The Eye of Odin Read online

The Eye of Odin

  F.T. McKinstry

  Copyright 2015 F.T. McKinstry

  All Rights Reserved

  Publication History

  Aoife’s Kiss

  Issue 35, December 2010

  Table of Contents

  Start of The Eye of Odin

  Thank You

  Outpost

  About the Author

  Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry

  Connect with F.T. McKinstry

  Violet Scott took a deep, uneasy breath as the gray-green orb of Asgard, the home of Odin Systems, appeared in the sentient darkness of space like a gaze. To calm herself, she mentally recited a tale that her grandfather, a professor of ancient Earth religions, had taught her as a child, about a Norse god who had sacrificed an eye to gain the wisdom of ages.

  He is warrior, he is poet, he is mad. He is Odin, the Wanderer.

  The lavender light behind her eyes turned incandescent white as she entered orbit. A gray shadow crossed it, a raven moving over a twilit cliff face. She brushed it off with a chill on her heart that crept down into her womb like a spider.

  The center of the hexagram in her mind shimmered as a clairaudient voice filled the space around her. “Odin Systems Ministry, calling Fenrir One. Identify.”

  “Valkyrie Scott,” she responded, carving her thought with a focused knife. “Warden of the Nightshade Outpost. Requesting permission to land.”

  She held her mind in a state of receptivity, a controlled opening surrounded by a steely network of supposition. Sprays of stars arced over her ship, a Fenrir fighter, glistening and fell in the emptiness between worlds. The soft, warm interior of the hull surrounded her body like the guts of a wolf that had consumed her.

  A long silence caused her to realize she had just unthinkingly given them the title of Valkyrie, which was no longer hers.

  “Request authorized,” came the response finally, devoid of emotion. “Report to the Hall of Gladsheim.”

  Violet eased back in her seat, spinning complex webs of geometry, the equations of a landing. She closed her eyes as the forces of entry gripped the hull and streamed over her mind in streaks of red, orange and nonlinear questions. A prickle raced up the right side of her spine.

  He rules over his great Council of Twelve, in his Hall of Gladsheim.

  Gladsheim. Not Valhalla, the hall in the east where the warriors were housed and trained; not Valaskjalf, the hall in the west that coldly ensconced the Systems Controls Tower. Not a good sign.

  She focused on the Light with an iron hand. Light fueled her ship; Light from every sun, color and tree; Light, the foundation of the cosmos. She gazed through the center of the star, spiraling in as darkness closed a fist around her.

  But she would not look into the Void. Not here, in sight of the Judges.

  ~*~

  They called it the Eye of Odin. A chip implanted in her brain, it broadcasted a multidimensional array of microscopic light beams into the glands and vortexes of her nervous system, creating in her mind’s eye a vast, intricate web in the shape of a hexagram comprising twelve equilateral triangles. Through the Eye, Violet perceived the universe by imagination; hearing, touching and seeing from a set of variables beyond the physical like some kind of mythical wizard—with one staggering exception. Somehow, the Ministry had isolated perception of the Void, the undersides, the unknown, as if to split a shadow from the thing that cast it.

  They called the Eye of Odin a revolution in engineering. It was also a contradiction, an advance in the art of evolution used for war.

  Master of magic, god of war, Odin wanders alone.

  It took serious discipline to look away, to see the Light, the formation of thought and not the bottomless chasm alongside it constantly slavering for attention. But the Void was not to be considered. The psychic power of the Eye had to be controlled; it was a weapon of war, not mysticism, and while one could not remove the Void, one could ignore it. This had been the primary focus of Violet’s training as a Valkyrie.

  Beloved of Odin, the Valkyries, fair battle maidens, sweep the bloody plain and gather the chosen dead to feast in the Hall of Valhalla.

  Raised in a family of warriors known for their flaming hair, Violet had felt great honor at being assigned to the Colonies as a Valkyrie. For the thrill of that, she had accepted the conditions of Odin’s stringent training with little thought for her heart aside from an ancestral passion for the blade. Whether her heart was very wise or very foolish, that was lost on her.

  Reality became magnificent through the Eye. She had become used to this, almost desensitized, a protective membrane grown over her heart. No doubt the Ministry counted on this happening in the minds of their warriors, a kind of natural fail-safe. Unfortunately, it had not happened in Violet before she laid her Eye on a man with thick hair the color of the mahogany cabinets in her grandfather’s library, and eyes like summer twilight. His name was Mael. That was the only thing she knew about him. But it did not matter; she still knew his essence on the velvet darkness of creation, the stars in his touch, the dove-feather caress of his voice and the aching weight of him, warm as seas, as he had parted her thighs and spilled his Light into the ultimate Void.

  Hers.

  It was forbidden, of course. Mael returned to Earth and she did not see him again. He had known not to get attached to a Valkyrie, whose energies must stay focused in the skies. Physical union short-circuited the Light to ground.

  So they said. During her tryst, at that sweetest moment, the hexagram behind her eyes had exploded and aligned with a new set of variables, a vast, interconnected web of Light that stretched far beyond the matrix, farther than she could imagine. And that was when Violet learned that the Void was alive, the lonely consciousness of the subjective, creating to know itself.

  Shortly thereafter, she had led a small company of Fenrir fighters to hold a destroyer-class ship for clearance to land on a Colony world. Under orders, she had expanded her vision to sweep the interior of the ship—named the Icarus, ironically enough—and there, in a glassy pool beneath her mind, she had seen a raven’s shadow, stirring as it turned very slowly and stared.

  Odin sees all from his silver tower of Hlidskjalf. His ravens, dark as night, they fly, listen, and whisper to him of the world below.

  The raven was not supposed to be there. But the Void knew. Violet had watched helplessly from an inward-facing mirror as resplendent Light came down from her newly extended matrix and vaporized the Icarus like a lightning bolt destroying a tree in its path to ground.

  Under questioning, she had put the whole thing off to an innocent mistake. This was not technically a lie; though she did see something on that ship, she had no idea why her mind responded as it had. She told the Ministry nothing. But amazingly, they bought her childish explanation and let her off with little more than stripped titles and a position on Balor, a world on the outer edge of colonization. Named after an Earth war god who had a poisoned eye that could slay with its glance, Balor featured jagged mountain ranges, few seas and a single, vast forest called Nightshade over which Violet was given ward. The wooded valley looked like a bruise in the surrounding landscape, which was grayish and strange as flesh drained of blood by fear or cold. The men on the docks made jokes about the color of the trees. They were black and blue.

  Violet often wondered if the Ministry knew the legend of Balor, and had stationed her there as a cruel reminder, embedded in metaphor, of what happened when the Eye was opened from the Void and not the Light.

  A fickle god, Odin cares not for the assumptions of triumphant warriors.

  They had sent a Minister in person to Balor to summon her to Asgard, when all they had to do was wait for her report, which she issued mentally each day. They had not told her why.
Had they reconsidered the leniency of her punishment? Perhaps they could detect a man’s seed in her womb like some kind of beacon blazing out with a telling identity stamp.

  She would find out soon enough.