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.~{:--------------:}~.
Laying waste to jotun helps Kai work out some of his issues. He grows calmer, and that just makes him deadlier, because now he's thinking about where to strike. «No matter,» he says to Fandral. «Let's just get out alive.» Not that he doesn't sound confident they'll do just that.
Just in time to get scruffed by a giant. He takes a swing with his knife, but he just can't reach. He kicks wildly, twisting this way and that. «I'll end you!» He lands a square kick to the giant's stomach but the creature is just too strong. Kai's brought up to its mouth, and the elf spits in its face like a mad cat as he takes another swipe with his knives.
So, the James Barnes they brought along on this insanity has left the building. A second or two of contact with the Mjolnir they've found and…..the figure that remains is bigger. Much bigger, and armored and cloaked in a blue-black the color of the belly of a supercell. None of their old Thor's touches of gold and scarlet splendor. Scaled armor, a raven-winged helm, and a metal arm made into something far less crude than the original Soviet work. He crackles with lightning, eyes blazing the hot blue of a flame's heart….and then he's after the fleeing Laufey, sending the hammer before him in a flying strike. Get him!
Gathering force crackles between the fingertips of the jotun scaling the hexagonal walkway, retreating no longer. Fur-trimmed cloak standing on end, the frost giant rears up as the stolen storm-power mingles with his own energy. Barometric pressure drops by thirty, forty kilobars. For Strange, the sensation is a sickening one, mana pulled from all corners to the sorcerous weaving flecked in ice, torment, and spatial warps.
Foolhardy beyond words for one magic user to tackle another, but the lithe girl in a youthful Asgardian's guise no longer contemplates hazards. Shards fly into the air where they impact. Illusory features mingle despair and contempt.
Slamming into him full force does not dislodge Laufey, and the low keening of pain erupts from parted lips where ice licks down those spell-wrought leathers. The trickster disrupts the spell, at bloody cost. A ragged hole blurring under the crystal jotun rears back in time for Mjolnir to fly true, slamming him back and through the hole in reality.
It's one thing to be winded — it's another thing to find your gag reflex fighting against the desperate need for air. The next audible sound from the Sorcerer Supreme is a stifled 'glurk', glassy ultraviolaceous eyes disappearing and then flicking to find the source of the skin-crawling disturbance in magical intent. The sense of the spellwork is pervasive, threatening, close to the skin like an uninvited approach by a handsy threat — inky, dark, the drag of a blade along the fine hairs of the neck — the stifling terror of an air-tight box closed and buried beneath permafrost. The bravest may rise above the fear, but only to so much of an extent.
Oh gods below, Laufey can cast, and that's Scarlett crumpling. Shitshitshit, where are the others?! With the aid of the Cloak, he's on his booted feet, soaked through on one side by Jotun blood. Even as he's processing the fact that a scrappy Kai is scruffed and snarling, there goes the comet-like zzzzzip of a thrown weapon. It's the impact that causes Strange to flinch, gripping momentarily at his tunic above his sternum; gods above, he nearly felt that in his teeth! That was Mjolnir on full display — wait, WHAT, who — Barnes, wielding it?!
Act first, think later. Pushing down the burning sensation of many small cuts to open skin and the wonderment at a deep torsal bruise to form later, he darts back into the fray and immediately to aid the Moon Elf. A booted foot at 25mph to the frost giant's head might hurt — a little.
The blonde Aesir has unfortunately needed to retreat from fighting alongside Kai. Some carefuly maneuvering on three giants' part has proven to separate him into his own corner of trouble. With a grimace of effort, he's doing his best to deflect multiple blades more suited to lopping a longhorn steer clean in half. His grey leather armor sports a rend or two, the edges stained with his efforts. He won't fall anytime soon, this one, lead onwards by battle-blood and the belief that Asgard must not fall!!!
The giant takes Strange's boot at 25mph and reels, releasing the elf some twenty feet in the air. Kai slashes at him on the way down. Take that! The giant howls as these small things keep attacking him. Kai tucks and rolls, but it's a hard landing. Whoof! He crouches, catching his breath. Then he's on his feet again. Thanks! he calls to Strange. This does some to smooth over his anger, at least for the moment.
Fandral has gone off to save Asgard, and may the gods go with him. Kai puts some distance between him and the giant as the creatures tries to shake off the blow to the head. "I don't think my services as a diplomat are needed anymore!" Kai calls through the din. He twirls his knives in his hands neatly, keeping a paranoid eye on the fray in this brief moment of respite.
Thor….for it is Thor, if in a new guise, is all whirling rage. He's after Laufey like a bolt from a crossbow, summoning Mjolnir back to his hand, the better to get up close and personal on the giant. It may only be wielded one handed but with whatever magic's work on him, that metal arm's strength is superhuman. Titanic, in truth.
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
Nietzsche spoke too well. Black soot creeps along the edges of the portal cleaved into the very fabric of Jotunheim. Snow and bloody quartz roll out a carpet of little welcome. Wavering dusk drains into the absolute fathomless night below. Colour bleeds into the darkest spectrum, diminishing out all tones through a lens darkly. Indistinct shapes swim through liquid haze that breathes a malignant presence and eagerly laps at the wound already sealing over.
Mjolnir completes its strike and arcs sharply back to hand. Momentum pummels Laufey through the wound, freefall of a burning white-blue star. The Trickster Prince dives after him, shedding a parade of rubicund drops up to the portal.
The only way Bucky will get up close and personal is leaping through that rent, and the hammer sends a groundswell of flight to make that happen.
Fandral recoils, shouting in alarm, "'Ware the Black Bifrost! 'Tis a tainted horror now that the Rainbow Bridge fell!"
God, it feels good to boot a giant. Kidding — it actually jars up the long-bones of his leg and Strange grimaces even as he whip-kicks about in mid-air to cuff the thing another solid blow to the side of the head with his other booted foot. Knifed and reeling, it staggers back and stumbles into one of the trio currently harrassing Fandral, who attempts to warn them with clarion shout. Giant do fall hard when they fall, and tripping's a pretty lame way to hit the ground. Still — legs do tangle. The blonde Aesir dodges out of the group and immediately follows the trail of sparks left in the wake of Mjolnir's flight.
«Elf, with us! Diplomacy has failed!» He seems no happier for approaching the horrifying rift between realities, but where the Hammer's chosen goes, he shall follow. After all, there is a promise to uphold, sworn in blood and later in tears.
Swallowing again and ignoring the metallic drag of blood down his roughened throat, the Sorcerer Supreme is quick to flit to the portal's edge, hovering in a spread of crimson. Now the thin slices show in places devoid of battle-leather; a thin runnel draws vertically from mid-cheek on the right, another gash longer and into his hairline beginning to bead above his left brow. Even his neck got clipped and that one is being overshadowed most protectively by one collar of the Cloak. Scarred hands twist summoned energy to his will and the molten surujin will act as bullwhip laced with starfire should any other giants attempt to chase them beyond and into the Black Bifrost.
"Yes!" Kai says, agreeing to this whole 'getting the hell out of here' idea. He breaks into a run for the rift, quick as a whip and light on his feet. Elves, what can you do? His blue-stained cloak flutters behind him in his fleeing, the ichor drying black on his skin. He's got a few bruises to remember the fighting by, but he's come out of this in a lot better condition than the giants he encountered have.
He ducks and dodges another giant, taking a swipe with his knives in passing, but he misses. Just as well, it means there's plenty of distance between them. He's not out for the kill anymore, those stabs and swipes are just his way of saying 'do not touch.'
It's standard issue James Barnes stupidity, leaping face first into battle with the unknown. And the berserker impulse of a thunder god does exactly nothing to inculcate better sense. Leap after Laufey he does, determined to latch on to the giant like a mastiff on its prey. The hammer in his hand pulls him through, into that darker realm. It'll be familiar, in a moment….and then there will be vengeance as fuel for the fire.
From Siberian cold that tests even an Aesir's constitution comes a jarring descent into the midnight zone. An oily residue gathers over the body and seeps through every chink in armour, cloak and shirt, sticky stained breaths clogged by corruption. Light bleeds off from them and the eyes cannot fully adjust to the exact murky gradient, not even Kai's enhanced ones. Oh, once his body might have known what primary sense to rely on. It jerks and bucks under him, the unconscious mind recalling the lessons discovered under lash and leash.
So too might the Winter Soldier hear the long, low drone, call to a predator, though the great nebulous storm shrieking through the uru-bodied hammer responds in a deafening shell-shock roar. Odin bestowed the authority of Asgard upon Mjolnir and Mjolnir upon the authority of his name.
No moon hangs here and not a flame survives outside the ultraviolet spectrum. But they roar as they fall through the heavens. Smears of motion imply a wriggling body, an ophidian coil, bleeding roots and bone-white wood, resolving into thicker, darker miasmas that deliberately cloak the great marshy wastes. Whispers fill the air, dread incantations that must not be listened to or heeded overlong, at risk of madness. The primeval stench rises as Laufey spins around and twists in shape, growing taller, larger, bluer for that matter. Blood-bright eyes turn upwards as he shouts another word and the violet ripples around him.
The falling sovereign of stories and lies shows a great deal less question about it. 'He' follows the arc in a violent spin. Scarlett's impulse may be as bad as Mjolnir's wielder and Strange's penchant for getting himself into trouble.
Fandral, on the other hand, descends damn gracefully with cloak and all. Fens and tangled foliage strikes memory.
Svartalfheim is not a place, pitch-black in the dead of night, that the soul ever fully forgets.
|ROLL| Bucky +rolls 1d2 for: 2
|ROLL| Strange +rolls 1d20 for: 4
The flickerSNAP of the molten surujin breaks against the chest of a giant in chase; blue flesh sears black in a near-diagonal stripe across the being's body and it cries out, bending near in two and curling up a shoulder in case of a secondary lashing. Another giant has its nose literally flicked near from its face and as it stumbles back, Strange has the room he needs to ensure that everyone's through the snarling tear upon reality that leads to…
…the lesser of two evils? Or perhaps an origami's precise paper-cut folds in reverse, facets revealed in new horrors by the second.
Once through, he hopes against hope that the others can hold on to their own light because he's got a rift to seal. The Words muttered in the slip of darkness growing around him resonate, causing the shadows to fluctuate as if beaten like the skin of a drum. Hands gloved in neon-purple light, near a match to his irises, transcribe a precise cyclical design upon the empty air before him and even as he uncrosses his forearms with militaristic sharpness, the rift is collapses upon itself. Like blobbed ink puddling to an invisible drain, the new reality shuts upon itself — and SLAMS back into him like some demented whirlwind in shades of murky, stagnant water and rotted weed. The Cloak fights against the power of the Black Bifrost, but in the end, he's caught up like a rose petal on dark, surging waters, attempting all along to buck whatever hold the dimension has upon his person. The flash of pale trees through depthful fog is seen and when boots make purchase, he attempts to will himself to a staggering halt, even if it involves stumbling into a weary guarded stance with upheld hands.
"I have no love for this benighted place, but why would that fiend flee here? Laufey is no fool!" Fandral shouts, holding his arms before him. He adopts an effortless pose to fall but no doubt has to hope someone will seize him. Someone with a hammer or pointy ears or a flapping cape. "This realm be no friend to the Mountain King, Thor! Elf, do what you must but wake no light here lest you stir the unquiet ones."
Kai cries out as his body remembers torture, and he hits the ground writhing in his cloak like a trapped animal. This might be of particular interest to a predator, the way he just looks so catchable, a wounded thing begging to be put out of its misery. Kai comes to rest once his senses catch up with him. He lies belly first to the ground, trembling, further mucking himself up. The winsome elf looks like he's been dragged like a paintbrush through blood and mud.
"I have to get out of here," he whispers. "I have to get out of here!" He scrabbles to his feet and gives the rift a long look, poised to bolt.
Blame the rift between the man he was and the god he's become, if even for that moment. Because along that fault, mental sparks strike….and there's utter rage consuming Thor. Laufey is all that matters, battering that mocking blue face into a shapeless pulp. Winter, in his prison, is primly horrified. Full frontal assault, with a weapon that's physically not much more than a rock tied to a stick? Dreadful. No light, huh? The newborn thunder god is not listening. Quiet? No chance. He remembers this place, too….and howls like a wolf as he attacks the jotun.
|ROLL| Bucky +rolls 1d20 for: 13
The ultraviolet current of the Black Bifrost is no different than its radiant cousin ministered to by the watcher, Heimdall. Energy soars around those suspended in its wake. Serpentine curves shuttle the Sorcerer Supreme of Midgard away from where landed Kai in the muck. Bucky turned Thor can choose his own path, guided by the uru hammer in hand. Scarlett can't outrun Mjolnir. The world sees a younger Loki Laufeyson than the All-Father on this throne strike a spell shield three times, and white ice crawl and crack across 'his' forearm. It doesn't stop a hand from clamping around and ripping something essential free, but not enough to down the prey. No, that's going to take wolves.
Trees close overhead to blot out the striations in the dusk that mark the umbral paths cut into everlasting gloom.
Tread lightly whilst the ground sucks eagerly at boots and limbs. There may just be no bottom to the generations of victims in the dark elves' chronic wars and battles. One misstep leads to fatal quicksand. Lightning even takes on a wrong cast here, burning lilac and trying to shuttle into dimmer spectra still.
|ROLL| Kai +rolls 1d20 for: 11
The Cloak seems to catch wind of what plagues the immediate vicinity before the Art-wearied man himself does. Point to the relic, to be sure! There's a jealous sucking of clinging muck at his boots, proof of a slow but steady descent into its muted depths composed of the myriad victims of the dark elves, before he lifts into the air. Still, height doesn't give an advantage here, not truly. If anything, it makes the phantasmal war dance unfolding before him more visible.
All the better to see you by, Dark Arts. No use gasping; the air is foul, stirred by the broad flap of void-black wings and by the wraiths that utilize what cover they can amongst the trees.
Strange dares to look around, his skin nearly electrified with nerves set to fire on the drop of a pin. He is interloper here by the widest margin possible and still fair game, unfortunately, given that he may as well be a beacon in the night. His own magics, aligning in the end to the trifold gods who name him Conduit, are invested in preservation of life — opalescence faintly limns him in that black ever-night.
And where are the others?! He forces himself to search visually through the melee below, where the white masks weave through the shades in eerie stark contrast.
|ROLL| Rogue +rolls 1d20 for: 17
Some people just have to show off. Fandral is a fucking show off of the first water. Not for him crashing into the ground, oh no. He lands with stupid grace for his armour, breaking his fall through a number of trees. "Do not run, ljosalf! For this place is no friend of yours and…"
They're too late. Too damn late. Mind that Kai may not completely succumb to terror and it's even more removed for Bucky, but shades of grey here. Someone calls. That Call rolls as eternally as the sea to the mighty leviathans. Set fear on fire: someone is blowing the Hunting Horn of Faerie.
Kai freezes, his eyes wide with terror. The tattoo on his back itches, feeling like it writhes under his skin. Here is the fox! Call the hounds! He does nothing. Just stands there, chest rising and falling quickly with his breathing. The knives tremble in his hands, and he risks dropping them. That call courses through his blood, chilling the very core of him.
Then he turns his head slowly toward Fandral. Through numb lips, he utters the word, "Run." Then he whips around to do just that, swift as he can, and he's a quick little elf.
Berserker fury makes an excellent insulation. Once he's dealt with Laufey will Bucky turn on the dark elves…though that horn cry is enough to walk a spider leg of ice right up his spine. But fear is easily transmuted to anger….and he'sblind enough with it that there's a very good chance he may try to rip someone's throat out with his teeth. Wolves don't fight with hammers, after all.
O'er the swamps and not far away, countless teeming legions of white-faced killers amass over the bloody marshes. Knives flash and dance to catch the corporeal forms of gaunt spectres in their tattered robes and fine armour. Slices leave no blood. Some blades erode away into nothing, rust on the wind. Always another weapon and another arm to bear it, a gluttonous tide of bodies rushing upon a sea of helmed, horned phantasms shaped largely as women.
Over the tide swoop black-winged figures, far too large to be gulls. Occasionally they cry out and the world shakes. One woman dips to grab bodies from the mass, and the proof those killers aren't mere automatons becomes clear when they start to scream in blood-curdling agony as viscera separate from flesh.
Then come the wolves. Always the wolves, black and sleek and huge, answering the bidding of their master and mistress in the cluster of the battlefield. No standard flies for what need fly? The enchanted horn cries out and seizes on the contorted bodies, the willing hosts. This the Sorcerer Supreme sees. This Kai and Bucky hear. Laufey has no hope between being beaten to goo and the last of his vitality shredded to pieces at the hands of a vengeful 'son.'
Within a letheful and simultaneously slick-quick minute, Strange is certain that the battlefield below contains no combatants of Midgardian or Alfheimian origin. No, all wrathful ghosts and Direwolves tangling between the muted glint of Dark Elf weaponry. The taste of blackest magic is soured milk laced with motor oil's gloss and rennet's dank throat-throttling grip in every breath.
In mid-air, despite the natural propensity for the Cloak to undulate, the entire form of the Sorcerer seems to freeze up. The horn blown carries through the trees and the tremor that comes of shifting bodies seems to reach into their roots much less the bones of Elf and Hammer-ridden and silver-templed man alike.
"No!" It's a breath of defiance, something he'll give to the last, because he can hazard precisely what the Call is, even having only read about it. The bane of a good memory: he remembers well enough the glistening eyes and timid tales over tea.
Space — he needs space for this! Through the miasm, above and beyond the battlefield spread out below, the Sorcerer Supreme comes to an abrupt stop. He breathes in deeply as he can before closing his eyes. That faint starlight clinging to his frame begins to grow in audacious wattage, its flickering taking on a citrine hue within a split-second. With a heavy cadence, he speaks, his lips forming each Word and forcing his will into it.
"By Vishanti's power, triumph divine,
Manifest upon this world mine
Will and wiles, Sorcerous true
To counteract the Horn that blew!
Threefolds gods, enable me —
I defy thee, Hunt, so mote it be!!!"
The crackling incandescent takes on an annoying strength about him now; his eyes blank and the Eye of Agamotto at his neck clicks open with a chime, casting its own violent clarity upon the entire immediate area. Immediately, the weight of the willpower of the Conduit of Midgard stoops upon the still-ringing notes of the Horn.
|ROLL| Kai +rolls 1d20 for: 15
Kai has made quite some distance by the time the light comes shining down. He casts about, caught in a moment if identity crisis. On one hand, darkness is filled with monsters, on the other, the light exposes him. He casts about, then decides he'll take his chances with the light. More than that, with the source of the light, and he finds the best place to hide he can think of: behind the Sorcerer Supreme. "We have to get out of here!" His voice cracks. "Stephen, they're coming."
His eyes are teary, his features wan. That night when he was returned from Niflheim and Strange found him? There are shades of that thin and fragile prey in him. He stays in the Sorcerer Supreme's shadow. He doesn't have to out run the Hunt. He just has to outrun Strange.
Thor smash. Because that is what Buckthorn is doing - turning Laufey into jotun jam. Only once the giant sorcerer is unrecognizable does he turn with a snarl to see the wolves coming. Light exposes them indeed….and since Strange has upped the ante, who is he to refuse? There's the pale purple of lightning called to him. The whole of the Hunt offers battle, and fear, fury and the memory of pain are a terrible amalgam that won't let him withdraw. He may end up with a shorter career as Thor than that of the average staffer in the current White House.
So opens that terrible Eye, green-bright gleam throwing all into disarray. Someone screams in the field. So many more answer as moans and laments.
The moonlight in this place is like being punched in the stomach. Bitter clarity gives no relief from hiding. Imperfections laid bare in a sweep show the writhing wrack of hundreds — no, thousands — of svartalfjar in a conflict spreading along a mile-wide front in the trees. Their enemies ride in efficient splendour, spinning and hacking with an efficiency borne of straddling two worlds and belonging fully to none.
Valkyrior, as Kai would plainly know. But these are not valkyrior. These are not women smiling as they escort the honoured dead of the battlefield to their rightful hall and place. For one, the battle-maidens don't end the living. A hand on the arm, a rustle of movement, yes. Not a pike to the gut, a guisarme rammed through the eyesocket in a splatter of viscera. What valkyrie laughs to seize upon the lifethreads until snapping, ropes in a gale?
Yes, oh yes, the Vishanti are strong even though this place does not belong to their purview and a dying god's final gift sealed off whatever equivalency would empower the equivalent triumvirate on an alternate Midgard. They spar, then, with the dreadful bindings of Faerie's wail. So Strange silences the notes. But the Call has struck some victims. Those victims ransack the woodlands, hunting for their prey. Bigger the better.
"You are not my son. Usurpers."
Overhead, Frigga claps her wings together and the shadows attend in a collective holding of their breath. She is not the smiling, gentle mother on the throne. She spins thrice and her gossamer plumes alight, flung away from her in a shower of razor sharp, ephemeral arrows. Arrows flung by the hand of death.
|ROLL| Rogue +rolls 1d20 for: 13
With unnaturally fluid motions, the gods-graced Sorcerer continues to hang in plain sight for all to see. Can't have shadows without light, after all; Kai might be wise or even more foolhardy to attempt to find solace and shelter far below him. Probably the latter of the two, given the immediate reactionby Frigga and her silent wings throwing their bladed pinions.
The Cloak tries, bless its relic-heart, but these are no physical things to be deflected. Made of smoke and exhaled ending breath and no more delightful to accept than actual weaponry, the feathers slice through the snapping aura surrounding Strange as well as the crimson silk attempting shielding.
It's like…someone walked on your grave with the bladed line of ice skates — like the kiss of Novecaine from twenty needles slipped beneath skin — like the caress of kidskin gloves drawing upon his flesh. Even the Conduit is given reason to flinch, for his near-immortal soul takes the majority of the blow that mortal flesh ignores. The resulting blowback of citrine power arcs out in lashes and sparkling coruscations, but still, he hangs. The blood weeping from physical cuts now glitters with peridot-mica.
Defiant, to the very end, this one, even as the wraiths below take note and begin to gather, a swarm of shadowed sharks sensing ichor in the water. His voice carries down to Kai, no more quiet than the sun is bright, overlaid thrice by bass, tenor, and alto: "Have faith, Alfsson."
More importantly, that citrine sheen diminishes. Put a pretty lampshade on it and that darkens the overall surroundings but for the dozens upon dozens of spectral women dancing in glee through the chaotic mess they've made. And let it be said for all those knives and swords, spell burn and holy gloaming unleashed upon them?
Not a one has fallen.
Kai hits the ground when the pinions fly out, and he presses himself flat, the grey cloak covering him. Have faith!? Kai takes hard, panting breaths. If he'd known that rift came here he wouldn't have come. The shame of cowardice flushes his cheeks. It's just that his worst nightmares, the ones that wake him up screaming, are all around him.
Then the light starts to diminish. "No, no, no, no," he groans. He lifts his head tentatively. What is he doing hiding in shadows? He's a ljosalfar. He begins to gleam. At first it's just a soft silverblue shimmer, but it grows, and grows, until all around him is like a snowbank beneath a full moon.
The moonlight hurts. Light hurts. This is a realm of darkness where no star shines and the monochrome strip of a noir film comes alive. The elves continue their murderous campaign against the disir, the wolves snapping and biting at anything their teeth can find. Kai isn't safe from the feathers that flash through his flesh, ice cold, kisses of guilt and sorrow and all the sins ever done rising in a bilious wave from the psyche.
Frigga is not kind. Her helm conceals her face to her mouth, a bloodless, dark line registering judgment. The All-Father is a mighty fighter but she was once in her time. It's almost an unfair comparison to see those ebony wings grow wide and arc in front of her to protect herseld from…
…the Black Bifrost. Mustn't forget those twin monarchs spinning their arts to defend themselves and repulse the fallen queen of Asgard's numbers. They're inside the halo of black-on-black fire.
That fury's left him. But now Bucky's bewildered. The enemy of their enemy is attacking them. "No!" he roars. "I am here to avenge your son!" The hammer is a burning beacon, lifted without hesitation. The dark elves….he's been carrying that hatred for months now, like a cancer. It's the rulers of the elves that he turns on, unleashing Mjolnir towards them.
|ROLL| Rogue +rolls 1d20 for: 3
The dark valkyrior round. Heads snap to the side almost in unison and their groundswell of interest is a palpable, sick roll. Somewhere, Fandral shouts, but he's lost to the clamour.
"Who dares my son's place?" Frigga's hissing voice is pregnant with agonies beyond the grave, inversions of hope and welcome smiles for any child encouraged to take to those warm arms. Mjolnir sings the haunted melodies of a chained cosmic hurricane.