In his dream, Grendel is sitting outside his cave watching the sunset. It isn’t winter, in his dream, but midsummer, and the air is warm and smells sweet and green. And the sky above him is all ablaze with Sól’s retreat, and to the east the dark shadows of a sky wolf chasing after her. And Grendel is trying to recall the names of the two horses who, each day, draw the chariot of the sun across the heavens, the names his mother taught him long ago. There is a terrible, burning pain inside his head, as though he has died in his sleep and his skull has filled with hungry maggots and gnawing beetles, as though gore crows pick greedily at his eyes and plunge sharp beaks into his ears. But he knows, even through the veil of this dream, that the pain is not the pain of biting worms and stabbing beaks.

No, this pain comes drifting across the land from the open windows and doors of Heorot Hall, fouling the wind and casting even deeper shadows than those that lie between the trees in the old forest. It is the hateful song sung by a cruel woman, a song he knows has been fashioned just so to burrow deep inside his head and hurt him and ruin the simple joy of a beautiful summer’s evening. And Grendel knows, too, that it is not the slavering jaws of the wolf Skoll that the sun flees this day, but rather that song. That song which might yet break the sky apart and rend the stones and boil away the seas.

No greater calamity in all the world than the thoughtless, merry sounds that men and women make, no greater pain to prick at his soul than their joyful music and the fishhook voices of their delight. Grendel does not know why this should be so, only that it is. And he calls out for his mother, who is watching from the entrance of the cave, safe from the fading sunlight.

“Please, Modor,” he asks her, “make them stop. Make her be quiet.”

“How would I ever do that?” she replies and blinks at him with her golden eyes.

“Oh, I could show you,” he says. “It is not so very hard to silence them. It is a simple thing. They break—”

“You promised,” she hisses softly.

“To endure this agony, is that what I promised?”

“You promised,” she says again, louder than before.

So, Grendel dreams that he shuts his eyes, hoping to find some deeper twilight there, a peaceful, painless dusk that cannot be ruined by the voice of a woman, by harps and flutes and drums, by the shouts of drunken men and the shrieks of drunken women. He shuts his eyes tightly as he can and drifts down to some time before this sunset outside his cave, a silent time, and he pretends that the ache in his ears and the din banging about inside his brain have yet to begin. Heorot Hall has not been built, and the king has not found his queen. Grendel is yet a child, playing alone in the murk of the cave, making some secret game from a handful of seashells and the backbone of a seal. Not a day he actually remembers, but a day that might have been, nonetheless.

“I will never let him find you,” his mother whispers from her pool.

And Grendel stops playing and stares for a moment into the cold water, the uneasy, swirling place where she lies just beneath the surface.

“Who?” he asks. “Who will you not let find me?”

She answers him with a loud splash from the pool, and Grendel looks back down at the shells cupped in his right hand. A mussel shell, four sea snails, two cockles, and he tries hard to remember what that means by the rules of his secret game. He knew only a moment before.

“Is that a question I should not have asked, Modor?”

“I cannot always keep you safe,” she tells him, and there’s regret and a sort of sadness in her voice, and it doesn’t suit her. “They are weak, yes, these men. But still they slay dragons, and they kill trolls, and they make wars and hold the fate of all the world in their small, soft hands, even as you hold those stray bits of shell in yours.”

“Then I will stay away from them,” he assures her. “I will hide here…with you. I won’t let them see me. I won’t ever let them see me.”

“That is not the truth,” she tells him. “Even in dreams, we should not lie to ourselves. You are a curious boy, and you will go to see them, and they will see you.”

Grendel lays the shells down on the dirt and travertine floor of the cave next to the seal vertebra. He’s forgotten the game now, because it’s something he never invented.

“Why do they kill dragons?” he asks his mother, and she sighs and slithers about at the edge of her pool.

“Because they are not dragons themselves,” she replies.

“And is this why they kill trolls, as well?”

“They are not trolls,” she answers. “They have neither the fiery breath nor the wings of dragons, nor have they the strength of trolls. And they are ever jealous of those things, and fearful. They destroy, Grendel. They despoil. They destroy for glory, and from jealousy and fear, to make the world safe for themselves. And I cannot hide you always, child. Your father—”

“Mé fædyr?” Grendel asks her, surprised, having never much dwelled upon the subject of his absent father and, perhaps, thinking himself somehow genuinely fæderleás—born somehow only of woman.

“He has slain a dragon,” she hisses from the pool.

“That weorm, Modor, maybe it did not know to hide,” Grendel insists, and he crushes the seal bone to white-gray dust between his fingers. “I will stay always here with you. They will not find me,” he says again. “Not ever.”

“That is a promise,” she says, and the words float up from the icy water like a threat. “But we break our promises all too soon.”

Grendel opens his eyes, tumbling back up and up from the cave and that lost, imagined day that never was, tumbling back to the place where his dream began—sitting outside his cave, watching the vanishing, wolf-harrowed sun, his ears aching with the song of King Hrothgar’s keening, yellow-haired bitch.

“Why can I not bear these sounds, Modor?” Grendel moans and stares up at the burning sky. “They are only songs, yes? Only frivolities and merrymaking, not swords and axes and spears. They are only the thin voices of weak creatures crying out in the dark to hear themselves. How is it that such things do me harm?”

From the entrance of the cave, his mother grinds bones in her teeth, sucking out the marrow, and does not reply.

And the harp of Heorot Hall has become a cacophony, the tumult as the very walls of Midgard collapse on that last day of all. Sól has gone from the sky now, leaving it to night and the pursuing wolf, and Grendel digs his claws deep into the rocky soil. Blood drips from his nostrils and stains the ground at his feet.

“Árvak,” he mutters, recalling finally the names of the horses leashed to the sun’s chariot, the answer to a riddle no one has asked. “Árvak and Alsvin are their names.” He grates his jaws against the song. But he is only Grendel, and he has never slain a dragon, and the song fells great trees and causes the earth beneath him to shudder. The song has frightened away even his mother, the merewife, giant-daughter and pool-haunter. In only another moment, his teeth will shatter and fall like dust from his mouth.

“I will wake up now,” he growls through blood and crumbling fangs. I am only dreaming this pain. I am only dreaming the noise…

And when next Grendel opens his eyes, he is awake, awake and alone in his cave at sunset, curled into a corner beneath the hides of deer and bears. His mother is not with him, but the pain is, and the flood of those voices rushing over the land, crashing upon his ears like breakers at the edge of a stormy sea. And the flood will drown him. Grendel opens his jaws wide and howls, vomiting rage and torment and confusion into that hollow space beneath the hills. But his voice, even in this wild frenzy, seems hardly a whimper raised against the flood. He turns toward the pool, wishing she were there, wishing he could find his way down through the depths to her, where she would hold him to her bosom and calm him and soothe away the hurt and fear swallowing him alive.