recognize it do you? I expected as much, especially after your encounter with Loki a couple weeks back. Don’t think I haven’t had an eye on you, Oliver. There have been many treasure hunters over the ages, some far more prolific than you can ever dream of becoming, but you’re the first to successfully gather more than two of these little devils together, or to realize their true significance.” Odin tapped at the corner of his missing eye as he said this, indicating the shard buried within his skull. “You’ve heard of my journey to the well of Mímir, of how I plucked out my own eye and placed it into the well, then drank from it and received true wisdom? That story, at least, is true. And it’s why I need you.”

“What could I possibly do for you?” Oliver asked.

“There’s one thing that the myths never quite made clear: I never went back. Oh, some of them say that I killed Mímir in battle, but the truth of it, Oliver, is that only a mortal can pass into the realm of the ash and serpent. That’s why Loki gave me the clues I needed to get there, he was hoping that I would bring back something for him, but the moment this shard of metal became lodged in my skull, I ceased to be mortal. Loki wasn’t happy about that, but by the time he learned what had happened it was too late for him to do anything about it. Not that he didn’t try to kill me more than a few times, but I always just healed right up again before he could pluck this metal from my head. And now, now I hope that you will be able to help me outsmart that bastard once more.”

“No need for that. If you’re right about Leo and Loki being the same person, he died in that explosion almost two weeks ago.”

Odin gave Oliver a look as if he had just suggested that the fine mead they had both been drinking was nothing more than sour lemon juice. He shook his head and said, “You really are just a boy, aren’t you. Do you really think that someone who has lived through so many ages of this world would be done in by a mere fire? Or are you forgetting that you, nothing more than a foolish mortal man, survived that same explosion, merely because you happened to be carrying the right relic in your pocket?”

Oliver felt his face growing hot at that and knew that he would soon be blushing nearly as red as his hair. He glanced up at the rafters and wondered if the raven Munin had been in the cave that day, or if Odin’s mysterious pet had simply perched outside his apartment window. 

“No, Oliver, Loki is still alive, and you would be a fool to discount his involvement in this game.”

“Then why hasn’t he duped some other mortal in to capturing whatever it is he wants?” Oliver demanded. 

“That I do not know. We haven’t been on what you might call speaking terms for several hundred years.”

“So what do expect of me? I’m not saying that I will help you, not yet, I just want to know how you think I can help.”

Odin tapped his face, just below the hold of his missing eye, and said, “I need you to step beyond the veil and retrieve the eye I left in the well beneath the roots of the world tree.”

“What will that accomplish?”

“I am old, Oliver, older than you can imagine. I don’t just call you boy to insult your manhood. You, and every living mortal on this planet, are mere children to me. I have longed to rest in the peace of death since before your grandfather was born, or his grandfather before him, but I could not find any way to make it happen.”

Oliver considered that for a while before responding. He studied the deep wrinkles of Odin’s features, the craggy lines etching down from the corner of his ruined eye like canyons, the thick hair as white as fresh fallen snow piled up around his neck, the dull glimmer of his one good eye, which drew Oliver so deeply into its own depth that he felt as if he might lose himself in its sorrowful weariness. He knew that he was looking at a man for whom life had reached an end, yet he could not justify bringing an end to it.

“You’re asking me to help you kill yourself,” Oliver said.

“Nothing so simple as that, boy. Oh, I see that righteousness in your eye. You think that this is somehow morally wrong, that you’d be complicit in a suicide. You don’t know if you could sleep at night, knowing that you aided an old man to his death.”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s not that simple. I am not mortal, Oliver. I don’t have a limited number of years to live on this earth. As far as I know, this damned shard of celestial steel lodged in my skull will preserve me in this exact form until the day that the sun explodes. By any right I ought to have died over three thousand years ago, but I found this key to eternity and knowledge.” Odin’s hands shook with passion as he spoke. His voice rose from a harsh whisper to a roar. He rose to his feet, towering over Oliver as he sat in stunned silence at the outpouring of rage from the old man. “Let me tell you now, you self-righteous fool, eternal life and knowledge of all things aren’t as desirous as you might expect, once you’ve experienced them. I have seen billions of people die. I’ve watched as my own life was transformed into the centerpiece of a religion that spanned hundreds of years, then watched it all crumble to dust as other faiths, some closer to the truth, others just another variety of my own cult, rose, were corrupted, and fell. After all of that, I think that I deserve the right to decide if I am to go on living as the human race accelerates to its glorious self destruction, or if I get to step off this ride and return to the dust, before I have to see the whole of humanity commit mass suicide through its own stupidity and pride. I wrote the tales of Ragnarok, I heard them sung around campfires and in mead halls, and I have no desire to witness it for myself.”

Odin fell back into his seat and grasped the hilt of his sword, where it lay on the table between them. A gust of wind battered against the door at the end of the mead hall and Oliver saw light streaming in through the cracks. A second gust blew the doors open, revealing the hallway of his hotel beyond.

“I am not threatening you, Oliver, I merely offer you a choice: You can help me to rid myself of this curse of immortality, and possibly come through the quest with some measure of wisdom about what it is you are facing, or you can walk out that door and spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened.”

Next Chapter: Back Door