Chapter Text
“[Odin] represents a totality on a very primitive level, a psychological condition in which man’s will was almost identical with the god’s and entirely at his mercy.”
– Carl Jung, tr. Hull (summarising Martin Ninck’s Wodan und germanischer Schicksalsglaube)
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It is in very late November that he finds himself with the boldness to venture inside.
The nights are so long that the blackness under the earth seems less radical. The wind is so cold that any shelter, even the icy roots of the earth, will seem warm.
He isn’t afraid of the salty black water, and he doesn’t much care if he dies in the cave either, but he prepares for the journey into the dark in much the same way as he might prepare for battle. He is hungry and exhausted, and he has little hope of seeing another man again.
He has so little to fill his short days and long nights that sometimes it feels as though he is losing the ability to think or see. Perhaps where his eyes once were he has only two tiny pools of black liquid: how would he know, with no one to look at him? Before he finally convinces himself that he is dead already, and has been dead for years, he needs to go to the last new place he has left.
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It is easy to reach the cave mouth from the place in which he has his camp, on the southern end of the island. He needs to swim, so he is wearing only his white tunic and trousers. He carries a knife, although it’s unlikely to be of much use to him down there.
At the end of the cliff path, he jumps into the water without a moment’s thought. The water is shockingly cold: his chest seizes up, and he can’t draw breath. It’s worse than he thought it would be: real gnawing panic seizes him.
Moving more to forestall his death than with any hope of escape, he strikes out, and after a long moment of despair, he bangs his head on a low-jutting arc of rock. In his eagerness to avoid the same mistake, he kicks himself lower and then, abruptly, realises that the cave is narrowing towards an opening under the surface of the water. He dives underneath and follows a short dreadful tunnel of pitch black, a passage full to the brim with seawater, even at this lowest of tides. It narrows again and again, and he hurts his ribs pulling his body through the irregular stone passageway. Suddenly, at the point that he had decided to turn back, he reaches the end of the tunnel, and, at the level of the stone floor, a featureless platform. Fearing, senselessly, even closer to death than he had a moment before, he stuck out his hand and found that the flat rock turned sharply upright, before reaching another plateau, then a few inches more of vertical wall before another flatness could be felt, and- steps. Normal, evenly-hewn stairs. By the fourth step, the roof of the cave opened up. Still blind, aching for breath, he pulled himself upwards. Slipping badly, he struggled once more, and then, half-faint, broke the surface of the water, and gasped in the dead but clear air of this weird chamber.
The change from water to air upsets him, turns his stomach, and he throws up, or tries to, several times. A rivulet of salt water leaves his mouth, but nothing else. His coughs don't seem to echo anywhere, they just get swallowed by the mouth of the cave.
He had the odd feeling that it was not perfectly dark: too black to see any features of the cave, too black to see his hand in front of his face, even flashing the blade of his knife, but less than pitch black. But there couldn't be any light down here, he knew that for sure.
Feeling around him for danger, useless knife in hand, he gathered himself, walked along the perfectly flat stone floor of the cavern, ever-further into the body of the island.
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It must have been nearly an hour of walking, crawling, and occasionally climbing, never noticing any branch in the path, before he happened across something strange. He thought he had stepped in sand. Pawing with his hands on the floor, he realised that it was ashes, long long cold but with the smell of smoke still lingering. Someone else - several someones? - had been here once, maybe many years ago, and lit a fire. He felt around the whole passageway near the ashes but found no other trace of them. He could no longer think straight. This made no sense to him, these relics of life lived in this terrible place. He became more and more conscious of the weight of the earth above his head, threatening at any moment to shift just a little and crush him into the ashes along with whatever had been burnt or eaten by those - men or gods or animals - which had dwelt here before him.
He was exhausted. He lay down, and stayed there in the dark for a long time with no mind to leave. The darkness felt primordial and eternal, just as it had felt as he laid on the glacial rocky shore in the other land.
He brings the knife to his forearm and makes a tiny knick, and licks the blood, just for the sensation of warmth, but he can hardly taste it.
The depth of the cold is sinister, physical, and he has a sensation he never remembers having before, something which probably belonged only to childhood: the feeling that his body was indeed soft and destructible. His mind is a fading spark and he can count the sensations of his body: numb back from the icy floor; bitter hunger permeating his whole frame, the faintest taste of salt in his throat, and then, close but almost unimportantly, he feels the hands of God all around him. and God’s hands on his body, all over. A crushing weight comes to bear on his forehead and his head hits the floor, and his mouth slackens.