Jörmungandr is the chapter about what is under the ship. VARGA, the Nordic duo behind Neo Viking Rock Trap, built it as a video rather than a release, and it sits in the story where the crossing gets long and the water gets deep and somebody says the name out loud for the first time.
Everybody on that ship knew the story. That is not the same as believing it.
The serpent lies around the world with its tail in its mouth. It is not somewhere. It is under — under the hull, under the next hull, under every hull that has ever crossed anything. You do not sail to it. You sail on it, the whole time, and the only question is whether it is awake.
Here is the thing nobody says about deep water. It is not the drowning. Drowning is quick and it is comprehensible and people have made their peace with it since there were people and boats. It is the scale. It is being on eighty feet of oak with two hundred fathoms underneath you and understanding, in a way you cannot un-understand, that the thing you are on top of does not know you are there.
That is the serpent. Whether or not there is an animal.
They went eleven days without land. On the fourth day the wind died and left them rowing in glass, and on the seventh a swell came from nowhere with no weather behind it and lifted the whole ship and set it down again, gently, like something turning over in its sleep. Nobody said anything. Forty people, and not one of them said anything, for about a minute.
Then someone at the third oar laughed, and it broke, and they rowed on.
There is a kind of courage that gets songs written about it, which is the kind where you run at something. The other kind never gets written about at all. It is sitting on a bench in the middle of the ocean pulling an oar you cannot see the end of, on the back of something enormous, and doing it again tomorrow.
Stori was on the third bench. She had been rowing for eleven days and she laughed too, and then she kept rowing, which is the entire moral of the chapter.