With a boom just as loud as the one that had sent us up, the brief journey from Midgard into the heavens above concluded thunderously, and the deceleration pressed me harder into the floor with a low grunt of discomfort. They had no trouble leaning into the shift in motion and hefted me up into the air like it was nothing a moment later. The room we had arrived in was a fair duplicate of the one down below, and the large silver doors opened up automatically as they trotted forward.
My first look at Asgard was... dark and blank. The expansive clouds that made up the ground were entirely empty as far out as I could see, as if the environment had been wiped clear and clean away. Overhead the black thunderclouds flashed with intermittent streaks of white, and silver, and even a shade of blue when they spread especially far.
If the sight of that was disturbing to anyone else, my captors showed no sign of distress, nor at the elemental fury raging across the sky nearby, and as they turned and carried me around the back of the elevator room I saw why with a feeling of idiocy. Ancient stone structures sank into the cloudy ground ahead of us for a square three miles, at best guess, and at least that far across, but almost every available inch of surface was covered up by gleaming plates of steel and iron working, and the harried rush of soldiers akin to the Midgardians going here and there between the doorways.
Perhaps Thor has a better idea of the threat Oberon represents to his kin than I had assumed. It was something of a comforting thought- that I might not have to struggle to get him to see the danger breathing down his neck.
At several points the Midgardian's halted to let their superiors go ahead, but they in turn seemed to be hardly noticed at all, as if they were just a natural part of the terrain to be stepped around. Even I didn't warrant so much as a cursory glance, trussed up like a ham to the slaughter, which only emphasized the concern the Aesir were giving toward things.
As we passed down the main road of Asgard in this manner I was able to turn my head from side to side and exam just what was happening around.
I saw honest Dwarves, black skinned like coal and eyes a dull glow of red, with scraggly beards and tumbles of hair around the sides and back of their necks, wearing caps of iron along their otherwise bald heads. They wore varying tunics and aprons thick enough to withstand the furious display of fire within their kilns, and they were smithing most of the steel that lined the buildings around as the lesser attributes were brought in by others. None of them took notice of us either, but I saw more than one that was at work with weaponry- hammers, of course, but spiked on either end rather like the Jotunn that I had first encountered- and claymores, flamberges, and other thick and effective swords for the taller warriors striding about. Still-visible runes like the ones on the Midgardian's hammers were being cut into the surfaces by a pair of Dwarves situated in a corner of each shack that they occupied, gradually tying in the same power and protections. The little etchings faded from sight within moments of completion.
In time the path ascended and the rest of the buildings on either side were shut up tightly, or else opening and closing so swiftly that I could not catch a glimpse of what lay within before it was already too late. For the most part, the Aesir here did not look all that much different than the Midgardians, and mostly it was in the way they carried themselves and the slightly thicker, lankier forms they possessed that set them apart, with faint swirls of power emanating freely in their wake. These were a men and women who possessed certain kind of strength that separated them from the rest I had seen so far.
In time the last of the Asgardians had departed the road the further up we traveled, and the lesser buildings likewise trailed off to leave a wide expanse at the top of the road exposed to the elements for perhaps a hundred feet around, where the true heart of the city stood alone like a silver and gray pedestal. The blackest clouds flashed heavily directly above the structure, wild and barely under control, but controlled they most assuredly were; for situated outside of the ancient, fortified doors within an aura of the same wild-blue energy surging around his body like a cape stood the deity himself, Thor, blond hair tangled and on end with static charge, and in his furrowed gray eyes stirred a hard look that challenged the element and grappled it to his will.
As one, the Midgardians sank to a single knee and bowed their heads, bringing the hand that was on the same side as their hammer up and over their chests and waited to be acknowledged. I was dropped down without a second's consideration and landed painfully on my knees, chest and chin, knocking the air right out of my lungs and leaving me wheezing there.
I was beginning to get used to the hard knocks by now, but that didn't make them hurt any less. I turned to other thoughts to distract myself from the ache while Lasciel's strength subtly smoothed the pain away. I think I can see why they all follow him, but hell's bells, any being with the temperance and strength to control lightning like what he's doing has to be just a little unhinged.
By the time I could finally breath easily again a few minutes later, however, Thor still hadn't turned his attention toward us, and it was beginning to leave an ache in my shoulders and wrists just laying around that the Denarian couldn't remove. I'd allowed the Midgardians to take me captive because it meant an end to their chase and no one else would be hurt, and it would put me directly before Thor to plead my case in person, but as we waited for his attention the time left was dwindling before Oberon's return to godhood.
Frowning and directing some of my newly enhanced control, I muttered a choice wind spell and narrowed the range down considerably, so that instead of a thick gale or gust as I was wont to do, I pulled up a streamlined current that was just sharp enough instead of the usual bluntness and aimed it over my neck and down my back where the ropes bound my form. As expected, the binding properties that would have made it a mad struggle if I were to try to do anything physically were not meant to hold up to base magic alone, and with a flicker of mortal will behind it, the ropes gave way and were split apart within moments.
I caught the way lead Midgardian tensed as the ropes fell away and I pushed up to my hands and knees again at last, but he and the others were apparently bound by their own decision to remain as they were until acknowledged by their god.
Tough luck for them, then, I thought as I stood up and approached the Asgardian ahead carefully. I'll admit that it wasn't exactly easy, gathering the nerve to do that. Without even my staff for reassurance I was feeling particularly naked before the deity, even though I was theoretically more powerful now than when I had borne the Winter Knight's mantle.
I waited for a few more minutes from a safe distance, gradually inching forward, and I knew that I had to speak up sooner or later, but on my feet properly and approaching him, I could see now that Thor's concentration was more important than it was worth to risk breaking. You don't just interrupt someone juggling around with lightning unless you plan to get the both of you flash-fried, and I inherently recognized that this had the potential for catastrophic damage if he was distracted from his task.
Eventually he exhaled somewhat raggedly and closed his eyes. Then he brought one hand to his hammer, the Mjolnir of legend, and wrapped his fingers about the leather bound hilt before thrusting the ancient tool skyward with an unknown shout ringing from his lips.
While I had no idea what exactly it was that he was casting, the effect, on the other hand, was immediately apparent as all noise about us seemed to go away for a tense instant, swallowing up the distant rumble of the far away and overhead thunder, the distant clang of steel being wrought at our backs, and even my own breathing drifted aside as if drawn up into a sudden vacuum.
And then just as quickly as it had all gone, it reappeared around the Norse deity, preceding the roar of every single bolt in the sky from miles around being pulled forward and down toward him.
I had no time to utter a proper oath at the radiant maelstrom of doom and reacted on a sixth sense, on a driving instinct that warned me to drop, hide, and pray that I survived as the first shards of brilliant light descended. So I flattened on the ground with a scream of shielding on my lips, in my mind, and the concentric oval force slammed around my body like a living shell in time to keep the residual energy burning through the air from nuking my body into dust. Even through that every hair on my head down to my toes stood on end and a heavy charge pressed against my skin, making a muscle here and there twinge on its own and spasm painfully.
Hell's bells! What in fucks name is he doing!?
Even with my head pressed into my chest, with one arm pressed over my eyes and the other over the back of my head, the glow illuminated the bones through my clenched eyelids and the noise rattled my entire skeleton, threatening to shake the marrow loose. I opened my eyes again and let go of my ears only after a dreadful minute had passed and the worst of the vibrations thrumming in the air had ceased. I had to squint to see through the image burned into my retinas, but by that point I could just make out the intense glow surrounding Thor. It had magnified to the look of a newborn star, a white so intense it seemed to render everything else around him into gray-scale.
And even still lightning surged down into Mjolnir and into his arm and body, and at last I realized exactly what it was behind his insane task. He's actually absorbing it and supercharging his body like a living battery, I thought in disbelief, followed by dismay. If anything goes wrong he'll destroy everything around us like a nuclear explosion. Hell, he'll probably take out most of Midgard below as well!
I didn't dare lower my shield to try and get back some of that precious distance I had abandoned earlier again least the energy being directed into him snap out and kill me before I could so much as blink, but I renewed the effort of will sustaining the shield and tried to fortify with a bit of Soulfire this time around. I turned my head away from him again to keep from being permanently blinded, Denarian healing or no.
I don't care what preparations he's made, if he keeps that much fuel burning for an extended period of time inside of his body, all that will be left here is a charred void. Unhappily it occurred that maybe, just maybe, that was exactly what Thor intended to greet Oberon with. A storm so volatile and immediate that it consumed the entire Sidhe opposition in a single Pyrrhic cataclysm.
You know, that's the kicker about the elemental magics; they all had their own reaction when accessed, as I had often learned the hard way. Fire was the great purifier, the one that returned what it touched back to the barest state and cleared away refuge and such that might have accumulated. Water neutralized the rest of them almost wholesale, balancing out the system. Earth absorbed great force and could redistribute it accordingly. And Lightning, well, it amplified what it was given by an order of magnitude, with just as great a chance as going off and exploding you from the inside out if mishandled as it had of obeying your efforts.
Thor was among the greatest Lightning specialists in existence- it was what he was renowned for in legend. What he was doing right now was probably the greatest working of his own element of care since anyone had learned how to handle it, but I personally wanted to be as far away from where I now was as possible when he finally finished up. A low weight in the back of my pants suddenly reminded me that I still held what that lawyer down in Hel had referred to as Loki's key- he had called me the Ragnarok Spokesman or some such. An unpleasant sensation of foreboding told me that, having already witnessed the Jotunn's demise and lent a very critical hand toward it, my being here before Thor right now was not going to end well, one way or another.
Chapter Eleven concluded.
