Changer (Athanor) by Jane Lindskold

called Arthur then.  He who had been Gilgamesh, Akhenaton, Rama, was known at this time as Frey, the golden prince of the Vanir.
    Merlin was also among the forces of the Aesir, but he was not yet associated with Arthur.  That would come later, after the debacle of Ragnarokk.  At this time he was called Mimir.
    Later, legend would name Mimir one of the Jotun, the enemies of the Aesir, just as Arthurian legend would give Merlin an incubus as a father.  There has always been that about Mimir/Merlin, for all his wisdom, that is dangerous and untrustworthy.
    The opponents of the Aesir were not the evil creatures that legend later counted them.  They, too, were athanor, but they held a different philosophy than the Aesir/Vanir alliance.  
    Whereas the Aesir, following the council of Mimir and Odin, were largely content to deal with growing humanity as something like equals, interacting as councilors and guardians, remaining behind the scenes if they meddled at all, the Jotun could see no reason for this stealth.
    Advised by the trickster Loki, they gloried in their difference from the human race.  Where Odin and Mimir emphasized the similarities between many athanor and humans, the Jotun noted the differences.
    The battle that had spread out beneath the Changer’s wings had been a living icon of this difference in philosophy.  The Aesir fought mostly in human form, wielding weapons such as a human might wield.  The Jotun shifted into fantastic, inhuman forms.  There was Fenris Wolf and Midgard Serpent; there were giants of fire and of ice—and all of them had been athanor.
    The Changer had striven alongside the Aesir, for his tendency toward caution led him to feel that the Jotun’s desire for open domination of humanity would eventually lead to trouble.  Compared to the relative infertility of his kin, humans, even with their single births and high infant mortality, whelped young in litters.  Anyone who has ever observed a plague of mice or rats knows that those who breed quickly overwhelm in the end.
    Still, he had not interfered in personal combat.  From above the battlefield he had watched as Thor and the Midgard Serpent had torn into each other.  The latter was his sea-born brother.  He had been pleased to see Jormungandr win this contest.  Thor was a braggart and a drunkard.
    And as he had dipped wing in congratulations to his brother, he had noted an odd figure standing in the shade of a great elm near the fringes of the battlefield.  It wore a silver-grey robe with highlights of leaf green and runes of power embroidered into the fabric.  The hood was raised, bulking strangely around the shape within.  The cowl hung so low about the face that even his raven eyes had difficulty making out the face it sheltered.
    Yet raven eyes, especially the raven eyes of the Changer, can be more keen than those of a normal raven or, indeed, those of any man.  They penetrated the darkness of that cowl and saw that within not one but two heads sprouted from the scrawny shoulders of the figure within the robe.  
    The heads were not identical.  Both were grey-haired with the grey that denotes wisdom, even among their unaging kind.  The skin of one head was smoother than that of the other, bore fewer lines, fewer traces of weathering, fewer signs of grief or joy.
    At a beckoning gesture from the robed one, the Changer had soared away.  He was one of the ancient and not to be summoned like a pet or a servant, even when the summoner was Mimir, who even then was called one of the great sorcerers of their kind.  
    Returning to the battlefield, he shifted into an even larger version of his raven-self and plucked Loki from the field just when that one’s aid might have meant the death of Frey.  From a great height, he dropped the trickster on a heap of rocks and believed him dead.  Later, he would regret not having checked more thoroughly.
    In the end, two heads or not, the counsel of Mimir was insufficient to protect