Tyr will stop him, Tyr the one-handed, and they will fight, man and nightmare dog. Tyr fights bravely, but the battle will be the death of both of them. Garm dies with its teeth locked in Tyr’s throat.
Thor will finally kill the Midgard serpent, as he has wanted to do for so long.
Thor smashes the great serpent’s brains in with his hammer. He will leap back as the sea snake’s head tumbles onto the battlefield.
Thor is a good nine feet away from it when its head crashes to the ground, but that is not far enough. Even as it dies, the serpent will empty its venom sacs over the thunder god, in a thick black spray.
Thor grunts in pain and then falls lifeless to the earth, poisoned by the creature he slew.
Odin will battle Fenrir bravely, but the wolf is more vast and more dangerous than anything could possibly be. It is bigger than the sun, bigger than the moon. Odin thrusts into its mouth with his spear, but one snap of Fenrir’s jaws, and the spear is gone. Another bite and a crunch and a swallow and Odin, the all-father, greatest and wisest of all the gods, is gone as well, never to be seen again.
Odin’s son Vidar, the silent god, the reliable god, will watch his father die. Vidar will stride forward, as Fenrir gloats over Odin’s death, and thrust his foot into the wolf’s lower jaw.
Vidar’s two feet are different. One of them has a normal shoe on it. The other wears a shoe that has been constructed since the dawn of time. It is assembled from all the bits of leather that people cut from the toes and the heels when they make shoes for themselves, and throw away.
(If you want to help the Aesir in the final battle, you should throw away your leather scraps. All thrown-out scraps and trimmings from shoes will become part of Vidar’s shoe.)
This shoe will hold the great wolf’s lower jaw down, so it cannot move. Then with one hand Vidar will reach up and grasp the wolf’s upper jaw and rip its mouth apart. In this way Fenrir will die, and so Vidar will avenge his father.
On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods. The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight.
Of Loki’s legions, only Loki himself will still be standing, bloodied and wild-eyed, with a satisfied smile on his scarred lips.
Heimdall, the watcher on the bridge, the gatekeeper of the gods, will also not have fallen. He will stand on the battlefield, his sword, Hofud, wet and bloody in his hand.
They walk toward each other across Vigrid, treading on corpses, wading through blood and flames to reach each other.
“Ah,” Loki will say. “The muddy-backed watchman of the gods. You woke the gods too late, Heimdall. Was it not delightful to watch them die, one by one?”
Loki will watch Heimdall’s face, looking for weakness, looking for emotion, but Heimdall will remain impassive.
“Nothing to say, Heimdall of the nine mothers? When I was bound beneath the ground, with the serpent’s poison dripping into my face, with poor Sigyn standing beside me trying to catch what venom she could in her bowl, bound in the darkness in the intestines of my son, all that kept me from madness was thinking of this moment, rehearsing it in my mind, imagining the days when my beautiful children and I would end the time of the gods and end the world.”
Heimdall will still say nothing, but he will strike, and strike hard, his sword crashing against Loki’s armor, and Loki will counter, and Loki will attack with fierceness and intelligence and glee.
As they fight, they will remember a time they battled long ago, when the world was simpler. They had fought in animal form, transformed into seals, competing to obtain the necklace of the Brisings: Loki had stolen it from Freya at Odin’s request, and Heimdall had retrieved it.
Loki never forgets an insult.
They will fight, and slash and stab and hack at each other.
They will fight, and they will fall, Heimdall and Loki, fall beside each other, each mortally wounded.
“It is done,” whispers Loki, dying on the battlefield. “I won.”
But Heimdall will grin then, in death, grin through golden teeth flecked with spittle and with blood. “I can see further than you,” Heimdall will tell Loki. “Odin’s son Vidar killed your son Fenris Wolf, and Vidar survives, and so does Odin’s son Vali, his brother. Thor is dead, but his children Magni and Modi still live. They took Mjollnir from their father’s cold hand. They are strong enough and noble enough to wield it.”
“None of this matters. The world is burning,” says Loki. “The mortals are dead. Midgard is destroyed. I have won.”
“I can see further than you can, Loki. I can see all the way to the world-tree,” Heimdall will tell him with his last breath. “Surtr’s fire cannot touch the world-tree, and two people have hidden themselves safely in the trunk of Yggdrasil. The woman is called Life, the man is called Life’s Yearning. Their descendants will populate the earth. It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. You have failed.”
Loki would say something, something cutting and clever and hurtful, but his life will have gone, and all his brilliance, and all his cruelty, and he will say nothing, not ever again. He will lie still and cold beside Heimdall on the frozen battlefield.
Now Surtr, the burning giant, who was there before the beginning of all things, looks out at the vast plain of death and raises his bright sword to the heavens. There will be a sound like a thousand forests turning to flame, and the air itself will begin to burn.
The world will be cremated in Surtr’s flames. The flooding oceans steam. The last fires rage and flicker and then are extinguished. Black ash will fall from the sky like snow.
In the twilight, where Loki and Heimdall’s bodies once lay beside each other, nothing can be seen but two heaps of gray ash on the blackened earth, the smoke mingling with the mist of the morning. Nothing will remain of the armies of the living and of the dead, of the dreams of the gods and the bravery of their warriors, nothing but ash.
Soon after, the swollen ocean will swallow the ashes as it washes across all the land, and everything living will be forgotten under the sunless sky.
That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods.
II
That is the end. But there is also what will come after the end.
From the gray waters of the ocean, the green earth will arise once more.
The sun will have been eaten, but the sun’s daughter will shine in the place of her mother, and the new sun will shine even more brightly than the old, shine with young light and new.