Surt is immensely old, and quite capricious in his own way. In many other pantheons and cultures, the figure of the Primal Light-Bringer is angelic and entirely beneficent, but in this our Nine Worlds, our Primal Light-Bringer is a grim and cantankerous fire-giant. There's a side of him that is almost stereotypically fire-giant - well, after all, they are all descended from him, so he isn't so much stereotypical as prototypical - that chuckles gruesomely and blasts things with fire, that seems gleefully bent on destruction. There's also a side of him that swaggers up arrogantly and with sudden blazing generosity, pitches you a wad of creative energy - zing! - as a freebie, and you're left standing there are juggling this red-hot thing that you'd better use for some high purpose before it burns out or burns you. He is straightforward, his language plain and almost coarse, and I almost underestimate the grim depths of his mind. Almost.

Then there's the other, older, side of him. I see that part when suddenly he pauses and darkens, becomes smoke-blackened rather than flaming, and his old, old eyes slide sideways and look at me, and through me. That's when he says something that reminds me that these other, more surface, sides of him are just camouflage, just a mask over the being that was born from the darkness and rent the first hole through Ginnungagap, and begat the world of Muspellheim that warmed and began all other life in the Nine Worlds. That's when I remember, again, that he is older than Urd, the oldest surviving frost-thurse, that he saw her born from a great distance in his own world. He told me once that after she had mated with two brothers and brought forth two daughters, he sent her one of his sons to be the father of her first-born son, to eventually lead the frost-thurses into new worlds. I remember also that he was born not only to begin life in the Nine Worlds, but to end it as well. In the end, it will be Surt who decides when Ragnarok goes down, and no other. To him is given the dread task of endings.

Surt sometimes comes to aid me when I am stuck on my creative work, blocked in, unable to get any further and cursing myself for it. He tosses me the tiniest spark of that primal creative fire, the stuff that lit Ginnungagap. When it leaves his fingers, it is just the faintest spark, but by the time it crosses the space between us, it is a raging fireball that I must open myself to take, desperately jamming open my chakras in that split second and praying that I don't become consumed. Surt doesn't have time to wait around for me; either I am ready for those blockages to be blasted away, or I can sit in my ice and suffer. The size difference isn't really a size difference, either. That spark hasn't grown any between his hands and my belly. It's just that he's that much bigger, and I am only a mere mortal.

You may think it cruel of him, that he'll toss someone a spark and not really care all that much if it burns them up or not. And yes, I am aware that he doesn't care. It's all fine to him. I've seen people consumed by such sparks - eaten by their creativity until the manifestation of the project was all that mattered, and such things as body, health, and lovers were forgotten in the bright blaze. Yet those that survived long enough, he shrugs, they left such a fine mark on the Universe! There is no compassion in Surt. That's not his job.