"In the beginning were the stories. Before the gods, before the worlds, before the light and the dark divided — there were stories. And the stories needed someone to carry them."
— Astrid of the Fjord Village, Asgard Strand — Year Unknown
The compass was in a box marked BOOKS, which was the first lie Eli Vance's grandfather had ever told him.
The second was more complicated, and Eli wouldn't understand it for several months yet, by which point he would be standing on the shore of a Norse fjord with a sea serpent the size of a subway train bearing down on him and a rather sarcastic fox telling him, in a tone of absolute calm, that he should probably run.
But that comes later.
For now, Eli was twelve years old, it was a Saturday in October, and the storage unit smelled like old newspaper and the particular kind of dust that forms when nothing has been touched for a very long time. Unit 14C. The manager had been odd about it — had stared at Eli's paperwork for too long before nodding and handing over the key, and had said, barely audible, something that sounded like "finally" before retreating behind her desk. Eli had decided not to think too hard about this.
He was good at deciding not to think too hard about things. It was a skill he'd been developing since starting seventh grade, where thinking too hard got you shoved into things.
The unit was full. His grandfather — Patrick Vance, dead eleven months, collector of objects and secrets in apparently equal measure — had accumulated a remarkable quantity of both over his seventy-four years. There were stacks of books in actual languages Eli recognised (Greek, Latin, what looked like Sumerian) and several he didn't. There were maps, hand-drawn on paper and animal hide, pinned carefully to boards and rolled into tubes. There were compasses — four of them, ordinary, pointing north — and there was, in a shoebox underneath a stack of Norse mythology volumes, one compass that was not ordinary at all.
Eli picked it up because it was warm.
Not warm like it had been sitting in a heated room. Warm like something alive. Warm the way a hand is warm when it's just let go of yours — residual, intimate, impossible to fake.
It was brass, roughly the size of his palm, with an obsidian face and a ring of eight symbols instead of cardinal directions. The symbols rotated slowly when he held it — not mechanically, not clicking from position to position, but smoothly, like they were considering something. The needle was split: one half dipped toward crimson red, one half edged toward pale gold. Both were pointing at him.
✦ ✦ ✦
He should have put it down.
This is something Eli has considered, in the time since. He has constructed many alternate versions of that Saturday morning in which he sets the compass back in its shoebox, tapes the lid down, and goes back to his ordinary life of library books and being shoved into things. In all of these alternate versions, he feels a profound and specific relief, the way you feel when you realise you've narrowly missed a bus that would have been the wrong one anyway.
He did not put it down.
He turned it over. On the inner ring — visible only when you held it at a certain angle to the light — there was an inscription in a script he didn't recognise. Not any of the scripts from his grandfather's books. Not any script he'd ever seen. The characters were angular and fluid at the same time, which shouldn't have been possible, but there they were.
The compass pulsed once. Gold, warm, steady, like a heartbeat.
And then the storage unit was not there anymore.
✦ ✦ ✦
What replaced it — what Eli stepped sideways into, or what stepped sideways around him, or what happened (he has tried several phrasings and none of them are quite right) — was something that looked like a tear in an old photograph.
The air bent. That was the best he could describe it, later, in his journal. The air bent, the way heat shimmer bends the road in summer, except instead of road you could see through it to somewhere else entirely. Blue-grey water. Pine trees. Cliffs. Two moons in a wrong sky.
Eli had read extensively about dimensional travel in mythology texts, three fantasy novel series, and two academic papers of questionable provenance he'd found online at midnight. He had opinions about it. He had highlighted passages. He had, in the margin of one particularly interesting chapter, written: 'mechanism unclear but compelling.'
He had not prepared for the cold.
Or the mud.
Or the sound, which was the sound of something very large moving through very deep water, very close.
TO BE CONTINUED...