The Bifrost ran its spectrum across the distance between realms with the continuous quality of something that had been restored rather than built — the light of it not new but returned, the particular wavelengths of the bridge present in their correct proportions as they had not been present since before Heimdall fell and the bridge went dark and the realms were separated by the silence that separation produced when the thing that connected them was simply absent. He had stood at this post before the fall. He had stood at it since the restoration. The standing was the same standing — the watchman's quality, the continuous read of everything that moved in the world and between the worlds, the hearing that reached past the horizon and past the horizon of the horizon and into the distances where things that were beginning began before anyone else had registered the beginning.
He heard grass grow. He had always heard grass grow. In the long dormancy of Hans — the lighthouse keeper, the man who could not leave the shore, the man whose body had been keeping the watch his conscious mind could not name — he had heard things he could not account for, sounds that arrived without sources, the specific attentiveness of a nervous system that had been built for a function and was performing that function without the framework to understand what the function was. Now the framework was present and the function was simply what it was — the watchman at the post, the bridge open, the realms reconnecting in the slow way of things that had been separated and were finding their relationship again.
He felt Sigurd's thread begin the way he felt significant threads begin — not as a vision, not as a sound, but as the specific quality of a presence entering the world that had been in the world before and was in it again, the soul's return carrying the particular signature of something that had been significant and was significant again even in the reduced form of an infant's first breath in a settlement in the plains country of North Dakota. He had been expecting it. Loki had told them in the observatory — the plains corridor, a village there, the soul re-entering the cycle sooner than the thread had required because AN's earthquake had ended the previous life early and fate had adjusted. He had filed the information with the thoroughness he brought to all information and had been watching the plains corridor with the specific attentiveness of the watchman who had been given a destination and was waiting for the arrival.
The arrival was quiet. That was the nature of it — an infant's first breath in a frontier settlement was not an event that announced itself to the world, was not accompanied by the quality that significant arrivals sometimes carried when the significant thing understood its own significance. The soul did not know what it was. The body it had entered did not know what it was. The settlement around it did not know what it contained. Only the watchman at the Bifrost knew, and he knew because knowing was what he did and because Loki had given them the map and the map had been accurate and the thread had begun exactly where the map said it would begin. He held the thread's beginning — the specific quality of Sigurd's soul in its dormant infant state, courageous and skilled and not yet any of those things in any form that the world could read, the potential of it present the way potential was present in a seed that had been placed in correct soil and was beginning the work of becoming what it was going to become. He held it. He noted the time in the way that Heimdall noted times, which was absolutely and without the possibility of error. He looked at the Bifrost. He looked at the plains corridor in the distance of the world below — the specific geography of North Dakota, the settlement there, the infant in it. He looked at the Bifrost. He went back to his watch.
The hall that Odin had chosen for the restoration work was not the largest hall in Asgard. It was the one with the best light — the one whose orientation caught the particular quality of the light that came through the Bifrost when the Bifrost was open and running at full spectrum, the light that was not any single color but all of them in the proportion that was simply what the Bifrost was. He had chosen it on the second day after arriving and had been working in it since with the methodical quality of someone who understood that the restoration of a realm was not a single act but a sustained process and that the sustained process required a place to work from that was correct for the working.
The work was not dramatic. That was the thing about it that would have surprised anyone who expected the restoration of Asgard to look like something other than what it looked like, which was a man at a table with maps and records and the accumulated documentation of a civilization that had been scattered across the nine realms for the better part of a thousand years and was now being inventoried and understood and called home piece by piece. Odin worked the way he had always worked — completely, with the patience that came from being something very old that had learned that patience was not the enemy of urgency but the only form urgency could take when the work required getting things right rather than simply getting things done. He worked through the mornings and the evenings and the hours between with the sustained quality of someone who had been waiting to do this work for a very long time and was not going to rush it now that the waiting was over.
The fourteen who had returned occupied the realm with the particular quality of people who had come back to something they had been away from and were relearning the relationship between themselves and the space. Not all of them had come back fully — some were still in the process, the memories returning in the incremental way of things that had been buried deeply and were coming up slowly, the divine nature present but not yet completely inhabited. Idunn had helped where she could — the apples doing what the apples did, which was accelerate what was already happening rather than produce what was not there, the restoration requiring the person rather than the fruit but the fruit shortening the distance between where they were and where they needed to be. Odin watched each of them with the attentive quality of someone who understood the process from the inside — who had been Olaf for decades with the full weight of himself present beneath the mortal life, who knew what it felt like to carry what you were without being able to use it, who had waited for the conditions that allowed the return and had been patient with the waiting because the waiting was what the situation required.
Frigg was in the eastern hall with the quality she always had when she was doing what she did — not dramatic, not performed, the seeing simply running in the background the way it always ran, the future-sight present in her awareness the way the watchman's hearing was present in Heimdall's awareness, simply part of how she existed in the world. She moved through the hall with the deliberate quality of someone who was organizing a space for a purpose that the space had been built for and that the space had not been used for in a very long time. She was making it ready. For what she was making it ready she did not say and did not need to say — the seeing told her what was coming and the coming required preparation and the preparation was what she was doing. She worked with the focused economy of someone for whom the work was not separate from the knowing but the expression of it.
Hoenir was at the table in the library — the long table, the one that had been in the library since before most of the current configuration of Asgard had been built, the table that had been present through all of it and that carried in its surface the quality of something that had been worked at by many people across a very long time. He sat with his hands on the table and the long thinking running at the level it ran at when it was running at full capacity, which was the level that was simply Hoenir working, the slow deep processing of someone whose mind moved through problems the way rivers moved through landscapes — not quickly, not violently, but with the patient certainty of something that understood that the correct path was the one that took the time it needed to be correct. He had been thinking since he arrived. He would be thinking when whatever the thinking was building toward was finished. The table was the right surface for it and the library was the right space for it and the doing of it was simply what Hoenir did.
Hermod was not in Asgard.
Hermod was between realms — the position that was simply his natural position, the messenger moving through the paths that were reopening with the specific knowledge of someone who had been moving through them for long enough to understand which ones were opening and which ones were not yet open and what the difference between those two categories meant in terms of what could be carried through them and what could not yet be carried. He moved with the purpose of someone who had been given a list and was working through the list with the methodical attention of someone for whom the working through was simply the work. The scattered Asgardians — the ones who had not come back through the Bifrost because they did not know the Bifrost was open, because they were in realms where the signal did not reach, because they had been in the far places through the long dormancy and had not yet received the word that the word could be received. Hermod carried the word. He went where the word needed to go.
The realm breathed around all of it — the fifteen fires burning in the halls including the ones the newly returned had claimed, the quality of a place that was alive and becoming more alive with the specific quality of something that was recovering rather than rebuilding, the distinction present in the way the realm received the returning people with the recognition of something that had been empty and was being filled rather than the recognition of something that was being made new. The halls remembered what they had been for. The fires remembered what they had been for. The stone of the walls and the floors carried the age of everything that had happened in them and the expectation of what was coming next in the way that old structures carried expectation — not announcing it, simply holding it, the weight of the future present in the quality of the structure that had been built to hold it.
Odin looked up from the table. He looked at the Bifrost light coming through the hall's high window — the spectrum of it falling across the stone floor and finding the colors in it that the Bifrost's particular light always found, the colors that were present in the stone and that ordinary light did not reveal. He had looked at this light coming through this window since the second day. He looked at it now with the quality of someone who had been looking at something for long enough that the looking was no longer the examination of something new but the confirmation of something known — the Bifrost open, the realm present, the work continuing. He looked at the maps on the table. He looked at the records — the inventory of the scattered Asgardians, the realms they had gone to, the conditions they had survived in, the ones Hermod had already reached and the ones Hermod had not yet reached. He looked at the list. He looked at the Bifrost light. He picked up the next record and began to read.
Heimdall felt him before he saw him.
That was the nature of Loki — not that he was invisible or that he concealed himself poorly, but that the feeling of him arrived before the form of him did, the specific quality of a presence that had been in the world longer than most of the things the world currently contained and that carried that duration in the way it occupied space. Not loudly. The other way. The compressed quality of something large that had learned to be small across a very long time and was now simply present at the Bifrost threshold with the easy quality of someone who had arrived somewhere they were allowed to be and understood the boundary of what allowed meant and was standing precisely at it.
He had not crossed. That was the first thing Heimdall registered — not that Loki was here, but that Loki was here and had not crossed, the agreement holding in the specific way that agreements held when the person holding them had made a genuine decision about the holding rather than a strategic one. He stood at the threshold with his hands in the pockets of the coat he was wearing — a coat that had the quality of something acquired in one of the other realms, the cut of it not Midgard and not Asgard but somewhere in between, the coat of someone who had been moving between places for long enough that their clothing had stopped belonging to any single place and had simply become what they wore. He looked at Heimdall. Heimdall looked at him.
A long moment passed between them. The specific quality of a long moment between two beings who had a history that contained everything it contained and who were standing on the other side of an agreement that had not resolved the history but had placed it in a different relationship to the present. The watchman and the one who had been watched. The bridge and the one who had been kept from crossing it for the better part of a thousand years and was now standing at its threshold having chosen not to cross. The moment held what it held.
"I would speak with Odin," Loki said. He said it without performance — not asking, not demanding, simply stating what he had come to do in the most direct available language. Heimdall looked at him. He looked at the threshold. He looked at the realm behind him — at Asgard coming back to itself in its slow and correct way, at the hall where Odin was working, at the Bifrost light falling across the stone floor. He looked at Loki. He touched the horn at his belt — not raising it, touching it, the contact of someone confirming the presence of something that was available if it was needed and noting that it was not needed yet. He turned toward the realm. "Wait," he said. He walked toward the hall.
Odin came to the threshold himself. He came with the quality he brought to significant things — without hurry, without ceremony, the pace of someone who understood that the significance of a moment was not enhanced by the speed of the approach and was not diminished by the deliberateness of it. He walked through Asgard with the Bifrost light around him and the realm present on either side of the path and the quality of the Allfather returned to his own hall, which was simply the quality of something occupying the space it had been built to occupy. He reached the threshold. He looked at Loki.
Loki looked at him. The coat. The hands in the pockets. The quality of someone who had been in the realms since the agreement was made and had been in the realms with the specific quality of someone who was honoring the agreement not because the agreement required them to honor it but because they had decided to honor it and the decision was real. He looked at Odin with the expression he had in the observatory — the third one, the unguarded version, the one that appeared rarely and that the people who had known him long enough had learned to receive as the closest thing to what Loki actually was underneath everything he performed and deployed and used. "I know where they are," he said. No preamble. No approach from the outside of the thing. Simply the statement of what he had come to say in the register of someone who had been moving through the realms since the agreement and had been doing something with the movement that was not simply the enjoyment of the freedom it represented. "The scattered ones," he said. "The Asgardians who have not come back because the signal has not reached them." He paused. He looked at Odin. "I have been in those realms. I know the paths to them. I know the conditions they are surviving in and the forms they are currently wearing and the specific places where Hermod needs to go to find them." He paused again. The quality of the pause was the quality of someone who had assembled something across the weeks since the agreement and was now presenting the assembly in full knowledge of what the presenting meant and what it cost and what it was. "I am offering you the list," he said.
Odin looked at him. He looked at the coat. He looked at the threshold between them — the line of the agreement, the boundary that Loki was standing at rather than crossing, the specific quality of someone who had made a decision about what the agreement meant and was living inside the decision. He looked at Loki's face — at the unguarded version of it, the one he had seen before the blood-brotherhood broke, the one he had seen less and less of across the centuries as the thing between them had become what it had become. He looked at him for a long moment with the quality of someone who was receiving something and understanding what the receiving required of them. "Why," he said. Not suspiciously — the genuine question, the question of someone who understood that the answer mattered and who was asking it because the asking was the correct thing to do rather than because the answer would determine whether he received what was being offered.
Loki looked at the threshold. He looked at the realm behind Odin — at Asgard in its slow return, at the fires in the halls, at the quality of a place that had been empty and was filling. He looked at the Bifrost light. He looked at Odin. "Because they deserve to come home," he said. He said it with the flat quality of a statement that was simply true and did not require elaboration and was not going to receive any. He looked at the threshold. "And because—" He stopped. He looked at the Bifrost light falling across the stone inside the boundary. He looked at Odin. Something moved through his expression — the movement of something that had been held for a very long time arriving at the surface in the specific way of things that had been held for very long times, not dramatically, with the specific quality of something that had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it and was not going to wait any longer. "Because I am tired," he said. "Of being only what I became." He looked at the threshold. He looked at Odin. "I was something else before," he said. "You know what I was before." Odin looked at him. The weight of what Loki had said settled into the space between them with the quality of something true landing in a space that had not contained it for a very long time and was receiving it with the specific quality of something that recognized truth and was adjusting to its presence. "Yes," Odin said. "I know." He paused. He looked at Loki — at the coat, at the hands, at the threshold. "Give me the list," he said.
Loki reached into the coat. He produced something — not paper, the material of the realms, the older kind, the surface that held information the way good stone held heat. He held it at the threshold. Odin reached across and took it. Their hands were close in the taking — the closest they had been since before everything, the specific proximity of two beings who had been blood-brothers and had broken that and were standing on the far side of the breaking trying to find what remained. Neither of them said anything about the proximity. Neither of them needed to. Odin looked at the list. He looked at what it contained — the locations, the realms, the forms, the conditions. He looked at the depth of it — at the knowledge of the realms that a thousand years of moving through them had produced in the person who had made this list, the specific intimate knowledge of paths and places that only someone who had been in them understood from the inside. He looked at Loki. "This is comprehensive," he said. Loki looked at the Bifrost light. "I had time," he said.
Heimdall had been at his post through all of it — present, watching, the watchman's quality running at its continuous level, the read of the threshold and the two beings at it and the quality of what was passing between them all present in his awareness simultaneously. He watched Odin take the list. He watched the proximity of the hands in the taking. He watched Loki's face in the moment after — the unguarded version, the tired version, the version of someone who had given something real and was in the specific space that giving real things produced, which was not emptiness but the particular openness of someone who had been carrying something and had set it down and was feeling the absence of the weight in their hands. He watched Odin look at the list and look at Loki. He watched the moment hold what it held. He did not intervene in it. He did not add to it. He simply watched with the complete attention that was simply what he did and had always done and would always do.
Odin looked at Loki one more time — the look of someone who had received something significant and was acknowledging the significance without making more of it than it was, because making more of it than it was would have been a different kind of disrespect than making less of it. He inclined his head — not a bow, the other gesture, the one between equals that acknowledged what had passed between them. Loki looked at the Bifrost. He looked at the realm beyond the threshold. He looked at Odin. He inclined his head in return. He turned. He walked away from the threshold with the easy quality of someone who had come to do something and had done it and was now going somewhere else, which was simply what Loki did — he went somewhere else, always, the somewhere else being the whole of where he lived. He disappeared into the distance between realms with the quality that things that were comfortable in the between-states disappeared — not dramatically, simply no longer present at the threshold, the coat and the compressed quality of his ancient presence absorbed back into the paths that were now open to him and that he knew better than anyone alive.
Odin looked at the list. He looked at the Bifrost light. He looked at the realm behind him — at the hall, at Frigg in the eastern wing making ready for what she had seen was coming, at Hoenir at the table with the long thinking running. He looked at the list in his hands. He thought about what Loki had said. I was something else before. He thought about what Loki had been before — the blood-brother, the travel companion, the one who solved problems with the specific oblique intelligence that Odin had relied on more times than he had ever formally acknowledged and that the current situation required him to acknowledge at least internally. He thought about the children — Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Hel. He thought about what Shane had said on Midgard with the plain directness of someone who did not soften things. He thought about the chain Gleipnir on Fenrir's legs. He thought about the sea. He thought about Baldr. He stood at the threshold of his own realm with the list in his hands and the Bifrost light around him and the weight of everything that had been and everything that was and everything that was coming in the specific configuration that the weight always arrived in when he stood at thresholds and held things that required holding.
He went back to work.
Frigg felt it the moment Loki left the threshold.
Not the leaving — the quality of what had happened at the threshold, the weight of it moving through the realm the way significant things moved through spaces that were attentive to significant things. She felt the quality of the exchange — not the words, the weight. Two people who had been something to each other and had broken that and were standing in the space after the breaking and finding something real in that space. Odin's hands receiving something from Loki's hands.
She stood in the eastern hall with her hands still.
The weight of Baldr was in it. Not announced. Not named. Simply present the way certain absences were present in spaces where the person had been real and significant and was now gone — the specific quality of a hall that had contained her son and that contained his absence now in the way that the absence of something real was always present in the space the thing had occupied. She carried his death the way she had carried it since before Odin fell into his reincarnation cycle — the specific grief of a mother who had seen it coming and had extracted every oath from every thing in the world and had missed the one thing and had watched the thing she missed become the instrument of the outcome she had been trying to prevent. She carried it. She had been carrying it since before the Shroud, since before the fall, since before any of the current configuration of the world had been its configuration. The grief was old. It did not diminish with age. It simply became part of what she was.
She looked at the eastern window where the Bifrost light came in. She looked at the hall she was preparing. She had seen what was coming — not clearly, not in the way that certainty felt, but in the way her seeing always worked, which was the shape of things rather than the detail of things, the direction rather than the destination. She had seen that what was coming required this hall to be ready and she was making it ready and the making of it was the expression of the knowing in the only form the knowing could currently take. She went back to work. She carried what she carried. She did not name it because the naming of it was not available to her — the grief was present and real and hers and it had no resolution that she could see and she had been a person who could see a very great deal for a very long time.
The missing thing — the oath she had not extracted, the plant she had thought too young, the specific gap in the protection she had built around her son — sat in her the way it always sat in her. Not as guilt exactly. As the permanent texture of something that had happened and could not be unhappened and that she was living in the aftermath of and would be living in the aftermath of until whatever came after the aftermath came. She looked at the Bifrost light on the floor. She looked at the hall. She went back to work.
Odin found Hoenir in the library.
He came in with the list in his hand and set it on the table beside Hoenir's hands with the quality of someone placing something important in a place where it would be seen and considered by the right person at the right time. Hoenir looked at the list. He looked at it with the reading quality he brought to everything — the slow deep intake of someone for whom understanding was not the first response but the destination of a process that could not be hurried and that produced results that faster processes missed. He picked it up. He read it. He set it back down. He looked at his hands on the table. He looked at Odin. "He made this himself," he said. Not a question. "Yes," Odin said. Hoenir looked at the list. "He has been in those realms," he said. "All of them on this list." "Yes," Odin said. Hoenir looked at the list. He looked at the library around him — at the records on the shelves, at the accumulated documentation of a civilization that had been scattered and was being reassembled, at the quality of a space that had been built for exactly this kind of work. He looked at the list. He looked at Odin. "The information is accurate," he said — with the flat certainty of someone who had been thinking long enough to know what accurate information felt like when it arrived and was distinguishing it from the other kind. "He knows these paths." He paused. He looked at the list. "He has been looking for them," he said. "The scattered ones. He has been tracking them." He looked at Odin. "That is not something you do incidentally," he said. "That is something you do with intention." Odin looked at the list. He looked at the Bifrost light coming through the library's high window. He looked at Hoenir. "Yes," he said. "I know." Hoenir looked at the list. He looked at his hands. He was quiet for a moment with the quality of the long thinking arriving at something and delivering it. "He is trying to come back," he said. "Not to Asgard. To something before Asgard." He paused. "To what he was before what he became." He looked at Odin. "The question is whether what he was before is still sufficiently present to come back to." He looked at the list. He looked at his hands. "I think it may be," he said. "I am not certain. But I think it may be." He looked at the list. The long thinking continued. Odin looked at the library. He looked at the Bifrost light. He looked at the list. He said nothing. He picked the list up. He went to find Hermod.
The weight of Baldr was not named in any of this. It was present in the weight of the room the way it was always present — in Odin's hands receiving the list from Loki's hands, in Frigg preparing the eastern hall for what she had seen, in Hoenir's assessment of whether what Loki had been was still sufficiently present to return to. It was present in the specific quality of the silence that surrounded the thing that could not be said — the silence of a realm full of people who had loved Baldr and who were building something in the aftermath of his absence and who did not know that the absence was less complete than they understood it to be, and who were receiving help from the person who had made the absence and who did not know that the help was connected to the absence in the way that it was connected, and who were moving forward in the specific quality of people who were doing the right things for reasons that were true but not complete, the whole truth distributed across a configuration that required the incompleteness to function correctly.
Heimdall knew more than the others. He always knew more — the watchman's quality, the read of everything, the awareness that was simply always running. He had read the threshold. He had read the exchange. He had read Loki's face in the moment after the list crossed the boundary and Odin's hands closed around it. He had read the quality of the giving and the quality of the receiving and what both of them communicated about the people doing the giving and the receiving and the history those people carried between them. He had read all of it with the complete attention that was simply what he did. He had filed what he read in the place where things were filed when they were significant and when their significance required time to fully reveal itself — the watchman's patience, the understanding that some things were best understood by continuing to watch rather than by drawing conclusions before the watching had produced what the watching was building toward. He looked at the Bifrost. He looked at the realm. He looked at the plains corridor in the distance of the world below — at the settlement in North Dakota, at the infant whose thread had begun, at the small girl in the same village whose thread was running its early quiet course, at the boy whose thread was also there. He looked at the Bifrost light. He went back to his watch.
Heimdall sent the message to Sanctuary the way he sent everything that needed to travel the distance between Asgard and Midgard — through the carved bone relay, the communication channel that Odin had established with Shane's people when the Bifrost was restored, the specific frequency of the carved object that carried meaning between the realms in the compressed way of things that were designed to carry meaning across distances that conventional communication could not cross. He composed it with the economy he brought to everything that needed to be communicated precisely and without excess — the watchman's understanding that the value of information was in its accuracy and its completeness and not in its elaboration.
The message said what it needed to say. A soul has returned to the plains corridor. North Dakota. The settlement near the tribal lands. The thread began this morning. It is dormant — the soul does not know itself. The two others are present in the same village. All three are dormant. All three are safe. Watch the corridor. Do nothing yet. The watching is sufficient.
He sent it. He looked at the Bifrost. He looked at the plains corridor in the distance of the world below — at the settlement, at the infant, at the small girl, at the boy. He looked at what those three threads meant in the configuration of what was coming and what they would become in the time between now and when the becoming was required of them. He looked at the distance between now and then — the years of it, the arc length of it, the specific quality of a long watch that had a known destination and an unknown path and that required the watchman's patience in the form it was most difficult to maintain, which was the patience of someone who knew what was coming and understood that the knowing required the waiting and that the waiting was the correct thing and not a failure of action.
He was very good at waiting.
The Bifrost ran its spectrum. The realm breathed around him — the fires in the halls, the quality of a place that was alive and becoming more alive with the patient quality of things that recovered correctly rather than quickly. He could hear Odin in the hall — the specific quality of movement that was Odin working, the sounds of maps and records being handled with the deliberate economy of someone who had a great deal to do and understood that the doing of it required the patience that the scope of it demanded. He could hear Frigg in the eastern hall — the quieter sounds of preparation, the specific quality of someone arranging a space for a purpose that the space did not yet know it would be used for. He could hear Hoenir in the library — which was to say he could hear the quality of deep thought, which was not a sound exactly but was present in the quality of the air around the library the way the presence of something very large and very patient was present in the air around the thing containing it. He could hear the fourteen in their halls — the specific sounds of people who had come back to something and were relearning the relationship between themselves and the space, the sounds of return.
He looked at the Bifrost. He thought about Loki at the threshold — the coat, the hands in the pockets, the list produced from the coat with the flat quality of someone delivering something they had been building toward since before the agreement was made. He thought about the quality of Loki's face in the moment after the list crossed the boundary. He thought about what Hoenir had said in the library — that Loki was trying to come back to something before what he had become, and that the question was whether what he had been before was still sufficiently present to return to. He thought about the threshold and the hands and the list and the inclined head. He filed what he thought alongside what he had seen with the thoroughness he brought to all filing — the watchman's record, the continuous inventory of everything that moved in the world and between the worlds and what the moving communicated about where things were going.
He looked at the Bifrost light running its spectrum across the distance between realms — the full spectrum, all colors in their correct proportion, the bridge doing what the bridge had been built to do from the beginning of the time in which bridges between realms had been a thing that existed. He had stood at this post before the fall and he was standing at it after the restoration and the standing was the same standing — not unchanged, the watchman himself having been through what the watchman had been through, the lighthouse and the shore and the long years of hearing things he could not account for and watching a horizon he did not know he was watching for something specific on. But the standing was the same in the way that mattered, which was that it was his and it was correct and it was what he had been built for and he was doing it completely and without reservation and without the particular quality of someone who was doing something because they had been asked to do it rather than because it was simply what they were.
The realm breathed. The fires burned. The fourteen moved through their halls in the various stages of their return. Odin worked at the table with the list in his hand and the records around him and the Bifrost light on the floor. Frigg prepared the eastern hall for what was coming. Hoenir thought the long thoughts that only Hoenir thought. Hermod moved between the realms carrying the word to the scattered ones who had not yet received it. And somewhere in the distance of the world below, in a settlement in North Dakota near the plains corridor, three children existed in the ordinary way of children who did not know what they were — an infant drawing his first careful breaths, a small girl learning the specific geography of a frontier settlement that was the whole of her current world, a boy somewhere in between those two stages doing what boys did in places that required people to be useful before they were old enough to understand usefulness. None of them knew. None of them needed to know yet. The knowing would come when the knowing was required and not before, which was the correct order of things and was the order that fate and the Norns and the watchman at the Bifrost all understood and were all, in their various ways, maintaining.
Heimdall looked at the Bifrost.
He looked at the realm.
He looked at the distance.
He watched.