Who: Skoll, Susannah [NPC] and off-screen Baba Yaga and off-screen Kali What: Following this When: Dawn, Wednesday morning Warnings: Revelations of the potentially earth shattering variety
He does not sleep but he sees the impossible.
He does not eat but he tastes blood in his mouth. He has not moved from this spot and his legs ache.
Sunday he found himself in Manhattan in the park and had no recollection of how or why he was there. Monday he found himself unable to articulate himself in any language remotely modern, or human. The second week, headaches pounded the inside and outside and very core of his brain; he does not sleep but he dreams, shadows with many arms and three eyes, a body svelte and strong against him and a voice that stirs bloodlust hot against his ear, a song of destructive harmony, a dance to melt away all chains to this human-shaped life he has been bound to for centuries. She has the face of the mother of his child but speaks in a tongue unknown to even him, foreign, exotic, sultry.
He is not sleeping but he sees her, a death crone with the smile of a mother and fingers with long claws, seen through plumes of opium smoke and silhouettes of forgotten, nightmarish lands. She speaks in an equally ancient tongue as the previous, but hers is not seductive; there is no promise of a better life in her. She speaks in curses. She speaks his curse.
He sees his daughter in the arms of her mother, M. Ironwood, and she has in place of eyes two shining stars, and even in the darkness, light emanates from her spirit, no longer chained, no longer secreted away if only for this fleeting moment of Skoll's waking dreams.
When he comes to, he hears Susannah screaming his name, screaming DADDY LET GO YOU'RE HURTING ME but he hears it in the language of ravens and the language of the gods and the language of wolves. Her neck is not the neck of a goddess but the neck of a little girl, and his hands are too big and too strong for it. Her eyes shine with an inner light that is not the little girl he has raised but the goddess he has sought to destroy.
And she is squirming, slipping from his grasp, reality's veil lifting further, and further, illusions have been cut through by she who is the first one, dark within her own reality - Ma Kali spins and dances, and Susannah is running out the door, down shotty stairs and onto the streets of the grungy neighborhood she and her daddy live in, tears streaking her round face. She does not know where she is running and why her daddy was hurting her, but it is her first and only instinct: run.
This can't be real, this is a foul trick, it must be Lopt, or some deceit by the Aesir, or...
At dawn on Wednesday morning, Stellan Ironwood is nowhere to be found. Nor is Susannah.