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.~{:--------------:}~.
Even when aware of the aching of over-worked nerves at some very far distance, no more perplexing than the glint of light from Dark Elf swords. At the moment, it simply is, whether Strange likes it or not.
"Disir Queen, hold your fury at our presence," says the Sorcerer overtop the scrum, his voice traveling with ease as bolstered three-times over. "We come with tidings from Jotunheim and our journey began in a world close to violation such as this." No need to draw too much attention to 'this', the chaos of battle and lingering remnants of the Hunt still lurking between the trees. "A scion of our world wields your son's weapon in honorable ways. Through this, he seeks retribution for the blood spilt in treason. Let us aid you."
Kai pulls at he pinions, struggling to free himself from them, and he glows. Oh how he glows. His aura of moonlight rises, gathers around Strange like a second mantle, bathing the Cloak in silverblue. Kai casts a defying look at the dark elves beyond the range of his moonlight. He's been their victim for too long. Come at him, bro. What's wrong, is a little light too much?
Still, most of his effort goes to enveloping the Sorcerer (as well ass himself, but that's a given). If anyone can get the Queen to listen, it's Strange. Strange, who must be protected. His friend. Put Kai alone and he'll curl up in a ball, but threaten someone he loves…
"I am not here to usurp, but to restore," insists Thor. "Mjolnir chose me to wield it… and the dark elves are our foes as they are. Let us join together and destroy them." It doesn't really even sound like Bucky, anymore.
The sovereigns in their dark elegance split apart, one pulling on the Black Bifrost to form a spreading portal around them. Darkened ripples weave around them, and the taller svartalf steps through the gaping fissure in reality to emerge among two of the prowling wolves. Spectral and huge, they growl at the high queen; she growls right back. The other monarch, white-haired and still masked, sketches a savage gesture from blood and mire. Groaning water bubbles and heaves, then erupts wavelike to intercept any unwanted arrows, hammers or spells. Old principle: the land follows the monarch. It's true.
Disir hunt through teeming masses, ripping at souls while impervious to blades and swords. They care nothing for the battle, testing souls, tasting hearts. In the wages of sin, a spear-thrust to the gut or a shattering maul-blow are all fair. Frigga does not halt or help them, her wings closing and spreading to keep her in a bobbing hover. "Of course you cannot be of us," she replies, dark spite on her voice. "Mjolnir chooses. Oh yes, that foul thing who failed us. Failed Asgard. It will fail you too in time. The World Tree is blighted. Why should it not fall and begin it all anew?"
The offered moonlight seems drawn up and about Strange moreso than the usual falling of glow by angle of ray. It takes on a life of its own in will-o-wisps, malleable and morphed by his — nay, their — inclinations on its use. Each slowly-shifting glow-ball radiates like a miniature star, tipped on the very fringes of its shine by citrine phosphoresence. Sure, he's been muted by the dank atmosphere himself, but ever do the orbs flicker about the Sorcerer Supreme linger.
"If you can guarantee that your actions will allow for our dimension and reality to remain untouched by this shearing of the Tree, then we grant ourselves little further use. However — " and the word hangs portentiously, making it crystal-clear that the Three don't See this as a state of incompetence; " — you are beleaguered, Disir Queen, and we see this ending poorly. Your son would not have wished this to come to fruition, the burning of the World Tree, and paid his last breath as warning. Do you count his dying wisdom to call our aid as without worth?" He looks upon Frigga with stony countenance. "Our scion, the one proferring Mjolnir to turn this tide, speaks true. Accept our aid."
Kai gazes up at the moonlight being shaped and hung about Strange, given his telltale citrine sheen, and his belabored features soften, proving in any circumstances, the elf can still find wonder. It's uplifting, loaning itself to light, and he continues to shine, a beacon, lending the Sorcerer Supreme what light he has within him. Luckily, he's ljosalfar, and so it is boundless.
Thank God for Strange's eloquence - this Thor is no more a man of elegant speech than any of those on their own world. "All fails in time," says Thor, without any hesitation. "But I will not. Not here, not now." No doubt in his voice, not for a moment. He's keeping an eye on the dark elves, most especially on their monarchs. But if the land shields them, he'll waste no effort on attacking. Not for the moment.
Dark wings thunder as she turns her head, searching for her quarry. A flick of her wrist sends four of the disir eagerly darting after one of the monarchs, and an explosive salvo peppers the air somewhere among the trees. Wolves howl in a scornful lamentation. It's not the same as the Hunting Horn calling but the pull hurts all the same. In this pitch-dark world, Midgard's seal on its powers and the different Powers That Be contest against the fallen All-Mother. Her smile is brutal, bloody, and pitieless. "This is Ragnarok," she hisses, "though the treacherous worm on the throne doesn't know or care. You see the end of days. Live gloriously or as cowards, but the end comes. Fight how you will. I will see them dead."
She points a sword as matte and dull as ichor, the hopeless core of a dead star dancing around a black hole. A jagged line sends a foul wind rushing dismally forth. "Strike what you want. I give you no promises. The boy I raised will take everything for himself. Your realm as it were."
Strange inclines his head with all the grace imbued to Tolkien's elvish creations, positively otherworldly despite being surrounded by the fuel of nightmares for aeons.
"We shall strike as we please, Disir Queen — and your child will regret his impositions upon our reality at a level he can barely comprehend." Oh dear, jealous, zealous Vishanti on the defensive. "Alfsson, shine your light. Barnes, betokened of the weapon Mjolnir, aid the Disir Queen. We shall act in our stead."
Those glimmering balls of confined moonlight? They begin to take on an extreme radiance, fighting back against the stifling darkness of this realm. One by one, they shoot down into the scrum below, landing at points of impact similar to constrained meteoric explosion, albeit laced with starfire and Old Magic, the kind first brought into being by the creator of the Eye. One, in particular, aims for the monarch attempting to cause tsunami waves upon the earth itself.
Kai nods up to Strange, and he is bathed in light, both arms outstretched to his friend as the light continues to envelope him. The elf's brow knits in brief consternation as they speak of the treacherous worm. He takes a deep breath. It's not his Loki. It's a different, darker one. His beloved isn't doomed to become this thing. Kai refuses to believe it. He shines all the more out of sheer defiance. This is not how his story is going to end!
"Yes!" he cries when Strange starts to shoot the light at their foe. "Get them!" A knife's edge smile unfurls upon his features, vindictive and vindicated. Make them pay.
IT is not Kai's Loki….and may it never be. This Thor is dark as stormwrack, more a sillhouette than any high relief, though Kai's light and Strange's do call up dim gleams of light from armor and hammer in return. But he unleashes the hammer on the forces and servants of the dark elves. The wolves especially….as if by slaughtering them he can erase the time he spent amongst them. He doesn't snarl and rage, not any longer. But instead he strikes with a deadly, machine-like precision.
For a moment, the tattered fragments of power ripple around Frigga. All she is, all she was, hovers in eclipsed parallels. Black pits of her eyes turn darker still, the disir laughing in eerie melodies. They know what they taste. Citrine, godsblood, and the Vishanti are a meal. As one, a mass of the spectres roll on their axes, rising in a tenebrous mass. Light bedamned. Dinner is up there. "My son," she utters in a bleak tone, "is dead. The one I raised is an imposter, traitor, kinslayer. May all the multiverse declare a mother's justice upon him." Her plumage shudders in the tolling of black bells.
Has no one ever told them one strand of the story is in all the stories, one lie part of the greatest lie? Ah well. Time will tell.
And that's just a bad time for light to rain down on the svartalfjar. Unlike drow, they don't dual wield scimitars and neither does the brightness inherently scald them. Percussive bursts blast out in front of them as the black rainbow bridging the realms comes to bear, woven between one monarch and the other, forming a curtain to repel and give cover. The hammer flashes between them, bursts of white and silver, purple ash and midnight fire erupting. Frigga calls and the disir sing their dolorous tunes, wading through the blood.
Who are the Vishanti to deny the justice of a mother? After all, one of the three claims motherhood to the youngest whose citrine power continues to limn the starfire grenades that rain down upon the battle below.
Strange, with hands upheld and out to his sides, attempts to aim at those malevolent casters, the monarchy split in two who claim power of the Darker Arts, all responding at their behest. Let the light fall, for all it impacts in detonation and immediately begins to gutter, not the predominant state of this black realm.
Kai continues to glow, all silverblue radiance so bright the form of the elf within is barely made out in mere glimpses of the lines of his youthful face and his prone form, pinioned. Light is beauty, light is life, light is righteousness. Light is a big 'suck my ass' to the dark elves who have haunted his nightmares. "To every hell with the bastards!" is his message of goodness to all the spheres. "Damn them a thousand times!"
He doesn't hurl Mjolnir. Not this time. Hammer and (newly born) god attack in concert. Because no strategy ever works better than throwing yourself in face first, right? After the monarchs - if a distant strikes doesn't work, surely he can rectify it by getting up in their collective magical grills. Oh, Thor.
Midnight splits in twain and splits again, revealing the dire situation of the battle. Blood flows as blood will. The mire underfoot grows tirelessly wet and dark and horrific when bodies pile up, not all of them purely one-sided. The death-born allies of Frigga can die, it just takes effort to banish them. Not that it matters in the luminous ultraviolet blur of destruction and ruin played out on a disastrous scale.
Light falls and the moonlit sheen burns. Currents of power rip through the atmosphere, hurling back elves — one light, many dark — or piercing through the stuff of disir-substance. Bucky Barnes made something more, something less, has the battle-frenzy of that spinning hammer to cleave open a space. Wolves circle and snap, but fall to the fray where the red-bright sorcerer bleeds overhead with a god-given light. (And oh, the disir hunger.) Maddened blades spin. They all shout and dance.
It's an assault to which they cannot stand apart from, not with Frigga in her deathless grace cleaving a path in another trajectory and the white-frost blooms of winter writhe off the bleak shades of an atypically blue creature on the ground, moving shadow to shadow. A frost-rime touch that devours a soul haunts that ground, and she knows her curse, no matter the face she wears.
Copper light strikes open one hole in a failing spell, striking back the black sovereign of dread. Terror locked in an engagement with Mjolnir and knife and touch is beaten back, down, until one black-winged horror mantled in death's embrace rams her sword through the fallen king in a chest-cleaving blow.
And death falls around them, countless motes and ashes tearing apart Svartalfheim…
So mote it be: one monarch falls for the Vishanti's insistance that this particular thread be snipped in the chaotic unweaving of the realm that infringes upon their own. The other at the hands of Midgard's bravest, chosen for their abilities.
On high, the bloodied Sorcerer hangs, watching the rest of things unfold, and in the confines of his mind, the triumvate convenes as to the next step, their speech resonating into his very bones. Three will-o-wisps remain and circle about him, comets trapped in his own metaphysical field.
Kai lets out a cry of joy as the Svartalf king falls, and as death tears apart Svartalfheim, he can't help but let out a joyous laugh, eerily innocent in its way, like a someone just told him a funny yet wholesome riddle. He knows he is no great leader (and would rather be flensed by scarabs than become one), and so his gaze goes to Strange for his cues. Oh, he's still peeved, but Svartalfheim is falling, and that does so much to improve his mood.
Svartalfheim is falling… and they're still on it.
Gods only know what'll be left of him when the battle madness passes. If anything. If he takes wounds, they don't slow him. Thor's wreaking havoc on his way to the elf monarchs - the king falls, and he turns his attention to the queen. His face is a mask of fury, and there's a kind of terrible grace in the way he fights, an extension of the hammer….the idea that they're cutting the pedestal out from beneath themselves just doesn't register with him.
Thank the gods it occurs to Strange — or rather, the realization is passed on to his demi-mortal mind by the Vishanti — that they need to get out of here forthright or be susceptible to the collapsing realm around them. With the monarchs tied to the land itself, their removal is a bit like kicking out the supportive pillars.
"We leave you to your choices, Disir Queen." His voice rings out over the shriek of shadows gone to shreddings and wisps of dismay; the very murky water on the ground begins to boil and what wolves remain take up a howl of dismay that ululates beneath his words. "Remember our aid in your time of sorrow. You know the signature of our Conduit and his companions. Mark it well and find them at your leisure." One hand points towards the effervescent Kai, wrapped in his coccoon of moonlight, and the other towards the raging Aesir-nee-Midgardian, bourne on his own tide of rage. Scarlett in her illusory guise is marked by the imperceptible shift of those blanked eyes. "Our work is done here."
And on that final note, a sudden cyclone of brilliantly-green auroral light swishes up around each and every Midgardian present. No Gate necessary when the gods want to leave. Hasta la vista, Svartalfheim — it's as painfully simple as turning off a light switch. One minute they're all there, wrapped in electrical swathes of deific magic, and the next, they're not.
They're elsewhere entirely, where the air is markedly devoid of a miasm of throat-locking shadow and the light is a present thing, not anathema. A solid surface makes for a set-down gently enough to avoid jarring shins and Strange himself slowly floats down to this ground. Upraised hands are brought to settle at nearly-neutral angles at his sides before he speaks again, looking to each companion in turn.
"You may yet count the Disir Queen as friend, though rest not your laurels upon its certainty. She mourns and this warps her perception of things. We cannot blame her." The crimson Cloak slowls undulates behind him, caught by a light breeze passing by. "We take our leave now. Should one of you possess a means of healing, our Conduit may be in need of it." How kind, may be in need. He blinks and the citrine wall of light leaves his eyes, revealing them with pupils pinpointed in shock. Patches of color high on his cheeks give him a feverish look and he blinks once more before his knees give way. Frankly, Strange crumples, victim of blood-loss and nerves burnt by godly use, and the air leaves his lungs in a wrenched sound upon impact with the ground. He lies there, still.