The Ninth World

Before the massacre, before that damned king tore down the tree, before I found the child alone in those cursed woods, I confess I never knew that much about humans.

Not many dragons ever really want to go to Earth, of course. Especially the majestic academy graduates, the ones of shiny, shimmering scales and immense wings that can blot out the light of the brightest stars that encircle the great world tree Yggdrasil. But, alas, I am a mere repair dragon, a working drone whose scales never shimmered as brightly as my contemporaries, and whose wings, though sound enough for basic flight, never made much of a heraldic profile to terrify the realms of mortals. Though I had been given the noble name Nidhöggr, the name of a father with terrifying red scales and wings that seemed to grow tenfold with his rage, I was doomed to drop out of dragon academy after a few eons of poor grades, and end up with stuck in a dead-end job of “world-tree repair dragon.”

On what was supposed to be my vacation, I found myself making the long journey out to the farthest sticks of Earth, the ninth and lowliest realm of all that orbited around the great trunk of the World Tree Yggdrasil. Earth, to be quite honest, never had much of a purpose other than a kind of cosmic garbage dump. While realms like Alfheim had its universal beauty, and Nidavellir its geometrically perfect material forms, Earth got little more than whatever refuse the other realms couldn’t work into their cosmic perfection and instead had to cast off into the dumps of the universe.

*

“So, Nid, you thinking we’ll get some of those humans to think we’re gods or something?”

This was Fafnir, an old school friend who I had managed to convince to accompany me out to Earth. Fafnir, a red drake who made up for his lack of wings with a sturdy and thick trunk and impressive, muscular, red-scaled legs, had enough athletic prowess to be easygoing in his daily life. He and I had planned on hanging out with the Vanir in Vanaheim, but I got a last-minute alert that the world-tree module planted on Earth—what the local humans called Irminsul—had lost contact with the central nexus of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil.

This usually meant that the tree had fallen, possibly in a storm, or by some stupid action from the mortals there. Honestly, I didn’t even know what would happen if I didn’t go to Earth and repair the tree with all haste. All worlds of the cosmos have their own cosmic tree modules, of course, which maintain their ethereal connection to the central Yggdrasil tree, and its infinite branches that us dragons fly around and feed on. But the backwoods realms like Earth held limited significance, and if their sacred tree were to lose connection to Yggdrasil for a little longer, just time enough for me to enjoy my vacation, well…

But with the damage report coming in from Earth, I had been caught in the cruel jaws of bureaucracy, the only thing less forgiving than dragon’s fire. So on what was supposed to be my break, I found myself trudging out to the dregs of Earth, bearing nothing but my tools and a foul mood.

And Fafnir—though with his endless chattering I was beginning to regret inviting him.

“Calm down,” I muttered. “Do you know what will happen if the management finds out you’re even here?”

“What?” he said with fake credulity.

I blinked. “Well…I don’t know. But I do know I’m the one who’ll suffer for it. So just leave the poor humans alone and let me do my job.”

He shrugged. “I mean, it might be nice to be thought of as a god for once. Even if it’s only by humans.”

My eyes were glued to the map that was already several eons out of date.

“Dragons care not for the opinions of mortals,” I said. “But, hey, do you remember Jormungandr?”

“Who?” Fafnir said.

“From school,” I said. “Gray lindworm dragon, liked the water. Got drunk and accidentally burned down a main Yggdrasil limb out by Asgard?”

Fafnir’s eyes traced his limited memories before finally coming to a realization. “Jorm the worm! That guy was crazy! What’s he been up to?”

“Well,” I said. “He’s currently holding the gig of guardian of Earth, so I figured we’d pay him a visit.”

Fafnir laughed. “Ha! I always assumed he’d wind up in jail, so I guess this isn’t as bad.”

“This might be court-ordered,” I said. “So who knows.”

When we found Jormungandr he was, of course, asleep. His long, serpentine form was curled up in the cosmic sea that flowed around the outer branches of Yggdrasil and surrounded the backwoods wasteland of Earth. Fafnir needed to prod him a few times with his mighty legs to get him to wake up.

“Oh…oh hey guys,” he said through a yawn. “Yeah, Nidhöggr…Nid, you were coming by…oh, hey Fafnir…you were, uh, going to fix…something…”

I sighed. “Irminsul,” I said. He blinked a few times without understanding. “The Yggdrasil module here. Earth’s sacred tree. You know…”

“Oh yeah,” Jorm said. “I’ve just been calling it a tree. Something up with it?”

“You’ve not been watching it?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“Isn’t that you’re job?”

He shrugged. “No one really cares what goes on out here.”

“You see,” Fafnir said.

I coughed in irritation. “Whatever. Where was Irminsul located again?”

Jorm furrowed his scaly brow in some crude attempt at remembering against his residual sleepiness. “The woods...definitely. I think…they’re calling it Verden now.”

“Ooh, you mean the humans?” Fafnir said. “That’s neat! I’m in a human fantasy league this season, though I’m a bit behind the recent results. Work, you know? But, did the Romans manage to conquer Verden at last?”

“Nah man,” Jorm said. “Rome’s gone. Or, at least, in the west it is. There was this whole thing where the empire split in half, west and east, then the west fell, and the east is still there, but they’re, like, Greek again…”

“Woah, no spoilers!” Fafnir yelled.

I grunted. “Did the humans do this?” I asked. “I was told not to let them see us...”

“I know, I know,” Jorm said. “I’m not that dumb. Now, let me think. There’s this new king out in that part of Earth. I think his name is…Karl, Karlus, Char-less, something like that. He’s not Roman…I think he’s the leader of, like, the Franks, or something…”

Fafnir chuckled at this.

“Can you just take us to Irminsul?” I asked. “I don’t even know the extent of the damage, and I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible. No offense.”

“Hey, I read you,” Jorm said. He fumbled for his keys to the Earth-realm. “Luckily, they threw the world tree module in a back corner somewhere, I don’t think the Romans even really conquered it. There were a few people—Saxons, I think—who, like, worship it. But I haven’t heard from them for a while.”

Of course, when we made our way through the portals to the spot where the now-damaged Irminsul tree lay in the forest, the three of us soon discovered why Jorm hadn’t heard from the Saxons lately.

Dragons, of course, have a keen sense of smell for metals and heavier elements. In human folklore, this may have led to the frankly rude stereotype of us as greedy gold hoarders, but this keen sense for metal is just useful when we’re browsing around the vast cosmic roots of Yggdrasil trying to find something to eat. And so, emerging from the portal into the dismal Earthly forest, the first thing I noticed was the overwhelming smell of iron.

“Yeesh,” Fafnir said. “They open up a quarry here?”

All three of us had to crouch our necks and backs down to fit under the tree canopy above, while our tails twisted together uncomfortably behind.

Jorm sniffed in the low light of Earth’s moon. “I don’t smell any silicon or aluminum. There’s like a ton of that in the Earth’s crust. You get used to it after a while, but of course—oh shit!”

Me and Fafnir looked down at the ground below us.

There was the sacred tree Irminsul. Or, at least, what was left of it. The tree lay on its side, cut down with clearly intentional precision. In the place where it must have stood was a tall, thin wooden pillar rising from the ground, with another, shorter pillar etched along the top horizontally.

And below that were the bodies.

Hundreds and hundreds of human bodies, lying dead, their skin and limbs gashed and mangled in a frenzy of violence. Heads caved in and throats cut and abdomens split open and white bones revealed to the air. Below the bodies, just clear enough in the moonlight was a growing pool of blood, blending together so that the blood of one could no longer be distinguished from another’s.

“Human blood is forged from iron, right?” I said to no one in particular.

“What the Hel?” Jorm barked. “Dammit Charles!”

“Who?” Fafnir burped through a wad of smoke.

“The Frank King,” Jorm said. “This must have been him.”

“Oh yeah,” Fafnir said. “Why’d he want to cut the tree down?”

“It must have been the damned religion thing again,” Jorm said. “Charles, or whatever his name is, was always trying to get these Saxons to try out his new religion. Christ-ism, or whatever it’s called.”

Fafnir rubbed the scales around his eye with one claw. “Christ-ism? I haven’t heard of that yet. Granted, I’m a bit behind on the human storyline.”

Jorm shrugged. “It popped up a few centuries ago, human time, back in the early days of the Roman Empire. Spread to the Franks, I think. The Saxons here were a bit too adamant on sticking to the old ways for Charles’s liking, I guess.”

Fafnir offered a hollow chuckle. “These humans keep making new religions and killing each other over them. Was this Christ-ism thing like another prank pulled by the Æsir?”

Jorm shrugged. “Hel if I know.”

“Ah, I must have missed that,” Fafnir said. “Still…” He scanned his eyes across the vast pile of dead humans below our feet, the remnants of Irminsul lying next to them on the bloody ground. “Seems pretty stupid, going through all this trouble just for a religious difference.”

Jorm shrugged his serpentine shoulders. “It’s humans. They’re mortal. They kill each other over dumb shit all the time. Hel, dying’s their main attribute, they probably want to spread the wealth best they can, so to speak.”

But I was only half-listening. My eyes stuck on the pile of bodies below me, so thick that I could no longer see the ground underneath them. Being a humble repair dragon, without the benefit of advanced academy courses on human affairs, I had never really had cause to deal with humans much.

And I’d never seen a dead one. Let alone this many.

“Do they always smell like this?” I asked. “When they die.”

Jorm shrugged again. “They smell whether they’re alive or dead. But can you blame them? They live in a glorified garbage dump. Now, if you have to repair this tree, could you maybe get working on that? I’d kind of like to get back to my nap.”

I scanned the bodies for another minute or two, not even looking at the downed tree that was supposed to be my only job on this gods-forsaken corner of the universe.

“It just seems,” I began, not even sure who I was even talking to. “If you’re mortal, why’d you want to cause even more death? Wouldn’t you want to avoid it?”

“What?” Jorm grunted. “Are you like, the human whisperer now? Who the Hel cares what the Hel these idiots get up to? Are you going to fix the tree, or what?”

I snorted in a wad of fire that had been billowing up in my throat, for reasons even I wasn’t sure of. “Yeah, give me a minute, here…”

I stopped, the words seizing in my throat to hang out with the mute fire burning down near my lungs.

“Wha?” Fafnir said in a tone that suggested he was half-paying attention.

“What is it?” Jorm asked. “Is it that Charles guy again? I’m going to kick his ass, regardless of the ‘rules’ or whatever…”

“No,” I said. “Unless a gods-damn baby can order a massacre…”

There, across the clearing from the pile of bodies and the fallen sacred tree, standing on chubby, uneven legs less than two feet off the ground, was a human child.

No, not a child. An infant? It looked that young. But human infants can’t stand on their own, can they? Even as clumsily as this one was. The child was leaning its small back against a tree, staring through a wad of dirty-blonde hair at either the pile of dead bodies or the three adult dragons crouched in the clearing across from it. Regardless, its expression showed no sign of terror, or awe, or confusion, but rather a softly curious expectancy, as if its world was not yet defined enough to know that neither blood nor dragons should not be expected on a random night such as this.

Fafnir gave a sharp whistle through his teeth that sent a column of steam rising from his nostrils to the night sky. “Got a live one here, huh?”

Jorm slithered over next to me. “Must be a kid of one of the…” He trailed off and gestured broadly to the carnage below us.

“How can you tell?” Fafnir asked.

“Looks about Saxon enough,” Jorm said. “Besides, he’s got blood on him.”

“How do you know it’s a he?” Fafnir asked.

Jorm shrugged. “Dressed that way, I guess. Best I can tell.”

“How old is he?” I asked. The child was staring back at me, meeting my gaze full-on as he held a thumb in his mouth and sucked it every few seconds.

“Hmmm,” Jorm said. “For one, he’s walking. Well enough as he can, I suppose. Don’t know if he’s old enough to talk yet. I’ve admittedly not paid much attention to humans here, but I’d say he’s around, like, two human years. Somewhere around there.”

For reasons I couldn’t even begin to articulate I began moving toward the human child. Slowly, of course, but with my comparatively massive frame waddling through the slight clearing, even the smallest steps closed the distance between the child and me within seconds. But the human child didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil. It continued staring back at me, with an expression that was somewhere between half-kindled curiosity and desire for a nap.

Has he heard storied about dragons? I thought. Stories that sent him off to sleep?

“So, like, what do we do?” Fafnir asked.

Jorm gave a bit of a snort. “Technically nothing. We’re not even supposed to be seen by mortals, let alone mortals of the human variety. But I don’t think this little one here is quite able to report us. So, we should be fine, as long as Nid can fix the damned tree and get us the Hel out of here before any other humans come along.”

“What’ll happen to him?” I asked. Again, I wasn’t even quite sure who I was speaking to. Maybe the trees themselves. Maybe the great World Tree Yggdrasil, if it could still hear me through its herald tree that lay fallen at my feet.

But Jorm took the cue anyway. “Well,” he began with a confused tone. “I suppose he’s going to die.”

“Die?” I asked.

Though I wasn’t looking at him, I could tell Jorm was blinking at me without comprehension. “I mean, he’s a mortal, so of course, he’s going to die. But, for one this young, out here by himself, assuming his parents among the dead here—yeah, he’s not going to make it much longer. I mean, best case scenario for him is some friendly passersby find him, take him in, raise him as a servant boy, or something. Let him die in a few human decades instead of human hours. But—humans this young, they can’t really do much for themselves.”

I felt something bitter and acidic rising in my throat, tasting too much like the stench coming off of the bodies below me.

“So, we’re just going to leave him here to die?”

Jorm murmured to himself. “Protocol technically says yes, but—you’re right. The nicest thing to do would be to finish him off quick.”

Before I could process this, Jorm had advanced toward the boy, drawing his sharp claws out into the night air.

“What?” I sputtered.

“Doubt the other humans here’ll know the difference between wounds from a sword and wounds from a dragon claw.” He sniffed once as if to drive the point home. “Especially not on a body small as this.”

Without further thought, I heard a ragged and frantic voice cry out:

“No!”

Then, a wad of fire and black smoke billowed from my mouth and towered above my eyes. And when it cleared, and I could see again, I was looking back at Jorm and Fafnir, my body back against the tree, my claws drawn towards my sometimes friends. My wings, small as they are, pulled down to blanket the human child who now stood at my side, leaning against my scaley leg and looking up at me with comical fascination as he continued to suck his thumb.

I didn’t really until then that the voice had been mine.

Jorm and Fafnir stared back at me unthinking for a few seconds. Then, through the side of his mouth, but still loud enough for me to hear, Jorm said:

“This is why you don’t send academy dropouts to Earth. They seem one cute human and they want to take it as a pet.”

“But didn’t you drop out of academy?” Fafnir said. Jorm grumbled but said nothing.

Meanwhile, my lungs, working independently of my brain, sent another way of warning smoke from the fire in my chest into the now warm night air. It erupted into a thick wad of blackness, which then settled itself into the wind and, finally, resolved into a crude ring that drifted off among the trees with the grace of an Earthly bird.

Next to me, the human child watched the smoke ring fly across his field of vision. And then, without warning or sense, he dropped his thumb from his mouth and, in defiance of literally everything else around him, began to giggle.

*

“This is idiotic,” Jorm said sometime later. “We are beyond fired right now.”

“Calm down,” I said. I had the unpleasant sensation that I was speaking more to myself. “You already said that no one cares about humans.”

“No one cares about humans when they stay on Earth!” Jorm whined. “This…”

He trailed off, gesturing broadly with his wings as if the context would finish the sentence for him. And, really, it did. Jorm, Fafnir, and myself had found our way out to one of the outer branches of Yggdrasil that wrapped around the world of Niflheim, the abode of mists. I had figured the misty, impression-obscured skies of Niflheim would be the best place to take refuge once we left Earth. At the very least, the deep, multi-colored mists that eternally swirl around the skies and spheres of Niflheim would likely prevent any prying eyes from catching us with a human child in our company.

The child was sitting on the soft, opaque ground that shifted its iridescent colors every moment or two, and rose and fell like the waves of a lazy ocean. The child watched the mists and colors of that strange new world twist around him, forming into new, strange shapes and melting apart with as much reason. Occasionally, one fertile strand of mist would mold itself into a more complex shape—a great winged creature, a twirling snowflake—and land in the child’s outstretched hand. The child looked on in wonder at it for a bit, then closed his small, chubby hands and watched the mists dissolve through his fingers and stream out into the surrounding atmosphere.

“You still haven’t told us what your plan is,” Jorm said. I’d had something of a time trying to convince Jorm to let me take the human child off Earth. We had argued the point back and forth for a while in that dismal forest, our claws trying to avoid the human remains scattered in blood below us. It wasn’t until the sound of approaching human footsteps forced us to flee, and by that point the child had already climbed up the ridges of my tail and along my back, and nestled up between my wings. Jorm scowled at me with a few puffs of angry black smoke from his nostrils, but he said nothing as the three of us—human child in tow—fled back through the portal and into the cosmic realm beyond the Earthen sphere.

Fafnir, the only one of the three with no job or status on the line, continued to watch the entire drama unfold with smug amusement.

“There has to be a protocol for something like this,” I said.

“You don’t know?” Jorm barked.

“I don’t work with humans!” I snorted back. “I just fix trees!”

Jorm snarled a spear of orange flames that burned through the surrounding mists before extinguishing. “There is a protocol for something like this,” he said. “It’s called let the stupid humans die and stay out of their affairs!”

Next to me, the human child stood up and began stumbling after a blue-green dodecahedron of mists on clumsy, wobbling legs. I encircled him with my tail.

“And what if one ends up outside of Earth?” I said. “In the cosmic realm? We could say we just found him here.”

Jorm’s eyes somehow furrowed more narrowly than they already were. “Humans can’t end up outside of Earth unless a dragon takes them! Since we’re the only dragons in the vicinity of Earth around now, who do you think they’ll suspect?”

In all honesty, I hadn’t put much thought into this part of the whole ordeal. Really, I couldn’t even explain to myself why I had taken the small, mortal human with us as we fled Earth. Searching my thoughts, all I found was a vague disorientation, a deep welling of feeling that slept below the realm of thought, something secret but potent in the air that seemed to draw from a well inside my chest when I watch the child’s eyes gaze upon the world around him. The dragons, the cosmic mists of Niflheim. Even the plain hollows of the forest where we had found him.

Where the great world tree still lay, alongside his kin.

“We could blame it on Fafnir!” I said. Fafnir broke from his amusement and glared at me.

“Hey, leave me out of this!”

“You’re the only one who’s got nothing at stake here!” I said.

“But there’ll be gossip!” he whined.

The child let go of the mist bauble he had been playing with and grabbed my tail.

“Even if you’re willing to take the fall for this,” Jorm said. “There’s another problem. In case you haven’t noticed, humans are mortal. You’ve taken him outside of his normal timeline. You know what that does?”

I gurgled up another was of fire to spit in his direction, but quickly realized that I didn’t actually have an answer for him.

“I dropped out of academy,” was all I could muster.

Jorm rolled his eyes. Fafnir just chuckled.

“Oh yeah, I forgot you dropped out before advanced year,” Fafnir said. “We did mortal studies. Got some tissue from mortal animals across the lower worlds. I wasn’t paying much attention, but I think I remember, when we took their bodies away from their worlds and into the cosmic sphere…well, look!”

Fafnir’s eyes snapped over to the human child who was still playing with my tail. I followed his gaze, and quickly saw that the “child” wasn’t much of a child anymore. His limbs had grown from short, flabby stubs into long, boney branches covered by taut, pale skin. His torso sprouted up into a taut frame, while his face, previously soft and smooth, had grown gaunt and hairy, with patches of fur beginning to encircle his mouth and stretch down across his chest and groin.

“This is what happens,” Jorm said. “Time passes differently for us. A split second for you is half a lifetime for him.”

I set my eyes low on the suddenly-older not quite child still standing next to my tail. But I wasn’t looking at his larger frame or the fragile stretching of his limbs. Rather, I looked directly at his eyes, the same soft, deep blue and somehow expansive eyes that seemed to ignore the changes in his body and continued to take in the whirling mists and impressionist colors that perpetually formed strange new hints of form and motion around him. I watched his eyes, and, from somewhere I couldn’t begin to understand, felt the same deep sense of longing that irradiated out of a secret fabric hidden in the deepest caverns of the cosmos. So deep I wouldn’t have learned of it even if I had stayed on through the final year of academy.

“What does he see?” I asked. Once again I wasn’t even sure who this was directed to.

“What?” Jorm chirped. “How would I know?”

“Well, how much time has passed for him?” I asked. “I don’t mean for his body. I mean for his mind. Like, what’s he seeing?”

“It’s a human!” Jorm shouted. “It’s mortal! You’re a dragon! His entire mind couldn’t comprehend the stupidest thought you come up with!”

I knew this, of course. But still, I couldn’t peel my eyes from his, nor shake the profound sense of longing—of expansion—that seemed to radiate from his gaze.

And then, within a blink, his body changed again. His torso, though growing no taller, began to bulge and ripple with waves of fat. The thick hair on his head began to thin in a bald spot at the top. The dark blonde hair on his face began to speckle with shades of gray.

But his eyes never left the swirling colors in the cosmic mists around him.

He’s living an entire lifetime, I thought. What’s he seeing?

Somehow, I didn’t think it would be something I could see.

“This is what happens,” Jorm said. “He’ll be dust and bones soon enough. Pretty much a waste, which is why we’re not supposed to bring…”

Before he could finish, I whipped my tail around the no-longer-child’s body and placed him on my back again. He didn’t make any sounds, but I felt his now-grown hands feel around my scales and hesitantly grip the space between my wings. I wondered if he even remembered the last time he rode me, however long ago it was for him.

Jorm and Fafnir stood agape as I unfurled my wings and, without further word, ascended into the kaleidoscopic mists surrounding Niflheim with the human on my back.

*

I don’t know what year it was on Earth when I returned—only that it was night. The forest of Verden, where the sacred tree Irminsul once stood, was now a small but glistening city whose electric lights challenged the stars. Centuries of Earthly times had passed since I left, I figured. In the center of the city, Irminsul’s remains lay scattered in dust and wood chips across the now-artificial ground. I took a moment to note with a smile that Fafnir was right. No one really cared about the sacred trees on Earth.

On my back was the dust that was all that was left of the once-child, the human whom I had shown the cosmos, given sights no mortal could ever again hope to see.

I landed in the middle of an empty city square. No humans were around to see me—not that I cared. I breathed in the night air of Earth and, without thought, shook off the dust of the human who had once been a child alone in a forest. The dust settled on the ground, mixed with the long-fallen remnants of Irminsul, and disappeared into the darkness of the night.

I looked up, watched the faint stars beyond the firmament of the world sea. From Earth they were mere dots of light, barely visible against a few passing clouds. I remembered the eyes of the human child, tried to absorb the memory into my own. Watched the stars of the Ninth world with the eyes of a mortal. One for whom the stars would always hint as things beyond comprehension, but somehow deeper than feeling.

I watched the stars for a few moments, and then noticed a subtle movement to my right. In a small, illuminated window of a nearby building, a small human child stood. She watched me, the strange dragon with mediocre wings and shine-less scales, that for some reason had decided to visit her lonely city that night.

I smiled at her, blew a few flames from my nostrils in greeting, and then, without further word, lifted my wings and sailed off into the night sky.