rive the fathomless stars
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a
LOKI / SIGYN
fanfiction
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some delightful beginnings have violent ends.
PROLOGUE
Let us begin here in the wake of cataclysm and destruction, the point of no return, Ragnarök.
The world—all the realms that hang from the Yggdrasil—is enveloped with ironhard frost, the insensate snow of the Fimbul Winter. Blizzards hail from all the corners of the cosmos. In the eternal vault of Asgard's heaven, with its jaws agape devouring the stars, Skoll has begun to swallow the sun. The silence is full, fatalistic and true; the Æsir have all been waiting for this end. It won't be long now before the earth shakes and the tidal waves come.
Look; watch. On the portico leading away from the Gladsheim palace, Loki and Sigyn stand still, unafraid and unrepentant. The aeons have withered everything between them. Now they are left with a wordless (worldless) farewell.
Loki stands just beyond the shadow of a column, bedraggled even in his full regalia. Unkempt hair and sunken eyes, bloodless cheeks; he looks like a corpse against the snow. His imprisonment has tarnished his façade of grandeur, but not his power. Not his rage. Seiðr flows from him relentlessly, eager for blood, for redemption, but even this cannot hide the tiredness in his bones. There is a heaviness about his shoulders that says, 'I long for the long sleep that is death'. The Prince of Asgard, just like the rest of the world, is about to face his long last kismet. He is ready.
Behind him is the woman who once held his heart, a heart that is not hers to hold, Sigyn who quietly seethes.
Even now she stands apart from him, staying under the shadow of the palace's roof. Here she hides, as if the umbra will conceal her from Ragnarök, from the Fenriswolf, from the end of the end of it all. Her heart saltates for a prayer, holds a knot of tears for the things she is about to lose. But the seas, the stars, are quiet and as Sigyn looks at Loki's back, she knows it is a little too late for prayers. She had begun losing things an eternity ago.
The sky is burgeoning with a hundred million stars (those yet to be consumed by Skoll and Hati), painted by the eternal nebulae with their tapers and curves. Loki has taught her their names, those pinpoints of light that bear the weight of lost years. She counts them off in her mind; the mill of Mundilfari, Nott and Dagr, the bursting Nóatun which shows only once in a century, now resting inside the belly of Hati…
Sigyn is suddenly compelled to say: Hold my hand now, just as you promised. Instead she chokes out a faint, "It is time."
Loki nods. He turns to her, his emerald eyes chasms of rage and savagery. Confusion. Loss. This boy was once the glorious Prince of Asgard.
This boy, this boy was once the boy she chose to protect. Suddenly there is an itch inside Sigyn's throat. Unspoken words are heavy against her chest. Everything has changed now; even the ghost of familiarity cannot change their broken bond. Unable to hold Loki's gaze, she looks at the shining point of the star Embla, scintillating just above Loki's left shoulder.
Beneath their feet, the earth rumbles with the strength of the World Serpent. So, this is how it all ends; the quiet becomes quieter, heartache dulls to nothingness.
Briefly, Sigyn wonders, how does one keep on loving someone who has become a stranger?