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Loki is not technically banished. This is just - giving her mother space. To think. About what to do with her wayward child. She will be called back in a few years for a more permanent decision. Midgard's nice enough, anyway, and Sigyn's coming along.
The Bifrost lights up in all its colors and -
- this might be Midgard, but it is not a part of Midgard she ever saw and not the place she was expecting to be dropped, and there is no Sigyn with her.
She holds Lævateinn ready as a glaive. Maybe her mother feared her sorcery and thought she'd best be sent somewhere deadly under the impression she was meant to survive the trip -
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purposeful_glory
"Turvo misses it desperately and would probably show and tell you everything, but I'm not sure it'd be healthy for him."
"Yeah. He is going to be okay, not for a while but eventually. He has a daughter, he has me - we weren't that close before his wife died, but I've been really really trying, now - and he wants things, and keeps planning how he'll build them. He's grieving and he's bitter and he's angry but he has a vision for this world so he'll be okay. I think. As long as there's always someone there when it gets hard.
I don't know if we handle grief badly because we were born to Aman and don't know how to handle it, or if it's something more fundamental. Everyone I know has been absolutely shattered. Some people die of grief. They lose someone on the ice - a child was the worst, almost no one survived losing a child - and they stopped wanting a body, their soul sort of rejects it. It's a startlingly violent death, for being entirely internally inflicted."
I don't know if we handle grief badly because we were born to Aman and don't know how to handle it, or if it's something more fundamental. Everyone I know has been absolutely shattered. Some people die of grief. They lose someone on the ice - a child was the worst, almost no one survived losing a child - and they stopped wanting a body, their soul sort of rejects it. It's a startlingly violent death, for being entirely internally inflicted."
purposeful_glory
"Even people born in harder places have a first loss. Although if the surrounding culture doesn't know how to cope either that could make it worse."
"We are learning quickly. Not by choice, but..."
"Do people know how to handle it where you're from?"
purposeful_glory
"In a sort of general sense, yes, but I'm not sure we physically can die of grief except via refusing to eat or something like that."
"No, it's not like that, it's not voluntary. It is mediated by the mind, but not the conscious mind; one could desire to keep living but die of grief, if it gets overwhelming enough. The Valar can prevent it. As can the Enemy or all his prisoners would choose the escape of death. We probably could too, if we knew how."
purposeful_glory
"I didn't think it was voluntary. It's just not something that happens to us."
"Maybe it's why you have more warriors and more wars. Or maybe the other way round, like the thing you said with the swifts - in a society full of wars, those who can die of grief do, and those who remain are those who can't."
purposeful_glory
"It could be. Although since we don't do the thing where the mind directly mediates the body I'm not sure the mechanism was ever in place."
"Right. Huh. The universe is much... bigger than we imagined, even when we dreamed of escaping Valinor."
purposeful_glory
"Much. Asgard is, not quite isolationist, but definitely not cosmopolitan; there are many realms we just ignore that I can't tell you much about but they number in the thousands."
"It has been an ambition of mine since you first mentioned them to someday go and see them, but I feel like we owe it to this one, and to everyone we've lost, to win this war first. And possibly somehow get them out of Mandos."
purposeful_glory
"I suspect it would amount to no good if I just flew to Valinor and attempted to talk to the Valar about how bad they are at their jobs. But it would be very satisfying, if only briefly."
"They'd kill you. They'd demand your surrender first and try to punish you and their punishment would be unacceptable to you and it would end up with you dead, somehow."
purposeful_glory
"And then I would cease to exist and the half a thing of the one and a half nice things I have heard about the Valar would be downgraded to a third of a nice thing. Not worth it. They are not good enough at their jobs to get better at them in any way I can help them with."
"What are the one and half things?
purposeful_glory
"Fëanor has a lovely story about one of them taking his third son out to discover something he was talented at; and it seems possible that going to Mandos instead of being obliterated as a conscious being altogether is better even if he's flagrantly abusing the ability to preserve people in this way. And if they killed me they would not be being careful to obey any systematic principle opposed to annihilation; it would just be something they do most of the time, maybe, probably, badly."
"I am sure they would not believe that killing you destroyed you. I have no idea what they'd do if they believed that, but they just wouldn't, they serve Eru and they trust utterly that even Men who die go on to whatever Eru intends for them."
purposeful_glory
"Eru's bad at their job too, but I don't think they have a clear enough location that I can even form a coherent daydream about flying over to tell them so. Anyway, the Valar wouldn't check to make sure I was one of Eru's, would they? They would see a transgression and lash out like angry toddlers without thinking about the possibility that there could be consequences they couldn't account for, or whether punishing me would accomplish anything worth the attention they'd spend to do it for my development or theirs or the cowed obedience of the bystanders!"
"They don't think like that. They don't do things because they'll have good results, they do things because those things are deserved. You're actually the only person I've ever met who doesn't talk that way. They would punish you because you had done something that warranted punishment, not because they expected it to make anything better."