Inbox (Caldera)

[coldsong]

"Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Attack while they are distracted.

Kindly leave a message."

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[loosed]

Flat sounds good.

[ Partly curiosity, for multiple reasons; he turns up at the door wearing what he's always wearing, bare feet and a woodsman's cloak, and if he looks like someone who's never been inside a flat, that is almost accurate. It has been a very very long time. They weren't called flats. And none of them were inhabited by gods.

He's acquired a pair of shrimp skewers from a food stall along the way. One is half gone. Rather than, like, hello, thanks for having me so I can continue my largely pointless investigation of this mutual murder, he holds the second one up in offer. ]

switching to prose format because it's easier for me but you do you!

[coldsong]

Loki's home is in a medium-sized building separated into four floors with two apartments each floor. Barely an apartment building at all for modern Midgard, but they're not in Midgard. Loki's place is on the second floor, but it's not hard to find, and he meets him at the top of the stairs, which are made of elegantly carved coral and stone. The building itself is probably meant to be high-class. Loki looks like wild creature that may not be suited for such surroundings, wearing his Jotun form: blue, etched with symmetrical ridges, red-eyed and equally barefoot. He's got a loose kurta and trousers on, but the shirt is open, as if he'd rather not be wearing it at all. It's a little warmer than he prefers.

The godling blinks, mildly surprised by the offer of food, but then smiles faintly and accepts it. He takes a small bite without question, swallowing, then beckons him in through an open door. "Do your people observe xenia, then? The obligation of a host, a guest, and those who share food to one another? Mine do. No harm will come upon you in my home. And thank you, regardless. I can offer a drink, if you wish."

He didn't expect to have to, he thought this was going to be far more adversarial, but he'll take a peaceful start without complaint.

The interior of the flat is surprisingly spartan for a place owned by a prince. There's a couch and a chair, a couple tables and shelves, but decoration is haphazard at best, and seems to consist of bits of art that he's either bought or been given by Calderans. Draped iridescent fabric over the furniture. A carved wooden octopus on the wall.

The primary decorations are books and scrolls, and there is no discernible organizational system. "Sit anywhere you like. I haven't had many people here at all. Outside of other Undines, Visitors don't seem eager to trust their lives to a magical bubble under the ocean."

i dig i dig

[loosed]

Xenia — no. Perhaps he's less hungry than he thought he would be. Or perhaps it's simply uncustomary kindness. But Felassan's grin isn't too sharp and his shrug is agreeable in its ambiguity, and his head-to-toe glance over Loki's appearance frank but quick in its curiosity, absent of anything that might be called a gawk or a leer, before he turns to inspecting the room instead.

"Last time I came down here, the city was falling apart and an orb was eating people's memories," he says, with a touch of amusement — he would count himself among those not eager to trust it, yes. Any of it. But the bubble is probably in his top ten untrustworthy things, so far as Caldera goes, if only because it makes being even outside in the city feel like being enclosed somewhere.

He'll sit wherever he decides he likes. But first he's taking his time along the perimeter of the room, with his head tilted fully sideways to read the spines of books as he passes them and a moment spent looking at the woodgrain on the octopus so closely his nose nearly touches it.

"I would not say no to water," he says, "or whatever you're having."

Re: i dig i dig

[coldsong]

They've only spoken over the network before, and while Loki has seen this man in passing, he's just now really getting a look at him. Not entirely different from the light elves of his own world, really. Handsome fellow, moves like he owns the space around him. He's not surprised this is the sort of person who would befriend and be befriended by Solas and Beleth.

"Indeed. And yet, it stands. I find that interesting. Either the dome is built more sturdily than it looks, or the place has plot armor," he says with a little smile, and takes another nibble of shrimp. The door closes itself behind Felassan, a gentle telekinetic push from Loki, but it does not lock.

"I was told the sculpture was carved of driftwood that had been aged for decades," he says, noting the up close study. "Couldn't tell you what sort of tree, though. One moment."

He retreats into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a pitcher of water, two glasses, and an open bottle of some sort of hard cider, on a tray, which he balances on one hand in such a way that it has to be help up partially with magic.

He sets it down on the table, then slides into a chair, slouched and manspreading casually. "You don't seem interested in a formal tea service, so I'll make so bold as to allow you to help yourself to whatever you prefer to drink. Did you want to just see the blade, or did you want the full explanation first?"

[loosed]

"I'm not in a hurry," is slightly a lie. While he is here, Beleth is alone at the house with the orb, with the dagger, with her fears for Solas, and with whatever new fears Felassan's unexplained absence might engender as the minutes stack up. Once, some years ago, he told his mortal ward he would be right back. Her tear-streaked teenaged fury when she found him lying on a hill to watch the wind in the grasses, a week later, taught him something about time and what is reasonable to ask of people with less of it when one, hypothetically, cares about their feelings.

But he would like the explanation. He expects it will not take five days.

He pulls his gaze from the octopus (he would be able to identify it at home, but here — ) to the drinks. He picks cider, and he picks the couch, and he considers Loki. Lies, mischief, and outcasts, he said, honored to provide empathy or a scapegoat to those who could not find them elsewhere, and now a barefoot blue art collector in a spare apartment beneath the sea, involved somehow with a friendly blond human Beleth seems very fond of.

People would not guess everything Solas was capable of, either, if they found him at home with a paintbrush in his hand and Beleth there to offer tea.

"I did calm him down," Felassan admits belatedly. Honesty for what he hopes, with some skepticism, will be honesty in return. "I guess it didn't stick."

[coldsong]

It could take days, if Loki really wanted to belabor the point, but he's long since learned people won't listen to him for as long as he'd like them to. Sometimes when he gets called out on lying by omission, it's because he's oversimplified something, aware that his listener (cough, Thor) won't sit still for the full, nuanced explanation. So he tells them what he needs them to know to do what he needs them to do.

Fortunately, he doesn't need Felassan to do anything in particular. There is no reason to dissemble or manipulate, and so he mirrors his choice, pouring a little cider for himself.

"You can't be next to someone every minute of every hour of every day," he says with a gentle shrug. Hard to tell if there is any hint of self-blame here, but if there is, there needn't be, in his distinctly unhumble opinion. "Calm isn't a permanent state for anyone, and I am under the impression he, more than many of the other people here, feels unjustly entrapped by this place and its rulers."

But to the matter at hand...

"My biological species are called Jotnar. Colloquially known as Frost Giants. I am, unfortunately, not giant. Why those genes skipped a generation I can't tell you, as I was adopted as an infant. I know who my father was, but not my biological mother."

"Jotnar have an innate talent for shapeshifting in such a way as to blend in with their surroundings. The planet they come from is harsh, a frozen world, though it teemed with life once. But they are known for taking the forms of animals and birds, stone and ice, and for creating blades and armor from their own bodies."

He raises one hand and flicks the wrist, careful to keep it where Felassan can see it. A shimmer of cold green light travels up from his wrist and coalesces into a dagger in a matter of milliseconds. It looks like it's made of pure ice, translucent in his hand.

"I carry my own more conventional weapons, as well," he says. "But I lost track of them in the extremity of the fight. I was able to duplicate myself, split off into multiple forms in order to distract him, but he was transforming them into stone as quickly as I could make them and jump my consciousness between them. In the end, I became frost. There was no other way to get close enough to get a blow in, without trickery and moving fast."

[loosed]

Loki's attempt at comfort is not wholly unwarranted. Nor is it wholly ineffective, despite Felassan's reaction being a slight narrowing of his eyes above his smile, a silent don't coddle me even as it sort of works. But in his opinion, Felassan's feelings are much less interesting than Loki's facts, which earn his silent attention and a curious cock of his head.

This can be said for Caldera: it has been a long time since Felassan encountered much that was new, especially with the Veil putting the deeper Fade with its mysteries and horrors so much further beyond reach. His interest is not purely utilitarian. Frost giants, another planet. They go on the list with Hel. But the more Loki explains, the more his affable attentiveness turns still and steely with concern, cider resting on his knee. He doesn't stop smiling, but it's different, you know, around the eyes, which fix on the crystalline dagger. A weapon drawn from the body of a race of giants. It would be nice if that were entirely new. Instead, his hope he might return to Beleth and say he learned nothing that was cause for further concern is dampening.

"Sneaky bastard meets sneaky bastard," he says, light and a little proud, like Loki's just told him Solas performed well in a footrace. He leans forward puts out his hand in an unspoken request for the dagger. "Were you still frost — "

Strange thought, though he has known people to transform into swarms of insects rather than a single bug, and perhaps it isn't so different.

" — when you did it?"

[coldsong]

Loki is nothing if not skilled with cold reading. He's collecting a lot of impressions from this conversation already: stolid, analytical, even-tempered but not dispassionate. An interesting man. Under better circumstances he would be happy to tell Felassan all about interplanetary travel and the history of war between Aesir and Jotnar. It's not the matter at hand today, though.

"Half and half." He flips the dagger easily and offers him the handle, fearless. "Betwixt and between. The less I commit to a single form, the more flexible I can be. The endgame all happened in a matter of a few seconds. I was running out of energy to maintain my illusions, and I knew I would be cornered if I didn't make a bold move. So I did. Split my consciousness between shadow and frost for just long enough to lunge."

"He caught me the second I did. Turning from frost to flesh to stone in the blink of an eye is a strange feeling."

[loosed]

"I would say I can imagine, but..."

Felassan's glance up from the dagger is impressed and amused, though both are muted, filtered through worry and distrust. Interesting and hospitable and capable of splitting his consciousness between frost and shadow can only go so far at the moment. Maybe they'll go further if Solas comes back. When Solas comes back.

The dagger he handles with care. Confidence, too – an old soldier. He feels the weight and admires the clarity. There are certainly uglier things to die by. Then he leaves the cider balanced on his leg by gravity alone so he can hold his other hand over the blade, searching for resonance.

"Our people can be difficult to kill," he says in the meantime, focus turning his tone meditative. "Some of us more than others. Under the right circumstances, we shatter into aspects that go on living independently of each other. I'm not aware of them ever being successfully reunited into a single person again. But that's probably not what happened."

Seems fair enough for Loki to know why he is being imposed upon and questioned. Pardon Felassan for not being anymore specific about what the right circumstances would be, given the situation they have found themselves.

Felassan doesn't find the threads he's searching for in the magic binding the dagger together, anyway. It's a relief, but not the kind that feels good, rather than just not worse; the absence of devastating evidence still leaves murky uncertainty. He offers the dagger back. There's something acerbic in his smile, now, but it's not meant entirely for Loki.

"Even if it is, I suppose the important thing is that you both had fun."

[coldsong]

"Don't try," he says dryly and shakes his head. "I've died more times than I can count. That was one of the least objectionable experiences but it was still decidedly weird."

He can tell that Felassan is looking for something in the dagger, something beyond the physical and perhaps not obvious even to an ordinary mage. And because Loki knows less about his own hereditary gifts than he would like to, he's immediately interested in the conclusion, whatever it may be. He tilts his head curiously, watching the focus and body language as much as he listens to the words the elf speaks.

"That is not something I'm aware of being capable of," he says. "Either receiving or dealing out. Though I'm sorry to admit that at the point I struck, I was running entirely on adrenaline. It's possible I did something I didn't intend to, although I hate to think so."

He snorts softly at the comment. You both had fun. They did, he thinks, but he's not sure he's comfortable saying so just yet. Whenever Solas comes back--and based on his experience of his power, Loki has to assume he will--then they can laugh about it.

"It was cathartic," he says. "But I'd rather we fought on the same side, going forward." Gods, what he wouldn't give to see Thanos, or even Ebony Maw, turned to stone...

[loosed]

"You and me and everyone but the gods."

This is, perhaps, unfair. But Felassan would only agree if his next breath contained an explanation that assuming Caldera's gods are concerned enough about them to care one way or the other, so long as they serve their purpose in the end, is assuming too much.

He's been thinking, in the meantime, and giving his cider a sip. It is not impossible that Loki did something he didn't intend to. A song in the dagger he can't sense. Some unexpected interplanary alchemy between elvhen and jotnar. But what could anyone do about it now? He can hardly ask Loki to kill him for experimentation's sake — not when that would mean leaving Beleth alone with her worry and grief, and especially not when it would mean leaving her alone with her worry and grief and the orb and the dagger. (Under other circumstances, it'd be a solid maybe.)

While he's still trying to think his way to an answer that is not going to come, he asks, "What was it like to die and come back? Did you have any awareness in between?"

[coldsong]

"Hm, which gods, though?" Loki says, with a wry look. He is, for the record, in favor of unfairness towards those in power, be they gods or something else.

Once back in his own hand, Loki lets the dagger dissipate, vanishing into a cloud of water vapor, as if it were ordinary ice.

"It's different every time," he says of dying and returning, gaze going distant in something approaching a thousand-yard stare. "There is usually awareness. Glimpses of some afterlife in potentia, never long enough to really grasp it in both hands. Even after my last death in my home world, there was something. Encroaching darkness."

"But not this time. There's nothing. Or, at least, there's nothing I can remember, and I certainly don't like that thought."

[loosed]

Which god and that wry look — and Felassan likes him, insofar as circumstances allow, despite what Loki has done this week and what he claims to be. So he still rolls his eyes. A god says which god, he can't do anything except roll his eyes. If he failed to roll his eyes, the memories of a thousand dead comrades would probably manifest as ghosts to beat him to death. But when the obligatory rolling ends, there's a hint of something friendlier in the corners of his eyes and his mouth, as a chaser.

And Felassan does not like that thought, either, suggests the tightening of his mouth. Afterlife both is and is not a foreign concept. Something like those who chose to go to leave their bodies behind to decay, or those who clung to half-life in fragments. But for most of his people, to die is to die, personality and memory eradicated from every plane. Felassan had thought he was ready for that; he'd had plenty of time. And it'd hardly be fair to decide mortality was an acceptable cost only for other people. But now, months past his chosen endpoint and grateful for the extension, he finds himself nearly wistful.

Perhaps this makes Caldera is his afterlife. Felassan will consider that later, when he isn't considering the less pointless and semantic question of what happened to Loki. What might be happening to Solas.

"If they are bringing you back, you must have been somewhere to be brought back from," he says, as if the physics of a soul could be that simple, then waves a hand. "Or it could be time shit."

Technical term.

[coldsong]

"Time shit," he echoes, and laughs. No, he gets it. 'Time shit' does about cover the possibility of brute-force reversing the destruction to the body, among other works that would take more finesse. But what happens to the soul when you ask the Norns to double-check their work and make a few minor revisions?

"Given how I had died before I first arrived here," he says blithely, "I have to assume they can poach from Valhalla, or Hel, or both. Does anyone really have the same mental picture of the afterlife, if they even believe in it at all?"

"We were taught that those who die honorably in battle are sent to Valhalla, the hall of our fathers, where they prepare for the final battle at the end of all worlds: fighting, dying, rising, feasting, only to begin again the next day."

He smiles thinly. "But I've never been fully convinced that fighting for a fight's sake is glorious. If offered a choice of eternities, I think I'd prefer oblivion to endless battle."

[loosed]

Felassan hums. He enjoys a good fight as much as the next feisty spirit who was swept along into a physical body specifically for his utility as a conscript in a thousands-of-years-long war, but they were at least promised it had a purpose. They did imagine there would be an end.

"I was dead, too," he says, tracing the top of his cup with his finger, "or about to be." He hasn't asked if Solas let him finish what he was trying to say first. (But he didn't.) "I'm not one of the ones who is difficult to kill... That is not an invitation," comes with half a smile. He's not really worried. "It should have been oblivion, but here we are."

Sitting in a sparse apartment, drinking cider with a god. A real one, the way their descendants believe gods must have been real, if he's to be believed. Quite a different thing to Felassan from Solas, a familiar old friend — talented and influential, but an equal, one of them, Felassan always tried his best to believe — who's been put through four thousand years of mythological meat-grinding. A real god who killed his friend. Maybe Felassan should try to set him on fire or something, as a matter of principle? But he's as curious as he is wary, and he's more wary than he is angry.

Overall: an odd turn of events.

"What is Hel, then? And who decides what counts as honorable?"

[coldsong]

Loki makes a soft, thoughtful humming sound, watching the play of thought and emotion across Felassan's face. He can't truly read him, but he can see there's a lot going on, and at least two-thirds of it is uncomfortable. And yet, here they are, drinking cider and tea.

"Believe it or not, I don't normally kill people for no good reason. If I had some overarching goal here that people were in the way of, maybe, but I have yet to feel compelled to do anything other than exist. It's strange. The last several years in my own world were a blur of...of desperation, really. Knowing an enemy was coming for me, for my world, for my universe, and knowing no one would believe me if I tried to warn them. So I did what I could to prepare, on my own, and failed at it for the most part."

A more honest, unvarnished commentary than he's offered most of the people here. "Though I did manage to save my brother, in the end. But maybe that's why I'm so listless, here. My work at home was done, and I have yet to pick up a new game."

For a moment, on the battlefield, facing Solas, he had a new game. It was fun, but over far too quickly.

"Hel is the realm of the 'dishonored' dead," he says, and makes air quotes with his fingers. "Valhalla is for the elite warriors. Folkvangr is Freya's hall for the beautiful and gifted who were slain. Hel is for everyone else, so presumably all your hardworking farmers, bakers, craftsmen and bureaucrats and ordinary folk end up there. What it's like depends on who you ask, but I imagine with that many people who can create the basic necessities of civilization, it's probably peaceful. Flawless roads. Sturdy architecture. Delicious pastries."

"But of course, those who have a vested interest in people dying while fighting willingly for their glory will paint it as dreary or miserable."