Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
The correct stimulus, apparently, was medieval sex furniture and a phantom Viking’s voice telling me I was a good girl for touching my own anus while I rocked myself to orgasm in a secret limestone cavern. This information about myself arrived simultaneously with the orgasm, which felt both exquisite and deeply inconvenient.
I cried out. The sound bounced off every wall. I pressed my fingers harder against the impossibly sensitive, shamefully pleasurable place my right hand had found. The orgasm extended itself, crested again, and I gripped the handle so hard my knuckles ached.
And then the tree came back.
This time it arrived in my imagination with the full weight of something real… all the more real for existing in a different dimension, truer than the one I had inhabited until this moment. It had waited for me, with enormous patience, for exactly this moment—for the precise instant when my rational mind’s grip on itself finally, entirely, gave way.
The cavern disappeared. The bride saddle did not disappear—I could still feel it beneath me, still feel the ridge, the warmth, and the ache of my own fingers—but around it the limestone walls dissolved and in their place rose something so vast that my mind could not hold its edges. I understood, with the small part of my intellect that had not drowned in sensation, that this was what the völur had described. This was what the Norse chronicler Snorri had gestured at, inadequately, when he set down what the seers told him.
A metaphor, certainly. A symbolic language for an internal state, even. But also the actual structure of the thing, the immensity of the Worldtree, its roots going down into three darknesses that I knew without knowing how I knew them, its branches spreading into the cold between worlds.
I was on it. I was traveling along it the way you travel in a dream, with the logic of dreams, without moving my body at all, except for the naughty thing my hips and my haunches couldn’t stop doing.
The small rational part of me—the part that had gotten a 4.0 through my undergraduate years, written two journal articles, knew the Younger Futhark, and could read Old Norse with a dictionary—was watching from a great distance and thinking, with a calm that was really just shock wearing scholarship’s clothing: this is the prophetesses’s vision. This is precisely what the primary sources describe. The völur went to the tree.
The rest of me simply arrived there.
I moved along a bough—was moved, perhaps, since I had no sense of directing myself—and the bough extended further than I had expected. As though the tree were larger than its own mythology. The cold between the branches was absolute but not unpleasant, and the light that filtered through the leaves was a color I had never seen before and could not name now, even though I had seen it.
Green, like a real tree in spring, and red-gold, as in autumn; both at once, but definitely not the brown that should have resulted. Ultragold or infragreen? Somewhere inside me, a wild spirit giggled at the nonsense.
Then I was looking down.
Not at any of the nine worlds I would have expected from my knowledge of Norse myth. At a room.
The room was very clean. That was the first thing I registered—an almost aggressive cleanliness, white walls and pale wood and the kind of aesthetic restraint that spoke of deliberate philosophy rather than mere minimalism. There was a dais at the center, low and covered in silk the color of old ivory, and on the dais there was a cushion, and over the cushion there was a young woman.
She was Asian. Chinese, I thought, though I could not have explained with certainty what cues told me that. Young—perhaps my age, perhaps younger. Small-boned, with long dark hair that had fallen forward over her face as she lay over the cushion with her hips elevated and her hands gripping the dais’s edge. She wore nothing.
A man stood behind her and to one side. He was dressed in dark clothing of a cut I didn’t recognize, formal without being traditional in any way I could place. His face bore no expression. I knew instinctively that he had practiced that expressionlessness until it became genuine. In his hands he held something I recognized at first as an oar—long-handled, flat, lacquered—and then he raised it and I understood that paddle was a more appropriate word. He brought the heavy blade of it down across the young woman’s upturned bottom with a crack that I somehow heard through the vision as clearly as I would have heard a sound in the physical world.
She cried out. The sound went through me.
He paddled her with methodical patience, spacing the strokes in a way that told me this was not anger. This was something else, something that had rules I didn’t know, and the young woman’s cries changed as it continued—shifted in register, became less pure pain and more complex. I recognized that note with a lurch of my stomach because I had just spent an hour looking at nine-hundred-year-old carvings that documented exactly this kind of transformation in exactly this kind of circumstance.