I walked back home, released from my oath, but feeling slightly guilty. Idun was the one person in Asgard who had never done a thing to me, and who’d been kind when I was hurt. Still, I’d sworn a binding oath, a real one, on my true name, and no one reneges on a binding oath without some radical consequences. I’d had no choice, I told myself – besides, the sliver of apple that she’d given me would last a while, at least until the other gods started to notice her absence . . .

It didn’t take long. The apples of youth, like all cosmetics, work on a cumulative principle. Meaning: once you stop, you drop. And that’s what happened in Asgard. Before you could say an apple a day, everyone was the worse for wear. Even Golden Boy, Balder the Fair, started to look distinctly less than glamorous. As for the others – well, you can imagine. Wrinkles, hair loss, middle-aged spread, incontinence, forgetfulness, piles . . . you name it – and that was just the goddesses. Except for Your Humble Narrator, of course, which meant that sooner or later they would put two and two together.

That was all right. That was my plan. Another little revenge – this time, hitting the gods where it hurt them the most, right at the heart of their vanity. And the beauty of it was that I would be the one to save the day – because when Asgard fell, I promised myself, it wouldn’t be at the hands of some hairy warlord from the hills, but in style, and with maximum effect, and with Yours Truly holding the whip. I wasn’t about to hand my revenge to someone like Thiassi; a renegade whose ambition extended to nothing more than sitting in Odin’s high seat and assuming the name of Allfather. No, if I was ever to regain my place in Chaos (an almost impossible dream, to which I turned in my darkest moments), I would have to do something spectacular. Nothing short of the total destruction of Order would satisfy Chaos. That meant Asgard; the gods; the Worlds. And even then, it might not be enough . . .

Eventually, they figured it out. Heimdall, whose eyesight had dimmed perceptibly since his supply of fruit was cut off, remembered seeing me coming back over the Bridge furtively a few weeks before. The rest of the gods searched their memories and concluded that this was the last day that anyone had seen Idun. And so they found me and dragged me in front of the Old Man, who was looking older than ever by then, white-haired and craggy-faced, and prepared to do very bad things to me.

‘Is this true?’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘What does it matter?’ said Heimdall. ‘Let’s just kill him now, before we all forget why we brought him here.’