bookishwench | Fic: Marked (Sif/Loki)

War is glory, or so the oldest warriors said, the ones who claimed to have seen the shadows of the Valkyries silhouetted against the sun in their youth. War is heartbreak, or so the widows said, the ones whose sweethearts and husbands were spirited away, leaving empty space and invisible wounds behind. War is profit, or so the nobles said, the ones whose own swords were for show and never proven in blood, their own or their enemies.

But the Aesir knew the truth of it. In the stabbing fury of battle, when the screams of horses and of men tangled together and led those in armor to a wildness unknown among the sane, it was then war and chaos became one.

Who they fought mattered not. A thousand times the horns called forth the Einherjar to the bloody fields, sometimes against one foe, sometimes another. Silence would fall as the armies stood apart from one another, the ravens gathering in the trees of whatever world would witness their deaths or their victory, for no other outcomes existed. Whether under glint of starlight or moonlight or the blaze of the sun, armor would blaze in harsh brightness that bit into the eyes, blinding if stared at for too long, not moving, waiting, coiled. Then, a battle cry would pierce the air, a wound made sound, and the fury was unleashed.

Sif was no pretty little warrior, sweetly singing soldiers to their deaths like a siren on dry land. Encased in metal, freezing and burning at once, she moved like the crashing of a tidal wave upon her foes, the flash of sword and shield like the crested foam of doom. They fell before her in legions, in battalions, in companies, and in hordes, a shriek and silence from each, save for the clatter of armor colliding with rocky ground or against the bodies of the dead. She was lethal to look upon.

As the attack rose to a crescendo, he would come nearer, the scent of her battle fever drawing him like a magnet to north. Whispers followed him like a trailing cloak even in the midst of combat, the words chittering like teeth clicking in coldness: Loki, mad one, liar, mage, death. Whether through magic or the blade, they drew back, parting like water around an immovable stone, clearing a path for his power, and his own vanquished lay behind him like a path of metal and blood, dagger-stricken. The closer he came to her, the wilder the battle grew, until it raged like Ragnarök had come at last, rending the armies to red shreds.

They caught sight of each other, and lips curled back over teeth in the snarl-smile of feral recognition. They were the same, halves of a whole, the two sharpened sides of the same sword, fatal and fated. As the tipping point was reached and victory incarnadine painted over the field, they met at last in the midst of the melee, and vanished, eyes mortal and immortal left blind.

The branches of Yggdrasil bowed beneath their weight as they smashed the boundaries between worlds. In the crook of the limbs of life, they intertwined, serpentine, fierce as war and chaos are bound in nature, taking and taken in turn, teeth and nails, skin and breath, hands and lips, consuming, consumed, burning brighter than mortal mind can fathom until at last the moment of surrender, mutual, exhaustion, sweat-dappled peace. Her brow rested against his heartbeat, still frantic as it calmed, her own pulse matching it beat for beat.

The first time they performed their rites, untold centuries ago, in the aftermath his hand found her thigh, clasping it, his eyes and hers holding a gaze of understanding more than mere words as permission was given and taken. A moment of searing pain, and then he withdrew it, leaving the mark of a green snake, teeth like daggers sinking into its own tail, upon her skin.

“Mine.”

She had tossed back her head and laughed.

Centuries passed, the rise and fall of ages, the cycle again and again, and each time, the snake upon her thigh bore forth the bond of their natures, the eternal link of their own ouroboros. Then eternity shattered, darkness fell, a return to dust for half of what drew breath. He was among those undimmed, chaos still gnashing its teeth in the face of death, unvanquished. She passed into the realm of nothing, the circle broken, wobbling, threatening to enter the abyss as war took on its own life, its patron and paragon dissolved.

Then, from the quiet of nothing, like the silence before vengeance, she reformed, called back as the greatest battle was to be waged against he who would saw the trunk of Yggdrasil, burn its limbs, end world upon world until the first darkness returned. She felt the cry of battle rise in her throat again when her first breath entered her lungs again, then stopped, the air taken from her. The place upon her thigh was blank, unwritten. She knew as if the runes were written on the ground before her that the one of the golden gauntlet had strangled the life from him, ripped even chaos asunder, and she was now unmatched.

As the battle joined on a far off plain, as the greatest of warriors sought justice in a war that held the universe in its scope, she did not heed the call. With the darkness of the void above and below, the coldness of the stars like the eyes of the unreachable dead, war wept tears of blood, alone.