If you clicked here from an image of a shirtless, exhausted man on a Siberian lakeshore: welcome. That man is Tarmo Amellal, and in today’s edited chapter he climbs out of Lake Baikal and realises he’s not just Odin but Rha aswell.

This is part of my ongoing Azad / Quantum Jump arc, where time travel, oral tradition, and cargo ships keep dropping very mortal people into very mythic situations.

What Actually Happens in This Chapter

Tarmo has been swallowed by the Python god in Lake Fundudzi in South Africa, passed through a cosmic egg floating in primordial waters, and spat out into Lake Baikal’s impossible clarity.

He:

Surfaces naked in Siberia, lungs burning, sure he should be dead.

Remembers not just Fundudzi and Asdar and the baby girl, but older lives: bone thrones, a traded eye, Valkyries, Yggdrasil burning—Odin memories.

Realises the wheel has turned again: gods are recycled, and he’s one of them.

When he hauls himself onto the stones, his body is human enough. What isn’t human is the quiet inner light in his skin and the way Ancient Egyptian and Estonian slide out of his mouth like second nature. That’s Ra arriving: sun-fire, creation, the god who doesn’t negotiate.

The chapter is essentially Tarmo’s godhood reboot: Odin’s manipulation and sacrifice colliding with Ra’s relentless solar presence, in one man sitting on a cold shore trying to decide what to do next.

Why Tarmo Matters (If You’re New Here)

If this is your first contact with the story:

Tarmo Amellal starts life as a Baltic billionaire with unnervingly good instincts.

Underneath that, he’s a recycled god, carrying fragments of old gods, Anu, Odin, and now Ra—into a modern world of trusts, shell companies and heritage politics.

He controls the Amellal Trust Heritage: banks, properties, philanthropic fronts, all of it designed as leverage rather than simple wealth.

In the larger arc:

Elena has been swung through time since she gave birth in Lake Fundudzi and is now lost somewhere in time.

Her children are scattered: her baby boy with Romani travellers, and her baby girl on a cargo ship heading toward Hargeisa.

Asdar, the shape shifting Dacian wolf priest is trying to walk backward through history to find her.

The universe is tightening threads into a pattern none of them can see whole.

Tarmo steps out of Baikal not just to survive, but to reclaim his empire and use it to protect those children—the “decoders of the pattern”—and to help Asdar, because the pattern demands it, not because he’s suddenly nice.

Tone, Not Triumph

This isn’t a triumphant “god descending in glory” chapter. It’s deliberately intimate:

He’s naked, warm when he shouldn’t be, worrying about clothes and transportation.

He thinks in terms of leverage, not destiny.

He is painfully aware that gods who forget their humanity become tyrants, and gods who remember it too well become irrelevant.

The last image is simple: Tarmo walking up through birch trees toward civilisation, quietly planning to pull his heritage trust back under his control. The sun follows. Shadow and flame in civilian clothes.

If You Came From Pinterest

If you arrived here because you saw Tarmo on Lake Baikal or in an Irkutsk hotel room:

This chapter belongs to the Azad arc of Quantum Jump, where myth, memory and heritage are as important as spaceships or time machines.

Tarmo’s “shadow and flame” moment is one of the key turning points for the series; from here on, every move he makes—financial, emotional, mythic—carries the weight of someone who has already traded an eye and watched worlds burn.

If that mix of anthropology, speculative myth, and quietly dangerous men in liminal spaces is your thing, you’re in the right place. Irena Phaedra.

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.