Andarin: The Mountains: hello world! --

How did you survive?
Didn't. Got killed.

When the colt that would eventually become Loki opened his eyes for the first time, two things happened:

One, light sliced through him, printing small multicolored dots in the back of his skull;

Two, his mind ripped wide open under the onslaught a thousand different voices and thoughts not his own.

The first sound to leave the throat of the colt who was not yet named Loki was a scream.

When the colt who was not Loki stood for the first time, it was with the weight of minds sliding into his own and the pure earth – not the ephemeral softness of plants and animals and all the cutesy things, but the rocks, the diamonds and metals, the tectonic plates, the force of earthquakes and landslides and mountains pushing through the sky – beneath his hooves.

The first time the colt who would become Loki stood, the stones stood with him – floating midair through no conscious effort of his own, as if suspended by invisible strings. He was strong, Loki, the undiluted violence of his father (hidden, yes, but there, the violence of wild and wilder things) and the sensuous sleek ambiguity of his mother falling into the melting pot of his own inner entropy.

He was weak, yes. He was early and it showed.

But he was strong even in his weakness - a tigress’s son - and he fought.

Years later he would never remember that moment when his mind – the mind of the abstract things still wetly sinking into the synapses of his brain – was raped. He would never remember a day when he didn’t have that extra sense, the one that pushed through others’ skulls and read their secrets as naturally as his eyes saw into the light and defined the shapes of things; he would mourn it when it abandoned him, in the wake of things to come - things he saw in his father’s eyes.

And yet, some nights, he would remember that primal horror, and scream for the voices to leave him alone.

The first time the colt named Loki turned his eyes to his father’s face as he stood besides his mother and saw the network of pride and horror in his mind, he felt a fierce gladness slip into his unprepared, juvenile breast. Whether he was glad of being alive or inspiring those feelings in his proud father’s mind, he would never know.

Suffice to say that he was.

His eyes were a very light green, like his parents’; they fluttered, and looked up at his mother, and loved her.

Yet.

Each iris was slashed in two, shadowed black as if an eclipse.

Black. Like Icarus’ own.

“Loki,” repeated the formless thing, the one that belonged to the highest air, not here, but who was there anyway.

Loki, a voice said very softly in his brain, distant like an out-of-tune radio spitting static. Loki.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Oh yes. It does.

-- l o k i
united we stand;
divided, i prevail.