when the short day is brightest, with frost and fire

Ragnarok is the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. A death in exchange for a renewal. Is it for me? Can I, too, be renewed, made again?

No more resurrections, Thanos said as my corpse hit the floor. No, but you were quite right, Titan. To rise again would be to take this old husk of mine and pull it back to its feet; clean it off, comb the grave-dust from its hair and set it in motion. Why should I step from the tomb if I can be obliterated, rendered to particles and reborn in fire and ice?

Perhaps I always knew it, this thing that Thanos does not realize. He would destroy the half to preserve the whole. Madness to think that could succeed, but even if it did, it’s wrong. It must be all or nothing. We all go down in the fire at the end of time, and when the last of the ashes are swept away, we are born anew.

You will never be a god. Because you do not truly understand sacrifice.

Maybe I am a fool to try to save the last of my people, as well. To hope my brother’s life may be spared. A purer kind of foolishness than my usual, though, and I will excuse it on my own behalf.

(I am the Trickster, and I transgress; no one forgives my trespasses save myself.)

My twin had the right of it: to face the fire and let it consume.

And Reynard…

"Do you know what Autumn's job is?" He said.

"She takes the things joyfully made in Spring, and passionately lived in Summer, and kills them. She places their remains where they need to be so that something can grow again next Spring. She leaves Winter a blank slate. A silent moment to meet your ghosts and prepare for a rebirth.

This is a place filled with silence now.”

The turn of seasons mirrors the cycle of the cosmos.

(Yggdrasil, the well of fate, the dragon that gnaws at the roots, the squirrel that traverses the branches to bring word from the eagle, life and death and life and death. And the Runes, which hold in slim, straight strokes the knowledge of the infinite.)

I am a serpent; I have shed my skin many times. From the coddled boy to the young mage, the young mage to the fallen prince, the Jotun exile to a broken blade passed between too many hands, and again to the throne of my false father. From a sweet plaything for a being of near-infinite age; I shed that skin for something resembling my childhood, at the side of my brother and my people.

These skins, these Lokis, lie dead in my wake, and none but me will mourn them. I scream into the storm-wind and let it carry my cries away.

I am not done, because I have another skin to be shed.

I could be a being of vengeance. Could cling to my rage and dog Thanos to the ends of the universe. I can. Perhaps I still will. But first, there is this: I am more important, and I will always outlast him.

I am a branch with leaves fallen to dust in the first frost. Something within me chills and swells and expands, breaking through skin and flesh and bone, bringing forth petals of suffering and death and delicate beauty. I let it. I lie in space, cradled in the wind as Odin once hung from the branch of a tree. I am stabbed, pierced from within, not without, and what streams forth, freezes and curls around me is ice and fire, sap and milk, bright and dark, bitter and sweet, in the coldest time of year.

In this moment, I know I am everything, but not all at once, and not without the interruption of death and renewal. I am a story with chapters. A poem. A song.

The wind releases me and I fall through the dark, a sacrifice of myself to myself, for myself. When I hit the ground, I shatter into a million fragments of ice.

In the nothingness, there is peace.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I will arise in a skin that shines anew.