Collateral damage, I fear. It’s very hard not to step on the ants when you’re fighting a war on an anthill. And then, when darkness came . . . well. Winter did the rest. A winter that lasted a hundred years, or so said the new historians – bringing new gods for a New Age of Order and enlightenment.

But I’m getting ahead of my tale. The Worlds as we knew them were at an end. Still, the Worlds have ended before, many times, and been remade. Nothing lasts. History spins its yarn, breaks threads, spins again, like a child’s top, going back to the beginning. The Oracle knew that. That’s what those last stanzas mean; a new world, rising from the ruins of the old. Of course, there was no chance of us ever getting to see it. Our time was done; the Oracle had made that very clear. And yet . . .

On what was once the battlefield
A New Age dawns. Its children
Find the golden game-boards
Of bright Asgard, the fallen.

See what the Oracle did there? That’s what we call a teaser. A lure, thrown out at the end of a tale suggesting a continuation.

I wasn’t about to argue with that. My story needed a sequel. Preferably a sequel in which I rose from the dead, regained my glam, saved the Worlds, rebuilt Asgard and was generally welcomed by all as a hero and a conqueror. A little far-fetched, I knew that. But in this ocean of mangled dreams, what else was there to do but cling to even the smallest of straws?

New runes will come to Odin’s heirs,
New harvests will be gathered.
The fallen will come home. The child
Will liberate the father.

New runes? New harvests? The fallen, returned? That interested me strangely. Mimir was bound to tell the truth, though not always in the clearest of language. It struck me that if he had really wanted to enlighten us when he first made the prophecy, he wouldn’t have chosen verse as his medium. Perhaps, I thought, there was something hidden in the text of the prophecy that Mimir didn’t want us to know. If there was as much as the tiniest chance . . .

Hope, that cruellest of sensations, bringing release in the midst of pain, only to snatch it away again just as the sufferer dares to believe. How I hated it. And yet, I kept what little faith I could. I’ve always been an optimist. And those last stanzas spoke to me with a special intensity.