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Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier

2025-05-24T23:13:28Z

MysteryCat: adding debt details

''Back to the main [[Urban_Shadows_Ashes_of_The_Archmage|Ashes of the Archmage]]'' page

'''Ashja, AKA The Grand Vizier'''

[[File:Ashja2.jpg]]

'''Look:''' North African, Male, Expensive Clothing

'''Demeanour:''' Seductive

'''Background:'''

''Part 1: Straight Outta Faerie''

The spirits of the Erg Chech are of fire and air, in two forever warring courts. Amon, King of Winds, leads one - and it's there that Ashja's story begins.

Yes, the jnun are long-lived creatures; yes, Ashja was among those who served at Solomon’s beck and call; but for much of his existence he was little more than one among a hundred winds.

Time passed, and Ashja rose to favour in the Court of Winds as a talented musician and fervent participant in the Lila, night-long festivals of music and dance that were dedicated to prayer and healing. As Ashja led the musicians, so did Rayah - daughter of Amon – lead the dancers.

Time passed… and centuries after the death of Solomon freed the Jnun from their servitude, an alien sort of music caught Ashja’s attention as he drifted across the dunes of the Erg Chech; alien, yet strangely familiar.

Fascinated by the rhythm, he followed its back across the rolling sand to its source: a group of teenagers on the edge of the desert, gathered around a car to listen to a scuzzy, low-fi recording of the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet on the dashboard tape deck.

Ashja was enraptured by the energy of the music, feeling something like revelation as it flowed through him. As the years passed, he snuck away from court again and again, riding the wind across the sands to the settlements of humans, to listen fascinated to their music.

But like a serpent, it never stayed still. Rock and roll was becoming this bloated, ornamental horror, and he felt the music’s hold on him – and his on it – slipping away. Then the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant came on the radio - whose radio? Just some unassuming human, out in the world. But it was everything he needed.

Ashja returned to the Court of Winds a whirlwind; snatching up a sintir from the old Maalem who led the Lila, the devotions to Amon, and leading the band into three minutes of such raw, snarling energy that all but Amon himself were compelled to rise and dance.

When Amon did rise, it was to tear the instrument from Ashja’s hands in a climactic squeal of discord – and to banish him from the Court forever.

'''Stats:'''
(Added 1 to Mind)
Blood -1 Heart 1 Mind 1 Spirit 1

'''Factions:'''
(Added 1 to Mortalis)
Mortality 1 Night -1 Power 1 Wild 1

'''Circle status'''
Mortalis 0 Night 0 Power 0 Wild 1

'''Questions'''
''Who are you?''
I’m the Grand Vizier, my friend – master of the decks, turntable magician. No? You’re not that into music? Ah, well. My name is Ashja, then.

''How long have you been in the city?''
Since punk was still a thing; real punk, full of anarchy and rage, kicking against the pricks. That was true street music – I remember stepping off the train at Kings Cross and feeling its pulse through the soles of my shoes. That's when I knew I was in the right place.

''What do you love most about humanity?''
Aside from their bottomless capacity for self-deception? The music, of course – it’s the distillation of all a person’s dreams and fears, poured out on the floor in public. It can be so pathetic you want to weep, or the most beautiful lies imaginable. Sometimes both.

''Who is your closest confidante in the city?''
Miss Susannah – I won’t give you her full name, for fear of embarrassing her. She was a wild one, when I first met her – so angry at everything, at the world. So determined to make a difference! And her lyrics… ah.
Shall I tell you a secret? I started Communion Records for her. I wanted to share what I heard, what I felt. What she felt. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and of course nothing came of it. She’s married now, children. A good job, in the real world. But still angry inside, I think.

''What do you desperately need?''
Why? Are you offering me something? Are they old school, funk, psychedelic? The old beats just aren’t doing it for me anymore - I need something fresh, something different. Tell me what you’ve heard.

'''Gear'''
''A Victorian end-of-terrace house in Forest Gate, overlooking Wanstead Flats.'' The neighbourhood was sketchy as hell when he bought the place, but the people who lived there came from all over. These days it seems West Ham and Forest Gate and a few other local neighbourhoods are the next up and coming thing, and the rich white families are starting to move in. Prices are on the up, services are improving, crime's falling… but as the minorities move out, they're taking their music with them.

''A lease car'' – shiny and expensive-looking, with very good theft cover. A car is a car, so the make and model varies… but it’s important to look the part.

''A smart phone'' – something up-to-the-minute, with decent built-in speakers.

''A relic from your homelands.'' A sintir (three-stringed lute) Ashja played as part of the Gnawa band in the Court of Amon. In his day he and the band could stir the Court into a frenzy of emotion when they played, or drive out evil, poison or madness. Now he mostly uses it when meditating, or when remembering better times.

''A symbol of your court.'' Amon’s court is that of the Wind, and a carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King’s own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father – hangs limp in Ashja’s kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

'''Debts'''
Tasked to enact a complex ritual on Convoy's Wharf in Deptford, the purpose of which was unclear to Ashja but he recognised the stink of sympathetic magic when he put it to work. The target, he suspected, was either Rupert Murdoch's News Corp or someone in that organisation, judging from the shipping container full of soiled newsprint from decades of The Sun and The Times which turned up at the wharf in the dead of night.

The purpose of the ritual may have been to infuse every word ever printed by these newspapers with a metaphysical taint, subtly influencing the collective unconscious of Britain itself? As for why the Order wanted it disrupted, perhaps if it had been successful the ritual would've screwed with the Orders own hidden methods of controlling information. Can't have that now can they? So they sent ''Algy'' in!

All sympathetic magic often relies on laying power along a leyline—a supernatural current that fuels the spell. Algy's sword, being steeped in kingship and rightful dominion, could have cut through the leyline itself, severing the ritual from its power source. By driving the sword into the ground at the right spot, he could have forced the magical energy to dissipate, like unplugging a power cord at the source.

'''Moves'''
''Faerie Magic:''
Whenever you use a faerie power, choose 1:
* Mark corruption
* Give your monarch a Debt
* Suffer 1-harm (ap)

''Faerie powers''
Nature’s Caress: Your touch heals 2-harm, starting with critical harm. You cannot use this power on yourself.
Glamours: You create illusions to fool the senses. The effects don't last long, but they are compelling. You cannot disguise or conceal yourself or your actions.
Bedlam: Touch a vulnerable target to place them in a specific emotional state (your choice) for the scene. Mark corruption to have that emotion directed toward a target of your choosing.

''Words Are Wind:''
You know instantly if someone has broken their word to you or reneged on a deal you’ve made; take a Debt on them and +1 ongoing to claim what you deserve from them or their allies until they’ve made things right.

''Scales of Justice:''
Cash in a Debt with someone to target them using a power from Faerie Magic—including powers not normally available to you—at no additional cost.

''Corruption Move''
When you break a promise or tell an outright lie, mark corruption.

''Intimacy Move''
When you share a moment of intimacy —physical or emotional— with another person, demand a promise from them. If they refuse you or break the promise, they owe you 2 Debts.

''End Move''
When you die or retire your character, choose a character and bestow the favour of your court upon them. They can choose either to take faerie magic and two of your faerie powers or to advance persuade an NPC.

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-05-24T22:25:31Z

MysteryCat:

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Hub moves==

===It's My Shout===
When you go out drinking in the hopes of meeting with someone in the know, roll with Heart. On a hit, you meet just the person—someone
connected to an NPC of your choice; the MC will tell you who they are. On a 10+, you get along famously; you can count them among your friends and they (drunkenly) agree to one favour you ask. On a 7-9, they are a bit more cautious, only scratching your back if you scratch theirs; take a +1 ongoing to persuade them to help you out if you agree to a small favour before you roll. On a miss, you overindulge in whatever vice plagues you most; the MC will tell you how your foolish needs get you in over your head.

===A Well Placed Word===
When you blackmail a powerful NPC with proof of their dirty deeds, roll with your Status in their Circle. On a hit, hold 2. On a 10+ hold 3. Spend your hold—1 for 1—as if spending a Debt (asking for a moderate favour, adding +3 to your roll when persuading them, etc.) when interacting with your target. Once you've used the last of your hold, take -1 ongoing to moves targeting them until time passes. On a miss, they call your bluff and make you, or your source, pay.

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

===Nyxis===
Nyxis of the Unkind Echo. Nyxis of the Silvered Vow. Nyxis of the Last Lullaby.
A member of the Court of Moonlight, imprisoned in the manager's office of the Blackbird by Dante Slade; freed by Ashja.
''She owes him a Debt.''

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Ashja,_the_Grand_Vizier|Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_JJ|JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Algy|Algy]]
|The Sworn
| 1
| 0
| 2
| -1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Robin Bellamy|Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Kayin|Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-05-24T22:24:21Z

MysteryCat: /* The Court of Moonlight */ added Nyxis

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Hub moves==

===It's My Shout===
When you go out drinking in the hopes of meeting with someone in the know, roll with Heart. On a hit, you meet just the person—someone
connected to an NPC of your choice; the MC will tell you who they are. On a 10+, you get along famously; you can count them among your friends and they (drunkenly) agree to one favour you ask. On a 7-9, they are a bit more cautious, only scratching your back if you scratch theirs; take a +1 ongoing to persuade them to help you out if you agree to a small favour before you roll. On a miss, you overindulge in whatever vice plagues you most; the MC will tell you how your foolish needs get you in over your head.

===A Well Placed Word===
When you blackmail a powerful NPC with proof of their dirty deeds, roll with your Status in their Circle. On a hit, hold 2. On a 10+ hold 3. Spend your hold—1 for 1—as if spending a Debt (asking for a moderate favour, adding +3 to your roll when persuading them, etc.) when interacting with your target. Once you've used the last of your hold, take -1 ongoing to moves targeting them until time passes. On a miss, they call your bluff and make you, or your source, pay.

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

====Nyxis====
Nyxis of the Unkind Echo. Nyxis of the Silvered Vow. Nyxis of the Last Lullaby. A member of the Court of Moonlight, imprisoned in the manager's office of the Blackbird by Dante Slade; freed by Ashja.
''She owes him a Debt.''

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Ashja,_the_Grand_Vizier|Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_JJ|JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Algy|Algy]]
|The Sworn
| 1
| 0
| 2
| -1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Robin Bellamy|Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Kayin|Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-05-05T09:10:07Z

MysteryCat: /* The City */ added hub moves

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Hub moves==

===It's My Shout===
When you go out drinking in the hopes of meeting with someone in the know, roll with Heart. On a hit, you meet just the person—someone
connected to an NPC of your choice; the MC will tell you who they are. On a 10+, you get along famously; you can count them among your friends and they (drunkenly) agree to one favour you ask. On a 7-9, they are a bit more cautious, only scratching your back if you scratch theirs; take a +1 ongoing to persuade them to help you out if you agree to a small favour before you roll. On a miss, you overindulge in whatever vice plagues you most; the MC will tell you how your foolish needs get you in over your head.

===A Well Placed Word===
When you blackmail a powerful NPC with proof of their dirty deeds, roll with your Status in their Circle. On a hit, hold 2. On a 10+ hold 3. Spend your hold—1 for 1—as if spending a Debt (asking for a moderate favour, adding +3 to your roll when persuading them, etc.) when interacting with your target. Once you've used the last of your hold, take -1 ongoing to moves targeting them until time passes. On a miss, they call your bluff and make you, or your source, pay.

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Ashja,_the_Grand_Vizier|Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_JJ|JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Algy|Algy]]
|The Sworn
| 1
| 0
| 2
| -1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Robin Bellamy|Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Kayin|Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-28T08:41:42Z

MysteryCat: /* Stats */ Adding Ashja's corruption

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Ashja,_the_Grand_Vizier|Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 1
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_JJ|JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Algy|Algy]]
|The Sworn
| 1
| 0
| 2
| -1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Robin Bellamy|Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Kayin|Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:54:28Z

MysteryCat: /* Stats */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Ashja,_the_Grand_Vizier|Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_JJ|JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Algy|Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Robin Bellamy|Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Ashes_of_the_Archmage_-_Kayin|Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier

2025-04-23T19:52:41Z

MysteryCat:

''Back to the main [[Urban_Shadows_Ashes_of_The_Archmage|Ashes of the Archmage]]'' page

'''Ashja, AKA The Grand Vizier'''

[[File:Ashja2.jpg]]

'''Look:''' North African, Male, Expensive Clothing

'''Demeanour:''' Seductive

'''Background:'''

''Part 1: Straight Outta Faerie''

The spirits of the Erg Chech are of fire and air, in two forever warring courts. Amon, King of Winds, leads one - and it's there that Ashja's story begins.

Yes, the jnun are long-lived creatures; yes, Ashja was among those who served at Solomon’s beck and call; but for much of his existence he was little more than one among a hundred winds.

Time passed, and Ashja rose to favour in the Court of Winds as a talented musician and fervent participant in the Lila, night-long festivals of music and dance that were dedicated to prayer and healing. As Ashja led the musicians, so did Rayah - daughter of Amon – lead the dancers.

Time passed… and centuries after the death of Solomon freed the Jnun from their servitude, an alien sort of music caught Ashja’s attention as he drifted across the dunes of the Erg Chech; alien, yet strangely familiar.

Fascinated by the rhythm, he followed its back across the rolling sand to its source: a group of teenagers on the edge of the desert, gathered around a car to listen to a scuzzy, low-fi recording of the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet on the dashboard tape deck.

Ashja was enraptured by the energy of the music, feeling something like revelation as it flowed through him. As the years passed, he snuck away from court again and again, riding the wind across the sands to the settlements of humans, to listen fascinated to their music.

But like a serpent, it never stayed still. Rock and roll was becoming this bloated, ornamental horror, and he felt the music’s hold on him – and his on it – slipping away. Then the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant came on the radio - whose radio? Just some unassuming human, out in the world. But it was everything he needed.

Ashja returned to the Court of Winds a whirlwind; snatching up a sintir from the old Maalem who led the Lila, the devotions to Amon, and leading the band into three minutes of such raw, snarling energy that all but Amon himself were compelled to rise and dance.

When Amon did rise, it was to tear the instrument from Ashja’s hands in a climactic squeal of discord – and to banish him from the Court forever.

'''Stats:'''
(Added 1 to Mind)
Blood -1 Heart 1 Mind 1 Spirit 1

'''Factions:'''
(Added 1 to Mortalis)
Mortality 1 Night -1 Power 1 Wild 1

'''Circle status'''
Mortalis 0 Night 0 Power 0 Wild 1

'''Questions'''
''Who are you?''
I’m the Grand Vizier, my friend – master of the decks, turntable magician. No? You’re not that into music? Ah, well. My name is Ashja, then.

''How long have you been in the city?''
Since punk was still a thing; real punk, full of anarchy and rage, kicking against the pricks. That was true street music – I remember stepping off the train at Kings Cross and feeling its pulse through the soles of my shoes. That's when I knew I was in the right place.

''What do you love most about humanity?''
Aside from their bottomless capacity for self-deception? The music, of course – it’s the distillation of all a person’s dreams and fears, poured out on the floor in public. It can be so pathetic you want to weep, or the most beautiful lies imaginable. Sometimes both.

''Who is your closest confidante in the city?''
Miss Susannah – I won’t give you her full name, for fear of embarrassing her. She was a wild one, when I first met her – so angry at everything, at the world. So determined to make a difference! And her lyrics… ah.
Shall I tell you a secret? I started Communion Records for her. I wanted to share what I heard, what I felt. What she felt. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and of course nothing came of it. She’s married now, children. A good job, in the real world. But still angry inside, I think.

''What do you desperately need?''
Why? Are you offering me something? Are they old school, funk, psychedelic? The old beats just aren’t doing it for me anymore - I need something fresh, something different. Tell me what you’ve heard.

'''Gear'''
''A Victorian end-of-terrace house in Forest Gate, overlooking Wanstead Flats.'' The neighbourhood was sketchy as hell when he bought the place, but the people who lived there came from all over. These days it seems West Ham and Forest Gate and a few other local neighbourhoods are the next up and coming thing, and the rich white families are starting to move in. Prices are on the up, services are improving, crime's falling… but as the minorities move out, they're taking their music with them.

''A lease car'' – shiny and expensive-looking, with very good theft cover. A car is a car, so the make and model varies… but it’s important to look the part.

''A smart phone'' – something up-to-the-minute, with decent built-in speakers.

''A relic from your homelands.'' A sintir (three-stringed lute) Ashja played as part of the Gnawa band in the Court of Amon. In his day he and the band could stir the Court into a frenzy of emotion when they played, or drive out evil, poison or madness. Now he mostly uses it when meditating, or when remembering better times.

''A symbol of your court.'' Amon’s court is that of the Wind, and a carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King’s own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father – hangs limp in Ashja’s kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

'''Debts'''

'''Moves'''
''Faerie Magic:''
Whenever you use a faerie power, choose 1:
* Mark corruption
* Give your monarch a Debt
* Suffer 1-harm (ap)

''Faerie powers''
Nature’s Caress: Your touch heals 2-harm, starting with critical harm. You cannot use this power on yourself.
Glamours: You create illusions to fool the senses. The effects don't last long, but they are compelling. You cannot disguise or conceal yourself or your actions.
Bedlam: Touch a vulnerable target to place them in a specific emotional state (your choice) for the scene. Mark corruption to have that emotion directed toward a target of your choosing.

''Words Are Wind:''
You know instantly if someone has broken their word to you or reneged on a deal you’ve made; take a Debt on them and +1 ongoing to claim what you deserve from them or their allies until they’ve made things right.

''Scales of Justice:''
Cash in a Debt with someone to target them using a power from Faerie Magic—including powers not normally available to you—at no additional cost.

''Corruption Move''
When you break a promise or tell an outright lie, mark corruption.

''Intimacy Move''
When you share a moment of intimacy —physical or emotional— with another person, demand a promise from them. If they refuse you or break the promise, they owe you 2 Debts.

''End Move''
When you die or retire your character, choose a character and bestow the favour of your court upon them. They can choose either to take faerie magic and two of your faerie powers or to advance persuade an NPC.

Ashja, the Grand Vizier

2025-04-23T19:50:04Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Ashja, the Grand Vizier to Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier: Game page hierarchy - character sheet page

#REDIRECT [[Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]

Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier

2025-04-23T19:50:04Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Ashja, the Grand Vizier to Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier: Game page hierarchy - character sheet page

'''Ashja, AKA The Grand Vizier'''

[[File:Ashja2.jpg]]

'''Look:''' North African, Male, Expensive Clothing

'''Demeanour:''' Seductive

'''Background:'''

''Part 1: Straight Outta Faerie''

The spirits of the Erg Chech are of fire and air, in two forever warring courts. Amon, King of Winds, leads one - and it's there that Ashja's story begins.

Yes, the jnun are long-lived creatures; yes, Ashja was among those who served at Solomon’s beck and call; but for much of his existence he was little more than one among a hundred winds.

Time passed, and Ashja rose to favour in the Court of Winds as a talented musician and fervent participant in the Lila, night-long festivals of music and dance that were dedicated to prayer and healing. As Ashja led the musicians, so did Rayah - daughter of Amon – lead the dancers.

Time passed… and centuries after the death of Solomon freed the Jnun from their servitude, an alien sort of music caught Ashja’s attention as he drifted across the dunes of the Erg Chech; alien, yet strangely familiar.

Fascinated by the rhythm, he followed its back across the rolling sand to its source: a group of teenagers on the edge of the desert, gathered around a car to listen to a scuzzy, low-fi recording of the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet on the dashboard tape deck.

Ashja was enraptured by the energy of the music, feeling something like revelation as it flowed through him. As the years passed, he snuck away from court again and again, riding the wind across the sands to the settlements of humans, to listen fascinated to their music.

But like a serpent, it never stayed still. Rock and roll was becoming this bloated, ornamental horror, and he felt the music’s hold on him – and his on it – slipping away. Then the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant came on the radio - whose radio? Just some unassuming human, out in the world. But it was everything he needed.

Ashja returned to the Court of Winds a whirlwind; snatching up a sintir from the old Maalem who led the Lila, the devotions to Amon, and leading the band into three minutes of such raw, snarling energy that all but Amon himself were compelled to rise and dance.

When Amon did rise, it was to tear the instrument from Ashja’s hands in a climactic squeal of discord – and to banish him from the Court forever.

'''Stats:'''
(Added 1 to Mind)
Blood -1 Heart 1 Mind 1 Spirit 1

'''Factions:'''
(Added 1 to Mortalis)
Mortality 1 Night -1 Power 1 Wild 1

'''Circle status'''
Mortalis 0 Night 0 Power 0 Wild 1

'''Questions'''
''Who are you?''
I’m the Grand Vizier, my friend – master of the decks, turntable magician. No? You’re not that into music? Ah, well. My name is Ashja, then.

''How long have you been in the city?''
Since punk was still a thing; real punk, full of anarchy and rage, kicking against the pricks. That was true street music – I remember stepping off the train at Kings Cross and feeling its pulse through the soles of my shoes. That's when I knew I was in the right place.

''What do you love most about humanity?''
Aside from their bottomless capacity for self-deception? The music, of course – it’s the distillation of all a person’s dreams and fears, poured out on the floor in public. It can be so pathetic you want to weep, or the most beautiful lies imaginable. Sometimes both.

''Who is your closest confidante in the city?''
Miss Susannah – I won’t give you her full name, for fear of embarrassing her. She was a wild one, when I first met her – so angry at everything, at the world. So determined to make a difference! And her lyrics… ah.
Shall I tell you a secret? I started Communion Records for her. I wanted to share what I heard, what I felt. What she felt. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and of course nothing came of it. She’s married now, children. A good job, in the real world. But still angry inside, I think.

''What do you desperately need?''
Why? Are you offering me something? Are they old school, funk, psychedelic? The old beats just aren’t doing it for me anymore - I need something fresh, something different. Tell me what you’ve heard.

'''Gear'''
''A Victorian end-of-terrace house in Forest Gate, overlooking Wanstead Flats.'' The neighbourhood was sketchy as hell when he bought the place, but the people who lived there came from all over. These days it seems West Ham and Forest Gate and a few other local neighbourhoods are the next up and coming thing, and the rich white families are starting to move in. Prices are on the up, services are improving, crime's falling… but as the minorities move out, they're taking their music with them.

''A lease car'' – shiny and expensive-looking, with very good theft cover. A car is a car, so the make and model varies… but it’s important to look the part.

''A smart phone'' – something up-to-the-minute, with decent built-in speakers.

''A relic from your homelands.'' A sintir (three-stringed lute) Ashja played as part of the Gnawa band in the Court of Amon. In his day he and the band could stir the Court into a frenzy of emotion when they played, or drive out evil, poison or madness. Now he mostly uses it when meditating, or when remembering better times.

''A symbol of your court.'' Amon’s court is that of the Wind, and a carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King’s own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father – hangs limp in Ashja’s kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

'''Debts'''

'''Moves'''
''Faerie Magic:''
Whenever you use a faerie power, choose 1:
* Mark corruption
* Give your monarch a Debt
* Suffer 1-harm (ap)

''Faerie powers''
Nature’s Caress: Your touch heals 2-harm, starting with critical harm. You cannot use this power on yourself.
Glamours: You create illusions to fool the senses. The effects don't last long, but they are compelling. You cannot disguise or conceal yourself or your actions.
Bedlam: Touch a vulnerable target to place them in a specific emotional state (your choice) for the scene. Mark corruption to have that emotion directed toward a target of your choosing.

''Words Are Wind:''
You know instantly if someone has broken their word to you or reneged on a deal you’ve made; take a Debt on them and +1 ongoing to claim what you deserve from them or their allies until they’ve made things right.

''Scales of Justice:''
Cash in a Debt with someone to target them using a power from Faerie Magic—including powers not normally available to you—at no additional cost.

''Corruption Move''
When you break a promise or tell an outright lie, mark corruption.

''Intimacy Move''
When you share a moment of intimacy —physical or emotional— with another person, demand a promise from them. If they refuse you or break the promise, they owe you 2 Debts.

''End Move''
When you die or retire your character, choose a character and bestow the favour of your court upon them. They can choose either to take faerie magic and two of your faerie powers or to advance persuade an NPC.

Ashes of the Archmage - Ashja, the Grand Vizier

2025-04-23T19:43:09Z

MysteryCat: Created page with "'''Ashja, AKA The Grand Vizier''' File:Ashja2.jpg '''Look:''' North African, Male, Expensive Clothing '''Demeanour:''' Seductive '''Background:''' ''Part 1: Straight Outta Faerie'' The spirits of the Erg Chech are of fire and air, in two forever warring courts. Amon, King of Winds, leads one - and it's there that Ashja's story begins. Yes, the jnun are long-lived creatures; yes, Ashja was among those who served at Solomon’s beck and call; but for much of his..."

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:30:48Z

MysteryCat: /* Debts */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"

!Ashja owes...
!JJ owes...
!Algy owes...
!Robin owes...
!Kayin owes...
!
|-
|N/A
|
|3
|2
|
|...to Ashja
|-
|1
|N/A
|
|
|
|...to JJ
|-
|
|
|N/A
|
|1
|...to Algy
|-
|
|2
|2
|N/A
|2
|...to Robin
|-
|1
|1
|1
|
|N/A
|...to Kayin
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:13:41Z

MysteryCat: /* Factions */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Night==
===The Howling Collective===
The Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===
???

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"
!
!Ashja
!JJ
!Algy
!Robin
!Kayin
|-
|Ashja
|N/A
|
|
|
|
|-
|JJ
|
|N/A
|
|
|
|-
|Algy
|
|
|N/A
|
|
|-
|Robin
|
|
|
|N/A
|
|-
|Kayin
|
|
|
|
|N/A
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:12:22Z

MysteryCat: /* Night */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

===Big Tom Grady===
Well known across Soho as the de-facto leader of the Soho Night Worker's Alliance, a secret labour organisation that protects bar staff, doormen, street cleaners, and after-dark vendors from predation or exploitation. They ensure that their members are paid, protected, and respected. Those that abuse members of the SNWC find their businesses trashed, at the very least, though rumours abound of much more violent conclusions. Everyone in Soho knows that Big T is a good guy, though he may have a slightly quick temper.

Algy knows Big T in an entirely different capacity. While on assignment for the Order of Saint Martin at the London Palladium, the two crossed paths. For reasons unknown, Algy was sent to ensure that an understudy took to the stage playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but found that the theatre was under the protection of a werewolf pack called the Howling Collective. This was unexpected, as during his pre-mission recon he had identified the territories of local packs, and none should have considered this an intrusion on their territory. During the fracas it came out that the Howling Collective consider their territory people, rather than places; an unconventional take for an unconventional pack.

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"
!
!Ashja
!JJ
!Algy
!Robin
!Kayin
|-
|Ashja
|N/A
|
|
|
|
|-
|JJ
|
|N/A
|
|
|
|-
|Algy
|
|
|N/A
|
|
|-
|Robin
|
|
|
|N/A
|
|-
|Kayin
|
|
|
|
|N/A
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:10:54Z

MysteryCat: /* Points of Interests */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interest==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"
!
!Ashja
!JJ
!Algy
!Robin
!Kayin
|-
|Ashja
|N/A
|
|
|
|
|-
|JJ
|
|N/A
|
|
|
|-
|Algy
|
|
|N/A
|
|
|-
|Robin
|
|
|
|N/A
|
|-
|Kayin
|
|
|
|
|N/A
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:10:19Z

MysteryCat: /* Wild */

[[Category:Urban Shadows]]
The landing page for the Urban Shadows game, ashes of the Archmage.

The sudden, violent death of the city’s most powerful sorcerer, the Archmage Ambrose Finch, has left the supernatural factions scrambling for power. Leylines are unstable, old alliances are crumbling, and every faction—from vampires to werewolves to fae and beyond—is maneuvering in the chaos. The streets are alive with danger, intrigue, and the lingering echoes of the Archmage’s last spell.

=The City=

==An Overview==

London is a city of old magic, deep shadows, and whispered pacts. The streets thrum with power, hidden just beneath the surface—among the bustling tourists, in the smoky backrooms of pubs older than nations, and in the whispered Latin of a back-alley exorcism. Here, in the heart of the supernatural underground, the balance between factions is delicate, and a single death can tip the scales.

Archwizard Ambrose Finch was more than just a mage; he was a keystone of London's magical order, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the silent broker of uneasy peace. Now he's dead.

Some say his heart simply stopped—an old man finally brought low by time. Others whisper of darker causes. A power struggle. A vendetta centuries in the making. A prophecy fulfilled.

Regardless of the cause, Finch's death has left a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. The city teeters on the edge. The wizards of the Circle scramble to hold onto their dominion. Vampires smell blood in the water. The Fae of the Hidden Courts stir, eager to reclaim old debts. The hunters and exorcists sharpen their blades. And in the darkest corners of the city, something old and forgotten stirs, drawn to the chaos like carrion to a feast.

You are part of this world. Maybe you were one of Finch's allies—or one of his rivals. Maybe you want justice, vengeance, or just a chance to carve out your own piece of London's underworld. One thing is certain: the city won't wait. The factions are moving, and the shadows are deepening.

What will you do when the city calls?

==Points of Interests==

===Madam Jojo's===
A currently closed and derelict bar that used to be a real community hub in Soho. The Moonrise Group, a development syndicate, are currently exploring their options in terms of development.

===The Blackbird===
A late-night bar, with many dark nooks for secret conversations, or secret trysts. It is run by Dante Slade, a vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master.

===The Cauldron===
A rooftop pub that serves the fringes of both moral and supernatural society. It's seen as a good place to meet, as everyone is so distrusting of one another that no-one could get away with a double-cross.The one thing everybody knows about Seattle, besides the coffee and Bill Gates. Built for the '62 World's Fair to collect and harness the psychic energy of Seattle's mortals. Forget I said that. It has a nice rotating restaurant on top, too.

=Factions=
==Power==
===The Shrouded Choir===
A group of wizards who do magic with souls, are willing to do things others aren't and gain the power from doing so. They have irritated, upset, or angered almost every other faction in the city, but are good enough at hiding their presence that these feuds haven't developed far.
===The Order of Saint Martin===
A group of immortals who control the mortal art scene from the shadows. They believe that they are the arbiters of what beauty is, and that they are the epitome of that beauty. They have an ongoing feud with The Penumbra Society.
===The Circle of Fog===
A group of reality hopping mages who seek to control and maintain London's leylines. They use nodes in those leylines to open portals to other realities. Many fey dislike this monopoly on London's magical fonts.
===The Westminster Society===
A group of mages that see themselves as the natural leaders of the supernatural underground. They seek to arbitrate disputes between factions and put down monsters that can't be reasoned with. Unfortunately with Ambrose Finch's death the society is leaderless, and may fracture into half a dozen sub-sects.

==Wild==
===The Court of Tradewinds===
A fae court that has a very limited presence in the city. They back the underdog, the immigrant, and the fringe, though they largely do so through subtle magics, given their limited presence.
===The Court of Moonlight===
A group of cruel, fickle fae. They feed on fear, distrust, and panic, and are not above using the city's vampires, werewolves, and ghosts to get their fill.

==Mortalis==
===The Waking Network===
A loose coalition of survivors, mystics, and hunters that aim to help give people newly ingratiated into the supernatural underground transition into their new life. They have no rivals, per se, but many within the underground see their methods as soft, inadequately preparing neophytes for the reality of their new lives.

===Aeternum Solutions===
A mercenary outfit who deal with occult issues for silver; a modern-day incarnation of the Knights Templar—a secretive, militarized order loyal to its own ancient codes. They protected relics, guarded bloodlines, enforced pacts, and—when necessary—cleansed corruption with fire and steel.

==Unknown==
===The Moonrise Group===
A development syndicate currently exploring their options for Madame Jojo's
===The Penumbra Society===

=NPCs=

==Mortality==
===Drishti===
Works bar at the Blackbird

==Night==
===Dante Slade===
A vampire of some renown, though rumours abound that he serves a darker master

==Power==
===Dame Corvina===
Dame Corvina was the one who did the bulk of Algy's training (and is one of his contacts within the order) - a no-nonsense immortal with centuries (or maybe a millennia!) of combat prowess that she's more than eager to bestow upon those she deems worthy of her tutelage. She's definitely the one who has handled the training of all the Sworn the Order has had over time.

Despite Algy's feelings that she would kill him in a heartbeat for stepping a toe out of line (and he's right), I'm thinking she may have something of a soft-spot for him, which isn't something that happens often. Perhaps she may be willing to look the other way in some instances, though if he does something that directly harms the Order she'll take appropriate action.

===Theodora "Theo" Rothwell===
BA Fine Art Student at Central Saint Martins. Theo is sharp-tongued and cool-eyed, with a voice that rarely rises above conversational but still commands attention. Her family, the Rothwells, are archivists, interpreters, and the silent watchers of the Order's relic history. Thea's mother, Margot Rothwell, is high-ranking within the Order's curatorial wing—devout, severe, and quietly disappointed in her daughter's tendency to question doctrine. Theo and her entire family are mortals that have served the Order for a very long time and have proved themselves to be quite useful to the organization's goals. Theo was marked into service at age sixteen, tattooed with the family sigil beneath her left shoulder blade during a ritual she doesn't fully remember.

Algy is one of the few people Theo actually lets in. Their friendship formed not in lectures or society functions, but in the claustrophobic dark of the Order's archive annex, elbow-deep in cursed pigment analysis and poorly documented relics that whispered.

She finds Algy infuriating and essential in equal measure. His irreverence and aplomb nature cracks the shell the Order's bred into her. He, in turn, finds her unnervingly composed, frustratingly private, and utterly magnetic when she lets the mask slip. They've covered for each other more than once. Shared a flask on rooftops after long nights. Shared silence when it mattered more than words. And maybe—maybe—shared a look or two that lingered a moment too long.

==Wild==
===Zdan===
An ancient maalem, the leader of the band in gnawa rituals at the court of Amon, working in harmony with Amon's daughter Rayah, who led the sacred dancers.

Now, in exile, he is visited only by his old mentor Zdan, who never fails to share how disappointed he is in his old pupil for embracing profane modern music over the divinely ordained rhythms of the gnawa; and for forcing Zdan to play on long after he should have retired and passed down his Sintir. He had earned the rest, but without Ashja there are none good enough to take his place and lead the ritual. So he plays on.

===Rayah===
Amon's daughter, who led the sacred dancers. Ashja's rival and once-betrothed, she has not visited in the decades since Ashja's exile. A carved driftwood windcatcher – hand-painted by the King's own daughter, back when he was a favourite of her father, and of her besides – hangs limp in Ashja's kitchen. If he ever actually cracked a window and allowed in the wind, it might spin hypnotically and produce an low, droning note. It might call across the skies to the Other Realm, to its maker the Princess of the Wind... if you believe in that sort of thing. And if he ever.

===Amon===
Lord of the Court of Tradewinds

==Unknown==
===Brynja, of the Valkyr===
Leader of a bunch of Valkyries. May be acquainted of Ragna Fairhair, who Kayin did a favour once.

=PCs=

==Summary Tables==

===Stats===

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Archetype
!Blood
!Heart
!Mind
!Spirit
!Harm
!Corruption
|-
|[[Ashja, the Grand Vizier]]
|The Fae
| -1
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 0
| 0
|-
|[[JJ]]
|The Aware
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Algy]]
|The Sworn
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Robin Bellamy]]
|The Spectre
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|[[Kayin]]
| The Wizard
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|}

===Debts===

Column owes Row the number in the cell. This is for PC by PC, but sufficiently entangled NPCs may be added later.

{| class="wikitable"
!
!Ashja
!JJ
!Algy
!Robin
!Kayin
|-
|Ashja
|N/A
|
|
|
|
|-
|JJ
|
|N/A
|
|
|
|-
|Algy
|
|
|N/A
|
|
|-
|Robin
|
|
|
|N/A
|
|-
|Kayin
|
|
|
|
|N/A
|-
|}

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:04:53Z

MysteryCat: /* NPCs */

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:01:15Z

MysteryCat: /* Mortality */

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T19:01:06Z

MysteryCat: /* Mortality */

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T18:55:40Z

MysteryCat: /* Night */

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T18:52:09Z

MysteryCat: /* Power */

Urban Shadows Ashes of The Archmage

2025-04-23T18:38:12Z

MysteryCat: Stole some useful elements and formatting from an old game

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2021-01-08T20:46:00Z

MysteryCat:

Sakinah/Stillwater (Gnoll)

[[File:Bleeding_Heart_Stillwater_1.png]]

Sakinah got to Spire the usual way Gnolls get to Spire - as a prisoner of war. Of course, that was just an elaborate Gnollish Intelligence operation to get her into place within a militarily-oriented Aelfir household - the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountains - where she could report back on logistics and so forth, and perhaps even subtly influence things (depending on her ability to make herself valuable and/or her captors exotic predilections).

She doesn't know how she got caught. Maybe someone turned. Maybe magic. Maybe she just wasn't a very good spy. Whatever it was, they sniffed her out. Said they had a very different mission in mind. And then, smiling, they introduced her to the Mask of Obedient Servitude.

Down in Derelictus, sniffing around the blood-wet edges of the Heart for any sign of the Aelfir's lost scion, she was little more than a clockwork servant. Until the bees found her, and offered her a deal. Now she is herself again. But then again, not...

=Class=
Deep Apiarist

=Protections=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Stress=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Fallout=
'''Blood'''

'''Mind'''

'''Echo'''

'''Fortune'''

'''Supplies'''

=Calling=
Forced

==Questions==
'''• Who, or what, are your masters?'''
Aelfir nobility; in the general, the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain. In the specific, Barienna Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, withered matriarch of that house.

'''• What do your masters want?'''
The safe return of Fenii Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, Barienna’s third child and only (surviving) son. He went into exile several years ago, after a misunderstanding involving the son (or was it daughter?) of Archdeacon Many-The-Seedlings, who sits on Spire’s ruling Council. The last the family heard of him was a garbled message left by his loyal retainer and bodyguard Antonio Quinn, saying they were heading into the undercity to restore his honour by hunting down… well, it sounded like nonsense, frankly. But Fenii always did have a dramatic streak. In time, once the fuss died down, he could have quietly returned to Amaranth. There was simply no need for such overblown gestures. And really? Everyone (or everyone who counts, at least) knows there’s no such thing as Angels.
'''
• How are your masters maintaining power over you?'''
The Mask of Obedient Servitude, a brass and clockwork horror fused directly with Sakinah’s skull. Bars encage her face. Brass filaments inscribed with tiny sigils wind down to infiltrate the vertebrae at the base of the neck. And a rough loop of hemp twists around her throat, winding ever tighter with the faintest tick-tick-tick. They told her they can see through her eyes, if they choose. She dare not doubt it.

'''• How do your masters contact you?'''
Through the mask itself; their voice grinds appallingly in the very bones of her skull, leaving Sakinah with a splitting headache and renewed hatred.

'''• Choose another player character. They have history with your masters too. What’s their relationship?'''
Plum - he was a peer of Fenii, back in another life, back when he had power, prospects, a family, a home.

=Active Beats=
• Perform a seemingly unconnected action for your masters that has grim consequences.

• Do a favour for someone to gain leverage over them.

==Fulfilled Beats==

=Traits=
==Calling Ability==
'''Collateral''' ''You have a knack for getting behind someone else when things kick off.'' Once per session, allocate stress to the nearest friendly target (PC or NPC) instead of marking it yourself.

==Core Abilities==
'''The Hive''' ''The sweetlings nest within your body.'' Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never benefit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.

'''Release the Swarm''' ''You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you.'' Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4 (upgraded to D6, Spread, Ranged; See '''Delirium Spike''').

==Major Abilities==
'''Delirium Spike''' ''The sacred majesty of the Hive fills you with fizzing, unstable power.'' The stress inflicted by your RELEASE THE SWARM ability increases to D6. The first time you inflict stress using RELEASE THE SWARM in a situation, add your Mind stress to the stress inflicted on the target. After the action is resolved, reduce your Mind stress to 0. This supersedes the normal limitations on removing Mind stress outlined in THE HIVE.

==Minor Abilities==
'''A Perfect Machine''' ''You see that cogs, gears and engines are just echoes of the infinite, staggering majesty that is the Hive.'' Gain the Technology domain. Given time, you can repair technological devices even if you don’t have the right parts: you synthesise them from wax and extruded bone.

'''Intoxicant''' ''Pheromone glands pucker and blossom on your wrists and neck; you are alluring, irresistible, almost soporific.'' Gain the Compel skill. Once per session, when you talk to someone for five minutes or more, you convince them to revert to their basest impulses. They become driven solely by lust, hunger or a need for shelter – whichever they desire most right now.

'''Many Eyes''' ''Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight.'' Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.

==Skills==
Mend

Compel

Discern

==Domains==
'''Occult'''

'''Technology'''

==Resources==
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar (D6 Occult, Fragile)

==Equipment==
Hive Tool (Kill D4, Brutal)

Dimensional Barometer (Delve D6)

The Mask of Obedient Servitude

A book of unsolved mathematical equations. Originally intended for passing or decyphering messages, the Aelfir gave it back to her with a spiteful smirk, when they sent her down into Heart. Or at least she imagines they did. Behind those masks, who can tell?

Knotted weave of string that describes your grandmother. Grand-damm Aaeedah was a magnificent bitch, a towering figure of a woman who rules over her vastly extended clan with a honey-smeared claw; sweet, but nasty. Sakinah doesn't know what happened to her - she was just gone, one day, and nobody would speak of her except to flinch and gesture towards the shadows as if to ward off evil.

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2021-01-08T20:43:49Z

MysteryCat: /* Traits */

Sakinah/Stillwater (Gnoll)

[[File:Bleeding_Heart_Stillwater_1.png]]

Sakinah got to Spire the usual way Gnolls get to Spire - as a prisoner of war. Of course, that was just an elaborate Gnollish Intelligence operation to get her into place within a militarily-oriented Aelfir household - the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountains - where she could report back on logistics and so forth, and perhaps even subtly influence things (depending on her ability to make herself valuable and/or her captors exotic predilections).

She doesn't know how she got caught. Maybe someone turned. Maybe magic. Maybe she just wasn't a very good spy. Whatever it was, they sniffed her out. Said they had a very different mission in mind. And then, smiling, they introduced her to the Mask of Obedient Servitude.

Down in Derelictus, sniffing around the blood-wet edges of the Heart for any sign of the Aelfir's lost scion, she was little more than a clockwork servant. Until the bees found her, and offered her a deal. Now she is herself again. But then again, not...

=Questions=
• Who, or what, are your masters?
Aelfir nobility; in the general, the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain. In the specific, Barienna Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, withered matriarch of that house.

• What do your masters want?
The safe return of Fenii Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, Barienna’s third child and only (surviving) son. He went into exile several years ago, after a misunderstanding involving the son (or was it daughter?) of Archdeacon Many-The-Seedlings, who sits on Spire’s ruling Council. The last the family heard of him was a garbled message left by his loyal retainer and bodyguard Antonio Quinn, saying they were heading into the undercity to restore his honour by hunting down… well, it sounded like nonsense, frankly. But Fenii always did have a dramatic streak. In time, once the fuss died down, he could have quietly returned to Amaranth. There was simply no need for such overblown gestures. And really? Everyone (or everyone who counts, at least) knows there’s no such thing as Angels.

• How are your masters maintaining power over you?
The Mask of Obedient Servitude, a brass and clockwork horror fused directly with Sakinah’s skull. Bars encage her face. Brass filaments inscribed with tiny sigils wind down to infiltrate the vertebrae at the base of the neck. And a rough loop of hemp twists around her throat, winding ever tighter with the faintest tick-tick-tick. They told her they can see through her eyes, if they choose. She dare not doubt it.

• How do your masters contact you?
Through the mask itself; their voice grinds appallingly in the very bones of her skull, leaving Sakinah with a splitting headache and renewed hatred.

• Choose another player character. They have history with your masters too. What’s their relationship?
Looking like this is Plum

=Class=
Deep Apiarist

=Protections=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Stress=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Fallout=
'''Blood'''

'''Mind'''

'''Echo'''

'''Fortune'''

'''Supplies'''

=Calling=
Forced

'''COLLATERAL.''' You have a knack for getting behind someone else when things kick off. Once per session, allocate stress to the nearest friendly target (PC or NPC) instead of marking it yourself.

=Active Beats=
• Perform a seemingly unconnected action for your masters that has grim consequences.

• Do a favour for someone to gain leverage over them.

==Fulfilled Beats==

=Traits=
==Calling Ability==
'''Collateral''' ''You have a knack for getting behind someone else when things kick off.'' Once per session, allocate stress to the nearest friendly target (PC or NPC) instead of marking it yourself.

==Core Abilities==
'''The Hive''' ''The sweetlings nest within your body.'' Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never benefit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.

'''Release the Swarm''' ''You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you.'' Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4 (upgraded to D6, Spread, Ranged; See '''Delirium Spike''').

==Major Abilities==
'''Delirium Spike''' ''The sacred majesty of the Hive fills you with fizzing, unstable power.'' The stress inflicted by your RELEASE THE SWARM ability increases to D6. The first time you inflict stress using RELEASE THE SWARM in a situation, add your Mind stress to the stress inflicted on the target. After the action is resolved, reduce your Mind stress to 0. This supersedes the normal limitations on removing Mind stress outlined in THE HIVE.

==Minor Abilities==
'''A Perfect Machine''' ''You see that cogs, gears and engines are just echoes of the infinite, staggering majesty that is the Hive.'' Gain the Technology domain. Given time, you can repair technological devices even if you don’t have the right parts: you synthesise them from wax and extruded bone.

'''Intoxicant''' ''Pheromone glands pucker and blossom on your wrists and neck; you are alluring, irresistible, almost soporific.'' Gain the Compel skill. Once per session, when you talk to someone for five minutes or more, you convince them to revert to their basest impulses. They become driven solely by lust, hunger or a need for shelter – whichever they desire most right now.

'''Many Eyes''' ''Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight.'' Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.

==Skills==
Mend

Compel

Discern

==Domains==
'''Occult'''

'''Technology'''

==Resources==
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar (D6 Occult, Fragile)

==Equipment==
Hive Tool (Kill D4, Brutal)

Dimensional Barometer (Delve D6)

The Mask of Obedient Servitude

A book of unsolved mathematical equations. Originally intended for passing or decyphering messages, the Aelfir gave it back to her with a spiteful smirk, when they sent her down into Heart. Or at least she imagines they did. Behind those masks, who can tell?

Knotted weave of string that describes your grandmother. Grand-damm Aaeedah was a magnificent bitch, a towering figure of a woman who rules over her vastly extended clan with a honey-smeared claw; sweet, but nasty. Sakinah doesn't know what happened to her - she was just gone, one day, and nobody would speak of her except to flinch and gesture towards the shadows as if to ward off evil.

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2021-01-08T20:42:00Z

MysteryCat: /* Fallout */

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2021-01-08T20:39:49Z

MysteryCat: /* Calling */ added Calling ability

Sakinah/Stillwater (Gnoll)

[[File:Bleeding_Heart_Stillwater_1.png]]

Sakinah got to Spire the usual way Gnolls get to Spire - as a prisoner of war. Of course, that was just an elaborate Gnollish Intelligence operation to get her into place within a militarily-oriented Aelfir household - the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountains - where she could report back on logistics and so forth, and perhaps even subtly influence things (depending on her ability to make herself valuable and/or her captors exotic predilections).

She doesn't know how she got caught. Maybe someone turned. Maybe magic. Maybe she just wasn't a very good spy. Whatever it was, they sniffed her out. Said they had a very different mission in mind. And then, smiling, they introduced her to the Mask of Obedient Servitude.

Down in Derelictus, sniffing around the blood-wet edges of the Heart for any sign of the Aelfir's lost scion, she was little more than a clockwork servant. Until the bees found her, and offered her a deal. Now she is herself again. But then again, not...

=Questions=
• Who, or what, are your masters?
Aelfir nobility; in the general, the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain. In the specific, Barienna Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, withered matriarch of that house.

• What do your masters want?
The safe return of Fenii Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, Barienna’s third child and only (surviving) son. He went into exile several years ago, after a misunderstanding involving the son (or was it daughter?) of Archdeacon Many-The-Seedlings, who sits on Spire’s ruling Council. The last the family heard of him was a garbled message left by his loyal retainer and bodyguard Antonio Quinn, saying they were heading into the undercity to restore his honour by hunting down… well, it sounded like nonsense, frankly. But Fenii always did have a dramatic streak. In time, once the fuss died down, he could have quietly returned to Amaranth. There was simply no need for such overblown gestures. And really? Everyone (or everyone who counts, at least) knows there’s no such thing as Angels.

• How are your masters maintaining power over you?
The Mask of Obedient Servitude, a brass and clockwork horror fused directly with Sakinah’s skull. Bars encage her face. Brass filaments inscribed with tiny sigils wind down to infiltrate the vertebrae at the base of the neck. And a rough loop of hemp twists around her throat, winding ever tighter with the faintest tick-tick-tick. They told her they can see through her eyes, if they choose. She dare not doubt it.

• How do your masters contact you?
Through the mask itself; their voice grinds appallingly in the very bones of her skull, leaving Sakinah with a splitting headache and renewed hatred.

• Choose another player character. They have history with your masters too. What’s their relationship?
Looking like this is Plum

=Class=
Deep Apiarist

=Protections=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Stress=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Fallout=

==Core Abilities==
'''The Hive''' ''The sweetlings nest within your body.'' Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never benefit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.

'''Release the Swarm''' ''You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you.'' Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4 (upgraded to D6, Spread, Ranged; See '''Delirium Spike''').

==Major Abilities==
'''Delirium Spike''' ''The sacred majesty of the Hive fills you with fizzing, unstable power.'' The stress inflicted by your RELEASE THE SWARM ability increases to D6. The first time you inflict stress using RELEASE THE SWARM in a situation, add your Mind stress to the stress inflicted on the target. After the action is resolved, reduce your Mind stress to 0. This supersedes the normal limitations on removing Mind stress outlined in THE HIVE.

==Minor Abilities==
'''A Perfect Machine''' ''You see that cogs, gears and engines are just echoes of the infinite, staggering majesty that is the Hive.'' Gain the Technology domain. Given time, you can repair technological devices even if you don’t have the right parts: you synthesise them from wax and extruded bone.

'''Intoxicant''' ''Pheromone glands pucker and blossom on your wrists and neck; you are alluring, irresistible, almost soporific.'' Gain the Compel skill. Once per session, when you talk to someone for five minutes or more, you convince them to revert to their basest impulses. They become driven solely by lust, hunger or a need for shelter – whichever they desire most right now.

'''Many Eyes''' ''Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight.'' Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.

=Calling=
Forced

'''COLLATERAL.''' You have a knack for getting behind someone else when things kick off. Once per session, allocate stress to the nearest friendly target (PC or NPC) instead of marking it yourself.

=Active Beats=
• Perform a seemingly unconnected action for your masters that has grim consequences.

• Do a favour for someone to gain leverage over them.

==Fulfilled Beats==

=Traits=

==Skills==
Mend

Compel

Discern

==Domains==
'''Occult'''

'''Technology'''

==Resources==
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar (D6 Occult, Fragile)

==Equipment==
Hive Tool (Kill D4, Brutal)

Dimensional Barometer (Delve D6)

The Mask of Obedient Servitude

A book of unsolved mathematical equations. Originally intended for passing or decyphering messages, the Aelfir gave it back to her with a spiteful smirk, when they sent her down into Heart. Or at least she imagines they did. Behind those masks, who can tell?

Knotted weave of string that describes your grandmother. Grand-damm Aaeedah was a magnificent bitch, a towering figure of a woman who rules over her vastly extended clan with a honey-smeared claw; sweet, but nasty. Sakinah doesn't know what happened to her - she was just gone, one day, and nobody would speak of her except to flinch and gesture towards the shadows as if to ward off evil.

Bree Khoroushi

2021-01-04T09:53:12Z

MysteryCat: /* Beliefs */ formatting

'''Bree KHOROUSHI''', an Executive

Feminine, Embroidered wear, strong face, generous eyes, pear-shaped body, Middle Eastern.

[[File:Bree_KHOROUSHI-abort-retry.jpg]]

'''Jam'''

Mandatory contracts from the board. Paid contracts on the side.

* Mad +1 / Peaceful -1
* Sad +1 / Joyful 0
* Scared 0 / Powerful +2

==Beliefs and background==

* First offer an open hand. Second, a fist. Third, a blade.
* The system breaks those who oppose it.
* Build anew, don’t burn it all down.

'''The Board'''

McCarthy Bradford is one of the world’s premiere independent audit, oversight and compliance service providers. From financial to ethical to regulatory matters, MCB offer uncompromising standards, unflinching attention to detail, and an innovative context-driven methodology.

* Anytime anything is lucrative, no matter the affiliations, they take it.(+1 Capital)
* They are the middle men between megacorporations (-1 Capital)

'''Power'''

You were born into it, it’s the family business/money. Bree’s mother Niamh is a cousin of MCB’s current chairman, and a non-executive shareholder in the company.

==Gear==

* 4 cred
* Hidden jamming blades (1 Harm hand infinite jamming)

'''Cybernetics'''

* Eye (Recording, Multi-spectrum, HUD. Causes headaches)
* Ear (Amplification, Recording, Intercepting. Distracting)
* Arm (Storage. Reduced sensation)
* Interface (Encrypted, Multitask. Corporate spyware)
* Chest (Gland implant; skin excretes paralytic neurotoxin. 2 S-Harm. Involuntary)

I owe Obligation to the company for my 'ware.

==Obligation==

* Bree has 1 Obligation on Isaac, because she pulled him out of the Veil as a potentially useful asset. He also has 1 Obligation on Bree, because he did some digging in an attempt to level the playing field, and found evidence she was skimming from MCB accounts. Whether she knows he knows, I'm not sure...!
* Bree has 1 Obligation on Keiko; she was involved in an audit on Ishtar, and had access to the files on her parents' company and Symbiote II.
* Bree has 1 Obligation on Erik; she uses him as an exclusive asset for her off-book contracts, occasionally.
* Helga has 2 obligation on Bree; the Empath used the Flow to comfort Bree through a difficult life event, and in the process discovered something of her past that could put her status at the corp in jeopardy.

==Moves==

''QUARTERLIES''
At the beginning of the session, or whenever you have completed your mandatory contracts from the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board assigns 2 mandatory contracts, both of your choosing. On a 7–9, the board assigns 3 mandatory contracts, 1 of your choosing. On a miss, the board assigns 3 contracts that the MC will choose. The board then gives you funds for every contract up front and expects that it be done in the amount of time described by the MC.

''TPS REPORTS''
When you do not complete a contract by the deadline given by the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board is displeased but you describe the circumstances and they grant you clemency. On a 7–9, the MC crosses out one of the agendas of the board for next session, they choose. On miss, they cross out one agenda on top of whatever the MC tells you.
''

THE EXECUTIVE SPECIAL''
When the Executive shares a moment of intimacy with someone, be it physical or emotional, roll without adding a State. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose only one.

* The board does not take notice of them as possible leverage over you.
* They don’t mark +1 Obligation to Lean on you with.

Bree Khoroushi

2021-01-01T21:45:07Z

MysteryCat:

'''Bree KHOROUSHI''', an Executive

Feminine, Embroidered wear, strong face, generous eyes, pear-shaped body, Middle Eastern.

[[File:Bree_KHOROUSHI-abort-retry.jpg]]

'''Jam'''

Mandatory contracts from the board. Paid contracts on the side.

* Mad +1 / Peaceful -1
* Sad +1 / Joyful 0
* Scared 0 / Powerful +2

==Beliefs==

* First offer an open hand. Second, a fist. Third, a blade.
* The system breaks those who oppose it.
* Build anew, don’t burn it all down.

'''The Board'''

McCarthy Bradford is one of the world’s premiere independent audit, oversight and compliance service providers. From financial to ethical to regulatory matters, MCB offer uncompromising standards, unflinching attention to detail, and an innovative context-driven methodology.

* Anytime anything is lucrative, no matter the affiliations, they take it.(+1 Capital)
* They are the middle men between megacorporations (-1 Capital)

'''Power'''

You were born into it, it’s the family business/money. Bree’s mother Niamh is a cousin of MCB’s current chairman, and a non-executive shareholder in the company.

'''Gear'''

* 4 cred
* Hidden jamming blades (1 Harm hand infinite jamming)

'''Cybernetics'''

* Eye (Recording, Multi-spectrum, HUD. Causes headaches)
* Ear (Amplification, Recording, Intercepting. Distracting)
* Arm (Storage. Reduced sensation)
* Interface (Encrypted, Multitask. Corporate spyware)
* Chest (Gland implant; skin excretes paralytic neurotoxin. 2 S-Harm. Involuntary)

I owe Obligation to the company for my 'ware.

'''Obligation'''

* Bree has 1 Obligation on Isaac, because she pulled him out of the Veil as a potentially useful asset. He also has 1 Obligation on Bree, because he did some digging in an attempt to level the playing field, and found evidence she was skimming from MCB accounts. Whether she knows he knows, I'm not sure...!
* Bree has 1 Obligation on Keiko; she was involved in an audit on Ishtar, and had access to the files on her parents' company and Symbiote II.* Bree has 1 Obligation on Erik; she uses him as an exclusive asset for her off-book contracts, occasionally.
* Helga has 2 obligation on Bree; the Empath used the Flow to comfort Bree through a difficult life event, and in the process discovered something of her past that could put her status at the corp in jeopardy.

'''Moves'''

''QUARTERLIES''
At the beginning of the session, or whenever you have completed your mandatory contracts from the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board assigns 2 mandatory contracts, both of your choosing. On a 7–9, the board assigns 3 mandatory contracts, 1 of your choosing. On a miss, the board assigns 3 contracts that the MC will choose. The board then gives you funds for every contract up front and expects that it be done in the amount of time described by the MC.

''TPS REPORTS''
When you do not complete a contract by the deadline given by the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board is displeased but you describe the circumstances and they grant you clemency. On a 7–9, the MC crosses out one of the agendas of the board for next session, they choose. On miss, they cross out one agenda on top of whatever the MC tells you.
''

THE EXECUTIVE SPECIAL''
When the Executive shares a moment of intimacy with someone, be it physical or emotional, roll without adding a State. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose only one.

* The board does not take notice of them as possible leverage over you.
* They don’t mark +1 Obligation to Lean on you with.

Bree Khoroushi

2021-01-01T20:50:15Z

MysteryCat:

'''Bree KHOROUSHI''', an Executive

Feminine, Embroidered wear, strong face, generous eyes, pear-shaped body, Middle Eastern.

[[File:Bree_KHOROUSHI-abort-retry.jpg]]

'''Jam'''

Mandatory contracts from the board. Paid contracts on the side.

* Mad +1 / Peaceful -1
* Sad +1 / Joyful 0
* Scared 0 / Powerful +2

==Beliefs==

* First offer an open hand. Second, a fist. Third, a blade.
* The system breaks those who oppose it.
* Build anew, don’t burn it all down.

'''The Board'''

McCarthy Bradford is one of the world’s premiere independent audit, oversight and compliance service providers. From financial to ethical to regulatory matters, MCB offer uncompromising standards, unflinching attention to detail, and an innovative context-driven methodology.

* Anytime anything is lucrative, no matter the affiliations, they take it.(+1 Capital)
* They are the middle men between megacorporations (-1 Capital)

'''Power'''

You were born into it, it’s the family business/money. Bree’s mother Niamh is a cousin of MCB’s current chairman, and a non-executive shareholder in the company.

'''Gear'''

* 4 cred
* Hidden jamming blades (1 Harm hand infinite jamming)

'''Cybernetics'''

* Eye (Recording, Multi-spectrum, HUD. Causes headaches)
* Ear (Amplification, Recording, Intercepting. Distracting)
* Arm (Storage. Reduced sensation)
* Interface (Encrypted, Multitask. Corporate spyware)
* Chest (Gland implant; skin excretes paralytic neurotoxin. 2 S-Harm. Involuntary)

I owe Obligation to the company for my 'ware.

'''Obligation'''

* Bree has 1 Obligation on Isaac, because she pulled him out of the Veil as a potentially useful asset. He also has 1 Obligation on Bree, because he did some digging in an attempt to level the playing field, and found evidence she was skimming from MCB accounts. Whether she knows he knows, I'm not sure...!
* Bree has 1 Obligation on Keiko; she was involved in an audit on Ishtar, and had access to the files on her parents' company and Symbiote II.* Bree has 1 Obligation on Erik; she uses him as an exclusive asset for her off-book contracts, occasionally.
* (tentative) Helga has 2 obligation on Bree; the Empath used the Flow to comfort Bree through a difficult life event, and in the process discovered something of her past that could put her status at the corp in jeopardy.

'''Moves'''

''QUARTERLIES''
At the beginning of the session, or whenever you have completed your mandatory contracts from the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board assigns 2 mandatory contracts, both of your choosing. On a 7–9, the board assigns 3 mandatory contracts, 1 of your choosing. On a miss, the board assigns 3 contracts that the MC will choose. The board then gives you funds for every contract up front and expects that it be done in the amount of time described by the MC.

''TPS REPORTS''
When you do not complete a contract by the deadline given by the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board is displeased but you describe the circumstances and they grant you clemency. On a 7–9, the MC crosses out one of the agendas of the board for next session, they choose. On miss, they cross out one agenda on top of whatever the MC tells you.
''

THE EXECUTIVE SPECIAL''
When the Executive shares a moment of intimacy with someone, be it physical or emotional, roll without adding a State. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose only one.

* The board does not take notice of them as possible leverage over you.
* They don’t mark +1 Obligation to Lean on you with.

File:Bree KHOROUSHI-abort-retry.jpg

2021-01-01T20:49:46Z

MysteryCat:

Bree Khoroushi

2021-01-01T20:44:25Z

MysteryCat:

'''Bree KHOROUSHI''', an Executive

Feminine, Embroidered wear, strong face, generous eyes, pear-shaped body, Middle Eastern.

'''Jam'''

Mandatory contracts from the board. Paid contracts on the side.

* Mad +1 / Peaceful -1
* Sad +1 / Joyful 0
* Scared 0 / Powerful +2

==Beliefs==

* First offer an open hand. Second, a fist. Third, a blade.
* The system breaks those who oppose it.
* Build anew, don’t burn it all down.

'''The Board'''

McCarthy Bradford is one of the world’s premiere independent audit, oversight and compliance service providers. From financial to ethical to regulatory matters, MCB offer uncompromising standards, unflinching attention to detail, and an innovative context-driven methodology.

* Anytime anything is lucrative, no matter the affiliations, they take it.(+1 Capital)
* They are the middle men between megacorporations (-1 Capital)

'''Power'''

You were born into it, it’s the family business/money. Bree’s mother Niamh is a cousin of MCB’s current chairman, and a non-executive shareholder in the company.

'''Gear'''

* 4 cred
* Hidden jamming blades (1 Harm hand infinite jamming)

'''Cybernetics'''

* Eye (Recording, Multi-spectrum, HUD. Causes headaches)
* Ear (Amplification, Recording, Intercepting. Distracting)
* Arm (Storage. Reduced sensation)
* Interface (Encrypted, Multitask. Corporate spyware)
* Chest (Gland implant; skin excretes paralytic neurotoxin. 2 S-Harm. Involuntary)

I owe Obligation to the company for my 'ware.

'''Obligation'''

* Bree has 1 Obligation on Isaac, because she pulled him out of the Veil as a potentially useful asset. He also has 1 Obligation on Bree, because he did some digging in an attempt to level the playing field, and found evidence she was skimming from MCB accounts. Whether she knows he knows, I'm not sure...!
* Bree has 1 Obligation on Keiko; she was involved in an audit on Ishtar, and had access to the files on her parents' company and Symbiote II.* Bree has 1 Obligation on Erik; she uses him as an exclusive asset for her off-book contracts, occasionally.
* (tentative) Helga has 2 obligation on Bree; the Empath used the Flow to comfort Bree through a difficult life event, and in the process discovered something of her past that could put her status at the corp in jeopardy.

'''Moves'''

''QUARTERLIES''
At the beginning of the session, or whenever you have completed your mandatory contracts from the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board assigns 2 mandatory contracts, both of your choosing. On a 7–9, the board assigns 3 mandatory contracts, 1 of your choosing. On a miss, the board assigns 3 contracts that the MC will choose. The board then gives you funds for every contract up front and expects that it be done in the amount of time described by the MC.

''TPS REPORTS''
When you do not complete a contract by the deadline given by the board, roll+Capital. On a 10+, the board is displeased but you describe the circumstances and they grant you clemency. On a 7–9, the MC crosses out one of the agendas of the board for next session, they choose. On miss, they cross out one agenda on top of whatever the MC tells you.
''

THE EXECUTIVE SPECIAL''
When the Executive shares a moment of intimacy with someone, be it physical or emotional, roll without adding a State. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose only one.

* The board does not take notice of them as possible leverage over you.
* They don’t mark +1 Obligation to Lean on you with.

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2021-01-01T20:16:45Z

MysteryCat: Corrected image link

Sakinah/Stillwater (Gnoll)

[[File:Bleeding_Heart_Stillwater_1.png]]

Sakinah got to Spire the usual way Gnolls get to Spire - as a prisoner of war. Of course, that was just an elaborate Gnollish Intelligence operation to get her into place within a militarily-oriented Aelfir household - the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountains - where she could report back on logistics and so forth, and perhaps even subtly influence things (depending on her ability to make herself valuable and/or her captors exotic predilections).

She doesn't know how she got caught. Maybe someone turned. Maybe magic. Maybe she just wasn't a very good spy. Whatever it was, they sniffed her out. Said they had a very different mission in mind. And then, smiling, they introduced her to the Mask of Obedient Servitude.

Down in Derelictus, sniffing around the blood-wet edges of the Heart for any sign of the Aelfir's lost scion, she was little more than a clockwork servant. Until the bees found her, and offered her a deal. Now she is herself again. But then again, not...

=Questions=
• Who, or what, are your masters?
Aelfir nobility; in the general, the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain. In the specific, Barienna Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, withered matriarch of that house.

• What do your masters want?
The safe return of Fenii Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, Barienna’s third child and only (surviving) son. He went into exile several years ago, after a misunderstanding involving the son (or was it daughter?) of Archdeacon Many-The-Seedlings, who sits on Spire’s ruling Council. The last the family heard of him was a garbled message left by his loyal retainer and bodyguard Antonio Quinn, saying they were heading into the undercity to restore his honour by hunting down… well, it sounded like nonsense, frankly. But Fenii always did have a dramatic streak. In time, once the fuss died down, he could have quietly returned to Amaranth. There was simply no need for such overblown gestures. And really? Everyone (or everyone who counts, at least) knows there’s no such thing as Angels.

• How are your masters maintaining power over you?
The Mask of Obedient Servitude, a brass and clockwork horror fused directly with Sakinah’s skull. Bars encage her face. Brass filaments inscribed with tiny sigils wind down to infiltrate the vertebrae at the base of the neck. And a rough loop of hemp twists around her throat, winding ever tighter with the faintest tick-tick-tick. They told her they can see through her eyes, if they choose. She dare not doubt it.

• How do your masters contact you?
Through the mask itself; their voice grinds appallingly in the very bones of her skull, leaving Sakinah with a splitting headache and renewed hatred.

• Choose another player character. They have history with your masters too. What’s their relationship?
Looking like this is Plum

=Class=
Deep Apiarist

=Protections=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Stress=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Fallout=

==Core Abilities==
'''The Hive''' ''The sweetlings nest within your body.'' Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never benefit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.

'''Release the Swarm''' ''You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you.'' Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4 (upgraded to D6, Spread, Ranged; See '''Delirium Spike''').

==Major Abilities==
'''Delirium Spike''' ''The sacred majesty of the Hive fills you with fizzing, unstable power.'' The stress inflicted by your RELEASE THE SWARM ability increases to D6. The first time you inflict stress using RELEASE THE SWARM in a situation, add your Mind stress to the stress inflicted on the target. After the action is resolved, reduce your Mind stress to 0. This supersedes the normal limitations on removing Mind stress outlined in THE HIVE.

==Minor Abilities==
'''A Perfect Machine''' ''You see that cogs, gears and engines are just echoes of the infinite, staggering majesty that is the Hive.'' Gain the Technology domain. Given time, you can repair technological devices even if you don’t have the right parts: you synthesise them from wax and extruded bone.

'''Intoxicant''' ''Pheromone glands pucker and blossom on your wrists and neck; you are alluring, irresistible, almost soporific.'' Gain the Compel skill. Once per session, when you talk to someone for five minutes or more, you convince them to revert to their basest impulses. They become driven solely by lust, hunger or a need for shelter – whichever they desire most right now.

'''Many Eyes''' ''Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight.'' Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.

=Calling=
Forced

=Active Beats=
• Perform a seemingly unconnected action for your masters that has grim consequences.

• Do a favour for someone to gain leverage over them.

==Fulfilled Beats==

=Traits=

==Skills==
Mend

Compel

Discern

==Domains==
'''Occult'''

'''Technology'''

==Resources==
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar (D6 Occult, Fragile)

==Equipment==
Hive Tool (Kill D4, Brutal)

Dimensional Barometer (Delve D6)

The Mask of Obedient Servitude

A book of unsolved mathematical equations. Originally intended for passing or decyphering messages, the Aelfir gave it back to her with a spiteful smirk, when they sent her down into Heart. Or at least she imagines they did. Behind those masks, who can tell?

Knotted weave of string that describes your grandmother. Grand-damm Aaeedah was a magnificent bitch, a towering figure of a woman who rules over her vastly extended clan with a honey-smeared claw; sweet, but nasty. Sakinah doesn't know what happened to her - she was just gone, one day, and nobody would speak of her except to flinch and gesture towards the shadows as if to ward off evil.

HtCB The Bleeding Heart:Main Page: Sakinah

2020-12-29T20:58:01Z

MysteryCat: /* Equipment */

Sakinah/Stillwater (Gnoll)

[[File:Bleeding_Heart_Sakinah.png]]

Sakinah got to Spire the usual way Gnolls get to Spire - as a prisoner of war. Of course, that was just an elaborate Gnollish Intelligence operation to get her into place within a militarily-oriented Aelfir household - the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountains - where she could report back on logistics and so forth, and perhaps even subtly influence things (depending on her ability to make herself valuable and/or her captors exotic predilections).

She doesn't know how she got caught. Maybe someone turned. Maybe magic. Maybe she just wasn't a very good spy. Whatever it was, they sniffed her out. Said they had a very different mission in mind. And then, smiling, they introduced her to the Mask of Obedient Servitude.

Down in Derelictus, sniffing around the blood-wet edges of the Heart for any sign of the Aelfir's lost scion, she was little more than a clockwork servant. Until the bees found her, and offered her a deal. Now she is herself again. But then again, not...

=Questions=
• Who, or what, are your masters?
Aelfir nobility; in the general, the house of Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain. In the specific, Barienna Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, withered matriarch of that house.

• What do your masters want?
The safe return of Fenii Clouds-Hide-The-Pale-Mountain, Barienna’s third child and only (surviving) son. He went into exile several years ago, after a misunderstanding involving the son (or was it daughter?) of Archdeacon Many-The-Seedlings, who sits on Spire’s ruling Council. The last the family heard of him was a garbled message left by his loyal retainer and bodyguard Antonio Quinn, saying they were heading into the undercity to restore his honour by hunting down… well, it sounded like nonsense, frankly. But Fenii always did have a dramatic streak. In time, once the fuss died down, he could have quietly returned to Amaranth. There was simply no need for such overblown gestures. And really? Everyone (or everyone who counts, at least) knows there’s no such thing as Angels.

• How are your masters maintaining power over you?
The Mask of Obedient Servitude, a brass and clockwork horror fused directly with Sakinah’s skull. Bars encage her face. Brass filaments inscribed with tiny sigils wind down to infiltrate the vertebrae at the base of the neck. And a rough loop of hemp twists around her throat, winding ever tighter with the faintest tick-tick-tick. They told her they can see through her eyes, if they choose. She dare not doubt it.

• How do your masters contact you?
Through the mask itself; their voice grinds appallingly in the very bones of her skull, leaving Sakinah with a splitting headache and renewed hatred.

• Choose another player character. They have history with your masters too. What’s their relationship?
Looking like this is Plum

=Class=
Deep Apiarist

=Protections=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Stress=
Blood 
Mind 
Echo 
Fortune 
Supplies 

=Fallout=

==Core Abilities==
'''The Hive''' ''The sweetlings nest within your body.'' Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never benefit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.

'''Release the Swarm''' ''You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you.'' Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4 (upgraded to D6, Spread, Ranged; See '''Delirium Spike''').

==Major Abilities==
'''Delirium Spike''' ''The sacred majesty of the Hive fills you with fizzing, unstable power.'' The stress inflicted by your RELEASE THE SWARM ability increases to D6. The first time you inflict stress using RELEASE THE SWARM in a situation, add your Mind stress to the stress inflicted on the target. After the action is resolved, reduce your Mind stress to 0. This supersedes the normal limitations on removing Mind stress outlined in THE HIVE.

==Minor Abilities==
'''A Perfect Machine''' ''You see that cogs, gears and engines are just echoes of the infinite, staggering majesty that is the Hive.'' Gain the Technology domain. Given time, you can repair technological devices even if you don’t have the right parts: you synthesise them from wax and extruded bone.

'''Intoxicant''' ''Pheromone glands pucker and blossom on your wrists and neck; you are alluring, irresistible, almost soporific.'' Gain the Compel skill. Once per session, when you talk to someone for five minutes or more, you convince them to revert to their basest impulses. They become driven solely by lust, hunger or a need for shelter – whichever they desire most right now.

'''Many Eyes''' ''Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight.'' Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.

=Calling=
Forced

=Active Beats=
• Perform a seemingly unconnected action for your masters that has grim consequences.

• Do a favour for someone to gain leverage over them.

==Fulfilled Beats==

=Traits=

==Skills==
Mend

Compel

Discern

==Domains==
'''Occult'''

'''Technology'''

==Resources==
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar (D6 Occult, Fragile)

==Equipment==
Hive Tool (Kill D4, Brutal)

Dimensional Barometer (Delve D6)

The Mask of Obedient Servitude

A book of unsolved mathematical equations. Originally intended for passing or decyphering messages, the Aelfir gave it back to her with a spiteful smirk, when they sent her down into Heart. Or at least she imagines they did. Behind those masks, who can tell?

Knotted weave of string that describes your grandmother. Grand-damm Aaeedah was a magnificent bitch, a towering figure of a woman who rules over her vastly extended clan with a honey-smeared claw; sweet, but nasty. Sakinah doesn't know what happened to her - she was just gone, one day, and nobody would speak of her except to flinch and gesture towards the shadows as if to ward off evil.

File:Bleeding Heart Stillwater 1.png

2020-12-29T20:52:21Z

MysteryCat:

AfterRagnarok:The Mythic

2019-01-28T20:45:33Z

MysteryCat:

== Loki #65 ==

In the angular space where three ancient school buses meet, yellow paint scored and blasted by the elements, a skald is telling of the end of the world. A pale woman, veiled, layered in furs, she sways as she lists the gods and their deaths.

Fenrir breaks free and kills Odin. Thor and the Midgard Serpent kill each other. Loki turns on the Aesir and he and Heimdall kill each other. Surtr sets Asgard and Bifrost on fire and kills Freyr.

The Nine Worlds burn, and plunge into boiling sea.

"All this has gone before," she says, and her head raises as you pass. Beneath the veil, her eyes glitter. "All this is yet to come."

She has a modest audience, less than a dozen. The desperate, the hopeless, the mad. But they sway in time, and moan as the verses pour from her lips, and something in their eyes is fire.

On and through, and the day grows colder still. There's a frost in the air now, on the lips, on the tongue. Bokkr wraps his face, breath freezing on the thin cloth of a child's scarf adorned with a raging green jötunn. Fenrir just snorts, but ice crystals glitter in his beard.

== Draghi #95 ==

the rattle of runestones announce the presence of an oracle. A pale, beardless young man sits cross-legged in the corridor between a fishmonger and a carver of strange, wooden trinkets. Before him, a circle of runes carved into the concrete promise truth, insight and binding fate. The young man is slumped a little, an elbow on his knee, idly pushing the stones around the circle with one finger of the other hand. He looks up, right at you, and his mouth is bruised and bloody. "You seek your fortune?" he says, a little hopefully.

"Er, yeah." He shows the scrap of cloth that Surtr had dropped. "The one who carried this troubles me. I would learn whether his wyrd is entangled with mine, but I'm not.." he lets the sentence trail off for fear of offending the other. "Can you guide me?

The boy looks a little unprepared for an answer in the positive, but he recovers well. "Yes! Yes, certainly." He waves for you to sit, turning and shuffling aside to make room for you out of the corridor's occasional traffic. Scrabbling among the pouches and rune-carved boxes, he produces a cheap scrap goblet with a little cry of triumph. The other hand opens towards you. "Fire?" he says hopefully. "For me, and for the knowing."

Dragi holds out a bit of treasure -- some matches, a lump of amber -- for the boy to see, then closes his hand when the boy reaches for it. "Know this. I have danced without legs and slept in lost cities and driven a thousand clicks with a corpse for a passenger. Do not think to impress me with rolled-up eyes and foaming mouth. I will know, and I will beat you, and I will name you to the market boss as a fraud and cheat and watch them crush you beneath cold stones."

Dragi isn't actually confident of any of these things, but he likes to make a first impression. "But for a true seeing, fairly given, this is yours, and more later as may be." He opens his hand again, warning given, and lets the boy take his payment. "Are mushrooms involved?" The little red fly-cap mushroom was a staple of religious life in Tyrs Hafn, and he emphatically doesn't miss it.
To give the boy credit, he seems to take the threat in his stride. "I'm no charlatan," he says, with a hint of pride in his raspy voice. "I learned the runes from Gosti Finehair, who learned them from Skoffir Twice-Burned, who learned them from Magda the Crone, who learned them hanging from the Ash. My seeing is true if you are."

He drew himself up as he spoke, and now slumps a little, coughing. But he nods and takes the payment, making most of it vanish.

"Mushrooms," the boy's eyes widen, as he strikes a match on the roughened side of the scrapweld goblet. "Damn. What I could do with some mushrooms..."

He drops the match into the goblet, and fire flares up with a puff of sharp, resinous smoke. He breathes deep of the fumes, and thrusts the cup in your face for you to do the same. The stink makes your eyes water, and as you breathe deep the flames of the candles around you seem to start to twinkle and dance like stars above. "Spit," the boy commands, and when you look at him his pale hair seems to bristle and glitter like gold.

He spits into the goblet after you, then shakes in a pouch of pale, rune-carved knucklebones that clatter dully as they fall. "Hear me, Odin," he begins to chant, stirring the woodash and spittle with a gnarled finger of yew that seems to flex and writhe slowly in his hand. "All-Father, I name you. Wanderer, spear shaker, thronesitter, wise one, gallows-lord, drinker of the draught of knowledge, rune-singer, one-eye. I name you with your names. I call you with your names. Odin! Woden! Wednesday! In Hel's silent hall - hear my song! Throw off death's veil, Lord! Call down the shaking rainbow! And let. Us. Pass!"

With that he casts the runes clattering across the floor between you.

Right after inhaling a lungful of the intoxicating smoke, Dragi remembers how much he hates this mystical shit. Life is not so beautiful that one needs to see it laid out in front of the eyes like a map, but here it is, staring back at him from the runestones, Fehu the fire and Uruz the Ox, and most of all Tiwaz, the god's rune, pointing at his heart like an arrow shot from the bow of justice. He hears people talk about what they see in the great blizzard of the world, and some joke about ice maidens and white bears, but Dragi has travelled the blizzard many times and he knows. It is a long cold wandering among the dead, with only one's sins for company and no prospect of rescue.

The bones rattle across the cold concrete, skittering to a halt. The boy leans forward to study their pattern. There is Raidō, the journey, nestled close beside Tiwaz. Here are Kaunan and Hagalaz, flanking a face-down stone as though in escort. The boy reaches down dreamlike and turns over the stone.

Ūruz. The lamentation of the clouds. The ruin of the harvest. The abomination of the shepherd.

"Curious," the boy says, and his voice is strangely doubled. When you look up at him, another face is looking down at you. A face impossibly old, stern and noble. The boy towers over you, you realise. The hand that holds the runestone is a mailed fist, clenched tight, thrust into the mouth of a wolf. There is a sword in the other, held hilt-up like a cross, blood running down the blade from too tight a grip. The point rests heavy on the ground, sunk deep into the earth.

There is chanting, voices in the swirling blizzard.

''—an axe age, a sword age
shields are riven
a wind age, a wolf age
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another''

Molten fire is bubbling up through the wound in the Earth, smoking around the point of the sword. Dark figures rise up with it, marching beside the flow of fire, directing its sweep across the land. Fish Hold burns. Splitsville burns. The nine towns become furnaces, places of raging flame, swirling smoke - ashes, only ashes. Nine worlds and all their people all burn, all the world. In Forge Surtr sits laughing on a throne, and he too holds a sword, but this one is burning, burning bright. Its flames lick at the fringes of the shadowed woods.

The wolf catches your eye, and bites down hard. The boy screams, pulls back a torn and mangled wrist. "We see you," the wolf declares, licking blood from scrapweld fangs. "Run all you like, there's no escaping Fate."

It grins, and shimmers like heat haze. "Where is Summer?" It says, in Surtr's voice, and its face is Surtr's now. Behind steel spectacles, fire burns in his eyes. You reach for the sword in the boy's bloody hand, but it withers and is consumed by frost. "Too bad," the Jötunn says, in a voice like the crackle of a diesel engine, and he raises his flaming sword.

The blade sweeps down, and you feel its heat.

You feel the heat. Around you, shouting, chaos. The boy sat across from you is a column of flame, writhing silently. You can smell him cooking as you scrabble away. The charm-carver is wailing, begging for the gods protection. The oracle's other market-neighbour, the fishmonger, quick-thinkingly empties a bucket of ice over the boy, dousing much of the flames.

The boy collapses, and the fishmonger beats out the last flickering fires that play over him with a heavy oilskin.

The boy groans weakly, blood and meltwater pooled around him. His shirt has melted, fused with his skin. His face is turned away from you, which seems a mercy, but his hair is all but gone, his scalp red and black in equal measure. His right arm ends at the wrist, in a mess of soot and blood.

You become aware of a throb in the palm of your hand. One of the bones is clenched there; it crumbles to hot white dust as you open your hand, and falls through your fingers like the softest snow. Your whole palm is a blister, but burned into the web between thumb and forefinger are three dark lines. The rune Fehu; fire of the sea.

"What in Hel's name happened?" the fishmonger challenges you. A small crowd has gathered to observe the spectacle. You can still smell the boy's burning flesh.

"I saw it!" The woodcarver says. "He burned like the wrath of god!"

"Bullshit," one of the crowd snorts, a woman in fire-stained leathers. "A lamp or something fell on him. From up there." She points at the ledge hacked into the wall above your heads, every inch of it filled with candles and other lightbringers.

"There was no lamp, fool," the woodcarver snaps at her. "His blasphemies have displeased the gods!" He fixes you with a wild eye. "You! The eye of Odin is on you now! Cower! Cower!"

== Ylva. #354 ==

You walk in a valley of dust and ash, and the snow is falling softly. No, not a valley, a riverbed; long dried up and gone. To the east, far to the east along the length of the riverbed, where the mountains rise, the scar of a once-great torrent is clearly carved. At its base, where a pool once glittered deepest blue, a vast dark emptiness.

Ahead of you a wall, as tall of the mountains. Scarred and torn by weapons of war. Its highest battlements crumbling. The great gate hangs open, not broken but unlocked.

You pass through, and the hall stands before you. Beneath the ash and snow, still it glitters – but the roof is long collapsed, the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it up rotting at the edges of a great dark hole.

Each of the 540 doors is flung open, and you enter in. The hall is dark, the floor thick with ash; the ruins of one last great feast still mouldering on the tables. Among the rotting benches, rust-ruined breastplates are strewn all about.

From the throne at the high table, a figure watches. Broad-hatted, cloaked in grey, a spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders – a mockery, you somehow sense. Trembling, you approach. Shadows hood his face, but his beard is long and grey.

You step up onto the dais, raise the broad brim of the hat to look upon his face. The dead flesh is withered, a dried husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisted in shock, dismay. As if faced with a fate unplanned for.

“Who’s there?” a voice rings out, quavering and weak. “The einherjar have marched… and no valkyr remain to choose.”

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might.

“Hel? Have you come to torment me again?”

Ylva feels strangely calm and speaks without fear.

"I'm not Hel, though I may be due to meet her soon."

She touches the place where the exit wound should be.

"I think I've been murdered for greed and pride, and I don't know if I'm coming back from it."

"You are dead?" the huge man says, in his quavering old man voice. He shuffles closer, emerging into the dim grey light that enters the hall through the broken-backed roof overhead. He is huge indeed, vastly muscled despite his age. And blind in truth, eyes white and staring. He shakes his head. "No. The dead no longer come to this place. The bodies of the einherjar lie where they fell, out on the field. There are no more - and none to choose them. Until..."

He tails off, and you can read a thousand sorrows on his face. "Come here," he says finally, and raises one massive hand - strangely gentle - towards your face. "Come here, and let me get a look at you."
Ylva hesitates, as a very early swims to the surface, a drunk man (her father?) whispers "Never trust the fucking gods". Is this man a god? Aren't they all dead? Either way...

Either way he seems harmless enough, and she's already dead. Or...

"Dead, or dying. Got my insides on the outside and enemies all around in any case."

Then she makes a decision and crosses the distance between them, leading his hand to her face.

The blind man - the god? - brushes your face with heavy, scarred, slablike fingers. Each of his hands is big enough to wrap around your whole face. He pauses as one finger explores the scars around your eye, and you see something like fear on his broad, craggy face. "No," he mutters finally, and his hands move on. "Hmm."

His hands brush your neck, your shoulders, your breasts - it should feel like an outrage, but somehow there's no sense of violation, of malign intent, to it - and move on. One hand pauses at your side. "Here," he says, pressing a huge palm hard into your abdomen, and you give a gasp of pain. "Mortal indeed."

The other hand traces back up your spine, to the nape of your neck, running clumsily through your rough-cut hair. He pauses, heavily lips pursing. "Wait." His fingers move round to the unmarked side of your face, above your ear. His face is grave. "This ain't right..."

And you scream as he pushes a heavy finger into the hole in your skull. Again. You feel him fishing around in your head, in your mind. Memories from what passed for your childhood. Your first love. "Almost..."

You remember laughing with the others as your brother raises his spear. The whisperer at his shoulder, always with that sly smile.

You don't have a brother.

"Wait..." the blind god in Odin's hall is pale as he draws out... something, pinched between two bloody fingers. You nearly sag to your knees, but his other hand grips your arm tight. He's wiping the thing on his ash-smeared tunic, blood.

A spearpoint. Fire-hardened wood.

The god is pale, staring at the thing he holds. "No, no, no." He releases your arm and you drop, forgotten, head and guts alive with pain. The hall swims around you, gloom deepening into true dark.

"Baldur?"
In the dream, you lie in a ship with a great curved prow, the fire all around you. A dead man stands at the helm, his eyes on the horizon. Behind you, on the beach, a score of figures; hooded, cloaked, weeping.

Ahead, far ahead across the storm-tossed sea, a grey and dreary shore.

Hel is waiting.

== Miekke #419 ==

(Gerda’s painting)
Gerda tugs, and the cloth falls in one heavy slump to the floor.

Below, a forest scene. Trees pressed in close on all sides, heavy and oppressive, rising beyond the frame of the canvas. Dark runes slashed into dark wood.

Three woman gathered at the side of a pool, watching a fourth figure - pale, bloody of face and hand - as it kneels beside the water. Around one out-thrust hand, the water boils red.

Intricate ropes of gold wind around the pale skin, the bare head. The face lined with pain and weariness beneath a mask of blood. But in the one eye is captured... something profound. Realisation. Awareness. Horror. All of these are there, in the strokes of Gerda's brush.

Behind, from the shadows beneath the trees, something dark and massive watches. A suggestion of scale and claw.

"Not a death this time," Gerda says, and she almost sounds relieved.

"It's beautiful....," Miekke comments, made breathless by the painting. "I... that's just beautiful, Gerda. I don't even know what to say. You've made more of these? Why have I never seen them?"
Gerda nods plainly. "You have," she says. She seems strangely dissatisfied with your response, as if she was expecting something more... profound. Her eyes keep going back and forth between the painting and you, like she's searching for flaws.

In which, you are not sure.

"You have," she says again. "My father hangs them downstairs, some of them at least. The violent ones. I think he likes to imagine what it would've been like to kill a god."
Miekke doesn't really hear Gerda's response. They're staring at the painting, and the eye within the face of pain and weariness engulfs them.
The first thing you know is pain; pain from the eye you plucked out. The second is the smell; the stink of the primal forest, the tall dark trees that gather inhospitable around you. A rich, loamy, leafy smell, undercut with the crispness of pine. There's snow on the branches above you, but down here in the shadows it's cool, not cold. And the water in the well is warm as blood.

The three sit across from you. Your one good eye is bleary, watering; each time you look at them they are sat somewhere different on the rocks. Their faces smear and judder as you try to focus, but you feel sure you know them.

When they speak, their voices blur and blend as their faces do. You think one is speaking, but another's lips move; the voice comes from the place of the third.
"You have sacrificed-"
"-given half the light-
"-of the world;"
"washed yourself white-"
"-so pure-"
"-so pale-"
"-white as the membrane-"
"-the skin that lies inside-"
"-the shell of the egg-"
"-so holy-"
"-so wise you will be-"
"-tell us, far-rider -"
"-wanderer-"
"-yes, tell us-"
"-does it hurt?"
"-no, not that-"
"-no, no-"
"-we know it hurts-"
"-Mimmir told us-"
"-poor Mimmir-"
"-tell us instead-"

One of them is beside you, her hand cool on your shoulder. She draws a ladle forth from the well, brimming with water that seems to shimmer with an inner light. You look up into a face that is clear and dark, a face you recognise. "Do you think it will save you?" she says, as she raises the well-water to your lips.
Miekke looks into the woman's face, wide-eyed, searching for understanding. They're afraid to breathe.

There's a weird sense of discontinuity, of inhabiting another skin. You feel the bonds of fate growing tighter, tighter. Leading you down the path once more... to Ragnarok.

Part of you, the part that is Odin in this place, despairs. You are so weary.

The world must end again... but not yet. Not yet.
"Save me?" AllFather-Miekke croaks, their voice raw and unused. "Do you think that the point of this? It's to save us all."

"I have to try."

That last is only a whisper, as their attention has shifted from speaking to more focused intent as they take the proffered water. Diving into it with the thirst of one seeking to avert Fate, the water is not drunk so much as it is devoured. Impassioned, fully exposed, seeking to digest it all in one raw, exposed moment, with no care for the protection of self. Diving into the deepest of pools, throat first, losing oneself in the sound of the splash as the rich water engulfs the entire person in its embrace.
The water of the well was warm to your hand; but it burns down your throat like magma, floods your being with heat and knowledge. You remember creation, Ragnarok, rebirth; Lif and Lifthrasir, man and woman, sheltering in the branches of Yggdrasill, the world ash, to emerge once more as the world begins again.

But mostly you remember destruction. The winter unending. The jotunn Surtr and his flaming sword. The Fenris-wolf, its teeth closing on your throat. The Nine Worlds descending into fire and death, collapsing into the cold wide void of Ginnungagap, over and over.

The death of everything. Over and over and over.

As fate has decreed.

But you struggle to your feet, lone eye blazing with knowledge. With one hand you reach out and carve a rune into the bark of the towering World-Ash.

ᛉ – Algiz, which means Life. A protection from enemies, a defense of that which one loves.

And Urðr, the weave of destiny... it trembles.

You come back to yourself, and to Gerda hanging onto your wrist, crying "Stop, stop!", and to pain.

The hand Gerda is restraining - your fingers are bloody, and you can feel the mess your nails have made of your cheek, your eye; they pulse with fire with every heartbeat.

You blink, and it's painful enough that you nearly shriek. But your vision clears some; you're not blind. Beyond Gerda, who kneels appalled in front of you, the painting.

The door opens; Urdakott is there. "Hel's black heart," he curses, and it seems aimed at Gerda as much as you. "Cover that damn thing up!" He vanishes back through the door, leaving it hanging open.

Gerda glances back at the painting, from it to you. She releases your hand, throws the patchwork blanket back over the canvas. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't expect..."

Your mind, though, is spinning. The pain from your eye is a little thing, inconsequential beside the revelations that course through you.

You have been here before, time after time.

The pain of the injured flesh is as nothing next to the pain of remembrance. They look at the young girl in front of them, and at the cascade of emotion that inhabits her face and her body.

They stand.

"Show me the others," they command, with the force not of a mesmerizing sword-dancer, but that of... something more.
"I can't," she says. "He put some up, downstairs - the deaths. He likes those. But the others..." She shakes her head. "He burned them."

Gerda looks at you then, and it's clear she's afraid. Not of you, but of what might change. "I'm sorry," she says quietly, miserably. "I just wanted to paint you. What I saw inside you."

== Loki #420 ==

The heart is warm and tough. As you tear at it with your teeth, hot coppery blood fills your mouth, flows down your throat. You feel its warmth fill your stomach.

Above you, the sky grows overcast. So focused on the work of devouring the heart, it's not until the first snowflake brushes your eye that you look up.

Realise you stand alone on a plain of ice.

A cold shadow passes over you. You cannot help but shudder, know it's the cold of death, of eternity on the Corpse Shore among the murderers, the adulterers, the oath-breakers.

And the vast bulk of the worm Níðhöggr crashes to the frozen earth.

You feel the ice shake beneath you as is raises up, shakes itself. Malice Striker, scaled in scabarous blue and grey.

As it turns towards you it stretches out its terrible wings, feathered with the bodies of the inglorious dead.

"Ah," the worm hisses, fixing you with a basilisk eye. You cannot move, cannot speak. "One of mine." Its skull-like head comes forwards on a long sinuous neck, death in the jaws that gape.

"Not yours." A voice behind you. Völva steps from your shadow. "His fate lies elsewhere than Nástrǫnd."

The worm rears its head back, hisses. "Has he not murdered? Has he not broken oaths - is he not planning to break one even now? I can see it wriggling in his mind like a red worm." It writhes, and flaps its wings, and the foul corpse stench rises from its body. "Is the child that nestles beneath your heart not his?"

"The adultery is mine," Völva says, raising her chin as you wonder at her calm. "I will answer it in my own way."

"No," the worm growls. "You will answer it in mine." And one great wing sweeps forward, quick as thought, to brush across Völva - her face, her breasts, her belly - with a terrible gentleness.

She staggers. Sobs. Drops to her knees in the snow. And is gone.

You feel the worm's attention turn back to you, like an avalanche descending.

"Would you too deny me?" Malice Striker purrs, winding its great head towards you. "You, who calls yourself Loki. Hah! Murderer, deceiver - will you deny what you are?"
"I am a wolf, unfathered," Loki answers, before lunging at Malice Striker to rip it to shreds.
The worm rears back hissing as you leap at it, machete swinging. The smell of it is foul, this close - the rotting, inglorious dead.

Your first wild upward blow scrapes on the boney plates of Níðhöggr skull-face, the tip of the blade scoring a line up towards the eye as its head draws back.

It roars, spreads its corpse-hung wings. One heavy foreleg knocks you staggering. You feel the claws bite. Its bulk is over you, its death-cold shadow swallows you. Span-long teeth snap inches from your face. Foul dark ichor runs sluggish from the cut you gave it, beading beneath the eye like a tear.

And your heavy second swing bites deep into one outstretched wing. Tearing through corpse-flesh, ancient bindings, skin and tendon.

Níðhöggr roars again, in dismay and pain. The stink of its breath is the wake of battle, the days-old unburied dead. It recoils from you, hisses. "You are not Loki!"

You advance, grinning, feral. Desperate, it spreads its wings again, leaps at you, past you. Knocking you flat. A crash shakes the ice. You scramble back to your feet, turn. The worm is struggling to rise, wing hanging ragged at its side. It wheels, tail whipping at you. Crashing into your shoulder, tumbling you back to the ice. You rise, blade in hand, blood in your mouth.

"Peace, unfettered!" the worm roars. You sense its desperation. "I mistook you!"

You snarl like the wolf you are.

And Níðhöggr... flinches. Then-

-you are on your back in the snow. The taste of bile in your mouth. Your gang milling, shouting, confused. Hel kneeling beside you. The hilt of a knife between your teeth. Blood and snow and sunshine. And the road.

You try to rise, feel weakness flood you. Where the worm struck, in your shoulder and your hip, flesh and bones are screaming.

Volva lies foetal in the snow a couple of feet away. Pale, shivering. Weeping silently. Agneta squats nearby, watching her worriedly.

"Well," Ketil says, kicking the pile of still-steaming reindeer meat. "I sure ain't eating any of that."

"You... alright, boss?" Hel says. More calculating than concerned.

''Later…''

The fire and the wind. Burning ice, biting flame. And you, caught between them. There's laughter around the fire.

The wolf within you snaps and snarls, struggles to free itself from its fetters. A silken ribbon, strong as iron. You recall the binding, the merriment - the relief - as you strained and snarled and could not work yourself free. The taste of blood, the consequence.

And the expectation. That subtle moment as your fetters... gave. Just a little.

The wolf within looks up, its mouth bloody still. Its eyes promise nothing; only destruction, chaos. A tearing down of things.

The bindings on its jaws are fraying, weakening. It will work itself free, sooner or later.

A slash of your knife could quicken the process.
Focusing in further, Loki imagines his knife—so comfortable in his hand but so clearly of it—and starts to worry at the bindings of the wolf with it. "No chains, inside or out," he mutters as he sets to his work.

The fetters part under the blade of your knife like they'd been waiting for it, and the wolf lunges up. In an eyeblink it has you on your back, your knife off buried in a snowbank somewhere. Mad red eyes stare down into yours, and there's no gratitude there. A low growl rumbles up out from out of its great black body, and the wolf opens its jaws-

Abruptly, with a dreamlike discontinuity, you are surrounded by grazing reindeer. The wolf's head snaps up.

The deer panic, scatter in all directions. Among them, the leaders of the herd; a golden stag with mighty antlers and a sleek, shimmering silver doe.

The wolf leaps off in pursuit. Pauses. "Hunt with me, brother!" it cries over its shoulder. Then it is off, running, jaws gaping against the snow and sky.

With a laughing howl, Loki follows after, chasing with reckless abandon.

The reindeer scatter before you, criss-crossing your path and that of your... packmate? Whatever the huge black wolf is to you, he runs like the wind, jaws gaping, breath wild and ragged. A panicking deer darts across his path and he rakes it open from neck to rump without breaking stride, blood spraying in the snow.

But you are fast, and faster still. Your paws pound the snow as you hit your stride, closing the gap between you. You scent the blood, and it is rapturous. But above and beyond that, your sharp eyes make out the headlong flight of the herd leaders. The stag, proud and golden, its rack of antlers a fearsome weapon - but heavy, and slowing it. Ten strides ahead, the silver doe - quicksilver fast, slippery and wise.

Most of the herd are behind you now - and you are alongside your packmate. Lost in the joy of the hunt. He dwarfs you - a mass of muscle and rage.

But you are no pup even so, a killer, an alpha. Behind you, you sense your pack has joined you; four or five wolves at your back, running hard.

And as your muscles begin to burn, as the two deer begin to veer apart, the hunt truly begins.
Without hesitation, Loki follows after the silver doe, after the true challenge. He has no doubt he could kill the stag in battle after running it down. But to hunt certainties is to not hunt at all.
The doe is fast, and sure-footed in the snow. It jinks through the snowdrifts, and mighty leaps carry it over the deepest drifts as it aims to lose you; while on the ice it seems almost to fly, abandoning cunning for sheer straight-line speed.

it's all you can do to keep up. Your lungs are straining, your muscles roaring with exertion. But you begin to close the gap.

The doe, seeming to sense the race is lost, tacks suddenly, sharply right. Off the ice and towards the copse of dark trees that rises from the edge of the frozen lake.

A desperate move. You can feel the forest's strangeness, its vast, alien indifference to wolves and men alike. Shadows flit between the trees, shapes bigger and more fearsome than any man or wolf.
The hunt is to perfect to give up, Loki presses on, and as the doe makes her desperate turn, he launches himself to take her throat and life.
As the doe turns at bay, you launch yourself at her throat; but you realise mid-air you've misjudged – both your leap, and her determination. She skips nimbly aside, spinning to deliver a double-hoofed kick to the ribs that lifts you off the ground and dumps you gasping in the snow.

Then your pack catch up, and are on her. Bursting through the trees into the clearing, circling her, keeping her turning. Nipping at her rear and flanks as you regain your footing. You join the harassment, and she does her best to keep her face to you, but the constant pressure of the rest of the pack is wearing her down. You can smell her fear, her desperation as she tries to break out but is driven back into the centre of the clearing by the pack's snarling lunges.

One of the wolves darts in, but too slow; she spins, knocking him howling with a sideways butt of the head. There's a gap in the circle as he scrambles.

An opening, an opportunity. She takes it.

And so do you.

This time your leap is true. Your weight staggers her, and your forelegs wrap around her shoulders as the two of you tumble in the snow. She kicks, writhes, but the pack close in tight. You bite and bite, taste quicksilver blood in your mouth, hot and salty. She's on her back, your jaws on her throat.

She goes suddenly still, and in her wide black eye you sense a recognition of the inevitable.
Loki savours the exhilaration and anguish of the hunt for a moment before he closes his jaws to take the life of the beautiful creature.
The doe thrashes once, hooves kicking in the bloody snow. The pack are pacing back and forth; all hungry eyes and hungry jaws. The trees loom dark, pressing in at the edges of the clearing.

There's a moment of intense dislocation, like your heart and mind were suddenly hooked sideways a thousand miles, and you're sitting in the dark. Back in yourself, two legs two arms. The taste of quicksilver blood still rich in your mouth.

Pitch dark, total and entire. No moon, no reflection off the snow. Nothing. You can't remember the last time you were so utterly, utterly blind.

''Later...''

Loki pops a pain pill and swallows it dry, moistening his lips after on a handful of clean(ish) snow. "Anyone who can hobble over for some pain pills, give them. Collect those who are salvageable and load up to make our way to someone that can really patch us up." Loki blinks his eyes and mind as clear as he can, and looks at the sky to try and get his bearings on who would be the best to go to. All the while feeling the howling of the blizzard making promises, promises about better routes to go through the snow, about better destinations. With a snarl, he lets the howling wind in, hoping to clear the cobwebs at the very least.

You open your mind and the blizzard rushes in, and it knows exactly where you should be. Marching among the un-numbered dead; howling as you cut a swath through the einherjar; tasting the all-father's blood on your teeth. This is the Wyrd laid out for you, your fate.

The frost you invited in, it eats away at your mind, your soul, your sense of self. You feel yourself growing indistinct.

Yet something in you speaks out; reminds you, you have a choice. Surrender to fate, or carve your own path. Loki, you named yourself - the deceiver, the betrayer, the rebel. And the voice that rings in your blood and in your bone, it asks: will you earn that name?

Or are you just a wolf?

Loki holds to himself, as agonizing as it is, letting the winds cut through him and then readying himself to push on.

The blizzard blows through you, and it has ice in its teeth. You can feel it driving you, turning you, pushing you in the direction Fate has laid out for you, and you struggle to stand, to hold your ground, to remain Loki.

It takes all your will, your stubbornness, to cling to who you are. And it costs you - every icy gust strips something away. A memory, a dream, a piece of your past. But one image remains, unyielding, though you cannot quite recall what it means. An older man, his beard turning grey, half his face in shadow - a brother? Father? Whoever he is to you, whoever he was, he nods; and you feel his approving hand on your shoulder, callused and heavy.

Something snaps. Like a thread in some great tapestry, it all begins to unravel. You brace...

A drop of liquid strikes your forehead, and you wake. You open your eyes wide with sudden pain as the venom begins to burn. It runs down into one of your eyes, and as half the world goes black you start to scream. Where is Sigyn? High above you, wound through the stalactites that dot the roof of the cave, the serpent hisses with delight. You watch another drop of venom form at the tip of its fangs, all the colours of Bifröst packed into its swelling curve. You hear Sigyn's hurried footsteps, returning with her bowl. Too late, too late. The drop is falling.

And you wake again, in truth.

==Ylva #423 ==

"Your Valkyr brings me," Superior says. "Literally. She broke into my car while I was... asleep... and brought me here against my will. And now she's avoiding me, when I need to speak with her." Her gaze keeps drifting off you to the bottle by your hand, and she licks her lips unconsciously.

"But perhaps..." She looks you in the eye then, and you get the impression that she's gathering her courage. "Perhaps your thread is woven in with hers. Perhaps you share more than a death." She hesitates.
"Were... were you given a message?" she asks, her cracked old voice quavering ever so slightly.
"No message. There's... I saw..."

She shivers, suddenly unsure of how to speak of what she's seen. To describe her... vision, her experience, to a believer is different from telling her friends, her chosen family.

"Someone is still there. A god, or a giant. Blind and bent by sorrow, he seemed."

Her words come in short bursts.

"He seemed alone, but... like he was waiting."

She glances to Camo, then looks Mother Superior in the eye.

"They're not all dead. The world isn't over. There's still hope."
You see Superior go pale at your words. "Hope!?" she stares at you in utter dismay, then slumps against the bar, draining the drink you poured her and snatching the bottle to pour another. "Hope!" She laughs, and it's not a pleasant sound at all.

Camo's expression is comical, eyebrows raised all the way up as he regards the old woodswoman, and he glances at you as if to say what the hell?

"What do you hope for, tell me that? Prosperity? Peace?" She laughs sourly again, and knocks back the drink. Reaches for the bottle.
Ylva snatches the bottle away with well-honed reflexes, then pinches the fingers of her other hand and makes a gesture like striking a match - with her reserves tapped out she can't afford to let anyone drink for free.

"In this world? Nothing so grand. I hope to eat, drink, and fuck another year, and dream to die in a warm bed. Same as everyone."

She stands relaxed, facing Mother Superior squarely.

"But now I have hope for the world after this. It may not be all ice and shadows."

She shrugs, making a gesture that takes in the bar, the hall, the world.

"Maybe we can still get more than this."
Superior's lips purse sourly as you snatch the bottle away; she sweeps one finger round inside the empty glass, sticks the finger in her mouth, sucks the last few drops of booze from it. "Ain't none of going to die in bed," she says, in a voice dead and dull, as she turns back towards the door. "Ain't none of us gonna see the world after this."

She pauses in the doorway. "The gods ain't yet dead," she says, shaking her head. "And you reckon that's cause for hope."

Her bitter, hopeless laugh hangs in the air long time after the door clacks shut behind her.

== Skuld #446 ==

As you open your finger, the forest seems to... come into focus somehow, to sharpen. You sense the weight of its attention, drawn by the spilling of blood. Then you exhale through bloody lips, and as the breath and blood mingles with the wind your mind is snatched up like a rag.

The wind whips through the dense dark trees, and you are drawn along with it. Through the shadows and light that dapple the snow. Through the barbed and tangled undergrowth. Through the scars cut by men, and the fresh wounds where men work still. With trucks and axes and buzzing saws, the thieves. But the wind recoils from something, from the eye that marks them, that burns in the shadows of their minds. Recoils and draws you onwards. Through the hidden clearings where the skogsrå and the huldrefolk dance, through the rookeries and parliaments in the high branches.

The ravens take exception to your intrusion, and tear your mind ragged with beaks and claws until the wind takes you beyond their reach. Takes you over the wall of the town, through the narrow, frozen streets, through the sulphurous steam that clouds the air over Ragnhall, cooling and freezing.

And deposits you back in yourself, exhausted and ravaged by a sudden splitting headache.

Even so, you sense all is not as it was.

A shadow detaches itself from the base of a nearby pine. "You have returned to us, systir." The hulder is beautiful, pale as milk and moving with sinuous grace as she crosses the clearing towards you. "Will you stay, this time?

For a moment she is confused - she feels the sharp pain from the wounds inflicted by the beaks and claws of the ravens, the gashes in her face. Reaching up to wipe away the blood, though, her fingers come off clean. The pain is still there, but the wounds not of this world. She blinks, almost reeling, as the shape of the huldra detaches itself from the pine.

Its´ words hit something inside of her - touches an emptiness at the center of her heart. Makes her feel naked, skinless. She backs off one step, then another - her hand going inside the coat, fingers closing on the taped handle of the stubnosed revolver, her memento from the market massacre.

"I don´t know you." Her voice is sharp, but lacks the hard weight of conviction.

There's a moment of disconnection, sharp and jarring, and the world seems to lurch sideways. You remember hanging from the tree, your blood pooling in the snow below you. The ravens that perched on your shoulder; their beady black eyes inquisitive, speculative, as they regarded you. Snatches of thought and memory return to you. The girl you were. Your life, your name. Your death, and what was taken from you. Odin, eyes glittering beneath the brim of his wide grey hat, laying a rune upon your brow. The arms of the hulder, the tree-spirit, as you hung from her branches.

Those same slim arms embrace you again.

Then rougher, thicker arms are around you, restraining, roughly shaking you. "Hey! Hey! Get a hold of yourself!"

Zeds.

The girl walks through the God-Chamber, bare feet on smooth stone. The runes on her bare skin is painted with blood, carriers of great power. The chamber is immense around her, and the light from the lanterns so very far behind now. In the darkness around her, faint glints of steel and dark glass from the sleeping giants. Sound doesn´t move through teh air as it should - some of them seem to reverberate forever in the immense space, others are swallowed entirely by its´ cold and stale air.

Her voice, as she speaks, is dry but quickly finds strength and traction. As she speaks the words, raises her hands, there is a humming sound from all around her. Panes of glass flicker and wake, bathing the chamber in light. Motes of dust dance all around her as she raises her arms and calls out to -

Zed barely has time to register what happens - Skuld´s leg hooks around his with snake-like speed, and the air is pushed out of him as he slams into the ground, cutting off his words and the yell that tried to form into a thin wheeze. She has twisted around, landing hard on top of him with an arm across his throat, one of her knees pushing down on his gun-arm as it twitches weakly in muscle memory and makes an attempt to move. Before he can fucking blink, there is a blade pointing at his eye and the valkyrie´s own pale pair stares into him with a fury that chills his bones.

Her lips peel back from her teeth as she hisses.
"Who the fuck do you think you´re touching?"

''Later...''

"We see what you are, Skuld." She makes an odd gesture, drawing the V of forefinger and thumb over her eyes and thrusting them at you, and the other two copy it. "Valkyr. Draugr. We see you. You would ask us to lend strength to your arm? Your war?"

"Your promise," the other woman interjects, as smoothly as if they spoke as one. "Your promise to look past us without seeing, when the sword-din rises."
She is not sure whether to laugh at the man or smack out a few of his teeth to make him appreciate the gravity of the situation - to some extent this goes for all of them. Their words take some of the fire out of her blood, though; makes it easier to cool it, to soften edges that want to be sharp. Part of her wants to ask more, to tear at the morsels of revelation.

Instead she straightens up, lends weight rather than rage to her voice.
"Lend your arms to my war, woodcutters, and when the storm is upon us I´ll look past you." Her voice drops just a little. "Fate-mark, crow-mark, death-mark, I´ll look past. That is where it ends, though. I can´t keep you from getting a bullet to the face if you go act stupid."

She peeels of a glove, spits in her snow-white hand; there´s a touch of steam as she holds it out to seal the pact.
"Still, it is a whole lot more than anyone else gets."
"When it all comes down, we'll hold you to that," he says, and tugs off his own glove.

----

== Miekke #597 ==

You prowl through Surtr's mansion, wincing occasionally as an unguarded movement tugs at the wound in your side; Eir clearly knows what she's doing, but even with expert care a gunshot is not to be dismissed.

The suite where you were laid to rest is in the northern end of the villa, closest to the steel works and to the Scrapyard; you find a window in a stairwell which looks out north, across a slice of town that might seem almost picturesque but for the dull, ruddy glow of the steelworks, which gives the snow a hellish aspect - as if blood had been poured across the town, and pooled on the roofs and in the spaces between buildings. You look down on Forge, and wonder why you've never noticed before - is it the elevation, your new and lofty position?

No, you realise, as you look further out. Beyond the light of the furnaces, and the occasional desperate trashfire in the Scrapyard. the world is utterly dark.

The sky is clear, stars twinkling like little touches of frost. Where is the moon? You frown, count backwards; no, it should be waxing nearly full.

Where is the moon?

The reflected glow of the steelworks on the snow paints a swathe of the stairwell ruddy, and Miekke's white skin canvas. It's a beautiful sight, though too reminiscent of Brokkr's workshop.

Not really thinking about it, upon wondering at the missing moon Miekke lifts the flap of their eye patch up and gazes at the sky with their injured eye. It's only as they feel it between their fingers that they realize they were wearing an eye patch.... curious.

The ruddy light of the forge floods everything, making even the sky a crime scene. The stars twinkle red like bloody jewels, turning as the world turns. Simulataneously they inch across the sky and roar through the cosmos; simultaneously glitter prettily and burn with a power like nothing in all nine worlds.

A great golden stag broaches the horizon, curling up into the sky and dimming the light of the stars. It is running hard, nostrils flaring, chest pumping like bellows. There's a note of wild panic in its eyes.

You hear the howls before you see the wolves. The hunters on its tail. The bigger of the two, black and vast and hungry-looking, a shadow against the blood-red sky, snaps at the heels of its prey.

The second wolf, muzzle bloodied with silver. Slower, weighed down with a full belly, yet its yellow eyes are bright and keen. And its teeth are just as sharp.

They will catch him, you know. In time. But today the stag escapes them, slipping below the horizon, and the blood-splashed stars prick the night again, twinking ruby and silver. The wolves slow to a trot, and the second raises its bloody muzzle to howl...

Then the first wolf turns, and notices you, and the force of its regard blasts and shreds you like the worst winter gale. It is all wolves, all monsters, all bad men, the destroyers and the ravagers and the enemies of hope. It is Fenrir, and Garm, and Sköll, and Hati, and Urdakott, and that smiling psychopath Loki, who left you out on the ice.

And then a face pushes forward, through the fading image of the wolf. Surtr.

He looks down at you, eyes flat behind the discs of his spectacles, and you realise you're on the floor. "When we found your bed empty," he says, in his bass growl, "We thought you had fled."

There's a question there. And perhaps, perhaps, something like relief.

== Ylva and Skuld #603 ==

there, sure enough, something moves. Crossing the breadth of the street to the base of the steps, it seems to flicker between forms. Now a man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery; now a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; now a wolf crouched low, scenting the trail, its coat painted in in blue and grey.

Abruptly, Skuld is seized by a chill. Your own footprints are clear – dashed lines through the otherwise unbroken snow.

But this...?

It leaves no prints at all.
BANG BANG
The bullet tears through Skuld's target, vanishing into the snow behind with a puff of white. It staggers. The man, the wolf, they look up at you, with eyes bright blue and hungry.

Then there is only the long-dead corpse, already stiff as it topples sideways.

Snow begns to cover it almost instantly.

Silence returns to the city; your breath, your heartbeats, are the only sound you can hear. Your every nerve is wired, awake to any sound, any flicker of movement.

But there is only the gentle fall of snow.

== Freyr #662 ==

You remember... a stage. An impression of movement, lithe and irresistably compelling. The raw emotion, the urgent, confusing need which flooded a mind just emerging from childhood. And with that emotion, you are there. A boy again, staring up at the pale gold-scribed creature as they dance above the sword, as they spin and form graceful shapes. Not much older than you, really, but so far beyond, so far removed, as to be like touching the sun. You can smell the people around you. Hear the faint whipping thrum of the dart-and-rope as Miekke weaves it about them. See the sheen of sweat on their pale limbs.

Then the memory, your...sense of the scene... changes. And across the stage, in the crowd, you are being watched. A woman; tall, ice-white, with eyes crackling with fire. There's a terrible lurch of recognition, of realisation that you know her.

Then she steps up, is striding across the stage towards you. You start back. But Miekke moves elegantly with her, makes her part of their languid dance, and the dart and rope that spins around them has become a weighted noose. Skuld bends to sweep up the sword from beneath Miekke's feet, and in her hand it warps and shimmers; she holds a wolf, a snake, a bloody spear.

The two dance close, bodies pressed, moving as one, the noose blurring about them as they spin. Faster, faster. The crowd are stamping their feet, roaring for blood. The stage is a swirl of snow-white flesh and ash and knotted rope. Faster and faster and faster still, a blizzard, a whirlwind of snow and blood and death. The beat is the clash of swords on shields; the roar of the crowd the cries of the dead and dying.

Then with a stamp and a crash of sudden silence, the dancers... freeze. Wrapped in each others' arms, the rope wound round their throats.

Skuld's arm thrown out. The spear, cast long. It arcs over your head, the crowd, the battlefield.

"I dedicate these deaths..." the dancers whisper as one.

"...to Odin."

"Hey." A boot prods you. You open your eyes. Alfvin, one of Surtr's guys, is standing over you. You're in a courtyard you don't remember coming to, near the town's main gate. A thin crust of snow crumbles off you as you rise stiffly to your feet. "You doze off or something?"

Behind him - hooded, older but utterly unmistakable, is Miekke. In the flesh.

== Solveig #670 ==

You go limp in your hazmat suit, eye working back and forth like the brushstrokes of a frenzied artist, not just perceiving but painting the soul of this place onto your brain. You see yourself, prone and twitching in the dark places beneath the hall; see Been, all numbers and guilt, muttering in math as he diagrams and annotates the flow, the pipes and valves and cisterns that have tamed the roaring cauldron, the untamable torrent, Hvergelmir, from which all other rivers flow. That holy water, bound by iron and runes, churns and boils up from the underworld, and is funnelled and channelled and put to use - yoked and tamed by the works of those who came before.

Up from the spaces beneath, your mind's-eye travels. And here is all life, all its mysteries and contradictions. Love and hate and song and war and death and birth, laughter and sorrow; these walls are steeped in the stories of mankind, drenched in them. In the tales of the gods, who are dead. It is an echo chamber; the howl of the blizzard, the maelstrom, reverberates and resonates in these halls, in Ragnhall, as history and myth are retold, again and again, layering anew each time until the world-as-it-was is buried, vanished, swallowed up by the remix and reinvention of how-it-was and how-it-is. Have things always been like this? You sense the earth beneath you fighting back, trying to reassert itself, but it is... so weak. It can barely remember what it was - only that it was... otherwise than this.

Your mind's eye soars, up and up, through the elegant hammerbeam roof of Ylva's hall, and the petty settlement of Logger Town spreads itself about you, a pitiful huddle of warmth and life against the encroaching cold. And you sense it is encroaching; implacable, patient, the blizzard grows in strength, Fimbulwinter will not be denied... yet the gods are dead, Ragnarok has been and gone, and still this little patch of defiance, huddled in the lee of a woodland so ancient and strange that even the alfar, deep to the south and deep in denial, burning themselves out to hold back the blizzard, would shudder to set foot there.

Up and up and further up, until the clouds glint around you with held-back frost. And here is a fine view - all of Midgard stretched out before you, as you rest on this highest seat. You settle in Hliðskjálf, feel the imprint of Odin's backside on that ancient stone, and look out as the Allfather might; yet you have two eyes to his one, and you see a world encased in ice. The giants have won, and only here, in this farthest corner of the world, does life remain.

Protected? Or simply left 'til last?

From Hliðskjálf you look up, and see a sky flecked with blood-red stars. The wolf stands over its celestial prey, gorging on silver flesh, and the eye of the doe is black and sightless...

You plummet. Down, the wind howling about you, or is that howling the wolf at your heels? Down and down, straining to return to your own self, to tether your spirit...

And you open your eyes with a start, and a strange stab of pain in your leg. Already the details of your vision are fading, rendering into abstracted impressions.

But one thing remains clear. The howl of the wolf, silver heartsblood staining its jaws, as the pack descends.

Something is coming. Coming here, you're sure. And chaos follows in its wake.

==Freyr #713 ==

He decides he's been here before. It is the top of the world - and the bottom. The lord can go back, or he can enter. He almost looks back, hearing the trees cease their growling behind him, but decides better of it. One foot after the other, he wades into the rushing black river, feeling nothing. The lord keeps his eyes on the hunter of the far bank, closer and closer.. The forge-child is down to his neck, and stops, for he knows the current will seize him if he tries to push his luck.

Where the lord had stood on the bank, a child now yells from the river, beckoning across the flow with a commanding question. It is all lips, no sound. Just silence.
On the far bank, the hunter staggers under the weight of the question. Colours swirl behind and around him, all the colours of Bifrost, flickering and incoherent, trampled into dust by the march of the dead. Behind you, the shattered gates of Asgard hang open, the forges cold.

The hunter frowns. "This isn't right." His feet are encased in ice, creeping down the bank of the river like a live thing. The water begins to freeze, radiating out. The ice is up to his knees, now. His waist. He twists, as if hearing something behind him. "I must...!" He tails off, uncertain. Looks at the runebound horn in his hand. "Hasn't this... already happened?" As he raises it towards his lips, the ice encases him entirely.

The leading edge of the ice rushes across the river towards you, around you, trapping you half-in, half-out. A strange ship is coming downstream towards you, seemingly drifting through the ice as though it were not there. The dead crew it, blue and cold in their silent ranks. The helmsman smirks at you. "I can see how this must be confusing," Loki says, then turns to his crew. "All out! Turn Asgard upside-down! Again!"

You watch, struggling against the embrace of ice. The dead disembark, march silent through the gates of heaven. You sense they are searching for something.

Meanwhile Loki steers the ship to the far bank, jumps down beside the hunter. He sighs, glances your way. "Wyrd can be such a bitch," he says, and his eyes are knowing. He turns away, embraces the frozen hunter. Ice swallows him in an instant, and you only then realise they both have daggers at each other's back.

The ice that traps you is rising, the cold burrowing deep into your bones. You struggle against it, but the world goes white.

==Ylva #731 ==

As they walk she stares up into the darkening sky, following Skuld more by sound than sight, the snowflakes swirling and dancing in patterns that almost seem meaningful if you only look long enough. The blizzard is coming, but here it's still mostly quiet, the crunching of the snow under their feet louder than the soft keening of the wind among the ruins.
Ylva, you're looking up into the darkening sky, the snow weaving patterns across your sight. So you're not your usual gainly self when your foot catches on something under the snow. The white rises to swallow you, crashes hard and cold against your bare skin, worms under or through the layers of cloth.

You bounce back up quick as you can, pull yourself up on the pale cold hand Skuld offers.

But it ain't Skuld.

A man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery, grips your hand; there's a flicker, a disconnect like the world just stuttered, and you stand facing a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; then a wolf, teeth locked on your wrist, ready to bite down.

"I tried to warn you," the dead god says, his eyes alight with cold fire. "You shouldn't have returned, father. Only the dead rule here now."

Those burning eyes flick to the towering edifice you've just fled, and something like pity dims their fire for a moment. "And see what has become of poor stupid Thor?"
Ylva feels a fearless fire inside her, the impatience filling her growing intolerable.

"Speak plainly or shut your mouth, corpse. I have no time for your riddles."

Face down in the snowdrift, she mumbles "And I'm not your father".

"Are you not?" the dead thing says, and then cocks its head as if hearing some distant call. Something changes, something in its posture, its bearing - like the difference between a wolf and a kicked dog...

In the east, the blizzard is rising.

"Well. My mistake, then. You have his stink all over you. A lover, perhaps? Or another of his by-blows?" You feel its teeth tighten on your wrist. "I need to find him, mortal. Tell me where greybeard is hiding."
Ylva is torn between fear and awe and anger, trying very hard not to let the latter win out as she's keenly aware of the wolf's teeth against her skin.

"If he can hide from you then surely I could not find him."

Before she can catch herself she continues, "And if there's any stink on me other than human filth, I would welcome it."
Skuld, you bend to lift Ylva... and you stagger as the world seems to shift beneath your feet. The white of the snow, the dark shadows of the dead city, it all blurs sideways...

And when the colours stop running, you're standing beside the hallmistress, one hand on her shoulder. A dead man grips her other wrist.

Burning blue eyes in a corpse's face. "You." There's a figure blazing with brilliant light. Ylva, you feel its heat blister your skin. Then, the cold fingers of a dead man.

The corpse god is looking from one of you to the other. "Is this another of your tricks?" He sounds weak, uncertain. A second time he stiffens, turns to look east, distracted. Ylva, you feel that burning, grave-chill, needletooth grip loosen on your wrist for a second.

Through the dead city, a figure approaches from the east. Out of the blizzard.
The moment the corpse god's grip loosens, Ylva tries to pull free. Her anger is fierce now - anger at being hunted, anger at being accosted by these cryptic dead gods who refuse to stay dead or admit they're alive, anger at fate for being unclear about what she should do.

"If it was, why would I tell you? Figure it out for yourself, corpse."

Grabbing hold of Skuld, Ylva tries to will herself back to Midgard, to leave the dead god to his dead god business.
"Because..." He is looking towards the approaching figure, realises too late that you've slipped away. "It's me or her, father."

There's no sign of the wolf now, no sign of that brilliant beautiful figure that burned itself into your eye. There's only the corpse. And he doesn't seem to even try to catch you as you flee.

You glance back, and see him bow his head before the approaching figure - a slip of a girl, hooded in shadow. Who reaches up to wrap slim pale arms around his neck, raises her hooded face to his, and kisses him deep.

There's something... terrible in the dead god's expression as their lips meet. Lust and loathing tangled all together.

Then a gust of rising wind blows snow across your vision, and the two of them are gone.

And you're staggering arm in arm through deep snow. The dead city's broken towers rising high above you.

And the blizzard is all around you.

''Later...''

So you lie in the snow, in each other's arms, and you doze. You dream a little, maybe; of the gods you learned in stories, and the gods who seem more and more to be intruding into your own.

You dream of the Allfather, one eye flashing. Dead at Ragnarok, or supposed to be, but here he is, runes dropping leaden from his tongue to spit and sizzle as they hit the snow. Driving back the blizzard.

You dream of Loki - not the smiling psychopath who prowls the ice wastes, but Loki Laufeyjarson, bane and boon to the Aesir, bound screaming beneath the earth after one joke too far. Bright Baldur dead at his brother Hod's hand, a dart of mistletoe through his heart. Consigned to Hel Half-Dead's realm, to sit at her side as consort.

You know the stories, you've sung the songs. You know how this is supposed to go. Fire and ice, at the end, as the dead march on Asgard and the winter wind blows through the golden halls. It all sinks back into the waters.

But here again is Odin. And with his one eye he winks at you...

...and you wake, to silence.

== Freyr #772 ==

You're feeling it settle into and over you - not calm, far from calm, but a strange kind of separation from yourself. The noise, the acrid stink of cordite, the percussive snap of each aimless bullet. The howl, somewhere, of a wounded man. The foul smell of someone who's shat themselves, or maybe just taken a bullet in the guts and guaranteed themselves a slow and agonising death.

None of this is in the songs you sing. But this, this is the path to Valhalla - in blood and chaos and indignity. The rune carved on your chest is burning, burning like the wound were new. Your fingers are numb on the pistol grip. You rise to one knee, turning, lowering the rifle, keening a song of death and glory as your finger tightens on the trigger.

There is a moment. You remember Miekke dancing, long ago. A spear hurled high.

And you level your rifle across a vast, unending battlefield. A plain strewn with broken shields, shattered swords, discarded spears.

And bodies enough to end the world.

Overhead, in the moonless dark, you hear... no, feel... the thump of enormous wings. Something vast is circling.

One last breath escapes Freyr's mouth, a cloud of breath escaping rows of clenched teeth and rising to dissipate mere fingers above his brow. He holds it there and goes silent. The hunter rests on the bank of the iceflow. He looks for his quarry on the other side - the one who will receive his gift of death. Where is it? Horned, furred, caught by arrow from the bow? The rifle scans the battlefield, a circle of blood and bone and fire lost in the vast dark husk of Ymir, the cosmic man. And all along, it keeps flapping, the thundering wings of omen, vibrating into the hunter's very marrow.

Freyr, you hear the great flap of wings overhead, look out across the vast and lifeless battlefield, and know you are seeing Ragnarok. The end that was. Or will be? Where is Loki? Where is Miekke? Dead among the countless dead, you sense. Part of you is screaming, pumping the trigger in wild rage... but that part of you is hamr, just meat and muscle.

Your higher soul, your hugr, is gripped by something... strange. A sense of dread, as those great wings thump overhead and you look up to see the stars eclipsed by some huge, circling shadow. And for the first time in your short, strange life, you understand what terror is. You've heard others speak of it, but it's been until now an alien thing. A concept.

Now, though. Something vast is hunting you across this sea of corpses. Run, your hamr tells you. Abandon your hate, your mission, your charge.

Run.

Freyr, you're frozen a heartbeat too long, as your hugr and hamr war for control. And with a whump and a rush of stinking wind like a battlefield of decaying corpses, a vast reptillian shape crashes down heavy in a flurry of snow and bodies, claws pinning you to the frozen earth.

A vast dark head descends, and Níðhöggr regards you with gleaming eyes. You feel the weight of its awful regard, near as crushing as the sheer physical weight pressing down on your chest. "Ah," the dragon purrs, and it sounds so horrifically pleased. "The one that got away."

You feel its claw start to pierce your side...

Then a deafening mechanical roar splits the air. The dragon's head snaps sideways, and light floods over it - giving you a moment's terrible sight of teeth and rotting scales, of the bodies that hang damned from Níðhöggr's foul wings - before everything becomes tangled and confusing. Pain from your side, brilliant light, . Something massive crashes hard into the dragon - or has it just become man-sized? - and it launches itself away skywards. Bullets are suddenly singing past you once again, and the orange firelight is casting everything in stripes of orange and black. Your rifle is in the snow beside you, its barrel steaming.

And Miekke - near naked, streaked with blood - is a couple of feet away, on the back of a roaring snowmobile.

== Miekke #794 ==

Miekke, as Freyr stumbled up and lurches towards your bike, you can feel the blood running down your back from where the bullet clipped your shoulder, hot blood in the cold night. From around the circle the Wolves are still firing, their gunshots muffled by the ringing in your ears, by the hammer of your heart. You press yourself low against the bike, and suddenly you can feel the bullet still inside you, as it grates against the bone. You howl at the sudden pain, at the feeling of wrongness, the feeling of violation. Your vision blurs - with tears, with faintness. There's an awful sense of retreating within yourself... no, of being roughly pushed aside. And you remember... something.

A line of poetry. A song.

Freyr… A smell intrudes. Among the blood and snow and cordite, the stink of flesh... burning. And some part of you sees the rune burning in the flesh of Miekke's shoulder, molten and burning like a brand.

Miekke, the pain is receding. You feel stronger somehow.

No, not dying. Something... more.

A throaty chuckle erupts unbidden from your mouth. You start in shock. Who has stolen your voice? You fight back. Take back your body your soul your voice your heart.

The other relinquishes its grip. Steps back with a mocking bow, and a twinkle in his one good eye.

== Miekke and Freyr #811 ==

here's a strange sense of dislocation, Freyr, as you grit your teeth against Miekke's probing hand, and for a moment you are both Miekke and Freyr; you feel their cold fingers in your side, and feel his bloody heat beneath your fingers. The delicate bones of their pale arching spine; the so-welcome roughness of his grip upon your neck.

Miekke; you feel that same duality. The heat and the cold. The need and the want. Sensuality and rage.

And then there is only the single you - looking out through a single eye. In the orange heat of the old dwarf's furnace, stripped to the waist and striped with sweat and soot, weak from hunger, your throat torn from runesong, your beard singed and thrown back over your bare right shoulder, your arms shaking with fatigue, the black-feathered shell of your Hugr shattered on the anvil before you.

You whisper "No..." as two of the clay figures, the Fylgja you have poured your self into, crumble back into dust.

From its perch on your left shoulder, lone Muninn gives a mournful cry.

And a single knock, vast and booming, shakes the ironbound door of Brokkr's forge.

"What are you doing, you fools?"

The question, hoarse and furious and leaden with fatigue. Even as you speak it, you know it's not rhetorical.
Miekke
Strange, sharing a mind with that one, and in this one's body. Did they invite the man into their other form? Were they intermingled without their intervention? No, this was their dream. The other's presence was accident, result of something still not understood. Something to be known.

"Trying to grow, Allfather. Trying to understand."
'''
????'''
The second dreamer is inert, faint and silent. Its presence, dim and small, sinks into the cast of a single sensation which washes over the body - a lurking, germinating anxiety, washing over in shivering waves of somatic dysphoria in the rhythm of a latent, dying heartbeat. As a strange tic or compulsion, the single eye is urged with each wave to peer deep into the flames of the forge.

'''Miekke, Freyr'''
"You are not here to understand!" He roars, and you all feel the strain, the rawness of a throat parched for water. "You are vessels, not partners! A mask, not the face it hides. You are not-"

"Odin!" The door stands open. A woman there, beautiful but barely more than a girl, posed half in the light of the forge, half in shadow. Her face angled sly in near silhouette, one eye filled with delight that is horrifying in its intensity. There is something wrong with her face, you sense. With the half cloaked in shadow.

"No!" Fear, dizzying and visceral, seizes the body you inhabit. "You've led her right to-"

Freyr, the fire you were losing yourself in, it's vanished in an eyeblink. The heat, too; you shiver in the sudden cold, in the gently falling snow that drifts down through the vast gaping hole in the roof of this once-great hall – the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it, long since rotted to dust.

You are yourselves again. Clothed in your own true flesh. But you feel something... missing.

Surrounded by open doorways, you stand amidst the ruins of one last great feast, still mouldering on the tables. Rust-ruined breastplates strewn all about amidst the rotting benches, half-buried in ash and snow.

"-me..." A dusty, drawn-out croak from the high table. From the throne, and the figure cloaked in grey, A spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders. Slowly it raises its head. Beneath the broad brim of the hat, dead flesh; a withered husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisting, wringing out a long low moan.

“Who’s there?” a voice from the shadows at the edge of the hall, quavering and weak. “More visitors?"

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might. "Why do you return here?" the huge old man says. "What do you hope to find?"

"The one that got away, of course." The woman, the girl, is approaching down the length of the hall. Hands out to her sides, half a smile on half a face. The other half is a corpse's snarl, flesh mottled and dark, lips drawn back from pale protruding teeth. Eye white and unseeing.

"Hel." The massive, ancient blind man shrinks back, but lifts his face desperately, bravely. "How many times? How many? He is not here..."

The goddess of the unworthy dead draws nearer. And her living eye flicks wickedly between you both. "You're sure about that...?" She says.

'''????
'''The interloper stands at the dreamer's side, now more clearly present, a short child with a bare scalp. He makes a hissing noise that echoes, and begins to grow and age. From shimmering follicles upon his scalp grow and extend stalks of gold, lengthening into great long locks of sunlight like the roots of a tree. They reach down his back, reaching for his hips, before the man, now bearded and old, begins to side-step, silently, closer to the dreamer.

The man, the radiant sunlight about his brow and torso reaching its zenith and beginning to whiten, places a calloused left hand around the dreamer's back and onto their farther shoulder and another hand on their right hip, all while he stares down the approaching figure. A triple drumbeat reverberates from his form across the hall like a murmurous heartbeat, and his long arms lift the dreamer up and into his embrace.

AfterRagnarok:The Mythic

2019-01-28T20:44:22Z

MysteryCat:

== Loki #65 ==

In the angular space where three ancient school buses meet, yellow paint scored and blasted by the elements, a skald is telling of the end of the world. A pale woman, veiled, layered in furs, she sways as she lists the gods and their deaths.

Fenrir breaks free and kills Odin. Thor and the Midgard Serpent kill each other. Loki turns on the Aesir and he and Heimdall kill each other. Surtr sets Asgard and Bifrost on fire and kills Freyr.

The Nine Worlds burn, and plunge into boiling sea.

"All this has gone before," she says, and her head raises as you pass. Beneath the veil, her eyes glitter. "All this is yet to come."

She has a modest audience, less than a dozen. The desperate, the hopeless, the mad. But they sway in time, and moan as the verses pour from her lips, and something in their eyes is fire.

On and through, and the day grows colder still. There's a frost in the air now, on the lips, on the tongue. Bokkr wraps his face, breath freezing on the thin cloth of a child's scarf adorned with a raging green jötunn. Fenrir just snorts, but ice crystals glitter in his beard.

== Draghi #95 ==

the rattle of runestones announce the presence of an oracle. A pale, beardless young man sits cross-legged in the corridor between a fishmonger and a carver of strange, wooden trinkets. Before him, a circle of runes carved into the concrete promise truth, insight and binding fate. The young man is slumped a little, an elbow on his knee, idly pushing the stones around the circle with one finger of the other hand. He looks up, right at you, and his mouth is bruised and bloody. "You seek your fortune?" he says, a little hopefully.

"Er, yeah." He shows the scrap of cloth that Surtr had dropped. "The one who carried this troubles me. I would learn whether his wyrd is entangled with mine, but I'm not.." he lets the sentence trail off for fear of offending the other. "Can you guide me?

The boy looks a little unprepared for an answer in the positive, but he recovers well. "Yes! Yes, certainly." He waves for you to sit, turning and shuffling aside to make room for you out of the corridor's occasional traffic. Scrabbling among the pouches and rune-carved boxes, he produces a cheap scrap goblet with a little cry of triumph. The other hand opens towards you. "Fire?" he says hopefully. "For me, and for the knowing."

Dragi holds out a bit of treasure -- some matches, a lump of amber -- for the boy to see, then closes his hand when the boy reaches for it. "Know this. I have danced without legs and slept in lost cities and driven a thousand clicks with a corpse for a passenger. Do not think to impress me with rolled-up eyes and foaming mouth. I will know, and I will beat you, and I will name you to the market boss as a fraud and cheat and watch them crush you beneath cold stones."

Dragi isn't actually confident of any of these things, but he likes to make a first impression. "But for a true seeing, fairly given, this is yours, and more later as may be." He opens his hand again, warning given, and lets the boy take his payment. "Are mushrooms involved?" The little red fly-cap mushroom was a staple of religious life in Tyrs Hafn, and he emphatically doesn't miss it.
To give the boy credit, he seems to take the threat in his stride. "I'm no charlatan," he says, with a hint of pride in his raspy voice. "I learned the runes from Gosti Finehair, who learned them from Skoffir Twice-Burned, who learned them from Magda the Crone, who learned them hanging from the Ash. My seeing is true if you are."

He drew himself up as he spoke, and now slumps a little, coughing. But he nods and takes the payment, making most of it vanish.

"Mushrooms," the boy's eyes widen, as he strikes a match on the roughened side of the scrapweld goblet. "Damn. What I could do with some mushrooms..."

He drops the match into the goblet, and fire flares up with a puff of sharp, resinous smoke. He breathes deep of the fumes, and thrusts the cup in your face for you to do the same. The stink makes your eyes water, and as you breathe deep the flames of the candles around you seem to start to twinkle and dance like stars above. "Spit," the boy commands, and when you look at him his pale hair seems to bristle and glitter like gold.

He spits into the goblet after you, then shakes in a pouch of pale, rune-carved knucklebones that clatter dully as they fall. "Hear me, Odin," he begins to chant, stirring the woodash and spittle with a gnarled finger of yew that seems to flex and writhe slowly in his hand. "All-Father, I name you. Wanderer, spear shaker, thronesitter, wise one, gallows-lord, drinker of the draught of knowledge, rune-singer, one-eye. I name you with your names. I call you with your names. Odin! Woden! Wednesday! In Hel's silent hall - hear my song! Throw off death's veil, Lord! Call down the shaking rainbow! And let. Us. Pass!"

With that he casts the runes clattering across the floor between you.

Right after inhaling a lungful of the intoxicating smoke, Dragi remembers how much he hates this mystical shit. Life is not so beautiful that one needs to see it laid out in front of the eyes like a map, but here it is, staring back at him from the runestones, Fehu the fire and Uruz the Ox, and most of all Tiwaz, the god's rune, pointing at his heart like an arrow shot from the bow of justice. He hears people talk about what they see in the great blizzard of the world, and some joke about ice maidens and white bears, but Dragi has travelled the blizzard many times and he knows. It is a long cold wandering among the dead, with only one's sins for company and no prospect of rescue.

The bones rattle across the cold concrete, skittering to a halt. The boy leans forward to study their pattern. There is Raidō, the journey, nestled close beside Tiwaz. Here are Kaunan and Hagalaz, flanking a face-down stone as though in escort. The boy reaches down dreamlike and turns over the stone.

Ūruz. The lamentation of the clouds. The ruin of the harvest. The abomination of the shepherd.

"Curious," the boy says, and his voice is strangely doubled. When you look up at him, another face is looking down at you. A face impossibly old, stern and noble. The boy towers over you, you realise. The hand that holds the runestone is a mailed fist, clenched tight, thrust into the mouth of a wolf. There is a sword in the other, held hilt-up like a cross, blood running down the blade from too tight a grip. The point rests heavy on the ground, sunk deep into the earth.

There is chanting, voices in the swirling blizzard.

''—an axe age, a sword age
shields are riven
a wind age, a wolf age
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another''

Molten fire is bubbling up through the wound in the Earth, smoking around the point of the sword. Dark figures rise up with it, marching beside the flow of fire, directing its sweep across the land. Fish Hold burns. Splitsville burns. The nine towns become furnaces, places of raging flame, swirling smoke - ashes, only ashes. Nine worlds and all their people all burn, all the world. In Forge Surtr sits laughing on a throne, and he too holds a sword, but this one is burning, burning bright. Its flames lick at the fringes of the shadowed woods.

The wolf catches your eye, and bites down hard. The boy screams, pulls back a torn and mangled wrist. "We see you," the wolf declares, licking blood from scrapweld fangs. "Run all you like, there's no escaping Fate."

It grins, and shimmers like heat haze. "Where is Summer?" It says, in Surtr's voice, and its face is Surtr's now. Behind steel spectacles, fire burns in his eyes. You reach for the sword in the boy's bloody hand, but it withers and is consumed by frost. "Too bad," the Jötunn says, in a voice like the crackle of a diesel engine, and he raises his flaming sword.

The blade sweeps down, and you feel its heat.

You feel the heat. Around you, shouting, chaos. The boy sat across from you is a column of flame, writhing silently. You can smell him cooking as you scrabble away. The charm-carver is wailing, begging for the gods protection. The oracle's other market-neighbour, the fishmonger, quick-thinkingly empties a bucket of ice over the boy, dousing much of the flames.

The boy collapses, and the fishmonger beats out the last flickering fires that play over him with a heavy oilskin.

The boy groans weakly, blood and meltwater pooled around him. His shirt has melted, fused with his skin. His face is turned away from you, which seems a mercy, but his hair is all but gone, his scalp red and black in equal measure. His right arm ends at the wrist, in a mess of soot and blood.

You become aware of a throb in the palm of your hand. One of the bones is clenched there; it crumbles to hot white dust as you open your hand, and falls through your fingers like the softest snow. Your whole palm is a blister, but burned into the web between thumb and forefinger are three dark lines. The rune Fehu; fire of the sea.

"What in Hel's name happened?" the fishmonger challenges you. A small crowd has gathered to observe the spectacle. You can still smell the boy's burning flesh.

"I saw it!" The woodcarver says. "He burned like the wrath of god!"

"Bullshit," one of the crowd snorts, a woman in fire-stained leathers. "A lamp or something fell on him. From up there." She points at the ledge hacked into the wall above your heads, every inch of it filled with candles and other lightbringers.

"There was no lamp, fool," the woodcarver snaps at her. "His blasphemies have displeased the gods!" He fixes you with a wild eye. "You! The eye of Odin is on you now! Cower! Cower!"

== Ylva. #354 ==

You walk in a valley of dust and ash, and the snow is falling softly. No, not a valley, a riverbed; long dried up and gone. To the east, far to the east along the length of the riverbed, where the mountains rise, the scar of a once-great torrent is clearly carved. At its base, where a pool once glittered deepest blue, a vast dark emptiness.

Ahead of you a wall, as tall of the mountains. Scarred and torn by weapons of war. Its highest battlements crumbling. The great gate hangs open, not broken but unlocked.

You pass through, and the hall stands before you. Beneath the ash and snow, still it glitters – but the roof is long collapsed, the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it up rotting at the edges of a great dark hole.

Each of the 540 doors is flung open, and you enter in. The hall is dark, the floor thick with ash; the ruins of one last great feast still mouldering on the tables. Among the rotting benches, rust-ruined breastplates are strewn all about.

From the throne at the high table, a figure watches. Broad-hatted, cloaked in grey, a spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders – a mockery, you somehow sense. Trembling, you approach. Shadows hood his face, but his beard is long and grey.

You step up onto the dais, raise the broad brim of the hat to look upon his face. The dead flesh is withered, a dried husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisted in shock, dismay. As if faced with a fate unplanned for.

“Who’s there?” a voice rings out, quavering and weak. “The einherjar have marched… and no valkyr remain to choose.”

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might.

“Hel? Have you come to torment me again?”

Ylva feels strangely calm and speaks without fear.

"I'm not Hel, though I may be due to meet her soon."

She touches the place where the exit wound should be.

"I think I've been murdered for greed and pride, and I don't know if I'm coming back from it."

"You are dead?" the huge man says, in his quavering old man voice. He shuffles closer, emerging into the dim grey light that enters the hall through the broken-backed roof overhead. He is huge indeed, vastly muscled despite his age. And blind in truth, eyes white and staring. He shakes his head. "No. The dead no longer come to this place. The bodies of the einherjar lie where they fell, out on the field. There are no more - and none to choose them. Until..."

He tails off, and you can read a thousand sorrows on his face. "Come here," he says finally, and raises one massive hand - strangely gentle - towards your face. "Come here, and let me get a look at you."
Ylva hesitates, as a very early swims to the surface, a drunk man (her father?) whispers "Never trust the fucking gods". Is this man a god? Aren't they all dead? Either way...

Either way he seems harmless enough, and she's already dead. Or...

"Dead, or dying. Got my insides on the outside and enemies all around in any case."

Then she makes a decision and crosses the distance between them, leading his hand to her face.

The blind man - the god? - brushes your face with heavy, scarred, slablike fingers. Each of his hands is big enough to wrap around your whole face. He pauses as one finger explores the scars around your eye, and you see something like fear on his broad, craggy face. "No," he mutters finally, and his hands move on. "Hmm."

His hands brush your neck, your shoulders, your breasts - it should feel like an outrage, but somehow there's no sense of violation, of malign intent, to it - and move on. One hand pauses at your side. "Here," he says, pressing a huge palm hard into your abdomen, and you give a gasp of pain. "Mortal indeed."

The other hand traces back up your spine, to the nape of your neck, running clumsily through your rough-cut hair. He pauses, heavily lips pursing. "Wait." His fingers move round to the unmarked side of your face, above your ear. His face is grave. "This ain't right..."

And you scream as he pushes a heavy finger into the hole in your skull. Again. You feel him fishing around in your head, in your mind. Memories from what passed for your childhood. Your first love. "Almost..."

You remember laughing with the others as your brother raises his spear. The whisperer at his shoulder, always with that sly smile.

You don't have a brother.

"Wait..." the blind god in Odin's hall is pale as he draws out... something, pinched between two bloody fingers. You nearly sag to your knees, but his other hand grips your arm tight. He's wiping the thing on his ash-smeared tunic, blood.

A spearpoint. Fire-hardened wood.

The god is pale, staring at the thing he holds. "No, no, no." He releases your arm and you drop, forgotten, head and guts alive with pain. The hall swims around you, gloom deepening into true dark.

"Baldur?"
In the dream, you lie in a ship with a great curved prow, the fire all around you. A dead man stands at the helm, his eyes on the horizon. Behind you, on the beach, a score of figures; hooded, cloaked, weeping.

Ahead, far ahead across the storm-tossed sea, a grey and dreary shore.

Hel is waiting.

== Miekke #419 ==

(Gerda’s painting)
Gerda tugs, and the cloth falls in one heavy slump to the floor.

Below, a forest scene. Trees pressed in close on all sides, heavy and oppressive, rising beyond the frame of the canvas. Dark runes slashed into dark wood.

Three woman gathered at the side of a pool, watching a fourth figure - pale, bloody of face and hand - as it kneels beside the water. Around one out-thrust hand, the water boils red.

Intricate ropes of gold wind around the pale skin, the bare head. The face lined with pain and weariness beneath a mask of blood. But in the one eye is captured... something profound. Realisation. Awareness. Horror. All of these are there, in the strokes of Gerda's brush.

Behind, from the shadows beneath the trees, something dark and massive watches. A suggestion of scale and claw.

"Not a death this time," Gerda says, and she almost sounds relieved.

"It's beautiful....," Miekke comments, made breathless by the painting. "I... that's just beautiful, Gerda. I don't even know what to say. You've made more of these? Why have I never seen them?"
Gerda nods plainly. "You have," she says. She seems strangely dissatisfied with your response, as if she was expecting something more... profound. Her eyes keep going back and forth between the painting and you, like she's searching for flaws.

In which, you are not sure.

"You have," she says again. "My father hangs them downstairs, some of them at least. The violent ones. I think he likes to imagine what it would've been like to kill a god."
Miekke doesn't really hear Gerda's response. They're staring at the painting, and the eye within the face of pain and weariness engulfs them.
The first thing you know is pain; pain from the eye you plucked out. The second is the smell; the stink of the primal forest, the tall dark trees that gather inhospitable around you. A rich, loamy, leafy smell, undercut with the crispness of pine. There's snow on the branches above you, but down here in the shadows it's cool, not cold. And the water in the well is warm as blood.

The three sit across from you. Your one good eye is bleary, watering; each time you look at them they are sat somewhere different on the rocks. Their faces smear and judder as you try to focus, but you feel sure you know them.

When they speak, their voices blur and blend as their faces do. You think one is speaking, but another's lips move; the voice comes from the place of the third.
"You have sacrificed-"
"-given half the light-
"-of the world;"
"washed yourself white-"
"-so pure-"
"-so pale-"
"-white as the membrane-"
"-the skin that lies inside-"
"-the shell of the egg-"
"-so holy-"
"-so wise you will be-"
"-tell us, far-rider -"
"-wanderer-"
"-yes, tell us-"
"-does it hurt?"
"-no, not that-"
"-no, no-"
"-we know it hurts-"
"-Mimmir told us-"
"-poor Mimmir-"
"-tell us instead-"

One of them is beside you, her hand cool on your shoulder. She draws a ladle forth from the well, brimming with water that seems to shimmer with an inner light. You look up into a face that is clear and dark, a face you recognise. "Do you think it will save you?" she says, as she raises the well-water to your lips.
Miekke looks into the woman's face, wide-eyed, searching for understanding. They're afraid to breathe.

There's a weird sense of discontinuity, of inhabiting another skin. You feel the bonds of fate growing tighter, tighter. Leading you down the path once more... to Ragnarok.

Part of you, the part that is Odin in this place, despairs. You are so weary.

The world must end again... but not yet. Not yet.
"Save me?" AllFather-Miekke croaks, their voice raw and unused. "Do you think that the point of this? It's to save us all."

"I have to try."

That last is only a whisper, as their attention has shifted from speaking to more focused intent as they take the proffered water. Diving into it with the thirst of one seeking to avert Fate, the water is not drunk so much as it is devoured. Impassioned, fully exposed, seeking to digest it all in one raw, exposed moment, with no care for the protection of self. Diving into the deepest of pools, throat first, losing oneself in the sound of the splash as the rich water engulfs the entire person in its embrace.
The water of the well was warm to your hand; but it burns down your throat like magma, floods your being with heat and knowledge. You remember creation, Ragnarok, rebirth; Lif and Lifthrasir, man and woman, sheltering in the branches of Yggdrasill, the world ash, to emerge once more as the world begins again.

But mostly you remember destruction. The winter unending. The jotunn Surtr and his flaming sword. The Fenris-wolf, its teeth closing on your throat. The Nine Worlds descending into fire and death, collapsing into the cold wide void of Ginnungagap, over and over.

The death of everything. Over and over and over.

As fate has decreed.

But you struggle to your feet, lone eye blazing with knowledge. With one hand you reach out and carve a rune into the bark of the towering World-Ash.

ᛉ – Algiz, which means Life. A protection from enemies, a defense of that which one loves.

And Urðr, the weave of destiny... it trembles.

You come back to yourself, and to Gerda hanging onto your wrist, crying "Stop, stop!", and to pain.

The hand Gerda is restraining - your fingers are bloody, and you can feel the mess your nails have made of your cheek, your eye; they pulse with fire with every heartbeat.

You blink, and it's painful enough that you nearly shriek. But your vision clears some; you're not blind. Beyond Gerda, who kneels appalled in front of you, the painting.

The door opens; Urdakott is there. "Hel's black heart," he curses, and it seems aimed at Gerda as much as you. "Cover that damn thing up!" He vanishes back through the door, leaving it hanging open.

Gerda glances back at the painting, from it to you. She releases your hand, throws the patchwork blanket back over the canvas. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't expect..."

Your mind, though, is spinning. The pain from your eye is a little thing, inconsequential beside the revelations that course through you.

You have been here before, time after time.

The pain of the injured flesh is as nothing next to the pain of remembrance. They look at the young girl in front of them, and at the cascade of emotion that inhabits her face and her body.

They stand.

"Show me the others," they command, with the force not of a mesmerizing sword-dancer, but that of... something more.
"I can't," she says. "He put some up, downstairs - the deaths. He likes those. But the others..." She shakes her head. "He burned them."

Gerda looks at you then, and it's clear she's afraid. Not of you, but of what might change. "I'm sorry," she says quietly, miserably. "I just wanted to paint you. What I saw inside you."

== Loki #420 ==

The heart is warm and tough. As you tear at it with your teeth, hot coppery blood fills your mouth, flows down your throat. You feel its warmth fill your stomach.

Above you, the sky grows overcast. So focused on the work of devouring the heart, it's not until the first snowflake brushes your eye that you look up.

Realise you stand alone on a plain of ice.

A cold shadow passes over you. You cannot help but shudder, know it's the cold of death, of eternity on the Corpse Shore among the murderers, the adulterers, the oath-breakers.

And the vast bulk of the worm Níðhöggr crashes to the frozen earth.

You feel the ice shake beneath you as is raises up, shakes itself. Malice Striker, scaled in scabarous blue and grey.

As it turns towards you it stretches out its terrible wings, feathered with the bodies of the inglorious dead.

"Ah," the worm hisses, fixing you with a basilisk eye. You cannot move, cannot speak. "One of mine." Its skull-like head comes forwards on a long sinuous neck, death in the jaws that gape.

"Not yours." A voice behind you. Völva steps from your shadow. "His fate lies elsewhere than Nástrǫnd."

The worm rears its head back, hisses. "Has he not murdered? Has he not broken oaths - is he not planning to break one even now? I can see it wriggling in his mind like a red worm." It writhes, and flaps its wings, and the foul corpse stench rises from its body. "Is the child that nestles beneath your heart not his?"

"The adultery is mine," Völva says, raising her chin as you wonder at her calm. "I will answer it in my own way."

"No," the worm growls. "You will answer it in mine." And one great wing sweeps forward, quick as thought, to brush across Völva - her face, her breasts, her belly - with a terrible gentleness.

She staggers. Sobs. Drops to her knees in the snow. And is gone.

You feel the worm's attention turn back to you, like an avalanche descending.

"Would you too deny me?" Malice Striker purrs, winding its great head towards you. "You, who calls yourself Loki. Hah! Murderer, deceiver - will you deny what you are?"
"I am a wolf, unfathered," Loki answers, before lunging at Malice Striker to rip it to shreds.
The worm rears back hissing as you leap at it, machete swinging. The smell of it is foul, this close - the rotting, inglorious dead.

Your first wild upward blow scrapes on the boney plates of Níðhöggr skull-face, the tip of the blade scoring a line up towards the eye as its head draws back.

It roars, spreads its corpse-hung wings. One heavy foreleg knocks you staggering. You feel the claws bite. Its bulk is over you, its death-cold shadow swallows you. Span-long teeth snap inches from your face. Foul dark ichor runs sluggish from the cut you gave it, beading beneath the eye like a tear.

And your heavy second swing bites deep into one outstretched wing. Tearing through corpse-flesh, ancient bindings, skin and tendon.

Níðhöggr roars again, in dismay and pain. The stink of its breath is the wake of battle, the days-old unburied dead. It recoils from you, hisses. "You are not Loki!"

You advance, grinning, feral. Desperate, it spreads its wings again, leaps at you, past you. Knocking you flat. A crash shakes the ice. You scramble back to your feet, turn. The worm is struggling to rise, wing hanging ragged at its side. It wheels, tail whipping at you. Crashing into your shoulder, tumbling you back to the ice. You rise, blade in hand, blood in your mouth.

"Peace, unfettered!" the worm roars. You sense its desperation. "I mistook you!"

You snarl like the wolf you are.

And Níðhöggr... flinches. Then-

-you are on your back in the snow. The taste of bile in your mouth. Your gang milling, shouting, confused. Hel kneeling beside you. The hilt of a knife between your teeth. Blood and snow and sunshine. And the road.

You try to rise, feel weakness flood you. Where the worm struck, in your shoulder and your hip, flesh and bones are screaming.

Volva lies foetal in the snow a couple of feet away. Pale, shivering. Weeping silently. Agneta squats nearby, watching her worriedly.

"Well," Ketil says, kicking the pile of still-steaming reindeer meat. "I sure ain't eating any of that."

"You... alright, boss?" Hel says. More calculating than concerned.

''Later…''

The fire and the wind. Burning ice, biting flame. And you, caught between them. There's laughter around the fire.

The wolf within you snaps and snarls, struggles to free itself from its fetters. A silken ribbon, strong as iron. You recall the binding, the merriment - the relief - as you strained and snarled and could not work yourself free. The taste of blood, the consequence.

And the expectation. That subtle moment as your fetters... gave. Just a little.

The wolf within looks up, its mouth bloody still. Its eyes promise nothing; only destruction, chaos. A tearing down of things.

The bindings on its jaws are fraying, weakening. It will work itself free, sooner or later.

A slash of your knife could quicken the process.
Focusing in further, Loki imagines his knife—so comfortable in his hand but so clearly of it—and starts to worry at the bindings of the wolf with it. "No chains, inside or out," he mutters as he sets to his work.

The fetters part under the blade of your knife like they'd been waiting for it, and the wolf lunges up. In an eyeblink it has you on your back, your knife off buried in a snowbank somewhere. Mad red eyes stare down into yours, and there's no gratitude there. A low growl rumbles up out from out of its great black body, and the wolf opens its jaws-

Abruptly, with a dreamlike discontinuity, you are surrounded by grazing reindeer. The wolf's head snaps up.

The deer panic, scatter in all directions. Among them, the leaders of the herd; a golden stag with mighty antlers and a sleek, shimmering silver doe.

The wolf leaps off in pursuit. Pauses. "Hunt with me, brother!" it cries over its shoulder. Then it is off, running, jaws gaping against the snow and sky.

With a laughing howl, Loki follows after, chasing with reckless abandon.

The reindeer scatter before you, criss-crossing your path and that of your... packmate? Whatever the huge black wolf is to you, he runs like the wind, jaws gaping, breath wild and ragged. A panicking deer darts across his path and he rakes it open from neck to rump without breaking stride, blood spraying in the snow.

But you are fast, and faster still. Your paws pound the snow as you hit your stride, closing the gap between you. You scent the blood, and it is rapturous. But above and beyond that, your sharp eyes make out the headlong flight of the herd leaders. The stag, proud and golden, its rack of antlers a fearsome weapon - but heavy, and slowing it. Ten strides ahead, the silver doe - quicksilver fast, slippery and wise.

Most of the herd are behind you now - and you are alongside your packmate. Lost in the joy of the hunt. He dwarfs you - a mass of muscle and rage.

But you are no pup even so, a killer, an alpha. Behind you, you sense your pack has joined you; four or five wolves at your back, running hard.

And as your muscles begin to burn, as the two deer begin to veer apart, the hunt truly begins.
Without hesitation, Loki follows after the silver doe, after the true challenge. He has no doubt he could kill the stag in battle after running it down. But to hunt certainties is to not hunt at all.
The doe is fast, and sure-footed in the snow. It jinks through the snowdrifts, and mighty leaps carry it over the deepest drifts as it aims to lose you; while on the ice it seems almost to fly, abandoning cunning for sheer straight-line speed.

it's all you can do to keep up. Your lungs are straining, your muscles roaring with exertion. But you begin to close the gap.

The doe, seeming to sense the race is lost, tacks suddenly, sharply right. Off the ice and towards the copse of dark trees that rises from the edge of the frozen lake.

A desperate move. You can feel the forest's strangeness, its vast, alien indifference to wolves and men alike. Shadows flit between the trees, shapes bigger and more fearsome than any man or wolf.
The hunt is to perfect to give up, Loki presses on, and as the doe makes her desperate turn, he launches himself to take her throat and life.
As the doe turns at bay, you launch yourself at her throat; but you realise mid-air you've misjudged – both your leap, and her determination. She skips nimbly aside, spinning to deliver a double-hoofed kick to the ribs that lifts you off the ground and dumps you gasping in the snow.

Then your pack catch up, and are on her. Bursting through the trees into the clearing, circling her, keeping her turning. Nipping at her rear and flanks as you regain your footing. You join the harassment, and she does her best to keep her face to you, but the constant pressure of the rest of the pack is wearing her down. You can smell her fear, her desperation as she tries to break out but is driven back into the centre of the clearing by the pack's snarling lunges.

One of the wolves darts in, but too slow; she spins, knocking him howling with a sideways butt of the head. There's a gap in the circle as he scrambles.

An opening, an opportunity. She takes it.

And so do you.

This time your leap is true. Your weight staggers her, and your forelegs wrap around her shoulders as the two of you tumble in the snow. She kicks, writhes, but the pack close in tight. You bite and bite, taste quicksilver blood in your mouth, hot and salty. She's on her back, your jaws on her throat.

She goes suddenly still, and in her wide black eye you sense a recognition of the inevitable.
Loki savours the exhilaration and anguish of the hunt for a moment before he closes his jaws to take the life of the beautiful creature.
The doe thrashes once, hooves kicking in the bloody snow. The pack are pacing back and forth; all hungry eyes and hungry jaws. The trees loom dark, pressing in at the edges of the clearing.

There's a moment of intense dislocation, like your heart and mind were suddenly hooked sideways a thousand miles, and you're sitting in the dark. Back in yourself, two legs two arms. The taste of quicksilver blood still rich in your mouth.

Pitch dark, total and entire. No moon, no reflection off the snow. Nothing. You can't remember the last time you were so utterly, utterly blind.

''Later...''

Loki pops a pain pill and swallows it dry, moistening his lips after on a handful of clean(ish) snow. "Anyone who can hobble over for some pain pills, give them. Collect those who are salvageable and load up to make our way to someone that can really patch us up." Loki blinks his eyes and mind as clear as he can, and looks at the sky to try and get his bearings on who would be the best to go to. All the while feeling the howling of the blizzard making promises, promises about better routes to go through the snow, about better destinations. With a snarl, he lets the howling wind in, hoping to clear the cobwebs at the very least.

You open your mind and the blizzard rushes in, and it knows exactly where you should be. Marching among the un-numbered dead; howling as you cut a swath through the einherjar; tasting the all-father's blood on your teeth. This is the Wyrd laid out for you, your fate.

The frost you invited in, it eats away at your mind, your soul, your sense of self. You feel yourself growing indistinct.

Yet something in you speaks out; reminds you, you have a choice. Surrender to fate, or carve your own path. Loki, you named yourself - the deceiver, the betrayer, the rebel. And the voice that rings in your blood and in your bone, it asks: will you earn that name?

Or are you just a wolf?

Loki holds to himself, as agonizing as it is, letting the winds cut through him and then readying himself to push on.

The blizzard blows through you, and it has ice in its teeth. You can feel it driving you, turning you, pushing you in the direction Fate has laid out for you, and you struggle to stand, to hold your ground, to remain Loki.

It takes all your will, your stubbornness, to cling to who you are. And it costs you - every icy gust strips something away. A memory, a dream, a piece of your past. But one image remains, unyielding, though you cannot quite recall what it means. An older man, his beard turning grey, half his face in shadow - a brother? Father? Whoever he is to you, whoever he was, he nods; and you feel his approving hand on your shoulder, callused and heavy.

Something snaps. Like a thread in some great tapestry, it all begins to unravel. You brace...

A drop of liquid strikes your forehead, and you wake. You open your eyes wide with sudden pain as the venom begins to burn. It runs down into one of your eyes, and as half the world goes black you start to scream. Where is Sigyn? High above you, wound through the stalactites that dot the roof of the cave, the serpent hisses with delight. You watch another drop of venom form at the tip of its fangs, all the colours of Bifröst packed into its swelling curve. You hear Sigyn's hurried footsteps, returning with her bowl. Too late, too late. The drop is falling.

And you wake again, in truth.

==Ylva #423 ==

"Your Valkyr brings me," Superior says. "Literally. She broke into my car while I was... asleep... and brought me here against my will. And now she's avoiding me, when I need to speak with her." Her gaze keeps drifting off you to the bottle by your hand, and she licks her lips unconsciously.

"But perhaps..." She looks you in the eye then, and you get the impression that she's gathering her courage. "Perhaps your thread is woven in with hers. Perhaps you share more than a death." She hesitates.
"Were... were you given a message?" she asks, her cracked old voice quavering ever so slightly.
"No message. There's... I saw..."

She shivers, suddenly unsure of how to speak of what she's seen. To describe her... vision, her experience, to a believer is different from telling her friends, her chosen family.

"Someone is still there. A god, or a giant. Blind and bent by sorrow, he seemed."

Her words come in short bursts.

"He seemed alone, but... like he was waiting."

She glances to Camo, then looks Mother Superior in the eye.

"They're not all dead. The world isn't over. There's still hope."
You see Superior go pale at your words. "Hope!?" she stares at you in utter dismay, then slumps against the bar, draining the drink you poured her and snatching the bottle to pour another. "Hope!" She laughs, and it's not a pleasant sound at all.

Camo's expression is comical, eyebrows raised all the way up as he regards the old woodswoman, and he glances at you as if to say what the hell?

"What do you hope for, tell me that? Prosperity? Peace?" She laughs sourly again, and knocks back the drink. Reaches for the bottle.
Ylva snatches the bottle away with well-honed reflexes, then pinches the fingers of her other hand and makes a gesture like striking a match - with her reserves tapped out she can't afford to let anyone drink for free.

"In this world? Nothing so grand. I hope to eat, drink, and fuck another year, and dream to die in a warm bed. Same as everyone."

She stands relaxed, facing Mother Superior squarely.

"But now I have hope for the world after this. It may not be all ice and shadows."

She shrugs, making a gesture that takes in the bar, the hall, the world.

"Maybe we can still get more than this."
Superior's lips purse sourly as you snatch the bottle away; she sweeps one finger round inside the empty glass, sticks the finger in her mouth, sucks the last few drops of booze from it. "Ain't none of going to die in bed," she says, in a voice dead and dull, as she turns back towards the door. "Ain't none of us gonna see the world after this."

She pauses in the doorway. "The gods ain't yet dead," she says, shaking her head. "And you reckon that's cause for hope."

Her bitter, hopeless laugh hangs in the air long time after the door clacks shut behind her.

== Skuld #446 ==

As you open your finger, the forest seems to... come into focus somehow, to sharpen. You sense the weight of its attention, drawn by the spilling of blood. Then you exhale through bloody lips, and as the breath and blood mingles with the wind your mind is snatched up like a rag.

The wind whips through the dense dark trees, and you are drawn along with it. Through the shadows and light that dapple the snow. Through the barbed and tangled undergrowth. Through the scars cut by men, and the fresh wounds where men work still. With trucks and axes and buzzing saws, the thieves. But the wind recoils from something, from the eye that marks them, that burns in the shadows of their minds. Recoils and draws you onwards. Through the hidden clearings where the skogsrå and the huldrefolk dance, through the rookeries and parliaments in the high branches.

The ravens take exception to your intrusion, and tear your mind ragged with beaks and claws until the wind takes you beyond their reach. Takes you over the wall of the town, through the narrow, frozen streets, through the sulphurous steam that clouds the air over Ragnhall, cooling and freezing.

And deposits you back in yourself, exhausted and ravaged by a sudden splitting headache.

Even so, you sense all is not as it was.

A shadow detaches itself from the base of a nearby pine. "You have returned to us, systir." The hulder is beautiful, pale as milk and moving with sinuous grace as she crosses the clearing towards you. "Will you stay, this time?

For a moment she is confused - she feels the sharp pain from the wounds inflicted by the beaks and claws of the ravens, the gashes in her face. Reaching up to wipe away the blood, though, her fingers come off clean. The pain is still there, but the wounds not of this world. She blinks, almost reeling, as the shape of the huldra detaches itself from the pine.

Its´ words hit something inside of her - touches an emptiness at the center of her heart. Makes her feel naked, skinless. She backs off one step, then another - her hand going inside the coat, fingers closing on the taped handle of the stubnosed revolver, her memento from the market massacre.

"I don´t know you." Her voice is sharp, but lacks the hard weight of conviction.

There's a moment of disconnection, sharp and jarring, and the world seems to lurch sideways. You remember hanging from the tree, your blood pooling in the snow below you. The ravens that perched on your shoulder; their beady black eyes inquisitive, speculative, as they regarded you. Snatches of thought and memory return to you. The girl you were. Your life, your name. Your death, and what was taken from you. Odin, eyes glittering beneath the brim of his wide grey hat, laying a rune upon your brow. The arms of the hulder, the tree-spirit, as you hung from her branches.

Those same slim arms embrace you again.

Then rougher, thicker arms are around you, restraining, roughly shaking you. "Hey! Hey! Get a hold of yourself!"

Zeds.

The girl walks through the God-Chamber, bare feet on smooth stone. The runes on her bare skin is painted with blood, carriers of great power. The chamber is immense around her, and the light from the lanterns so very far behind now. In the darkness around her, faint glints of steel and dark glass from the sleeping giants. Sound doesn´t move through teh air as it should - some of them seem to reverberate forever in the immense space, others are swallowed entirely by its´ cold and stale air.

Her voice, as she speaks, is dry but quickly finds strength and traction. As she speaks the words, raises her hands, there is a humming sound from all around her. Panes of glass flicker and wake, bathing the chamber in light. Motes of dust dance all around her as she raises her arms and calls out to -

Zed barely has time to register what happens - Skuld´s leg hooks around his with snake-like speed, and the air is pushed out of him as he slams into the ground, cutting off his words and the yell that tried to form into a thin wheeze. She has twisted around, landing hard on top of him with an arm across his throat, one of her knees pushing down on his gun-arm as it twitches weakly in muscle memory and makes an attempt to move. Before he can fucking blink, there is a blade pointing at his eye and the valkyrie´s own pale pair stares into him with a fury that chills his bones.

Her lips peel back from her teeth as she hisses.
"Who the fuck do you think you´re touching?"

''Later...''

"We see what you are, Skuld." She makes an odd gesture, drawing the V of forefinger and thumb over her eyes and thrusting them at you, and the other two copy it. "Valkyr. Draugr. We see you. You would ask us to lend strength to your arm? Your war?"

"Your promise," the other woman interjects, as smoothly as if they spoke as one. "Your promise to look past us without seeing, when the sword-din rises."
She is not sure whether to laugh at the man or smack out a few of his teeth to make him appreciate the gravity of the situation - to some extent this goes for all of them. Their words take some of the fire out of her blood, though; makes it easier to cool it, to soften edges that want to be sharp. Part of her wants to ask more, to tear at the morsels of revelation.

Instead she straightens up, lends weight rather than rage to her voice.
"Lend your arms to my war, woodcutters, and when the storm is upon us I´ll look past you." Her voice drops just a little. "Fate-mark, crow-mark, death-mark, I´ll look past. That is where it ends, though. I can´t keep you from getting a bullet to the face if you go act stupid."

She peeels of a glove, spits in her snow-white hand; there´s a touch of steam as she holds it out to seal the pact.
"Still, it is a whole lot more than anyone else gets."
"When it all comes down, we'll hold you to that," he says, and tugs off his own glove.

----

== Miekke #597 ==

You prowl through Surtr's mansion, wincing occasionally as an unguarded movement tugs at the wound in your side; Eir clearly knows what she's doing, but even with expert care a gunshot is not to be dismissed.

The suite where you were laid to rest is in the northern end of the villa, closest to the steel works and to the Scrapyard; you find a window in a stairwell which looks out north, across a slice of town that might seem almost picturesque but for the dull, ruddy glow of the steelworks, which gives the snow a hellish aspect - as if blood had been poured across the town, and pooled on the roofs and in the spaces between buildings. You look down on Forge, and wonder why you've never noticed before - is it the elevation, your new and lofty position?

No, you realise, as you look further out. Beyond the light of the furnaces, and the occasional desperate trashfire in the Scrapyard. the world is utterly dark.

The sky is clear, stars twinkling like little touches of frost. Where is the moon? You frown, count backwards; no, it should be waxing nearly full.

Where is the moon?

The reflected glow of the steelworks on the snow paints a swathe of the stairwell ruddy, and Miekke's white skin canvas. It's a beautiful sight, though too reminiscent of Brokkr's workshop.

Not really thinking about it, upon wondering at the missing moon Miekke lifts the flap of their eye patch up and gazes at the sky with their injured eye. It's only as they feel it between their fingers that they realize they were wearing an eye patch.... curious.

The ruddy light of the forge floods everything, making even the sky a crime scene. The stars twinkle red like bloody jewels, turning as the world turns. Simulataneously they inch across the sky and roar through the cosmos; simultaneously glitter prettily and burn with a power like nothing in all nine worlds.

A great golden stag broaches the horizon, curling up into the sky and dimming the light of the stars. It is running hard, nostrils flaring, chest pumping like bellows. There's a note of wild panic in its eyes.

You hear the howls before you see the wolves. The hunters on its tail. The bigger of the two, black and vast and hungry-looking, a shadow against the blood-red sky, snaps at the heels of its prey.

The second wolf, muzzle bloodied with silver. Slower, weighed down with a full belly, yet its yellow eyes are bright and keen. And its teeth are just as sharp.

They will catch him, you know. In time. But today the stag escapes them, slipping below the horizon, and the blood-splashed stars prick the night again, twinking ruby and silver. The wolves slow to a trot, and the second raises its bloody muzzle to howl...

Then the first wolf turns, and notices you, and the force of its regard blasts and shreds you like the worst winter gale. It is all wolves, all monsters, all bad men, the destroyers and the ravagers and the enemies of hope. It is Fenrir, and Garm, and Sköll, and Hati, and Urdakott, and that smiling psychopath Loki, who left you out on the ice.

And then a face pushes forward, through the fading image of the wolf. Surtr.

He looks down at you, eyes flat behind the discs of his spectacles, and you realise you're on the floor. "When we found your bed empty," he says, in his bass growl, "We thought you had fled."

There's a question there. And perhaps, perhaps, something like relief.

== Ylva and Skuld #603 ==

there, sure enough, something moves. Crossing the breadth of the street to the base of the steps, it seems to flicker between forms. Now a man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery; now a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; now a wolf crouched low, scenting the trail, its coat painted in in blue and grey.

Abruptly, Skuld is seized by a chill. Your own footprints are clear – dashed lines through the otherwise unbroken snow.

But this...?

It leaves no prints at all.
BANG BANG
The bullet tears through Skuld's target, vanishing into the snow behind with a puff of white. It staggers. The man, the wolf, they look up at you, with eyes bright blue and hungry.

Then there is only the long-dead corpse, already stiff as it topples sideways.

Snow begns to cover it almost instantly.

Silence returns to the city; your breath, your heartbeats, are the only sound you can hear. Your every nerve is wired, awake to any sound, any flicker of movement.

But there is only the gentle fall of snow.

== Freyr #662 ==

You remember... a stage. An impression of movement, lithe and irresistably compelling. The raw emotion, the urgent, confusing need which flooded a mind just emerging from childhood. And with that emotion, you are there. A boy again, staring up at the pale gold-scribed creature as they dance above the sword, as they spin and form graceful shapes. Not much older than you, really, but so far beyond, so far removed, as to be like touching the sun. You can smell the people around you. Hear the faint whipping thrum of the dart-and-rope as Miekke weaves it about them. See the sheen of sweat on their pale limbs.

Then the memory, your...sense of the scene... changes. And across the stage, in the crowd, you are being watched. A woman; tall, ice-white, with eyes crackling with fire. There's a terrible lurch of recognition, of realisation that you know her.

Then she steps up, is striding across the stage towards you. You start back. But Miekke moves elegantly with her, makes her part of their languid dance, and the dart and rope that spins around them has become a weighted noose. Skuld bends to sweep up the sword from beneath Miekke's feet, and in her hand it warps and shimmers; she holds a wolf, a snake, a bloody spear.

The two dance close, bodies pressed, moving as one, the noose blurring about them as they spin. Faster, faster. The crowd are stamping their feet, roaring for blood. The stage is a swirl of snow-white flesh and ash and knotted rope. Faster and faster and faster still, a blizzard, a whirlwind of snow and blood and death. The beat is the clash of swords on shields; the roar of the crowd the cries of the dead and dying.

Then with a stamp and a crash of sudden silence, the dancers... freeze. Wrapped in each others' arms, the rope wound round their throats.

Skuld's arm thrown out. The spear, cast long. It arcs over your head, the crowd, the battlefield.

"I dedicate these deaths..." the dancers whisper as one.

"...to Odin."

"Hey." A boot prods you. You open your eyes. Alfvin, one of Surtr's guys, is standing over you. You're in a courtyard you don't remember coming to, near the town's main gate. A thin crust of snow crumbles off you as you rise stiffly to your feet. "You doze off or something?"

Behind him - hooded, older but utterly unmistakable, is Miekke. In the flesh.

== Solveig #670 ==

You go limp in your hazmat suit, eye working back and forth like the brushstrokes of a frenzied artist, not just perceiving but painting the soul of this place onto your brain. You see yourself, prone and twitching in the dark places beneath the hall; see Been, all numbers and guilt, muttering in math as he diagrams and annotates the flow, the pipes and valves and cisterns that have tamed the roaring cauldron, the untamable torrent, Hvergelmir, from which all other rivers flow. That holy water, bound by iron and runes, churns and boils up from the underworld, and is funnelled and channelled and put to use - yoked and tamed by the works of those who came before.

Up from the spaces beneath, your mind's-eye travels. And here is all life, all its mysteries and contradictions. Love and hate and song and war and death and birth, laughter and sorrow; these walls are steeped in the stories of mankind, drenched in them. In the tales of the gods, who are dead. It is an echo chamber; the howl of the blizzard, the maelstrom, reverberates and resonates in these halls, in Ragnhall, as history and myth are retold, again and again, layering anew each time until the world-as-it-was is buried, vanished, swallowed up by the remix and reinvention of how-it-was and how-it-is. Have things always been like this? You sense the earth beneath you fighting back, trying to reassert itself, but it is... so weak. It can barely remember what it was - only that it was... otherwise than this.

Your mind's eye soars, up and up, through the elegant hammerbeam roof of Ylva's hall, and the petty settlement of Logger Town spreads itself about you, a pitiful huddle of warmth and life against the encroaching cold. And you sense it is encroaching; implacable, patient, the blizzard grows in strength, Fimbulwinter will not be denied... yet the gods are dead, Ragnarok has been and gone, and still this little patch of defiance, huddled in the lee of a woodland so ancient and strange that even the alfar, deep to the south and deep in denial, burning themselves out to hold back the blizzard, would shudder to set foot there.

Up and up and further up, until the clouds glint around you with held-back frost. And here is a fine view - all of Midgard stretched out before you, as you rest on this highest seat. You settle in Hliðskjálf, feel the imprint of Odin's backside on that ancient stone, and look out as the Allfather might; yet you have two eyes to his one, and you see a world encased in ice. The giants have won, and only here, in this farthest corner of the world, does life remain.

Protected? Or simply left 'til last?

From Hliðskjálf you look up, and see a sky flecked with blood-red stars. The wolf stands over its celestial prey, gorging on silver flesh, and the eye of the doe is black and sightless...

You plummet. Down, the wind howling about you, or is that howling the wolf at your heels? Down and down, straining to return to your own self, to tether your spirit...

And you open your eyes with a start, and a strange stab of pain in your leg. Already the details of your vision are fading, rendering into abstracted impressions.

But one thing remains clear. The howl of the wolf, silver heartsblood staining its jaws, as the pack descends.

Something is coming. Coming here, you're sure. And chaos follows in its wake.

==Freyr #713 ==

He decides he's been here before. It is the top of the world - and the bottom. The lord can go back, or he can enter. He almost looks back, hearing the trees cease their growling behind him, but decides better of it. One foot after the other, he wades into the rushing black river, feeling nothing. The lord keeps his eyes on the hunter of the far bank, closer and closer.. The forge-child is down to his neck, and stops, for he knows the current will seize him if he tries to push his luck.

Where the lord had stood on the bank, a child now yells from the river, beckoning across the flow with a commanding question. It is all lips, no sound. Just silence.
On the far bank, the hunter staggers under the weight of the question. Colours swirl behind and around him, all the colours of Bifrost, flickering and incoherent, trampled into dust by the march of the dead. Behind you, the shattered gates of Asgard hang open, the forges cold.

The hunter frowns. "This isn't right." His feet are encased in ice, creeping down the bank of the river like a live thing. The water begins to freeze, radiating out. The ice is up to his knees, now. His waist. He twists, as if hearing something behind him. "I must...!" He tails off, uncertain. Looks at the runebound horn in his hand. "Hasn't this... already happened?" As he raises it towards his lips, the ice encases him entirely.

The leading edge of the ice rushes across the river towards you, around you, trapping you half-in, half-out. A strange ship is coming downstream towards you, seemingly drifting through the ice as though it were not there. The dead crew it, blue and cold in their silent ranks. The helmsman smirks at you. "I can see how this must be confusing," Loki says, then turns to his crew. "All out! Turn Asgard upside-down! Again!"

You watch, struggling against the embrace of ice. The dead disembark, march silent through the gates of heaven. You sense they are searching for something.

Meanwhile Loki steers the ship to the far bank, jumps down beside the hunter. He sighs, glances your way. "Wyrd can be such a bitch," he says, and his eyes are knowing. He turns away, embraces the frozen hunter. Ice swallows him in an instant, and you only then realise they both have daggers at each other's back.

The ice that traps you is rising, the cold burrowing deep into your bones. You struggle against it, but the world goes white.

==
Ylva #731 ==

As they walk she stares up into the darkening sky, following Skuld more by sound than sight, the snowflakes swirling and dancing in patterns that almost seem meaningful if you only look long enough. The blizzard is coming, but here it's still mostly quiet, the crunching of the snow under their feet louder than the soft keening of the wind among the ruins.
Ylva, you're looking up into the darkening sky, the snow weaving patterns across your sight. So you're not your usual gainly self when your foot catches on something under the snow. The white rises to swallow you, crashes hard and cold against your bare skin, worms under or through the layers of cloth.

You bounce back up quick as you can, pull yourself up on the pale cold hand Skuld offers.

But it ain't Skuld.

A man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery, grips your hand; there's a flicker, a disconnect like the world just stuttered, and you stand facing a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; then a wolf, teeth locked on your wrist, ready to bite down.

"I tried to warn you," the dead god says, his eyes alight with cold fire. "You shouldn't have returned, father. Only the dead rule here now."

Those burning eyes flick to the towering edifice you've just fled, and something like pity dims their fire for a moment. "And see what has become of poor stupid Thor?"
Ylva feels a fearless fire inside her, the impatience filling her growing intolerable.

"Speak plainly or shut your mouth, corpse. I have no time for your riddles."

Face down in the snowdrift, she mumbles "And I'm not your father".

"Are you not?" the dead thing says, and then cocks its head as if hearing some distant call. Something changes, something in its posture, its bearing - like the difference between a wolf and a kicked dog...

In the east, the blizzard is rising.

"Well. My mistake, then. You have his stink all over you. A lover, perhaps? Or another of his by-blows?" You feel its teeth tighten on your wrist. "I need to find him, mortal. Tell me where greybeard is hiding."
Ylva is torn between fear and awe and anger, trying very hard not to let the latter win out as she's keenly aware of the wolf's teeth against her skin.

"If he can hide from you then surely I could not find him."

Before she can catch herself she continues, "And if there's any stink on me other than human filth, I would welcome it."
Skuld, you bend to lift Ylva... and you stagger as the world seems to shift beneath your feet. The white of the snow, the dark shadows of the dead city, it all blurs sideways...

And when the colours stop running, you're standing beside the hallmistress, one hand on her shoulder. A dead man grips her other wrist.

Burning blue eyes in a corpse's face. "You." There's a figure blazing with brilliant light. Ylva, you feel its heat blister your skin. Then, the cold fingers of a dead man.

The corpse god is looking from one of you to the other. "Is this another of your tricks?" He sounds weak, uncertain. A second time he stiffens, turns to look east, distracted. Ylva, you feel that burning, grave-chill, needletooth grip loosen on your wrist for a second.

Through the dead city, a figure approaches from the east. Out of the blizzard.
The moment the corpse god's grip loosens, Ylva tries to pull free. Her anger is fierce now - anger at being hunted, anger at being accosted by these cryptic dead gods who refuse to stay dead or admit they're alive, anger at fate for being unclear about what she should do.

"If it was, why would I tell you? Figure it out for yourself, corpse."

Grabbing hold of Skuld, Ylva tries to will herself back to Midgard, to leave the dead god to his dead god business.
"Because..." He is looking towards the approaching figure, realises too late that you've slipped away. "It's me or her, father."

There's no sign of the wolf now, no sign of that brilliant beautiful figure that burned itself into your eye. There's only the corpse. And he doesn't seem to even try to catch you as you flee.

You glance back, and see him bow his head before the approaching figure - a slip of a girl, hooded in shadow. Who reaches up to wrap slim pale arms around his neck, raises her hooded face to his, and kisses him deep.

There's something... terrible in the dead god's expression as their lips meet. Lust and loathing tangled all together.

Then a gust of rising wind blows snow across your vision, and the two of them are gone.

And you're staggering arm in arm through deep snow. The dead city's broken towers rising high above you.

And the blizzard is all around you.

''Later...''

So you lie in the snow, in each other's arms, and you doze. You dream a little, maybe; of the gods you learned in stories, and the gods who seem more and more to be intruding into your own.

You dream of the Allfather, one eye flashing. Dead at Ragnarok, or supposed to be, but here he is, runes dropping leaden from his tongue to spit and sizzle as they hit the snow. Driving back the blizzard.

You dream of Loki - not the smiling psychopath who prowls the ice wastes, but Loki Laufeyjarson, bane and boon to the Aesir, bound screaming beneath the earth after one joke too far. Bright Baldur dead at his brother Hod's hand, a dart of mistletoe through his heart. Consigned to Hel Half-Dead's realm, to sit at her side as consort.

You know the stories, you've sung the songs. You know how this is supposed to go. Fire and ice, at the end, as the dead march on Asgard and the winter wind blows through the golden halls. It all sinks back into the waters.

But here again is Odin. And with his one eye he winks at you...

...and you wake, to silence.

== Freyr #772 ==

You're feeling it settle into and over you - not calm, far from calm, but a strange kind of separation from yourself. The noise, the acrid stink of cordite, the percussive snap of each aimless bullet. The howl, somewhere, of a wounded man. The foul smell of someone who's shat themselves, or maybe just taken a bullet in the guts and guaranteed themselves a slow and agonising death.

None of this is in the songs you sing. But this, this is the path to Valhalla - in blood and chaos and indignity. The rune carved on your chest is burning, burning like the wound were new. Your fingers are numb on the pistol grip. You rise to one knee, turning, lowering the rifle, keening a song of death and glory as your finger tightens on the trigger.

There is a moment. You remember Miekke dancing, long ago. A spear hurled high.

And you level your rifle across a vast, unending battlefield. A plain strewn with broken shields, shattered swords, discarded spears.

And bodies enough to end the world.

Overhead, in the moonless dark, you hear... no, feel... the thump of enormous wings. Something vast is circling.

One last breath escapes Freyr's mouth, a cloud of breath escaping rows of clenched teeth and rising to dissipate mere fingers above his brow. He holds it there and goes silent. The hunter rests on the bank of the iceflow. He looks for his quarry on the other side - the one who will receive his gift of death. Where is it? Horned, furred, caught by arrow from the bow? The rifle scans the battlefield, a circle of blood and bone and fire lost in the vast dark husk of Ymir, the cosmic man. And all along, it keeps flapping, the thundering wings of omen, vibrating into the hunter's very marrow.

Freyr, you hear the great flap of wings overhead, look out across the vast and lifeless battlefield, and know you are seeing Ragnarok. The end that was. Or will be? Where is Loki? Where is Miekke? Dead among the countless dead, you sense. Part of you is screaming, pumping the trigger in wild rage... but that part of you is hamr, just meat and muscle.

Your higher soul, your hugr, is gripped by something... strange. A sense of dread, as those great wings thump overhead and you look up to see the stars eclipsed by some huge, circling shadow. And for the first time in your short, strange life, you understand what terror is. You've heard others speak of it, but it's been until now an alien thing. A concept.

Now, though. Something vast is hunting you across this sea of corpses. Run, your hamr tells you. Abandon your hate, your mission, your charge.

Run.

Freyr, you're frozen a heartbeat too long, as your hugr and hamr war for control. And with a whump and a rush of stinking wind like a battlefield of decaying corpses, a vast reptillian shape crashes down heavy in a flurry of snow and bodies, claws pinning you to the frozen earth.

A vast dark head descends, and Níðhöggr regards you with gleaming eyes. You feel the weight of its awful regard, near as crushing as the sheer physical weight pressing down on your chest. "Ah," the dragon purrs, and it sounds so horrifically pleased. "The one that got away."

You feel its claw start to pierce your side...

Then a deafening mechanical roar splits the air. The dragon's head snaps sideways, and light floods over it - giving you a moment's terrible sight of teeth and rotting scales, of the bodies that hang damned from Níðhöggr's foul wings - before everything becomes tangled and confusing. Pain from your side, brilliant light, . Something massive crashes hard into the dragon - or has it just become man-sized? - and it launches itself away skywards. Bullets are suddenly singing past you once again, and the orange firelight is casting everything in stripes of orange and black. Your rifle is in the snow beside you, its barrel steaming.

And Miekke - near naked, streaked with blood - is a couple of feet away, on the back of a roaring snowmobile.

== Miekke #794 ==

Miekke, as Freyr stumbled up and lurches towards your bike, you can feel the blood running down your back from where the bullet clipped your shoulder, hot blood in the cold night. From around the circle the Wolves are still firing, their gunshots muffled by the ringing in your ears, by the hammer of your heart. You press yourself low against the bike, and suddenly you can feel the bullet still inside you, as it grates against the bone. You howl at the sudden pain, at the feeling of wrongness, the feeling of violation. Your vision blurs - with tears, with faintness. There's an awful sense of retreating within yourself... no, of being roughly pushed aside. And you remember... something.

A line of poetry. A song.

Freyr… A smell intrudes. Among the blood and snow and cordite, the stink of flesh... burning. And some part of you sees the rune burning in the flesh of Miekke's shoulder, molten and burning like a brand.

Miekke, the pain is receding. You feel stronger somehow.

No, not dying. Something... more.

A throaty chuckle erupts unbidden from your mouth. You start in shock. Who has stolen your voice? You fight back. Take back your body your soul your voice your heart.

The other relinquishes its grip. Steps back with a mocking bow, and a twinkle in his one good eye.

== Miekke and Freyr #811 ==

here's a strange sense of dislocation, Freyr, as you grit your teeth against Miekke's probing hand, and for a moment you are both Miekke and Freyr; you feel their cold fingers in your side, and feel his bloody heat beneath your fingers. The delicate bones of their pale arching spine; the so-welcome roughness of his grip upon your neck.

Miekke; you feel that same duality. The heat and the cold. The need and the want. Sensuality and rage.

And then there is only the single you - looking out through a single eye. In the orange heat of the old dwarf's furnace, stripped to the waist and striped with sweat and soot, weak from hunger, your throat torn from runesong, your beard singed and thrown back over your bare right shoulder, your arms shaking with fatigue, the black-feathered shell of your Hugr shattered on the anvil before you.

You whisper "No..." as two of the clay figures, the Fylgja you have poured your self into, crumble back into dust.

From its perch on your left shoulder, lone Muninn gives a mournful cry.

And a single knock, vast and booming, shakes the ironbound door of Brokkr's forge.

"What are you doing, you fools?"

The question, hoarse and furious and leaden with fatigue. Even as you speak it, you know it's not rhetorical.
Miekke
Strange, sharing a mind with that one, and in this one's body. Did they invite the man into their other form? Were they intermingled without their intervention? No, this was their dream. The other's presence was accident, result of something still not understood. Something to be known.

"Trying to grow, Allfather. Trying to understand."
'''
????'''
The second dreamer is inert, faint and silent. Its presence, dim and small, sinks into the cast of a single sensation which washes over the body - a lurking, germinating anxiety, washing over in shivering waves of somatic dysphoria in the rhythm of a latent, dying heartbeat. As a strange tic or compulsion, the single eye is urged with each wave to peer deep into the flames of the forge.

'''Miekke, Freyr'''
"You are not here to understand!" He roars, and you all feel the strain, the rawness of a throat parched for water. "You are vessels, not partners! A mask, not the face it hides. You are not-"

"Odin!" The door stands open. A woman there, beautiful but barely more than a girl, posed half in the light of the forge, half in shadow. Her face angled sly in near silhouette, one eye filled with delight that is horrifying in its intensity. There is something wrong with her face, you sense. With the half cloaked in shadow.

"No!" Fear, dizzying and visceral, seizes the body you inhabit. "You've led her right to-"

Freyr, the fire you were losing yourself in, it's vanished in an eyeblink. The heat, too; you shiver in the sudden cold, in the gently falling snow that drifts down through the vast gaping hole in the roof of this once-great hall – the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it, long since rotted to dust.

You are yourselves again. Clothed in your own true flesh. But you feel something... missing.

Surrounded by open doorways, you stand amidst the ruins of one last great feast, still mouldering on the tables. Rust-ruined breastplates strewn all about amidst the rotting benches, half-buried in ash and snow.

"-me..." A dusty, drawn-out croak from the high table. From the throne, and the figure cloaked in grey, A spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders. Slowly it raises its head. Beneath the broad brim of the hat, dead flesh; a withered husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisting, wringing out a long low moan.

“Who’s there?” a voice from the shadows at the edge of the hall, quavering and weak. “More visitors?"

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might. "Why do you return here?" the huge old man says. "What do you hope to find?"

"The one that got away, of course." The woman, the girl, is approaching down the length of the hall. Hands out to her sides, half a smile on half a face. The other half is a corpse's snarl, flesh mottled and dark, lips drawn back from pale protruding teeth. Eye white and unseeing.

"Hel." The massive, ancient blind man shrinks back, but lifts his face desperately, bravely. "How many times? How many? He is not here..."

The goddess of the unworthy dead draws nearer. And her living eye flicks wickedly between you both. "You're sure about that...?" She says.

'''????
'''The interloper stands at the dreamer's side, now more clearly present, a short child with a bare scalp. He makes a hissing noise that echoes, and begins to grow and age. From shimmering follicles upon his scalp grow and extend stalks of gold, lengthening into great long locks of sunlight like the roots of a tree. They reach down his back, reaching for his hips, before the man, now bearded and old, begins to side-step, silently, closer to the dreamer.

The man, the radiant sunlight about his brow and torso reaching its zenith and beginning to whiten, places a calloused left hand around the dreamer's back and onto their farther shoulder and another hand on their right hip, all while he stares down the approaching figure. A triple drumbeat reverberates from his form across the hall like a murmurous heartbeat, and his long arms lift the dreamer up and into his embrace.

AfterRagnarok:The Mythic

2019-01-28T20:43:16Z

MysteryCat: Created page with " == Loki #65 == In the angular space where three ancient school buses meet, yellow paint scored and blasted by the elements, a skald is telling of the end of the world. A pal..."

== Loki #65 ==

In the angular space where three ancient school buses meet, yellow paint scored and blasted by the elements, a skald is telling of the end of the world. A pale woman, veiled, layered in furs, she sways as she lists the gods and their deaths.

Fenrir breaks free and kills Odin. Thor and the Midgard Serpent kill each other. Loki turns on the Aesir and he and Heimdall kill each other. Surtr sets Asgard and Bifrost on fire and kills Freyr.

The Nine Worlds burn, and plunge into boiling sea.

"All this has gone before," she says, and her head raises as you pass. Beneath the veil, her eyes glitter. "All this is yet to come."

She has a modest audience, less than a dozen. The desperate, the hopeless, the mad. But they sway in time, and moan as the verses pour from her lips, and something in their eyes is fire.

On and through, and the day grows colder still. There's a frost in the air now, on the lips, on the tongue. Bokkr wraps his face, breath freezing on the thin cloth of a child's scarf adorned with a raging green jötunn. Fenrir just snorts, but ice crystals glitter in his beard.
----

== Draghi #95 ==

the rattle of runestones announce the presence of an oracle. A pale, beardless young man sits cross-legged in the corridor between a fishmonger and a carver of strange, wooden trinkets. Before him, a circle of runes carved into the concrete promise truth, insight and binding fate. The young man is slumped a little, an elbow on his knee, idly pushing the stones around the circle with one finger of the other hand. He looks up, right at you, and his mouth is bruised and bloody. "You seek your fortune?" he says, a little hopefully.

"Er, yeah." He shows the scrap of cloth that Surtr had dropped. "The one who carried this troubles me. I would learn whether his wyrd is entangled with mine, but I'm not.." he lets the sentence trail off for fear of offending the other. "Can you guide me?

The boy looks a little unprepared for an answer in the positive, but he recovers well. "Yes! Yes, certainly." He waves for you to sit, turning and shuffling aside to make room for you out of the corridor's occasional traffic. Scrabbling among the pouches and rune-carved boxes, he produces a cheap scrap goblet with a little cry of triumph. The other hand opens towards you. "Fire?" he says hopefully. "For me, and for the knowing."

Dragi holds out a bit of treasure -- some matches, a lump of amber -- for the boy to see, then closes his hand when the boy reaches for it. "Know this. I have danced without legs and slept in lost cities and driven a thousand clicks with a corpse for a passenger. Do not think to impress me with rolled-up eyes and foaming mouth. I will know, and I will beat you, and I will name you to the market boss as a fraud and cheat and watch them crush you beneath cold stones."

Dragi isn't actually confident of any of these things, but he likes to make a first impression. "But for a true seeing, fairly given, this is yours, and more later as may be." He opens his hand again, warning given, and lets the boy take his payment. "Are mushrooms involved?" The little red fly-cap mushroom was a staple of religious life in Tyrs Hafn, and he emphatically doesn't miss it.
To give the boy credit, he seems to take the threat in his stride. "I'm no charlatan," he says, with a hint of pride in his raspy voice. "I learned the runes from Gosti Finehair, who learned them from Skoffir Twice-Burned, who learned them from Magda the Crone, who learned them hanging from the Ash. My seeing is true if you are."

He drew himself up as he spoke, and now slumps a little, coughing. But he nods and takes the payment, making most of it vanish.

"Mushrooms," the boy's eyes widen, as he strikes a match on the roughened side of the scrapweld goblet. "Damn. What I could do with some mushrooms..."

He drops the match into the goblet, and fire flares up with a puff of sharp, resinous smoke. He breathes deep of the fumes, and thrusts the cup in your face for you to do the same. The stink makes your eyes water, and as you breathe deep the flames of the candles around you seem to start to twinkle and dance like stars above. "Spit," the boy commands, and when you look at him his pale hair seems to bristle and glitter like gold.

He spits into the goblet after you, then shakes in a pouch of pale, rune-carved knucklebones that clatter dully as they fall. "Hear me, Odin," he begins to chant, stirring the woodash and spittle with a gnarled finger of yew that seems to flex and writhe slowly in his hand. "All-Father, I name you. Wanderer, spear shaker, thronesitter, wise one, gallows-lord, drinker of the draught of knowledge, rune-singer, one-eye. I name you with your names. I call you with your names. Odin! Woden! Wednesday! In Hel's silent hall - hear my song! Throw off death's veil, Lord! Call down the shaking rainbow! And let. Us. Pass!"

With that he casts the runes clattering across the floor between you.

Right after inhaling a lungful of the intoxicating smoke, Dragi remembers how much he hates this mystical shit. Life is not so beautiful that one needs to see it laid out in front of the eyes like a map, but here it is, staring back at him from the runestones, Fehu the fire and Uruz the Ox, and most of all Tiwaz, the god's rune, pointing at his heart like an arrow shot from the bow of justice. He hears people talk about what they see in the great blizzard of the world, and some joke about ice maidens and white bears, but Dragi has travelled the blizzard many times and he knows. It is a long cold wandering among the dead, with only one's sins for company and no prospect of rescue.

The bones rattle across the cold concrete, skittering to a halt. The boy leans forward to study their pattern. There is Raidō, the journey, nestled close beside Tiwaz. Here are Kaunan and Hagalaz, flanking a face-down stone as though in escort. The boy reaches down dreamlike and turns over the stone.

Ūruz. The lamentation of the clouds. The ruin of the harvest. The abomination of the shepherd.

"Curious," the boy says, and his voice is strangely doubled. When you look up at him, another face is looking down at you. A face impossibly old, stern and noble. The boy towers over you, you realise. The hand that holds the runestone is a mailed fist, clenched tight, thrust into the mouth of a wolf. There is a sword in the other, held hilt-up like a cross, blood running down the blade from too tight a grip. The point rests heavy on the ground, sunk deep into the earth.

There is chanting, voices in the swirling blizzard.

''—an axe age, a sword age
shields are riven
a wind age, a wolf age
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another''

Molten fire is bubbling up through the wound in the Earth, smoking around the point of the sword. Dark figures rise up with it, marching beside the flow of fire, directing its sweep across the land. Fish Hold burns. Splitsville burns. The nine towns become furnaces, places of raging flame, swirling smoke - ashes, only ashes. Nine worlds and all their people all burn, all the world. In Forge Surtr sits laughing on a throne, and he too holds a sword, but this one is burning, burning bright. Its flames lick at the fringes of the shadowed woods.

The wolf catches your eye, and bites down hard. The boy screams, pulls back a torn and mangled wrist. "We see you," the wolf declares, licking blood from scrapweld fangs. "Run all you like, there's no escaping Fate."

It grins, and shimmers like heat haze. "Where is Summer?" It says, in Surtr's voice, and its face is Surtr's now. Behind steel spectacles, fire burns in his eyes. You reach for the sword in the boy's bloody hand, but it withers and is consumed by frost. "Too bad," the Jötunn says, in a voice like the crackle of a diesel engine, and he raises his flaming sword.

The blade sweeps down, and you feel its heat.

You feel the heat. Around you, shouting, chaos. The boy sat across from you is a column of flame, writhing silently. You can smell him cooking as you scrabble away. The charm-carver is wailing, begging for the gods protection. The oracle's other market-neighbour, the fishmonger, quick-thinkingly empties a bucket of ice over the boy, dousing much of the flames.

The boy collapses, and the fishmonger beats out the last flickering fires that play over him with a heavy oilskin.

The boy groans weakly, blood and meltwater pooled around him. His shirt has melted, fused with his skin. His face is turned away from you, which seems a mercy, but his hair is all but gone, his scalp red and black in equal measure. His right arm ends at the wrist, in a mess of soot and blood.

You become aware of a throb in the palm of your hand. One of the bones is clenched there; it crumbles to hot white dust as you open your hand, and falls through your fingers like the softest snow. Your whole palm is a blister, but burned into the web between thumb and forefinger are three dark lines. The rune Fehu; fire of the sea.

"What in Hel's name happened?" the fishmonger challenges you. A small crowd has gathered to observe the spectacle. You can still smell the boy's burning flesh.

"I saw it!" The woodcarver says. "He burned like the wrath of god!"

"Bullshit," one of the crowd snorts, a woman in fire-stained leathers. "A lamp or something fell on him. From up there." She points at the ledge hacked into the wall above your heads, every inch of it filled with candles and other lightbringers.

"There was no lamp, fool," the woodcarver snaps at her. "His blasphemies have displeased the gods!" He fixes you with a wild eye. "You! The eye of Odin is on you now! Cower! Cower!"
----

== Ylva. #354 ==

You walk in a valley of dust and ash, and the snow is falling softly. No, not a valley, a riverbed; long dried up and gone. To the east, far to the east along the length of the riverbed, where the mountains rise, the scar of a once-great torrent is clearly carved. At its base, where a pool once glittered deepest blue, a vast dark emptiness.

Ahead of you a wall, as tall of the mountains. Scarred and torn by weapons of war. Its highest battlements crumbling. The great gate hangs open, not broken but unlocked.

You pass through, and the hall stands before you. Beneath the ash and snow, still it glitters – but the roof is long collapsed, the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it up rotting at the edges of a great dark hole.

Each of the 540 doors is flung open, and you enter in. The hall is dark, the floor thick with ash; the ruins of one last great feast still mouldering on the tables. Among the rotting benches, rust-ruined breastplates are strewn all about.

From the throne at the high table, a figure watches. Broad-hatted, cloaked in grey, a spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders – a mockery, you somehow sense. Trembling, you approach. Shadows hood his face, but his beard is long and grey.

You step up onto the dais, raise the broad brim of the hat to look upon his face. The dead flesh is withered, a dried husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisted in shock, dismay. As if faced with a fate unplanned for.

“Who’s there?” a voice rings out, quavering and weak. “The einherjar have marched… and no valkyr remain to choose.”

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might.

“Hel? Have you come to torment me again?”

Ylva feels strangely calm and speaks without fear.

"I'm not Hel, though I may be due to meet her soon."

She touches the place where the exit wound should be.

"I think I've been murdered for greed and pride, and I don't know if I'm coming back from it."

"You are dead?" the huge man says, in his quavering old man voice. He shuffles closer, emerging into the dim grey light that enters the hall through the broken-backed roof overhead. He is huge indeed, vastly muscled despite his age. And blind in truth, eyes white and staring. He shakes his head. "No. The dead no longer come to this place. The bodies of the einherjar lie where they fell, out on the field. There are no more - and none to choose them. Until..."

He tails off, and you can read a thousand sorrows on his face. "Come here," he says finally, and raises one massive hand - strangely gentle - towards your face. "Come here, and let me get a look at you."
Ylva hesitates, as a very early swims to the surface, a drunk man (her father?) whispers "Never trust the fucking gods". Is this man a god? Aren't they all dead? Either way...

Either way he seems harmless enough, and she's already dead. Or...

"Dead, or dying. Got my insides on the outside and enemies all around in any case."

Then she makes a decision and crosses the distance between them, leading his hand to her face.

The blind man - the god? - brushes your face with heavy, scarred, slablike fingers. Each of his hands is big enough to wrap around your whole face. He pauses as one finger explores the scars around your eye, and you see something like fear on his broad, craggy face. "No," he mutters finally, and his hands move on. "Hmm."

His hands brush your neck, your shoulders, your breasts - it should feel like an outrage, but somehow there's no sense of violation, of malign intent, to it - and move on. One hand pauses at your side. "Here," he says, pressing a huge palm hard into your abdomen, and you give a gasp of pain. "Mortal indeed."

The other hand traces back up your spine, to the nape of your neck, running clumsily through your rough-cut hair. He pauses, heavily lips pursing. "Wait." His fingers move round to the unmarked side of your face, above your ear. His face is grave. "This ain't right..."

And you scream as he pushes a heavy finger into the hole in your skull. Again. You feel him fishing around in your head, in your mind. Memories from what passed for your childhood. Your first love. "Almost..."

You remember laughing with the others as your brother raises his spear. The whisperer at his shoulder, always with that sly smile.

You don't have a brother.

"Wait..." the blind god in Odin's hall is pale as he draws out... something, pinched between two bloody fingers. You nearly sag to your knees, but his other hand grips your arm tight. He's wiping the thing on his ash-smeared tunic, blood.

A spearpoint. Fire-hardened wood.

The god is pale, staring at the thing he holds. "No, no, no." He releases your arm and you drop, forgotten, head and guts alive with pain. The hall swims around you, gloom deepening into true dark.

"Baldur?"
In the dream, you lie in a ship with a great curved prow, the fire all around you. A dead man stands at the helm, his eyes on the horizon. Behind you, on the beach, a score of figures; hooded, cloaked, weeping.

Ahead, far ahead across the storm-tossed sea, a grey and dreary shore.

Hel is waiting.

----

== Miekke #419 ==

(Gerda’s painting)
Gerda tugs, and the cloth falls in one heavy slump to the floor.

Below, a forest scene. Trees pressed in close on all sides, heavy and oppressive, rising beyond the frame of the canvas. Dark runes slashed into dark wood.

Three woman gathered at the side of a pool, watching a fourth figure - pale, bloody of face and hand - as it kneels beside the water. Around one out-thrust hand, the water boils red.

Intricate ropes of gold wind around the pale skin, the bare head. The face lined with pain and weariness beneath a mask of blood. But in the one eye is captured... something profound. Realisation. Awareness. Horror. All of these are there, in the strokes of Gerda's brush.

Behind, from the shadows beneath the trees, something dark and massive watches. A suggestion of scale and claw.

"Not a death this time," Gerda says, and she almost sounds relieved.

"It's beautiful....," Miekke comments, made breathless by the painting. "I... that's just beautiful, Gerda. I don't even know what to say. You've made more of these? Why have I never seen them?"
Gerda nods plainly. "You have," she says. She seems strangely dissatisfied with your response, as if she was expecting something more... profound. Her eyes keep going back and forth between the painting and you, like she's searching for flaws.

In which, you are not sure.

"You have," she says again. "My father hangs them downstairs, some of them at least. The violent ones. I think he likes to imagine what it would've been like to kill a god."
Miekke doesn't really hear Gerda's response. They're staring at the painting, and the eye within the face of pain and weariness engulfs them.
The first thing you know is pain; pain from the eye you plucked out. The second is the smell; the stink of the primal forest, the tall dark trees that gather inhospitable around you. A rich, loamy, leafy smell, undercut with the crispness of pine. There's snow on the branches above you, but down here in the shadows it's cool, not cold. And the water in the well is warm as blood.

The three sit across from you. Your one good eye is bleary, watering; each time you look at them they are sat somewhere different on the rocks. Their faces smear and judder as you try to focus, but you feel sure you know them.

When they speak, their voices blur and blend as their faces do. You think one is speaking, but another's lips move; the voice comes from the place of the third.
"You have sacrificed-"
"-given half the light-
"-of the world;"
"washed yourself white-"
"-so pure-"
"-so pale-"
"-white as the membrane-"
"-the skin that lies inside-"
"-the shell of the egg-"
"-so holy-"
"-so wise you will be-"
"-tell us, far-rider -"
"-wanderer-"
"-yes, tell us-"
"-does it hurt?"
"-no, not that-"
"-no, no-"
"-we know it hurts-"
"-Mimmir told us-"
"-poor Mimmir-"
"-tell us instead-"

One of them is beside you, her hand cool on your shoulder. She draws a ladle forth from the well, brimming with water that seems to shimmer with an inner light. You look up into a face that is clear and dark, a face you recognise. "Do you think it will save you?" she says, as she raises the well-water to your lips.
Miekke looks into the woman's face, wide-eyed, searching for understanding. They're afraid to breathe.

There's a weird sense of discontinuity, of inhabiting another skin. You feel the bonds of fate growing tighter, tighter. Leading you down the path once more... to Ragnarok.

Part of you, the part that is Odin in this place, despairs. You are so weary.

The world must end again... but not yet. Not yet.
"Save me?" AllFather-Miekke croaks, their voice raw and unused. "Do you think that the point of this? It's to save us all."

"I have to try."

That last is only a whisper, as their attention has shifted from speaking to more focused intent as they take the proffered water. Diving into it with the thirst of one seeking to avert Fate, the water is not drunk so much as it is devoured. Impassioned, fully exposed, seeking to digest it all in one raw, exposed moment, with no care for the protection of self. Diving into the deepest of pools, throat first, losing oneself in the sound of the splash as the rich water engulfs the entire person in its embrace.
The water of the well was warm to your hand; but it burns down your throat like magma, floods your being with heat and knowledge. You remember creation, Ragnarok, rebirth; Lif and Lifthrasir, man and woman, sheltering in the branches of Yggdrasill, the world ash, to emerge once more as the world begins again.

But mostly you remember destruction. The winter unending. The jotunn Surtr and his flaming sword. The Fenris-wolf, its teeth closing on your throat. The Nine Worlds descending into fire and death, collapsing into the cold wide void of Ginnungagap, over and over.

The death of everything. Over and over and over.

As fate has decreed.

But you struggle to your feet, lone eye blazing with knowledge. With one hand you reach out and carve a rune into the bark of the towering World-Ash.

ᛉ – Algiz, which means Life. A protection from enemies, a defense of that which one loves.

And Urðr, the weave of destiny... it trembles.

You come back to yourself, and to Gerda hanging onto your wrist, crying "Stop, stop!", and to pain.

The hand Gerda is restraining - your fingers are bloody, and you can feel the mess your nails have made of your cheek, your eye; they pulse with fire with every heartbeat.

You blink, and it's painful enough that you nearly shriek. But your vision clears some; you're not blind. Beyond Gerda, who kneels appalled in front of you, the painting.

The door opens; Urdakott is there. "Hel's black heart," he curses, and it seems aimed at Gerda as much as you. "Cover that damn thing up!" He vanishes back through the door, leaving it hanging open.

Gerda glances back at the painting, from it to you. She releases your hand, throws the patchwork blanket back over the canvas. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't expect..."

Your mind, though, is spinning. The pain from your eye is a little thing, inconsequential beside the revelations that course through you.

You have been here before, time after time.

The pain of the injured flesh is as nothing next to the pain of remembrance. They look at the young girl in front of them, and at the cascade of emotion that inhabits her face and her body.

They stand.

"Show me the others," they command, with the force not of a mesmerizing sword-dancer, but that of... something more.
"I can't," she says. "He put some up, downstairs - the deaths. He likes those. But the others..." She shakes her head. "He burned them."

Gerda looks at you then, and it's clear she's afraid. Not of you, but of what might change. "I'm sorry," she says quietly, miserably. "I just wanted to paint you. What I saw inside you."

----

== Loki #420 ==

The heart is warm and tough. As you tear at it with your teeth, hot coppery blood fills your mouth, flows down your throat. You feel its warmth fill your stomach.

Above you, the sky grows overcast. So focused on the work of devouring the heart, it's not until the first snowflake brushes your eye that you look up.

Realise you stand alone on a plain of ice.

A cold shadow passes over you. You cannot help but shudder, know it's the cold of death, of eternity on the Corpse Shore among the murderers, the adulterers, the oath-breakers.

And the vast bulk of the worm Níðhöggr crashes to the frozen earth.

You feel the ice shake beneath you as is raises up, shakes itself. Malice Striker, scaled in scabarous blue and grey.

As it turns towards you it stretches out its terrible wings, feathered with the bodies of the inglorious dead.

"Ah," the worm hisses, fixing you with a basilisk eye. You cannot move, cannot speak. "One of mine." Its skull-like head comes forwards on a long sinuous neck, death in the jaws that gape.

"Not yours." A voice behind you. Völva steps from your shadow. "His fate lies elsewhere than Nástrǫnd."

The worm rears its head back, hisses. "Has he not murdered? Has he not broken oaths - is he not planning to break one even now? I can see it wriggling in his mind like a red worm." It writhes, and flaps its wings, and the foul corpse stench rises from its body. "Is the child that nestles beneath your heart not his?"

"The adultery is mine," Völva says, raising her chin as you wonder at her calm. "I will answer it in my own way."

"No," the worm growls. "You will answer it in mine." And one great wing sweeps forward, quick as thought, to brush across Völva - her face, her breasts, her belly - with a terrible gentleness.

She staggers. Sobs. Drops to her knees in the snow. And is gone.

You feel the worm's attention turn back to you, like an avalanche descending.

"Would you too deny me?" Malice Striker purrs, winding its great head towards you. "You, who calls yourself Loki. Hah! Murderer, deceiver - will you deny what you are?"
"I am a wolf, unfathered," Loki answers, before lunging at Malice Striker to rip it to shreds.
The worm rears back hissing as you leap at it, machete swinging. The smell of it is foul, this close - the rotting, inglorious dead.

Your first wild upward blow scrapes on the boney plates of Níðhöggr skull-face, the tip of the blade scoring a line up towards the eye as its head draws back.

It roars, spreads its corpse-hung wings. One heavy foreleg knocks you staggering. You feel the claws bite. Its bulk is over you, its death-cold shadow swallows you. Span-long teeth snap inches from your face. Foul dark ichor runs sluggish from the cut you gave it, beading beneath the eye like a tear.

And your heavy second swing bites deep into one outstretched wing. Tearing through corpse-flesh, ancient bindings, skin and tendon.

Níðhöggr roars again, in dismay and pain. The stink of its breath is the wake of battle, the days-old unburied dead. It recoils from you, hisses. "You are not Loki!"

You advance, grinning, feral. Desperate, it spreads its wings again, leaps at you, past you. Knocking you flat. A crash shakes the ice. You scramble back to your feet, turn. The worm is struggling to rise, wing hanging ragged at its side. It wheels, tail whipping at you. Crashing into your shoulder, tumbling you back to the ice. You rise, blade in hand, blood in your mouth.

"Peace, unfettered!" the worm roars. You sense its desperation. "I mistook you!"

You snarl like the wolf you are.

And Níðhöggr... flinches. Then-

-you are on your back in the snow. The taste of bile in your mouth. Your gang milling, shouting, confused. Hel kneeling beside you. The hilt of a knife between your teeth. Blood and snow and sunshine. And the road.

You try to rise, feel weakness flood you. Where the worm struck, in your shoulder and your hip, flesh and bones are screaming.

Volva lies foetal in the snow a couple of feet away. Pale, shivering. Weeping silently. Agneta squats nearby, watching her worriedly.

"Well," Ketil says, kicking the pile of still-steaming reindeer meat. "I sure ain't eating any of that."

"You... alright, boss?" Hel says. More calculating than concerned.

''Later…''

The fire and the wind. Burning ice, biting flame. And you, caught between them. There's laughter around the fire.

The wolf within you snaps and snarls, struggles to free itself from its fetters. A silken ribbon, strong as iron. You recall the binding, the merriment - the relief - as you strained and snarled and could not work yourself free. The taste of blood, the consequence.

And the expectation. That subtle moment as your fetters... gave. Just a little.

The wolf within looks up, its mouth bloody still. Its eyes promise nothing; only destruction, chaos. A tearing down of things.

The bindings on its jaws are fraying, weakening. It will work itself free, sooner or later.

A slash of your knife could quicken the process.
Focusing in further, Loki imagines his knife—so comfortable in his hand but so clearly of it—and starts to worry at the bindings of the wolf with it. "No chains, inside or out," he mutters as he sets to his work.

The fetters part under the blade of your knife like they'd been waiting for it, and the wolf lunges up. In an eyeblink it has you on your back, your knife off buried in a snowbank somewhere. Mad red eyes stare down into yours, and there's no gratitude there. A low growl rumbles up out from out of its great black body, and the wolf opens its jaws-

Abruptly, with a dreamlike discontinuity, you are surrounded by grazing reindeer. The wolf's head snaps up.

The deer panic, scatter in all directions. Among them, the leaders of the herd; a golden stag with mighty antlers and a sleek, shimmering silver doe.

The wolf leaps off in pursuit. Pauses. "Hunt with me, brother!" it cries over its shoulder. Then it is off, running, jaws gaping against the snow and sky.

With a laughing howl, Loki follows after, chasing with reckless abandon.

The reindeer scatter before you, criss-crossing your path and that of your... packmate? Whatever the huge black wolf is to you, he runs like the wind, jaws gaping, breath wild and ragged. A panicking deer darts across his path and he rakes it open from neck to rump without breaking stride, blood spraying in the snow.

But you are fast, and faster still. Your paws pound the snow as you hit your stride, closing the gap between you. You scent the blood, and it is rapturous. But above and beyond that, your sharp eyes make out the headlong flight of the herd leaders. The stag, proud and golden, its rack of antlers a fearsome weapon - but heavy, and slowing it. Ten strides ahead, the silver doe - quicksilver fast, slippery and wise.

Most of the herd are behind you now - and you are alongside your packmate. Lost in the joy of the hunt. He dwarfs you - a mass of muscle and rage.

But you are no pup even so, a killer, an alpha. Behind you, you sense your pack has joined you; four or five wolves at your back, running hard.

And as your muscles begin to burn, as the two deer begin to veer apart, the hunt truly begins.
Without hesitation, Loki follows after the silver doe, after the true challenge. He has no doubt he could kill the stag in battle after running it down. But to hunt certainties is to not hunt at all.
The doe is fast, and sure-footed in the snow. It jinks through the snowdrifts, and mighty leaps carry it over the deepest drifts as it aims to lose you; while on the ice it seems almost to fly, abandoning cunning for sheer straight-line speed.

it's all you can do to keep up. Your lungs are straining, your muscles roaring with exertion. But you begin to close the gap.

The doe, seeming to sense the race is lost, tacks suddenly, sharply right. Off the ice and towards the copse of dark trees that rises from the edge of the frozen lake.

A desperate move. You can feel the forest's strangeness, its vast, alien indifference to wolves and men alike. Shadows flit between the trees, shapes bigger and more fearsome than any man or wolf.
The hunt is to perfect to give up, Loki presses on, and as the doe makes her desperate turn, he launches himself to take her throat and life.
As the doe turns at bay, you launch yourself at her throat; but you realise mid-air you've misjudged – both your leap, and her determination. She skips nimbly aside, spinning to deliver a double-hoofed kick to the ribs that lifts you off the ground and dumps you gasping in the snow.

Then your pack catch up, and are on her. Bursting through the trees into the clearing, circling her, keeping her turning. Nipping at her rear and flanks as you regain your footing. You join the harassment, and she does her best to keep her face to you, but the constant pressure of the rest of the pack is wearing her down. You can smell her fear, her desperation as she tries to break out but is driven back into the centre of the clearing by the pack's snarling lunges.

One of the wolves darts in, but too slow; she spins, knocking him howling with a sideways butt of the head. There's a gap in the circle as he scrambles.

An opening, an opportunity. She takes it.

And so do you.

This time your leap is true. Your weight staggers her, and your forelegs wrap around her shoulders as the two of you tumble in the snow. She kicks, writhes, but the pack close in tight. You bite and bite, taste quicksilver blood in your mouth, hot and salty. She's on her back, your jaws on her throat.

She goes suddenly still, and in her wide black eye you sense a recognition of the inevitable.
Loki savours the exhilaration and anguish of the hunt for a moment before he closes his jaws to take the life of the beautiful creature.
The doe thrashes once, hooves kicking in the bloody snow. The pack are pacing back and forth; all hungry eyes and hungry jaws. The trees loom dark, pressing in at the edges of the clearing.

There's a moment of intense dislocation, like your heart and mind were suddenly hooked sideways a thousand miles, and you're sitting in the dark. Back in yourself, two legs two arms. The taste of quicksilver blood still rich in your mouth.

Pitch dark, total and entire. No moon, no reflection off the snow. Nothing. You can't remember the last time you were so utterly, utterly blind.

''Later...''

Loki pops a pain pill and swallows it dry, moistening his lips after on a handful of clean(ish) snow. "Anyone who can hobble over for some pain pills, give them. Collect those who are salvageable and load up to make our way to someone that can really patch us up." Loki blinks his eyes and mind as clear as he can, and looks at the sky to try and get his bearings on who would be the best to go to. All the while feeling the howling of the blizzard making promises, promises about better routes to go through the snow, about better destinations. With a snarl, he lets the howling wind in, hoping to clear the cobwebs at the very least.

You open your mind and the blizzard rushes in, and it knows exactly where you should be. Marching among the un-numbered dead; howling as you cut a swath through the einherjar; tasting the all-father's blood on your teeth. This is the Wyrd laid out for you, your fate.

The frost you invited in, it eats away at your mind, your soul, your sense of self. You feel yourself growing indistinct.

Yet something in you speaks out; reminds you, you have a choice. Surrender to fate, or carve your own path. Loki, you named yourself - the deceiver, the betrayer, the rebel. And the voice that rings in your blood and in your bone, it asks: will you earn that name?

Or are you just a wolf?

Loki holds to himself, as agonizing as it is, letting the winds cut through him and then readying himself to push on.

The blizzard blows through you, and it has ice in its teeth. You can feel it driving you, turning you, pushing you in the direction Fate has laid out for you, and you struggle to stand, to hold your ground, to remain Loki.

It takes all your will, your stubbornness, to cling to who you are. And it costs you - every icy gust strips something away. A memory, a dream, a piece of your past. But one image remains, unyielding, though you cannot quite recall what it means. An older man, his beard turning grey, half his face in shadow - a brother? Father? Whoever he is to you, whoever he was, he nods; and you feel his approving hand on your shoulder, callused and heavy.

Something snaps. Like a thread in some great tapestry, it all begins to unravel. You brace...

A drop of liquid strikes your forehead, and you wake. You open your eyes wide with sudden pain as the venom begins to burn. It runs down into one of your eyes, and as half the world goes black you start to scream. Where is Sigyn? High above you, wound through the stalactites that dot the roof of the cave, the serpent hisses with delight. You watch another drop of venom form at the tip of its fangs, all the colours of Bifröst packed into its swelling curve. You hear Sigyn's hurried footsteps, returning with her bowl. Too late, too late. The drop is falling.

And you wake again, in truth.

----

==Ylva #423 ==

"Your Valkyr brings me," Superior says. "Literally. She broke into my car while I was... asleep... and brought me here against my will. And now she's avoiding me, when I need to speak with her." Her gaze keeps drifting off you to the bottle by your hand, and she licks her lips unconsciously.

"But perhaps..." She looks you in the eye then, and you get the impression that she's gathering her courage. "Perhaps your thread is woven in with hers. Perhaps you share more than a death." She hesitates.
"Were... were you given a message?" she asks, her cracked old voice quavering ever so slightly.
"No message. There's... I saw..."

She shivers, suddenly unsure of how to speak of what she's seen. To describe her... vision, her experience, to a believer is different from telling her friends, her chosen family.

"Someone is still there. A god, or a giant. Blind and bent by sorrow, he seemed."

Her words come in short bursts.

"He seemed alone, but... like he was waiting."

She glances to Camo, then looks Mother Superior in the eye.

"They're not all dead. The world isn't over. There's still hope."
You see Superior go pale at your words. "Hope!?" she stares at you in utter dismay, then slumps against the bar, draining the drink you poured her and snatching the bottle to pour another. "Hope!" She laughs, and it's not a pleasant sound at all.

Camo's expression is comical, eyebrows raised all the way up as he regards the old woodswoman, and he glances at you as if to say what the hell?

"What do you hope for, tell me that? Prosperity? Peace?" She laughs sourly again, and knocks back the drink. Reaches for the bottle.
Ylva snatches the bottle away with well-honed reflexes, then pinches the fingers of her other hand and makes a gesture like striking a match - with her reserves tapped out she can't afford to let anyone drink for free.

"In this world? Nothing so grand. I hope to eat, drink, and fuck another year, and dream to die in a warm bed. Same as everyone."

She stands relaxed, facing Mother Superior squarely.

"But now I have hope for the world after this. It may not be all ice and shadows."

She shrugs, making a gesture that takes in the bar, the hall, the world.

"Maybe we can still get more than this."
Superior's lips purse sourly as you snatch the bottle away; she sweeps one finger round inside the empty glass, sticks the finger in her mouth, sucks the last few drops of booze from it. "Ain't none of going to die in bed," she says, in a voice dead and dull, as she turns back towards the door. "Ain't none of us gonna see the world after this."

She pauses in the doorway. "The gods ain't yet dead," she says, shaking her head. "And you reckon that's cause for hope."

Her bitter, hopeless laugh hangs in the air long time after the door clacks shut behind her.

----

== Skuld #446 ==

As you open your finger, the forest seems to... come into focus somehow, to sharpen. You sense the weight of its attention, drawn by the spilling of blood. Then you exhale through bloody lips, and as the breath and blood mingles with the wind your mind is snatched up like a rag.

The wind whips through the dense dark trees, and you are drawn along with it. Through the shadows and light that dapple the snow. Through the barbed and tangled undergrowth. Through the scars cut by men, and the fresh wounds where men work still. With trucks and axes and buzzing saws, the thieves. But the wind recoils from something, from the eye that marks them, that burns in the shadows of their minds. Recoils and draws you onwards. Through the hidden clearings where the skogsrå and the huldrefolk dance, through the rookeries and parliaments in the high branches.

The ravens take exception to your intrusion, and tear your mind ragged with beaks and claws until the wind takes you beyond their reach. Takes you over the wall of the town, through the narrow, frozen streets, through the sulphurous steam that clouds the air over Ragnhall, cooling and freezing.

And deposits you back in yourself, exhausted and ravaged by a sudden splitting headache.

Even so, you sense all is not as it was.

A shadow detaches itself from the base of a nearby pine. "You have returned to us, systir." The hulder is beautiful, pale as milk and moving with sinuous grace as she crosses the clearing towards you. "Will you stay, this time?

For a moment she is confused - she feels the sharp pain from the wounds inflicted by the beaks and claws of the ravens, the gashes in her face. Reaching up to wipe away the blood, though, her fingers come off clean. The pain is still there, but the wounds not of this world. She blinks, almost reeling, as the shape of the huldra detaches itself from the pine.

Its´ words hit something inside of her - touches an emptiness at the center of her heart. Makes her feel naked, skinless. She backs off one step, then another - her hand going inside the coat, fingers closing on the taped handle of the stubnosed revolver, her memento from the market massacre.

"I don´t know you." Her voice is sharp, but lacks the hard weight of conviction.

There's a moment of disconnection, sharp and jarring, and the world seems to lurch sideways. You remember hanging from the tree, your blood pooling in the snow below you. The ravens that perched on your shoulder; their beady black eyes inquisitive, speculative, as they regarded you. Snatches of thought and memory return to you. The girl you were. Your life, your name. Your death, and what was taken from you. Odin, eyes glittering beneath the brim of his wide grey hat, laying a rune upon your brow. The arms of the hulder, the tree-spirit, as you hung from her branches.

Those same slim arms embrace you again.

Then rougher, thicker arms are around you, restraining, roughly shaking you. "Hey! Hey! Get a hold of yourself!"

Zeds.

The girl walks through the God-Chamber, bare feet on smooth stone. The runes on her bare skin is painted with blood, carriers of great power. The chamber is immense around her, and the light from the lanterns so very far behind now. In the darkness around her, faint glints of steel and dark glass from the sleeping giants. Sound doesn´t move through teh air as it should - some of them seem to reverberate forever in the immense space, others are swallowed entirely by its´ cold and stale air.

Her voice, as she speaks, is dry but quickly finds strength and traction. As she speaks the words, raises her hands, there is a humming sound from all around her. Panes of glass flicker and wake, bathing the chamber in light. Motes of dust dance all around her as she raises her arms and calls out to -

Zed barely has time to register what happens - Skuld´s leg hooks around his with snake-like speed, and the air is pushed out of him as he slams into the ground, cutting off his words and the yell that tried to form into a thin wheeze. She has twisted around, landing hard on top of him with an arm across his throat, one of her knees pushing down on his gun-arm as it twitches weakly in muscle memory and makes an attempt to move. Before he can fucking blink, there is a blade pointing at his eye and the valkyrie´s own pale pair stares into him with a fury that chills his bones.

Her lips peel back from her teeth as she hisses.
"Who the fuck do you think you´re touching?"

''Later...''

"We see what you are, Skuld." She makes an odd gesture, drawing the V of forefinger and thumb over her eyes and thrusting them at you, and the other two copy it. "Valkyr. Draugr. We see you. You would ask us to lend strength to your arm? Your war?"

"Your promise," the other woman interjects, as smoothly as if they spoke as one. "Your promise to look past us without seeing, when the sword-din rises."
She is not sure whether to laugh at the man or smack out a few of his teeth to make him appreciate the gravity of the situation - to some extent this goes for all of them. Their words take some of the fire out of her blood, though; makes it easier to cool it, to soften edges that want to be sharp. Part of her wants to ask more, to tear at the morsels of revelation.

Instead she straightens up, lends weight rather than rage to her voice.
"Lend your arms to my war, woodcutters, and when the storm is upon us I´ll look past you." Her voice drops just a little. "Fate-mark, crow-mark, death-mark, I´ll look past. That is where it ends, though. I can´t keep you from getting a bullet to the face if you go act stupid."

She peeels of a glove, spits in her snow-white hand; there´s a touch of steam as she holds it out to seal the pact.
"Still, it is a whole lot more than anyone else gets."
"When it all comes down, we'll hold you to that," he says, and tugs off his own glove.

----

== Miekke #597 ==

You prowl through Surtr's mansion, wincing occasionally as an unguarded movement tugs at the wound in your side; Eir clearly knows what she's doing, but even with expert care a gunshot is not to be dismissed.

The suite where you were laid to rest is in the northern end of the villa, closest to the steel works and to the Scrapyard; you find a window in a stairwell which looks out north, across a slice of town that might seem almost picturesque but for the dull, ruddy glow of the steelworks, which gives the snow a hellish aspect - as if blood had been poured across the town, and pooled on the roofs and in the spaces between buildings. You look down on Forge, and wonder why you've never noticed before - is it the elevation, your new and lofty position?

No, you realise, as you look further out. Beyond the light of the furnaces, and the occasional desperate trashfire in the Scrapyard. the world is utterly dark.

The sky is clear, stars twinkling like little touches of frost. Where is the moon? You frown, count backwards; no, it should be waxing nearly full.

Where is the moon?

The reflected glow of the steelworks on the snow paints a swathe of the stairwell ruddy, and Miekke's white skin canvas. It's a beautiful sight, though too reminiscent of Brokkr's workshop.

Not really thinking about it, upon wondering at the missing moon Miekke lifts the flap of their eye patch up and gazes at the sky with their injured eye. It's only as they feel it between their fingers that they realize they were wearing an eye patch.... curious.

The ruddy light of the forge floods everything, making even the sky a crime scene. The stars twinkle red like bloody jewels, turning as the world turns. Simulataneously they inch across the sky and roar through the cosmos; simultaneously glitter prettily and burn with a power like nothing in all nine worlds.

A great golden stag broaches the horizon, curling up into the sky and dimming the light of the stars. It is running hard, nostrils flaring, chest pumping like bellows. There's a note of wild panic in its eyes.

You hear the howls before you see the wolves. The hunters on its tail. The bigger of the two, black and vast and hungry-looking, a shadow against the blood-red sky, snaps at the heels of its prey.

The second wolf, muzzle bloodied with silver. Slower, weighed down with a full belly, yet its yellow eyes are bright and keen. And its teeth are just as sharp.

They will catch him, you know. In time. But today the stag escapes them, slipping below the horizon, and the blood-splashed stars prick the night again, twinking ruby and silver. The wolves slow to a trot, and the second raises its bloody muzzle to howl...

Then the first wolf turns, and notices you, and the force of its regard blasts and shreds you like the worst winter gale. It is all wolves, all monsters, all bad men, the destroyers and the ravagers and the enemies of hope. It is Fenrir, and Garm, and Sköll, and Hati, and Urdakott, and that smiling psychopath Loki, who left you out on the ice.

And then a face pushes forward, through the fading image of the wolf. Surtr.

He looks down at you, eyes flat behind the discs of his spectacles, and you realise you're on the floor. "When we found your bed empty," he says, in his bass growl, "We thought you had fled."

There's a question there. And perhaps, perhaps, something like relief.

----

== Ylva and Skuld #603 ==

there, sure enough, something moves. Crossing the breadth of the street to the base of the steps, it seems to flicker between forms. Now a man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery; now a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; now a wolf crouched low, scenting the trail, its coat painted in in blue and grey.

Abruptly, Skuld is seized by a chill. Your own footprints are clear – dashed lines through the otherwise unbroken snow.

But this...?

It leaves no prints at all.
BANG BANG
The bullet tears through Skuld's target, vanishing into the snow behind with a puff of white. It staggers. The man, the wolf, they look up at you, with eyes bright blue and hungry.

Then there is only the long-dead corpse, already stiff as it topples sideways.

Snow begns to cover it almost instantly.

Silence returns to the city; your breath, your heartbeats, are the only sound you can hear. Your every nerve is wired, awake to any sound, any flicker of movement.

But there is only the gentle fall of snow.

----

== Freyr #662 ==

You remember... a stage. An impression of movement, lithe and irresistably compelling. The raw emotion, the urgent, confusing need which flooded a mind just emerging from childhood. And with that emotion, you are there. A boy again, staring up at the pale gold-scribed creature as they dance above the sword, as they spin and form graceful shapes. Not much older than you, really, but so far beyond, so far removed, as to be like touching the sun. You can smell the people around you. Hear the faint whipping thrum of the dart-and-rope as Miekke weaves it about them. See the sheen of sweat on their pale limbs.

Then the memory, your...sense of the scene... changes. And across the stage, in the crowd, you are being watched. A woman; tall, ice-white, with eyes crackling with fire. There's a terrible lurch of recognition, of realisation that you know her.

Then she steps up, is striding across the stage towards you. You start back. But Miekke moves elegantly with her, makes her part of their languid dance, and the dart and rope that spins around them has become a weighted noose. Skuld bends to sweep up the sword from beneath Miekke's feet, and in her hand it warps and shimmers; she holds a wolf, a snake, a bloody spear.

The two dance close, bodies pressed, moving as one, the noose blurring about them as they spin. Faster, faster. The crowd are stamping their feet, roaring for blood. The stage is a swirl of snow-white flesh and ash and knotted rope. Faster and faster and faster still, a blizzard, a whirlwind of snow and blood and death. The beat is the clash of swords on shields; the roar of the crowd the cries of the dead and dying.

Then with a stamp and a crash of sudden silence, the dancers... freeze. Wrapped in each others' arms, the rope wound round their throats.

Skuld's arm thrown out. The spear, cast long. It arcs over your head, the crowd, the battlefield.

"I dedicate these deaths..." the dancers whisper as one.

"...to Odin."

"Hey." A boot prods you. You open your eyes. Alfvin, one of Surtr's guys, is standing over you. You're in a courtyard you don't remember coming to, near the town's main gate. A thin crust of snow crumbles off you as you rise stiffly to your feet. "You doze off or something?"

Behind him - hooded, older but utterly unmistakable, is Miekke. In the flesh.

----

== Solveig #670 ==

You go limp in your hazmat suit, eye working back and forth like the brushstrokes of a frenzied artist, not just perceiving but painting the soul of this place onto your brain. You see yourself, prone and twitching in the dark places beneath the hall; see Been, all numbers and guilt, muttering in math as he diagrams and annotates the flow, the pipes and valves and cisterns that have tamed the roaring cauldron, the untamable torrent, Hvergelmir, from which all other rivers flow. That holy water, bound by iron and runes, churns and boils up from the underworld, and is funnelled and channelled and put to use - yoked and tamed by the works of those who came before.

Up from the spaces beneath, your mind's-eye travels. And here is all life, all its mysteries and contradictions. Love and hate and song and war and death and birth, laughter and sorrow; these walls are steeped in the stories of mankind, drenched in them. In the tales of the gods, who are dead. It is an echo chamber; the howl of the blizzard, the maelstrom, reverberates and resonates in these halls, in Ragnhall, as history and myth are retold, again and again, layering anew each time until the world-as-it-was is buried, vanished, swallowed up by the remix and reinvention of how-it-was and how-it-is. Have things always been like this? You sense the earth beneath you fighting back, trying to reassert itself, but it is... so weak. It can barely remember what it was - only that it was... otherwise than this.

Your mind's eye soars, up and up, through the elegant hammerbeam roof of Ylva's hall, and the petty settlement of Logger Town spreads itself about you, a pitiful huddle of warmth and life against the encroaching cold. And you sense it is encroaching; implacable, patient, the blizzard grows in strength, Fimbulwinter will not be denied... yet the gods are dead, Ragnarok has been and gone, and still this little patch of defiance, huddled in the lee of a woodland so ancient and strange that even the alfar, deep to the south and deep in denial, burning themselves out to hold back the blizzard, would shudder to set foot there.

Up and up and further up, until the clouds glint around you with held-back frost. And here is a fine view - all of Midgard stretched out before you, as you rest on this highest seat. You settle in Hliðskjálf, feel the imprint of Odin's backside on that ancient stone, and look out as the Allfather might; yet you have two eyes to his one, and you see a world encased in ice. The giants have won, and only here, in this farthest corner of the world, does life remain.

Protected? Or simply left 'til last?

From Hliðskjálf you look up, and see a sky flecked with blood-red stars. The wolf stands over its celestial prey, gorging on silver flesh, and the eye of the doe is black and sightless...

You plummet. Down, the wind howling about you, or is that howling the wolf at your heels? Down and down, straining to return to your own self, to tether your spirit...

And you open your eyes with a start, and a strange stab of pain in your leg. Already the details of your vision are fading, rendering into abstracted impressions.

But one thing remains clear. The howl of the wolf, silver heartsblood staining its jaws, as the pack descends.

Something is coming. Coming here, you're sure. And chaos follows in its wake.

----

==Freyr #713 ==

He decides he's been here before. It is the top of the world - and the bottom. The lord can go back, or he can enter. He almost looks back, hearing the trees cease their growling behind him, but decides better of it. One foot after the other, he wades into the rushing black river, feeling nothing. The lord keeps his eyes on the hunter of the far bank, closer and closer.. The forge-child is down to his neck, and stops, for he knows the current will seize him if he tries to push his luck.

Where the lord had stood on the bank, a child now yells from the river, beckoning across the flow with a commanding question. It is all lips, no sound. Just silence.
On the far bank, the hunter staggers under the weight of the question. Colours swirl behind and around him, all the colours of Bifrost, flickering and incoherent, trampled into dust by the march of the dead. Behind you, the shattered gates of Asgard hang open, the forges cold.

The hunter frowns. "This isn't right." His feet are encased in ice, creeping down the bank of the river like a live thing. The water begins to freeze, radiating out. The ice is up to his knees, now. His waist. He twists, as if hearing something behind him. "I must...!" He tails off, uncertain. Looks at the runebound horn in his hand. "Hasn't this... already happened?" As he raises it towards his lips, the ice encases him entirely.

The leading edge of the ice rushes across the river towards you, around you, trapping you half-in, half-out. A strange ship is coming downstream towards you, seemingly drifting through the ice as though it were not there. The dead crew it, blue and cold in their silent ranks. The helmsman smirks at you. "I can see how this must be confusing," Loki says, then turns to his crew. "All out! Turn Asgard upside-down! Again!"

You watch, struggling against the embrace of ice. The dead disembark, march silent through the gates of heaven. You sense they are searching for something.

Meanwhile Loki steers the ship to the far bank, jumps down beside the hunter. He sighs, glances your way. "Wyrd can be such a bitch," he says, and his eyes are knowing. He turns away, embraces the frozen hunter. Ice swallows him in an instant, and you only then realise they both have daggers at each other's back.

The ice that traps you is rising, the cold burrowing deep into your bones. You struggle against it, but the world goes white.

----

==
Ylva #731 ==

As they walk she stares up into the darkening sky, following Skuld more by sound than sight, the snowflakes swirling and dancing in patterns that almost seem meaningful if you only look long enough. The blizzard is coming, but here it's still mostly quiet, the crunching of the snow under their feet louder than the soft keening of the wind among the ruins.
Ylva, you're looking up into the darkening sky, the snow weaving patterns across your sight. So you're not your usual gainly self when your foot catches on something under the snow. The white rises to swallow you, crashes hard and cold against your bare skin, worms under or through the layers of cloth.

You bounce back up quick as you can, pull yourself up on the pale cold hand Skuld offers.

But it ain't Skuld.

A man, beautiful blue-eyed and pale, swathed in ragged finery, grips your hand; there's a flicker, a disconnect like the world just stuttered, and you stand facing a withered corpse, naked and blue with cold; then a wolf, teeth locked on your wrist, ready to bite down.

"I tried to warn you," the dead god says, his eyes alight with cold fire. "You shouldn't have returned, father. Only the dead rule here now."

Those burning eyes flick to the towering edifice you've just fled, and something like pity dims their fire for a moment. "And see what has become of poor stupid Thor?"
Ylva feels a fearless fire inside her, the impatience filling her growing intolerable.

"Speak plainly or shut your mouth, corpse. I have no time for your riddles."

Face down in the snowdrift, she mumbles "And I'm not your father".

"Are you not?" the dead thing says, and then cocks its head as if hearing some distant call. Something changes, something in its posture, its bearing - like the difference between a wolf and a kicked dog...

In the east, the blizzard is rising.

"Well. My mistake, then. You have his stink all over you. A lover, perhaps? Or another of his by-blows?" You feel its teeth tighten on your wrist. "I need to find him, mortal. Tell me where greybeard is hiding."
Ylva is torn between fear and awe and anger, trying very hard not to let the latter win out as she's keenly aware of the wolf's teeth against her skin.

"If he can hide from you then surely I could not find him."

Before she can catch herself she continues, "And if there's any stink on me other than human filth, I would welcome it."
Skuld, you bend to lift Ylva... and you stagger as the world seems to shift beneath your feet. The white of the snow, the dark shadows of the dead city, it all blurs sideways...

And when the colours stop running, you're standing beside the hallmistress, one hand on her shoulder. A dead man grips her other wrist.

Burning blue eyes in a corpse's face. "You." There's a figure blazing with brilliant light. Ylva, you feel its heat blister your skin. Then, the cold fingers of a dead man.

The corpse god is looking from one of you to the other. "Is this another of your tricks?" He sounds weak, uncertain. A second time he stiffens, turns to look east, distracted. Ylva, you feel that burning, grave-chill, needletooth grip loosen on your wrist for a second.

Through the dead city, a figure approaches from the east. Out of the blizzard.
The moment the corpse god's grip loosens, Ylva tries to pull free. Her anger is fierce now - anger at being hunted, anger at being accosted by these cryptic dead gods who refuse to stay dead or admit they're alive, anger at fate for being unclear about what she should do.

"If it was, why would I tell you? Figure it out for yourself, corpse."

Grabbing hold of Skuld, Ylva tries to will herself back to Midgard, to leave the dead god to his dead god business.
"Because..." He is looking towards the approaching figure, realises too late that you've slipped away. "It's me or her, father."

There's no sign of the wolf now, no sign of that brilliant beautiful figure that burned itself into your eye. There's only the corpse. And he doesn't seem to even try to catch you as you flee.

You glance back, and see him bow his head before the approaching figure - a slip of a girl, hooded in shadow. Who reaches up to wrap slim pale arms around his neck, raises her hooded face to his, and kisses him deep.

There's something... terrible in the dead god's expression as their lips meet. Lust and loathing tangled all together.

Then a gust of rising wind blows snow across your vision, and the two of them are gone.

And you're staggering arm in arm through deep snow. The dead city's broken towers rising high above you.

And the blizzard is all around you.

''Later...''

So you lie in the snow, in each other's arms, and you doze. You dream a little, maybe; of the gods you learned in stories, and the gods who seem more and more to be intruding into your own.

You dream of the Allfather, one eye flashing. Dead at Ragnarok, or supposed to be, but here he is, runes dropping leaden from his tongue to spit and sizzle as they hit the snow. Driving back the blizzard.

You dream of Loki - not the smiling psychopath who prowls the ice wastes, but Loki Laufeyjarson, bane and boon to the Aesir, bound screaming beneath the earth after one joke too far. Bright Baldur dead at his brother Hod's hand, a dart of mistletoe through his heart. Consigned to Hel Half-Dead's realm, to sit at her side as consort.

You know the stories, you've sung the songs. You know how this is supposed to go. Fire and ice, at the end, as the dead march on Asgard and the winter wind blows through the golden halls. It all sinks back into the waters.

But here again is Odin. And with his one eye he winks at you...

...and you wake, to silence.

----

== Freyr #772 ==

You're feeling it settle into and over you - not calm, far from calm, but a strange kind of separation from yourself. The noise, the acrid stink of cordite, the percussive snap of each aimless bullet. The howl, somewhere, of a wounded man. The foul smell of someone who's shat themselves, or maybe just taken a bullet in the guts and guaranteed themselves a slow and agonising death.

None of this is in the songs you sing. But this, this is the path to Valhalla - in blood and chaos and indignity. The rune carved on your chest is burning, burning like the wound were new. Your fingers are numb on the pistol grip. You rise to one knee, turning, lowering the rifle, keening a song of death and glory as your finger tightens on the trigger.

There is a moment. You remember Miekke dancing, long ago. A spear hurled high.

And you level your rifle across a vast, unending battlefield. A plain strewn with broken shields, shattered swords, discarded spears.

And bodies enough to end the world.

Overhead, in the moonless dark, you hear... no, feel... the thump of enormous wings. Something vast is circling.

One last breath escapes Freyr's mouth, a cloud of breath escaping rows of clenched teeth and rising to dissipate mere fingers above his brow. He holds it there and goes silent. The hunter rests on the bank of the iceflow. He looks for his quarry on the other side - the one who will receive his gift of death. Where is it? Horned, furred, caught by arrow from the bow? The rifle scans the battlefield, a circle of blood and bone and fire lost in the vast dark husk of Ymir, the cosmic man. And all along, it keeps flapping, the thundering wings of omen, vibrating into the hunter's very marrow.

Freyr, you hear the great flap of wings overhead, look out across the vast and lifeless battlefield, and know you are seeing Ragnarok. The end that was. Or will be? Where is Loki? Where is Miekke? Dead among the countless dead, you sense. Part of you is screaming, pumping the trigger in wild rage... but that part of you is hamr, just meat and muscle.

Your higher soul, your hugr, is gripped by something... strange. A sense of dread, as those great wings thump overhead and you look up to see the stars eclipsed by some huge, circling shadow. And for the first time in your short, strange life, you understand what terror is. You've heard others speak of it, but it's been until now an alien thing. A concept.

Now, though. Something vast is hunting you across this sea of corpses. Run, your hamr tells you. Abandon your hate, your mission, your charge.

Run.

Freyr, you're frozen a heartbeat too long, as your hugr and hamr war for control. And with a whump and a rush of stinking wind like a battlefield of decaying corpses, a vast reptillian shape crashes down heavy in a flurry of snow and bodies, claws pinning you to the frozen earth.

A vast dark head descends, and Níðhöggr regards you with gleaming eyes. You feel the weight of its awful regard, near as crushing as the sheer physical weight pressing down on your chest. "Ah," the dragon purrs, and it sounds so horrifically pleased. "The one that got away."

You feel its claw start to pierce your side...

Then a deafening mechanical roar splits the air. The dragon's head snaps sideways, and light floods over it - giving you a moment's terrible sight of teeth and rotting scales, of the bodies that hang damned from Níðhöggr's foul wings - before everything becomes tangled and confusing. Pain from your side, brilliant light, . Something massive crashes hard into the dragon - or has it just become man-sized? - and it launches itself away skywards. Bullets are suddenly singing past you once again, and the orange firelight is casting everything in stripes of orange and black. Your rifle is in the snow beside you, its barrel steaming.

And Miekke - near naked, streaked with blood - is a couple of feet away, on the back of a roaring snowmobile.

----

== Miekke #794 ==

Miekke, as Freyr stumbled up and lurches towards your bike, you can feel the blood running down your back from where the bullet clipped your shoulder, hot blood in the cold night. From around the circle the Wolves are still firing, their gunshots muffled by the ringing in your ears, by the hammer of your heart. You press yourself low against the bike, and suddenly you can feel the bullet still inside you, as it grates against the bone. You howl at the sudden pain, at the feeling of wrongness, the feeling of violation. Your vision blurs - with tears, with faintness. There's an awful sense of retreating within yourself... no, of being roughly pushed aside. And you remember... something.

A line of poetry. A song.

Freyr… A smell intrudes. Among the blood and snow and cordite, the stink of flesh... burning. And some part of you sees the rune burning in the flesh of Miekke's shoulder, molten and burning like a brand.

Miekke, the pain is receding. You feel stronger somehow.

No, not dying. Something... more.

A throaty chuckle erupts unbidden from your mouth. You start in shock. Who has stolen your voice? You fight back. Take back your body your soul your voice your heart.

The other relinquishes its grip. Steps back with a mocking bow, and a twinkle in his one good eye.

----

== Miekke and Freyr #811 ==

here's a strange sense of dislocation, Freyr, as you grit your teeth against Miekke's probing hand, and for a moment you are both Miekke and Freyr; you feel their cold fingers in your side, and feel his bloody heat beneath your fingers. The delicate bones of their pale arching spine; the so-welcome roughness of his grip upon your neck.

Miekke; you feel that same duality. The heat and the cold. The need and the want. Sensuality and rage.

And then there is only the single you - looking out through a single eye. In the orange heat of the old dwarf's furnace, stripped to the waist and striped with sweat and soot, weak from hunger, your throat torn from runesong, your beard singed and thrown back over your bare right shoulder, your arms shaking with fatigue, the black-feathered shell of your Hugr shattered on the anvil before you.

You whisper "No..." as two of the clay figures, the Fylgja you have poured your self into, crumble back into dust.

From its perch on your left shoulder, lone Muninn gives a mournful cry.

And a single knock, vast and booming, shakes the ironbound door of Brokkr's forge.

"What are you doing, you fools?"

The question, hoarse and furious and leaden with fatigue. Even as you speak it, you know it's not rhetorical.
Miekke
Strange, sharing a mind with that one, and in this one's body. Did they invite the man into their other form? Were they intermingled without their intervention? No, this was their dream. The other's presence was accident, result of something still not understood. Something to be known.

"Trying to grow, Allfather. Trying to understand."
'''
????'''
The second dreamer is inert, faint and silent. Its presence, dim and small, sinks into the cast of a single sensation which washes over the body - a lurking, germinating anxiety, washing over in shivering waves of somatic dysphoria in the rhythm of a latent, dying heartbeat. As a strange tic or compulsion, the single eye is urged with each wave to peer deep into the flames of the forge.

'''Miekke, Freyr'''
"You are not here to understand!" He roars, and you all feel the strain, the rawness of a throat parched for water. "You are vessels, not partners! A mask, not the face it hides. You are not-"

"Odin!" The door stands open. A woman there, beautiful but barely more than a girl, posed half in the light of the forge, half in shadow. Her face angled sly in near silhouette, one eye filled with delight that is horrifying in its intensity. There is something wrong with her face, you sense. With the half cloaked in shadow.

"No!" Fear, dizzying and visceral, seizes the body you inhabit. "You've led her right to-"

Freyr, the fire you were losing yourself in, it's vanished in an eyeblink. The heat, too; you shiver in the sudden cold, in the gently falling snow that drifts down through the vast gaping hole in the roof of this once-great hall – the shields that thatched it and the spears that held it, long since rotted to dust.

You are yourselves again. Clothed in your own true flesh. But you feel something... missing.

Surrounded by open doorways, you stand amidst the ruins of one last great feast, still mouldering on the tables. Rust-ruined breastplates strewn all about amidst the rotting benches, half-buried in ash and snow.

"-me..." A dusty, drawn-out croak from the high table. From the throne, and the figure cloaked in grey, A spear across its knees. A wolfskin draped across his shoulders. Slowly it raises its head. Beneath the broad brim of the hat, dead flesh; a withered husk, grey as beard and cloak. One shrivelled eye stares blindly out at you, and the mouth is twisting, wringing out a long low moan.

“Who’s there?” a voice from the shadows at the edge of the hall, quavering and weak. “More visitors?"

You turn. Out of the shadows at the edge of the hall, a huge figure slowly emerges… tentatively, feeling his way as a blind man might. "Why do you return here?" the huge old man says. "What do you hope to find?"

"The one that got away, of course." The woman, the girl, is approaching down the length of the hall. Hands out to her sides, half a smile on half a face. The other half is a corpse's snarl, flesh mottled and dark, lips drawn back from pale protruding teeth. Eye white and unseeing.

"Hel." The massive, ancient blind man shrinks back, but lifts his face desperately, bravely. "How many times? How many? He is not here..."

The goddess of the unworthy dead draws nearer. And her living eye flicks wickedly between you both. "You're sure about that...?" She says.

'''????
'''The interloper stands at the dreamer's side, now more clearly present, a short child with a bare scalp. He makes a hissing noise that echoes, and begins to grow and age. From shimmering follicles upon his scalp grow and extend stalks of gold, lengthening into great long locks of sunlight like the roots of a tree. They reach down his back, reaching for his hips, before the man, now bearded and old, begins to side-step, silently, closer to the dreamer.

The man, the radiant sunlight about his brow and torso reaching its zenith and beginning to whiten, places a calloused left hand around the dreamer's back and onto their farther shoulder and another hand on their right hip, all while he stares down the approaching figure. A triple drumbeat reverberates from his form across the hall like a murmurous heartbeat, and his long arms lift the dreamer up and into his embrace.

AfterRagnarok:Main Page

2019-01-28T20:31:17Z

MysteryCat: /* The Mythic */

[[Category:Apocalypse World]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok Interest] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?815491-Re-recruitment-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok Re-recruitment] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809251-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok IC] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809145-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok OOC]

=The Premise=
=People=
==The player characters==

[[Skuld]], played by Argent

[[Ylva]], played by AndersGabrielsson

[[Miekke]], played by Atlictoatl

[[Solveig]], played by Lysus

[[Freyr]], played by Dirty Chai

===Stats===
Highlighted stats are bold/red.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Playbook
!Cool
!Hard
!Hot
!Sharp
!Weird
|-
|[[Skuld]]
|Battlebabe
| '''+3'''
| -2
| +1
| +1
| '''+1'''
|-
|[[Ylva]]
|Maestro D'
| =0
| '''+1'''
| '''+3'''
| +1
| +1
|-
|[[Miekke]]
|Skinner
| -1
| '''0'''
| +2
| '''+2'''
| -1
|-
|[[Solveig]]
|Brainer
| +1
| +1
| -2
| '''+1'''
| '''+2'''
|-
|[[Freyr]]
|Gunlugger
| +1
| '''+3'''
| -1
| +1
| '''0'''
|-
|}

===Hx===

Column has Hx on Row, as listed
{| class="wikitable"
!
!Skuld has...
!Ylva has...
!Miekke has...
!Solveig has...
!Freyr has...
|-
|...on Skuld
|N/A
| +3
| +1
| +2
| -1
|-
|...on Ylva
| -1
|N/A
| +2
| +2
| +2
|-
|...on Miekke
| -2
| +2
|N/A
| +1
| +3
|-
|...on Solveig
| +3
| +1
| -1
|N/A
| -2
|-
|...on Freyr
| +x
| +1
| +1
| +3
|N/A
|-
|}

====Former characters====
[[Dragi]], played by DannyK

[[Loki]], played by The Tim

====Connections====
* Skuld can trust Ylva. Her needs are simple and obvious, and dealing falsely is the surest way to undermine her position, such as it is.
* Can Skuld trust Loki? If trust means predict, no. If trust means will have her back, no. If trust means won't lie to or use her, no. Unless trust means something really weird, nope not at all.
*Skuld can trust Miekke to be who they are, and to do what they can to help out in a pinch.
* [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314048#post21314048 Skuld stood up to Loki and the Wolves, for the sake of Key.] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314158#post21314158 Loki follow-up]
* Ylva figures she could take Loki in a fight. [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314306#post21314306 Not because she's stronger or faster or a better fighter. Loki can afford to lose. Ylva can't.]
*Miekke rode with the Wolves for a time, first on the back of Hel's snowmobile, then on the back of Fenrir's.
* Skuld is Ylva's favourite. Weird, mysterious, sexy and/or strangely endearing. Though Ylva has her own reasons.
*Ylva finds Miekke most attractive.
*Ylva is Miekke's friend.
*Skuld is Miekke's lover, very much like a cat that shows up now and then like nothing happened; show up, be really passionate for a little while and then go off on some new gig or something before returning a week or more later with a gift. Loyal if really needed but very rarely overtly romantic.
*Loki ordered Miekke off the snowmobiles at one point, out somewhere their survival wasn't assured. Miekke won't forget.
*Dragi is in love with Miekke.
*Miekke has been with Dragi for days on the road. They rode with him for fun, until he talked about losing his legs and took them to the glacier called Freya's Heart and the dead city underneath it, still glowing like a second aurora borealis. Upon coming back, Miekke never later acknowledged that it had happened.

==NPCs and their groupings==
===The Wolves of the Blizzard beyond Time===
Loki's snowmobile-riding gang. They run protection across the ice wastes, and steer scavengers who can pay towards places they might get lucky. And when it gets too cold, there's always Surtr's Forge.

'''Fenrir''' - Loki's second.

'''Hel''' -- Loki's other second. She drives a big heavy custom bike, practically a half-track, and pulls the gang's fuel bowser.

'''Völva''' (Witch) - Doesn't have the same sense of humour as the rest of the gang. With child, likely Loki's.

'''Flosi (deceased)''' - Jumped Ylva one morning, after closing, maybe at Been’s order (they used to be as tight). He took her eye, scarred her face up bad. She got better, or better enough to pay him back tenfold, and kept his blade. He didn’t have the friends to do anything about it, so he ran, and now he runs with Loki. Betrayed the gang under unclear circumstances - left dead in the snow by Loki.

'''Agneta''' - Laughed at Loki once, and got away light.

'''Styrmir''' - Has a condition that requires medicine. Carved the moustache on Loki's wolfhead. Was repaid with pain. Crippled on the night of no moon

'''Ketil Goatbeard'''

'''Kalla Stretch-Neck''' - Someone, somewhere, tried to hang this one. It didn't take.

'''Thorstein Black (deceased)''' - killed in the forest, on the night of no moon, by creatures with eyes of blue fire.

'''Elli''' - badly injured on the night of no moon

'''Narfi''' - survived the night of no moon without injury, surprisingly. Not much of a fighter.

'''Randúlf''' - whose easy charm masks a mind like cold clockwork.

===Ylva's crew and regulars===
'''Bucket''' - Bouncer. Fat and friendly and doesn't have a bad word for anyone, but he'll stomp your face if you hassle anyone.

'''Helga''' - handles the performers. She keeps to herself, doesn't smile much.

'''Jinders''' - An old-timer, always laughing and joking. Picks up weird crap for props, and also picks up strays.

'''Bits''' and '''Jenga''' - the stars of the show, and a package deal.

Half a dozen or so other helpers, choristers, dancers, musicians - right now there's '''Babbers''', '''Oula''', '''Seven''' and '''Mill''' performing, and '''Old Lars''' pouring booze and stoking the fires. One of the others is '''Zeds''' - tall, intimidating, with a nose that's been broken more than once. Doesn't talk much. Does repairs and general carrying and fetching,

'''Camo''' - a welcome guest. He mostly keeps to himself without being unfriendly, and he's helped defuse potential situations more than once.

'''Ba''' - An attention hog, she's loud, and the fucking drama.

'''Rolf''' - is pushing on "investing" and "expansion". May be hot for Ylva, but flirts with everyone.

'''Gams''' - helped get the place up and going, and see off Bumpers. Never pays.

'''Been''' - has crazy ideas about steam power and piped hot water and shit. He's mostly been quiet since '''Flosi''' left town, and since Ylva had a serious talk with him about how he should stop fucking digging fucking holes to divert the water or maybe he'd dig too deep a hole and wouldn't find his way out of it. Probably hasn't given up though.

===Plower’s crew===
What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

'''Plower''' - in charge.

'''Dog’s Head''' - had a little dalliance with Loki some time back. There was still some feeling on her part, but Loki beat that out of her.

'''Minko''' - a scrawny scraggly-bearded old coot who talks about snow a lot. No relation to the '''Minko''' who owns Crash/burn in Splitsville, as far as anyone knows.

===Surtr's crew===
'''Surtr''' - in charge.

'''Morth''' - a drunk. Used to be part of '''Mother Superior''''s crew, before they split. Tells the story of finding '''Skuld''' to anyone who'll listen.

'''Kiartan Wood-leg''' - bad-tempered. Has a prosthetic leg.

'''Urdakott''' - tall, thin enforcer, feral beneath a civil mask.

'''Halfdan the Even-Handed''' - keeps things smooth in the Buzzard Market.

===Sjöfn's crew===
Performers, whores and staff, though it can be hard to tell one from another.

'''Sjöfn''' - in charge. Used to work for Ylva, but kicked out for whoring. Runs that new place in Forge, giving the metalworkers somewhere to relax at the end of a hard shift.

'''Ulf Fishingpole''' Dances. Well named.

'''Snowhands''' - attends to the baths.

'''Thorolf''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Moothskegg''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Rodi''' - muscle. A tall, wiry woman, blonde and broad shouldered, she looks a bit like Skuld.

'''Kniv''' - muscle. A stout man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair just barely kept in check by a full set of silvery hair clips.

'''Einar Beardless''' - muscle of sorts. Bald, beardless, soft-spoken, he's good at talking people down.

===Mother Superior´s crew===
Found '''Skuld''' in the woods; mostly gone or split up now.

'''Superior''' - tough as old boots, but something '''Skuld''' told her scared her.

===Thief Eyes’ crew===
Woodsmen, that crazy, creepy bunch who harvest timber and sometimes never come back?

===Ravens===
Those damn slim kids with their oddly sleek feather coats, daring the winds to either skim along the icy ground or even take off of it... Sure they can be run down, but they turn erratically. And killing one will make everyone pissed at you. Everyone needs quick messengers willing to take risks and go fast.

===Others===
'''Brokkr'''
Works on the Wolves' snowmobiles. Friendly with '''Loki'''. He does good work and he likes being paid in bits and pieces, so he doesn't need to go out scavenging for himself. Lives in '''Logger's Town'''.

'''Golem'''
Weaponsmith - a fixer of broken guns, and maker of bullets. Supplies '''Skuld''' with custom ammo for her rifle. Lives and works in '''Forge'''.

'''Flatnose'''
A purveyor of finest liqueurs - or at least of booze that likely won't kill you straight off. Operated out of the back of the markethall in '''Forge''' up until a few weeks ago - now relocated to Logger Town, under Ylva's patronage. The cause of the disagreement between Ylva and Surtr.

'''The Muckers'''
Two, previously three brothers (probably; they're lumpy and filthy enough it's hard to tell) who make swill that's of a slightly better quality than the swill everyone else makes. If you mix it right it could almost pass for drinkable, but it's nowhere near the quality of Flatnose's brew. Ylva killed Hen, the middle child.

'''Barker''' – the cloeset thing Loggertown has to a doctor. Barker lives in a fortified trailer with an added tent used for medical operations and drug-cooking. Iggy Pop-thin and of indeterminate gender, Barker is always wrapped in at least three layers of cloaks or ponchos, their face nigh-permanently hidden by a jury-rigged gas mask. Way too cheerful about their work, which tends to deter prospective clients.

=Places=
==The ice wastes==

What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

==The woods==
Some go there because they have to get some jingle and wood is at a fucking premium all the fucking time. If they go alone, and they stay on the edges, and they get out before night falls, maybe they come back nine times out of ten.

But for the most part it's slavery. You fuck up bad enough and don't have the jingle to settle the debt, off you go on a lumber crew.

And then there's those who claim to trade with folk who live in there.
==Settlements==
The world is cold now, but in a few places there are hot springs or vents and you better believe someone owns that shit.

Some try to make do with firewood but that means the woods.
===Logger Town, also called Gösta===
Previously just a few shacks around '''Bumpers'''' place. Nothing left of that now that we've got logs coming in from the forest for proper houses.

Nowadays most outsiders call it Logger Town. I figure they're even less eager to go into the woods elsewhere.

Those who've lived here longest call it Gösta, supposedly short for "City of the Gods". The olds take the rituals up at the ruins very seriously.

'''Ylva''' took Bumper’s place at the springs, and built '''Ragnhall'''. The guy selling bedwarmth now is called '''Greensleeves'''.

====Ragnhall - hall of the gods====
Ylva’s place. People come to Ragnhall to escape the darkness, the dreariness, the bleak fucking cold. For a few hours they get songs and dance and they get to be the gods of their own stories. Sure, there's some food and drink to be had, but the main feature is the crew of dancers, singers, and actors who bring the stories to life, with enthusiastic and welcome audience participation.

Main attraction: Spectacle
Supporting attractions: Music, art
Atmosphere: Intimacy, fantasy, forgetting, dancing

===Forge===
'''Surtr''''s place. Huddled alongside and inside old ruined factories from before, it's got more than its share of makers and builders.

'''The Buzzard Market''' - selling, buying, renting by the hour; once a month the narrow corridors and claustrophobic siderooms of Forge’s crumbling markethall writhe with life. People come from Logger Town, a couple of other nearby settlements, even down from Splitsville if they really want something.

'''The Scrapyard''' - where the rusted hulks of old trucks and buses and shit have been pulled together and remade to quarters, mostly for the indentured. People get sick in there all the time. Skuld lives here, and so does '''Key'''.

'''The Chandle House''' - where the flesh of the inglorious dead is rendered into tallow – for candles, soap, biodiesel and food for thralls – and their bones are stored.

====Sjöfn´s place====
In the basement of a crumbling concrete silo near the scrapforge - all the better to draw in a decent crowd at the end of a hard shift feeding the roaring furnaces.
*Skuld: I imagine Sjöfn´s place to be a place of pleasures that aspires to be at least semi-classy. Baths with or without attendants (mostly, but not necessarily for sex), drugs, drink, maybe some entertainers in market times. I picture something [https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ like this] going on, mostly because I just saw it.
*Ylva: Sjöfn is a clever and underhanded bitch. She always seems to be three moves ahead, as long as she doesn't let her temper get the best of her. I don't know if she's actually mean and mostly hides it or if she just lashes out hard when she gets pissed at someone. I kicked her out for whoring and trying to get some of the other cast members to join her. I don't want that shit at my place, not after getting away from the shitface Bumpers. She claimed she had planned to leave anyway so I'm not sure how she felt about it. I... kinda miss her. She's a bitch, but she's fun to be around as long as she doesn't turn on you.

===Fish-hold===
Somewhere to the northeast, on the trade route. Where the snow never settles and the fjord never freezes.

'''Brettir''' has been there - he says there's a guy, I shit you not, runs a fucking spa. A spa - big steaming pools of hot clean water. You ever heard anything like that?

===Splitsville===
Two days up the trade route, such as it is, in Splitsville, they've got these skate races where they go around a track out over the lake and in through the town, and half the time someone breaks a leg or their neck. A body can make good jingle at that racing if they've got the skill and the looks, or can bet on those who do.

'''Crash/burn''' - '''Minko''''s place, in a prime spot where you can see almost the whole track.

===Tyrs Hafn===
Where Dragi is from. Ruled by the Tyr amputation cult.

=[[AfterRagnarok:The Mythic|The Mythic]]=
An edited compilation of all the PCs' forays into the mythic. Lengthy, occasionally annotated.

=Inspirational Materials=
*''[http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/mary-margaret-road-grader/ Mary Margaret Road-Grader]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/strange-monsters-recent-past/ All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''Heirs of the Perisphere'', by Howard Waldrop [http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597290838/9781597290838__25.htm sample]
*''The World, As We Know't'', by Howard Waldrop
*[https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ video of Burning Man woman with performance dart]

AfterRagnarok:Main Page

2019-01-28T20:28:33Z

MysteryCat: Adding link to mythic content

[[Category:Apocalypse World]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok Interest] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?815491-Re-recruitment-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok Re-recruitment] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809251-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok IC] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809145-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok OOC]

=The Premise=
=People=
==The player characters==

[[Skuld]], played by Argent

[[Ylva]], played by AndersGabrielsson

[[Miekke]], played by Atlictoatl

[[Solveig]], played by Lysus

[[Freyr]], played by Dirty Chai

===Stats===
Highlighted stats are bold/red.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Playbook
!Cool
!Hard
!Hot
!Sharp
!Weird
|-
|[[Skuld]]
|Battlebabe
| '''+3'''
| -2
| +1
| +1
| '''+1'''
|-
|[[Ylva]]
|Maestro D'
| =0
| '''+1'''
| '''+3'''
| +1
| +1
|-
|[[Miekke]]
|Skinner
| -1
| '''0'''
| +2
| '''+2'''
| -1
|-
|[[Solveig]]
|Brainer
| +1
| +1
| -2
| '''+1'''
| '''+2'''
|-
|[[Freyr]]
|Gunlugger
| +1
| '''+3'''
| -1
| +1
| '''0'''
|-
|}

===Hx===

Column has Hx on Row, as listed
{| class="wikitable"
!
!Skuld has...
!Ylva has...
!Miekke has...
!Solveig has...
!Freyr has...
|-
|...on Skuld
|N/A
| +3
| +1
| +2
| -1
|-
|...on Ylva
| -1
|N/A
| +2
| +2
| +2
|-
|...on Miekke
| -2
| +2
|N/A
| +1
| +3
|-
|...on Solveig
| +3
| +1
| -1
|N/A
| -2
|-
|...on Freyr
| +x
| +1
| +1
| +3
|N/A
|-
|}

====Former characters====
[[Dragi]], played by DannyK

[[Loki]], played by The Tim

====Connections====
* Skuld can trust Ylva. Her needs are simple and obvious, and dealing falsely is the surest way to undermine her position, such as it is.
* Can Skuld trust Loki? If trust means predict, no. If trust means will have her back, no. If trust means won't lie to or use her, no. Unless trust means something really weird, nope not at all.
*Skuld can trust Miekke to be who they are, and to do what they can to help out in a pinch.
* [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314048#post21314048 Skuld stood up to Loki and the Wolves, for the sake of Key.] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314158#post21314158 Loki follow-up]
* Ylva figures she could take Loki in a fight. [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314306#post21314306 Not because she's stronger or faster or a better fighter. Loki can afford to lose. Ylva can't.]
*Miekke rode with the Wolves for a time, first on the back of Hel's snowmobile, then on the back of Fenrir's.
* Skuld is Ylva's favourite. Weird, mysterious, sexy and/or strangely endearing. Though Ylva has her own reasons.
*Ylva finds Miekke most attractive.
*Ylva is Miekke's friend.
*Skuld is Miekke's lover, very much like a cat that shows up now and then like nothing happened; show up, be really passionate for a little while and then go off on some new gig or something before returning a week or more later with a gift. Loyal if really needed but very rarely overtly romantic.
*Loki ordered Miekke off the snowmobiles at one point, out somewhere their survival wasn't assured. Miekke won't forget.
*Dragi is in love with Miekke.
*Miekke has been with Dragi for days on the road. They rode with him for fun, until he talked about losing his legs and took them to the glacier called Freya's Heart and the dead city underneath it, still glowing like a second aurora borealis. Upon coming back, Miekke never later acknowledged that it had happened.

==NPCs and their groupings==
===The Wolves of the Blizzard beyond Time===
Loki's snowmobile-riding gang. They run protection across the ice wastes, and steer scavengers who can pay towards places they might get lucky. And when it gets too cold, there's always Surtr's Forge.

'''Fenrir''' - Loki's second.

'''Hel''' -- Loki's other second. She drives a big heavy custom bike, practically a half-track, and pulls the gang's fuel bowser.

'''Völva''' (Witch) - Doesn't have the same sense of humour as the rest of the gang. With child, likely Loki's.

'''Flosi (deceased)''' - Jumped Ylva one morning, after closing, maybe at Been’s order (they used to be as tight). He took her eye, scarred her face up bad. She got better, or better enough to pay him back tenfold, and kept his blade. He didn’t have the friends to do anything about it, so he ran, and now he runs with Loki. Betrayed the gang under unclear circumstances - left dead in the snow by Loki.

'''Agneta''' - Laughed at Loki once, and got away light.

'''Styrmir''' - Has a condition that requires medicine. Carved the moustache on Loki's wolfhead. Was repaid with pain. Crippled on the night of no moon

'''Ketil Goatbeard'''

'''Kalla Stretch-Neck''' - Someone, somewhere, tried to hang this one. It didn't take.

'''Thorstein Black (deceased)''' - killed in the forest, on the night of no moon, by creatures with eyes of blue fire.

'''Elli''' - badly injured on the night of no moon

'''Narfi''' - survived the night of no moon without injury, surprisingly. Not much of a fighter.

'''Randúlf''' - whose easy charm masks a mind like cold clockwork.

===Ylva's crew and regulars===
'''Bucket''' - Bouncer. Fat and friendly and doesn't have a bad word for anyone, but he'll stomp your face if you hassle anyone.

'''Helga''' - handles the performers. She keeps to herself, doesn't smile much.

'''Jinders''' - An old-timer, always laughing and joking. Picks up weird crap for props, and also picks up strays.

'''Bits''' and '''Jenga''' - the stars of the show, and a package deal.

Half a dozen or so other helpers, choristers, dancers, musicians - right now there's '''Babbers''', '''Oula''', '''Seven''' and '''Mill''' performing, and '''Old Lars''' pouring booze and stoking the fires. One of the others is '''Zeds''' - tall, intimidating, with a nose that's been broken more than once. Doesn't talk much. Does repairs and general carrying and fetching,

'''Camo''' - a welcome guest. He mostly keeps to himself without being unfriendly, and he's helped defuse potential situations more than once.

'''Ba''' - An attention hog, she's loud, and the fucking drama.

'''Rolf''' - is pushing on "investing" and "expansion". May be hot for Ylva, but flirts with everyone.

'''Gams''' - helped get the place up and going, and see off Bumpers. Never pays.

'''Been''' - has crazy ideas about steam power and piped hot water and shit. He's mostly been quiet since '''Flosi''' left town, and since Ylva had a serious talk with him about how he should stop fucking digging fucking holes to divert the water or maybe he'd dig too deep a hole and wouldn't find his way out of it. Probably hasn't given up though.

===Plower’s crew===
What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

'''Plower''' - in charge.

'''Dog’s Head''' - had a little dalliance with Loki some time back. There was still some feeling on her part, but Loki beat that out of her.

'''Minko''' - a scrawny scraggly-bearded old coot who talks about snow a lot. No relation to the '''Minko''' who owns Crash/burn in Splitsville, as far as anyone knows.

===Surtr's crew===
'''Surtr''' - in charge.

'''Morth''' - a drunk. Used to be part of '''Mother Superior''''s crew, before they split. Tells the story of finding '''Skuld''' to anyone who'll listen.

'''Kiartan Wood-leg''' - bad-tempered. Has a prosthetic leg.

'''Urdakott''' - tall, thin enforcer, feral beneath a civil mask.

'''Halfdan the Even-Handed''' - keeps things smooth in the Buzzard Market.

===Sjöfn's crew===
Performers, whores and staff, though it can be hard to tell one from another.

'''Sjöfn''' - in charge. Used to work for Ylva, but kicked out for whoring. Runs that new place in Forge, giving the metalworkers somewhere to relax at the end of a hard shift.

'''Ulf Fishingpole''' Dances. Well named.

'''Snowhands''' - attends to the baths.

'''Thorolf''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Moothskegg''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Rodi''' - muscle. A tall, wiry woman, blonde and broad shouldered, she looks a bit like Skuld.

'''Kniv''' - muscle. A stout man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair just barely kept in check by a full set of silvery hair clips.

'''Einar Beardless''' - muscle of sorts. Bald, beardless, soft-spoken, he's good at talking people down.

===Mother Superior´s crew===
Found '''Skuld''' in the woods; mostly gone or split up now.

'''Superior''' - tough as old boots, but something '''Skuld''' told her scared her.

===Thief Eyes’ crew===
Woodsmen, that crazy, creepy bunch who harvest timber and sometimes never come back?

===Ravens===
Those damn slim kids with their oddly sleek feather coats, daring the winds to either skim along the icy ground or even take off of it... Sure they can be run down, but they turn erratically. And killing one will make everyone pissed at you. Everyone needs quick messengers willing to take risks and go fast.

===Others===
'''Brokkr'''
Works on the Wolves' snowmobiles. Friendly with '''Loki'''. He does good work and he likes being paid in bits and pieces, so he doesn't need to go out scavenging for himself. Lives in '''Logger's Town'''.

'''Golem'''
Weaponsmith - a fixer of broken guns, and maker of bullets. Supplies '''Skuld''' with custom ammo for her rifle. Lives and works in '''Forge'''.

'''Flatnose'''
A purveyor of finest liqueurs - or at least of booze that likely won't kill you straight off. Operated out of the back of the markethall in '''Forge''' up until a few weeks ago - now relocated to Logger Town, under Ylva's patronage. The cause of the disagreement between Ylva and Surtr.

'''The Muckers'''
Two, previously three brothers (probably; they're lumpy and filthy enough it's hard to tell) who make swill that's of a slightly better quality than the swill everyone else makes. If you mix it right it could almost pass for drinkable, but it's nowhere near the quality of Flatnose's brew. Ylva killed Hen, the middle child.

'''Barker''' – the cloeset thing Loggertown has to a doctor. Barker lives in a fortified trailer with an added tent used for medical operations and drug-cooking. Iggy Pop-thin and of indeterminate gender, Barker is always wrapped in at least three layers of cloaks or ponchos, their face nigh-permanently hidden by a jury-rigged gas mask. Way too cheerful about their work, which tends to deter prospective clients.

=Places=
==The ice wastes==

What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

==The woods==
Some go there because they have to get some jingle and wood is at a fucking premium all the fucking time. If they go alone, and they stay on the edges, and they get out before night falls, maybe they come back nine times out of ten.

But for the most part it's slavery. You fuck up bad enough and don't have the jingle to settle the debt, off you go on a lumber crew.

And then there's those who claim to trade with folk who live in there.
==Settlements==
The world is cold now, but in a few places there are hot springs or vents and you better believe someone owns that shit.

Some try to make do with firewood but that means the woods.
===Logger Town, also called Gösta===
Previously just a few shacks around '''Bumpers'''' place. Nothing left of that now that we've got logs coming in from the forest for proper houses.

Nowadays most outsiders call it Logger Town. I figure they're even less eager to go into the woods elsewhere.

Those who've lived here longest call it Gösta, supposedly short for "City of the Gods". The olds take the rituals up at the ruins very seriously.

'''Ylva''' took Bumper’s place at the springs, and built '''Ragnhall'''. The guy selling bedwarmth now is called '''Greensleeves'''.

====Ragnhall - hall of the gods====
Ylva’s place. People come to Ragnhall to escape the darkness, the dreariness, the bleak fucking cold. For a few hours they get songs and dance and they get to be the gods of their own stories. Sure, there's some food and drink to be had, but the main feature is the crew of dancers, singers, and actors who bring the stories to life, with enthusiastic and welcome audience participation.

Main attraction: Spectacle
Supporting attractions: Music, art
Atmosphere: Intimacy, fantasy, forgetting, dancing

===Forge===
'''Surtr''''s place. Huddled alongside and inside old ruined factories from before, it's got more than its share of makers and builders.

'''The Buzzard Market''' - selling, buying, renting by the hour; once a month the narrow corridors and claustrophobic siderooms of Forge’s crumbling markethall writhe with life. People come from Logger Town, a couple of other nearby settlements, even down from Splitsville if they really want something.

'''The Scrapyard''' - where the rusted hulks of old trucks and buses and shit have been pulled together and remade to quarters, mostly for the indentured. People get sick in there all the time. Skuld lives here, and so does '''Key'''.

'''The Chandle House''' - where the flesh of the inglorious dead is rendered into tallow – for candles, soap, biodiesel and food for thralls – and their bones are stored.

====Sjöfn´s place====
In the basement of a crumbling concrete silo near the scrapforge - all the better to draw in a decent crowd at the end of a hard shift feeding the roaring furnaces.
*Skuld: I imagine Sjöfn´s place to be a place of pleasures that aspires to be at least semi-classy. Baths with or without attendants (mostly, but not necessarily for sex), drugs, drink, maybe some entertainers in market times. I picture something [https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ like this] going on, mostly because I just saw it.
*Ylva: Sjöfn is a clever and underhanded bitch. She always seems to be three moves ahead, as long as she doesn't let her temper get the best of her. I don't know if she's actually mean and mostly hides it or if she just lashes out hard when she gets pissed at someone. I kicked her out for whoring and trying to get some of the other cast members to join her. I don't want that shit at my place, not after getting away from the shitface Bumpers. She claimed she had planned to leave anyway so I'm not sure how she felt about it. I... kinda miss her. She's a bitch, but she's fun to be around as long as she doesn't turn on you.

===Fish-hold===
Somewhere to the northeast, on the trade route. Where the snow never settles and the fjord never freezes.

'''Brettir''' has been there - he says there's a guy, I shit you not, runs a fucking spa. A spa - big steaming pools of hot clean water. You ever heard anything like that?

===Splitsville===
Two days up the trade route, such as it is, in Splitsville, they've got these skate races where they go around a track out over the lake and in through the town, and half the time someone breaks a leg or their neck. A body can make good jingle at that racing if they've got the skill and the looks, or can bet on those who do.

'''Crash/burn''' - '''Minko''''s place, in a prime spot where you can see almost the whole track.

===Tyrs Hafn===
Where Dragi is from. Ruled by the Tyr amputation cult.

=[[The Mythic]]=
An edited compilation of all the PCs' forays into the mythic. Lengthy, occasionally annotated.

=Inspirational Materials=
*''[http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/mary-margaret-road-grader/ Mary Margaret Road-Grader]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/strange-monsters-recent-past/ All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''Heirs of the Perisphere'', by Howard Waldrop [http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597290838/9781597290838__25.htm sample]
*''The World, As We Know't'', by Howard Waldrop
*[https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ video of Burning Man woman with performance dart]

AfterRagnarok:Main Page

2018-06-25T20:19:19Z

MysteryCat: /* The player characters */ adding Solveig's Hx

[[Category:Apocalypse World]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok Interest] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?815491-Re-recruitment-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok Re-recruitment] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809251-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok IC] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809145-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok OOC]

=The Premise=
=People=
==The player characters==

[[Skuld]], played by Argent

[[Ylva]], played by AndersGabrielsson

[[Miekke]], played by Atlictoatl

[[Solveig]], played by Lysus

[[Freyr]], played by Dirty Chai

===Stats===
Highlighted stats are bold/red.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Playbook
!Cool
!Hard
!Hot
!Sharp
!Weird
|-
|[[Skuld]]
|Battlebabe
| '''+3'''
| -2
| +1
| +1
| '''+1'''
|-
|[[Ylva]]
|Maestro D'
| =0
| '''+1'''
| '''+3'''
| +1
| =0
|-
|[[Miekke]]
|Skinner
| -1
| '''0'''
| +2
| '''+2'''
| -1
|-
|[[Solveig]]
|Brainer
| +1
| +1
| -2
| +1
| +2
|-
|[[Freyr]]
|Gunlugger
| +1
| '''+3'''
| -1
| +1
| '''0'''
|-
|}

===Hx===

Column has Hx on Row, as listed
{| class="wikitable"
!
!Skuld has...
!Ylva has...
!Miekke has...
!Solveig has...
!Freyr has...
|-
|...on Skuld
|N/A
| +3
| +1
| +2
| -1
|-
|...on Ylva
| -1
|N/A
| +2
| +2
| +2
|-
|...on Miekke
| -2
| +2
|N/A
| +1
| +3
|-
|...on Solveig
| +x
| +1
| +x
|N/A
| -2
|-
|...on Freyr
| +x
| +1
| +x
| +3
|N/A
|-
|}

====Former characters====
[[Dragi]], played by DannyK

[[Loki]], played by The Tim

====Connections====
* Skuld can trust Ylva. Her needs are simple and obvious, and dealing falsely is the surest way to undermine her position, such as it is.
* Can Skuld trust Loki? If trust means predict, no. If trust means will have her back, no. If trust means won't lie to or use her, no. Unless trust means something really weird, nope not at all.
*Skuld can trust Miekke to be who they are, and to do what they can to help out in a pinch.
* [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314048#post21314048 Skuld stood up to Loki and the Wolves, for the sake of Key.] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314158#post21314158 Loki follow-up]
* Ylva figures she could take Loki in a fight. [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314306#post21314306 Not because she's stronger or faster or a better fighter. Loki can afford to lose. Ylva can't.]
*Miekke rode with the Wolves for a time, first on the back of Hel's snowmobile, then on the back of Fenrir's.
* Skuld is Ylva's favourite. Weird, mysterious, sexy and/or strangely endearing. Though Ylva has her own reasons.
*Ylva finds Miekke most attractive.
*Ylva is Miekke's friend.
*Skuld is Miekke's lover, very much like a cat that shows up now and then like nothing happened; show up, be really passionate for a little while and then go off on some new gig or something before returning a week or more later with a gift. Loyal if really needed but very rarely overtly romantic.
*Loki ordered Miekke off the snowmobiles at one point, out somewhere their survival wasn't assured. Miekke won't forget.
*Dragi is in love with Miekke.
*Miekke has been with Dragi for days on the road. They rode with him for fun, until he talked about losing his legs and took them to the glacier called Freya's Heart and the dead city underneath it, still glowing like a second aurora borealis. Upon coming back, Miekke never later acknowledged that it had happened.

==NPCs and their groupings==
===The Wolves of the Blizzard beyond Time===
Loki's snowmobile-riding gang. They run protection across the ice wastes, and steer scavengers who can pay towards places they might get lucky. And when it gets too cold, there's always Surtr's Forge.

'''Fenrir''' - Loki's second.

'''Hel''' -- Loki's other second. She drives a big heavy custom bike, practically a half-track, and pulls the gang's fuel bowser.

'''Völva''' (Witch) - Doesn't have the same sense of humour as the rest of the gang. With child, likely Loki's.

'''Flosi (deceased)''' - Jumped Ylva one morning, after closing, maybe at Been’s order (they used to be as tight). He took her eye, scarred her face up bad. She got better, or better enough to pay him back tenfold, and kept his blade. He didn’t have the friends to do anything about it, so he ran, and now he runs with Loki. Betrayed the gang under unclear circumstances - left dead in the snow by Loki.

'''Agneta''' - Laughed at Loki once, and got away light.

'''Styrmir''' - Has a condition that requires medicine. Carved the moustache on Loki's wolfhead. Was repaid with pain. Crippled on the night of no moon

'''Ketil Goatbeard'''

'''Kalla Stretch-Neck''' - Someone, somewhere, tried to hang this one. It didn't take.

'''Thorstein Black (deceased)''' - killed in the forest, on the night of no moon, by creatures with eyes of blue fire.

'''Elli''' - badly injured on the night of no moon

'''Narfi''' - survived the night of no moon without injury, surprisingly. Not much of a fighter.

===Ylva's crew and regulars===
'''Bucket''' - Bouncer. Fat and friendly and doesn't have a bad word for anyone, but he'll stomp your face if you hassle anyone.

'''Helga''' - handles the performers. She keeps to herself, doesn't smile much.

'''Jinders''' - An old-timer, always laughing and joking. Picks up weird crap for props, and also picks up strays.

'''Bits''' and '''Jenga''' - the stars of the show, and a package deal.

Half a dozen or so other helpers, choristers, dancers, musicians - right now there's '''Babbers''', '''Oula''', '''Seven''' and '''Mill''' performing, and '''Old Lars''' pouring booze and stoking the fires. One of the others is '''Zeds''' - tall, intimidating, with a nose that's been broken more than once. Doesn't talk much. Does repairs and general carrying and fetching,

'''Camo''' - a welcome guest. He mostly keeps to himself without being unfriendly, and he's helped defuse potential situations more than once.

'''Ba''' - An attention hog, she's loud, and the fucking drama.

'''Rolf''' - is pushing on "investing" and "expansion". May be hot for Ylva, but flirts with everyone.

'''Gams''' - helped get the place up and going, and see off Bumpers. Never pays.

'''Been''' - has crazy ideas about steam power and piped hot water and shit. He's mostly been quiet since '''Flosi''' left town, and since Ylva had a serious talk with him about how he should stop fucking digging fucking holes to divert the water or maybe he'd dig too deep a hole and wouldn't find his way out of it. Probably hasn't given up though.

===Plower’s crew===
What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

'''Plower''' - in charge.

'''Dog’s Head''' - had a little dalliance with Loki some time back. There was still some feeling on her part, but Loki beat that out of her.

'''Minko''' - a scrawny scraggly-bearded old coot who talks about snow a lot. No relation to the '''Minko''' who owns Crash/burn in Splitsville, as far as anyone knows.

===Surtr's crew===
'''Surtr''' - in charge.

'''Morth''' - a drunk. Used to be part of '''Mother Superior''''s crew, before they split. Tells the story of finding '''Skuld''' to anyone who'll listen.

'''Kiartan Wood-leg''' - bad-tempered. Has a prosthetic leg.

'''Urdakott''' - tall, thin enforcer, feral beneath a civil mask.

'''Halfdan the Even-Handed''' - keeps things smooth in the Buzzard Market.

===Sjöfn's crew===
Performers, whores and staff, though it can be hard to tell one from another.

'''Sjöfn''' - in charge. Used to work for Ylva, but kicked out for whoring. Runs that new place in Forge, giving the metalworkers somewhere to relax at the end of a hard shift.

'''Ulf Fishingpole''' Dances. Well named.

'''Snowhands''' - attends to the baths.

'''Thorolf''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Moothskegg''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Rodi''' - muscle. A tall, wiry woman, blonde and broad shouldered, she looks a bit like Skuld.

'''Kniv''' - muscle. A stout man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair just barely kept in check by a full set of silvery hair clips.

'''Einar Beardless''' - muscle of sorts. Bald, beardless, soft-spoken, he's good at talking people down.

===Mother Superior´s crew===
Found '''Skuld''' in the woods; mostly gone or split up now.

'''Superior''' - tough as old boots, but something '''Skuld''' told her scared her.

===Thief Eyes’ crew===
Woodsmen, that crazy, creepy bunch who harvest timber and sometimes never come back?

===Ravens===
Those damn slim kids with their oddly sleek feather coats, daring the winds to either skim along the icy ground or even take off of it... Sure they can be run down, but they turn erratically. And killing one will make everyone pissed at you. Everyone needs quick messengers willing to take risks and go fast.

===Others===
'''Brokkr'''
Works on the Wolves' snowmobiles. Friendly with '''Loki'''. He does good work and he likes being paid in bits and pieces, so he doesn't need to go out scavenging for himself. Lives in '''Logger's Town'''.

'''Golem'''
Weaponsmith - a fixer of broken guns, and maker of bullets. Supplies '''Skuld''' with custom ammo for her rifle. Lives and works in '''Forge'''.

'''Flatnose'''
A purveyor of finest liqueurs - or at least of booze that likely won't kill you straight off. Operated out of the back of the markethall in '''Forge''' up until a few weeks ago - now relocated to Logger Town, under Ylva's patronage. The cause of the disagreement between Ylva and Surtr.

'''The Muckers'''
Two, previously three brothers (probably; they're lumpy and filthy enough it's hard to tell) who make swill that's of a slightly better quality than the swill everyone else makes. If you mix it right it could almost pass for drinkable, but it's nowhere near the quality of Flatnose's brew. Ylva killed Hen, the middle child.

'''Barker''' – the cloeset thing Loggertown has to a doctor. Barker lives in a fortified trailer with an added tent used for medical operations and drug-cooking. Iggy Pop-thin and of indeterminate gender, Barker is always wrapped in at least three layers of cloaks or ponchos, their face nigh-permanently hidden by a jury-rigged gas mask. Way too cheerful about their work, which tends to deter prospective clients.

=Places=
==The ice wastes==

What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

==The woods==
Some go there because they have to get some jingle and wood is at a fucking premium all the fucking time. If they go alone, and they stay on the edges, and they get out before night falls, maybe they come back nine times out of ten.

But for the most part it's slavery. You fuck up bad enough and don't have the jingle to settle the debt, off you go on a lumber crew.

And then there's those who claim to trade with folk who live in there.
==Settlements==
The world is cold now, but in a few places there are hot springs or vents and you better believe someone owns that shit.

Some try to make do with firewood but that means the woods.
===Logger Town, also called Gösta===
Previously just a few shacks around '''Bumpers'''' place. Nothing left of that now that we've got logs coming in from the forest for proper houses.

Nowadays most outsiders call it Logger Town. I figure they're even less eager to go into the woods elsewhere.

Those who've lived here longest call it Gösta, supposedly short for "City of the Gods". The olds take the rituals up at the ruins very seriously.

'''Ylva''' took Bumper’s place at the springs, and built '''Ragnhall'''. The guy selling bedwarmth now is called '''Greensleeves'''.

====Ragnhall - hall of the gods====
Ylva’s place. People come to Ragnhall to escape the darkness, the dreariness, the bleak fucking cold. For a few hours they get songs and dance and they get to be the gods of their own stories. Sure, there's some food and drink to be had, but the main feature is the crew of dancers, singers, and actors who bring the stories to life, with enthusiastic and welcome audience participation.

Main attraction: Spectacle
Supporting attractions: Music, art
Atmosphere: Intimacy, fantasy, forgetting, dancing

===Forge===
'''Surtr''''s place. Huddled alongside and inside old ruined factories from before, it's got more than its share of makers and builders.

'''The Buzzard Market''' - selling, buying, renting by the hour; once a month the narrow corridors and claustrophobic siderooms of Forge’s crumbling markethall writhe with life. People come from Logger Town, a couple of other nearby settlements, even down from Splitsville if they really want something.

'''The Scrapyard''' - where the rusted hulks of old trucks and buses and shit have been pulled together and remade to quarters, mostly for the indentured. People get sick in there all the time. Skuld lives here, and so does '''Key'''.

'''The Chandle House''' - where the flesh of the inglorious dead is rendered into tallow – for candles, soap, biodiesel and food for thralls – and their bones are stored.

====Sjöfn´s place====
In the basement of a crumbling concrete silo near the scrapforge - all the better to draw in a decent crowd at the end of a hard shift feeding the roaring furnaces.
*Skuld: I imagine Sjöfn´s place to be a place of pleasures that aspires to be at least semi-classy. Baths with or without attendants (mostly, but not necessarily for sex), drugs, drink, maybe some entertainers in market times. I picture something [https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ like this] going on, mostly because I just saw it.
*Ylva: Sjöfn is a clever and underhanded bitch. She always seems to be three moves ahead, as long as she doesn't let her temper get the best of her. I don't know if she's actually mean and mostly hides it or if she just lashes out hard when she gets pissed at someone. I kicked her out for whoring and trying to get some of the other cast members to join her. I don't want that shit at my place, not after getting away from the shitface Bumpers. She claimed she had planned to leave anyway so I'm not sure how she felt about it. I... kinda miss her. She's a bitch, but she's fun to be around as long as she doesn't turn on you.

===Fish-hold===
Somewhere to the northeast, on the trade route. Where the snow never settles and the fjord never freezes.

'''Brettir''' has been there - he says there's a guy, I shit you not, runs a fucking spa. A spa - big steaming pools of hot clean water. You ever heard anything like that?

===Splitsville===
Two days up the trade route, such as it is, in Splitsville, they've got these skate races where they go around a track out over the lake and in through the town, and half the time someone breaks a leg or their neck. A body can make good jingle at that racing if they've got the skill and the looks, or can bet on those who do.

'''Crash/burn''' - '''Minko''''s place, in a prime spot where you can see almost the whole track.

===Tyrs Hafn===
Where Dragi is from. Ruled by the Tyr amputation cult.

=Inspirational Materials=
*''[http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/mary-margaret-road-grader/ Mary Margaret Road-Grader]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/strange-monsters-recent-past/ All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''Heirs of the Perisphere'', by Howard Waldrop [http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597290838/9781597290838__25.htm sample]
*''The World, As We Know't'', by Howard Waldrop
*[https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ video of Burning Man woman with performance dart]

AfterRagnarok:Main Page

2018-06-16T11:55:36Z

MysteryCat: /* Hx */ Freyr's Hx

[[Category:Apocalypse World]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok Interest] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?815491-Re-recruitment-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok Re-recruitment] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809251-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok IC] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809145-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok OOC]

=The Premise=
=People=
==The player characters==

[[Skuld]], played by Argent

[[Ylva]], played by AndersGabrielsson

[[Miekke]], played by Atlictoatl

[[Ljós]], played by Kunakic

[[Solveig]], played by Lysus

[[Freyr]], played by Dirty Chai

===Stats===
Highlighted stats are bold/red.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Playbook
!Cool
!Hard
!Hot
!Sharp
!Weird
|-
|[[Skuld]]
|Battlebabe
| '''+3'''
| -2
| +1
| +1
| '''+1'''
|-
|[[Ylva]]
|Maestro D'
| =0
| '''+1'''
| '''+3'''
| +1
| =0
|-
|[[Miekke]]
|Skinner
| -1
| '''0'''
| +2
| '''+2'''
| -1
|-
|[[Ljós]]
|Hocus
| 0
| +1
| -1
| +1
| +3
|-
|[[Solveig]]
|Brainer
| +1
| +1
| -2
| +1
| +2
|-
|[[Freyr]]
|Gunlugger
| +1
| '''+3'''
| -1
| +1
| '''0'''
|-
|}

===Hx===

Column has Hx on Row, as listed
{| class="wikitable"
!
!Skuld has...
!Ylva has...
!Miekke has...
!Ljós has...
!Solveig has...
!Freyr has...
|-
|...on Skuld
|N/A
| +3
| +1
| +x
| +x
| -1
|-
|...on Ylva
| -1
|N/A
| +2
| +x
| +x
| +2
|-
|...on Miekke
| -2
| +2
|N/A
| +x
| +x
| +3
|-
|...on Ljós
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
| +x
| -1
|-
|...on Solveig
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
| -2
|-
|...on Freyr
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
|-
|}

====Former characters====
[[Dragi]], played by DannyK

[[Loki]], played by The Tim

====Connections====
* Skuld can trust Ylva. Her needs are simple and obvious, and dealing falsely is the surest way to undermine her position, such as it is.
* Can Skuld trust Loki? If trust means predict, no. If trust means will have her back, no. If trust means won't lie to or use her, no. Unless trust means something really weird, nope not at all.
*Skuld can trust Miekke to be who they are, and to do what they can to help out in a pinch.
* [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314048#post21314048 Skuld stood up to Loki and the Wolves, for the sake of Key.] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314158#post21314158 Loki follow-up]
* Ylva figures she could take Loki in a fight. [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314306#post21314306 Not because she's stronger or faster or a better fighter. Loki can afford to lose. Ylva can't.]
*Miekke rode with the Wolves for a time, first on the back of Hel's snowmobile, then on the back of Fenrir's.
* Skuld is Ylva's favourite. Weird, mysterious, sexy and/or strangely endearing. Though Ylva has her own reasons.
*Ylva finds Miekke most attractive.
*Ylva is Miekke's friend.
*Skuld is Miekke's lover, very much like a cat that shows up now and then like nothing happened; show up, be really passionate for a little while and then go off on some new gig or something before returning a week or more later with a gift. Loyal if really needed but very rarely overtly romantic.
*Loki ordered Miekke off the snowmobiles at one point, out somewhere their survival wasn't assured. Miekke won't forget.
*Dragi is in love with Miekke.
*Miekke has been with Dragi for days on the road. They rode with him for fun, until he talked about losing his legs and took them to the glacier called Freya's Heart and the dead city underneath it, still glowing like a second aurora borealis. Upon coming back, Miekke never later acknowledged that it had happened.

==NPCs and their groupings==
===The Wolves of the Blizzard beyond Time===
Loki's snowmobile-riding gang. They run protection across the ice wastes, and steer scavengers who can pay towards places they might get lucky. And when it gets too cold, there's always Surtr's Forge.

'''Fenrir''' - Loki's second.

'''Hel''' -- Loki's other second. She drives a big heavy custom bike, practically a half-track, and pulls the gang's fuel bowser.

'''Völva''' (Witch) - Doesn't have the same sense of humour as the rest of the gang. With child, likely Loki's.

'''Flosi (deceased)''' - Jumped Ylva one morning, after closing, maybe at Been’s order (they used to be as tight). He took her eye, scarred her face up bad. She got better, or better enough to pay him back tenfold, and kept his blade. He didn’t have the friends to do anything about it, so he ran, and now he runs with Loki. Betrayed the gang under unclear circumstances - left dead in the snow by Loki.

'''Agneta''' - Laughed at Loki once, and got away light.

'''Styrmir''' - Has a condition that requires medicine. Carved the moustache on Loki's wolfhead. Was repaid with pain. Crippled on the night of no moon

'''Ketil Goatbeard'''

'''Kalla Stretch-Neck''' - Someone, somewhere, tried to hang this one. It didn't take.

'''Thorstein Black (deceased)''' - killed in the forest, on the night of no moon, by creatures with eyes of blue fire.

'''Elli''' - badly injured on the night of no moon

'''Narfi''' - survived the night of no moon without injury, surprisingly. Not much of a fighter.

===Ylva's crew and regulars===
'''Bucket''' - Bouncer. Fat and friendly and doesn't have a bad word for anyone, but he'll stomp your face if you hassle anyone.

'''Helga''' - handles the performers. She keeps to herself, doesn't smile much.

'''Jinders''' - An old-timer, always laughing and joking. Picks up weird crap for props, and also picks up strays.

'''Bits''' and '''Jenga''' - the stars of the show, and a package deal.

Half a dozen or so other helpers, choristers, dancers, musicians - right now there's '''Babbers''', '''Oula''', '''Seven''' and '''Mill''' performing, and '''Old Lars''' pouring booze and stoking the fires. One of the others is '''Zeds''' - tall, intimidating, with a nose that's been broken more than once. Doesn't talk much. Does repairs and general carrying and fetching,

'''Camo''' - a welcome guest. He mostly keeps to himself without being unfriendly, and he's helped defuse potential situations more than once.

'''Ba''' - An attention hog, she's loud, and the fucking drama.

'''Rolf''' - is pushing on "investing" and "expansion". May be hot for Ylva, but flirts with everyone.

'''Gams''' - helped get the place up and going, and see off Bumpers. Never pays.

'''Been''' - has crazy ideas about steam power and piped hot water and shit. He's mostly been quiet since '''Flosi''' left town, and since Ylva had a serious talk with him about how he should stop fucking digging fucking holes to divert the water or maybe he'd dig too deep a hole and wouldn't find his way out of it. Probably hasn't given up though.

===Plower’s crew===
What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

'''Plower''' - in charge.

'''Dog’s Head''' - had a little dalliance with Loki some time back. There was still some feeling on her part, but Loki beat that out of her.

'''Minko''' - a scrawny scraggly-bearded old coot who talks about snow a lot. No relation to the '''Minko''' who owns Crash/burn in Splitsville, as far as anyone knows.

===Surtr's crew===
'''Surtr''' - in charge.

'''Morth''' - a drunk. Used to be part of '''Mother Superior''''s crew, before they split. Tells the story of finding '''Skuld''' to anyone who'll listen.

'''Kiartan Wood-leg''' - bad-tempered. Has a prosthetic leg.

'''Urdakott''' - tall, thin enforcer, feral beneath a civil mask.

'''Halfdan the Even-Handed''' - keeps things smooth in the Buzzard Market.

===Sjöfn's crew===
Performers, whores and staff, though it can be hard to tell one from another.

'''Sjöfn''' - in charge. Used to work for Ylva, but kicked out for whoring. Runs that new place in Forge, giving the metalworkers somewhere to relax at the end of a hard shift.

'''Ulf Fishingpole''' Dances. Well named.

'''Snowhands''' - attends to the baths.

'''Thorolf''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Moothskegg''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Rodi''' - muscle. A tall, wiry woman, blonde and broad shouldered, she looks a bit like Skuld.

'''Kniv''' - muscle. A stout man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair just barely kept in check by a full set of silvery hair clips.

'''Einar Beardless''' - muscle of sorts. Bald, beardless, soft-spoken, he's good at talking people down.

===Mother Superior´s crew===
Found '''Skuld''' in the woods; mostly gone or split up now.

'''Superior''' - tough as old boots, but something '''Skuld''' told her scared her.

===Thief Eyes’ crew===
Woodsmen, that crazy, creepy bunch who harvest timber and sometimes never come back?

===Ravens===
Those damn slim kids with their oddly sleek feather coats, daring the winds to either skim along the icy ground or even take off of it... Sure they can be run down, but they turn erratically. And killing one will make everyone pissed at you. Everyone needs quick messengers willing to take risks and go fast.

===Others===
'''Brokkr'''
Works on the Wolves' snowmobiles. Friendly with '''Loki'''. He does good work and he likes being paid in bits and pieces, so he doesn't need to go out scavenging for himself. Lives in '''Logger's Town'''.

'''Golem'''
Weaponsmith - a fixer of broken guns, and maker of bullets. Supplies '''Skuld''' with custom ammo for her rifle. Lives and works in '''Forge'''.

'''Flatnose'''
A purveyor of finest liqueurs - or at least of booze that likely won't kill you straight off. Operated out of the back of the markethall in '''Forge''' up until a few weeks ago - now relocated to Logger Town, under Ylva's patronage. The cause of the disagreement between Ylva and Surtr.

'''The Muckers'''
Two, previously three brothers (probably; they're lumpy and filthy enough it's hard to tell) who make swill that's of a slightly better quality than the swill everyone else makes. If you mix it right it could almost pass for drinkable, but it's nowhere near the quality of Flatnose's brew. Ylva killed Hen, the middle child.

'''Barker''' – the cloeset thing Loggertown has to a doctor. Barker lives in a fortified trailer with an added tent used for medical operations and drug-cooking. Iggy Pop-thin and of indeterminate gender, Barker is always wrapped in at least three layers of cloaks or ponchos, their face nigh-permanently hidden by a jury-rigged gas mask. Way too cheerful about their work, which tends to deter prospective clients.

=Places=
==The ice wastes==

What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

==The woods==
Some go there because they have to get some jingle and wood is at a fucking premium all the fucking time. If they go alone, and they stay on the edges, and they get out before night falls, maybe they come back nine times out of ten.

But for the most part it's slavery. You fuck up bad enough and don't have the jingle to settle the debt, off you go on a lumber crew.

And then there's those who claim to trade with folk who live in there.
==Settlements==
The world is cold now, but in a few places there are hot springs or vents and you better believe someone owns that shit.

Some try to make do with firewood but that means the woods.
===Logger Town, also called Gösta===
Previously just a few shacks around '''Bumpers'''' place. Nothing left of that now that we've got logs coming in from the forest for proper houses.

Nowadays most outsiders call it Logger Town. I figure they're even less eager to go into the woods elsewhere.

Those who've lived here longest call it Gösta, supposedly short for "City of the Gods". The olds take the rituals up at the ruins very seriously.

'''Ylva''' took Bumper’s place at the springs, and built '''Ragnhall'''. The guy selling bedwarmth now is called '''Greensleeves'''.

====Ragnhall - hall of the gods====
Ylva’s place. People come to Ragnhall to escape the darkness, the dreariness, the bleak fucking cold. For a few hours they get songs and dance and they get to be the gods of their own stories. Sure, there's some food and drink to be had, but the main feature is the crew of dancers, singers, and actors who bring the stories to life, with enthusiastic and welcome audience participation.

Main attraction: Spectacle
Supporting attractions: Music, art
Atmosphere: Intimacy, fantasy, forgetting, dancing

===Forge===
'''Surtr''''s place. Huddled alongside and inside old ruined factories from before, it's got more than its share of makers and builders.

'''The Buzzard Market''' - selling, buying, renting by the hour; once a month the narrow corridors and claustrophobic siderooms of Forge’s crumbling markethall writhe with life. People come from Logger Town, a couple of other nearby settlements, even down from Splitsville if they really want something.

'''The Scrapyard''' - where the rusted hulks of old trucks and buses and shit have been pulled together and remade to quarters, mostly for the indentured. People get sick in there all the time. Skuld lives here, and so does '''Key'''.

'''The Chandle House''' - where the flesh of the inglorious dead is rendered into tallow – for candles, soap, biodiesel and food for thralls – and their bones are stored.

====Sjöfn´s place====
In the basement of a crumbling concrete silo near the scrapforge - all the better to draw in a decent crowd at the end of a hard shift feeding the roaring furnaces.
*Skuld: I imagine Sjöfn´s place to be a place of pleasures that aspires to be at least semi-classy. Baths with or without attendants (mostly, but not necessarily for sex), drugs, drink, maybe some entertainers in market times. I picture something [https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ like this] going on, mostly because I just saw it.
*Ylva: Sjöfn is a clever and underhanded bitch. She always seems to be three moves ahead, as long as she doesn't let her temper get the best of her. I don't know if she's actually mean and mostly hides it or if she just lashes out hard when she gets pissed at someone. I kicked her out for whoring and trying to get some of the other cast members to join her. I don't want that shit at my place, not after getting away from the shitface Bumpers. She claimed she had planned to leave anyway so I'm not sure how she felt about it. I... kinda miss her. She's a bitch, but she's fun to be around as long as she doesn't turn on you.

===Fish-hold===
Somewhere to the northeast, on the trade route. Where the snow never settles and the fjord never freezes.

'''Brettir''' has been there - he says there's a guy, I shit you not, runs a fucking spa. A spa - big steaming pools of hot clean water. You ever heard anything like that?

===Splitsville===
Two days up the trade route, such as it is, in Splitsville, they've got these skate races where they go around a track out over the lake and in through the town, and half the time someone breaks a leg or their neck. A body can make good jingle at that racing if they've got the skill and the looks, or can bet on those who do.

'''Crash/burn''' - '''Minko''''s place, in a prime spot where you can see almost the whole track.

===Tyrs Hafn===
Where Dragi is from. Ruled by the Tyr amputation cult.

=Inspirational Materials=
*''[http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/mary-margaret-road-grader/ Mary Margaret Road-Grader]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/strange-monsters-recent-past/ All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''Heirs of the Perisphere'', by Howard Waldrop [http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597290838/9781597290838__25.htm sample]
*''The World, As We Know't'', by Howard Waldrop
*[https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ video of Burning Man woman with performance dart]

AfterRagnarok:Main Page

2018-06-15T20:08:05Z

MysteryCat: /* Stats */

[[Category:Apocalypse World]]

[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok Interest] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?815491-Re-recruitment-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok Re-recruitment] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809251-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok IC] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?809145-Apocalypse-World-2e-After-Ragnarok OOC]

=The Premise=
=People=
==The player characters==

[[Skuld]], played by Argent

[[Ylva]], played by AndersGabrielsson

[[Miekke]], played by Atlictoatl

[[Ljós]], played by Kunakic

[[Solveig]], played by Lysus

[[Freyr]], played by Dirty Chai

===Stats===
Highlighted stats are bold/red.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Name
!Playbook
!Cool
!Hard
!Hot
!Sharp
!Weird
|-
|[[Skuld]]
|Battlebabe
| '''+3'''
| -2
| +1
| +1
| '''+1'''
|-
|[[Ylva]]
|Maestro D'
| =0
| '''+1'''
| '''+3'''
| +1
| =0
|-
|[[Miekke]]
|Skinner
| -1
| '''0'''
| +2
| '''+2'''
| -1
|-
|[[Ljós]]
|Hocus
| 0
| +1
| -1
| +1
| +3
|-
|[[Solveig]]
|Brainer
| +1
| +1
| -2
| +1
| +2
|-
|[[Freyr]]
|Gunlugger
| +1
| '''+3'''
| -1
| +1
| '''0'''
|-
|}

===Hx===

Column has Hx on Row, as listed
{| class="wikitable"
!
!Skuld has...
!Ylva has...
!Miekke has...
!Ljós has...
!Solveig has...
!Freyr has...
|-
|...on Skuld
|N/A
| +3
| +1
| +x
| +x
| +x
|-
|...on Ylva
| -1
|N/A
| +2
| +x
| +x
| +x
|-
|...on Miekke
| -2
| +2
|N/A
| +x
| +x
| +x
|-
|...on Ljós
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
| +x
| +x
|-
|...on Solveig
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
| +x
|-
|...on Freyr
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
| +x
|N/A
|-
|}

====Former characters====
[[Dragi]], played by DannyK

[[Loki]], played by The Tim

====Connections====
* Skuld can trust Ylva. Her needs are simple and obvious, and dealing falsely is the surest way to undermine her position, such as it is.
* Can Skuld trust Loki? If trust means predict, no. If trust means will have her back, no. If trust means won't lie to or use her, no. Unless trust means something really weird, nope not at all.
*Skuld can trust Miekke to be who they are, and to do what they can to help out in a pinch.
* [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314048#post21314048 Skuld stood up to Loki and the Wolves, for the sake of Key.] [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314158#post21314158 Loki follow-up]
* Ylva figures she could take Loki in a fight. [https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?808522-Interest-Apocalypse-World-2E-%96-After-Ragnarok&p=21314306#post21314306 Not because she's stronger or faster or a better fighter. Loki can afford to lose. Ylva can't.]
*Miekke rode with the Wolves for a time, first on the back of Hel's snowmobile, then on the back of Fenrir's.
* Skuld is Ylva's favourite. Weird, mysterious, sexy and/or strangely endearing. Though Ylva has her own reasons.
*Ylva finds Miekke most attractive.
*Ylva is Miekke's friend.
*Skuld is Miekke's lover, very much like a cat that shows up now and then like nothing happened; show up, be really passionate for a little while and then go off on some new gig or something before returning a week or more later with a gift. Loyal if really needed but very rarely overtly romantic.
*Loki ordered Miekke off the snowmobiles at one point, out somewhere their survival wasn't assured. Miekke won't forget.
*Dragi is in love with Miekke.
*Miekke has been with Dragi for days on the road. They rode with him for fun, until he talked about losing his legs and took them to the glacier called Freya's Heart and the dead city underneath it, still glowing like a second aurora borealis. Upon coming back, Miekke never later acknowledged that it had happened.

==NPCs and their groupings==
===The Wolves of the Blizzard beyond Time===
Loki's snowmobile-riding gang. They run protection across the ice wastes, and steer scavengers who can pay towards places they might get lucky. And when it gets too cold, there's always Surtr's Forge.

'''Fenrir''' - Loki's second.

'''Hel''' -- Loki's other second. She drives a big heavy custom bike, practically a half-track, and pulls the gang's fuel bowser.

'''Völva''' (Witch) - Doesn't have the same sense of humour as the rest of the gang. With child, likely Loki's.

'''Flosi (deceased)''' - Jumped Ylva one morning, after closing, maybe at Been’s order (they used to be as tight). He took her eye, scarred her face up bad. She got better, or better enough to pay him back tenfold, and kept his blade. He didn’t have the friends to do anything about it, so he ran, and now he runs with Loki. Betrayed the gang under unclear circumstances - left dead in the snow by Loki.

'''Agneta''' - Laughed at Loki once, and got away light.

'''Styrmir''' - Has a condition that requires medicine. Carved the moustache on Loki's wolfhead. Was repaid with pain. Crippled on the night of no moon

'''Ketil Goatbeard'''

'''Kalla Stretch-Neck''' - Someone, somewhere, tried to hang this one. It didn't take.

'''Thorstein Black (deceased)''' - killed in the forest, on the night of no moon, by creatures with eyes of blue fire.

'''Elli''' - badly injured on the night of no moon

'''Narfi''' - survived the night of no moon without injury, surprisingly. Not much of a fighter.

===Ylva's crew and regulars===
'''Bucket''' - Bouncer. Fat and friendly and doesn't have a bad word for anyone, but he'll stomp your face if you hassle anyone.

'''Helga''' - handles the performers. She keeps to herself, doesn't smile much.

'''Jinders''' - An old-timer, always laughing and joking. Picks up weird crap for props, and also picks up strays.

'''Bits''' and '''Jenga''' - the stars of the show, and a package deal.

Half a dozen or so other helpers, choristers, dancers, musicians - right now there's '''Babbers''', '''Oula''', '''Seven''' and '''Mill''' performing, and '''Old Lars''' pouring booze and stoking the fires. One of the others is '''Zeds''' - tall, intimidating, with a nose that's been broken more than once. Doesn't talk much. Does repairs and general carrying and fetching,

'''Camo''' - a welcome guest. He mostly keeps to himself without being unfriendly, and he's helped defuse potential situations more than once.

'''Ba''' - An attention hog, she's loud, and the fucking drama.

'''Rolf''' - is pushing on "investing" and "expansion". May be hot for Ylva, but flirts with everyone.

'''Gams''' - helped get the place up and going, and see off Bumpers. Never pays.

'''Been''' - has crazy ideas about steam power and piped hot water and shit. He's mostly been quiet since '''Flosi''' left town, and since Ylva had a serious talk with him about how he should stop fucking digging fucking holes to divert the water or maybe he'd dig too deep a hole and wouldn't find his way out of it. Probably hasn't given up though.

===Plower’s crew===
What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

'''Plower''' - in charge.

'''Dog’s Head''' - had a little dalliance with Loki some time back. There was still some feeling on her part, but Loki beat that out of her.

'''Minko''' - a scrawny scraggly-bearded old coot who talks about snow a lot. No relation to the '''Minko''' who owns Crash/burn in Splitsville, as far as anyone knows.

===Surtr's crew===
'''Surtr''' - in charge.

'''Morth''' - a drunk. Used to be part of '''Mother Superior''''s crew, before they split. Tells the story of finding '''Skuld''' to anyone who'll listen.

'''Kiartan Wood-leg''' - bad-tempered. Has a prosthetic leg.

'''Urdakott''' - tall, thin enforcer, feral beneath a civil mask.

'''Halfdan the Even-Handed''' - keeps things smooth in the Buzzard Market.

===Sjöfn's crew===
Performers, whores and staff, though it can be hard to tell one from another.

'''Sjöfn''' - in charge. Used to work for Ylva, but kicked out for whoring. Runs that new place in Forge, giving the metalworkers somewhere to relax at the end of a hard shift.

'''Ulf Fishingpole''' Dances. Well named.

'''Snowhands''' - attends to the baths.

'''Thorolf''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Moothskegg''' - occasional help, mostly manual.

'''Rodi''' - muscle. A tall, wiry woman, blonde and broad shouldered, she looks a bit like Skuld.

'''Kniv''' - muscle. A stout man with bloodshot eyes and wild hair just barely kept in check by a full set of silvery hair clips.

'''Einar Beardless''' - muscle of sorts. Bald, beardless, soft-spoken, he's good at talking people down.

===Mother Superior´s crew===
Found '''Skuld''' in the woods; mostly gone or split up now.

'''Superior''' - tough as old boots, but something '''Skuld''' told her scared her.

===Thief Eyes’ crew===
Woodsmen, that crazy, creepy bunch who harvest timber and sometimes never come back?

===Ravens===
Those damn slim kids with their oddly sleek feather coats, daring the winds to either skim along the icy ground or even take off of it... Sure they can be run down, but they turn erratically. And killing one will make everyone pissed at you. Everyone needs quick messengers willing to take risks and go fast.

===Others===
'''Brokkr'''
Works on the Wolves' snowmobiles. Friendly with '''Loki'''. He does good work and he likes being paid in bits and pieces, so he doesn't need to go out scavenging for himself. Lives in '''Logger's Town'''.

'''Golem'''
Weaponsmith - a fixer of broken guns, and maker of bullets. Supplies '''Skuld''' with custom ammo for her rifle. Lives and works in '''Forge'''.

'''Flatnose'''
A purveyor of finest liqueurs - or at least of booze that likely won't kill you straight off. Operated out of the back of the markethall in '''Forge''' up until a few weeks ago - now relocated to Logger Town, under Ylva's patronage. The cause of the disagreement between Ylva and Surtr.

'''The Muckers'''
Two, previously three brothers (probably; they're lumpy and filthy enough it's hard to tell) who make swill that's of a slightly better quality than the swill everyone else makes. If you mix it right it could almost pass for drinkable, but it's nowhere near the quality of Flatnose's brew. Ylva killed Hen, the middle child.

'''Barker''' – the cloeset thing Loggertown has to a doctor. Barker lives in a fortified trailer with an added tent used for medical operations and drug-cooking. Iggy Pop-thin and of indeterminate gender, Barker is always wrapped in at least three layers of cloaks or ponchos, their face nigh-permanently hidden by a jury-rigged gas mask. Way too cheerful about their work, which tends to deter prospective clients.

=Places=
==The ice wastes==

What's left of the roads are kept clear by Plower and his crew of crazy fuckers who drive these ancient snow-clearing machines, chopping up trees that fall across the roads, and get all the food, drink, and heat at any settlement that doesn't want to end up cut off, never to be heard from again.

A road is any stretch of frozen ground with less than a foot of snow on it, or any river or lake with more than a foot of ice. If Plower's crew says you can drive there, you can drive there. Anywhere else? You're taking your chances.

==The woods==
Some go there because they have to get some jingle and wood is at a fucking premium all the fucking time. If they go alone, and they stay on the edges, and they get out before night falls, maybe they come back nine times out of ten.

But for the most part it's slavery. You fuck up bad enough and don't have the jingle to settle the debt, off you go on a lumber crew.

And then there's those who claim to trade with folk who live in there.
==Settlements==
The world is cold now, but in a few places there are hot springs or vents and you better believe someone owns that shit.

Some try to make do with firewood but that means the woods.
===Logger Town, also called Gösta===
Previously just a few shacks around '''Bumpers'''' place. Nothing left of that now that we've got logs coming in from the forest for proper houses.

Nowadays most outsiders call it Logger Town. I figure they're even less eager to go into the woods elsewhere.

Those who've lived here longest call it Gösta, supposedly short for "City of the Gods". The olds take the rituals up at the ruins very seriously.

'''Ylva''' took Bumper’s place at the springs, and built '''Ragnhall'''. The guy selling bedwarmth now is called '''Greensleeves'''.

====Ragnhall - hall of the gods====
Ylva’s place. People come to Ragnhall to escape the darkness, the dreariness, the bleak fucking cold. For a few hours they get songs and dance and they get to be the gods of their own stories. Sure, there's some food and drink to be had, but the main feature is the crew of dancers, singers, and actors who bring the stories to life, with enthusiastic and welcome audience participation.

Main attraction: Spectacle
Supporting attractions: Music, art
Atmosphere: Intimacy, fantasy, forgetting, dancing

===Forge===
'''Surtr''''s place. Huddled alongside and inside old ruined factories from before, it's got more than its share of makers and builders.

'''The Buzzard Market''' - selling, buying, renting by the hour; once a month the narrow corridors and claustrophobic siderooms of Forge’s crumbling markethall writhe with life. People come from Logger Town, a couple of other nearby settlements, even down from Splitsville if they really want something.

'''The Scrapyard''' - where the rusted hulks of old trucks and buses and shit have been pulled together and remade to quarters, mostly for the indentured. People get sick in there all the time. Skuld lives here, and so does '''Key'''.

'''The Chandle House''' - where the flesh of the inglorious dead is rendered into tallow – for candles, soap, biodiesel and food for thralls – and their bones are stored.

====Sjöfn´s place====
In the basement of a crumbling concrete silo near the scrapforge - all the better to draw in a decent crowd at the end of a hard shift feeding the roaring furnaces.
*Skuld: I imagine Sjöfn´s place to be a place of pleasures that aspires to be at least semi-classy. Baths with or without attendants (mostly, but not necessarily for sex), drugs, drink, maybe some entertainers in market times. I picture something [https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ like this] going on, mostly because I just saw it.
*Ylva: Sjöfn is a clever and underhanded bitch. She always seems to be three moves ahead, as long as she doesn't let her temper get the best of her. I don't know if she's actually mean and mostly hides it or if she just lashes out hard when she gets pissed at someone. I kicked her out for whoring and trying to get some of the other cast members to join her. I don't want that shit at my place, not after getting away from the shitface Bumpers. She claimed she had planned to leave anyway so I'm not sure how she felt about it. I... kinda miss her. She's a bitch, but she's fun to be around as long as she doesn't turn on you.

===Fish-hold===
Somewhere to the northeast, on the trade route. Where the snow never settles and the fjord never freezes.

'''Brettir''' has been there - he says there's a guy, I shit you not, runs a fucking spa. A spa - big steaming pools of hot clean water. You ever heard anything like that?

===Splitsville===
Two days up the trade route, such as it is, in Splitsville, they've got these skate races where they go around a track out over the lake and in through the town, and half the time someone breaks a leg or their neck. A body can make good jingle at that racing if they've got the skill and the looks, or can bet on those who do.

'''Crash/burn''' - '''Minko''''s place, in a prime spot where you can see almost the whole track.

===Tyrs Hafn===
Where Dragi is from. Ruled by the Tyr amputation cult.

=Inspirational Materials=
*''[http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/mary-margaret-road-grader/ Mary Margaret Road-Grader]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/strange-monsters-recent-past/ All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past]'', by Howard Waldrop
*''Heirs of the Perisphere'', by Howard Waldrop [http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597290838/9781597290838__25.htm sample]
*''The World, As We Know't'', by Howard Waldrop
*[https://www.instagram.com/p/BYrEx2xBoSO/ video of Burning Man woman with performance dart]

Loki

2018-06-12T12:14:47Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Loki to AfterRagnarok:Loki: Setting up proper child page relationships

#REDIRECT [[AfterRagnarok:Loki]]

AfterRagnarok:Loki

2018-06-12T12:14:47Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Loki to AfterRagnarok:Loki: Setting up proper child page relationships

Back to [[AfterRagnarok]].

=Loki=

==Look==

[[File:AWLoki.jpg]]

Ambiguous, showy biker wear, strong face, scorched eyes, wiry body

=Stats=

{| class="wikitable"
|
! Cool
! Hard
! Hot
! Sharp
! Weird
|- style="text-align:center;"
| ''Starting''
| +1
| +2
| +1
| =0
| -1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| ''Current''
| +1
| +3
| +1
| =0
| =0
|}

=Moves=

==Chopper Moves==

===Pack Alpha===
When Loki tries to impose his will on his gang, he rolls+hard. On a 10+, all 3. On a 7–9, choose 1:
* They do what he wants (otherwise, they refuse)
* They don’t fight back over it (otherwise, they do fight back)
* He doesn’t have to make an example of one of them (otherwise, he must)
On a miss, someone in his gang makes a bid, idle or serious, to replace him for alpha.

===Fucking Thieves===

When Loki has his gang search their pockets and saddlebags for something, roll+hard. It has to be something small enough to fit. On a 10+, one of them happens to have just the thing, or close enough. On a 7–9, one of them happens to have something pretty close, unless what he's looking for is hi-tech, in which case no dice. On a miss, one of them used to have just the thing, but it turns out that some asswipe stole it from the gang.

===Special===

If you and another character have sex, they immediately change their sheet to say Hx+3 with you. They also choose whether to give you -1 or +1 to your Hx with them, on your sheet.

==Other Moves==

===NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH===
In combat, Loki counts as a small gang, with armor and harm as per his equipment.

=Loki's Stuff=

* Sawed off
* Machete
* Biking gear incorporating armour (2-armour)

=Loki's Snowmobile=

rugged, aggressive; howling, flashy; bucking

''Fiber glass wolves head on it, as is the fashion of the gang''

=Loki's Gang=

The Wolves of the Blizzard Beyond Time (2-harm gang small savage mobile rich obligation 1-armor)
* Nomadic at heart (they crave the wind of the wastes)
* Self-sufficient (people need protection on the byways out there, and they'll pay for it)
* In debt to Surtr (because he has a hall and reach)

==Named NPCs of Note in Gang==

Hel and Fenrir are Loki's seconds

Völva rides with the wolves and is carrying Loki's child

=Hx=

Skuld +3 ''She stood up to my gang and I. It didn't get too ugly.''

Ylva +2 ''She thinks she could take me in a fight if it came down to it''

Miekke +1 ''She road with his gang for a while''

Dragi =0 ''A professional acquaintance''

=XP=

==Earned==
* Attempting to seduce Dog's Head (mixed success)
* Going aggro on Dog's Head when she wouldn't cough up what he wanted
* Seize by Force when jumped
* Fucking Thieves for some dynamite or something
* Seizing Flosi by Force

* Pack Alpha to get the gang into shape for more disciplined raiding program
* Ate a magic reindeer heart and opened brain to Maelstrom (not a success)
* Attacking a dream monster
* Open Mind to Maelstrom for some advice on giving out the meat (not a success; at all)
* Again with the Open Mind to Maelstrom, this time to figure out where to go for better healing (ha ha, nope)

==Spent==
* Move from another playbook (NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH)
* +1hard (max +3)

=Harm=

3-harm

* Life became untenable, came back with +1 weird (=0 total)

Dragi

2018-06-12T12:14:32Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Dragi to AfterRagnarok:Dragi: Setting up proper child page relationships

#REDIRECT [[AfterRagnarok:Dragi]]

AfterRagnarok:Dragi

2018-06-12T12:14:32Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Dragi to AfterRagnarok:Dragi: Setting up proper child page relationships

Back to [[AfterRagnarok]].
=Dragi=
[[File:Dragi.jpg]]

''Man, showy scrounge wear, handsome face, sad eyes, stocky body, prosthetic legs''

Dragi wears a mix of athletic and military winter wear and furs with a tight watch cap over his head. He usually wears mirror sunglasses outside to make him look cool, and has a perpetual squint from driving through snow glare. His legs end mid-thing and are replaced by functional, worn-looking prosthetics with small clawed feet on the end. They are insulated ceramic and titanium, painful to wear but allow him to stand outside without getting particularly cold since his body is 4 feet off the ground.

''Here's the story Dragi doesn't tell anyone. Dragi was raised up in a now defunct cult that worshipped Tyr, one handed god of war and justice. Someplace up before you get to Splitsville, but off the main trade route. His legs -- he says something about an accident but truth is, they were willingly sacrificed in emulation of the god, and replaced as a sign of his high status as a Tyrsman. It's hard to explain to outsiders. He was the chauffeur to the Gothi of the cult driving the limo, but when this worthy died after one amputation too many, Dragi was expected to immolate himself and the limo as a funereal rite. Instead, he broke out of the compound, going straight through the gate behind the wheel of Jotun with the limo and the priest's corpse in a trailer behind it. Dragi knows his soul is forfeit, but he couldn't bear to see that car get torched. The Tyr cult has fallen into infighting, but he keeps the Jotun, and the high priest's artificial limbs (the body is a mere shell, but the replacements are shining and incorruptible) as leverage.''

''So how'd he get to where he is now? He broke away from the funeral procession in the limo that was to be both your pyres, and fled with the cult in hot pursuit. Dragi is running from the cult, on the road for several days at high speed, pursuit hot on his tail. He's exhausted. Ylva is on her way from Gösta to Forge with Sjöfn, riding in Dogs Head's snowplows. Bad weather, not quite a blizzard but not something you want to be caught outside in. They nearly hit the limo, which is half buried in a snowdrift with Dragi asleep or unconscious at the wheel. The bulk of the snowplow hides whatever's still visible of the limo, and the cult pass without stopping. When Dragi wakes, for whatever reasons, they help him drag the limo back onto the road, and set him on his way.''

So, technically Ylva and Dog's Head know some of his story, and he told Miekke everything, but he's not even sure if Miekke was listening.

<hr>

'''Cool 2, Hard 0, Hot 1, Sharp 1, Weird -1'''

'''Gear:'''

Sawed-off 3-harm close reload messy

Elaborate overlapping mismatched winter weather gear and furs

Trade goods worth 3-barter

Prosthetic legs: +all-terrain, +responsive, -painful, -obvious.

'''Moves:'''

Eye on the Door:
name your escape route and roll+cool. On a 10+, you’re gone. On
a 7–9, you can go or stay, but if you go it costs you: leave something behind or take
something with you, the MC will tell you what. On a miss, you’re caught vulnerable, half
in and half out.

My other car is a tank:
you get a specialized battle vehicle

'''Cars:'''
Hross the limo, a gorgeous relic of the legendary past. Dragi sacrificied his soul to keep this car intact, so he's not going to let you fucking eat in it, OK? Just don't even ask.
massive 2, off-road,fast, sleek, sloppy, guzzler.+speed +armor

Jotun the assault vehicle. He keeps in a locked-down and inconspicuous garage in Loggertown. He knows Surtr would love to haul it home and reverse-engineer it, or drive around in it like an ass.
The Jotun is a Finnish combat engineering minefield breaching vehicle, decorated with runes and devotions to Tyr the war god.
The Jotun stats should be +1 speed +1 armor, -loud -sloppy. The look is garish and muscular, both sophisticated and barbaric. People tend to either freak out when they see it or get fascinated.

<hr>
'''Driver Special''' 
If you and another character have sex, roll+cool. On
a 10+, it’s cool, no big deal. On a 7–9, give them +1 to
their Hx with you on their sheet, but give yourself -1
to your Hx with them on yours. On a miss, you gotta
go: take -1 ongoing, until you prove that it’s not like
they own you or nothing.
<hr>

If you need jingle during a session, tell the MC you’d like to work a gig. Your gigs:
*Serve a wealthy NPC as driver
*Serve a wealthy NPC as courier
*Others, as you negotiate them.

<hr>
'''Hx:'''
*''Which one of you got me out of some serious shit?'' Ylva helped me hide and survive when I was on the run from the cult of Tyr.
*''Which one of you has been with me for days on the road?'' Miekke had a gig, going to different towns. I told her about giving up my legs, showed her the wonders of Freya's heart, the dead city under the icen glittering like the aurora. I think I offended her somehow...
*''Which one of you have I caught watching the horizon?'' Skuld. That's why we make a good team, we think alike. I think.

Non-Hx relationship: Dragi has an agreement with Loki; the Wolves don't hunt him in exchange for him giving them a cut of the business. That way they concentrate on others and keep his reputation as the guy who can get it done. Not sure if the Wolves are all in agreement with this though.

===Stats Tracker===
XP: x x o o o

Harm: 2 (beat up by some damn woodcutter)

Freyr

2018-06-12T12:14:05Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Freyr to AfterRagnarok:Freyr: Setting up proper child page relationships

#REDIRECT [[AfterRagnarok:Freyr]]

AfterRagnarok:Freyr

2018-06-12T12:14:05Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Freyr to AfterRagnarok:Freyr: Setting up proper child page relationships

Back to [[AfterRagnarok]].
===Look===
[[File:Defiance 1.jpg]]

''look goes here''

===Stats===
'''Cool-1 Hard-0 Hot+2 Sharp+2 Weird-1'''

====Experience====
====Harm====

===Gear===

====Barter====

====Gigs====
If you need jingle during a session, tell the MC you’d like to work a gig. Your gigs:
* X
* X
* X
* Others, as you negotiate them.

===Moves===
'''MOVE''' 
<hr>
'''MOVE''' 
<hr>
'''MOVE''' 
<hr>
'''Special''' 

===Hx Q&As===
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A

==Notes==
===Character Questions (from MC)===
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A
*''Q?'' A

Solveig

2018-06-12T12:13:24Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Solveig to AfterRagnarok:Solveig: Setting up proper child page relationships

#REDIRECT [[AfterRagnarok:Solveig]]

AfterRagnarok:Solveig

2018-06-12T12:13:24Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Solveig to AfterRagnarok:Solveig: Setting up proper child page relationships

Ljós

2018-06-12T12:13:09Z

MysteryCat: MysteryCat moved page Ljós to AfterRagnarok:Ljós: Setting up proper child page relationships

#REDIRECT [[AfterRagnarok:Ljós]]