Odin's End

• Jacob Smith, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2010

The universe shook, silently, brightly, with the march of the gods. Those immense beings in celestial parade, blue and gold against the inky void moved with purpose towards something. Against the dark of the untold volumes of space there pushed a great something – a subtle pulsation, a trembling of the very bounds of existence which intensified with each colossal step each figure took, stepping on nothing. Coming ever closer and closer, the ranks of the immortal thinned as the weak fled, fading into the dark before the nameless adversity of the dark. As those remaining, shining in stubborn splendour, reached the threshold, limbs were raised; they felt the dark energies of dimensions unseen, and, in unison, began to grasp at the space before them like terrible, tall blind men. However, it was not as the aimless thrashings of the afflicted that these gods worked their arts; from their hands, great darknesses rose and made combat with equally great canvasses of furious blinding energies, sparking and coruscating against one another as they strove to make themselves seen in the space allowed to them before their makers, the gods. Each brightness shiningly shattered into a maelstrom of tiny points, gathering around their largest brothers; each darkness pulled, and was repelled by their brothers, mostly far from the lights, some collecting the new stars, pulling them ‘round in spiralling galaxy.

It was the greatest, most deft deity who noticed first that the great pulsating source had still much force left over. Billowing forward, encroaching upon the new clusters of matter as an alien cloud of phantasmic force, it threw chaos into the mix of all things. Tearing, the unwoven force jealously consumed the new universe, leaving red swathes of spent and deadened atoms behind as it rent the very stuff of stuff into pieces. The most terrible God bellowed - ‘twas a sound of tumultuous anger and rage, echoing ‘round and ‘round the cosmos in roaring audition. He and his brothers the Greater Ones brought their arms and hands together in a mighty clap; the stars closest burst in stunning and loud display, but were drowned by the coming fury of their fathers. The traitorous darkness took offence; rearing up to meet the near-infinitely spanned gods, they came tearing together with such ferocity and rabidity that all else dimmed in reverence to the unnatural battling of energy and deity. The gods waned against unrelenting strikes from their enemy, and at one last sounding of their raging cry, nigh spoiling the folds of reality, threw themselves in stunning sacrifice upon the uncontrolled dark energies, hiding them forever. All was quiet as stars and space recovered.
Those Lesser Ones, weak and inept in the arts of Creation, crept into the plane, cautiously, and chose the closest cluster of radiant points as their playground.
We are the ants in that playground; we suffer the prods of the demigods. We are humankind, and have an uncertain future, relying upon the musings of excluded and pathetic deities.