Scion AMA: Aurora Dahl

If you're a fan of all things Norse and the most Norsey prophetess ever to meddle around with them, it's your AMA day! These questions are being answered by Aurora, later Vala, daughter of Odin and goddess of hope and foreknowledge.


Did you call it? I bet you called it.

I always call it. Even when I don't want to call it, I call it.

What would you say is your biggest regret?

Regrets are like grains of sand. Singly, against skin, in an eye, beneath a foot, they feel enormous; they are inescapable, ever-present, and a few of them can be compared in size only by the pain they cause. Some hurt more because they are greater in stature; others, only because they touch something that is scratched more easily by the small points of their edges. The eye cannot really see which is greater. The heart can, but it is inaccurate at best.

Once enough regrets pile up, they are no longer single pains to be felt between cloth and hide, but instead the vast swallowing mouths of desert dunes and ocean beds. They collect the sun as a single living thing, reflecting its heat up so that together they burn far more painfully than they could have pricked as individuals.

I have been in the desert for too long to remember what individual grains of sand feel like.

Have you ever been in love?

People like me are not meant to be in love. At best, we listen at love's window, and wonder what it would be like if the window were a door.

We know from mythology that gods who can see the future usually aren't very popular. Have you ever had problems with other people in your pantheon (or others) not wanting to be around you/treating you badly?

There are few portents of joy in the future; destiny seeks players for its drama, not mummers for a comedy. There is reason to be grateful for glimpses of things to come, for those who want to make provisions for them or plan ahead, or even just to know instead of remaining ignorant, but there is seldom reason to be glad about it. I understand why lesser creatures often went past me with mistrust and dislike, and why the gods themselves read in me fear and apprehension. I am not the things I know, but it's hard to make that distinction when one is frightened.

My brothers have never been big fans.

If you had the choice to be just a normal human instead of ever becoming a god, would you take it? Why or why not?

If you had the choice to be a single cell, part of a giant constellation of thoughtless organic material, free of thought and responsibility until you dissolved to create other new cells, would you take it? Why or why not?

Thanks to Anne’s writing, we know how you experienced the world when you were a young Scion... but how much did it change as you grew into godhood? Can you describe some of the gods (including new gods like you) you met in this way?

The world does not change much. It feels, when you are young and your universe is small, like its borders must be finite, and then when you discover this is not true, you think that the world has grown. It is a defense, to think that it must be the world that is wrong instead of yourself.

But really, the world is itself, and we are motes in its eyes. It has not changed, but I hear it now, all its oceans and tunnels and inner secrets, and the heights of its atmosphere where the wind screams in voices too high to do anything but shiver bones, and the silence above and beyond that where the stars send their cold colors down toward us. I hear a million million heartbeats, so many that they are an indistinguishable blanket, a constant thrumm like a long, deep-toned string that never ends. I hear a million million words, together into a smear that makes a single voice, saying a single noise, and that noise is never a word but is also not exactly not one. I hear the elephantine steps of billions of insects, their steps shaking the endless waterfall of dew off of plants and homes and stones and one another in a flood that no one notices.

I get a lot of headaches.

Gods are worlds in themselves, so that they jangle against the rest of the world, and each other, whenever they enter it. And because they are worlds, they are experienced by every person who enters them; I could no more tell you what the world of the sun god or the woodland goddess is like than you could tell me what you think the color blue looks like. I could tell you that to know Baldur is to feel the warmth of every spring day settle in your bones so that they can no longer feel chill, or that to know Hera is to feel the pressure of a sky that will lay itself on your shoulders day by day until you kneel and that kneeling will rewrite the landscape of your knees, or that to know Shiva is to know the death of your throat, choked by ash and slowly turning to sludge as it feeds on itself to live only a few moments more while the ground beneath you quakes to tear your ankles into so many splinters.

But that wouldn't actually be very helpful to you. Photographs never are.

What changed in you after Wolf and the others?

There is no cell of my body that was alive when they were alive. In a way, Aurora is also dead, which some might find comforting.

In some ways, everything changed. In more important ones, nothing did. They and I stood on the same road at the same moment for a tiny flicker of a blinking eye, and when they left, I was still on that road. I never left it.

This might be too broad of a question, but according to what you’ve seen, what’s the biggest misconception about Fate and the workings of the cosmos?

There are infinite ways that we all perceive our destinies, but two that are cried out the loudest and longest. The first is the idea that the future can be changed, that knowledge of what is coming can prevent its eventual occurrance, that destiny is in the hands of those who reach out to take control of it, that forewarned is forearmed.

This is not true. Fate is a creature with a thousand eyes and teeth, and it cannot be bridled or bitted. You cannot escape its mouth by running, no matter how quickly you believe you go. Everyone runs at the same speed.

The second is the idea that the future is fixed, immutable, uncaring of its actors, that the script we play was written at our birth and that every spoken word is a line, every movement a stage direction, that there is no action taken by any living creature that was not foreordained, that there is no such thing as choice.

This is also not true. Destinies are truths that simply have not yet come to pass, but there are truths that are known and truths that are made. You cannot escape your fate, but you also cannot deny your participation in it; there is no passive observation. If your destiny is the end of a long journey, a place that you must eventually reach no matter how long it takes or what happens to bring you there, then your choices are the steps that you make on that journey, and each of them is your own.

The first thought is foolishness. The second is cowardice.

You’ve dealt with inevitability your whole life, but you seem to be a calm and collected person. Do you have any pointers or life habits for others with the same gifts to carry on day by day and remain sane?

Remember that you are not in control, but that there are things you can control along the way. Remember that what you do is terrible and that it will bring sadness and despair, but that without it the despair of unknowing would be greater. Remember that fate is not cruel, only uncaring, and hate it only as much as you hate the sky or the earth or your own veins.

Remember that if you did not know what you know, you would still make choices, but they would be choices made in the dark.

Remember that you are not your eyes.

Does it... stop in the afterlife (or wherever you are)? I mean, is there a finality to it all or is Fate never satisfied?

When a book is read, it tells a story. Its words and images are given, page to heart, to its reader. At the end of the book, it is closed, and that story is no longer given.

But the book is placed on shelves, moved to rooms, sold, borrowed, traded, lost, forgotten, remembered, found. It is still there. A book does not cease to exist when it is closed. It is telling a different kind of story.