The circle of the year winds once more to its beginning.  Urðr knots the thread and cuts it, then takes Skuld’s new weave from Verðandi’s hand—future becomes present becomes past, as it has since the Realms began and as it will until the Realms end, if such terms could be considered to have any meaning at all.

And Thor Odinson, firstborn of the All-Father, stumbles away from the warm glow of Gladsheim and drops to his knees at the glittering, shard-bright end of the shattered Bifrost.

It blurs before his sight, a smear of varicolored needles bleeding out into the velvet emptiness, the stars naught but smudged fingerprints in the endless black.  He clutches his drinking horn tightly; warm mead spills over his knuckles nonetheless, trickles down to patter like raindrops onto the broken path.

Thor is unused to fleeing the sound of his friends’ raucous laughter.  Yet, now, he can bear it no longer—not Sif’s bright ululations, nor Fandral’s high-pitched snigger, nor Volstagg’s booming mirth, nor even Hogun’s undignified snorts, bring him the joy they should.  They grate, instead, unharmonious.  Cacophonic.  Wrong.  Such noise, created by a lack all too obvious.

“You laugh so quietly,” he calls out to the void, leaning dizzily over the edge.  ”Yet its absence rings louder than all the bells in Niðavellir.”

The black between the stars swallows his call.  (Heimdall, standing nearby at watch, says nothing, for Heimdall is wise.)

Thor curls his free hand around the end of the bridge, gazes down where the seas fall away into nothing.  His eyes burn hot.

“I know you much prefer wine,” he continues.  ”But without you to stop her Sif has gone and drunk it all.  I think she misses you as well.  Though she would sooner die than admit it.”

(They understood one another, misfits both, bucking the reins of their positions.

Understand.  Understand one another.)

The smile stretching Thor’s face feels weak, a pale counterfeit.  ”So I suppose you shall have to settle for mead,” he says.  ”My deepest apologies.”

His voice cracks—crumbles.

“Hail, brother.”  He raises the horn high.  ”My brother, my companion, my helpmeet, my left hand.  When you return”—and here his voice breaks completely, his breath shuddering—“when you return, there shall be a great feast in your honor, all your favorites, anything you wish, and I shall stand behind you, so that all may see you and know that you are home.”

And Thor tips the drinking horn, pours the mead out into the expanse.  It flows as freely as the tears that drip from the end of his nose.

“I will not celebrate the new when the old is not yet gone.”

————-

OH MY GOD I HAVE NO IDEA WHY THAT WAS SO HORRIBLE BUT APPARENTLY I AM ANGST-BOT 5000 TONIGHT HOLY SHIT

WELP

I’M DONE