This is where Yours Truly comes in. Time to pay attention. Till then I’d existed in Chaos, of course, in the world of Pandaemonium. Chaos, the pure; Chaos, the wild; Chaos, the unpolluted. Ruled by Disorder in its primary Aspect in the form of Lord Surt, the Destroyer; Father of glam; Master of Change; the original wellspring of the Fire. The Vanir were only bastard Firefolk, living off the scraps of glam that fell from Lord Surt’s table. But I was Wildfire incarnate; a true son of Chaos; happy and free.

Well, maybe not entirely free. Or even entirely happy. Lord Surt was a jealous master; pitiless; all-consuming. There was no reasoning with Surt; he was, by nature, unreasonable. You might as well try reasoning with an erupting volcano, or a thunderstorm, or the pox. And we were formless, innocent, hostile to everything that lay beyond the borders of our world, and that was how Surt meant us to stay; perfect Chaos, unfettered by form, blissfully free of all the rules of god, mankind or physics.

I, on the other hand, was perverse. It was, after all, my nature. And I was curious to know more about the other Worlds that lay beyond our boundaries; Worlds in which Order and Chaos met and sometimes co-existed; where creatures kept to the same shape, and lived and died without tasting the Fire.

Of course I’d already heard of the gods. The warring parties – well, most of them – had put aside their differences, and the survivors of that war – twenty-four Aesir and Vanir in all – were living together in Asgard. It wasn’t an easy alliance. Some of the Vanir had refused to accept Odin as their General, and had broken away to join forces with Gullveig in the Northlands. Others allied themselves with the Rock Folk, some buried themselves in World Below, some fled to the forests of Inland and hid away in animal form. Thus were the old runes scattered and lost; divided between our enemies, bastardized and gone to seed like grain reverting to wild stock.

Of course, in time this bastardization had its effects in Chaos. Runes have their primal source in the Fire, and every time Aesir or Vanir used a piece of their stolen glam, every time they shifted Aspect or cast a rune at an enemy, every time they dipped a toe into the river Dream, or wrote down a story, or even carved their name into the trunk of a fallen tree, Chaos shivered in outrage and I grew increasingly curious. Who were these people, whose influence I could feel across the Worlds? How was it that I could sense them, and did they even know I was there?