Curse Of Blood: Gods & Monsters

Chapter XXXIII - Loki

Loki sat coiled around a branch watching Aila's clan as they basked in the glow of the afternoon rays. The embers of Gunnar's funeral pyre had long since sputtered out, and life would continue as it always had.

Every mortal's death was foreordained at birth, the span of their life-threads subject to the whims of the Nornir. All that was left to chance and luck was the manner in which that worsted length of yarn was best spent.

They mourned Gunnar, but they also celebrated his memory as was only right. There was no use in regretting what the Nornir had ordained from where they dwelt in the Well of Urd. They would ever carve their runes into Yggdrasil's trunk, weaving their webs like three little spiders.

Still, humans were such complex and frail creatures, he thought, their little hearts as fragile and resilient as the silken threads that wove their destinies. Fickle too.

But he, contrariwise, knew he should never recover if his Aila was taken from him. Ergo he had seen to it that that would never happen. Her preferences be damned! No part of her would ever touch the dreary plains of Hel where she would be lost to him forever. No, not if he had any say in the matter. And he did.

He could not risk the possibility of his only love being taken from him betimes, before he had time to convince her to abandon her tragic mortality. Her absurd desire to cling to her hopeless mortal fetters utterly confounded him. It was the only subject on which they clashed. She would stay; but he would have it otherwise. The Nornir had shown him something of her future. And it had terrified him.

It was a moot point in any event, her continued resistance, for he did not need to fathom that which he had every intention of avoiding — her premature death.

His strange serpent eyes flicked across her as she side-stepped Ragnar's sword with agile footwork. She loved her people, but she would not be able to stay with them for long. She was already different and they would soon begin to see what was already discernible to his eyes.

She was no longer one of them. She was of Asgard now. Or nearly was — betwixt and between. Just one more, and she will be made an Aesir...

"Loki, my brother, come down from thy post. Do let us speak of the one thou watch most."

Loki cocked his reptile head down towards the owner of that deep, distinctive voice. "Ever the poet, Brother?" He eased his coils along the oaken bark to better observe his unexpected interlocutor.

The chief of the Aesir was wont to speak in nothing but rhyme or riddle, thinking himself too wise by half, since stealing the Mead of Poetry, to communicate as prosaically as the rest of them did. With a flick of his forked tongue, Loki opened his mouth in a hideous parody of a taunting chuckle and slithered to the ground where he thence reposed, his body bulging and shuddering as his scales split apart.

Within moments he was covered in his thick, grey pelt, giving a vigorous shake of his massive body to rid himself of any scale that might yet have clung to his fur. He trotted over to the bearded man that was seated on the rock beneath the oak that Loki had only just glided from.

"You do realize how ridiculous you sound, don't you?" Loki opined, still diverted by his brother's words. And let us not forget pompous; and overbearing.

The war god lifted his shoulders noncommittally, his smile one of cold boredom, as he leaned back against the oak. "The prerogative of kings is to speak as they must; the lot of the lowly is to sneer with disgust."

Loki rolled his eyes at the mild rebuke.

Odin's one eye was fixed sharply to his younger brother the while he stroked his long, white beard with one hand, the fingers of the other drumming against the spear, Gungnir, that lay across his lap.