Author's Note: so this is the first chapter. I'm not sure if this was clear from the prologue, but the events of the scene with Loki take place a few yearsafter the rest of the prologue. This chapter takes place the same night as Loki's...fall? This fanfic will try to blend mythology with Marvel. We'll get...Marvelthology? I dunno. Something like that.

About the Language: The words "Min Drottning" mean "My Queen" in Swedish. In this fic I have used the proper spelling of all Norse mythological stuff—Jotunheim is actually Jötunheim, Bifrost is Bifröst, and Mjollnir is Mjölnir. And Balder/Baldur is Baldr.However, Midgard remains unchanged because the actual spelling of the real word looks kind of like it should say "Miogaro." At least to me.

About One Word Specifically: I prefer the spelling of bjørn to björn. However, björn is the Swedish version of the word. So that's my one major artistic license - I'm using the Danish (I think Danish) version of the word, which is bjørn, instead of the Swedish version, because I like the way it looks better. However, I say that that version of the word is Swedish in the story. It's a preference thing.

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Chapter One
Words and Lies and Whispers

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"Can you see Loki, Heimdall?"

The Guardian of the shattered Bifröst did not glance away from the vast sea of stars glittering beyond the edges of the Rainbow Bridge as his queen stepped lightly onto the crystalline pathway. He looked, as he always looked for Frigg. Looked beyond Jötunheim, where her foster son had been born in ice and shadow. Beyond the other Realms, all the way to Midgard's gleaming city spires of glass and iron, their forests frozen and tropical, their Realm of snow-capped mountains and crashing oceans. And as he always told his queen, he said, "I do not see him, Min Drottning, but if he is anywhere, it is on Midgard."

He knew that his queen wanted more than this. That she asked not only for herself, but for Prince Thor and for Odin the All-Father, who loved the son of King Laufey as their own blood. But he could not speak the words Frigg wanted so desperately to hear.

Heimdall could not tell her if Loki Tricksmith was dead or alive.

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Steven Rogers stared at the old-fashioned radio—Old-fashioned? These were the thing to listen to back when I...back when I was...before, he thought, and swallowed down the twinges of something that didn't quite feel like bitterness or grief, but certainly weren't happiness or contentment. He ignored whatever it was in favor of staring at the lid of his compass. The feeling that came from that was easier to describe.

Pain. Straight as a razor's edge, bright as a drop of blood on white snow. Acidic as snake venom. All from looking at the dark curls tumbling around Peggy's shoulders, the dark lashes and the curl of her lip as she arched a brow at whatever schmuck happened to be behind the camera. Black and white and shades of gray. Only in his mind could he recall vivid colors. The wine-red of her mouth, the smooth ivory of her silk blouse, the chocolate of her eyes, the chestnut hair cut like some glamorous film starlet. If he closed his eyes, Steve knew he could even trace the curve of Peggy's cheek and the delicate line of her collarbone, the slope of her neck melding into her shoulder.

One kiss. Just one. A press of lips, a thundering of hearts. A single moment of nothing but Peggy's soft mouth and the taste of her on his tongue. Why hadn't he tried for more than just one? Why hadn't he tried to kiss her sooner?

"You shouldn't brood about the past," said a soft, slightly rasping voice from the open door to his room. Steve looked up from the photo and frowned. A girl—maybe his age, but probably a few years younger—limped into the Spartan bunk. One arm carried a white and red paper sack with what looked like a golden M splashed on the front. Grease stained the bottom.

Her other arm was slipped into a medium-sized silvery brace attached to a crutch. Three metal bands looped her arm: one at the wrist, one at mid-forearm, the last clasping just beneath the elbow. Mottled fingers gripped a rubber-covered handle. Steven could tell by the way she held her right foot at a stiff angle to her body that without this brace, she wouldn't have been able to walk at all. She crutched over to the little desk beside the bed where he sat and levered herself into the chair. Then she tossed him the bag.

"Special Agent Fury asked me to talk to you, Captain."

Steven didn't answer her; simply peeked into the bag, which crackled noisily. The scent of hamburgers and fries teased his nose. Underneath of that, the sweet spice of apple pie. The soldier looked back at the girl. Raised an eyebrow. The girl shrugged.

"Nothing as American as baseball, burgers, and apple pie. Or so I've been told. Wouldn't actually know, seeing as I've never been to a baseball game in my life." At the older man's look, she smiled. It didn't quite reach her eyes. "Not on the radio, not in a stadium, not on television or in a movie. I'm not much of a team sports person." She held out a hand. A long, slightly jagged pink scar ran from the inside of her wrist to her elbow. "You're Steven Rogers. Captain America. Nice to meet you."

He shook her hand. Her fingers were long and slim and felt oddly brittle in his grasp. When she pulled her hand back again, one of her knuckles grated strangely under her skin. Steven noticed two of her fingers didn't bend at the middle joints. "And you are?"

"Rory," she replied, sounding aggrieved. "But I prefer Alex."

Steve blinked. "How do you get Alex out of Rory?"

She smiled a little brighter. It didn't quite reach her eyes this time, either. "You don't." She indicated the bag with a lift of her chin. "You going to eat those, or wait for them to get cold?" The girl waited until he'd eaten half of the first burger before opening her mouth again. "Like I said—you shouldn't brood about the past. So I've heard. It's past, you lost it, you've been in cryogenic stasis for like, ever, frozen in an iceberg. Lucky you. At least everyone you know is dead so you don't have to worry about dealing with them now that they're not the people you knew anymore."

A cold sort of anger, the kind he hadn't felt since Bucky...since the train, and Bucky...for a long time, he growled at himself, frosted across his skin and slipped like mountainous meltwater down Steven's spine. Lucky him? Lucky him? What did this girl know about losing everyone you loved because you were stuck in a giant frozen chunk of ice for sixty-odd years? His heart slammed hard against his ribs once. Twice. He crushed the fries he'd been holding in one fist without conscious thought.

"Excuse me?" Every syllable was a glacial slap.

The girl—Rory, or Alex, or whatever her name was—dragged herself to a standing position and headed at an agonizing limp toward the door. "You heard exactly what I said, Captain. Lucky you. You're alive. Red Skull isn't. Count your blessings and stop drooling over some girl who's probably dead already. And if she's not dead, she's forgotten all about you. So suck it up and deal."

And she crutched out the door.

Steven just stared after her, incredulous, for a long moment. Then he threw the rest of the food in the trash. He'd lost his appetite.

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Her knuckles ached from squeezing the handle of her crutch. The bones stood out nearly white against the soft tan of her normal skin tone. Thorns of pain seared a jagged path from her hairline to her temple as her heart-rate and blood-pressure spiked. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Why was she here? Why had she agreed to come down from the Tower and do this? Just because the high and mighty director of S.H.I.E.L.D. asked her to? Just because he'd asked her to get this man, this hero, this Steven Rogers, to "stop moping" and join the Avengers Initiative?

Like she cared about the stupid Avengers Initiative. Like she wanted to be the one to deliver Fury's message. It was wrong, on so many levels. Wrong to lie to Captain Rogers. Wrong to parrot S.H.I.E.L.D.'s idiocy as if she actually believed it. Let the poor guy miss his past. Let him mourn what he'd lost. Why not? Pushing down how he felt about it wasn't going to help anyone except, maybe, the governing board. For sure it wouldn't help the Avengers. Wasn't this Captain America supposed to be the eventual leader of the team?

Because they had "so much" in common, according to the S.H.I.E.L.D. director, he'd wanted Alex to talk to Steven first. The thought coated her tongue with something sour. In common? They had nothing in common. What she'd been through was nothing compared to what Captain America had suffered. It probably hadn't even felt the same—the impact of the HYDRA ship with the water versus a car accident. She hadn't died in the car crash, either. Hadn't passed out then. Steven had hit the water and that was the last thing he remembered. But she remembered more than that -

- Flash of blood red out the window
Shockwaves smashing through the car
Metal shrieking in protest
Shouting, screaming
Fire ripping through her leg, her arm
Dull agony throbbing through the back of her skull
Spinning, spinning, spinning
Then falling out of the car onto the glass-sprinkled pavement
Coulson's face
Blurred by tears and blood in her eyes as he jumped out of the pursuing car
The concussive boom of a gunshot
Coulson falling to the ground...-

And now she was choking on the dry, disinfected staleness of the recycled air and the fluorescents were sending spindle-pricks of pain shooting through her right temple and forehead. Alex leaned her head back against the cool steel of the hallway wall. Turned her head to the metal wall and took a deep breath. The sharp cool scent of the metal, slightly copper at the very back of her throat, helped her to regulate her breathing.

She couldn't hyperventilate right now. Couldn't get overexcited. Couldn't really do anything that made her blood throb or her heart race because then she'd get a migraine and she wouldn't find out what was going on.

So she was just a civilian. Didn't matter. She'd informed General Fury that as a resident of both S.H.I.E.L.D. Underground and the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, she and the other adult civilian residents ought to at least be told what was happening, if not allowed to take part.

Alex flexed her fingers around the brace's handle. Like it was even possible for her to take part, even if she'd had any powers. As if her father would let her.

The click-click of her father's steel-toed boots on the metal walkway plucked at her attention. Each sharp tap of heel and toe to steel flooring sent tiny bolts of pain pinging through her skull. Alex took another breath. Time to give the damage report. She pushed off the wall, taking a minute to situate her body so she wouldn't trip trying to crutch toward the approaching S.H.I.E.L.D. director. Then she moved toward her father.

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"Did it work?" Nick asked softly as Rory—he could never think of her as Alex—came down the corridor. The stormy look in her eyes made him wonder if she were pissed at him, and if so, whether it was over what he'd told her to do, or the nearly-killer headache he was fairly certain brewed behind her eyes. "Did you talk to him?"

"Yes," she hissed, gripping the handle on the crutch tighter. Her father turned to walk with her as she brushed past him.

When she made it to the elevator and punched a series of buttons, he realized she was heading back to her rooms in the Underground Reverse-Tower. Not acceptable. She needed to go outside, get some sun. Some air that wasn't recycled. She looked pale enough that most people would have been surprised to know she was his daughter in the first place. She had to stop hiding out there, in the gloom and shadows.

But Rory continued, "I told him what you wanted me to tell him, which is bogus, and then I left. Not that it will do much good. He didn't appreciate the message coming from cute little me, either. And now he thinks I'm a complete witch."

The elevator shifted into gear, and she stumbled. He reached out to steady her and she jerked back from him, nearly losing her balance again. Right. He'd let himself forget—when she was doing S.H.I.E.L.D. work, especially S.H.I.E.L.D. work she didn't agree with, she didn't want him to help her. Nick wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the little girl who would run up and ask him to hoist her onto a counter because she couldn't reach the Lucky Charms.

"Why do you care what he thinks of you?" The government agent asked casually. When his daughter said nothing, he added, "Maybe you sympathize with him. You two're kinda in the same boat, right?"

She shook her head. "Saying he and I are in the same boat is so disrespectful to what he's experienced. He lost sixty years stuck out in that ice. I've read the file, I know what happened. He saved millions of people, and lost more than sixty years. I only lost a tenth of that, and I wasn't even saving anyone. I was just stupid enough to get taken hostage. Let him mourn what he's lost if he wants to. Why shouldn't he? He had a life, people he loved. Like that girl in the picture. It's not right to say he can't miss those things."

Nick studied Rory in the fluorescent lights of the elevator. The only thing, he thought, that hadn't changed about her was her hair. It had grown fast in the hospital. She wore it now in a ponytail to the middle of her back, just like she had in high school. But other than that...

Most of the time it seemed as if there was nothing left of the daughter he'd known in the woman she'd become. She didn't dance anymore; couldn't, with her leg a mangled wreck. She never looked at the old videos of her recitals and performances. Didn't seem to taste the sweetness of honeysuckle or see the beauty of the dawn breaking over the waters of the Bay. Never looked at the fire of golden leaves in autumn or made thimble and paperclip pictures in the window frost. Didn't try contacting her old friends from high school anymore. She simply stayed in her Tower, her nose buried in the books Coulson brought her.

What, if anything, did she miss from her old life? Nick didn't know. Rory wouldn't tell him. She wouldn't talk about anything before the accident and attack that had put her in an almost-six-year coma.

The elevator doors hissed open and she stepped out. Nick forced the door to remain open by bracing his weight against it. "Rory?" She didn't turn around. "Alex?" His daughter stopped and turned back to him. "I know I said we'd have dinner tonight, but with Captain Rogers here, and the Cube here too...I need to get some men on that." When she just watched him with blank eyes, he added, "We'll do dinner some other night. I promise. But we've got a consultant coming in tonight and he needs to be briefed on the situation. I want to tell you because I know you don't like not knowing what's going on-"

"Thanks, Dad," she said softly, and smiled. It was the same smile she'd given Steven—bright as phosphorescence, empty as blown glass, never once touching her eyes. "Coulson and I can order pizza or something from the eatery." She limped off down the hall, an awkward and out of place shadow in dark clothes against the polished brightness of the steel corridor.

"Crap," Nick muttered. The elevator door slid shut. "Blew it again."

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The night was dark and cold as Loki Odinson—no, he reminded himself, swallowing back salt and jagged glass. I am Loki Laufeyson, aren't I?—slid through the shadows beneath the earth. He strode along labyrinthine tunnels, prowling after the mortals delving deeper into the underground building. They were going to the artifact which they referred to as "the Cube." A relic they could never hope to truly understand. A tesseract.

They would lead the enshadowed Loki to the tesseract. And once he saw what the Midgardians meant to do with it, he would figure out what needed to be done in order to secure its power.

Narrowed jade eyes tracked the slow, timid steps of the white-haired Midgardian that gawked at his surroundings. His escort veered off and left him to traverse the final few feet alone. It seemed to take the old man an inordinate amount of time. Could he not hurry up and get where he was going? This place, Loki thought, was nothing exceptional. A series of simple, maze-like tunnels formed out of an odd glittering gray stone, ribbed with steel bones. The mortal's footsteps echoed off the metal walkways. Crunched with the dirt caked to his poorly-made brown boots.

Another mortal caught Loki's attention. For just a moment all the pseudo-Æsir could see was the dark-veiled figure, the gleam of sienna light like battlefires on black leather, the stygian emptiness where an eye had once been. For just a moment, all Loki Odinson could remember was a tall and broad-shouldered man astride a tenebrous eight-legged horse saddled with darkness, the golden spire of Gungnir in one upraised hand, the wreck of a ruined eye dressed by an aurulent patch, the remaining eye of keen blue burning like the heart of a newborn star as it surveyed its foes.

Then the mortal with the eye patch spoke, and the memory was shattered. In its wake were only fragments of ice biting deep into Loki's chest. He ignored the frigid chill, as he ignored the Jötunn ice that still frosted his blood, and focused instead on the humans.

"Dr. Selvig."

Erik barely managed to suppress a startled jump at the sound of his name. He turned to see a tall, dark-skinned man with his hands hidden in the pockets of his long black coat, watching him with one darkly gleaming eye. Where the other should've been was nothing but a black eye patch and a mound of scar tissue. A thin black goatee gave the lean face a feral cast. Who exactly was this guy?

"So you're the man behind all this?" Erik said, trying for joviality. "It's quite a labyrinth." A nervous chuckle barely managed to croak out of his throat. Nothing close to the hail-fellow-well-met voice he'd intended. Swallowing hard, he added with another weak laugh, "I was thinking, 'They're taking me down here to kill me.'"

And that, Erik thought with the first skitterings of true fear scritching up and down his spine like spiders, would've been the perfect time for this man to have laughed and assured him that S.H.I.E.L.D. was going to do nothing of the kind. It would've been the perfect time for him to say that government agencies didn't ask someone to get into a nondescript car with tinted windows and no way to open the back doors from the inside, just to drive that person all the way to a secure government facility and lead them underground, just to kill them because this hypothetical person knew too much about things like the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and the Foster Theory and what had happened in Puente Antiguo. This would have been the absolute perfect time to say all of that, and maybe laugh a little.

Instead, that single eye fixed on Erik like a cobra's gaze would fixate on a mouse. He didn't smile. His mouth didn't even so much as twitch. In fact, the look he slashed the astrophysicist with clearly stated, That's a possibility if this doesn't go the way I want it to.

That agent, the one who had spoken to Jane when S.H.I.E.L.D. had confiscated her work—Colby? Copenhagen?—had said S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were the good guys.

Erik was starting to wonder about that.

Loki studied the two mortals through slitted eyes, trying to breathe around the ice shards still pricking under his skin and the smoldering pain in his chest that had not dissipated since smashing into Midgard. He hadn't had time to see to his injuries. The tesseract's pull had brought him to this...place, within hours of impact. And now he had to stand there, waiting for these imbecilic humans to get to the point, so that he could find the relic and determine how best to use it.

What intrigued the prince, however, were the emotional currents surrounding the two mortals. The older human was suddenly, very much afraid of the one-eyed man in the leather coat. That fear whispered along the human's skin and frosted the air like a breath of coming winter. And yet the solder that watched this other human with the poisonous eyes of a snake wasn't actually paying much attention to him. In fact, this Nicholas Fury seemed almost...distracted. As if he were thinking of something, somewhere else. Someone else. A person.

Loki was not a thought-senser. But his sorcerous abilities and aptitude for seiðr opened his senses a little more than others to what was in the air. Every thought, every memory, every whisper of sentience, held magic. Held the essence of the one who'd birthed that thought or conjured that memory. It was a simple piece of magic, held even by animals. Even by mortals. And because he was a master at manipulating that magic, Loki caught a glimpse of what this warrior of Midgard allowed to distract him.

A woman, and a little girl, so much alike they must have been mother and daughter, or sisters.

The girl-child was young—maybe eleven, with the first blushes of womanhood. Bright eyes. Wild tangles of curly hair covered in bits of leaf debris and tiny twigs. Had these Midgardians never heard of brushes or combs? Green stained the knees of her blue trousers with the juices of crushed grass. And for some reason the mortal warrior pictured this child spinning in a whirlwind of golden leaves, laughing with inexplicable delight.

But the woman was altogether different, though she might have once been the spitting image of the girl. There was no laughter in this woman's empty eyes like brittle glass. There was nothing there. Only an aching sorrow in the human soldier's mind. A terrible sense of loss. And the vision of her was smeared like a half-erased drawing.

Perhaps the woman was dead. Loki would have to investigate further at some point. Such a weakness could be easily exploited in any upcoming confrontations with this Midgardian soldier. He seemed to be in charge of this pathetic little band of mortals. A potential obstacle to obtaining the tesseract. The illusion of a dead wife as a weapon, perhaps, and a little girl as a bargaining chip, would probably not be strictly necessary...but it would make things much easier.

The question was, he supposed, did he want things to be easy...or fun?

"I've been hearing about the New Mexico situation," Nick said after a moment of silence as heavy as the air in the damp stone tunnels. "Your work has impressed a lot of people who are much smarter than I am."

Like Rory, the S.H.I.E.L.D. director thought with a twinge. She'd pushed him and pushed him and pushed him to tell her what had him so distracted, what had him forgetting about their so-called "family counseling" sessions and their father-daughter dinner dates. He'd refused. Every time.

Finally she'd had Coulson bring her the files on the Cube.

The other agent still felt responsible for Rory's stolen dream of dancing, and for the coma that had ripped away six years of her life. Since Rory had a certain level of security clearance strictly by living in S.H.I.E.L.D. Underground and on the Helicarrier—all the civilian residents did—and because she occasionally did assignments for the government agency, it wasn't as huge a breach of protocol as it could've been, but even now it still caused a lot of tension between the two men.

It was also why Coulson had been assigned to deal with the migraine that was Tony Stark.

Rory had been impressed with what she'd read about Dr. Jane Foster and Dr. Erik Selvig and their research. Not one for astrophysics per se, she believed Arthur C. Clarke to be the king of bedtime reading and had a bit more grounding in interstellar whatever than the average layman. According to Coulson, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent had the same grounding. "Got it from watching Star Trek," he'd said. So both of them knew enough about the theories and what else was in those files to get a vague picture and understand that maybe these two scientists could actually be useful as expert civilian consultants.

"I have a lot to work with," Erik replied diffidently. The obsidian of this man's eyes made his gut clench into a hard, cold knot. There was nothing overtly threatening in the way he was acting, but...there was still an odd feeling. Like being watched by a coyote. He hastened to add, "The Foster Theory. A gateway to another dimension. It's unprecedented."

Nothing but silence from the man Erik was beginning to think was the leader of the secretive S.H.I.E.L.D. agency.

Unable to bear that silence, the physics doctor added, "Isn't it?"

"Legend tells us one thing, history another. But every now and then, we find something that belongs to both." Something Rory had always said.

Nick ground his teeth and grounded himself in the present. He needed to focus. So instead of wondering if he should've put this meeting off until tomorrow, instead of wondering if he should've invited her to come along and see what he had to show Dr. Selvig, he opened the silver containment case Stark had built for S.H.I.E.L.D. Twin flickers of aether-blue in the doctor's eyes reflected the cyanotic glow of the Cube. Veins of neon red from the wiring cast an almost demonic sharpness to the lined doctor's face.

The astrophysicist had never seen anything like it. "What is it?" The question almost wheezed out of him, the strain and strangeness of what he was seeing strangling his voice. He glanced up at the director's face. Into that single dark eye kept carefully blank.

Nick subtly arched a brow. "Power, Doctor." He glanced back down at the luminous Cube. At the tiny cracks in its surface. Tiny particles of static sparked along the edges of the cracks. The SHIELD director already knew from Captain America that the Cube had been damaged during his fight with Johann Schmidt. Now he studied each hairline fracture with a vulture's eye for weakness. Studied the non-terrestrial symbols, nearly the same color blue as the Cube itself, etched lightly into all its sides. There was a secret there. Someone just had to unlock it. "If we can figure out how to tap it," he added, "maybe unlimited power."

Loki sneered. Power? Unlimited power? Was that all they saw? Did they even understand what unlimited power was? This relic, this artifact, this...this cosmic instrument, could reorder time and space at the whim of its wielder. He could feel all of that power, all of that potential. It thrummed just under his skin like hot blood. Throbbed through his bones like a toothache. Whispered to him like the wind, sang for him like a rhinemaiden.

Once, as boys, his brothers—he'd had more than one then. Thor who was the eldest; and Baldr, now long dead; and Víðarr, who had sworn himself no kin of Loki's; and little Bragi, who had always been so fragile—had rashly dared him to lay his bare hands to Mjölnir's haft. Baldr had only been poking fun, but Víðarr had insisted he do it. His eyes had been cool and appraising as they judged this younger son of their father and found him wanting yet again. And both his little brother and Thor had been terrified that something awful would happen to Bragi's favorite eldest brother if Loki dared touch the ensorcelled hammer without the aid of Járngreipr, the iron gauntlet Odin used to wield Mjölnir's power.

It was this last, more than anything else, that had made him do as Víðarr had urged him. To ease his little brother's fear. Their father wouldn't leave such a thing unguarded if it was so dangerous, surely. And to prove to Thor that he was just as brave as the golden prince. So he had touched the mighty hammer that was Thor's inheritance. Touched it, and for a moment he'd felt the power humming through the haft and the heavy iron head.

Then had come the pain.

It had taken all four of his brothers to pry his hand from Mjölnir's handle, and by then his palm had been blistered white practically all over and even Víðarr had not teased him about the tears running unchecked down his cheeks. Loki had learned an important lesson that day. So he wasn't going to simply snatch up this so-called Cube and make off with it like a thief in the night. He would allow the humans to learn of it while he gathered his strength and determined the best course of action. Once they'd laid the groundwork, then he would see.

"Well," the one called Tricksmith, Master of Mischief and Lies, whispered like a chill breath through the older mortal's skull. He saw the old man barely manage to suppress a shiver. "I guess that's worth a look."

Wondering where the words were coming from even as he said them, Erik murmured, "Well, I guess that's worth a look."

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Author's Note: So Odin never wielded Mjölnir as far as I know, but you see Mjölnir in the film during that clip when Loki and Thor are all cute and adorable and young, so I'm thinking in the Marvel-verse it was handed down from father to eldest son? Just an idea. Thor in mythology did wear an iron gauntlet called Járngreipr so that he could wield Mjölnir (which was red-hot, apparently) without damage.

Thor, Baldr, Víðarr, and Bragi are all biological sons of Odin, though they all had different mothers (Thor's mother was the primordial goddess Fjörgyn; Baldr's mother was Frigg, Odin's wife; Víðarr's mother was the frost giantess Gridr; and Bragi's mother is never named, although if it's Frigg, she doesn't like him much).

And the fairy tale themes this fic will most likely be incorporating are as follows—the Snow Queen, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Snow White and Rose Red (not to be confused with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves).

And even though I don'tusuallyaskfor them, I do like reviews. A lot. I usually do review prompts for those who can't think of what to comment on once my fics pic up speed. Hope you enjoyed this chapter. I try to update regularly (at least once a month) for the fics that I'm pushing hard with, like this one.

Translation:"seiðr" is Nordic/Viking sorcery.