High in the ash-tree’s wounded wood, the Allfather tilts his hollow eye, watching the desert bleed dark blood beneath an engine-harrowed sky. No raven wheeling through the cloud, but wings of iron, cold and blind— a drone out of the river-plains to sever veins the sands confined. The pipes run dry; the black sap stays, as Loki laughs in smoke and blaze. Far south, where Ran spreads out her net across the narrow throat of seas, a jagged crag of stone is seized beneath the salt-wind’s prophecies. The straits are closed; the keels must stay. A shore turns hollow, stripped of grace, while fifty thousand barefoot shades flee through the dust without a place— their hearth-fires quenched, their shelters thin, as Fenrir bares his shadow-grin. Upon a hill of gold and law, two kings confer in marble halls, their breath disguised in measured vows behind the city’s ancient walls. The council gathers, smooth and grave, and pens a truce of papered might: Restrain the spear, release the wave, and let the galleys cross the night. Yet Tyr looks down with one pale hand, and counts the treaties carved in sand. And north, within the stone-bound cage, Surtr’s spark ignites the floor; seven thralls are claimed by smoke behind an iron-bolted door. No valkyrie bends down to lift the nameless fallen from the stone— the world unspools its iron threads, and the norns weave silent, dark, alone.
