In mid-air she sang, and at high noon. Odin, sitting in his throne of gold, was silent, and listening he understood, for from the beginning he had foreknowledge of the end. Yet was he not afraid. He awaited Ragnarok, ‘the Dusk of the Gods’, as in youth he had waited, and now he was grown old.’ – Donald A. Mackenzie, Teutonic Myth and Legends 1 Picture this. Forest. One hundred miles of dense, forbidding forest on every side, cut through by streams and rivers that flow between the dark, straight stands of pine, mirror bright beneath the moon. And here, on an island in a river, behind a stoutly built stockade, is a wooden fort and a tower and a crude stone chapel. This is Christburg, built three years past on ground cleared from the virgin forest and defended against the heathen. Two guards man the tower, casting their weary eyes to the foreboding blackness of the surrounding forest. Deep snow carpets that bleak, unforgiving space between the fort and the river, while overhead a full moon shines down from a clear, blue-black sky.
