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It’s fitting, Loki thinks, in a bitter sort of way, for the start of Winter to have its own brief spring. Outside one of his hidden lairs within the Nexus there’s a little stand of ornamental trees. Today, beneath the minimal shelter of their lowest branches, a collection of dead stems and leaves are hung with ribbons of ice. Frost flowers.
The "petals" are thin and glittery in the low light. Here they are knotted in fanciful curls and spirals like a woman’s hair; there they ripple like the edge of a dancer’s skirt; on some of the branches above they dwindle into filament-like strands and look almost as if they’d be soft to the touch.
These only show forth at the start of the cold season, he knows, when the temperature of the ground is still above freezing and the remnants of dead plants have enough sap within to still be shocked by the vicious air. The water within chills and expands, splits the stems from whence it came. Hitting the air, it then freezes white, but behind it still more liquid leaks, freezing and folding and twisting.
These won’t last long. The sun is scarce, but one peep from behind a cloud and it will destroy the little baubles; they will sublimate into nothing.
He likes them. He, too, knows ice in his veins that cannot be contained, that springs forth whether he will or not, forming fissures, peeling back layers of illusion. Broken open, he crouches by the trees and strokes the edge of a translucent ice-petal, face tranquil and pale and smiling distantly.
As chill as his fingers, as light as his touch, the frost flower can’t bear it, and the ribbon of hoar collapse beneath the contact.
If he could pick one of these for Harley, he would. But he cannot; all he can do is admire for a moment, then rise again to depart.
They are a phenomenon so violent, and so exquisitely delicate. The cold is not merely a blunt instrument of destruction; it is also a scalpel. There is so much here, and much to come; an entire world of horror and despair and desperate beauty.
The "petals" are thin and glittery in the low light. Here they are knotted in fanciful curls and spirals like a woman’s hair; there they ripple like the edge of a dancer’s skirt; on some of the branches above they dwindle into filament-like strands and look almost as if they’d be soft to the touch.
These only show forth at the start of the cold season, he knows, when the temperature of the ground is still above freezing and the remnants of dead plants have enough sap within to still be shocked by the vicious air. The water within chills and expands, splits the stems from whence it came. Hitting the air, it then freezes white, but behind it still more liquid leaks, freezing and folding and twisting.
These won’t last long. The sun is scarce, but one peep from behind a cloud and it will destroy the little baubles; they will sublimate into nothing.
He likes them. He, too, knows ice in his veins that cannot be contained, that springs forth whether he will or not, forming fissures, peeling back layers of illusion. Broken open, he crouches by the trees and strokes the edge of a translucent ice-petal, face tranquil and pale and smiling distantly.
As chill as his fingers, as light as his touch, the frost flower can’t bear it, and the ribbon of hoar collapse beneath the contact.
If he could pick one of these for Harley, he would. But he cannot; all he can do is admire for a moment, then rise again to depart.
They are a phenomenon so violent, and so exquisitely delicate. The cold is not merely a blunt instrument of destruction; it is also a scalpel. There is so much here, and much to come; an entire world of horror and despair and desperate beauty.