Here’s another excerpt, this time from the last book in Sean’s series (barring unexpected things such as the world not ending after all). In this scene, with Fimbulwinter freezing Puget Sound solid, Sean decides to once more consult his occasionally prophetic laptop about what’s in store for him and his friends when Ragnarok comes.

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I hadn’t touched my old laptop in a while, but for some reason tonight I felt like taking a look. I could even have made a case for playing some Twilight of the Gods (TOTG), something like Maybe I missed some random clue Loki embedded in the game, that will make all the difference! But it didn’t matter anyway, since electronic devices don’t work on Runnymede.

Don’t work normally, that is. But my laptop has been known to open a window on the future (or the past, or different places in the present, or maybe alternate timelines. Basically the same standard disclaimer Galadriel pulled out when Frodo took a look in her mirror.)

I know, what did I think I was going to see, with Ragnarok about to hit us like a million tons of jotuns, trolls, and assorted monsters?

Anyway, what I did see was boring, at first. It was just an empty plain, stretching out as far as I could see. It wasn’t day, or really night either—more like one of those twilight places I’d seen way too much of in the last while. I thought for a second it actually might be Hel, but there was no river and no city. Just the empty land.

Then the first jotuns came into view. Mountain giants and frost giants, mostly, but there were puffs of smoke drifting around that made me think fire giants weren’t far behind. It was an army of them, more than I’d ever seen at one time, or actually all the times I’ve seen them put together. They seemed bigger than usual, even for giants, but it was hard to tell with nothing else in sight.

Then some trolls started showing up around the edges, and I could tell just how big they were. They were big. These guys had definitely eaten their meat and potatoes and cleaned their plates, like their giant moms told them to.

They kept on coming in endless waves, passing the point where my magic camera was, I guess, floating in the air. Yup, there were the fire giants, hundreds of them, but who’s counting? I remembered how tough it was dealing with one fire giant in Asgard, and lost track of my stomach for a second.

Other things started to show up after the fire giants had passed by. Dragons, most of them fifty-footers or more, if I was any judge. Hey, where had they found so many? When we wanted a new treasure guardian for Runnymede, we’d had to go on a quest to find one. Maybe there were dragon farms somewhere, run by jotuns in asbestos overalls, with giant kids coming to feed and pet the baby ones.

There were two kinds—green dragons, like the one I’d more or less accidentally slain in the first book, that breathed fire as they slithered along, sometimes incinerating a troll or two (now I really understood what my dad and Fiona were talking about when they mentioned ‘friendly fire’), but also white ones. Those just darted out their tongues once in a while, so I assumed they didn’t breathe flame. No clue what they might do instead, except I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

Then I started seeing the draugr. At first I thought those flickers I saw on the screen were caused by, I don’t know, bad prophecy transmission conditions. But then one paused and, as far as I could tell, looked right back out of the screen at me. It looked human, mostly, and wore armor that looked pretty normal, thought maybe a bit rusty. But the face was kind of falling apart, and the eyes were more like black holes.

Once I saw the first one, they were everywhere. Way too many to count, like the trolls and jotuns. (All right, I could probably have counted the dragons, but I didn’t.)

There were other things, too—swords and maces and spears just cruising around like berserk drones, things like animated trees stumping around—literally, they were actual stumps with branchy arms, and you know how when you look at a tree, you can see faces in the bark? You couldn’t not see these. Not to mention the wargs—lots of the trolls were mounted, most using serpent-reins, like the one that had crashed through our picture window what felt like ten years ago.

It seemed like way enough, and I kept expecting the viewpoint to shift and maybe show me something useful. But they just kept on coming. If they didn’t have twenty monsters to every hero I could even imagine getting to the battle, it wasn’t the fault of the hard-working Muspelheim and Niflheim recruiters.

“Where are they coming from?” I wondered aloud.

The laptop seemed to hear that, and finally the scene changed. I had trouble making out exactly what was going on, at first. There was a lot of motion on the screen, but it was like shadows just going around in circles. Then the picture sharpened and I saw two giants—giant women, actually, not that they were any less burly or scary than the guys—who were pushing a huge wooden shaft around, which went through an equally huge, circular stone.

And now I was getting audio, too—a grinding noise that sounded like a waterfall full of swords and armor going off a high cliff, but actually came from the millstone going around and around.

The work wasn’t making the women break too much of a sweat, I guess, because now I heard that they were talking at the same time (in verse, like so many of my least favorite people were lately):

Grind, mill, grind,

Grind out horrors

And the death of heroes!

Grind draugr and dragon,

Warg and woodwose,

Nightmare and maelstrom!

Grind, mill, grind!

They kept repeating that over and over, in singsong voices that I had no trouble hearing over the white noise overload of the grinding. And meanwhile, what looked like shadows, but I was totally willing to believe would become all the evil things they were name-dropping, were streaming out from the mill­stone in all directions.

Thanks to Lore class, I knew what I was looking at, which was a good thing since I didn’t have Parvati around to ask at the moment. The magic millstone was called Grotti, and it could grind out whatever you wanted, as long as the giant sisters could keep it turning. A king whose name I forget had the mill grind out peace and gold for his kingdom, but he wouldn’t give the sisters a break, so they ground out total doom for him.

It looked like they were still at it.

After a while, I felt my head going round and round with the grinding and the chant, like I was tied to the millstone. “That’s enough!” I said.

The laptop screen went dark. I felt a chill at the back of my neck. It had never responded to voice commands before. That, and the audio capability, seemed like somebody had pushed out an upgrade without me knowing it. I didn’t like to think of who it might be, or why.

In fact, I just didn’t want to think any more. Not until the morning, anyway. I knew where and when Fiona was, now. With any luck, by the end of tomorrow I’d actually have a plan.

Resisting the impulse to go out and throw the laptop in the Bay, and hope that the maelstrom the giants were chanting about took it down to the bottom forever, I turned out the lights and got into bed.