Havoc and Retribution

Defiance in Her Veins

"She fell from the stars."

The way Lokasenna tells the story makes Loki feel as if he was there, seeing what happened to Sigyn.

"Eventually, when she came to understand she was on Midgard, she learned she landed in a small village just outside of what is present day Aleppo in Syria. The year was 1916." While Loki does not know all that much about Midgard's history, the way that Lokasenna says those words makes him shiver.

"Mom was a mess," Senna tells him. "She never told me much about those days. Mom landed in the middle of the Turks trying to round up a shoot a group of Armenian villagers. Our world here is just now recognizing that those events were genocide." There is disgust in Senna's voice. "Millions slaughtered in unmarked graves and we're just now recognizing those actions as the Armenian Genocide."

"So here is this woman, dressed in the remains of a bridal gown, barefoot in the desert of the old Ottoman Empire, sparking with Vanir magic as the Turkish soldiers open fire on the villagers. She must have been feeling lost and furious and all messed up about being sold to Asgard for peace because she leveled the soldiers. Bifrost magic slopping all over the place, stinging and slashing."

Something about the way she says words catches his attention. "Bifrost magic?" he interrupts.

Senna gives him a look. "Yeah. Mom knew, even before she started experimenting that she didn't just have Vanir magic. We ended up calling it Bifrost magic over the years."

"Why?" he asks bluntly. "Because it's rainbows?"

Senna arches an eyebrow at him. "Thick. As. A. Board." She enunciates. "No, because later she learned where her magic came from." At his confused look, she turned a genuinely bewildered face to him. "You mean you, with all your galivanting and researching, haven't figured out what she was yet?"

Annoyed at her patronizing tone, her grabs the wheel and swerves them around a truck Senna wasn't paying attention to. "Assume I'm a dimwit," he growls.

"And a dullard and an idiot, and a lunatic to boot," Senna says, batting his hand off the wheel with a none too gentle slap. "But you've guessed," she says, looking at Loki out of the corner of her eye.

He sighs. He has worked it out, or at least he thinks he has. Researching Sigyn and Hel's origins on Asgard, the legends he found never really added up. But the base of all of those legends was a being beyond death with power over space and matter. Magic to control the universe is exactly what Senna describes it as. Bifrost magic.

He may be a rogue, but he did pay attention to the myths in school. He is a god of stories after all.

There were only one set of beings with magic to shape and form the Bifrost. The Norns.

When they learned of the dragon in the Ice Peaks of Vanaheim and when Jay had exploded from the temple alive with knowledge and grief, he has begun to remember the old stories. But then they had needed to battle Tyr and Hel and there hadn't been time to do much more than survive. Then time distorted for him and he ended up on Asgard facing down a conglomerate chaos goddess. When Jay had revealed Sigyn's soul was on Earth, when he has time to think and analyze, he began to piece things together, memories and stories and everything he knew. The realization came slowly, not as a euphoric flash of knowledge.

Aloud, to Senna, he says, "She was a Norn, wasn't she?"

Senna smiles, a sad smile and dips her head in a nod. "Mom was one of the Fates." Her voice is a soft chuckle. "Does that make me Destiny or Predetermination?"

"Destiny would be a better name than Lokasenna," he mutters. "If she'd named you Predetermination, you'd have a hard time thinking anything you ever did was your own choice."