Asgard by Fynn F Gunnarson

Author:Fynn F Gunnarson [Gunnarson, Fynn F]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Wolf Slayer

Gullinkambi’s raucous tones sounded loudly and clearly as dawn arrived in Valhalla; they were welcomed by absolutely nobody. Each morning, Valhalla’s fastidious rooster crowed his wake-up call for all to hear and, under different circumstances, the residents might have considered the distinctive reveille as something of a service: informing them that the time had come to rise, face the day head-on and set promptly about their allotted tasks, such as battlefield training and weaponry classes, with vim and vigour.

Unfortunately, circumstances on Valhalla mornings never usually varied: each morning, everybody in the great hall woke with a hangover to end all hangovers. Each member of Valhalla’s elite band of warriors could happily have strangled the life out of Gullinkambi in mid-crow, if the wily old bird had not known better than to position himself at a safe distance from those he brought back to reluctant consciousness.

This particular morning in Valhalla was slightly different from all other mornings in Valhalla, however, in that the great hall was home to two guests who would not, normally, have been present: a human warrior and his Light Elf maiden bride-to-be, neither of whom had had to undergo the usual entry requirement of being killed honourably. At that precise moment, however, Sharp Axe might have been forgiven for thinking he was in the process of suffering a horrible, painful and lingering death.

‘W… where… am I?’ he groaned, groggily and with bleary eyes, having just been rudely wrenched from his sleep by an unworldly noise, the like of which he had never heard before and which, with all his heart, he hoped he would never have to hear again. Sharp Axe’s head had been supported throughout the night by his left arm which, as a result of being trapped between head and table surface, had lost all feeling. As he attempted to massage the numbness out of it, Mithrén, who had fallen asleep next to Sharp Axe in a similar and equally-uncomfortable fashion, raised her head, squinted in the general direction of her intended, moaned as she became aware of a pulsating headache and a numbness in her own arm and, finally, lowered her forehead onto the table surface, muttering something in a language which Sharp Axe did not recognise. He thought, inasmuch as he could think at all, that what he had heard had probably been a series of carefully-selected, appropriate ancient curses, in a near-forgotten Elvish tongue and, if Sharp Axe had been in the right frame of mind to ask Mithrén about it and she had been al all inclined to answer, he would have been delighted to find that his theory had been correct.

The next voice of which Sharp Axe became aware was his grandfather’s: more comprehensible but equally unwelcome. Knut was suffering much like his grandson but, by now, was well-used to Valhalla hangovers.

‘Good morning!’ he bawled at his visitors and thumped the table forcefully for good measure, which caused Mithrén’s head to bounce upwards off its surface and fall back onto it, with a rather painful-sounding thud.

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