Not your average undead warrior: This is how I imagine the awakening of Loki.  (Picture from the entirely unrelated anime HSD Kenichi.)

Instead of words of timeless wisdom, here’s a page of fantasy drivel. It is something I could write for NaNoWriMo, if I am still around and able to write by then.

The setting for this story is Norway sometime around our age. To teenage cousins, a boy and a girl, are contacted by an elf. The elf is not quite what they expected, even apart from being real. Almost real, at least. It can disappear, passes through things, and appear again on the other side. The reason for this, the elf tells them, is that it comes from another dimension: The world of Yggdrasil.

It turns out that the world described in the Norse mythology was actually real, just not in our reality. It is somewhat unclear whether it always existed, or was brought into being by the power of the collective imagination and belief of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. Anyway, it is in trouble. The gods have left.

It appeared that Loki, the trickster god, had a change of heart eventually. He asked the gods to free him from his chains just once so that he could undo his life’s greatest mistake, his sons Fenrir the Wolf and Jörmungand, the Midgard Serpent, the monster which encircles the world and is fated to kill Thor during Ragnarök, the end of the world. Without its mightiest defender, the gods will not be able to overcome their enemies, led by just Loki, and the world will be destroyed and reborn. So say the sagas. But according to our elf visitor, Loki was freed but put under strong guard as he went to do battle against his own sons. In the ensuing fight, Loki was killed, but not before killing Fenrir and mortally wounding the serpent. A fitting end for the great oath-breaker.

With the greatest enemies of the gods dead, the Aesir and Vanir pressed their advantage, bullying Hel (Loki’s daughter and ruler of the shades of the dead) to give up Baldur, who (according to the gods at least) did not rightly belong there.  Baldur, the god of heroism and purity, went to Muspellheim to negotiate with Surtr, king of the Fire Giants, who was slated to set the world on fire at the end of days.  Impressed with Baldur’s personality and earnestness, Surtr swore by his sword to not destroy the world and to keep the Giants away from Midgard – the world of men – in exchange for the gods also leaving Midgard alone forever.

This done, and the future secured, the gods decided to leave the dimension and ascend, leaving the lesser races to rule themselves.  On the completion of their ritual, every one of the old gods disappeared, their grand halls empty and gathering dust.

It was all a Nemesis plot.

Loki had prepared a spell of soul exchange, a spell not known by the gods, and had, a heartbeat before his death, changed souls with one of the hindmost of the Einherjar (immortal soldiers) who guarded him.  These inhabitants of Valhall were not part of the ascension, and over time they became bored.  Restless immortal armies are not a good thing, especially when one among them is always spreading rumors, making them dissatisfied with their lot and feeling betrayed and abandoned.  Loki, still under his other name, eventually became their leader, and under his masterful strategies they conquered the other worlds and set up a military dictatorship encompassing almost all of the Nine Worlds of Yggdrasil.  Only then did Loki reveal his true identity, and is now ruling with an iron fist.

Some of the Einherjar serve Loki gladly, enjoying their power to dominate others and take what they want. Others serve him out of fear. There is an underground resistance, and parts of Utgard are nominally free, being old allies of Loki. Vidblainn, the holy refuge of the Light Elves, is still untainted, but none but the purest souls can enter there. Surtr still holds the Sword of Fire, and is the only being Loki still treats with respect.  As Loki plots the invasion of Earth, Surt likewise ponders whether to destroy our world rather than let it fall into Loki’s hands.

This is where our heroes come in. Descendants of the Norse gods through the ancient kings, the bloodlines have diverged and converged innumerable times over the centuries, but by the strange weaving of the Norns (Fates), the old blood has gradually concentrated until in these two it is almost back to its full strength. Frode and Fröydis are, in short, the last heirs of the Aesir and Vanir.

The Elven resistance has cobbled together a spell that lets them travel to Alfheim, home of the Light Elves. From there, it is up to them to travel the Nine Worlds and rally the races as the rightful rulers of the land, to throw off the usurper and make peace with Surtr before it is too late, before Earth along with the worlds of Yggdrasil is thrown into Ragnarök.

Hey, that’s 803 words just describing the basic premise.  Should not be too hard to get to 50 000. And if I should fall short, it would be easy to add some youthful lust … eh, teenage romance.

Actually, this may be my excuse to write a NaNo in my mother tongue, New Norwegian. It is not like people outside Scandinavia know about the Aesir, the Jotnar or Yggdrasil after all.

NaNoWriMo also has that effect on some people.

Yes, only a few weeks till November, or NaNoWriMo as some of us calls it. National (more like International these days) Novel Writing Month.  The forums are heating up, the various participants are blogging, and planning and plotting are done by the kind of people who do those things.

Correspondingly, it becomes harder to not start writing already on all of the ideas that pop up, and they do pop up pretty frequently as the time draws close. I don’t know what I am going to write about if I’m still around and capable of writing in November (which I sincerely hope). I have said half in jest that my NaNoWriMo story will be the one that has survived unwritten through October.

In other words, October is Non-Writing Month, thus today’s headline.

I have already started on a couple stories that might have been expandable to short books.

“Sucks to be a succubus” – about two teenage boys in the magical world of Arcanus who try to summon a succubus (female sexual demon). Because they gets one of the magical words wrong, they end up summoning the soul of a dying teen boy from Earth into the excessively sexy female body. Chaos ensues.  Pro: I already have a lot of worldbuilding for Arcanus and Myrror, for an earlier NaNoWriMo story that annihilated itself and its backups (which were on the same disk, for convenience). Con: A month with a succubus. -_-;

Crystalight: A world with superheroes but no supervillains, because superpowers come from attuning to the mystic light of the Crystals in the half-ethereal Overworld, and only young teenagers of good reputation are allowed to enter the Academy built around the Crystals. So nothing can go wrong… or can it? Pro: I’ve written Magic School stories since long, long before Harry Potter saw the light of day. Con: Not enough content for a month. I would have to contrive a lot.

Still unwritten:

“Return to Niniveh”: A young man start hearing voices telling him that he is the reincarnation of the prophet Jonah. El, king of the gods, needs his services again: As the only known prophet to convert a large city, he is El’s last best hope to avert the end of the current era. “Don’t make me come down there!” Pro: Psychological angle. Is he really the prophet reborn, or just crazy? Con: Potential blasphemy, and lots of it.

“Mirror world”: One day there is a girl in the large bathroom mirror. This would not have been uncommon except the one in front of it is a boy. The girl is his counterpart in the Mirror World, and he gets over to the other side to help her investigate a mystery.  Mirror World borders on many different worlds, most of them magical worlds strikingly different from ours. Pro: With unlimited worlds, it should be easy to get to 50 000 words in a month. Con: No plot, no point, no message.

Or I could reboot some older story, in which case there are too many to even list by name.  I have been writing since I was little, after all.  I wonder if I will stop before my body gives out.

I cannot remember for sure whether I have written about this before, but I think maybe not. I wrote a couple short stories – well, one short story and one longer that I did not complete, as usual – set in this imaginary world.  But now I can’t find them, so it is probably some time ago.

The meta-setting of this imaginary universe is the planet I originally called Splendor. I will have to change that if I get back to it, because I later found an actual science fiction novel centered on a planet with that name. I am not sure what to use instead though.  It is a splendid place indeed.

The Splendorians – or Splendiferous as I said back then – are basically humans but larger than life.  This is partly literal:  They are about a third taller than humans, with a similar but slightly more slender build, but their heads are proportionally larger than ours. Not ridiculously so, but they could be told apart from humans at a glance by their more bulbous heads.  A young Splendorian is similar to a human, but they outgrow it, physically and not least mentally.

The Splendiferous technology is indistinguishable from magic. Automatons perform all menial tasks, and almost all adults spend almost all their time creating imaginary worlds and visiting the imaginary worlds of others. These worlds are made in a kind of virtual reality that is far, far ahead of ours. They are basically to our “sim” games what a spacecraft is to a stone-age log raft.

The visitor may personally immerse himself or herself in the imaginary world, or observe it through the experiences of one or more characters.

So basically it is a meta-narrative to construct multiple fantasy worlds that may be tied together, and that can incorporate religious or other elements that might be offensive if pretended to be real. Most notably polytheism, which is actually perfectly natural in worlds that accommodate several “players”. The actual visitors from Splendor would be the gods, or at least the main gods, organizing their own religions complete with different types of afterlives, blessings, curses etc. Of course, these would have to be on a comparable power level.

For instance, a “god” might offer his followers rapid reincarnation, retaining parts of their memories and skills. Your simulated person would still start as a helpless baby, but over the course of growing up would gradually remember their previous life, until as adults they got back 90% of their old memories. However, the other 10% would be gone forever.  The retrieved memories would include 90% of 90% of their second-last life and so on, so over the course of a few reincarnations their past would gradually fog out and be lost, and it would be completely random which parts were lost.

Another “god” might offer his followers various goodies in this life, like health and prosperity, but at the cost of complete loss of the soul at death.  And none of his blessings would be waterproof: No matter your health and youth, you could still be killed in a freak accident or by a dedicated enemy.  Still, it would appeal to impatient people.

A third “goddess” might offer people a very long (but not eternal) afterlife in a paradise, in exchange for following certain precepts in this life.  Of course, it would be kind of harder to convince people of this than the other two, so an annual holiday might be arranged to let the living and the dead meet up to inform each other of what they had done since last.

The “sims” of these imaginary worlds would have an artificially intelligence roughly similar to an Earth human, so would be the ones the readers of the stories would be likely to identify with.

Back on the “real” world of Splendor (by any name…) I had a rough outline of their culture.  Basically names are earned rather than just randomly given or taken.  You start with a short name made from a combination of the stem names of your parents.  (It is assumed that parentage is always known.  Splendorian lifespan is measured in millennia rather than decades, so they breed rarely.  In effect, every child is an only child, as their brother or sister may be a thousand years older or younger. Or at least 500, which is the time it takes to grow up.) Once you are old enough to choose a line of study, you would get your next syllable in your name, denoting your specialization. As an adult, you would earn more syllables through your work, which for the vast majority would be the creation of worlds.  An avid reviewer of other people’s worlds would also be able to earn syllables that way, and a few people by maintaining and improving technology in the “real” world.  But for the most part world creation would be your way to fame and a long name.  Each syllable would represent a certain type of accomplishment, kind of like a badge.

I would not be surprised if someone had come up with this already. That is how it often is.  Either before me, or in the time between my inventing it and telling the world of it.  And they probably did it better.  I still have two old stories, one on paper and one on a floppy, about teen boys who each study at a magical school in a stone castle but are called on by circumstance to save the world.  But frankly, Rowling did it better.  And that says something, given that I only read the first couple Harry Potter books before I got fed up…

So, giving these ideas away for free, it is probably approximately what they are worth!

I thank you all in advance for your sympathy. ^_^

I mounted the external diskette drive today, for the first time since I moved. I found out a couple things.

One, I definitely wrote better fiction in New Norwegian than in English. The humor, the drama, the terse expressions at critical moments: All of them are stronger in my native language.

Two: In 1993, my hope for Supergirl was that she would love knowledge for its own sake like I did.  I am not sure whether that hope has been fulfilled or not. Well, it is out of my hands for sure.

Three: The most important fiction I have ever written, important for myself at least, was on a floppy that happened to lie in the old bag that I threw away the day I moved. There is no backup. It is probably fairly deep in the landfill by now.