📜 The Immortal Gazette Presents
Ragnarok: The End That Wasn’t
Told (and interrupted) by Loki, Alice the Mad Queen, and Rumplestiltskin the Historian of Chaos
The sky was ash, the seas boiled, and the great serpent Jörmungandr had loosed his final breath. Fenrir had devoured Odin. Thor and the serpent had slain each other. The world tree trembled… and then? Silence. Until -
“Oh please,” Loki interrupted, flopping backward in his smoke-summoned chaise lounge, conjured in the middle of the Gazette's newsroom. “You make it sound like it was all doom and gloom. Honestly, that was one of the most liberating days of my afterlife. The chains were off, the stage was burning, and every god, giant, and talking squirrel had to admit we’d let things rot too long.”
Alice, slamming a teacup down with such force the porcelain cracked (and a startled intern ducked), growled, “Loki, you scorched the World Tree! The squirrel Níðhöggr was never seen again!”
“Correction,” said Rumplestiltskin, twirling his ink-stained quill with maddening delight, “Níðhöggr was the dragon chewing the roots. The squirrel was Ratatoskr, and I believe he survived. Probably spreading gossip in the new world as we speak.”
“Ugh, semantics.” Alice rolled her eyes. “The point is - Ragnarok wasn’t the end. Just the end of that cycle. The gods fought, died, and poof - what crawled out of the ashes wasn’t just smoke and ghosts.”
“No no no,” Rumple said, his grin stretching unnervingly wide, “It was hope.”
Alice and Loki both groaned audibly.
“Don’t even start,” Alice hissed. “If one more deity tells me that pain and destruction is a necessary prelude to ‘hope,’ I’m going to personally hex the next reincarnated Valkyrie into a duck.”
“I second that,” Loki said, swirling his wine goblet (filled with what may or may not have been molten moonlight). “The gods love dangling hope in front of mortals like it’s some shiny prize. Meanwhile, the Nine Realms are crumbling, and the best we get is: ‘But don’t worry! Hope will bloom from your suffering!’ Ugh. Sounds like propaganda to me.”
“And yet,” Rumplestiltskin said silkily, “from the ruin did rise something green. A new world, untouched by divine politics - for a while at least. Lif and Lifthrasir, hidden in the branches of Yggdrasil, emerged into the morning light.”
“Two humans,” Alice muttered. “Because apparently, the best we could do after cosmic apocalypse was repopulate the Earth with a couple named ‘Life’ and ‘Willing-to-live.’ Real subtle.”
“Oh I love the poetry,” Rumple purred. “They were the seeds. Unspoiled. No memory of war. Just dew-kissed grass, sunrise, and potential. A blank page.”
“A blank page,” Loki echoed, though a glint of irony laced his tone. “That’s what terrifies me the most.”
Alice leaned back, eyes narrowing. “Why?”
“Because blank pages attract gods like moths to flame,” Loki said darkly. “We can't leave anything alone. We build. We burn. We rebuild. And always - always - we pretend it’s all for hope.”
“Which is really just control,” Alice added. “Let’s call it what it is. Hope, as spun by divine hands, is just a leash made of gold thread.”
Rumplestiltskin clapped slowly, mock-theatrical. “Bravo! And yet… without hope, you get despair. Without hope, mortals stop moving forward. You need the carrot. You need the story. You need the myth.”
Alice stood, her cloak swirling like ink in a storm. “You need truth more.”
And then, a moment of quiet. No quills scribbling. No fire crackling. Just the idea, humming in the air like a half-sung spell:
The end is never the end.
And stories - real stories - don’t give you hope. They give you vision.
Footnote by the Gazette’s Archive Goblin:
Lif and Lifthrasir weren’t just Adam and Eve 2.0. They were us - the potential to start again, to remember the mistakes, and build something new. Whether we do… well, that’s a tale still being written.
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