There are authors, and then there are authors.

You know, the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds, all those guys you can’t shut the hell up about eighty years later. They wrote about all the same shit you write about—booze and women and that little white lie called the American dream—but the ink on those pages glitters, while yours is ‘pretty and well structured, but ultimately passé and not quite daring enough’.

And that’s half the problem, isn’t it? You’re trying so damn hard to be the next Hemingway, the next Faulkner, the next whoever wrote about war or tragedy and made it big enough to be remembered.

Writers make themselves bleed to achieve some half-baked dream of godhood (The sort of half-baked dream most authors tell you hardly ever come true, but you just won’t listen, will you?), when the reality is much simpler:

To be remembered, the way a person feverishly remembers a god of words like Salinger or Steinbeck, you’ve got to make someone else bleed.

~

When the writer was younger, all he wanted was to be around other writers.

Now? Not so much.

If he’d known he was going to be the only one writing literary fiction in the group, he’d have just stayed home.

“If people want to read Hemingway,” the group organizer, Lauren, had said in a deeply nasal voice, “they’ll read Hemingway. Just write like you.” The others nodded, like sheep.

He’d wanted to say her story about the ramifications of time travel was trite and pedantic, but he bit his tongue because it had been the only critique group that had any openings at the time, and he’d needed eyes on his work, even if they were short-sighted.

So, he ‘wrote like himself’, for a time, and he spent the next two years listening to crickets and reading months-overdue emails explaining all the ways in which his work ‘just wasn’t right for the agency, but that doesn’t mean anything about the quality of your work’ (Though he knows they know perfectly well that’s exactly what that means).

“I think you get what you give, honestly,” Beth says after their Thursday night meeting at the coffee house. Another wasted night, he thinks; he’d spent hours poring over Lauren’s stupid story about the ghost in the moors and written over three pages of comments, and then he’d gotten three sentences back on his own work: Hemingway—bad! You—good! More you please!!!

He’d wanted to light her shitty story on fire.

Beth continues, “I know you wrote a lot of comments for Lauren, but not a lot of it was very constructive. I like to do a point-for-point system; first, you say something you liked about the story, and then you say something you think needs work. You can be tough without being cruel.”

“What if you didn’t like anything at all?”

“You find something. I think it’s pretty rare to have a story with no redeeming qualities.” He wants to tell her she’s full of shit, but he keeps quiet, because she’s his closest thing to a friend, and he likes walking with her after their meetings because she’s one of the rare ones that likes to talk about writing almost as much as she likes the craft itself.

It also doesn’t hurt that she’s real easy on the eyes.

The lipstick she wears is a deep indigo, and the way it offsets her pale skin haunts him sometimes, when he’s alone and trying to find a plot where there isn’t really. He thinks back to all the times he’s written about a nameless character that looks a bit too much like her when he should be working out the kinks in what’s supposed to be his magnum opus, and he’s glad it’s too dark for her to see the flush at his cheeks.

Beth digs into her coat pocket, holds a crumpled-up piece of paper out to him. “Here. Lauren gave this to me because I’m the only one who writes fantasy, but I thought you might want to consider it. You’ve been working on that book for like four years. Maybe you just need to try something different.”

The logo on the paper is a giant white tree with many grasping fingers, two black birds perched on its limbs. “Yggdrasil House?”

“Yeah. You know, like Odin? He sacrificed himself to himself by hanging from the world tree. Gave up one of his eyes for magic. Real badass. He’s a minor character in the book I’m writing. They’re local, and they put out a call for submissions. I just wanted to let you know.”

“They’re probably just looking for gods and monsters. I can’t write that.”

“Maybe you should try.”

“Yeah, and wind up stuck in that shitty little nook next to all the people writing about knights wandering around knock-off Medieval England and the eight-hundredth book about exiled princes looking for revenge?”

“Fantasy authors are successful all the time,” she says with a pinched face.

“Come on. George R. R. Martin could write a book about drywalling, and all those idiots would still fall over themselves to buy it; sales don’t mean shit. People act like Neil Gaiman has some divine gift, but he’s just some guy writing about fairytales. Where’s the rawness in any of that?”

“Shitting on someone’s success won’t make you successful too, so why start?” They walk in silence for a few moments. “Do you look down on me for writing fantasy?”

“I mean, it’s not like you’re writing about trolls or anything, but you’re definitely holding yourself back. Honest, you’ve got magic, you just aren’t using it the way you should be, that’s all.”

She stops in the middle of a rain puddle. “That’s some balls coming from someone who’s never had anything published himself.”

“Yeah, well. It’s hard, when you’re writing literary fiction. There’s only so much room for it because it doesn’t sell as well as wizards and spaceships and teenagers falling desperately in love after like three days.”

“Good writers persevere, and they don’t blame other writers for not getting to the place they want to be. You’re not getting rejected because you’re some tragic soul being held back by all those hacks you whine about; you’re getting rejected because you’re just some voiceless nobody writing about a bunch of other voiceless nobodies.” She turns and walks the other way, leaving him standing in the rain.

Her words cut, a laceration deeper than any coffee house critique.

~

As he walks back home, miserable and lonely, he hears a bird cawing in the distance.

He ignores it at first. A moment later, he hears it again, much closer than before. He looks up, and sees a raven perched upon the streetlamp above. It raises its head and chokes, like something is caught deep in its throat. It hacks up a crumple of paper, and stares at him, waiting.

The writer opens the paper and stares white-faced down at the Yggdrasil House flyer. The raven flits to the next streetlamp, caws, and hacks up another flyer. He follows a trail of soiled paper down three more night-darkened streets, to a brick house with white spiraled pillars along the porch.

The raven lands on the edge of the roof and stares down at him. It motions with a shiny black beak to the front door, and caws. When he doesn’t move, it drops to the ground and chases him up the stairs.

Halfway up the porch, a girl bursts through the door, sniffling. “Don’t do it,” she sobs. “He’s the devil. He doesn’t look like it, but he is. I saw things in that eye…” She flees, and he’s alone with the raven.

The raven leads him through tan corridors poorly lit for a business establishment, the walls strangely bare. It screeches when he nears a redwood door at the end of the third corridor, and he timidly lets himself in, half-wondering if someone spiked his coffee with something.

Inside, a little white-haired man sits at an oak desk, hunched over a stack of paper. In a faintly accented voice (Though the writer, for the life of him, cannot place it), he says, “Print a few flyers and the vultures descend. Every damn time.”

“There was a girl out there. She was crying. Said you were the devil?”

“Oh, well. She was a lousy writer, and that can’t be helped, no matter how much you sacrifice.” He looks up. The writer flinches at the dead eye staring back at him, black and devoid of light. The other eye is a grayed blue like the sea. “Not every publisher that sends you packing is the devil.”

He swallows. “Uh…normally I wouldn’t show up in person. Unprofessional, and all, but…”

“But the bird brought you here?” He nods, hardly believing what he’s hearing. “Well, give us a look, then.” He holds a withered hand out.

The writer digs through his bag. “It’s just some sample chapters. If I’d known…” He takes a deep breath. “If I’d known a raven was going to lead me to a publishing house, I’d have brought the whole thing.” He laughs at the bizarreness of it all, but the old man merely stares, silent. He swallows and hands the chapters to the old man and sits at his request. “There might be a problem. It’s literary, not fantasy. You know, like slice-of-life? If that’s a problem—”

“Oh, we can do literary,” he says in a dejected voice. He turns to the raven and mutters, “Go on and get her. Some sparse horseshit writer like Hemingway for her to rave over.”

The raven takes off and flits out the door on black wings. The writer says, “I don’t have to sit here and let you insult me.”

“Don’t worry. One man’s trash is another’s jackpot, and she loves her damn jackpots.”

“Mind telling me what literary fiction you’ve published?”

“Oh, the gamut; Hawthorne, Melville, London, all those voiceless turds.”

“Are you honestly trying to tell me you published Moby Dick?”

“We paved the way for all the old greats.” He leans forward and whispers conspiratorially, “Though truth be told, my wife’s the one with the good eye round here; I thought Hemingway was too damn sparse, not nearly enough glitter, but she took a real shine to that one. Gotta admit, he made a good trade. Some men’s bargains are worth a lot more than you give ‘em credit for. Shit writing, but there was something in his soul for damn sure.”

“Oh, I get it. You told that girl she needs to sell her soul to get published here. Like the devil.” He wonders who let their senile grandfather out of the house, and how he printed all these flyers. “Should I call someone for you?”

He laughs so hard he wheezes. He wipes a tear away from the blue eye. “Hot damn, I haven’t been called that since the Christians came to spoil all my fun.” He grins, the mischievous sort of grin only little old men seem to be able to find. “Make a few deals here and there, and then all the sudden you’re some six-winged monster with daddy issues. I much prefer One-Eye over Old Scratch, you know.”

A woman shambles into the office, bent and gray. She gives the man a light tap on the shoulder. “Oh, hush, you.” She smiles at the writer, and for a moment, he’s a little boy in his grandmother’s kitchen, waiting for her to turn her back so he can make off with a handful of sugar cookies. “I bet her cookies really were the best,” she says, and she laughs as the color drains from his face. “They’re always better when your gran makes them, aren’t they?”

“You must forgive my wife,” One-Eye sighs. “She’s was born a nosy ol’ hag, and she’ll die a nosy ol’ hag.”

“Oh, stop it, you. Relax, dear,” she coos to the writer. “He’s really not the devil, I promise. Not nearly handsome enough.”

“But isn’t that just something the devil would say?”

One-Eye grins, and the writer realizes his teeth are thinner and sharper than they have any right to be. “If I were the devil, shouldn’t I have bigger fish to fry? The devil destroys, while gods have a hand in creation. We’re like the writers of the world. It’s why we’re such fans of your kind, my wife and I. Aren’t we, dear?”

“Oh, yes.” She leans forward and whispers, “He didn’t want to take Hemingway’s sacrifice. He’s got no taste for the literary unless it’s one of his damn poets.”

“Sacrifice?”

“Well,” the old woman says in a gentle voice, “you can’t get something for nothing, dear. That’s never been the way the world works.” She shambles over to a bookshelf behind One-Eye, and pulls down a monstrous gray tome. She places it upon the desk and pushes it over to the writer.

She opens the book to somewhere in the middle—the paper is yellow and stained with what looks like coffee, and smells of dust and metal—and impossibly, he sees his own name staring back at him from the bottom of the page. “Consider it our fifteen percent,” One-Eye says with a throaty chuckle.

“Isn’t the devil supposed to have a book like this?”

“You know, kid, if you can’t get past this devil gobbledygook, you might want to look elsewhere.” He smirks. “I hear slice-of-lifes about writers wasting away in Portland coffee shops are just leaping off the shelves these days.”

The old woman takes the writer’s hand into her own, runs a gnarled finger over his palm. She looks up and smiles, the wrinkles around her eyes tightening. “You’ll do good things for Yggdrasil. I just know it.”

One-Eye’s good eye twinkles. “She’s never been wrong before, you know.”

“What do I get in return?”

“Godhood,” the old man says with a lazy smile. “It’s sort of a cushy job. They’ll be praising your words for a long time to come. Isn’t that what you want? To stop toiling so you can finally be someone?”

His poor Catholic mother would cry if she could see him now, but he thinks his soul is meaningless if he can’t even get his name out there.

So, he whispers, “Ok. Take your fifteen percent.”

One-Eye smiles, and then he sinks his teeth into the soft flesh of the writer’s wrist. He howls and jerks, but the old man’s hunger is a ravenous thing, and he can do nothing to shake him. One-Eye lets him go and spits onto the page, a reddish glob of tin. The writer watches his blood vanish beneath the ink. One-Eye holds a wiry hand out to him. “Now, we shake on it.”

“Your goddam blood snack wasn’t enough?”

“The blood’s the seal. We shake, because that’s just what men do when they reach an agreement. Kids these days, I tell ‘ya.”

His wife pats him on the shoulder. “There, there.”

They shake hands, and the old man’s grip is crushing, sending pain spearing up his arm. He tries not to wince. “So, now what?”

One-Eye digs through a drawer and hands him a knife. It’s long and slender and serrated, and terribly stained. “You give the devil his due.”

He smiles, and when the writer catches the glance of that dead black eye, he knows.

~

One-Eye seals the deal with a handshake. The fifth deal of the day, and it’s not even Wednesday. “Oh, you’ve got a good, firm grip on you. Must have Viking in your blood, eh?”

The girl smiles, a pretty indigo twist. “Maybe. You know, there was a girl crying on the way here, mumbling something about you being the devil. I laughed, because if she knew her stuff, she’d know all the old gods were just cursed to become the devil to people who don’t know any better.”

One-Eye knows his wife made the right choice, then.

“Would you like to know what I need from you?” he asks. All these soft morsels, nothing like his iron people of the past, who once held their heads high to stare into the Seducer’s terrible black eye.

How he misses them.

Her eyes meet his. She holds her hand out, and he digs through his drawer for another knife, and this time he feels pride handing it over, not pity or disgust.

She leaves with his knife and her head held high.

The door closes behind her, and he says, “There is an honest-to-god Viking in a godless age. Life’s full of fun little surprises.”

His wife smiles, and says, “Not for me, dear. Not for me.”

~

The writer holds One-Eye’s knife for a long while. It starts to rain, which he supposes is a good thing, because it’ll hopefully muffle the sound of the door opening. The old man’s black eye had told him the ravens would take care of the body and the blood, that all he needed to do was bring the knife back, slick and red and gleaming.

“You can do this,” he whispers. “You can do this.”

It’s not as if he’ll be snuffing someone good out, he tells himself. Just another hack writing about poorly constructed time travel and ghosts wandering around the moors like literally every other ghost story in existence.

“You wanna be a god,” he whispers, knife trembling in his hand. “So, go in there and make yourself a god.”

No more toiling.

He slowly slides the key into the lock (God, Lauren is so stupid, prattling on and on about every aspect of her mundane existence at the coffee house meetings, like how she always likes to hide a spare key in a fake rock under the wooden porch in case one of them needs a quiet place to write for a weekend, because she’s got a spare room available. She thinks she’s such a goddamn saint, and he hates her even more for it). He starts to twist the key, and someone says, “His wife told me you’d be here, you know. She’s never been wrong before.”

He startles and spins, and the blade is sinking into his gut before he can even put his hands out. He crumples to the ground, gasping and gagging, clutching at his abdomen. He looks down at his hands, slick and hot and red.

“Fate works in funny ways, doesn’t it?” Beth asks. “I just wanted to find a publisher. I didn’t expect to find Odin and Frigg—that’s One-Eye and his wife, because you strike me as the sort of person who doesn’t really know a lick of Norse mythology because it doesn’t mesh with your hard-on for Hemingway. But you know? I’m not really surprised to find you here. Not one bit.”

She picks Lauren’s key up off the wood. “The ravens are gonna come for you now, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He gasps and pulls in a wet, rattling breath. “She’s nothing. Why…why…”

“Why? Because no one deserves to die so they can be your stepping stool. I told One-Eye to give my godhood to Lauren, because you hated her so much you were going to kill her over a book that doesn’t even have a plot.” Blood pools in his mouth, burning copper. She rests on the balls of her heels. “I’m gonna be a god one day no matter what. I don’t need to pick someone else off like a vulture.”

Beth rises to her feet, and her smile widens to a wolfish thing. He thinks she looks very much like One-Eye. He knows then that the little old man really is the devil—a fairytale monster so ravenous for blood that foreigners in his strange land believed he was the devil so wholly that they’d made him the devil.

“And you know what? I’m gonna write a book about trolls, just for you.” She steps away. He hears the thud of her boots on the porch stairway, and then nothing at all. The stars overhead darken and dim as the frost sets in.

The writer wonders if some ancient part of One-Eye and his wife are up there, somewhere, looking down at him as he bleeds out, laughing the cold laughter of stars.

~

One-Eye thinks the girl with the indigo lips looks a vision on the panel—success can put some color in one’s cheeks, after all. He even enjoyed the short story about trolls she’d shared in his office that night (“She’ll be writing an award-winning book based on that story,” his wife had chimed. “You mark my words.”), and it’s been a hot minute since he’s enjoyed any of the stale writers chosen by his better half.

But she’s a special one. She’s got iron in her bones.

He is the last to greet her for a signing. “Well, well, well,” she says. “If it isn’t the devil himself.”

“Ha! He should be so lucky.” He’s polite enough to ask for her signature, though a crotchety part of him thinks she should be asking for his (His wife’s voice pipes up in his head and tells him to can it). She discreetly passes him a brown box.

“Please tell Frigg thank you for me,” she says. “If she hadn’t told me where he was headed, a friend of mine would be dead.”

He doesn’t bother telling her that he doesn’t think the little worm really had the spine to go through with it, because his iron people love to feel like heroes, and he sometimes feels the whim to indulge them.

“Fancy panels, autographs.” He grins. “Well, aren’t you just booking right along?”

“It’s just a local thing. I haven’t really made it yet, I guess.”

“Oh, you will. A few more months of this, and then you’ll be in New York, Chicago, Atlanta. Hell, you’re gonna be all the way in London next winter.”

“How do you know?”

He slips the box into his coat pocket. “My wife told me so.” He pats the girl with the Viking blood on the cheek and makes his way out the door.

And then, he’s not even there at all.

~

One-Eye’s blue eye flashes, and the cottage at the center of the world shimmers into place.

He can see Yggdrasil’s pale limbs climbing high up into the clouds from the garden (The sky is black and angry at the world’s center, already scattering cries of thunder; he grins, because he loves a good storm), and he wonders when the day will come when the tree shudders and shakes and brings all the old ones back together for one last bloody hoorah.

Old man One-Eye wishes for that day to never come at all, but a ghost of his younger self lusts for it mightily.

He goes into the kitchen and opens the box. Inside, he finds his knife, uncleaned as requested. He grabs a mason jar from the cupboard and taps the blade against the glass; blood streams and spurts from the metal, rising impossibly to the top of the jar, filling the kitchen with its delicious iron scent.

Out in the garden, his wife kneels at the base of the pale tree, waiting for him. She wears her gray hair in many braids, and her dress is adorned with tiny beads shining in the pale sunlight. She looks more beautiful than any woman he’s ever seen.

He wanders over, eyeing the tree. “It’s sure lookin’ healthy these days. All these writers snuffing each other out in my name gives it an awful nice sheen, eh?”

She smirks. “Hemingway did that, you know.”

“Oh, horseshit. Whitman did that, and you know it.”

“You always did like your crusty ol’ poets, didn’t you?”

“Damn right. And you always liked bad writers.”

Frigg purses her lips, but then she smiles, because she can never stay mad at him for too long. “Did you get your sacrifice, Old Scratch? That much entitlement should be a fine offering. That’s the one thing that never really changes, isn’t it? All these hacks trying to snatch the light from the people who’ve already found it.”

He pretends not to have heard her say ‘Old Scratch’, because it threatens to open that old wound of jealousy and betrayal, the knife twist of being shunted from your own damn country. He is One-Eye, not some red bastard with curlicue horns. “I most certainly did get my sacrifice; I always do.”

He hobbles over to the tree and stiffly lowers himself to his knees. He’s glad blood sacrifices work almost as well as hanging; he doesn’t think his back could keep up with ‘em these days. She looks the mason jar over and sighs. “Honestly, dear, don’t you ever get sick of making sacrifices to yourself?”

“Not at all.”

They take the mason jar into their knotted hands and pour it over the roots of the tree; it is a strong and mighty thing, wide enough to hang a man from. She rolls her eyes. “Go ahead,” she says in a withdrawn voice.

He grins, and as the blood seeps into the roots, he shouts, “To me!” He cackles as she mumbles something about marrying vanity personified, but she smiles despite it all, and he knows it’s because she treasures these little sacrificial moments just as much as he does.

Because one day, Yggdrasil will catch fire and ruin the whole goddamn world, and they’ll burn up with it. He knows no amount of sacrifices to himself can change that, but faith is making sacrifices even when you know it might mean nothing in the end, and he’s glad to have someone to make those sacrifices with.

“You know, dear,” he says, “it’d be more potent if it would’ve been the girl. She had the better stuff inside her. Why’d you pick her? I liked her too—plucky little thing, lotsa moxie—but I was sure you’d go with the other one. He wrote sparse horseshit just like your Hemingway.” Her face puckers like a lemon and he grins a wolfish grin.

“I didn’t pick,” she says. “I never pick. And my Hemingway had heart and flavor, you uncultured swine.”

He huffs, though he should be used to mincing words with her by now. “Well, why that one?”

She smiles, and it’s a smile that takes him back to a time of wolves and runes and terrible sacrifice. “You know, dear? I really don’t know why that one over the other, or this one over that.” She pecks him on the cheek. “But everyone knows fairytales and trolls are better than all those dime-a-dozen slice-of-lifes. I think the universe just knows these things too.”

One-Eye gives her a peck on the cheek in return. “Been a while since we had a good troll story.”

Their eyes meet, and their laughter is the sound of stars falling and dying and birthing out of the blackness once again.

~