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Tony always wants me to tell him more stories. I do, sometimes, in the warmth of the communal lounge at the centre at midnight, or in the car or jet on long journeys to and from conferences or galas. He likes the ones where Captain America if flawed, imperfect, human like all of us. I understand why: even now, after saving so many people and spending so much to help repair damage, he feel that he can never be good enough. Being able to see Steve’s weaknesses is comforting, showing that you don’t need to be perfect to still be an essentially good man.But I tell him other tales too: Achilles, Helen, Archimedes, Daedalus. Men and women who are famous because of their mistakes. He likes those ones, of pride and hubris and haughty grandeur – he says he can see himself in their flaws and that he’s glad he’s managed to fix a lot of them. Pepper always smiles and murmurs that she’s glad. I thought that she’d ask for stories too, but she hardly ever does except to announce that “We’re having an optimistic one tonight.” or that they need to be “Child-friendly please.” Most often I tell them in fittingly similar situations: Achilles was told as we besieged a rebel base in the East, Helen at a highbrow gala in New York, Daedalus and the inventors’ tales on clean-up ops in the labs or after a fight.Clint like to hear of my travel with Thor, Loki, others. I tell him of a warrior pair- Wolf and Dragon, a shape-shifter and a human wizard- who could turn the tide of any battle and infiltrate the strictest courts. He likes those because they are spies’ tales of intrigue and political upheaval. Wolf and dragon would like you, I say, and they’d love your family too. He frowned at me and told me he can hear how sad I get when I talk about them. Smiling sadly I assure him that it’s nostalgia because it’s been so long since I last laid my eyes on them, two young men who live on forever in the songs of every world they’ve encountered.When the days have been too hard, and I’m sad or stressed or grieving again over those I used to know I tell stories about children I’ve raised, fostered, trained. I tell of young Tom, who fell in love with a time traveller and eloped and joined the Howling Commandos; of a young man so angry and terrified and limitless that I took him to Asgard, Olympus, the Nova Corps, and trained him to be a diplomat. One wintery October night Steve very quietly asked about Tom, his wife, and whether the child turned out to be a girl. Looking him in the eye and telling him we never found out because Hydra got to her first is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Telling their story brought all the heartbreak back and left all of us weary and grieving. Sam- and Pepper even- prefer happy stories of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen and the funniest anecdotes of Thor’s childhood and pre-serum-Steve’s many misadventures. So I tell of feasts disturbed by two unruly boys- one gold, one dark- being scolded by Frigga because princes such as they should be setting the example and hence should not be upsetting maids by stealing bread in the palace kitchens. They always shake their heads, commenting on how far Thor’s come. I tell them of how the relationship between Steve and Tom developed, of how Steve’s reaction to Hermione’s pregnancy was “I’m not ready to be a grandfather!” and how he then needed a whole bottle of whiskey and a lie down when they announced their engagement. Steve himself tells how proud he was to walk her down the aisle of a tiny church in the north of France.Today is a hot July day: the fifth, when we all hide our hangovers in coffee and black tea. What should I tell this morning?Something happy.
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"How is he a ghost story if he makes this much mess? Really, I want to know.""You really want this discussion now? I'm pretty sure you haven't slept in at least two days. Okay. Fine: it was Hydra.""That's not a good answer--that's a SHIELD answer.""Is it? Hydra created the perfect soldier, an assassin with very little independence who could be targeted and was guaranteed to get the job done. When the Winter Soldier intends to be stealthy you bet your ass - oh god I've hung around you too long, I'm using Americanisms- you won't find him. But, beneath all the programming, he's still James Buchanan Barnes. He hated Hydra. He was set to kill Fury. Fury is SHEILD, SHEILD is Peggy, Peggy means Steve and Steve means brother. Brother, that means home, and love, and maybe it doesn't mean safety but family is forever once you've chosen it. Bucky believed this, and he was the loyalest man I knew back in-""You are not that old. Don't be ridiculous.""You've fought aliens. Why does any of this stuff still surprise you? Surely you've seen Science! stuff weirder than this. Yeah. Anyways, Bucky didn't want anything to do with Hydra at all back in the war, unless he was putting bullets in heads. Of course he revolted.Hydra had a task force dedicated to tidying up after Winter: collect discarded guns, clean up blood, remove all evidence, wipe cameras, remove dangerous witnesses. They're some of Hydra's most brutal operatives.""They're still around? Huh. Sounds like a huge job. But what about when he went after Fury, huh? That was messy, what happened there? Huh?""Will you please stop interrupting me? Really, please. Thank you. Now then, Buck wanted Hydra to fall. If he makes a public mess over failing to efficiently destroy their main enemy, well. They'd be slowed down significantly in the clean-up, and the SHEILD intelligence people would have more of a chance.But Hydra still managed to hide it. Think about it: they managed to erase most of a very messy public incident. That's why they're so dangerous, so frightening. It's not the fact that they had a Winter Soldier but the fact that they hid him and everything they ever did from a world of cameras and eyes and publicity. They shrouded themselves in shadows.""Yeah, but they're pretty much ended and done now, right? Nat and Fury managed to put them in the light. Played havoc with the servers...""Did they?
Don't give me that look, you know what I'm asking. Are Hydra really in the light now?"
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Recently Peter has been curious about Norse mythology. How much of it is true? Well, I say, truth is about perspective. Truth is that what you believe to be true, the facts that you have. Fact, I tell him, is not going to fit everyone's truth. I take pity on him though, as always, and decide to tell him a story before he goes to bed.
One day in midwinter, a very long time ago, my brother asked me who I knew out of the other pantheons. "Nobody," I responded, "except Bor who died long ago." Humming in agreement, my brother swallowed the last pomegranate seeds and announced, "I had a guest last week." I was, frankly, stunned. Who comes to the underworld? More to the point, who gets to leave again? This could be very interesting to hear. "Oh? I'm shocked, brother. Well? Who was it? Were they here for a quest? Under orders?What-"
"Hush, sister, be calm. It was the young Norse trickster god. Loki Odinson, whose birth I believe you informed me of. His mother used to be a friend of yours, did she not? She sends her love." Speechless, I stare at my mirthful sibling in awe. I hadn't realised she still lived..."Loki is Micheif, Lies,Trickery, so on and so forth, and he told me that he discovered one of our entrances quite by accident. He transformed into a blackbird and flew down here, tricking his way past Cerberus and Charon to land on the sill of the judging hall. He told me that he watched for quite some time, and had come to see that for all I am a fair and just ruler, I was lonely. So what does our intrepid young acquaintance do? He flew down, turned back to his Aesir form, and introduced himself." Hades- or Aidoneus, as he was still occasionally known by his birth name- leant back in his throne-like seat at the head of the long table. His pale angular face was softened by the uncommonly good humour he was in. Seeing this, I decided I would welcome this godling to our court even if I disliked him. Anyone who could make by brother forget the weight he carried as Lord of the Underworld and God of the Dead was a welcome addition to our tiny circle of friends. His shockingly blue eyes, bluer than any other Olympian's, glittered in the dull light. I smiled."Then he is welcome here, love, for he makes you happy. When will he return?"My brother looks thoughtful. Perhaps he hadn't truly believed I'd react positively-our youth left us wary of those we don't know. "I think, love, we will invite him for Persephone's returning feast. That will give us time to ensure we can host properly, and allow the two of us time to hear my wife's tales." Nodding sharply, he tells me that that is what we'll do, and rises to return to the judging hall when a bell tolls hauntingly throughout the marble halls. Seph said that we really go in for the 'welcome to the land of the dead' aesthetic down here, and that "Couldn't you have gone against all of the traditional stereotypes about death? Seriously, stop laughing. I'm not joking. Why are you laughing so hard? Pull yourself together!" She rolled her eyes when I managed to calm down enough to tell her that the stereotypes come from us, we outdate them, and we really don't want to redecorate.So the last few lonely winter week pass quicker this year, because we're planning a guest and it makes the loneliness of the cool dark underworld retreat for my brother just a little. So Loki comes for the feast, and I am beyond surprised when I see him. He's barely more than a child, just a pale teenager with hair the same impossibly dark hair as Nyx and emerald eyes and seidr, magic, whirling all over him.He doesn't look like Frigga, until he moves and weaves a purple flower out of shimmering green seidr and present it to Seph.
He stays for a month and returns every year without fail- for a month, a day, sometimes only for the feast. Loki becomes as much my brother as Aidon, and we promised him he would always have a place with us when he needed a change of scenery or to be away from his family. "I think that's it for tonight. Pete's yawning." Tony stops Peter's growing protests with a look. He pretends he doesn't go all Dad-mode on Peter as much as he pretends Steve doesn't go Dad-mode on him. I smile, and say goodnight to Peter as he gets up to follow Tony out. There'll be another story for him tomorrow if he wants it.
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Thor is usually quiet. He likes to just listen to the stories that he’s already heard from me or Loki, to laugh in the right places, wistful, nostalgic. But he’s been too quiet in the last few weeks and it’s not hard to see the ever-growing concern in the team’s faces, so it falls to me as my unofficial job to cheer him up. I am the ultimate mum friend, I am fond of saying. A story, one that he knows and will cheer him up.I am not a true wordsmith.Thor has not been well recently. This worries me because it’s many years since he last fell ill. He says that Loki is dead; there can be no doubt that has something to do with it. Tonight we are sat eating together in the communal kitchen waiting for the others to get back from whatever base they’re destroying today. That Thor sat this out is what truly worries me.“Tell a story, please?”I look up sharply to meet his eyes. For lack of a better word, he appears haunted in the fading summer twilight, as if the ghosts of his heart’s past lurk in the corners or stroke clammy intangible fingers over his broad powerful shoulders to flick his biceps and unbalance the weight of the people he carries upon them. Perhaps he needs distraction; perhaps he needs to be allowed to speak; perhaps, perhaps, perhaps will get us nowhere. I speak gently to avoid breaking the peaceful soothing quiet filling the kitchen. “What would you like to hear?”Thor frowns, considering, and after a few aborted efforts manages, “Loki.”Well. What shall I tell? Yesterday I told Peter about the circumstances surrounding my meeting Loki – I make a mental note to tell him about the meeting itself at some point- so carrying on from there seems to be reasonable. An occasion as bitter as it is sweet to remember comes to mind: Loki’s engagement to Sigyn.“Did I tell you about when Loki was first engaged? You were away I believe. Yes, I remember. As you say, it was a long time ago. I actually remember Loki turning up in our halls one winter morning looking ill and nervous an even paler than usual – yes! I mean it, Thor, he looked like one of the dead, stop laughing – looking lost. Well, we couldn’t just send him away. We invited him in, requested some Upperworld food...sat down to eat. The poor lad just paced up and down, the length of our table, his skin eerie pale in the marble-reflected torchlight and dull grey. He paced so long that Persephone retreated to her rooms with an amused smile and my brother had some work brought through. It was rather amusing...of a sudden he whipped around, threw himself into a chair, and announced, “Her name is Sigyn and I’m in love and I want her to marry me!”Dramatics, dear boy, runs in your family. Regardless, we were all chuffed to bits. His eyes ere a brighter green than I’d ever seen before, brighter than the noon sun through leaves, brighter than my brother’s emeralds, brighter even than little Hela’s....he was so happy, Thor.Loki told us of Sigyn of Vanaheim, a woman with no particular height or figure, but with hair like copper and freckles on cream skin and eyes the same dark green as oak leaves blazing with joy and life. I....Norns, Thor, she must have made such a first impression! He’d only known her a year, you know, just twelve moons, and he would have gone into Tartarus if she’d wished it. He spent hours telling us of her merits, her terrible habit of snapping her hair, the way she shrieked when something made her jump. By the end of the day I felt I knew her as well as he did. Obviously, we needed to celebrate, so we told him to bring her to us when he was ready, and we’d throw him a feast like we hadn’t since Persephone’s marriage to Hades - and being honest, I admit I don’t remember most of the week after the wedding. But when I think of Sigyn as I first saw her, I see Pepper, Boudicca, mighty women who fought for all that they loved and believed in. Such fire should not go unnoticed, should it? Valkyries, Thor, can be found in many places.”Thor is softened, eyes fond as he remember his brother and blood-sister. We are happy, and we are content in each other’s company. It is good.
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They are the Apostate Kings. They believe in no god but themselves, and spread no truth but that of the end of life. Their words are those of greed, avarice, jealousy and selfishness. I have no personal recollections to share with you, but I can recount what I have heard and read. What can one say about the Kings that I haven’t already? Their footprints in history swagger over the ashes of the cities they burned in their hunt for more, more, always more. You, Tony, are remembered as much as they are in the worlds below this one. You are the Merchant of Death, a dealer of soul-killing machines. There is a particular scent to a soul destroyed by a machine: like old oil, or cold rusted metal, like engine sheds. Hand-killed souls smell like old garages, mostly. Natural deaths have natural smells, growing grass, new hay, verdant things from the surface world. The Apostate Kings reeked of soot, decay, something not-quite-there that felt a lot like death. There were three of them – three, like the Fates, the Norns, Erinyes, like the splitting of the world, like the brothers who rule Olympus – and they only cared for the material. Their downfall came when the material protested.Today is St George’s Day, and I know little except the old tale of Saint George and the Dragon. He isn’t what I want to talk about: it’s the dragon who played the key role in the downfall of the Apostate Kings.Now dragons smell of fire and earth when they die, like forest fires. Alive they leave the taste of soot and ash in the air, much as the Kings did. That is why the Kings claimed descendence from the fabled dragon-men who could shift form, and why in the end a dragon hauled them to their deaths. No man is permitted to masquerade as one of the dragon-men and live. The Kings cared not for laws of men or dragon, striding over the weak prince-states of the day like the Titans of old, haughty and pompous, mimicking invulnerability.This was their first unforgivable (there are three).The second was the Seige of Gomareh. Gomareh was a mighty citadel by virtue of science and the enormous library, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Library – the Alexandrian, the definitive article – was torched by Roman soldiers. The site of Gomareh is lost, as so many ancient things are, buried deep in desert sands. Gomareh had for centuries, a millennium even, been recognised as dragon-hoard, that is, property of the last dragon. The last dragon protected Gomareh from many invaders, magicks, tumultuous events of the Earth itself. It was heralded as unkillable, unperishable. But the truth? The truth is that dragons burn when exposed to a hotter dragonflame. These Apostate Kings has over their reign conquered the city that was said to hold the secret of manufactured dragonflame – Greek Fire, as has never been recreated since then, a secret buried with the ashes of the Kings’ passing. This fire was said to glow poison-green when in contact with rock, deep moss when on wood, and said to scream like the souls of the damned when it hit dragonskin. Damned souls don’t have a sound. That sort of screaming is silent. The screaming of fire on dragonskin is the scream of a dying dragon itself, wrenched out of its wretched soul in the utmost agony. Not even Woe wails in such a manner. The Kings had bottles of Greek Fire, clear glass to show the eery blue-green of liquid fire blazing like contained suns against black leather, glinting off silver crowns.Gomareh nestled in the dunes five days from the nearest water, a city of Ash-stained sandstone looming protectively over its thousands of inhabitants. The Kings were seen approaching under a serpentine spire of black smoke, green lightning bolts searing the sand underfoot, five days away. They arrived in two. The seige lasted a month and killed half of the city (this is the second unforgiveable).When the city gave in, starved, emaciated, a stronghold only for the archives nobody was left to read, they torched it. Greek Fire painted the landscape for hundreds of miles in greens and blues and screaming for weeks. The great city of Gomareh razed to the sand it came from. Nothing was left, nothing but devastation, the footprint of the Kings.Then they went for the dragon lurking beneath the archives. The heat of it warmed the springs of the market, kept the frosts off the scrolls, kept the children happy and healthy. Dragonbreath is a great healer.The Kings hesitated only as long as it took them to open the bottles of blue-green death criss-crossed on their chests to attack. The dragon screamed and screamed and screamed, echoing through the rock itself. The sky wept, the sea roared, Hades itself humming in fury as the scent of woodsmoke filled what remained of the once-mighty city. The Kings damned themselves truly to an eternity that day.Dragons are not meant to be slaughtered by men.(this was their last unforgiveable)As the dragon died it burned, hotter than any manufactured flame, vaporising the armies of the Kings and all that lay above in the desert sands. The Kings it caught in its teeth, a dying revenge, dragging them to hell with it.They were the Apostate Kings. They believed in no god but themselves, and spread no truth but that of the end of life. Look upon them, and see that when your end draws near you don’t leave behind metal and blood and soot.
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There are days in every life where a moment is taken by some kind of world-changing realisation, such as that of a child growing taller than his father or a mother seeing her son wield a training sword for the first time, or a god seeing the world of the humans, or a Titan hearing the triumph of a mortal. For some these days are labelled and remembered and recounted for generations, yet even more of these days are lost to the dust left by Time.But on some days, oh so rarely, even the Fates encounter a snag in the life-threads.“Ah, Lady of the Flame. I feel today calls for a story.” Young Peter popped his head up above Thor’s, grinning beseechingly with his best puppy eyes. Thor lumbered into his usual chair, shaking like a dog to send Peter flipping across the room in a burst of impossible teenage energy – I enjoy seeing him, a reminder of youth and all its emotion and glee. Faced with two expectant gazes, the story had to begin. What to talk about? Young Peter, he last heard of Loki, no? Well....“Young Peter, would you like a tale of Loki and Sigyn?”He springs onto the ceiling, crawling over to drop at my feet. His smile, so kind still, eases what little reluctance I still bear towards the telling.“I was reflecting, a moment ago, on the snags in the threads of life. I shall tell you of the greatest snag the Norns have ever met: the day Loki Silvertongue, Worldwalker, tore the curse from his own heart and passed it to another.Asgard is a world and a city. It is lofty and haughty and everything the word glamour means: a spell, a mirage, gold and glory and valour a mere sheen on the poverty and pain and corruption within. There are five parts to the curse laid upon Loki. I shall tell you these, and then I shall tell how Loki and his wife worked together to break it.The first part to any curse is intent. Intention is the thing that hauls down Kings and builds up the roots of legends; intention is the root of all magic. A mage who is truly in touch with his inner magic can create spells without needing words, and allows his spell to be formed by intent – and that is what makes Silvertongue so dangerous, so powerful. His power over his words permitted the most impossible feats of language, articulation, elocution. His power over his seidr allowed illusion, allowed healing, allowed him even that most impossible feat of world-walking, slipping between the frail curtains of the realms and along the wisps of borealis which danced in the brisk dark skies under bright stars, a waltz with reality itself, the flight of a bird between leaves. Intention, my dears, is what the Norns had.The Norns wove Loki’s thread from gold, ruby, that impossibly strong life-force which builds a being who will be a god. They intended, and allowed intent to leach into the threads like bloodstains. Strength, cunning, seidr and seidr and seidr, and then – the snag.Ragnarok, foretold for many generations. The end of days. The earth snake would kill the Golden Prince Thor, swallow the sun, destroy the stars. Catastrophe. The end of all things. It could not be permitted, and so they knotted snags into the thread, to disrupt, to separate this magic child from his children and lock him into the bare bones of his magic – still too much, always too much seidr for one being.The knots took form, and the life-thread grew ridged and damaged, ash-dark with golden god-strength glinting like promise within.Intent.The Norns intended Loki to suffer so he never started Ragnarok. What they did not see, what no-one could see, was that it was not Loki who could cause the end of days: it was his children, in violent retribution for the suffering paid to them. The second part of a curse is circumstance. To make a curse stick, the recipient must be unprepared and unprotected as Loki was, a magical being. On this occasion, circumstance was on the side of the Norns. Odin Borsson stole the magic-prince from the temple of the mages on Jotunnheim, preventing his birth-magic from seeding inside his heart. The fire that would one day scorch civilisations into dust and planets into oblivion was buried deep in his seidr, only to reawaken when the fires of Helheim chewed him up and spat him out. Circumstance stiffened the snag in Loki’s life-thread with permafrost and hard blue ice-runes. Third, is whether or not the recipient knows the curse is cast upon him. Loki, the babe, new nothing intellectually of magic. He could shift his form, and when Odin-King took him he blended his skin onto pale and red-haired. The curse did not leave, wrapping itself into his innate seidr abilities like dye through felt, but Loki could do nothing about that. He grew older and oldsd feeling magic buzz on his skin in his ears, tracing arcs across his vision, never suspecting that a curse lay among his bones and blood. Who can understand a mind like his, someone who knew exactly how a heart beat, how magic travelled, who was immersed in pure seidr from birth?His destined, intended, his Sigyn. Sigyn was the goddess of bonds, fidelity, of the promises and bindings which tied threads together, better or worse. One could call upon her to see a binding, to bless it so that the threads ran smooth through the Norns’ spindles. The bond-goddess first met Loki when they were five hundred, which in human terms is perhaps eleven. Half-grown, but very aware of what she could do, Sigyn wasn’t the most talented of seidr-seers to practice under Frigga the All-Mother, but she possessed certain abilities nobody else did. Reading the life-threads is a taboo. Sigyn was not the sort to allow society to repress her ability, and so Frigga gave her the same lessons she gave her son.They were sixteen – around 1000 – when Sigyn detangled enough of Loki’s threads to sense the snags, the binding, and the rotten curse seeping into Loki’s every cell like mould through dead wood or water through sponge.