A man burst into the chamber. Loki's angelic face was a hell-mask of rage. The sword glittered in his hand and his blue eyes were blazing.
"I knew the Aesir would seek thus with my own ancient handiwork to snatch triumph from me by destruction," he said. "But you are too late."
He sprang at me with tiger swiftness, his sword raised. I ripped out my own weapon, but Loki's blade was already stabbing through my shoulder like a white-hot iron. I reeled, senses failing from that agony, dropping the silver control box. Freya darted forward with a wrathful cry, and I saw Loki hurl her back against the wall.
"You have lost, Aesir!" taunted Loki maliciously. "Asgard is mine, and the last Aesir falls to the swords of my Jotuns."
He did not see the great shape rising behind him. Thor, roused by sound of Loki's hated voice, had clutched the rock wall with his nerveless, bloodily tattered fingers and dragged himself erect. Involuntarily I recoiled from the staggering, ominous, black-fleshed figure. But Loki was caught unprepared. The giant hands stole close — and clutched Loki's white neck!
"Turn the knob upon the control box, Jarl Keith!" Thor roared.
Loki stabbed his dagger blindly and furiously back into Thor's breast, battling venomously to free himself. I lunged forward and snatched up the silver box. I seized the knob upon it and turned it as far as it would go.
From the pit-mouth at the center of the chamber came a dull, distant roar of rushing waters. Then a terrific shock rocked Asgard to its foundations. Blinding steam swirled up from the pit with a ravening sound.
"Fool!" shrieked Loki as he tore free from dying Thor.
He hurled himself at me, seeking to snatch the control box from my grasp. I thrust him back with the last of my strength. Through the scalding steam that filled the chamber, Loki staggered backward — and reeled straight into the pit!
A fading scream came up from the roaring cloud of steam as he plunged down into the abyss…
All Valhalla castle was rocking wildly above us. One fearful earth-shock followed another. Wild yells of panic chorused from above, coming thinly through the tumult of grinding mountains. Freya was flung against the stone floor, and I stooped frantically over her.
"It is well!" choked Thor. "Asgard and Midgard shall die with the Aesir!" As he sagged to the floor, he raised his dying face toward me. "Save Freya if you can, Jarl Keith. If you can reach your flying ship, you may escape the death that stoops now over all this land."
His eyes blazed up with the last light of fast departing life. For a moment his voice rolled out as strongly as of old.
"Skoal to the Aesir! Skoal to the great race that is gone forever!"
Then his bearded face sagged to the floor in death.
I helped Freya to her feet and dragged her out of that scalding, steam-filled chamber. The Earth-shocks were becoming more violent with each moment. The crash of falling masonry was ominously loud.
"We can't stay here any longer!" I cried to her. "But if we can get to my plane, we can escape."
"Let me die here with my people," Freya moaned, her white face agonized. Abruptly her eyes cleared and she clasped my arm. "No, Jarl Keith. Even now I wish to live for you. But can we escape?"
I stumbled with her up through the shaking, grinding halls of Valhalla castle. The Jotuns had fled or been buried. The scene outside the castle was appalling. Storm still blackened the sky. Lightning flared and thunder roared, but all noises were drowned by the terrible grinding crash of the Earth-shocks.
The castles around the edge of Asgard were being shaken down into ruined masses of masonry. The Jotuns were fleeing wildly down toward their ships in the fiord.
I hastened with Freya toward Bifrost Bridge. A terrible roar beneath us heralded the new shock that flung us off our feet. From cracks splitting in the solid rock of Asgard, wild clouds of steam rushed up. There was a prolonged roar of falling stone. Freya cried out. I looked back just in time to see great Valhalla collapsing into flaming, tumbling ruin.
By this time we had reached Bifrost Bridge and were stumbling precariously across that corpse-littered, dizzy, trembling span. The rainbow bridge abruptly rocked beneath us, threatening to throw us into the crazily boiling sea far below. Some Jotuns were escaping ahead of us, paying no attention to us in their mad panic.
My plane suddenly loomed out of the stormy dusk. The Jotuns, in their fierce eagerness to get into Asgard, had not even molested it. I pulled Freya into the cabin. The rocket motor roared into life, and the plane rushed along the quaking field and lurched into the air. Upward we climbed, the ship bucking and rocking in the terrific currents.
As we climbed higher and headed northward, I saw the full extent of the disaster that had smitten the hidden land. Midgard and Asgard, rocking wildly and shaking the rainbow bridge between them into fragments, were sinking into the sea, shrouded with steam.
The titanic explosion caused by the inrush of sea upon the raging atomic fires of Muspelheim was forcing the whole land to collapse upon that buried underworld. Before our eyes, as I fought to keep the plane aloft, the land solemnly sank.
There was nothing but sea and veils of steam. The blind-spot refraction around the whole land instantly vanished. The rhyme of the rune key had been fulfilled.
Ragnarok had come — the twilight and doom of the Aesir, destroying them and their amazing, wonderful civilization — and also their destroyer…
Epilogue
Of my great adventure, little remains to tell. Our night back across the frozen ocean to the expedition's schooner was without mishap. I shall never forget the amazement of Doctor Carrul and the rest of the expedition's members, when I landed my rocket plane beside the Peter Saul. Feverishly they asked excited questions when they saw Freya and the bloodstained, battered helmets and mail we wore.
I told them the truth, though I suppose I should have known they could not believe my story. But for their disbelief, I cared little. Nor did I care about what happened after our return to New York. The expedition included in its report a statement that Keith Masters, physicist and pilot, had returned in a delirious condition. They said I had been caught in an Arctic storm, and had brought with me a woman who was obviously a survivor from some storm-wrecked Norwegian ship.
I know now that the smug skepticism of modern men is not to be shaken lightly. Far in the north, beneath the frozen ocean, lie the shattered ruins of the hidden land I trod. Though men may some day penetrate to that submerged, lost land and lay bare the broken stones that once were Asgard's proud castles, they will not wholly believe.
Nor can I entirely blame them. For there are times when even to me all that I experienced takes on the semblance of a dream. It certainly seems like a dream that I rode over Bifrost Bridge with Odin and the warriors of Asgard. Did I really sit in Valhalla's high hall and feast with the nobles and captains of the Aesir? How can I be sure I fought side by side with Thor against Loki and his hordes, on that last great day?
But to reassure myself that it was no dream, I have only to turn and smile gratefully at Freya, my wife. She is dressed now in modern garb, but with the same bright golden hair, sea-blue eyes and slender grace as when I met her first on the cliffs of Midgard. For always Freya is beside me, and not one day have we ever been separated, nor will we ever be.
We do not speak often of lost Asgard and its people, though always they are in my mind as I know they are in hers. But on one night each year, the night of that doomsday eve when we feasted in Valhalla before the coming of the enemy, I pour wine into two glasses and we drink a toast. And our toast is in the words that Thor spoke from dying lips.