Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== 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.