“Nothing I can’t do anytime on my own. If all I wanted was to be able to force people to consider going to get a light jacket, you’d be right.” But it wasn’t and Thor wasn’t, so Loki tightened his grip on the staff slightly and moved it as if tugging on a line tied to its head. Physically miming his mental yank at the resistance keeping the temperature above freezing.
Magic was shaped partly by belief, and foci allowed belief to shift. Once, Mjolnir let Thor believe that it had control for him while in reality he’d developed his own. The staff - which would probably need a name at some point - had been tended to be similar, a sort of stand-in to throw ice where Loki couldn’t. Instead, it was apparently a crowbar of sorts: a lever to force locked doors open or move heavy things out of the way.
No surprise, really. It had been the oldest and ugliest limb of a tree sacred to the man Loki hated almost as much as he hated silence, carved at night by a blade given to him by the mother whose death he’d set in motion, finished with his own blood during an argument with the only being in the universe he loved. Of course it was a bleak, stubborn, angry thing.
And, eventually, it worked. After pouring effort into it, the resistance snapped. The runes on the staff flared blue-white (like the Casket of Ancient Winter rather than Loki’s usual green) and the temperature around the brothers plunged well below freezing. It was a strain, but it worked, and better? Loki understood why it worked.
Which meant he could also believe it would work again. “This is a good first effort.”
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-12-08 01:44 am (UTC)Magic was shaped partly by belief, and foci allowed belief to shift. Once, Mjolnir let Thor believe that it had control for him while in reality he’d developed his own. The staff - which would probably need a name at some point - had been tended to be similar, a sort of stand-in to throw ice where Loki couldn’t. Instead, it was apparently a crowbar of sorts: a lever to force locked doors open or move heavy things out of the way.
No surprise, really. It had been the oldest and ugliest limb of a tree sacred to the man Loki hated almost as much as he hated silence, carved at night by a blade given to him by the mother whose death he’d set in motion, finished with his own blood during an argument with the only being in the universe he loved. Of course it was a bleak, stubborn, angry thing.
And, eventually, it worked. After pouring effort into it, the resistance snapped. The runes on the staff flared blue-white (like the Casket of Ancient Winter rather than Loki’s usual green) and the temperature around the brothers plunged well below freezing. It was a strain, but it worked, and better? Loki understood why it worked.
Which meant he could also believe it would work again. “This is a good first effort.”