Chapter 2

For a moment, stone was only stone.

It was cold through my palms and harder than any floor had a right to be. My buttocks had found it first. The rest of me arrived in no particular order, followed by a sharp breath that did not seem interested in becoming a complete one.

I stayed where I was because moving required deciding what had happened, and I was not ready to do that yet.

The air smelled wrong.

Not bad. Just absent of everything my room should have contained: dust warmed by the radiator, old paper, the faint detergent from the sweater over my chair. This air had cold in it. Somewhere nearby metal rang once, then again. Voices moved across open space, not through walls.

I looked up.

The square rose around me in pale, thin light. Broad stone stretched away in front of me, broken by dark seams and one shallow place where water had gathered in the night. Beyond it stood the castle.

For several seconds, I could only stare at it.

The walls climbed above the square in the same heavy sweep I had described the night before. Towers cut into the paling sky. The first light caught their upper edges and did not quite reach the lower stone. I knew the angle of the open space. I knew the way the castle had been meant to dominate it. I knew it with the flat certainty of remembering a sentence I had read too many times.

I had seen this place.

No.

I had written something like it.

That was different. It had to be different.

A cart creaked somewhere behind me. A woman in a grey shawl crossed the far side of the square with a basket held against her hip. Two men argued quietly beside a doorway where someone had repaired the stone around the frame with mortar of a different colour. Steam rose from a covered stall near the street, carrying hot fat and bread into the cold.

I had not written the stall.

I had not written the woman. I had not written the patch of darker mortar, or the way one of the arguing men rubbed his thumb across the rim of his cup as though the argument had been waiting for him before I arrived.

The square in my manuscript had contained people. They had worried, shouted, and waited for news because the scene needed them to. These people were not doing any of that. They were simply here.

Someone stopped in front of me.

“Are you hurt?”

The question was close enough that I flinched.

She had crouched a few steps away rather than over me. Sensible. Her cloak was short enough not to drag in the wet stone, and several small pouches hung from the belt beneath it. Long light-brown hair had been gathered into a braid that had started practical and surrendered somewhere along the way. A loose strand had fallen over her cheek. She pushed it behind one ear without taking her eyes off me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

My knee objected to being consulted. I put a hand on it and tried again.

“I mean, probably.”

She considered that answer for exactly as long as it deserved.

“Can you stand?”

“That seems like the next thing to find out.”

She held out a hand. I looked at it, then at her face. She looked young, perhaps my age or a little younger, but there was nothing tentative in the way she had asked. She had already decided that I was either going to stand or need help standing, and both possibilities appeared equally manageable.

I took her hand.

She pulled me up without making a performance of it. When I was upright, the square seemed larger. The castle seemed worse.

“There,” she said. “Any blood?”

“Only the usual amount.”

Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Then you have done this before?”

“Fallen off a chair? Not professionally.”

She glanced past me, apparently looking for the chair in question. There was only open stone.

“Where did you fall from?”

I turned with her.

There was no room. No desk. No book. The thought came with a small, stupid relief. At least I had not dragged my apartment into the middle of whatever this was.

“I don’t know,” I said.

That was the first honest answer I had managed.

The woman looked from me to the castle, perhaps checking whether a guard or a servant might claim responsibility for a confused stranger on the ground.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked.

“No.”

She glanced up at the walls. “Then you are in Asgard. Outside Odin’s castle.”

The name did not arrive dramatically. It simply landed in the space between us.

Asgard.

I looked back at the walls.

The breath I had failed to take when I hit the ground finally came in too fast.

“No,” I said.

She did not look offended. “No?”

“No. I mean, yes. Obviously. You said it.”

“That is usually how names work.”

“I am Gina,” she added. “Since this is becoming a conversation.”

“René.”

She repeated it once, quietly, as though fixing the sound in place. Then she looked toward the side street. “I was going to Frigg’s rooms. I can be late for that if you are about to fall over again. Are you?”

I put both hands over my face for a moment. The cold had reached my fingers. I could feel grit in the lines of my palms.

Asgard. Odin’s castle. The public square below it, lit by the first thin morning light.

Those were facts, or at least the kind of facts a stranger could tell another stranger. They did not explain the missing chair. They did not prove that the castle above me was the castle I had put on paper rather than a place my own words had copied from some other source.

But I had not imagined the arrangement. I had chosen it. I had spent an evening deciding where the towers should sit in relation to the square because a reader needed to feel the castle before anyone said its name.

I looked again, more carefully this time.

The square was not identical to the page. It could not be. My final scene had given it broad stone, a gathering of worried people, pale morning, and the castle above them. It had not supplied the wet seam running through the paving, the smell of breakfast, or the woman on the far side now setting down her basket to argue with the stallholder. It had not supplied the boy leading a dog away from a pile of vegetable peelings.

It had supplied the shape.

Or the shape had been there, and I had somehow described it.

Neither thought helped.

“Are you lost?” Gina asked.

There were probably answers a person gave when they woke up in an unfamiliar city. A name. A road. A village. Someone who would recognize them. I had none that would improve this conversation.

“I was at home,” I said.

“In Asgard?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

I opened my mouth and found that explaining Earth to someone standing beneath Odin’s castle had become difficult in a way it had never been before.

“Midgard,” I said at last.

Her expression changed, though only slightly. Not alarm. Interest, perhaps.

“Midgard is large,” she said. “Where in it?”

“Not anywhere you would know. I was in my room. Sitting at my desk.”

“And then?”

“Then I was here.”

“What happened before that?”

I looked at her.

The question was so ordinary that it took me a second to understand why it helped. I had been trying to decide what impossible thing had taken place. She was asking what I had actually done.

“I was finishing something,” I said.

“Finishing what?”

“A manuscript.”

She waited.

I wished she would stop doing that. My mentor waited like that when he had found the point I was avoiding.

“I read the end again,” I said. “I thought it needed more pressure. So I added a line. Then I marked it finished. I was checking something in the middle and I touched the page. Then the chair was gone.”

“The chair was gone.”

“I know how that sounds.”

“What was the manuscript about?”

The answer stood around us.

I turned slowly toward the castle. The square opened beneath it exactly as it had on the last page, except that it had acquired a hundred things I had never asked it to have. The wet seam in the stone. The stall. The woman in the grey shawl now arguing with the stallholder about something too small to matter to anyone but them.

“A story,” I said.

“About?”

I did not answer.

She followed my gaze. “The castle?”

“Asgard.”

The word felt ridiculous as soon as I said it.

Her eyebrows rose. “You were writing about Asgard.”

“I was writing about an Asgard.” The correction came out before I had decided to make it. “I did not know this one. I have never been here. I had a story.”

“And it ended here.”

“It ended in this square.” I pointed at the ground, then the towers. “Below that castle. The last image was supposed to be this view.”

Gina looked at the castle, then at me. “You know Odin lives there.”

“Yes.”

“Who told you?”

“No one.”

That was not true, but it was closer to the truth than anything I could explain.

I took a step toward the open part of the square and stopped. The stone beneath my boots was rougher than I had imagined it. I had written broad stone. Broad stone had been enough, until it had to hold my weight.

I reconstructed the final page in my head as if it might defend itself. The crowd. The castle. The first light. The argument that had just run out of words. I had given no name to the square because I had not needed one. I had not described the street where Gina had been going or the place Frigg kept her rooms. I had not even decided what someone would sell at a stall before dawn.

But the scene had been here. Not merely near a castle, not merely in a place that might have been Asgard if someone was generous with coincidences. Here.

My mouth had gone dry.

“I think this is the place I wrote,” I said.

Gina did not take a step back. She did not kneel, laugh, or ask whether I had been struck on the head before falling. Her gaze moved over me once, practical and unreadable.

“That is a large conclusion,” she said.

“I am trying.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. “That is what I have been doing.”

“Then keep thinking.” She did not seem offended.

That was almost exactly what my mentor would have said, except he would have been holding a pencil and enjoying himself more.

Gina. I tried the name against every page I could remember. Against the scraps in the folder on my desk. Against the abandoned notes I had never shown anyone. Nothing caught. No Gina had crossed the square. No young woman with a practical braid had appeared in a deleted scene. No one in Frigg’s household had needed to exist for the story I had written.

Yet she stood in front of me with dampness darkening the hem of her cloak, a message waiting somewhere under her arm, and enough impatience to make clear she had been going somewhere before I interrupted her morning.

I had not written Gina.

The fact would not become less strange when repeated, so I did not repeat it.

“You said you were going to Frigg’s rooms,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you work for her?”

“Sometimes.” The loose strand had fallen again. She pushed it back. “Today I am carrying a message. That is generally what carrying one looks like.”

She said it without grandeur. As if Frigg’s household, messages, and an unknown man landing in the square were all merely different things likely to delay the morning.

Behind her, the woman in grey had won whatever argument she had been having and walked away with two wrapped loaves instead of one. The boy and dog disappeared down the road. A guard shifted his spear below the castle gate because his hand was cold.

I had not written any of them either.

The thought led me back to the ending.

No more than a month remained before Ragnarök.

I had added it beneath the square because the scene had been too clean. The castle had looked finished. The people had finished their immediate argument. The morning had promised that the story might close its cover and leave everyone where I had arranged them.

So I had put pressure behind the image. A line. A promise of trouble.

Now the woman with two loaves was going somewhere. The guard was rubbing warmth back into his hand. Gina was late with a message. They had plans for the rest of the morning, and perhaps the next day, and perhaps a month that I had given a shape without knowing what it meant to anyone inside it.

My stomach tightened.

Until then, Ragnarök had been useful. It had been the thing after the ending, the dark edge that made the last page feel as though it opened onto more story instead of stopping because I had run out of paper. I had not pictured a guard with cold hands. I had not pictured someone deciding whether two loaves were worth an argument. I had certainly not pictured Gina trying to deliver a message before the morning got away from her.

None of that proved I had made any of this happen. I did not know what I had done, if I had done anything at all. But the sentence was mine, and it sat in the air above the square with a weight it had never possessed on the page.

“What is it?” Gina asked.

I looked at her. “Ragnarök.”

The word did not strike her as a revelation. It struck her as a word she knew. That was somehow worse.

“What about it?”

“How long?”

“Until it?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a careful look. “If you know a date, you have chosen an odd way to ask for it.”

“I do not know a date. I wrote that there was no more than a month left.”

For the first time, she looked at me as if the ground might be less reliable than she had assumed.

“You wrote that.”

“In the manuscript. Yesterday.” I heard how it sounded and pressed on anyway. “If this is the Asgard I wrote about, then that line applies here. It cannot be more than a month. It might be less.”

She looked toward the castle. This time she did not look as if she expected it to provide an answer.

“I do not know anyone who can tell you that,” she said.

Neither did I. That did not make the sentence go away.

Then something else from the manuscript rose with it, almost too quickly to trust.

I had left a way back.

For one clean second, the square loosened its grip on me. My room appeared in my mind with ridiculous clarity: the desk under the lamp, the charger looped around the glass, the book I owed someone, the chair that had betrayed me by remaining exactly where it belonged. I could go home. I could explain to my mentor that his advice about leaving the manuscript until tomorrow had become unexpectedly important.

The thought was so welcome that I almost smiled.

“There is a way back,” I said.

Gina waited.

“In the story. I made sure there was a book that would take someone back to the place the story began.” I swallowed. “To Midgard. To my home.”

Her attention sharpened. “Where is it?”

“Odin’s treasury.”

The relief lasted just long enough for her to close her eyes.

“That is inside the castle,” I said.

“I had noticed.” She opened them. “And it is Odin’s treasury.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because an unknown man who fell into the square and says he has a book inside it is not how people are admitted to Odin’s treasury.”

“I wrote it.”

“You say you wrote it.” Her tone was not cruel. It was simply exact. “At the moment, I have no way to tell whether that makes you its owner, its thief, or a man who needs to sit down before he falls again.”

I had no answer to that.

She looked toward the castle. Guards stood at the broad approach below the main gate, small from where we were and unmistakably present. I had not written their faces. I had not written the way one of them shifted his spear to scratch the side of his boot.

“I know where the treasury is,” Gina said. “I know who keeps its doors and what they do when someone asks questions about it. I cannot take you in because you say you belong somewhere else.”

The hope went away more slowly than it had arrived. It left behind a more useful problem, which was not the same thing as a better one.

“Then I need to get into the treasury,” I said.

Gina frowned. “But you got here without it.”

“Yes.”

“Then go back the same way you came.”

I stared at her. “I was sitting in my room.”

“What did you do just before you came here?”

I looked at my hands.

Ink still marked the side of my right thumb. A thin crescent near the nail. I had not noticed it until then.

“Paper,” I said.

Gina waited.

“I was writing. I finished writing, and I touched the page. That was all.”

“Can you do that again?”

She meant the things I had just listed. She did not know which of them mattered; neither did I. But I had been sitting at my desk, and then I had been standing in this square. Between those facts had been the manuscript, the last line, my mark, and the page under my hand.

There had been no boat. No bridge. No ordinary journey at all.

The manuscript was still on Earth. It had to be. The desk and chair had not come with me. Somewhere under my lamp, my mark sat in the lower margin of the last page, and I could not reach it.

Unless the manuscript had been part of what brought me here.

The thought was not a plan. It was barely a sentence. It required paper, ink, and another finished story. I knew how to begin that much. I had just done it. But the first manuscript had grown over months of pages, corrections, and arguments with myself. I did not know whether repeating any part of it would work. I did know that I could not make months appear because I needed them.

The square was waking around us. A shutter opened above the road. The castle held the first light on its walls, exactly as I had wanted it to, and nothing about that made it less frightening.

The first manuscript had taken me months.

The sentence I had added said this world had no more than one.