Mickey Zucker Reichert - By Chaos Cursed

Prologue
Chapter 1 - Chaos Madness
Chapter 2 - Chaos Dreams
Chapter 3 - Chaos War
Chapter 4 - Chaos Link
Chapter 5 - Chaos Destruction
Chapter 6 - Chaos’ Massacre
Chapter 7 - Chaos of Thought and Passion
Chapter 8 - Chaos-Controlled
Chapter 9 - Chaos Transport
Chapter 10 - Chaos Coupled
Chapter 11 - Chaos at the Tower
Chapter 12 - Chaos Hunted
Chapter 13 - Chaos Justice
Chapter 14 - Chaos Stand
Epilogue

To Nigel Ray, for a lot

Special thanks to the following people for their help with difficult, frustrating, and bizarre research (the facts are theirs, the mistakes my own): Police Captain Donald Strand, Meyer and Florine Elkin (New Yorkers), Chris Mortika (magician), Arthur Bailey-Murray (SCA), Rockwell Williams (VA psychologist), SPC Ted Meyer, John Stitely (lawyer, martial artist), several unnameable thieves and a gang of New York street montes, who taught me to cheat at cards.

I would also like to thank the rest of “the group”: Eleanor, Susan, the Lauras, Beth, Roxanne, Bill, Wendy, and Anastasia for teaching me to like Mondays.

And, as always, to Dave Hartlage, Sheila Gilbert, Jonathan Matson, and Richard Hescox for their repeated help and contributions.

Vidarr ambled across a meadow on the god-world of Asgard, pleased by the way the omnipresent sun sparkled off each grass blade as if from a plain of emerald knives. Yet, sharp as the highlights made them seem, the blades tickled harmlessly between the bindings of the sandal on Vidarr’s left foot. Constructed from the mismatched scraps of a thousand mortal cobblers, the boot on Vidarr’s right foot crushed ovals in the grassland, the blades springing back to attention as he moved. A breeze ruffled golden hair twisted into war braids. His face was fair, handsome, and timeless in the near-perfect way only the gods could achieve. His cloak shimmered, interwoven with silver threads.

Unhurriedly, Vidarr continued his walk, far from the gates of Valhalla, the Bifrost Bridge, and the citadels of his colleagues. Taciturn in the extreme, Vidarr had learned to radiate his emotions in lieu of words, but he preferred the more complete silence that could only come with solitude. Let the other gods argue over the quality of the wine or who deserved the honor of sitting beside beautiful Freyja. A seeker of wisdom and truth could speak with Vidarr’s father, Odin. For tales of strength and courage, no one could match Vidarr’s brother, Thor; and, for polite and attractive company, Vidarr’s other brother, Baldur, recently raised from Hel’s underworld, was the ideal. For scintillating conversation, a god could do worse than seek out Freyja’s brother, Freyr. Still, it was not bitterness that sent the Silent God tramping the fields of Asgard. Quiet, demure Vidarr simply preferred to be alone.

A patch of aqua and gold wildflowers seized Vidarr’s attention, and he swerved toward it. Two long-legged strides brought him to a patch of singed foliage before the flower bed. He froze, suddenly assailed by memory. He recalled a day nearly a year ago, an eye blink to the time sense of a god. Deeply etched remembrance rose, painful in its clarity. Vidarr recalled marching across this same field. Then, he had had a companion. Radiant as a new bride and nearly as handsome as Baldur, Loki the Trickster had matched Vidarr stride for stride, verbally goading the Silent One to interest in the new sword at his hip.

Aware Loki would one day betray the gods, Vidarr cared little for his walking mate. As did all the gods, he knew Loki’s destiny was to lead the giants and the souls of the dead against them in a bloody war, called Ragnarok, which would kill all but a handful of the Norse deities. But Vidarr also believed he had nothing to fear. The time for war had not come yet, and, of them all, Vidarr was to be the war’s hero, the only god every legend named certain to survive the Ragnarok.

As vividly as if it had been yesterday, light slashed Vidarr’s vision, and the explosion of Loki’s magics thundered through his ears. Pain slammed his chest with the force of a galloping stallion. Bowled to the ground, he was caught in a whirling vortex of sorcery that stole all sense of time, place, and existence. The recognition of flesh and self disappeared, replaced by a perfect prison of cold, solid iron. Vidarr vaguely recalled the high-pitched fear of his own scream ringing across his hearing through an eternity of otherwise unbroken, silent darkness.

Now, Vidarr shivered at the thought. Trapped within a block of metal, he had fought for a glimpse of light, a whisper of sound, a taste or a touch. As one eternity seemed to pass to the next, he came to believe himself forgotten, lost in an endless void of imprisonment. No external battle gained him so much as a flash of sight, so he strove for a madness that would not come. In this, mankind had surpassed the gods. The knowledge of their own mortality gave men a bent toward insanity that allowed them to surrender to it when other options seemed worse. Vidarr simply suffered, never knowing how hard Freyr tried to reach him through the iron nor how the god of elves and the sun had the dark elves craft Vidarr’s prison into a sword.

Freyr had then searched the world for a man without the natural mental barriers that prevented gods and sorcerers from intruding on people’s thoughts and dreams or warping their perceptions. Finding no one, Freyr had turned to alternative times, the magic involved costing him volumes in time, health, and valuables. And the answer had come in the finding that future civilizations had no sorcerers and no Balance of Law and Chaos. Unused and unneeded, the mental barriers had evolved away, and Freyr had found his hero/victim in the person of an American soldier in Vietnam, a twenty-year-old private named Al Larson who, against all propriety of his era, called upon Freyr himself as the enemies’ machine guns took his life.

The details of the transfer went beyond Vidarr’s knowledge. The other gods made only distant mention of the permanent damage to Freyr’s magic and his mental stability. Larson had lost his human body, replaced by that of an elf follower of Freyr.

And Vidarr’s first glimpse of reality had come through the eyes of his wielder, perceptions warped by battle fatigue, flashbacks, confusion, and gross ignorance. Struggling to sort reality from madness, Vidarr had forged a bond with his human wielder stronger than any ties to the gods. With the help of Larson’s Freyr-chosen companions, a powerful Dragonrank sorceress named Silme and her ronin bodyguard, Kensei Gaelinar, Vidarr finally pieced together the means to break Loki’s spell, a solution that had required the death, and ultimately the complete destruction, of Loki and the Chaos he harbored. In the process, Vidarr learned details about human nature he could never have guessed.

Now, before the hole of brown, curled grasses burned by Loki’s magic, a smile twitched across Vidarr’s lips. Unlike the humans of this era who fawned and groveled at the feet of the pantheon, Larson had little respect for anyone or anything. Through him, Vidarr learned that mortality made humans’ existence more, not less, precious than the gods’. Each day held the value of a deity’s decade. Lives so short and death so complete gave honor and glory to any life voluntarily sacrificed for the good of others. And Vidarr learned one thing more.

Intolerant of untruths, even among themselves, a god’s word was always held to be inviolate, unquestionable authority on man’s world of Midgard. Morality used to seem simple to Vidarr. What was right was simply right. But mankind, and especially Al Larson, knew a spectrum of behavior in shades of gray that Vidarr would never have hypothesized or understood without having tangled himself so deeply in a mortal’s mind. It was Al Larson who taught Vidarr to lie and to deceive and, appropriately, Al Larson who was the victim of that betrayal.

Killed centuries earlier by Loki’s treachery, Vidarr’s brother, Baldur, had spent his time in the dank, dark, malodorous halls of Hel, comforted by the knowledge that he was destined to live again after the Ragnarok. But Loki’s death meant that Ragnarok would never occur. Concerned for his brother, Vidarr had used trickery to commit Larson, Gaelinar, and a quick-witted thief named Taziar the Shadow Climber to a quest long considered impossible. As a result, they were forced to battle unmatched volumes of Chaos-energy in its natural form: as a dragon. The quest had cost Gaelinar his life, but it had brought enough Chaos into the world to balance the resurrections of two powerful keepers of Law, Baldur and Silme, and to replace the permanent loss of Loki.

The reminiscence roused Vidarr’s curiosity. Larson had come out of that quest gut-shot by a rifle as out of time as himself and clinging to the meticulously-crafted katana that had belonged to his beloved and respected Kensei sword-master. Aware that Taziar’s Dragonrank girlfriend, Astryd, had some knowledge of magical healing, Vidarr had left Larson, Taziar, Silme, and Astryd to their own devices.
I wonder how they’re doing?
Vidarr considered. Larson had made it clear that he resented the gods’ intrusions into his mind. Through effort, the elf had learned to wall trespassers into pockets of memory. Vidarr had learned the danger of that tactic when Larson had trapped him and an enemy in the Vietnamese jungles, their only escape, back through Larson’s mind, neatly blocked by its owner.