The Doom of Odin

As the Black Death rampages across Europe, two creatures of the Elder World clash over the rotting corpse of Christendom in Scott Oden's third book in the Grimnir Series

Sicily, 1347 AD. A ghost ship from the east washes ashore at Messina. A ship of dead men, and hidden in its belly is a doom like no other: the dragon Niðhöggr, the Malice-Striker, an ancient vessel of destruction from the Elder Days. And while it is no longer the mighty wyrm of Ragnarök, the beast’s breath still bears upon it a pestilence, a plague that will echo through the ages as the Black Death.

But the world of Men has a strange champion – another creature of the Elder World: a snarling, spitting knot of hatred, profane and blasphemous, whose ancestors were the goblins of myth and legend; he is a monster in truth, though nevertheless he stands as the last bastion between humanity’s future and the cold silence of oblivion. He is Grimnir, and he has hunted the Malice-Striker for more than a century, from the cold wastes of the Baltic to the dank cisterns beneath Constantinople.

Now, as the plague stalks through Western Europe – and as the dread wyrm slithers through Italy, bound for Rome on its mission to devour the head of Christendom – Grimnir must contend not only with the beast’s insidious cunning, but with the iron fist of the Papal Inquisition, and the army of a vengeful Sicilian nobleman.

But, it is in the empty halls of the Vatican, in the shadow of St. Peter’s throne, where the Doom of Odin will fall . . . and the Elder World will finally meet its bloody end. Only one question remains: will Miðgarðr and the world of Men survive this deadly clash of titans?