Lifthrasir

"Lif?", Autumn said. She felt stupid. Was this something they'd learned already in the Mythology section of Freshman English? But Emily had always been kind of weird. She could be making stuff up. Except, there was that blue stone that kept her paralyzed, and she didn't seem phased by ghosts, and... she lived with the Librarian. Autumn shivered.

"Yes, pay attention." Emily said. She pulled out a dusty old book from her backpack, bound in red leather and embossed with the picture of a tree like a celtic knot, all the branches curling and twisting in on each other. Stones of amber, jet, and pale blue stone studded the spine. Emily turned on the teacher's projector and set the book on top. Just in front of the whiteboard a 3d picture sprang to life with a blare of trumpets. "Let me just change the volume a bit," she said, twirling her hand on an invisible dial.

In front of them a series of twelve great beings on high thrones sat. "The old Gods. This was the ruling council, before the war that destroyed them all. Well, mostly." Emily typed in the air, and the picture zoomed in on two of them. "Do you know anything about Ragnarok? The Last Battle?"

Autumn gathered her thoughts. "The old Norse gods fight. They die." Autumn swallowed. "But it hasn't happened yet."

"Actually," Emily corrected, "It did. About five hundred years ago. It completely destroyed Asgard, where the gods used to live, and decimated the homeworld of the giants, and the groves of the Alfar. Imagine a war fought by gods and monsters the size of mountains. A war so horrible that it completely wiped out one world and sent two others back to the stone age."

An echo of the screams of dying horses and men, of fiery explosions and thunder from heaven, and howling, earth rending howling, echoed in the darkest corners of Autumn's mind, like the an ancient memory or a nightmare, she couldn't be sure which. For a moment she forgot where she was. The room seemed to glimmer dark, and Autumn felt dizzy, her heart rate rising. She clutched the edges of the desk until the moment passed.

"I've seen some of the archived footage," Emily muttered, almost to herself. Her voice was wooden. "I'm not going to put you through that, though." She shook herself, like waking out of a bad dream, and continued.

"A few of the gods survived." Emily pointed at the two figures in the picture. They were dressed in white and amber and pale  green, with clear bright eyes looking off into the distance. "That's Lif and Lifthrasir, minor gods, servants in the house of Odin Allfather. They escaped to this earth, Midgard, running and hiding along the trunk of the World Tree. Their children married into the royal families of northern Europe: Norway, Denmark, Sweden. It's been hundreds of years, and now their descendants have spread all across the world. Most of the time, they're regular humans, but every once in awhile, for some reason, the blood of the Lif wakes up. They find they can do things and see things that normal people can't do. Weird stuff happens to them because they let off a kind of static. Otherworlders can sense it."

"Like the ghosts." Autumn nodded.