11:6

Ragnarök.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök (UK) is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors.

—Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnarök)

He and his boon companions had taken turns reading aloud in the quad beneath the ancient campus basilica on those slow summer eves. There was something about those old Norse Eddas that had captured their imaginations and they had spent hours discussion their ‘impending doom’ as if it was quite real and inevitable.

And now it seems their prophetic impromptu salons were about to come home to roost.

The end was near. No matter that that if foresaw a new and better beginning; it was unlikely in the extreme that he was to be one of the chosen survivors, especially given his current circumstances.

The machine, its mysterious behaviour, the disaster at the mansion’s gates, the slow and seemingly unrelated series of events that had led to his current disreputable state: it all matched that saga and foretold the profitlessness of his current efforts to maintain the machine.

And yet he could not give up, could not pause in his enterprise, even for a moment. As if a hunger was upon him, a hunger to succeed, to survive to emerge again, as if he was destined to live on in another chapter. It was vain and arrogant, but that much of his true self had survived this ordeal. He had lived his life embracing his conceits and he would fight one wrapped in their accustomed embrace.

For if young Hal had been faced with ice giants rather than the scurrilously disdainful French he still would have uttered to himself that now famous line:

“Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more;”