The End of the world is not the Ragnarök

By Mark Hayes on September 20, 2024

I write stories, you may be aware of this... Some stories are written for specific projects, others just begin because I am throwing words at a page and seeing what happens, and some stories are written because they want to be. Sometimes all three.

Quite a while back now, I was asked to write a story for a forth coming anthology of stories. The brief for which was Tales of the Post Apocalypse. As is my want, I began by more or less ignoring the brief, in order to find the story I wanted to tell. The first attempted involved a world over run by werewolves, which was a some what hairy apocalypse. But while I liked the seed of the idea it did not grow. So I started over. This is not unusual, I often do this, many a tale never gets past a few hundred words. But conversely some that start out as nothing more than a half idea of an interesting scene can grow beyond all measure. Sometimes a seed needs a few years to germinate.

This is why I always keep the seeds, the scraps of stories...

For the anthology I found a lot of seeds but none of them were the right seed and when the deadline approached I was still scratching around in the wasteland for a seed that would grow. Mostly I was trying to approach the brief from different angles. This went on a while, in fact I missed the deadline, and the second deadline, and almost missed the 'okay this is defiantly the final dead line it goes to the printers on Monday' So in desperation I wrote a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world. Almost annoyingly that last attempt with a simple premises work out rather well. It ended up being a story about something I had wanted to write for a long time, deeply personal in a somewhat oblique way, and a 'perfect' counterpoint, in my opinion at least, to the many other great stories in the anthology written by other writers.

That last part if often my goal in any anthology, which is something of a conceit. The degree to which the story, 'The Tawny Eyes of Caroline' is a 'perfect' counterpoints other stories in the anthology is debatable, but I think this one in particular works well in that regard. Which is my excuse for it taking so long to write...

In any regard, one of the scraps I wrote for this project that I rejected was a interesting idea that morphed into something of a prose poem. A poem about another man at the end of the world, sitting in a cave in this case rather than walking up a hill. It was however the wrong kind of apocalypse... Or to be more exact the idea was to start within one apocalypse myth and move through others.

That is not how it worked out, it wanted to stay where it started and the idea I had for it wasn't going to work, in part because it was far too ambitious for the purposes of the anthology (I wrote out a 'plan' in note form and realised that if I took this where I wanted to then this was a novella length idea, and novella length prose poems are so 1700's... I did however enjoy writing the piece, and while it is far from complete, its is more stylistic than a tale right now, I still liked the results.

So anyway, here is the most complete excerpt of the prose poem, that isn't going to be in the forth coming Harvey Duckman anthology of post Apocalypse tales 'Death +70' and was instead replaced by a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world.

This may be called 'fimbulwinter' but I really couldn't say.

She utters honeyed words of violence to sooth the savage that waits within the child that whimpers at her breast
I hear her words, but they mean as nothing. Utterances of the lost, spoken to the raging of the darkness in her mind
The madness has taken her, as it has taken so many. Only the child that whimpers at her breast hold her in check.
A thread of sanity, waiting to be snapped
They huddle behind me in the darkness of the cave around the fire that gives out only the memory of heat
Heat has left the world, the fimbulwinter is upon us. The serpent stirs the black waters of the ocean
Fenris prowls the even night, his children howl in the dark hunting
hunting us.
I sit cross legged at the entrance of the cave and stare off into the darkness
My axe is cold, frost crisscross's the handle and the fingers that hold it, but the blade is sharp still and blood still flows in he that would wield it.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

She utters honeyed words of violence. I hear them not as words but liken to the hiss of the serpent, the hiss of madness
She utters honeyed words of violence and the child whimpers at her breast and I sit, the ache in the small of my back grown the longer I remain still. The ache in the small of my back reminding me I am alive, despite the ice that forms upon my beard.
Ice forms in my tears, blurring my eyes. The fimberlwinter is upon us. The serpent stirs the black waters of the ocean
Fenris prowls the even night, his children howl in the dark hunting
hunting us.
I sit cross legged at the entrance of the cave and stare off into the darkness
My axe is cold, frost crisscross's the handle and the fingers that hold it, but the blade is sharp still and blood still flows in he that would wield it.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

I found them on the road. Lost in the twilight of the world, lit by neither moon nor star, only the fading afterglow of the falling world.
I should have left them there. The woman and the child at her breast. I should have left them to the darkness and the howling of wolves.
Had I left them they would be dead. Lost to the Ragnarök. A feast for Fenris, bones to be picked by ravens, haunted things, ghosts unto the world.
Had I left them it would have been a kindness. A quick death, bereft of suffering. But I am selfish, I would not be alone in the ever dark
My axe is cold in my hands, my finger bitten by the frost, but blood still flows, and the heat of my anger sustains me.
Beyond the cave mouth fires burn upon the waters and the serpent moves through the waves. The monstrous children of Loki do their fathers bidding, and my breath freezers in the air.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

The anthology this tale will not be appearing is as I said, called ' Death +70' it is the latest Harvey Duckman anthology and is rather good,

It features disturbing, thought-provoking, darkly funny and entertaining short stories from Kate Baucherel, Jenna Warren, Nimue Brown, Lee Arrowsmith, Ben Sawyer-Walpole, Robin Blasberg, Ross Young Sarah Spence, Melissa Rose Rogers, Anna Atkinson-Dunn, Keith Errington, CK Roebuck, Tamara Clelford, R Bruce Connelly, Nyki Blatchley, Phil Sculthorpe, Mark Hayes and CG Hatton.

And a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world... Which is in no way a story on the theme of dementia, quality of life, the bitter sweet beauty of nature and the right to decide if it is time for you to lay down for the last time. It is just a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world...