THE BEAUTY IS THERE BUT A BEAST IS IN THE HEART

By Dale Glaser

Ulrika looked down on the horsemen from relatively higher ground, specifically the toppled remains of a man-made structure which had been composed of enormous gray bricks; she assumed the colossal blocks must have been cast by giants. The pile of decomposing rubble provided just enough elevation to place the crouching woman’s bare blue feet above the pointed tips of the horsemen’s leather helmets. Her opponents numbered ten in total, all wearing boiled leather armor over dark sleeves and trousers that shimmered silkily. The armor was enhanced by different means for each of the soldiers, metal beads for one, plates of horn for another. The four nearest to Ulrika carried medium-length iron lances, while the six ranging behind them were armed with weapons that would allow them to attack at greater range: three of them held double curved bows, which Ulrika recognized, and the other three cradled what looked like windlasses except for the missing bow and string, replaced by metal pipes. Ulrika observed the warriors with a neutral expression, her face as impassive as the semi-eroded walls of the abandoned buildings all around them, until one of the lancers shouted in a strange and guttural tongue and the six marksmen aimed their weapons and let loose their barrage, accompanied by cracks that sounded like small thunders.

That was the moment at which Ulrika bared her teeth in a savage grin as dazzlingly white as the winter moon.

Ulrika threw herself off the crest of the rubble heap as arrows darted just above her head and other projectiles, too small and fast to see, whizzed past her on all sides. An arrow lodged itself in the pale gray fur of her cloak just above her right shoulder; one of the tiny projectiles struck her headpiece in the left eye and flung it backwards, loosing Ulrika’s raven-black hair. All of the other shots missed. Then Ulrika was crouching on the ground between two of the lancers’ mounts.

With a fearsome strength belied by the slimness of her arm, Ulrika swung her battleaxe in a vertical circular path. As it swept upward the axe blade passed along the flank of the first horse, severing the rider’s leg at mid-thigh and tearing a strip of flesh from the animal. The horse reared wildly in pain and fear, unseating the maimed lancer on its back before bolting away. The arc of the axe’s fang-like head continued, without slowing, up over Ulrika’s head and down again on the other side, cleaving through the second lancer’s head and sternum before coming away from his body. The rider toppled limply from his seat on the horse, which skittishly retreated from Ulrika.

Lacking the cover that the horses had provided, Ulrika found herself exposed once again in the sights of the archers and their companions with the strange, loud windlasses. As they nocked their arrows against strings and pulled on levers protruding from stocks, Ulrika bent beside the second rider she had felled. Rather than blood and bone and muscle, tangles of bright-colored strands and warped fragments of thin metal spilled from the two halves of the soldier’s upper body, spitting white sparks. The thigh-stump of the first rider showed the same interior composition. Ulrika ignored the mysteries revealed by the grievous wound and hefted the iron lance that had clattered to the stony ground beside its former wielder.

Ulrika drew the lance back and howled wildly as she threw it, sidearmed, toward her attackers. Rather than cutting cleanly through the air like a properly thrown javelin, the lance spun like a flying iron wheel and struck the heads of two of the windlass carriers, one glancingly, the other hard enough to crush the soldier’s forehead and send jets of white sparks bursting from both his eye sockets. The glancing blow was still forceful enough to nearly unseat the first struck rider, who dropped his windlass while scrabbling with both hands for his mount’s reins. Once again horses were unnerved by clanging weaponry and felled soldiers, and the ensuing distraction prevented some of the archers from loosing arrows, while causing others’ shots to miss entirely.

With stinging quickness, Ulrika sprinted across several yards separating her from the nearest mounted lance-carrier and threw herself at him. Her free hand grabbed the soldier’s right wrist as she vaulted herself onto the horse’s back behind him, and she brought her axe blade crashing down through his left elbow, sundering the limb that held the horse’s reins. Ulrika wrestled the rider’s iron lance to the side as she urged the horse into motion with her heels, and a moment later the weapon had pierced the chest of the only other remaining lancer, driving the impaled soldier violently off the back of his steed while breaking through the back of the leather armor vest in an accompanying shower of sparks. Ulrika clubbed the head of the man seated directly in front of her, knocking him to the side while nearly separating his metal skull from his neck full of metal coils.

Sending her newly claimed mount into a charging gallop, Ulrika made short work of the five remaining soldiers. She rode into their midst with her battle axe orbiting her in a ceaseless blur, like the fluttering wings of a valkyrie. Two soldiers fell almost at once, while the other three cast aside their bows and windlasses and drew curved swords, to no avail. After the last of the horses fled into the twisted warrens created by the decrepit buildings all around, and Ulrika brought her own steed to a calm stillness after the battle frenzy, all was quiet.

A.R.M.O.R. Director Charles Little Sky looked up at the woman standing in his office, while he sat behind his desk. He had offered his guest a chair, but as always, she had refused. Although Ulrika would never allow herself to show it, Little Sky wondered how discomfited she felt within the confines of the Hollow. The menagerie of alien and interdimensional creatures and technology amassed in and around A.R.M.O.R.’s base of operations was understandably off-putting to many a visitor, no matter what their world of origin. Ulrika was a creature of many worlds, and yet of none.

She was Asgardian, although not one of the coterie of gods properly called Aesir or Vanir. Her long, lithe frame, pale blue skin and jet black hair denoted her Svartalfar heritage. But while a Dark Elf would normally garb herself in nothing less than gowns of the most exquisite materials in opulent style, Ulrika’s attire was merely functional, bordering on primitive. A sleeveless gray animal-hide tunic clung to the slender curvature between her shoulders and hips, while a full wolf’s skin with pale gray fur draped down her back, its empty forelegs forming a rough mantle that was knotted in front of Ulrika’s breastbone. Those were Ulrika’s only trappings, except for the massive iron battleaxe she held in one hand, its haft inclined lightly against one leg and its blade resting on the floor of Little Sky’s office. Her simple tribal wardrobe, to any familiar with the less-civilized domains of the Asgardian dimensions, would identify her immediately as one of the Wolflings, the nomads who had in fact raised the Dark Elf woman from a foundling.

Director Little Sky leaned back in his chair, still holding Ulrika’s unperturbed gaze with his own. “My power will be able to transport you to the realm where the danger has arisen, but not directly to its exact source.”

Ulrika nodded.

“You’ll have to find it on your own, and I can’t say for certain how many obstacles might lie in your path,” Little Sky elaborated.

Ulrika nodded again.

“And once you find it, it must be destroyed,” Little Sky went on. “You understand all of this, I hope?”

The corners of Ulrika’s lips curled ever so slightly. “Why else would you have called once again upon the greatest hunter in the Nine Realms?” she asked.

Ulrika guided the steed she had claimed in combat along a path that at first was composed of a single flat black stone but slowly gave way to dusty earth. Strange pale green plants resembling the heads of vicious weapons dotted the ground on either side, but the landscape was otherwise barren and nearly featureless. To Ulrika’s eyes, however, signs of disturbance were not only visible but as plainly readable as signposts, leading her from an overturned rock to a displaced drift of sand and onward.

Desert in its turn was overtaken by snow-covered fields, where recurring patches that had been compressed and melted and then refrozen led Ulrika through a small village of weather-beaten hovels. Eyes appeared in dark, wood-framed windows, timidly marking the passage of the Dark Elf on horseback. The cold air rushed past Ulrika in clean gusts of wind, carrying no trace of the scent of living things, and the adoptive Wolfling woman knew that the peasants watching her were the same kinds of unnatural constructs as the ten warriors she had faced earlier. Ulrika rode on.

The snow thinned and fell behind Ulrika as her mount’s hooves rang against a seemingly endless expanse of tempered steel. Glassy towers reaching higher than the tallest sanctuaries of sorcery lined a wide boulevard, and metallic pylons marched down the center of the street, supporting a set of tracks like those used in dwarven mines to guide ore carts. Ulrika slowed her steed as she took in her surroundings, which evoked in her thoughts of asingle castle encompassing an entire kingdom. If Those Who Sit Above did so in Light rather than Shadow, Ulrika mused, their domain might look much like this.

Ulrika forced herself to focus on the hunt, and realized that in completely constructed environs, such as her present surroundings, irregularities were even simpler to spy. A depression here, a hairline crack there, and Ulrika remained assured that her quarry was near.

The Dark Elf’s horse turned a corner at her urging, and came face to face with a pair of mounted riders. The mounts were enormous, shaggy beasts with long tapering snouts that writhed like snakes, and four long and curved tusks emerging in pairs from the sides of their mouths. The riders wore bulky, asymmetrically layered clothes which appeared to have once been brightly colored but now had a faded look, stained by heavy use. Their heads were exposed, not merely bald but completely hairless, with distressed flesh that seemed as if it had not only been burned but burned over and over again, with other indignities inflicted besides.

“Blue skin,” the rider on Ulrika’s left observed to his companion. “That’s a new mutation to me. You ever see anything like it?”

“Maybe from the Genoshan Run-Off Estuaries,” the rider on the right answered. “Those are all a lot darker blue, though.”

“That’s a chemical mutagenesis, right? Those are rarer than radiation types. She might be worth a lot,” the first rider suggested.

Ulrika resolved to no longer allow herself to be spoken of like livestock, and in a single motion rose to her feet on the back of her horse and leapt at the left-hand rider, all while freeing her battle axe from its belt bindings. As she was airborne, Ulrika saw the serpent-nosed steed rear up on its hind legs with a furious trumpeting cry, and suddenly instead of flying over the creature’s head to meet its master, the Dark Elf was rapidly approaching the beast’s gaping mouth. Undeterred, Ulrika reached out with her free hand and grabbed one of the protruding tucks, then used it to swing herself upward to the creature’s back. Before the stunned rider could react, Ulrika grabbed a handful of the man’s jacket and hoisted him upwards. The rider went over Ulrika’s head, where she released him, and his momentum carried him downward until he was impaled on a tusk, multi-colored metal ribbons and brilliant sparks blooming from the chest wound.

“You’re worth less than nothing now!” the other rider bellowed. He produced a weapon from the folds of his clothing near his belt, another windlass-like contraption, although this was small enough to be wielded one-handed and was composed of glass tubing surrounded by metallic ribs. The rider pulled his trigger and it was as if a thin column of air had been transformed into a red-hot poker aimed between Ulrika’s eyes.

Ulrika had already flattened herself against the top of the mount’s furry skull, and the super-heated discharge sailed harmlessly above her. The Dark Elf drew her battleaxe back over her shoulder and threw it at her attacker. Spinning in a dizzyingly fast circle, the flying axe covered the distance between them in less than a heartbeat and came to a sudden stop as the blade buried itself in the other rider’s chest. The wound was deep enough to reach whatever internal power animated the artificial man, and a sizable explosion of brightly burning fluids and thick, oily smoke accompanied the expected effulgent sparks, throwing the rider to the steel avenue below.

Ulrika dismounted quickly to retrieve her weapon. The noise of the explosion had startled the two long-nosed behemoths and both lumbered away from the scene; they in turn spooked the horse Ulrika had been riding, and all three stampeded into the distance of the empyrean city. Ulrika let them go, sparing a moment’s hope that the horse which had served her well would take care of itself, then dislodged the head of her battleaxe from the ruined torso of the felled construct. Bright, loyal horses were rare, but an unfailing weapon was rarer still. Ulrika’s finely tempered battleaxe was unscratched. She propped the haft against the wolfskin covering her shoulder, certain that her hunt was nearing an end and that her axe would be needed again soon.

“May I ask you one more thing, Ulrika?” Director Little Sky asked.

“If you must,” the Dark Elf replied.

“You’re right, as you say, that I need you,” Little Sky stated. “But I doubt very much that you feel in any way as though you need me.”

Ulrika silently awaited the promised question.

“Why help me at all? What do you gain from it?”

“You wonder this now?”

“I’ve always wondered. I’m asking now.”

Ulrika shifted her weight almost imperceptibly as she considered the question, pressing the curve of her hip against the haft of her battleaxe. “The Wolflings’ way of life is hard. Every day of my clan’s continued existence depends upon arduous, unrelenting work which any of the Aesir would find taxing. Yet every day it is the same work. The hunt for food, the guarding against enemies, morning noon and night. I do not shy from my share of this work. I love these exertions as I love my clan, in fact in many ways the two are inseparable. And yet …” Ulrika’s coal-black eyes took on a faraway look. “Sometimes … I yearn for more. For a challenge. For a chance to test myself against that which I have not seen in all of Asgard. It matters very little what you ask me to do, Charles Little Sky … so long as I have never done it before.”

In the wake of Ulrika’s confession, a charged silence hung in the air of the office.

“Sir?” the voice of Director Little Sky’s personal assistant Prithita emanated from the speaker of his desk phone. “Dane Whitman of Earth 1.G.7.9.5 is here to see you.”

“Reporting success in delivering the armistice declarations to the Dreamqueen, I hope?” Little Sky asked.

“I’m afraid not, sir,” Prithita answered. “Not unless the Black Knight being transformed into a six-foot tall toad-man was part of your expectations of success.”

Little Sky bowed his head. “I was afraid of something like that. Please tell him I’ll be right out and he can give me the details as we go to the vaults. And call ahead to Mr. Citrine in the alchemical division and have him start cross-referencing elixirs for us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Little Sky looked up at Ulrika. “I should let you be on your way, then.” Ulrika’s only response was to take up her battleaxe from its resting position. Little Sky gestured towards the bookcase-lined wall of his office, and a swirling white disk bordered in crackling violet opened in midair. Ulrika walked serenely through the interdimensional portal without looking back.

The outskirts of the gleaming cityscape merged into a desolate expanse like the hearth of giants, broken gray stones warm to the touch, completely devoid of signs of both animal and plant life. Ulrika progressed unerringly through the rocky terrain until she spied a singular structure in the distance: her destination.

Ulrika closed on the massive structure and soon stood at its base, a symmetrical building of polished white stone, its walls composed of narrowly spaced, fluted columns, its shallowly sloped roof fronted with ornate carvings, all of which reminded Ulrika of the handful of ideas she had picked up over the years forming her mental image of the realm of Olympus. The physical presence of the pale building spoke of its revered origins as a temple. The profusion of chaos above its roofline indicated that reverence was no longer being given.

A colossal iridescent cylinder with backswept fins stood up at a slight angle from the apex of the temple roof, and disappeared into the bottom of the pitch-covered keel of a formidable wooden sailing ship. The elongated prow of the ship ran into one eye socket of the skull of an enormous bird and out the other eye. Where the ship’s main mast should have been, a narrow, four-story brick house arose. The flat roof of that building supported a sand-colored pyramid which leaned precipitously to one side and was crowned with enormous lush green vines and gigantic tropical flowers of all kinds. The pile of seemingly incompatible construction continued higher and higher still, but was lost to sight in the dark, heavy clouds ahead beyond the point where a riveted steel bunker balanced atop the pyramid.

As Ulrika considered the scene before her, the various segments of the composite structure began to glow. Faint at first, the light intensified until it pulled away from the buildings and took on semi-solid substance of its own. In a moment a being hovered before her which looked as if the Rainbow Bridge Bifrost itself had been carved into the shape of a gargantuan spider, hanging upside down from the sky. Long, claw-tipped legs composed of ever-chasing colors twitched and flickered, as two pure white eyes, each as wide as half the Dark Elf’s height, regarded her calculatingly. “Youuuuuuuu … shouldnotbehere,” the glow-thing hissed.

“Nor should you,” Ulrika returned calmly, as something like a sharp tongue darted from side to side beneath the thing’s burning eyes.

“Ilikethis … plaaaaaaaaaaaace …” the glow-thing offered. “It … issssssssss … afeastoftime. I would staaaaaaay … andfeeduponthis plaaaaaaaaaaaace. Iwouldnotleavehere … willllllllingggggggglyyyyyyy.”

“And I,” Ulrika countered, “care not at all what you will.”

Ulrika brought the axe crashing down into the center of the glow-thing’s left eye. Her arms immediately felt as if they were simultaneously plunged into an icy river and a roaring bonfire. She fought to hold her grip on her weapon’s haft, distantly aware that the glow-thing was screaming, its rainbow illuminated carapace flashing like summer lightning.

Ulrika staggered back several steps as the glow-thing’s screams grew louder. She forced herself to look up through the gaps of her fingers at the glow-thing, now a blinding torch against the canopy of clouds, and realized it was poised to fall upon her with all its fury. She braced herself.

The many-legged glow-thing swooped downward, its spiked tongue slashing through the air, and Ulrika held her ground. The fiery tongue wrapped itself around Ulrika’s waist, setting off what felt like earthquake’s across all of the Dark Elf’s own physical depths. Ulrika cried out in equal parts pain and defiance and put her hands on her weapon. In a singular motion she dislodged the axehead from the glow-things fading left orb, swung the battleaxe over her head, and brought it down savagely in the center of the glow-thing’s right eye.

Primal howls shook the patchwork monument behind them, the ground all around them, and the sky above, as the glow-thing’s tongue released Ulrika. She felt as if her entire body had been trampled by Odin’s own horse. If the artificial constructs Ulrika had dispatched over the course of her hunt were capable of feeling, she now felt as they must have, juddering and shedding electric splinters of white-hot pain, like steel between hammer and anvil. The glow-thing continued to shriek but was fading, growing dimmer and more distant, quieter and smaller, until Ulrika began to wonder if she had truly vanquished her foe, or if rather she were the one fading into eternal darkness.

And then the violet-edged white disk appeared nearby, salvation drawn against the darkness.

“So, any questions?” Director Little Sky asked.

Ibrahim al-Bazzaz, the aide-de-camp to A.R.M.O.R.’s leader, replied unhesitatingly. “Not about the phenomenon as such. I can see how a quantavore would be drawn to the Tower of Time and how disruptive its presence could be. Brane displacement alone would lead to dangerous worldline instabilities, more than enough to justify A.R.M.O.R. involvement, if I understand correctly.”

“I think you do,” Little Sky confirmed. “When the Scorpian race constructed the Tower of Time to house their simultaneity vortex on Earth, they were courting disaster. Their control of tardyonic principles was advanced, but only really reliable under best-case conditions. And those never hold.”

“But from our point of view, the Tower of Time has already self-destructed in the past,” Ibrahim continued. “You sent Ulrika to the same chrono-insertion point prior to that where the quantavore had manifested. Which … seems like, in order to counter the alterations the quantavore had caused you altered the past even more?”

“If that’s your question, it’s going to require a half-day seminar on higher order causality and spontaneous symmetry breaking, something Morrie would be better at delivering,” Little Sky suggested.

“No, no,” Ibrahim responded. “I’m not questioning that the course of action taken wasn’t the right one. I just … I’m not second-guessing your choice of freelancers to take action, either, but I am curious as to why you chose Ulrika, specifically.”

“Given a multiverse of infinite options to select from, you mean?” Little Sky asked, to which Ibrahim nodded. The Director explained, “Her skills were aligned with what the scenario called for, someone who could track a quantavore through a hazardous environment like the Tower of Time, and someone who could at the very least wound the entity and force it to retreat to the synconical realm. Beyond that, the Tower of Time is not just dangerous but potentially disorienting to almost any sentient being, and an order of magnitude more disorienting when destabilized by the quantavore’s passing through its levels.”

“But less disorienting to Ulrika?” Ibrahim ventured.

“Much less,” Little Sky said. “Ulrika is perceptive, intuitive, shrewd, and a singularly gifted hunter and warrior, the best of the best among both Dark Elves and Wolflings. She also lacks any sense of the historical passage of time as you and I comprehend it. Her world, the wildernesses of Asgard, is timeless and unchanging, and her race is immortal. A test-tube dinosaur from the post-World War Four era marching down the streets of thirteenth century Byzantium, to her, is simply a dragon in a strange city. And by the same token, there was virtually no chance that she could become sidetracked into logical loops by the intricate implications of time travel. The paradoxes simply do not exist in her frame of reference.”

“I see,” Ibrahim acknowledged, considering. After a few seconds he said, “And her … gender was a non-factor?”

“Gender?” Little Sky repeated. He regarded his teenage aide-de-camp thoughtfully before he spoke again. “Some people believe that the only way that a woman can do a job better than a man is if the job itself has an essential element which only a woman can address. That all things being equal, with no extenuating circumstances, a man would always be the better choice. But that’s a kind of sexism I would hope that you would not be susceptible to, since it has no place here under my watch.”

“No sir, I mean, I’m not sexist,” Ibrahim insisted.

“Good,” Little Sky said. “Because as it happens, Ulrika’s gender didn’t influence me at all.

“Really?” Ibrahim arched an eyebrow, emboldened once again. “You didn’t notice that she was … feminine?” In spite of his efforts for decorum, Ibrahim’s voice infused the last word with a note of prurient admiration.

“I’m not sure I appreciate what you’re suggesting, Ibrahim,” Little Sky replied coolly.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ibrahim said quickly, instinctively looking at the floor before recovering and meeting the Director’s gaze again. “I don’t, ahem, I don’t have any more questions, sir. Should I go?”

Little Sky gave a curt, silent nod and Ibrahim exited the office. Then, unbidden but not entirely unwelcome, a smile played across Little Sky’s expression momentarily, before he returned his attention to his monitor.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Like much of the cast of the ongoing A.R.M.O.R. series here at Marvel Omega, Ulrika is an original creation woven from threads of existing Marvel Comics lore. Dark Elves and Wolflings are both previously established societies from Asgard, although to the best of my knowledge an orphan from one race being raised by the other is a new twist. Similarly, the Tower of Time is lifted directly from the bygone series Skull the Slayer, and any discrepancies in my depiction of it can be attributed to writer error, or to the instability brought on by the quantavore incursion, depending on how generous the reader is feeling.

Will Ulrika appear again in the pages of A.R.M.O.R.? Time (and your feedback) will tell!

DG