Welcome to Asgard

[complicatedliar]

Who: Loki and anyone who is around (feel free to mingle)
Where: Asgard's Keep and surrounding lands
When: Say about a week's worth of time, July 19-26, pick a day
What: New people are beginning to arrive in Asgard in the wake of Loki's decision to ask Ebon Askavi. He's still not sure how he feels about this.
Warnings: Violence potential, please use trigger warnings and tag porn as applicable

Loki has only been back in Asgard for a few days, but he still can't shake the restlessness of having been gone. The keep doesn't feel safe to him, of course--it probably never will again--but Ebon Askavi had been frightening in its own right. The stress of the trip, of keeping himself in order and calm, has begun to take its toll.

And if he's done his job, new people will be arriving. He's anticipating that with a special sort of hope and horror mixed. The land must be healed. And he'll do whatever it takes to see that happen, even if it means kneeling to a Queen again. If he's lucky, maybe he won't survive the experience this time... so long as Asgard does. He'd knelt before the Lady of Ebon Askavi and... but it won't be her that's coming. If it was her, he'd almost be able to believe things would be all right.

But he'll just have to trust.

The keep is made as ready as it can be for visitors, cleaned and ready to be welcoming--as welcoming as anywhere can be in these troubled, untrusting times. Loki occupies himself in the gardens, though he studiously avoids the northern garden, and may disappear for some time in the western one. He also goes for long rides, watching for incursions from other territories, and waiting. Someone is just as likely to meet him on the road as they are in the keep.

Comments

[complicatedliar]

"Strutting peacocks," Loki mutters. How might life have been different, had he been born a warlord prince? Or more rightfully, he thinks bitterly, a Queen?

"She is," he agrees. "I both want it to be true and do not. I don't want to... To belong to anyone again."

[abjurer]

"I'll make sure they get a sharp reminder," Max said with a lazy smile, a hint of danger along the edges. "Not all of us were born to be ornamental."

He can't help the thirst that he has to know about her. Witch herself, dreams made flesh. Everything that the Blood had dreamed of for centuries, while the taint ravaged the land. "To serve Witch. That would be a terrifying prospect. And a glorious one." To those of them who still held with old ways. "You never did belong to any of the bitch queens. In body perhaps. But never anything more substantial."

[complicatedliar]

"Oh, the pissing and prick waving that would greet that statement. Do let me know, so I can watch."

Hah. "Terrifying... yes." He doesn't want to lose himself like that, but he's already lost. "But to offer what so many tried to take by force... is not easy." He's tired of being so vulnerable. Knowing someone can destroy you when you've given so much to survive is... difficult. "I hope that you will be able to meet her, however. Perhaps next time a message must go to Ebon Askavi, I will send you."

[abjurer]

"I'll take great pleasure in it," Max replies.

Service freely offered. Not something he'd imagined he would ever hear from Loki. "I imagine it is. But you survived. Not many can say that probably. Not from Terreille anyway." Not when villages and towns stood half empty after the purge.

He ponders that for a moment, then nods. "I think I would like that. It scares me just the thought of it but... I'd like to see the Keep at least once, and see Witch herself." What member of the Blood wouldn't, if they remained untainted?

[complicatedliar]

"They said similar things, the males who were with her, after the audience." And that it was brave. He hadn't felt particularly brave. He'd felt like he was going to lose his grip on reality all over again. "This realm is a blight, I think, through and through." He'd ask if there was a point to saving it, but what choice did he have? At least, he would fight to his last drop of blood for Asgard.

"Then the next time we have cause to send a messenger to the keep, it will be you. Unless they specifically require my attendance."

[abjurer]

That is possibly a better gauge of this Queen in the Darkness. The males that she surrounded herself with and how they behaved. "And them? Were they..." He took a breath, pondered how to word it, the specific way that males often behaved here. "Were they like us?" Broken in particular ways by years of enslavement.

Sometimes he agreed with Loki but... "For better or worse, we were left alive. I don't know Kaeleer. But I know Terreille. It wasn't always like this." But that had been a long time ago, long before he had been born.

He nods when Loki makes his proclamation. "Thankyou. I will probably be equally terrified when it comes to it."

[complicatedliar]

"I don't know," he said. "They were... powerful. Self-assured. Less overtly aggressive than I might have thought. Sympathetic..." He huffed a humorless laugh. "They said they understood. I don't know if I believe them or not."

"It wasn't always like this," he agreed. "But some wounds are mortal. Others, when they heal, still leave scars that make recovery impossible. But I must believe that Asgard will rise again." Otherwise, what has his life been for?

[abjurer]

"Maybe they need to posture less. They have their positions. It isn't essential to their survival." In some ways it was a relief that his fate had been sealed when he'd been gifted to the Queen of Asgard; no need to play a part and curry favour just in order to stay alive. He had already had his future position decided. "At least they're willing to help. Doesn't matter otherwise I suppose."

They'd probably never come into contact with them again.

"It will. I feel like it will. Mother Night, it has to."

[complicatedliar]

"I think that is the very thing," he said, nodding. "They are secure in their relative position to each other, and where they stand with their Queen." He remembered, dimly, seeing that sort of confidence in the males of Frigga's court. "Yes. Though I don't know how I feel about Ebon Askavi being quite so interested in our little territory and its internal workings. We have little choice, however." He could only hope they wouldn't try to actively interfere in his lands.

"It has to," he agreed. That, he had seen in his tangled web, that it was at least possible. But he didn't expect to live to see that day himself. Max would, he thought. And that would be enough.

[abjurer]

"Security... it sounds like a dream," Max said. He leaned back, folding his arms across his chest. "It's been a long time since anyone felt secure in their position." Even now, the Queen dead, they had to contend with everyone who was left alive. The purge had taken the worse, but so many males without guidance, so many witches still terrified and traumatised... it was a precarious peace at best.

"One way or another, we'll fine out, I suppose."

[complicatedliar]

"Mmm. I don't know if I think it possible, in truth." He tended to be more honest with Max than nearly anyone else. It was something of a relief to not have to keep up the act of complete confidence constantly. "Though I do remember, dimly, what it was like." When his mother had been Queen; things had been so different then. And he tried not to think about it too much; it was more pain than he wanted to inflict on himself.

"Or we'll be dead," he said equably. "So it could be worse."

[abjurer]

"Hayll was rotten before I was even born." And who knows what Hayll is like now? Probably a smoking pit. Part of him hopes that is the case. "But we have to try. It's probably too late for us, but there are still those who might have a chance." Those who were just growing up, young enough to have avoided the worst of it.

"Even hell is preferable in some senses, I agree."

[complicatedliar]

"Lucky for you to have escaped the rot." It wasn't a sarcastic remark; it was lucky. Had any other Hayllians? Not bloody many. "It is too late for some," he agreed. He wasn't the sort to be uselessly optimistic, and that wasn't what Max needed to hear out of him. "But the battle does not end until one side's been bled dry. We still have more blood left in us." And they would water the ground for a new generation, of that he was convinced. He'd seen as much.

[abjurer]

"I know," Max replies solemnly. "Strange how getting taken as a slave turned out to be salvation. I wouldn't have survived otherwise." You played court games or you died.

"I think you missed your calling as an orator," Max says, a faint smile on his lips. "The fight goes on, I suppose. We'll see how it ends."

[complicatedliar]

"It was the salvation for many. An unintended consequence, perhaps." It had corrupted and twisted most out of all recognition and taught them to hate females and distrust them. Loki felt that as well. But it had also given many of them a reason to hate Hayll and cherish the old ways, in which they would have been free.

Though really, would they be too corrupted to live in the new order they helped create? Time would tell. Another thing he didn't intend on expounding upon for Max.

He flashed Max a brief smile. "Silvertongue first for reasons the bitches did not like."

[abjurer]

"The Queens certainly never intended for any good to come of it. But we survived. Even if it was just to rebuild." Allow a newer generation to have a foundation to build upon. It was worthy but also an exhausting prospect when so many were already so tired.

Max grinned back at him. "It is an apt moniker."