The craftsman and the sorceror stood at the edge of the bridge. Their feet lay far from its abrupt edge as it tapered into crystalline fibres, shorn off in tumult. The edges of spaces repell with their overwhelming chasmic overbearance. They draw in the eye, the incautious step, the uncertain mind. The body recoils and the dizzying moment lingers until the back is turned to the void and it can be safely dispelled. The twisted shards bled glimmering energy; faint flashes of colour twisting away into the abyss. A sickly hum of tainted power hung in the air, uneasy, dangerous, wasted, like the innards of a great machine laid bare to corrosion.
"Years...decades." The voice was raised over the hum, words blurred by it, the stress in the tone poorly masked by a coarse laugh.
"Even with all the might of Asgard," the other replied, "and the power of the Allfather himself."
The prince dismounted his horse with the faint clinking of bit and stirrup. Each step brough forth a flurry of colour upon a surface that gleamed like fractured ice, yet it was a poor show compared to its former glory. His pace was slow, laboured, like the gait of one who was battle-weary. He stepped out over the void, eyes avoiding its cavernous, star-flung space. The two figures parted at his passing, their own gazes averted. They took their leave as silent as ghosts, fearful of disturbing the prince's solitude.
He crossed the bridge's width, touched its cool surface with a hand that shook with a motion that he could not still. One side to the other he drifted as if drawn by the currents of an ocean, no word spoken. Sometimes his hands would hang lifeless; so gentle for a warrior, and sometimes they would touch his chest as if to soothe a pain there. His steps took him to the bridge's torn limit, its bleeding wound. The splinters creaked and shuddered beneath his weight, yet he welcomed the danger over the dull ache of the memories that hung there, shimmering away wraith-like into the void, spun from shards of crystalline colour. Each breath caught as if laced with ice crystals.
He dropped to his knees, the pain overwhelming. His vision blurred and mingled with the memories, each one like the slice of a hot blade drawn in a torturous path across naked flesh. It was more raw and more splintered than the bridge's fractured limit. He pressed his cheek to its surface, its untamed hum coursing through his body along with its chill. His broad shoulders shuddered yet he made no sound. His vast cloak pooled behind him, a swath of blood against ice, rippling with his agony.
Sometimes he would stay there until weariness would overcome his form, and his eyes would fall closed against the backdrop of stars, memories spinning away into convoluted nightmares. Each time he would see those fingers, pale against the night, unclasp, and before the end, that feral grin would flash and blink out into the darkness.
"He misses her, the woman he loved on Midgard," the craftsman murmured.
"Nay," the sorcerer replied, "he misses his brother."