This story follows on from Behold! and was written for Scoot ‘s Flash Fiction Friday prompts:
Nothing lasts forever. After a while, even such things as bouncy castles lose their thrill, particularly when one has known the golden spires of Asgard. Thrud, daughter of Thor, Strength of Valhalla, etc., had finally reached that point. “You!” she called to the press secretary turned Norse party planner. “Enough of this! I have business elsewhere on this world!”
“Where exactly, ma’am?” the press secretary said cautiously.
Thrud hesitated in her turn. “Where are your Dwarven kingdoms? I saw none when I came to this city, but this is a place of Men, so I expected none. I thought when I was in the air before I glimpsed a range of hills further west; would they be there?”
“Dwarves?” the man repeated. He hadn’t read the right books, unfortunately, so his first thought went to the movies, and even then he guessed wrong. “Like in Snow White?”
The look Thrud gave him made him want to scurry away as fast as he could go and hide under a rock. “I know not this nonsense of which you speak. I am in search of a particular Dwarf Lord, Alviss, the All-Wise, who I am pledged to marry. I see you do not know him: therefore, I shall go elsewhere!”
She raised Mlrning, the Shovel of Thor, towards the sky. Its blade shone with an eerie blue light. She almost smiled; she remembered the day she had first seen it glow, when her father had first presented it to her as a gift. “I used to clean the snows off the bridge with this,” he’d said. “Now it is yours.” She’d inherited the chores that came with it too, but she hadn’t minded. It was the steadiness of her Thunder-God father made real, and it had always helped, no matter how dark things were.
“‘Scuse me,” came a mild cough. Thrud turned. A man in disheveled tweed had run up beside the press secretary. “Well, they sent for me from the university, Norse expert and all, and, er, I think I might be able to help-”
“Do you know where Alviss is?” Thrud demanded, aiming the Shovel at him.
The man took a breath. “Yes, sort of. Well, it’s in a poem.” He gathered himself, closed his eyes, and began:
“Í einu brjósti
ek sák aldrigi
fleiri forna stafi;
miklum tálum
kveð ek tældan þik:
Uppi ertu, dvergr, of dagaðr,
nú skínn sól í sali.”
The words meant nothing to the press secretary. Thrud’s face went so pale he thought she might be sick. “But,” she managed, “That was… surely, by now-”
“That poem is believed to be some eight hundred years old, maybe more. There are no Dwarves now, anymore than there are Elves. And your dwarf, in particular, was turned into stone by, well, your father. According to that poem, anyway.”
“We’ve got some elves,” grumbled the press secretary, who had fond childhood memories of Christmas movies. Thrud wasn’t listening anymore. The Strength of Valhalla should not cry. So, Thrud decided, she would not cry. If it quite suddenly began to rain at that particular instance, well, who could account for the weather?
At last she swiped at her face, swore terrifically, and threw herself into the sky, the Shovel lifting her away into the clouds as it always had. For the first time Thrud could remember, and that was a very long time indeed, she had no idea where she was supposed to go.