“Good-bye, Father,” said Fenris. With a great leap he joined me.
“Click.”
“Good-bye,” cried Loki, “and . . . good luck!” Then he smiled like the first breath of spring after a thousand-year winter, and whispered, “Somewhere. Somehow.”
I waved back, then looked around for Laginn—I owed him a farewell. Something grabbed my bare ankle.
“Clash.”
In a huge room carved from the living wood of the World Tree, Yggdrasil, a million copper beads all moved in the same direction at once.
The world ended. And, as so often happens in such moments, a new one began.
KELLY MCCULLOUGH
has sold short fiction to publications including
Weird Tales
,
Absolute Magnitude
, and
Cosmic SF
. An illustrated collection of Kelly’s short science fiction, called
Chronicles of the Wandering Star
, is part of InterActions in Physical Science, an NSF-funded middle school science curriculum. He lives in western Wisconsin. Visit his website at
www.kellymccullough.com
.