All usual character disclaimers apply.
Except for David, poor sod.. :)

If you want to know what hapenned before, read parts 1-8!!

C&C WANTED!
pleeeeeeeeeeease.
Even if you hated it.


Dave Row





------------------------

Chapter 9

I took a step backwards. I didn't want to, but the sight in front of me 
was so appalling I just couldn't stand there and look at it. I think I 
might have run, except that the step made me bump into Skuld. 
She was standing, half-crouched, glaring about her with a small 
spherical object gripped in one hand. That bomb looked a lot nastier in 
real life than they do in the manga... Although from her stance I got 
the impression she'd rather have fed it to whoever was responsible for 
this instead of merely blowing him up!

Urd raised her hand, and the glow against her palm brightened, lighting 
the room for a few seconds, dispelling the shadows. It helped a little, 
and showed nothing but Keiichi. She nodded to herself, as if expecting 
this, then motioned us back.

"We can't do anything here for him, not after what's been done. But I 
can stabilise him, so we can get him away from this place."

Well, I was certainly in favour of the last part of that, even if I had 
no idea what she meant by stabilise. I know its facile to say this place 
reeked of evil, but this one did! I couldn't put the feeling it gave me 
any better, I just wanted to be a long way away from here. From the 
quick glances she gave around the room as we waited for Urd, Skuld must 
have felt the same way; she was looking as if she expected something 
awful to dart out of the shadows and attack us at any moment.

Urd raised her hands, chanting in that gutteral language I had heard her 
use before. This time it lasted longer, and the effects were a lot more 
spectacular. First a pale, white glow slowly grew about her, then it 
writhed and turned into a mass of curling frost-coloured fire that threw 
back the shadows, Urd's figure enveloped inside its flickering core. 
With a hurling gesture she threw her hand towards the pitiful figure on 
the rack, as the fire left her and blazed about it, blinding me for a 
moment. When the afterimage cleared from my eyes, Keiichi and the rack 
were inside a cloudy crystal, the icy cold emanating from it reaching 
across to me, making me colder but, oddly, feeling to be a far cleaner 
cold than that we had encountered entering here.

Urd sighed, and looked at us.

"Skuld, can you carry this along with us? It will keep him stable till 
we can work something out for him."

Skuld nodded, pulling something out of an inside pocket in her cloak. I 
blinked, wondering for a moment how she carried something resembling a 
large pile of spheres and rods in there without any apparent bulge, then 
dismissed the thought as being fairly irrelevant in the current 
circumstances. She put it down, pressing a button on it and standing 
back as it assembled itself in seconds into a large mech, seeming much 
larger than its component parts, which scuttled under the crystal, 
lifting it onto its back.

"All done! Can we go, now, Urd, please!!!"

Urd nodded, and led us out, her handfire again illuminating our passage 
back to the surface, the mech bringing up the rear. I was torn between 
casting quick glances as it, to see if it were still there, and not 
wanting to look at the frozen body encapsulated within its icy embrace.

Eventually we reached the surface. Passing out into the temple 
courtyard, we emerged into the cold night. The rain that had been 
falling earlier had stopped, but the ground was covered in icy pools, 
the cold wind biting. Looking up, thick turbulent clouds writhed and 
twisted their racing path across the sky. I shivered, not only from the 
cold.

Standing before us, face unnaturally calm, was Belldandy. Looking 
quickly at the crystal, I was glad that it somewhat obscured what was 
within. We all stopped, looking at her. She met Urd's gaze, nodding 
slowly.

"He isn't dead, I would know."

"He isn't dead, Belldandy. But he's badly hurt."

She walked forward, as Skuld and I moved aside, not wanting to get in 
her way. Placing her palm against the crystal, she closed her eyes for a 
moment, all expression leaving her face. After a few moments that 
stretched out like an eternity, she nodded again, and turned to us.

"Whoever did this will pay dearly."

I shivered again. For someone as polite and soft-spoken as Belldandy, 
those few words had spelled doom for someone. Although, having seen what 
they had done, I had no doubts that they richly deserved their fate.

I didn't want to look at Belldandy's face, not when it was like that. 
The mixture of grief and determination was such that I didn't want to 
see it, not even though I was innocent of anything to do with what had 
happened to Keiichi. Turning, something drew my gaze across the 
courtyard. I don't know what it was; the scene looked perfectly 
ordinary, but somehow the area across from us looked - odd. I can't 
describe how, it was a feeling more than anything I could see or 
describe.

I looked around for Skuld, about to tell her about it; it may have been 
nothing more than my imagination, after all that had happened my nerves 
weren't what they were a little while ago, but stopped as I saw her 
looking intently at a small device in her hand. It was humming softly, 
as she pointed it in the general direction I had been looking, and she 
was looking excited.

"Oneesama, Urd, there's something..."

Her words were cut off by a peal of hideous laughter, seeming to come 
from where we had both been looking. All of us spun around to look, but 
there was nothing to see, just that insane noise that grated against my 
nerves like a file.

"Ah, is the goddesses little toy broken? What a pity, now she'll have to 
find something else to play with at night!"

The voice didn't sound much saner then the laughter. I still couldn't 
see anything, but I was feeling more and more uneasy, my skin crawling 
as my eyes flicked about, looking to try and see who was causing this, 
certain they didn't mean any good to us.

Slowly, a leprous green light grew at the end of the courtyard. Unlike 
the earlier clean glow of Urd's fire, this looked like it belonged to 
something found long-rotting under a log. Then the air - twisted. It was 
like looking at the heat-haze above a radiator, except this stayed in 
the same place. I blinked, rapidly, unwilling at first to believe this 
was happening, despite all my earlier experiences today.

The next thing I knew, the ground itself was shuddering underneath me as 
the temple trembled, a harsh, grating noise coming from the distortion, 
the air itself about it crackling as figures appeared inside it, running 
together like a reverse-motion film of oil dispersing in water as the 
walls cracked and splintered about us. The three goddesses kept their 
feet; me, I hit the ground and held on, not getting up till the world 
stabilised a little.

Standing facing us was a group of figures, at their head a very tall 
man, clad in a millennia-old style of Viking costume. I looked at him, 
and for a second my mind went blank, seeing a single scene I almost 
recognised, this man standing triumphant over the bodies of the three 
goddesses, a single frame frozen from my memory, then he spoke, and the 
vision shattered into shards as my attention broke.

"Greetings, Norns. How nice to see you all here, safe and sound! I do 
hope you won't mind my entrance, but I do so like a spot of drama, don't 
you?"

Behind him, a low, gutteral giggling rose from his followers. I'd never 
seen anything like them before, but from their size, appearance, 
medieval weaponry and general air of malignant brutality I guessed troll 
was as good a description as any for the time being. The one exception 
was a woman, wearing a hooded cloak, standing a little way apart from 
both the man and his other followers, as if almost detached from all of 
this.

Urd spat.

"Loki. I didn't expect to see you again, but this has all the hallmarks 
of your meddling"

The man smiled, beaming in an air of assumed innocence that didn't even 
fool me, let alone the norns.

"Ah, Urd, you do wound me. Why, there I was, chained in my small, dark, 
underground prison, and I thought how much I'd like to see some of my 
old friends..."

Urd spoke again, at length. I didn't know what the words in that 
language meant, but from Urd's expression and the honeyed smile upon 
Loki's face, I suspected Old Norse was a very expressive language for 
swearing in, it certainly sounded good even when you couldn't understand 
it!

Belldandy touched her sisters arm, breaking her flow of curses. Looking 
straight at Loki, she held him with the coldness of her stare, such that 
his followers stepped back a bit, and even his grin faded somewhat.

"You were responsible for hurting my Keiichi"

Loki grinned again.
"Me?? Why, it wasn't MY power that opened that demon portal using his 
body, Belldandy. Why don't you blame the one who's power caused the 
harm? And he's been so useful in other parts of my plans, too." 

I gulped, feeling sick as I suddenly got a very bad feeling about this. 
It was confirmed as Belldandy looked at Loki for a moment, then turned 
slowly, looking straight at me.

"But... I didn't, I mean I couldn't, I..."

My stumbling protestations of innocence were cut off by her gaze. It 
seemed to look straight into me, straight past my skull and right inside 
my head. I couldn't look away, or even blink as that stare burned into 
me. Finally she turned away, looking back at the smirking visage of 
Loki, and I gasped, able to breath again.

"Loki, your fabled cunning seems to have deserted you. Don't you think I 
can tell the difference between someone whose power was stolen and the 
villain responsible for the theft and the deed?"

He chuckled, not pleasantly.

"Well, since you choose to live with a mortal pet, I didn't suppose your 
standard of perception was currently high, no..."

Urd reached out, her hand touching Belldandy's arm, calming her 
somewhat. She didn't look that calm herself, but her anger seemed to be 
under control, and aimed at Loki.

"So just how do you expect to get away with this, Loki? You were 
sentenced to be chained underground until your release at Ragnarok, 
where you will die. You know we have the power to return you there, what 
is all this in aid of?"

Loki seemed to find this statement hilarious, at least his manic 
laughter echoed around the courtyard for nearly a minute.

"Ah, Urd, as usual so beautiful and so stupid!! Do you think I would 
have worked to escape and have my revenge just to let a foolish trio of 
women stop me! Now that my plan has come to fruition, none of the gods 
can stop me! And as for my death at Ragnarok... why, that just 
propaganda. The winning side will write what happened, and mine will me 
the winning side!!"

Skuld pushed half past me, glaring up at the god, a fistful of her bombs 
half raised in her hand.

"And how do you intend to stop us rechaining you?? You can't stand 
against us!"

This time he merely smiled, very sweetly and innocently. Raising his 
hand, he pulled a small amulet out from under his shirt. I looked at it, 
then looked away quickly, my eyes burning; it had _twisted_ as I looked 
at it.

He looked at us, then gestured expansively at the woman standing behind 
him.

"Ah, I do so love it when a plan comes together! Thanks to my darling 
little daughter here, who has the custody, as I am sure you will 
remember, of Baldur, I have made certain... 
arrangements... to copy the code Yggrasil made when he was made _nearly_ 
invulnerable, and copy it! Now I have his immunity, and now I will 
destroy the nine worlds and remake them in my image!!

I frantically tried to make sense of what he was saying. If what I 
remembered about the Norse myths from my world held true here (something 
about which I had serious doubts about, but then I didn't have anything 
better to go on at the moment) Baldur was the god who would have to die 
before Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, could happen. So they arranged 
things so everything in the world agreed not to harm him. Except that 
they forgot mistletoe, and he was killed by a dart made of it. 

Belldandy looked at the cloaked woman, her voice full of icy rage.
"So, Hel, it seems you have seen fit to interfere with what was 
prophesised..."

The woman shrugged under her cloak.
"It is of no matter to me what the living do, Norn. My concerns are... 
otherwhere."

Urd growled.
"When you interfere with us and those under our protection, you make it 
our concern!"

Hel just shrugged again, managing to indicate sublime indifference to 
any and all of us without uttering a sound.

Loki smiled at us again, then started to walk towards us. Behind him, 
his followers looked uneasy, then all of them except Hel backed away, 
increasing the distance between them and their master. 
I wondered why... what was the point of having minions if they weren't 
there to support you? Maybe they were just some sort of Norse God 
Fashion Accessory?


Behind me I heard Skuld make a muffled noise of anger and outrage at the 
refusal of Loki to play by the rules. I didn't like it much either, I 
was getting more and more angry as I worked out what had been done, and 
why I had been dragged here by this madman!

I looked at Loki, the blood pounding in my head...
"You bastard! Not only do you drag me here, you use MY power to fuel 
your mad scheme to control the Universe!"

Loki grinned, nastily.
"So, the mortal worm objects to being used by a god? Pitiful fool, what 
else are mortals for!?"

I growled, and lost it. Uncaring, I swung my hand back and hit him, as 
hard as I could, on the mouth. I put all my strength into it, it was 
pretty impressive. I moved his head almost 2 inches. Then almost bit my 
tongue at the pain, it had been like hitting a wall.

This time, Loki didn't smile. Instead he bared his teeth, but no-one in 
their right mind would ever have called that expression a smile. Looking 
at it, I suddenly realised maybe hitting a mad Norse God wasn't quite 
the most intelligent thing I could do under these circumstances.
He reached out, moving with a demonic speed quite belying his size, 
grabbing my shirt and lifting me effortlessly, until I was staring into 
his contorted face. 
"Scum... how DARE you strike me, Loki, Lord of the Universe!!"

In a sort of disconnected way, despite what I could sense what was about 
to happen to me, I was still half amused at his arrogance... talk about 
bad supervillain dialogue...!! That feeling didn't last very long, 
however.
With an almost lazy gesture, he hurled me away from him. Off the ground 
to start with, thanks to him, I don't think I ever touched the ground 
before slamming into the remains of the temple wall. I felt a terrible 
impact at my back, and a number of loud snapping noises - then things 
went hazy for a moment.

Skuld winced visibly as she watched the mad god casually hurl the mortal 
across the open space, until he went through the remains of the temple 
wall, accompanied by loud breaking noises, and finally a small puff of 
dust...
"Oh Kami-sama... !"
She ran over, scared of what she was going to see when she got closer...
"He's only human, is he even going to be alive after that? He went 
THROUGH the wall!!"

(to be continued)