Free Mythos by Kelly McCullough

weird Norse DecLocus.
    In my pantheoverse, there are more faerie rings than there are stars in the sky, and opening a new one is as easy as drawing a circle and connecting it to chaos. As a child of the Titans, that chaos runs in my blood, and spilling it on the appropriate sort of circle is the simplest way to create a new one.
    There’s more than that, though. As a chaos power, I have enormous control over the ring network. Like anyone, I can use it to transport me to any other ring between the blinks of an eye. I can also . . . not exactly create new places by using the rings, but define conditions that I would like a ring to fulfill, such as sanctuary. If such a place exists, the rings will take me there. Or, if the potential for a ring exists someplace that I want to go, I can force it open. That was what I’d just done with the bottle-cap ring.
    What made it such an odd experience? The fact that as far as I could tell, in this pantheoverse, the circle of fire and the bottle cap were the only faerie rings in existence, and neither one of them had been there before I made them. Nor were they connected back to my home network.
    I vaulted over the edge of the bottle cap and dashed across the bit of sidewalk between it and the Shakespeare place. A moment later I walked back into the sitting room. I found Melchior there, glaring at Loki across a heap of broken furniture and the brand-new faerie ring. The latter looked more than a little stunned.
    “You were saying?” I raised an eyebrow at Loki from the doorway.
    He looked over the top of his glasses at me and made another chaos-touched gesture, restoring most of the room to its former state—the ring being the exception.
    “I was saying that we really ought to sit down and discuss this like two civilized beings,” he replied.
    “Three,” said Melchior, making a point of going around the ring as he made his way to the sideboard—where he hopped up and crossed his legs goblin fashion.
    I made just as much of a point of stepping through the ring as I returned to the chaise. In its activation, the ring had changed, of course, becoming an inch-wide circle of char with letters of gold fire slowly writing themselves around the edge, like the words on one of those LED highway signs. At the moment, they seemed to be quoting out the beginning of the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream : Over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier, over park, over pale, through flood, through fire, I do wander everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere . . . etc.
    I occasionally suspect that the very stuff of reality has an ironic streak. As I settled into my seat, I couldn’t help but notice the mantelpiece behind Loki wink at me. For one brief instant an eye of fire and smoke appeared in the stone. Then it snapped shut and was gone. I smiled inwardly, though I was careful not to let it show on my face. Whatever happened next, Tisiphone, hidden by her magical hunter’s chameleon, would stand ready to back me up. Silence stretched out between Loki and me.
    “You’re the one who placed this call,” I finally said to Loki. “Why don’t you start?”
    “All right. That”—he indicated the faerie ring with a nod—“is very interesting. Rather elegant, too. One of those bits of design that makes you wonder why you’d never thought of it. Between that and your eyes and your friends”—now he nodded at Melchior—“I’m starting to think that you’re not from around here. I’d initially believed you and the girl were both some new sort of fire-giant, and I was rather put out that no one had told me of not one but two such interesting, fresh players joining the ’gard-game.”
    “But now you’ve changed your mind?” I asked. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but I didn’t want him to know that.
    “I have. I know you don’t come from Asgard, not with those eyes. My next thought was that the Vanir had finally gotten tired of letting the Aesir have