Lost in a Legend

Edited by MichelleMoran

Thence come the maidens, mighty in wisdom,

Three from their dwelling in roots of the tree;

Past is one named, Present the next --

They scored wood with runes-- and Future the third.

Laws they made there; and life they allotted

To the sons of men, and set their fates.

The

Völuspá

Chapter 1

It was a dark and stormy night...

No, seriously, it was a fucking dark and stormy night. It was cold, wet, miserable, and dark as hell. I was sunk in mud halfway up my combat boots, my ruck was funneling rain water right down the middle of my back, and I would have been shivering if I hadn't been burning up from an eight or nine mile hump over the hills and through the woods to-grandmother's-house we damn well

go

, in full battle-rattle. I could only see at all because we stopped at the edge of a break in the forest, and the difference between pitch black and almost-pitch-black was enough to see by.

I was bent over with my hands propped on my knees to take some of the weight off my shoulders. They say it's better to drop your ruck and walk it out, but that would have required moving. And there was mud everywhere, and I didn't want to deal with the mess. And it would have required moving. To hell with my pride, I was

tired

. I'd had to keep pace with a horse, for chrissake. I concentrated on keeping my breathing even.

Wolfdietrich leaned back on his horse beside me and shrugged his hood back. When I worked up the strength to open my eyes and look up, he was halfheartedly trying to shake the water out of his reins. He had already tugged his boots up, adjusted his belt, and hitched his sword further back on his hip.

His horse shifted its weight from foot to foot and sighed loudly. Then it tugged on the reins.

Personally, I agreed with the horse. Wolfdietrich was killing time we probably didn't have, because he wasn't looking forward to taking the next step. And who could blame him? I wasn't very happy about the idea of marching into a hole in the ground to take on a dragon either, but I wasn't in charge, so I didn't have to be. They pay officers to be happy about that sort of shit. Or nobles, in this case.

Yes, the guy's name was actually Wolfdietrich, and we were about to fight a fucking dragon.

But maybe I should back up.

My name is John Falcone, Sergeant First Class, US Army. I'm a 21 Mike –a firefighter, and I'm responsible for all, and I quote, "Fire protection, personnel rescue, first aid and fire prevention duties" at Army Flight Operations Detachment, Heidelberg. Translation: I'm a thirty two year old solder in this man's Army, pretending to be a station chief, trying to keep an honest-to-god firefighting service together on hope, dreams, bailing wire and all the equipment I can misappropriate from beautiful, scenic, Heidelberg Army Airfield.

That last part was a lie. There's nothing scenic about Heidelberg AAF. If Heidelberg is a jigsaw puzzle, AFOD Heidelberg is a piece from a different puzzle that somebody stomped into place. I shit you not; there are houses two hundred feet from the runway. Look it up on Google Maps, it'll scare the hell out of you. And if you think it makes you nervous to look at on a map, try flying out of it sometime. Or into it. Someone could literally back off the end of their driveway and onto the airfield. When the locals are drunk enough on their awesome German beer, sometimes they

do

.

Do you know the story of Sisyphus? The guy who was punished by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, but as soon as he gets it to the top, it rolls down the other side and forces him to start all over again? My job is like that. Almost all our equipment is twenty years out of date, we don't have the budget for testing it regularly, much less training with it, and I have precisely four other dedicated firefighters to work with. The rest of my boys are mechanics or machinists who cross-trained to fill in.

Not that it's a disaster waiting to happen, really. When Army doesn't have the funding or equipment to solve a problem, it tries to make up for it with good people. Usually. And we have good relations with the local

Feuerwehr

. And whenever the Heidelberg

Feuerwehrleute

strap on their black-and-gold bumblebee suits to have a training exercise, more often than not one of my guys will be tagging along, trying to look inconspicuous in silver mylar and digicam nomex.

They put me in charge of this mess because I'm one of the four enlisted men in the Army with a Master's degree in fire prevention engineering. University of Maryland, class of '09. Bet you didn't know there was such a thing. Don't feel bad, my chain of command didn't know either. They were so happy when they found out that, for my sins, they promoted me to Sergeant First Class and ended my career.

You see, because I'm a firefighter, I'm just about guaranteed never to be promoted beyond SFC. And if by some miracle I am, the Army will turn me into just another general contractor doing general contracting in an engineering battalion, and I'll spend my days doing something interesting –like building a bulletproof Starbucks in Afghanistan.

Knowing that to an old 21 Mike that kind of thing would be a fate worse than death, some kind soul in Admin somewhere managed to put me out to pasture at what's essentially a private airfield for the brass at Campbell Barracks. Or, excuse me, at Component Command-Land Headquarters, Heidelberg, as we're officially supposed to call it now. Yeah I know, no one else does either.

Either way, the brass fly in, the brass fly out. They pretend that I'm valued, and I pretend to believe it. All together it's enough to give a man a headache.

Which was why, as soon as my CO approved my leave request, I hopped a train from Hamburg to Freiburg im Breisgau for four days of hiking through the Black Forest.

Der Schwarzwaldverein

, kind of a combination hiking club and nature society, had sent me a surprisingly detailed tourist map that promised me 24,000 kilometers of clearly marked, easy-to-navigate nature trails, and I was ready for all of them. Rank hath its privileges.

A lot of avid hikers try to go for "yuppie-adventurist chic". Slip-on running shoes

sans

socks, cargo shorts

circa

1998, Underarmor running shirt superglued to the abs, Livestrong bracelet, weathered ballcap, hemp necklace, seven hundred dollar modular hiking system with lumbar support... you know the look. You have to accessorize before you can go for a walk in the woods. Whatever happened to the classic outdoorsman look? Maybe it makes me old-fashioned, but I keep rocking the flannel and jeans.

It was almost nineteen hundred hours when I finally stepped into something that looked like a forest. I still had a little more than an hour of daylight left though, and there was no way I was going to wuss out and rent a room on my first night of leave. So I tightened up the only kind of boots I own, threw my MOLLE pack over my shoulders and shuffled off down the trail at the quickest pace I could manage without risking my knees. Hooah.

It didn't take long in the forest to convince me that Germany is amazing. Even their forests are clean. I've never seen anything like it in the States. I grew up in Tennessee, and between the fallen logs, underbrush and rabbit holes, our forests will flat break your leg if you're not careful when walking off the beaten path. Not in the Black Forest. It's almost like they have someone go out with a rake and a lawnmower to clean up the woods. Then again, it's Germany. Maybe they do.

It was well after sunset, so I had maybe twenty minutes of light left when I came across a good camp site. This is Europe so of course it was occupied, but it wasn't full. I unpacked both halves of my same-as-issued two-man tent and staked out a spot between the tall, sweeping roots of a truly enormous old beech tree on the edge of the clearing.

The camping ground was on the crest of a long, steep hill that overlooked stone-fenced pastures, and a sleepy little hamlet with an unpronounceable name full of too many consonants and grossly inflated prices. The other campers had obviously decided to cook for themselves rather than take out a mortgage to have dinner in

Touristplatz

down below. Or maybe they didn't want to hike back up that godawful hill while drunk as a skunk.

Either way, food was cooking and the drinks were flowing. And the pot was smoking. Enough that you'd think we were in Amsterdam. I was worried about getting a contact high and flunking my next drug test until a little breeze pushed most of the cloud away.

While I was walking around setting up camp, I noticed that I got a few looks from my campmates

du jour

. When you're a big guy with short hair and you dress like a lumberjack or an off-duty cop, you tend to get that. I chalk it up to my good looks and southern charm. And if you believe that, I'd love to sell you some prime Arizona beachfront property.

I was a little surprised, though, because you

don't

normally get scowls, frowns and suspicion. Or at least I don't. Southern charm, remember? But several of the campers visibly kept their distance. Maybe I'm too old for the cool kids to play with anymore. Or maybe they were afraid I was

Bundespolizei

and here to break up the fun.

Either way it looked like I would be keeping myself company. I picked at a cold chicken breast MRE –because I'm a bachelor and they're cheap, easy, and indestructible, and at least they're familiar– and I leaned back against the smooth white bark of the big old beech and watched the people.

Okay, yeah, I watched the girls.

The girls are another reason that Germany's amazing. Not that all the campers were German; I was able to pick out Italian, something that sounded like Russian but maybe wasn't, and at least one other language that sounded vaguely Germanic –but out of the dozen or so young women walking around, there wasn't one who wouldn't look great in a bikini. God bless the European diet.

The boys they were with, on the other hand, were mostly chestless wonders. It's always baffled me how these kids turn from the wispy-bearded stick-figures that protest World Trade Organization meetings, into the proper, "

alles in Ordnung"

Teutonic

Übermensch

that bring us beer, bratwurst and BMWs without any apparent steps in between.

But they were getting laid by alabaster goddesses, and I wasn't. Little bastards must have something going for them.

I polished off the skittle pack in my MRE with a swing of water and ducked into my tent, trying to pretend I wasn't jealous as hell. I consoled myself with the thought that I was twice their size and could benchpress any three of them.

Cold comfort, let me tell you.

I peeled off my shirt, slipped into my sleeping bag and drifted into the dreamless sleep of the weary.

I awoke to the sound of the tent's rainfly being slowly unzipped. I went rigid. Silently, I groped around the inside of the tent for something to use as a weapon. I found my ruck beside me and thrust my hand into the open pouch. The first thing that came to hand was... a chemlight.

A chemlight?

Seriously

? Who do I even carry those with me?

Probably because safety conferences give them away for free and I'm a natural scrounger. And because, technically, they're part of the seventy-two hour kit I feel naked without lugging around.

Well, fine. Punching someone with the end of a glowstick will hurt me less and them more than my fist will. And light could be good.

The inner fly my tent peeled open with a quiet hiss, and I saw the silhouette of a head start to duck into the inner chamber.

I snapped the chemlight into emerald brightness and pulled back my first to strike out at... a beautiful young woman, blinking at me in amazement. Her mouth opened and she worked her jaw to say something, but apparently she thought better of it because nothing came out. It looked like she had crawled into the wrong tent by mistake. Then she cocked her head at me for a moment, as if she were trying to figure something out. She peered at me for a long second, then she straightened, and crawled the rest of the way in.

Holy Shit.

I was in shock on several levels. For one, that she had actually had the nerve to come in to my tent like that. For another, I had never seen a woman so uniquely beautiful in my entire life. I mean, sure I watch movies like everyone else, and there's always the internet, but even counting the singers and actresses that tour with the USO, I had never seen anyone that looked like her in person. She was long and delicate like a spun-glass figure, or a living barbie doll. She had the longest swan-like neck I had ever seen, terrific breasts, and mouth-wateringly wide hips that flared beneath a dramatically narrow waist. In the soft green light her skin could have been made of polished marble, and her hair must have been newly brushed into the lustrous, silky waves that hung down past her waist. What kind of woman puts that much effort into her hair anymore?

Oh, and she was totally, unashamedly, gloriously naked. And she was reaching for the zipper to my sleeping bag.

Holy

Shit

.

As it happens, I know something about willpower. The Army issues you a whole bunch of it when they promote you to a senior NCO billet and turn you into a father figure for a bunch of perpetually horny young men. So when this pale blond goddess started unzipping my sleeping bag, I summoned up fucking

all

of it and just barely managed to force myself to catch her hand.

She looked up at me with a question in her eyes.

Wait, she wants me to talk, too? That can't be fair.

"Honey, I think you have the wrong tent," I finally croaked out. Very smooth.

She cocked her head at me again in that curious expression and murmured something to herself in a language that sounded vaguely Germanic but defiantly wasn't German. Maybe she was Swedish. That might explain a few things, actually. She smiled slyly and reached for the zipper again, and when she did she shifted position a little and

Oh God her breasts were amazing.

I didn't care about stopping her anymore.

She pulled open the sleeping bag and looked me over with obvious satisfaction. And damn if that isn't an awesome feeling, knowing that a beautiful woman finds your body attractive.

She slipped into the sleeping bag with me. The first touch of that white thigh against my leg was electric. I went rigid with pleasure from that touch alone. God, what was wrong with me, it hadn't been that long since my last time with a woman, had it? I counted the months on mental fingers and the months turned into years which turned into the

firm

conclusion that yes, it

had

been that long since my last time.

She slithered against me while her hands played out patterns on my chest and shoulders, all the while murmuring her appreciation in Swedish. When she nestled the mound of her pussy on top of my briefs, and settled her weight on my cock, all I could do was groan my acceptance of the inevitable.

This unbelievable Swedish chick was going to fuck me. And she didn't seem to care that she didn't know me, or that even though she was full grown, I had probably gotten my first promotion in the service before she had finished kindergarten. Hell, I wasn't sure we even shared a language, but she was going to fuck me.

I'll be damned if I wasn't going to fuck her back.

I pulled her up into a kiss, and when our tongues touched I swear my vision went white for a second. She moaned into the kiss, and I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her tighter against me. Her breasts crushed against my chest, and I was amazed and insanely proud to feel her nipples hardening against me.

I grabbed a fistful of her pale gold hair and pulled her head back, trailing kisses down the underside of her jaw, and she groaned and writhed. Her ankles hooked around my legs and she ground herself against my cock. Her nails dug into my chest, kneading me, almost like a cat. I got down to her collarbone and suddenly she threw me flat on my back and it was back to the lip-lock.

Our tongues danced, and when we broke for air she bit my lower lip, and gently pulled on me until I sat up into her kiss. She snaked her arms beneath my shoulders, got a grip on my hair, and clamped me down into the most amazing oral experience of my life.

It was more than a kiss. The way she used her lips... God. I thought I was aggressive kisser, but she explored my tongue as if she were taking part of me into her. Little did I know. The whole time she was gyrating her hips on top of me, massaging me into painful hardness beneath her. I started humping back against her and then suddenly, I don't know how, my briefs were gone and my cock was sandwiched between her lips.

The feeling of her silkiness against my skin shocked me into stillness. As she dragged herself across my cock, it twitched, and she smiled hungrily.

She raised herself up, and I watched from inside a curtain of her pale gold hair as she reached down between us and squeezed my cock, long and lovingly. She tipped me up at a little angle and rubbed the head back and forth across her hairless slit. Her eyes went half-lidded in desire.

"Yesss," she hissed.

She sank back a little, just enough to split her shaven lips with the head of my cock. I pumped my hips out of sheer reflex, but she artfully kept herself just out of my reach, teasing me with her contact. She grinned at me, and lowered her head to play her tongue around the hollow of my throat.

I rubbed my hands up and down the smooth skin of her narrow flanks and she purred in response. She rocked her hips up and down, sliding my cock bottom to top between her soaking lips. She tongued around my neck, and played at biting my collarbone in between kisses. And then she bit down harder, hunched her back and slid me inside her. The feeling of her bulging around me, sliding me into her was so intense I didn't dare to breathe.

When her mound came to rest against my pelvis and she had buried me inside her to the root, she shuddered against me. She huffed ragged breaths against my neck between bared teeth.

I brought my hands along her sides and cupped the sides of her breasts where they pillowed against me, thumbing her nipples. At my touch, I felt them swell harder against my chest, and she let out an involuntary moan of pleasure. Her pussy spasmed around my cock and she shuddered.

She took a deep breath and rose to her knees. I looked up in fascination at her as she towered over me, ducking her head to fit beneath the curved roof of the tent. She had unbelievable breasts such a slender frame. They were heavy and soft in my hands, each one more than a handfull. I kneaded what I could hold, tracing my thumb in circles around the pebbled skin around her swollen nipples.

Her eyes fluttered in pleasure, and she began rocking her hips sharply forward and back. Her hands drifted across my chest and shoulders, and trailed their way up my arms, squeezing. She kept up her rocking pace like the rhythm of riding a horse, and her eyes fluttered again. Her hands found my wrists, and pulled my hands harder against her breasts.

She started rotating her hips in small circles, grinding her pussy against the root of my cock. She let her hands drop down to her thighs, closing her eyes and breathing deeply through her nose. I took the opportunity to explore her with my hands, caressing her smooth belly. Her ribcage was tiny in my hands, and I traced the hollows between her ribs and the curves of her abdomen.

She hissed in pleasure and I felt her pussy grip me tighter. Grinning at her response, I ran my hands lightly up an over her shoulders and around the sides of her neck, barely touching her. I drew my hands down the back of her arms, and she squirmed again.