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Note: Continuation of Amora's punishment as devised by the All-Father and Karnilla, the Norn Queen. Karnilla is played by Rogue.
Amora had gone to her quarters and taken only a little time to rest and wash up. The rest? She ordered very particular food items from the kitchens. She knew the staff there would take it as a challenge, especially now. So it was that the blonde haired goddess was able to procure various items that she needed for a potion. Spells she might not have, however, her knowledge was more than intact and potions were still within her realm of workings.
So she mixed a few simple charms, one to reveal spells to her eyes when a few drops where rubbed on her eyelids. Another few.. well, she needed some kind of offense. Most of the ingredients just weren't available through the kitchens, at least not without rousing suspicion. So she made due.
A glance out the window showed a steep drop from a relatively tall window downwards. The thought of jumping wasn't ideal, she'd likely be fine, but then who knew what kind of traps Karnilla had in store? Ones that might evade her potion'ed gaze?
So Amora took a more conventional route, attempting to sneak out of her quarters, quite earlier than anyone would expect of her.. and down the halls toward the servant's wing.
*
The chambers themselves are elegant, but somewhat plain, wine-dark flowers blossoming down the hall and here too. Heavy blossoms lend a soporific effect to the air, leading an induced sense of calm and relaxation. Elegant lines groove all over, the dance of twisting gilded lines and the smooth flagstones a harbinger of favour and grace.
Kara, the courtier assigned to Amora, remains with her the entire time. She points out several shifts in a drawer and linens, then the changing layout of the palace. It isn't at all like before, but two thousand years is a very long time to grow tired with the architecture. Then let them sleep, and sleep deeply. The young disir stands outside the door, waiting, patient.
It begins quietly enough, as the woman attempting to steal down the hall. There are always attendants, always people in the dark and the bright hours. Elves, Asgardians, Nornheimjar: they are a constant presence. Two girls carry a lovely bowl between them full of perfume distilled from some plant, and glance up shyly enough. Another young man with a sword laughs in passing, then shakes his head.
"Where fare you," inquires the woman behind. The glamour she wears is a whisper of her power, something innate to her breed and not of eldritch might. It can't be seen through, the veil that separates her from the living and dead, except by the dying and other disir.
*
Amora grumbles mentally, and some what verbally as she tries and fails to find a means to avoid the foot-traffic through the halls. Annoyance flitting about her features when each possible exit or path out of the castle that she had once known, was occupied by a set of eyes. "Through Over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar, over park, over pale, through blood, through fire, I do wander everywhere.." She muttered to the question posed to her.
Oh yes, Amora thought herself quite clever with tossing in her favorite mortal writer. Alas that she was unable to see his plays performed properly anymore. A sigh fell from her lips and she frowned faintly. "I go where I please, were there orders else wise?" She arched an imperious brow upwards and tilted her head to the side.
*
Clever quotes and quips will not spare one the mild, even gaze of a disir. She watches without remorse, pale blue-grey eyes turned towards the stunning blonde in her simple attire. Chin raised, Kara does not immediately respond. The two startled women hurry off with their prize between them. The warrior melts against the wall, as though the shadows might conceal his presence in a narrow niche filled by an urn.
"You will know when there are not." A simple response to the inquiry follows a heartbeat later. Dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand, she tucks her palms inside her sleeves. "Where do you please to go?"
*
A narrowed eyed gaze follows as Amora turns, and without deigning an answer left, the woman standing there or to follow. A second thought following the woman's words and Amora changed her route, no longer bothering to attempt stealth, she made her way to the door of the palace. Her expression set and prepared for anyone to challenge her. Had Karnilla expressly stated she couldn't leave? Not in her hearing. Thusly, Amora reasoned, she must be able to leave the confines of the fortress.
A toss of her hair followed as she eyed the guardians at the door. "I would like to go outside please," She batted her eyelashes, her voice barely considered sweet or pleading. Impatience was grinding at her, along with the irritation at wearing magicked clothes.
*
Neither the guards nor the disir bar the way, leaving Amora to proceed how she will. The gardens without are lovely and dark, aflame in scarlet and plum, intense gold and shining copper. Trees gather with bark of silver and gold, pale white and stunning iridescence drawn in detail that would make an elf weep. Indeed, many of the Ljosalfar do.
The path stretches out, glittering by the moonlight, through a courtyard and into the rolling distance. Those guardians are armed, but do nothing to impede her, looking from the woman to the winding route.
"Peace," one of them says.
Kara is ever the quiet, attentive attendant, slipping her thumbs against the belt wrapped around her midsection.
*
A deep inhale follows as Amora exits the palace, her gaze lifting to the heavens above and a long exhale followed. Then she was shoving into the garden, her jaw squaring determinedly as she wove between the plants and statues, fountains and towering trees. She knew that eventually, if she could break through, she'd be met with a wall. But if she could scale it? She had never been physically inclined, but anger and the set righteous belief in that she was the wronged party spurred her onwards.
Her goal? The Norn Forest. Yes, there were decidedly guardian demons between here and there, but what else was left to her without magic? Her breathing left her in sharp gusts, unused to having to /walk/ everywhere.
*
The moment she steps through the path, her spell dissolves away as though a clock's hands struck a midnight hour.
Power spills away from her in a wave of nothing. Plants and statuary provide an elegant goal, but the first few steps she takes clearly do not gain her any closer to the sumptuous landscaping laid out at the foot of the palace. On the contrary, the distance is unaltering. She might walk for an hour and get no further than she is, the bottom steps of a recessed flight enveloped by a bowl of grooved earth and sufficient greenery to dismay a grasshopper.
Something cold and pointed rests at her back, flush between her shoulder blades and tracing west. It halts, and the fabric parts after dimpling beneath it. "Thou doth insist upon thine vexed course, e'en when the very sacred Sisters themselves conspire to spake of thine folly in plain terms." Eloquent words, truly.
The cold burns deeper, enough to give a mastodon pause, and send frost jotun into paroxysms of delight. A curving staff, it might be called, rests in a slim hand, long and graceful, ending in a deadly point. Karnilla speaks a word, then, one that even Amora's eldritch lexicon has no place for, and violet-blue light pulses around her.
Such rapture, such pain, has no description worth the telling. It bites into the marrow and burns at the core, feeding into those blighted portions of the psyche still attuned to revenge and thwarted love. The sorceress supreme of this realm gazes on the results in a spectrum visible to her, and perhaps a few others.
"It burns yet. Did not the Queen of Nornheim warn thee before the All-father himself?" Feather-light words fall through the soul-blaze, and she draws back the spindled tip for but a moment. "Remember whom thou art, and not what thou desirest to be."
Then she slams the point of the spindle straight through the back of the Enchantress' ribcage, bypassing bone and opening a glittering portal straight to the ventricle of her heart. A splash of power races down to fill the void, and almost immediately the sickening glow convulses, green overtaken by the indigo fire. Hardening shapes form along the bulges, cleavage and facets growing, filling the cavity.
Karnilla withdraws her right hand, the free one holding a bloody heart. It vanishes in a wave of her palm. "Two nights." A promise. "Then we shall judge your progress, Amora the Apprentice."
*
The former Enchantress of Asgard struggled against the magical bonds that held her at the edge of the palace's steps. Her teeth gritted together as she lashed out, flinging her arms out, a sound of frustration peeling from her lips as she physically attempted to struggle against the Enchantment that kept her still. Then she felt the hastily created potion's power drain away and the cold tip of something pressed at her spine. She froze, her hands still upheld as she stared at the far away point of the garden well and truly out of reach. At first she simply felt the chill as an annoyance, and she attempted to lean forward to avoid it minutely, and in vain. A sharp retort for the Norn Queen on her lips.
Then was the strange word of power. The thrum of magic that Amora had been blinded to struck a chord some where deep within her psyche, even if she hadn't knowledge of it. It spoke of fear and terror, and the thought to run, /run/, flee, escape— It all ended with a cry ripping from her lips as the pain blossomed inwards. Yet she still couldn't move. Couldn't escape the icy burn.
A scream of utter agony followed as the sharp slam of the silvery tip through her chest, her hands reaching up to claw at her breast in panic. Her features white as she screamed and realized that what she was staring at was her own beating heart ripped free from its home in her chest.
Tears stained her cheeks, yet no fresh ones fell as the organ disappeared from her sight. Her knees gave out as she dropped to the ground, clutching and clawing at the fabric at breast as she mentally could not process what had just happened. Much less Karnilla's words.
Panicked hyperventilation followed as Amora clasped her hands against her chest, finding no warmth, no comforting heart beat beneath her fingers. "What .. what did you /do/ to me?" She whispered, her voice hoarse sounding, brows pinched as verdant eyes lifted to scan Karnilla's features above her.
"How am I not dead?"
*
She is the one an English poet conceived, merciless and pristine as the night, and so much more. Writhing locks of her hair dance around her shoulders, a veil that wafts on the currents of power binding sorceress to Nornheim, arcane working to the glistening spindled staff she carries. In a moment, she banishes it out of sight, along with the remnants of a woman's broken, useless heart.
Screams resonate through the night, fading into nothing, the sweet choruses plied by insects under the blossoms and harvest moon maintaining their lyrical vigils. Behind the palace burns in a welcoming glow, light streaming through the windows to beckon guests to sanctuary in a turbulent world. All holds an air of serenity bloomed from careful stewardship, unlike the frenetic turbulence of Muspelheim or the unchanging, static vaults of the underworld.
"To Hel with thine impudence. Cast out thine bitter dregs, cracked cup, and be mended whole once more. For what vessel of any worth may you be, sundered by a fall?" Karnilla's hemline dusts the ground as she turns away, then, and utters an incantation full of murmuring whispers.
A circular seal forms beneath Amora, wreathed by another revolution of knotwork and fine sigils carved out of ultraviolet radiance. When the last completes, the gate is unsealed to some precise place on Midgard.
She falls, and in her fall, strikes the dusty old apartment somewhere in Queens. The apprentice is surrounded by furnishings under white sheets and a dim beam headed through slanted, crooked curtains. Her power is reduced and bound, Odin's edict enforced, and Amora's return is marked not with a bang, nor a whimper, but a sigh of escaping air.