Life in Wartime (Part V): Götterdämmerung

Wagner was a romantic fatalist, compared to his sources. For him, valkyries and pyres, heavenly choirs, all kinds of mushy guff. And that abomination, he called Götterdämmerung despite it having nothing to do with the original.

But to us who served during the Twilight War, it was clear that the Wagnerian take was what the public saw, and most of the clientele saw it that way too — fake thunder and lightning, drama and beauty, and everyone taking a bow together at the end. Under the surface, however, the Tree of Life groaned as the dragon gnawed at its roots. The ravens took flight, and ponderously, the ship made of fingernails moved into play.

It might come as a surprise to those who read such things that some secrets of the Twilight War are also woven into the threads of epic myth as described elsewhere. Yet those are hard to disentangle, and the arts required are no longer commonly found among the living. Still, there are more brutal paths to knowledge.

Essentially, the purge of the faithful, which began a decade ago, had weakened the Citadel. The Leader had placed inferior officers slowly but surely into positions of trust. They were reliable people, but often not principled or bright enough to be a threat to him. And in those choices lay the seeds of doom, for if the Leader failed, there would be none left to raise the Citadel.

So it came to pass. All the losses sustained across the years caught up with Asgard, and the ravens left the Tower. When the Old Man looked across the room at the meeting of the wyvern brothers in March, he should have known his time was up. I looked into his face, but he did not dare meet my gaze. And in that moment, I knew it was time.