Read Online Perfekt Order (The Ære Saga Book 1) by S.T. Bende - Free Book Online Page A

alone.
    “Are they always that weird?” I turned to
her.
    She shook her head with a wry smile. “You
don’t know the half of it.”
     
    ****
     
    “Hey, Charlotte, can you come in here for a
minute?” Papers and highlighters littered my desk, bed and floor.
It was the kind of mess I usually would have deemed unfit for
company, but at this point I was too confounded to care about
tidiness. And that was saying a lot.
    “What’s up? Oh, my.” Charlotte stepped
gingerly over to my bed and pointed to a clear spot. “May I?”
    “Go ahead.” I swept the sea of index cards to
the side, making a bigger space for my roommate to sit. “I read
ahead so I could pre-outline for next week’s lectures, and I am
totally lost in art. Help.”
    “Oh, honey.” Charlotte lowered herself onto
my bed and crossed her legs at the ankles. “Of course. What’s
confusing you?”
    “It’s the mythology. There are too many
characters to keep track of on top of the artists and paintings and
themes. I can diagram and spreadsheet and notecard, but I can’t
memorize all of this if I don’t understand why it matters.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s easy enough. Pull up
Wikipedia.” Charlotte nodded to my laptop, the beacon of
information in a sea of wadded up papers.
    “I did that already. Plus I checked out John
Lindow’s Norse Mythology from the library.” I handed her a
spreadsheet I’d printed. It was filled with notes. “This is a
highlighted breakdown of the gods, their functions, and their
powers, sorted according to realm of residence. Asgard is in hot
pink.”
    “I can see that. Wow, you are an
uber-overachiever.” Charlotte shook her head.
    “Card-carrying member.”
    “So what’s your question?”
    “My question is what does all of it mean?
There are like a thousand different gods and realms and battles and
stories. It’s an entire religion, or it was for the Vikings, and
the Nordic cultures that came before them. And there are so many
different versions and variations—I’m not sure which ones are
right. I don’t know how it relates to me, or our society, or Art
History, or anything. Right now, they’re just facts on a
spreadsheet to memorize, but I feel like I should be relating to it
if I want to get the most out of the artwork it inspired. I should
be feeling something when I look at the paintings. I should
be connecting to the backstory.”
    “Or you could just memorize the names of the
paintings and the artists like everybody else and get by with a B.”
Charlotte set the spreadsheet on my bed.
    “I can’t do that. And neither could you.”
    “You’re probably right.” Charlotte picked up
the spreadsheet again. “Okay, let’s go over the basics. There’s way
too much on this paper to tackle in one night.”
    “Fair enough.” I closed my laptop and
swiveled my chair toward my roommate. “Enlighten me.”
    “Okay. So the Norse creation story is pretty
standard—two opposite combined to make something bigger. The fire
of Muspelheim and the ice of Niflheim created a giant called Ymir.
Ymir fed off the milk of a cow, and created the first humans from
his armpits before Odin and his brothers killed him.”
    “Hold on.” I ripped the spreadsheet out of
Charlotte’s hands. “I didn’t read anything about armpits.”
    “Then you missed the fun part. Anyway, Odin
and his brothers killed Ymir and created Midgard—Earth—from parts
of the giant’s body. His blood became our oceans, his bones our
mountains, and every time you pick up a rock, you’re touching one
of his teeth.”
    “Ew.”
    “I know, right? Told you their myths were
crazy.” Charlotte took the spreadsheet back. “Anyway, Earth was
created, some other stuff happened, and big bang boom. We got the
nine realms.” Charlotte glanced at the paper. “You’ve got that part
on here. Asgard, the realm of the titled gods; Vanaheim, the realm
of the next rung of gods; Alfheim, the realm of the light elves;
Svartalfheim, the realm of the