Mímir sat by the well. He had always done so, and he always would, and he knew that, because Mímir knew everything.
That was the problem.
The well lay at the third root of Yggdrasil, the one that stretched toward the land of the giants. The water was black and still and it reflected nothing, because it was not that sort of water. It was not a mirror. It was an abyss with a memory.
Mímir drank from the well every morning. One sip. Never more. Truth is concentrated, and more than one sip drives you mad. Mímir knew that. He knew precisely how close to the edge he lived. He knew the edge lay exactly one sip away, and that he had been balancing on it for so many thousands of years that he was no longer sure which side he stood on.
He saw what had happened. He saw what was happening. He saw what would happen. And the third was the worst, because it could not be changed. Every attempt to change the future was part of the future. The one who tries to twist a prophecy only screws it tighter.
Odin had come once. Only once. He wanted to drink. Mímir said: "It costs." Odin said: "What?" Mímir said: "An eye." And Odin, who was used to paying with other people's suffering, suddenly stood holding a bill that could only be paid with his own flesh.
He dug it out himself. No ceremony, no speech to the other gods, no fucking drama. He pushed his fingers in and pulled the eye out the way you pull a root vegetable from mud, and it sounded the way it sounds when flesh parts from bone, and he held it out without a word. It lay in his palm like a wet stone, and Mímir took it and dropped it into the well without looking at it.
He already knew what it looked like. He already knew everything, and that is not a gift, it is a kind of imprisonment that does not even have walls.
Since then the eye had sat on the bottom. It stared upward, dead and blue and wide open, and sometimes when Mímir leaned over the edge his gaze met Odin's gaze, and it was like looking into a well inside a well, and it never ended.
No one else came. Not after Odin. Sometimes he heard Ratatoskr running past. Click click click in the bark. The squirrel never stopped. Mímir was glad of it. Ratatoskr dealt in gossip and Mímir dealt in truth, and those are two currencies that cannot be exchanged.
The worst thing about knowing everything was not the future. It was the present. He saw Odin sitting in Hliðskjálf playing omniscient while half his field of vision was dark. He saw Loki lying with Svaðilfari and then feeling so deep a shame that the shame became hatred, and the hatred became Ragnarök, and none of the gods understood the chain because none of them wanted to see it. He saw Freyja fuck four dwarves for a necklace and the gods call her a whore and then beg for her help in the next war. He saw how every creature in every world was thinking about itself, and that those who were not thinking about themselves were thinking about how others thought of them, and that the entire fucking web of consciousness was exactly as cramped as a single frightened animal brain in the dark.
Mímir drank. And knew. And stayed. There was nothing else to do.