Mythos by Kelly McCullough Page A

branches were lost in the gloom above. We came around a particularly mighty trunk to face an open space the size of a cathedral and . . . How could I describe it? The king of all trees? Their god? The one true tree of which all others were only shadows?
    It towered over us, impossibly tall, unbelievably wide, more like a topless tower of bark than anything living. Yet I had no doubt that it was alive and . . . somehow aware. At its base stood a wide stone basin fed by some hidden spring so that water poured eternally over the nearer edge, where it bathed one great root before flowing away into the darkness of the forest behind me.
    “Yggdrasil,” said Odin. “The World Tree.”
    I didn’t say anything. Somehow, “It’s nice,” sounded insufficient, and anything else seemed beyond me. We walked across the forest floor, our footsteps muffled to silence by the deep mold, until we stood on the edge of the basin. It was perhaps twenty feet across, and the water within was as clear as air. Only the faintest ripples on the surface betrayed its presence at all. Nine feet deep? Or ninety? Or even nine hundred? I couldn’t say, though I could see the bottom as well as if it were only nine inches and there, in a fold of the raw rock, lay . . .
    “Is that your eye?” I asked.
    “It is. I sacrificed it for a deeper sight.”
    “I’m not sure I understand.” Or that I wanted to.
    “Look at me.” It wasn’t a request, and I didn’t argue.
    Odin opened his other eyelid and exposed the Void within. Until that very instant I had not understood that nothing could exert such power. Odin had created a divine vacuum, and all the knowledge in the universe had rushed to fill it. But it could never be full for it was zero made manifest, the Void.
    “One of my many titles is Allfather,” said Odin. “But I might as easily be called the Nofather. I am both the one and the zero, Lord of Information, the Binary God.”
    “Now ask him about the last ‘Binary God,’ ” said a voice from off to the left, a voice I knew too well.
    “Atropos!” I whipped my gaze away from the water and found myself facing . . .
    Here stood my many-times-great-aunt Atropos, the Fate who cuts the threads, who had once attempted to cut mine. Except, it wasn’t. The voice was identical. So were the eyes, the terrible knowing eyes of Fate. The flawless skin, the dark fall of hair. In every way she was the aunt who despised me and would have killed me if she could.
    “I am and am not she whom you named,” she said, “oh, child of my sister’s house. Now ask the question I required of you.”
    I met Fate’s eyes then. There’s no hint of human emotion in those depths. They hold the record of every single thing you’ve ever done or thought of doing. Every secret fear that lurks in the shadows of your heart, every petty jealousy, every noble ambition. It’s all visible there, just so much raw data to be weighed when Fate calculates your destiny. I held her gaze with my own, and I shook my head.
    “Fate is neither my friend nor my master.” My words tasted hard and cold and bittersweet, fueled as they were by a deep and abiding anger at the wrongs done me by my family. “I have defied my own grandmother at the cost of my name and my house. I will not bend the knee to Fate ever again, not in any of her forms and though it cost me my life.”
    “Interesting,” she said, “very.” Then she turned her gaze on Odin. “Answer the question.”
    “Very well, Skuld. You saw that my eye was not all that lay in the water?” he asked me.
    “You mean the head? It was kind of hard to miss, as it’s about three times normal size. So was the fact that it’s also short an eye. I was going to ask, but then Dame Fate arrived and precluded the question.”
    “Say rather that I demanded it, and you’ll be closer to the truth,” said Skuld.
    “To-may-to, to-mah-to . . .” I winked at Fate.
    “The head belongs to Mimir,” said Odin, “the previous Lord