Nidhogg's Lesson
by Raven Kaldera
In the back field of the farm where I live,
there is an altar to the powers of Rot, in many pantheons. It doesn’t look like
an altar. It is a small group of chicken-wire cages, weighted down with stones.
In the cages are the severed heads of all the animals that we slaughter on our
farm - sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits. The cages are there to
deter predators; the real power lies under those cages, in a whole city of busy
ant mounds which spend their time carefully stripping the flesh off of those
heads. When they are clean and white, we remove them and hang them on the
trees. This little unobtrusive pile of natural recycling has horrified a few
people who have stumbled across it, but it is part of our way of life. Waste
nothing.
I was making my way across the field when the pile of cages caught my eye, and I was drawn towards it. Kneeling, I watched the flies buzzing about it, watched the ants crawling on the latest pile of half-eaten heads. It was summer, and the mosquitoes were fierce. My body, uncomfortable in the cloud of bugs, warred with the part of me that wanted to stay and do some kind of obeisance. Suddenly, a shining movement caught my eye, and I turned my head. A shimmery silvery-blue dragonfly was hovering about me, lazily sucking in mosquitoes. It dropped briefly onto my shoulder - I didn’t dare move at that point - and then lifted, going back to its work. As it silently moved around me, devouring the little vectors of disease, suddenly Nidhogg was there, silvery-blue as the dragonfly, sniffing at the severed heads. The long coil of her tail slid past me, roughly, sensually, like a snake uncoiling, huge enough to knock me off my feet. I had the strong feeling that I shouldn’t speak, even to greet her, and I was right. In time, she spoke to me, golden reptilian eyes glinting. Like her mistress, Nidhogg smells of rot, of the piled corpses on Dead Man’s Shore.
The words came as poetry, as images. Nidhogg can speak, in hissing serpentine whispers, but she does not speak like a human. Unlike Jormundgand, she has language, but the translation crackled and strobed in my head, breaking up the meaning. This I wrote afterwards, as much as I could remember:
Nidhogg’s Lesson:
There is no such place as Away.
All you throw, all you cast off,
They will come back to haunt you,
For they fall no further than your feet,
No matter how hard you run.
You are a plague upon the land. You foul
Clean water with your waste, wasting
Its purity; you do not return it
To the Earth who will gladly consume it.
You take no responsibility for it,
Your shit, your vomit, your mucus,
All the detritus you scatter like ugly
Autumn leaves from an evil tree
That does not properly rot. The Earth
Is pitted from your disease, cities like scabs
Barren patches that once waved with green hair,
Open wounds of bleeding strip-mines, poisoned veins
That once flowed clean. Land-wights sleeping,
Or dead, emptying the land of its soul.
Your are a mange upon the land’s pelt,
A skin cancer that devours, and yet you think me ugly?
This is the truth about rot, children.
It all comes down to roots. I am the Gnawer
At The Root. Where are your roots?
Where is the soil in which you sprouted?
Even if they are sound and perfect - and how many
Can make that claim, in truth? - you cannot use them
As a garbage heap for all you would not see,
While you reach blissfully towards the sky.
Your roots are poisoned with the denial that you drop,
And I promise you that it will one day choke you.
If you try to settle into your roots, you feel it,
The gnawing feeling that all is not right in your sunlit world.
That is the kiss of my jaws, little fool. You may try
To run from it, run from those roots, but see,
There is no such place as Away.
Only when you go down, down to the bottom,
Wading knee-deep through the corpses of your waste,
Your greed, your convenience, your blindness.
You must choke them down, eat them all,
And only then shall you be clean.
Would you give me tribute, would you ask
For aid, that I might take from you that rot?
This is the only tribute that I care for.
For one day, you waste nothing.
Can you do that? Nothing that leaves your body
Shall be wasted - bury or burn it all - and nothing
Shall fall unwanted from your hand
Without being reduced to ash or given to rot
In a place where it shall best be used. No clean water
Shall be fouled by you, unless it goes into the ground
To be cleansed by the Earth. One day,
Sunup to sunup. Can you do that, plague children?
I will take as much from you as you give me,
Which is to say, one day’s worth. Not enough
To stop your choking, but my bargain stands
To be kept as many times as you would have it.
No matter how high you climb, no matter
How much you revile me, here I am,
Coiled about your roots, dragging you down
When you would rather forget your own wastes.
Run, little locust-children, run in fear from my truth,
The truth that stinks, but you will always find
There is no such place as Away.
Artwork by Rushelle Kucala.