Valhalla Sucks

He couldn’t help but feel that death should never be this easy. His last conscious memories were of red rain and flying limbs, of swords shaking in hands no longer attached to bodies. He’d waded over a mountain of corpses to reach the iron doors of the keep, and even with 15 arrows in him, he kept walking and screaming and killing into the approaching blackness at all sides of his vision.

It hadn’t occurred to him while he lived that his shade would wear an imitation of his mortal form’s dying moments. He might’ve been more careful. He might’ve decided against head-butting the man in the spiked helmet, at any rate.

Then again, there were worse things than bathing in a flowing stream while naked shield maidens treated his wounds. He knew these women were too impossibly beautiful to be human, but for the moment he decided to accept the illusion. As if to reward his good judgement, the redhead laying across his chest put her hand over the messy crack in his skull and pinched, running her clasped fingers the length of the injury and erasing the mace’s damage as if it had been a line in the sand washed away by waves.

They’d performed this magic all over his body, turning backwards the ravages of time and war. For the first time since he was a boy, he saw clearly from both eyes, the ugly gash made by a wolf’s claw undone by a blonde with the biggest tits he’d ever seen.

It would have been erotic if not for his intestines being scooped back into his shredded guts; a hard-on would have to wait. He was glad for it when he noticed the bearded man approaching from the bank.

“Enjoying the angels’ healing touch, friend?”

He despised small talk, but was in little position to refuse. “I’m enjoying having two lungs again,” he said, making a point of not meeting the bearded man’s gaze.

“Aye! They’ll have you as unscarred as the day your Mother birthed you before long.”

Like Hel they would. “I’ll be healed enough to swing a sword,” he said to the Valkyries as much as the bearded man, “Nothing more.” What good had there been in living if all reminder of it were wiped away after death?

“Why pollute our mead hall with your Earthly filth when you could glow like the gods?”

A man capable of uttering that sentence bore looking at, if only while deciding which limb to disfigure first. Now that he could see the arrogant bastard, he noticed how unnatural the man’s skin looked-it was unscarred by blade and age alike. The man’s proportions were too perfect, his beard too well-groomed, his armor too shiny. This was the hero of a child’s fable.

He’d hated those fables, even as a boy.
Sensing the tension, the maidens slowly drew themselves against his body and began pulling ever so slightly downward. The gaping wound in his chest had been sealed, and he admitted a satisfaction in the loss of the pain. He closed his eyes and reached an arm around the nearest warm body. It was relaxing to finally touch something without intending to kill it.

“Not a talkative sort, are you? Very well.”

A thousand different kinds of violence danced behind his eyelids as his peace was interrupted again. He lifted his torso, straining only slightly against the weight of the women. Something smooth and warm came around the shaft of his penis, then, and he realized one of them has taken it in her hand. As the others began to embrace him more fully, he decided that he could get used to this, irritating bearded men or no...

And get used to it he did, for several days. The valkyries were better at sex than any Earthly woman and had stamina enough to climb a mountain in one breath. He could fuck them for days until boredom or exhaustion put a temporary stop to it. He saw little enough of his fellow honored dead, which suited him; they did little besides boasting and posing.

He’d enjoy the food occasionally, when the sun had gone down and mead hall was close to empty. There were cows the size of longhouses roasting over flames that never died, yielding meat that never ran out. There was a flock’s worth of pheasants hanging from a ceiling beam, already featherless. There were never-ending baskets of perfectly ripe fruit, and vegetables bigger than men, and barrels with more wine than the ocean had water.

When he tired of food, drink, and sex, he’d sleep, and dream of rusty, blunted blades smashing ineffectively against dented armor while water filled his boots and froze his feet. There was panic as his body rushed to follow his mind’s commands to raise the shield in time to block the coming blow. Despite the cold, the impact shook loose a mail of sweat from his skin, and the released heat would boil up from his armor’s openings as steam. Ignoring the pain, he rushed forward, his comrade's bumping him from behind and his enemies raining down panicked, imprecise sword-swings in front. The weather was shit, and the plunder would just barely be worth it.

Then he’d wake up in endless perfection, where everything was provided.

The other warriors had learned quickly to avoid him after he’d just woken up; it meant he’d be looking for a fight. There weren’t supposed to be fights in the afterlife. Battles, yes-in great abundance. This was a mythical, realer-than-real realm, where wounds closed more quickly than they could be opened and warriors stood as mighty as gods. In Valhalla, men could know the joy of endless battle, where every blow struck was struck in the name of honor and glory. Its newest soul just liked to fight.


So fight he did, whenever the fancy struck him. He’d wait for one of their little smirks or sneers and then dive into them like an animal. The first several had been waged with weapon-in-hand, but he quickly graduated to leaping into the fray bare-handed. There would be no epic songs written about these. They were bloody, slobbering, stupid things that began and ended on the ground; wine-fueled and proudly ignoble.

At first, he’d anticipate fighting the way a virgin anticipates his first fuck, but soon even he tired of the flying teeth and crunching noses. The knuckles he went to such lengths to open closed within seconds, and every blow landed on every repulsively beautiful face was gone in the next instant. He felt no exhaustion, no fear of losing.

No victory. Without that, what was the point?

Soon he became so disgusted with the mead-hall that he abandoned it in favor of the outer wilderness, but even in this he was denied; the forest was little more than an overgrown garden. The animals were huge and noble, proudly staring forth like soldiers witnessing their king’s passing, even as he loosed the arrow that would kill them.

Even the wolves were domesticated. They didn’t drool or shit or anything; it was an ordeal just to get them growling, and as ever, there was nothing real about them.

He was frustrated enough to fuck, but the thought of the impossibly smooth, perfectly-proportioned statues that this place had the audacity to call women was almost nauseating. He needed a crooked-toothed whore. He needed someone who’d be a challenge to satisfy. He needed to fumble around in the dark of a stable, pouring wine down his throat while a woman twice his age rode him long and hard.

He needed all of this, and the only thing around was a knothole in the nearest tree.

Suddenly he was a boy again, on the cusp of manhood and perpetually hard, and within seconds, his pecker was jammed into the rough circle of bark. He giggled like an idiot as he wrapped his arms around the trunk, and pictured his first lay. She was fat, drunk and covered with as much filth as he was. Her pussy was rough and hairy. Her lips her wine-stained and sticky.

She asked him if he wanted her, and he told her he did. It had only been farm animals or his hands up to that point; a real woman was something new. They slobbered all over each other for nearly an hour before he came into her.

“Don’t worry” she told him later, “A horse kicked me in the crotch when I was four. I can’t grow nothing in here.”

His memories broke long enough to picture himself, in the afterlife, fucking this tree, and the stupidity made him laugh. He should have known that would be the signal the world needed to screw with him some more, because at that moment, the rough bark moistened, and softened, and pulled itself around him as the trunk heaved and pulsated with sudden life. The tree seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then he found himself embracing another perfect, impossible shield maiden.

He screamed, then pulled himself out of her and threw her away. Not “her,” he was reminded, “It.” It. IT IT IT IT IT. Always and forever. Perfect women and perfect food and no chase forever and ever. No fight. No chase. No hunt. No fun. Always always always, and no way out. Ever.

All through the endless forest of the afterworld, a naked man was seen running and screaming. Game was found the next morning, torn apart as if by hand, bloody footprints in their wake. Trees had chunks missing by what appeared to be bite marks. Even the Valkyries, impossible to know and seemingly emotionless, were badly unnerved by whatever had gone on the night before.

No one ever saw the crazy one again. The damage dealt the night before, including the muddy footprints near the edge of the waterfall, healed quickly and were then forgotten. On the rare occasion that he was discussed, it was said that he’d found a way to commit some final, permanent suicide. No one cared to know for sure.

That was a long time ago.

Today, there’s a club in New York that still has proper punk bands. The music is loud and the crowd is wild. The decoration is DIY and the owners are straight-edge.

They’ll tell you about the old days, “when Punk was capital-fucking-P.” They’ll tell you about the bands, and the mosh pits, and all the crazy shit that used to happen. A favorite story of theirs is the time the skinheads showed up during a Spleen-Kicker show. The lead singer was a black lesbian. You do the math.

They were big, and there were a lot of them, so they made short work of the kids in the crowd. They made it about halfway to the stage, and things were looking bad. Then, some guy drilled the leader like an NFL linebacker tackling a scarecrow. He was a big guy, but not in a body-builder way. He had long hair and eyes like a shark, and he seemed to enjoy taking the skinheads apart.

“You should’ve seen the guy, darling,” they’ll tell you, “He looked like Conan the Barbarian or something. And do you know? He got right back in the pit after!”

It wasn’t a castle siege, but it was life, and that was enough.