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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 1, 2014 18:07:03 GMT -5
The kings of Asgard, self-appointed governors to the rest of the realms that they were, had strictly limited the usage of the Bifrost to those acting under the direct oversight of Asgardian authority, which meant that very few people from other realms ever had opportunity to travel there at all unless invited or captive. Nornheim was somewhat luckier than the rest; it was four hours’ ride by cart from their borderland forests to the Asgardian capital. Some of the more enterprising people among them had found a way of using that to their advantage.
Today’s cart had the usual odds and ends, people who looked weary before the trip had even begun, a few complaining children and bleary-eyed elders settled in among the merchants and relatives of Asgardians en route to loved ones they hadn’t seen in years. One young woman, heavily pregnant, had taken her seat near the driver and sat in silence, hugging her cloak around herself.
The driver glanced at her from time to time, when it was safe to turn his eyes from his rams and the path. She was olive-skinned and snub-nosed and pretty enough, he decided. She’d paid to climb on with a handful of dented copper coins and come up short, but the driver didn’t grudge her and agreed to bring her to Asgard regardless. She looked both famished and ready to go into labor at any moment, after all, and the idea of leaving her behind seemed unimaginably cruel.
They stopped halfway through for a relief driver to meet them from a village on the Asgardian outskirts, and the first driver slid himself in beside her.
“Are you traveling alone?” he asked.
It took her a moment before she blinked rapidly and seemed to suddenly become aware that he was there at all.
“I beg your pardon?” “I said, are you traveling alone?”
The girl hesitated, and then nodded. The cart had fewer passengers now, which gave her an opportunity to stand and stretch her back and legs. When she sat back down, she propped herself up in the corner with her legs far apart under her roughspun skirt and one elbow on the edge of the cart. The first driver almost laughed, but he reasoned that it was probably more comfortable with the baby on the way and kept it to himself.
“To Asgard? Alone, in your condition?” “I’m going to my mother’s house,” she replied, “if I’m welcome there.” She smiled a little lopsidedly, a little knowingly.
“And is the father coming after you?” “Don’t talk to me of fathers,” she snapped, turning away.
The hood of her cloak flittered a little in the wind, affording a brief glimpse of a mass of dark hair underneath. The first driver was beginning to form a rather grim picture of recent events in this woman’s life, and realized he’d have to play things a little more subtly.
“Have you got a name?” he asked. “Angla,” the woman said softly, after a small pause. She was studying the nails of her left hand. They were painted black. “Angla,” he repeated. “I’m Jarl.”
Angla raised her eyes to look at him. Her eyebrows followed suit. She looked distinctly unimpressed.
“Is this a habit of yours, Jarl?” “Well, you know how it is,” he said, shrugging. “A young woman in a bad way, traveling alone...” “You think I’m in a bad way?” Angla asked, sounding amused.
Jarl gestured vaguely toward her belly. She looked down at it.
“Oh, right,” she said absently. “Loki, no-“
Angla’s head swung abruptly in the direction of the sound. A fox had darted out of the trees alongside the cart, and a little boy in the back had jumped up to hurry to the edge to get a better look at it. An old man, perhaps his grandfather, leapt up after him and pulled him back by the shoulder.
“Loki,” he chided, “how many times must I tell you not to stand while we’re on a cart? If I had to tell your mother you’d fallen off...” “I’m sorry, Uncle,” the boy said obediently as he shuffled back to his seat.
Jarl glanced from the boy to Angla, who was now staring at him. She turned away, just as abruptly, with a distant-looking frown.
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 1, 2014 20:20:58 GMT -5
In a tower in an Asgardian castle, right in the capital city, a woman of regal bearing in a long, loose dress, her hair in an ornate braid that began up one side of her head and cascaded down the other shoulder was descending from a distant room, an untouched room.
Many untouched rooms may gather dust, but this woman was a magic user, and though the young man who had lived there had not touched its door in thirty years, no dust covered that long vanished young man's belongings. It was not even that she could not bear to see them ruined by it. She accepted the lack of him as one aging accepts the inevitable inelasticity of their joints, the developments of new aches. But to see his room dusty would show not only that he was not returning to it, not only the passage of time, but then, ah, she would touch the things and leave her handprints on them. That had happened once, and only once. To see the smear seemed only to make real her own desperation. The way the handprint seemed to show a grasping hopelessly at something lost and best left to gather dust - that she couldn't bear, nonsensical though it was. So she kept it as dustless as he would have liked it. This way it felt suspended in time, a thing she did not need to touch. A thing that did not need to be confronted, so that it did not confront back.
Her grief for her son was like a coiled, sleeping snake, and so long as she did not stroke it, she need not wake it; so long as she did not look on it, she did not think to fear its inevitable bite.
Somehow, she thought with a pang, her hand smoothing silk over her belly, I thought the twins would make it easier...
The nurse was sitting at the fire with a book of seidr open in her lap, young eyes squinting as she tried to divine in the fire.
Queen Frigga wore a bemused smile on her lips. It almost hurt her face, but the pain of that was older than Loki's lack. Queens knew to conceal their sadnesses beneath smiles.
"What do you see, Signy?"
The boys were asleep, and she did not mind the practice of the woman's magic around her boys; she had done it often herself, even with the last set. Her former youngest son had learned it himself, and perhaps she would teach it to one or both of these as well, if it was necessary. If it will ease the loss of Loki's passing.
Shadows danced before the girl, and Frigga might have peered at them herself, but then it would not really be the girl's magic; she would never learn it if she could not stand on her own two feet and read the signs for herself.
"I cannot tell, my Queen," she said, banishing them, and casting a rueful glance over her shoulder.
Frigga folded her hands elegantly, her expression one of pleased patience.
Signy hesitated.
"...I thought.... I saw a rider, my lady," she reluctantly confessed. "Passing beneath an arch, and followed by whispers."
Frigga lifted her eyebrows.
"A fairly advanced image," she said, remaining somewhere between impressed, and unconvinced. An arch was a simple enough shape, and whispers not uncommon - sometimes they were unfiltered background noise, and othertimes intentional yet not clear enough. A loop above, something squirming in the smoke beneath it, with foggy sounds surrounding it, was a promising start for a very young sorceress, as Signy was, but not necessarily a rider passing beneath an arc.
Signy's manner, however, was curiously precise, and she was an insecure girl, quick to pass off clearer images than that as nothing. Her hesitation to state what she'd seen could be modesty and uncertainty. She had taught such a student, once, very long ago.
"What did the arch look like?" she asked her unassumingly.
Signy bit her lip.
"It had - banners, Lady. Banners streaming from it."
Now her eyebrows were truly up indeed.
"A herald of great fortune, it sounds. A celebration, perhaps?"
"...that's just it, my lady. The whispers - they were dark and heavy."
"Could you discern any words? Any voice?"
"There seemed to be many voices echoing from many places," Signy said, gathering herself up from her seat and playing with her hair in nervousness. "And I could not hear individual words, but they were full of - of blame and hurt."
And then, in a fashion typical to the nursemaid, too high strung to immediately see Frigga's stunned and disturbed expression, she twisted her hair braid, and pleaded, "Oh, my lady, it does not mean that you are angry at me, are you?"
Now Frigga's smile was back, though wearied in a way she hoped the young girl could not read. "No," she said firmly. "I feel certain whatever fault you scried was not ascribed to yourself. Whispers are just whispers. And this is a very old castle."
Signy looked relieved, and bent over the cradle.
"It has very young things in it, my lady," she said warmly. "I would like to know what is in their heads. Would that I could see their sweeter dreams in the shadows."
"They would not be shadows," said Frigga in amusement, though it was dark beneath her jovial tone. Young things, like yourself, she thought. Would that I could live what is in your head once more.
"For now, banish the shadows from your mind, they need not trouble you. Be a good girl, and bring us tea," she said, as she lowered herself into her chair beside the cradle. "I think we'd both be done good by that."
"Yes, my lady; I will."
She bowed formally and left promptly. When the door shut, a mask seemed to drop from Frigga; she looked as she felt, tired, faintly spooked, and sullied with sadness. She did not look like a happy young mother. She had already been a happy young mother once, and she was no longer so young. She had loved both Thor and Loki from the time each of them had been laid in her arms, never dreaming that the secrets she kept would do them all so much harm. The wound had given all the appearance of healing - a neat scar on the outside - but beneath it the pain had never fully left. Odin had comforted her as a king should, but perhaps kings were not like other husbands. He had given her more children, and she had accepted the pregnancy with a joy in her heart, but it had not finished the healing process as they had hoped. Thor had not returned since their birth; the matter of introducing them to him seemed hopeless. He too would only think of the two small brothers who had once played, fought, learned, and loved in these very halls, as Frigga did. She could not hold her own children to her breast without thinking of the boys she had lost, and she pushed the magnitude of that sadness away in the hopes that it would make her a better mother; but she could not undo the mothering she had already done.
With a weary laugh she considered alone in this room that she treated the grief as she once had treated the truth, accepting the need to hide, to repress it. It had only ever made things worse. Like this serpent, she had treated the truth of Loki's birth as something she need not acknowledge. She knew now she had played her part in hiding it from him out of selfishness, though she had reassured him it was out of love. She thought she would lose Loki the day he learned who - and what - he really was. She had been right, though - having undoubtedly worsened things by delaying that day - perhaps it had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Perhaps she would never leave this cycle of regret. But she did not want Baldr and Hodr - Baldr the Bitty, Hodr the How-Small, as they had been quietly nicknamed - to grow in this atmosphere of silence and unhappiness. She did not know how to tend to her own insecure feelings without unwittingly poisoning her children with them.
As she once had.
She covered her eyes carefully with her hand so that she would not be seen in tears by the soon-returning Signy, so that she would contain her misery to silent tears for the time being and not wake her boys with weeping. She felt in this moment that she could offer them so little as a mother as it was, she did not need to interrupt their sweet sleep as long as they were still young enough to have it.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 1, 2014 23:09:16 GMT -5
He had made the coins that he had used for passage by working over the shattered armor he had worn when he'd fallen until it looked right. He couldn't conjure new material, but he could change what was there or pull more from elsewhere, and since the rest of his openwork breastplate, bronze over copper, was going to be sacrificed in the next step, there was no use in sentimentality.
Loki made a point of not letting Jarl get any closer to Angla for the rest of the trip. Jarl had tried to angle an answer out of him about the boy's name, but Loki decided that was a good time to have Angla burst into tears and wave a hand in a traumatized and hopefully guilt-inducing way. That managed to shut him up, and Loki let her melt into the crowd as soon as he climbed off.
Once he was out of sight, he shifted from Angela DiBartolomeo's borrowed form (a small price in exchange for the service he'd done her, he reasoned) into one of his father's yellow-cloaked guards, with a blue sash to indicate that he was a scout. He put the unchanged fragment of his armor in his cloak and wrapped it carefully, then strode off in the direction of the palace gates.
It was a bit like walking through a dream, familiar and yet not all at the same time. Loki knew every stone of the street he tread on, could anticipate the curve of every arched doorway before his glance had climbed all the way up, but there was a detachment there that he couldn't quite place. It was almost as though he knew it all from a picture rather than from life.
"Look out-"
A children's ball whizzed out in front of him in pieces, reassembling itself as it fell to the ground on the other side of the street. Loki turned to see where it had come from.
Three small children- two girls and a boy- were looking disappointedly toward the pedestal at which their ball had come to a rest in the middle of the square.
"Can't we go get it?" the smaller of the girls asked. "No," the boy groaned. "Mother told us not to cross. We'll have to wait until Father and Augun get home and ask one of them."
He started to turn back into the house, but the smaller girl suddenly piped up and waved at Loki.
"Sir! Sir, can't you give us our ball back, sir? It's right there-"
Loki sighed and crossed the forbidden fifteen feet of paved road to pick up the ball.
Then he glanced up at the statue on top of the pedestal and dropped it again.
"Sir?" came one of the girls' voices.
Loki hesitated, and then remembered where he was. He tossed the ball back toward them one-handed, without looking away from the statue.
It was of himself- some twelve feet tall, carved in marble, and with the kind of smooth, barely distinctive face characteristic of most Asgardian statuary, but holding Gungnir to his side, wearing his openworked breastplate and horned helm. The statue's right hand was just barely extended in a benevolent, open-palmed gesture, and when he stepped back to see it better he saw that it had fuller lips than he did, and they were smiling gently.
He looked at the children, but they were distracted by the ball.
Slowly, he began to recall what Thor had said to him months ago.
"Father could not let Asgard know of what you attempted... it was no secret that there were Ice Giants there that day, however. He passed around that they stole their treasure and froze Heimdall, then set the bridge to explode, hoping to kill all of Asgard. He claimed you and I fought with one another against them and we were forced to destroy it in order to stop their scheme, but you were lost in the process.
Father always was one for appearances."
He felt his heart leap into his throat. This was not one of the stations of the path he followed in any of Teja's stories. Every book that spoke of Loki told of a man repeatedly accused and denied respect from the rest of Asgard, until finally he was so consumed by bitterness that he turned upon them. That was always Loki's story, every Loki's story.
Except his. "You are a hero now at home, you know that?"
Something had gone very, very cosmically wrong, and yet he didn't care. For once, something had gone wrong in his favor.
He wished Teja were with him. He wanted to pick her up in his arms and lift her in the golden light of Asgard and ask if she had a kiss for her fallen hero. In the meantime, though, he had his parents to deal with... or, at least, his mother and her husband.
This caused his heart to sink somewhat. The last he'd seen of his mother's face was the confused betrayal when Thor had accused him of attempted fratricide in front of her. Weeks of tears or no, that... was not the ideal last impression, he conceded.
He considered turning back. He wondered if Teja had opened and read the letter he'd left behind explaining that he would be gone for only a few days at most, and not to Fandral's bed, so she need not worry. He hoped she hadn't been frightened to see the letter at all.
Turning back would waste too much time, he decided. He had come too far to go without, at least, some kind of closure. With Odin's concern for appearances rivalling Veidt's, the chances of an incident were slim enough to force him onward.
He approached another yellowcloak as casually as he could and asked if the queen was occupied. "I have something that might be of interest to her."
He did his best to look serious and mildly doleful as he produced a piece of his own shattered breastplate from within his cloak. The other guard's eyes widened.
"Is that-" "A Vanir trader's daughter brought it to me. She didn't realize the significance, only that it was of Asgard."
The other guard very nearly touched it, but withdrew his hand reverently.
"Were there... remains?" he asked softly. "She didn't know where it had come from," Loki lied swiftly. "I told you- all she knew it as was a piece of Asgardian armor."
The other guard nodded.
"She's in his chambers, as ever," he said quietly. "Suitable, for the occasion."
He nodded to Loki, who nodded back and continued inside.
Here were the stairs he had had to teach an eight-legged foal to climb. Here was the banister he and Thor had slid down countless times. Here was the gallery they had played at swords in. There was the corner he had accidentally chipped with an accidental bolt from his hand when he was just a boy. Everything carried a memory, all of them made slightly bitter now in the recounting.
He stopped outside his own- the chambers that were once his- took a breath, and opened the door.
"My queen," he said automatically, but he stopped, stunned, before he could keep playing his part and bend his knees. She wasn't there after all, but neither was anything dusty, or ill-kept. The bed was turned down as though he might climb into it at any moment, the dark wooden frame still gently shining in the light coming through the window.
Loki slowly set down the fragment of his armor and stepped inside, feeling like his own ghost.
When he opened his wardrobe, his clothes still hung in rows, his unworn shoes arranged beneath them. He opened the drawers and found his daggers still sheathed, the emerald-encrusted hilts of the finer ones still gleaming and unpolished.
He wanted to sit down on the bed and lie back and close his eyes, and maybe when he opened them again the last year of his life would turn out to be only a dream- but the thought of Teja put an end to that, and the yellowcloak's face in the mirror brought him firmly back to reality. He'd have to go find his mother himself.
Loki picked up the armor and strode away from his chamber again.
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 1, 2014 23:40:33 GMT -5
Signy had felt a dull, shy girl growing up in Vanaheim. She had not taken any pride in her little love for her homeworld - they were free and licentious there, and she had felt nothing but envy. The realm of Asgard, on the other hand, while still bright and shining, was a little more famously staid - and, unfortunately, warlike. But the queen was a willing emigrant from Vanaheim herself, and out of a fondness, she frequently sought for handmaids there. She didn't know what the queen had seen in her, but she had somehow, somehow, out of all the girls who presented themselves to the queen, been chosen as nursemaid to the Queen Frigga's due twin sons. It seemed miraculous looking back. It had been raining, and Signy caught in it, dark tresses plastered over neck and shoulders, the last of the gaggle of girls to arrive, the last to straighten herself out, surely red in the face from nerves and desperation to please.
But Frigga had been kind to her, compassionate and maternal. Signy adored to work for her, and believed, as she had told her once, that she would be the greatest of mothers to her sons.
Frigga had smiled at her in a crooked way, her eyes filling with tears. Signy didn't understand the Queen's melancholies, but she worked nonetheless to lighten the room, rarely letting others know of her own secret burdens.
She was returning to the Queen's room with a tray of tea when she saw a guard in the hallway striding downwards, and in the embarrassed way she often met guards - men, really - she dropped her eyes from him.
There she saw what he held carried by his side and her mouth dropped open.
A sudden feeling of awfulness and shadow overwhelmed her. Now her tray also dropped with a clang, a cup overturning, the other rolling down the stairs. Signy covered her face with her hands and gave an awful cry.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 1, 2014 23:57:14 GMT -5
He stopped it with his foot, and then realized that that probably defeated the purpose. A lifetime ago, he might have sneered at her distress, or at least dismissed it, but by now he was so reminded of Teja that that was impossible. His father also had rarely used these sorts of cups in the past, at least, so he could also hazard a guess as to where the maid had been going.
"Take the tray back to the kitchen and get a fresh one, that's all," he advised. "The queen is a patient woman."
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 2, 2014 0:01:11 GMT -5
It took Signy a moment to control herself, so abject was her distress.
"It's not that, sir - it's - "
She lifted one shaking hand to point to the late prince Loki's armor.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 2, 2014 0:04:15 GMT -5
"Ah, yes," he said. "I intended to bring it to her."
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 2, 2014 0:08:51 GMT -5
She brought herself to standing with her legs still shaking, her hands backward, groping, against the wall.
"I had a vision of this," she whispered. Her eyes flickered to the guard's in mute distress, a moment of her searching before she found the words again. "Of a great man riding in, but it felt wrong." She drew a shaking breath and covered her eyes. "The hero prince returning home, but dead!"
In the stone hallway, her voice echoed, her anguish magnified.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 2, 2014 0:10:31 GMT -5
"I relieve you," he said quickly. "The queen will understand that you are overwrought, if I do not misjudge her. Where might I find her?"
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 2, 2014 0:31:03 GMT -5
She informed him, lifting a hand to dry her eyes.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 2, 2014 0:39:33 GMT -5
He watched her for a moment, unsure of what else to say, and then hurried into the next room to drop on one knee before he had to look her in the eye.
"My queen- I..."
His voice faltered, and he held out the armor.
Damn.
He wanted to look up to see if she was even there, but that would mean breaking the role. He had to test the water here first.
He wanted to throw up.
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 2, 2014 0:43:10 GMT -5
Queen Frigga was surprised by the entrance of a guard without announcing himself. She drew herself to her feet, looking alarmed - and then she saw what she held.
She had never been so grateful her children were sleeping, for had she held one in her arms now she would have feared for his well-being.
The breath she drew was sharp and almost horrified.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 2, 2014 0:56:46 GMT -5
He raised his face to look at her, slowly.
"...Mother," he said, unbidden, in the yellowcloak's voice. Realizing his mistake, he abruptly forced himself to his feet and shoved off the glamour as quickly as he could. "Mother, it's me-"
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Frigga
- In the Duggins -
Posts: 79
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Post by Frigga on May 2, 2014 1:20:44 GMT -5
Frigga even in her moment of horror had the sense of mind not to stumble backwards toward the cradle.
Draw its eye, draw its eye-
She backed off immediately and seized from behind her her sword, bringing it to face him, the horror on her face coalescing into rage.
"I don't know what you are, but if you thought this jibe would weaken me, you do not know me.
"And it will be your death, demon!"
She attacked swiftly.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on May 2, 2014 1:26:16 GMT -5
ABORT ABORT ABORT
" Mother-"
If she were anyone else, he would have pulled out a dagger, but given the circumstances he ducked down and flashed himself across the room as quickly as he could, holding a barrier of light in front of himself.
"Mother, I swear -"
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