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The ride of Thor
There was a silence, but it was not an easy one. It was not a silence as we might ordinarily know it. The kind of silence that was actually filled with tiny almost imperceptible noises, all of them dancing at the very edges of our hearing. The comforting, low, background white noise of existence that we mere mortals customarily call silence... Read saga
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There was a silence, but it was not an easy one. It was not a silence as we might ordinarily know it. The kind of silence that was actually filled with tiny almost imperceptible noises, all of them dancing at the very edges of our hearing. The comforting, low, background white noise of existence that we mere mortals customarily call silence.
This silence was total.
It was heavy.
It lay over everything like a deep, densely suffocating mantle of freshly fallen snow. It was absolute - a silence so complete that it was not just the absence of any noise, but the smothering cancellation of the very existence of sound.
A silence so perfect, so entire, that it would make a person experiencing it question whether sound had ever existed at all in the first place.
And in the midst of that deafening and almost painful silence, stood a building. A huge, dark building. It’s walls, doors, windows and overhanging eaves seemingly carved out of hues of black. It was as if the bleak, black darkness of midnight at midwinter itself had been expertly carved and whittled into the shape of a monstrously majestic, monochrome, feast-hall.
Lain across it all was the all-pervading, smothering silence.
Then without a single note of warning, the gigantic double-doors at one end of the black-upon-black feast hall burst open in a tumultuous explosion of light and sound. A sudden, cataclysmic fury of a fierceness that could melt eardrums, fusing them to the inside of your skull shredded the all-consuming silence rending it into a million seared fragments.
Any mortal standing within a thousand leagues of this incandescent, raging cacophony of sound and light would have been rendered instantly deaf and blind. More than likely, the apocalyptic sonic and visual symphony unfolding here would have stopped even the boldest and most hale of hearts immediately in its tracks.
This would be a tragedy because to die at this very moment would mean not being a witness as to the cause of this cataclysmic, mind-numbing majesty.
For, through the now flung-wide doors of the feast hall burst first Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, the two mighty goats of Thor, pulling the exquisite and brilliantly carved chariot of the god. Within which, Thor himself stood, braced agilely on both legs. His left hand was effortlessly holding the reins and deftly guiding the goats. In his right, Mjölnir - the hammer of Thor - was brandished high in the air, crackling with blinding bursts of white light, acting as a conductor for the electricity that snaked down into, through and then back out again through the body of the god, arcing out in a desperate attempt to find earth, and failing this task, snapping, cracking and curling with a stuttering sinuousness back upon itself again.
Thor, the god of thunder, was riding again. Out and down from the doors of his feast hall, into the night. The heavy-shod hooves of his goats and the thick, metal-rimmed wheels of his chariot sending mighty, crushing clashes of sound raging out across the cosmos, slamming into and echoing off anything and everything into which it mercilessly smashed.
The silence was gone now. Shattered utterly. It was in turn replaced with a sound that makes the heart of even the stoutest warrior quaver.
A sound that startles children from their sleep and sends them quivering and weeping into the arms of their parents, who despite the soothing words they use to calm their offspring, still nevertheless themselves harbour a sense of awe for the raw, unfettered power that is the Ride of Thor.
This silence was total.
It was heavy.
It lay over everything like a deep, densely suffocating mantle of freshly fallen snow. It was absolute - a silence so complete that it was not just the absence of any noise, but the smothering cancellation of the very existence of sound.
A silence so perfect, so entire, that it would make a person experiencing it question whether sound had ever existed at all in the first place.
And in the midst of that deafening and almost painful silence, stood a building. A huge, dark building. It’s walls, doors, windows and overhanging eaves seemingly carved out of hues of black. It was as if the bleak, black darkness of midnight at midwinter itself had been expertly carved and whittled into the shape of a monstrously majestic, monochrome, feast-hall.
Lain across it all was the all-pervading, smothering silence.
Then without a single note of warning, the gigantic double-doors at one end of the black-upon-black feast hall burst open in a tumultuous explosion of light and sound. A sudden, cataclysmic fury of a fierceness that could melt eardrums, fusing them to the inside of your skull shredded the all-consuming silence rending it into a million seared fragments.
Any mortal standing within a thousand leagues of this incandescent, raging cacophony of sound and light would have been rendered instantly deaf and blind. More than likely, the apocalyptic sonic and visual symphony unfolding here would have stopped even the boldest and most hale of hearts immediately in its tracks.
This would be a tragedy because to die at this very moment would mean not being a witness as to the cause of this cataclysmic, mind-numbing majesty.
For, through the now flung-wide doors of the feast hall burst first Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, the two mighty goats of Thor, pulling the exquisite and brilliantly carved chariot of the god. Within which, Thor himself stood, braced agilely on both legs. His left hand was effortlessly holding the reins and deftly guiding the goats. In his right, Mjölnir - the hammer of Thor - was brandished high in the air, crackling with blinding bursts of white light, acting as a conductor for the electricity that snaked down into, through and then back out again through the body of the god, arcing out in a desperate attempt to find earth, and failing this task, snapping, cracking and curling with a stuttering sinuousness back upon itself again.
Thor, the god of thunder, was riding again. Out and down from the doors of his feast hall, into the night. The heavy-shod hooves of his goats and the thick, metal-rimmed wheels of his chariot sending mighty, crushing clashes of sound raging out across the cosmos, slamming into and echoing off anything and everything into which it mercilessly smashed.
The silence was gone now. Shattered utterly. It was in turn replaced with a sound that makes the heart of even the stoutest warrior quaver.
A sound that startles children from their sleep and sends them quivering and weeping into the arms of their parents, who despite the soothing words they use to calm their offspring, still nevertheless themselves harbour a sense of awe for the raw, unfettered power that is the Ride of Thor.
