This is the first snow of Ragnarok.
No vicious, icy rush, the bluster of a storm soon to strike dead the world and die itself ------ these flakes fall steady and silent, inexorable and inevitable as the will of Skaði. It was she who had passed judgment on Loki, torn his family asunder ------ decreed that Vali should be made a monster in the image of his eldest brother, and tear his next nearest limb from limb.
And now it is she who scours the worlds in search of he who should not be free. She who has taken Yggdrasil in hand by Odin’s vow that he will not see it returned to his care until the Trickster has been safely returned to the cave and the serpent, Sigyn returned to the bowl. She who still sits in judgment, who has painted these golden days of late summer silver in her image.
Here, in the last of the wilds, the Mother of Monsters seeks the last of his free children, the last of the free wolves. Here, in a patch of forest abandoned to an ancient poison from a time when wild places still were ------ the last forest not crouched in the shadow of steel and cinder like a haggard mongrel ------ he can feel the presence of his ancient child.
In an earlier age, this place may have been surrounded by countryside. And in that countryside, once, there may have been mortal people who would have lamented such an early frost, the blight upon their fields of golden wheat now withered husks, broken, stricken. People who, after the coming three seasons of winter ------ three seasons of famine, of strife, of war ------ would see the jaws of wolves close around the sun and the moon, and would cry for so kind an unhappiness as hunger.
But in this age, there are few such people ------ people who set the rhythm of their lives to the changing of the seasons. In this age, so many long centuries since the end of the earth was foretold in books of myths half-forgotten, prophecy has turned to fairy tale, and the unseasonable snowfall is little more than a curiosity.
A being with hair once red, now struck through with dull silver ------ man or woman, it is difficult to tell ------ wanders half-dazed through the undergrowth. They do not know that it is snowing ; what few snowflakes manage to filter through the pine boughs overhead turn to water and fade even before they reach the autumn-warm earth. The ancient, aging god does not perceive the water. Though their eyes seem glazed among the jagged scars that cross their face like lightning veins, they move with purpose. Sometimes their threadbare cloak ------ once crimson, perhaps, but now of a color that more closely resembles dried blood ------ catches on a branch, and each time they tug it free, they become a little more ragged than before.
They thought they were following a wolf.
The creature they find crouched and hidden is much too small ------ and much too familiar.