Asgard! Illyana, by herself,

[x-snowflake.livejournal.com]

On Illyana's last night with Hel, she sits on the roof and sums up what she's learned in her four weeks spent serving the goddess. The last log I wrote by myself, I promise. Set just before the log where Alison finds Illyana.



Serving Hel was not the same as serving Belasco, in most of the ways that mattered.

Hel was not, and had never been, mortal. She was only a step away from the kind of pure power that Belasco had coveted during his long life; it coloured her, and those around her, in ways that he had never achieved. She was regal, where he had been despotic; she was purposeful, where he had simply been power-hungry. While she involved herself in matters purely for her own amusement -- or so it seemed -- he had been maniacal in his quest for ultimate power.

The goddess had no morals that Illyana could distinguish, but her trickery was not in the name of power, and that made all the difference. There had not been a time in Limbo when Illyana had not feared to bleed; here, she guarded herself closely, but not for the sake of her soul. The encounter with the Enchantress had cinched it in her mind -- while she was not the spoiled (if amusing) daughter of nobility, she was not here to die. There was a possibility that she would die, but not much greater than it had been on Earth.

That she was here to stay didn’t matter as much, in the long run.

She was tired of Asgard; ready to go home, wherever that was, whatever it meant to her now. She hated the constant physical conflict, the vague sense that no one else would have stuck around helping Hel, even with the bonds, being unable to sleep for nausea. In a strange way, she even hated getting back into her game, so to speak -- hated that she loved the speed, the stamina, the pure rush she got from being so good at what she did. Sneaky and calculating and being a stone cold bitch was the least of it.

She never forgot what being so good at what she did meant.

Dead friends. No family. No life that she could foresee, although as some of them would have it, she’d be graduating in no time and starting her fabulous career any time now.

That was what Piotr wanted, she thought. Just forget the last decade of your life, move on, act like a normal teenager. He wanted her to go misty-eyed and ask him to forgive her, and she wouldn’t. He wanted the details, because he wanted them to be a thrilling adventure story of a girl surviving against all odds, and they just weren’t. He wanted her to be seven, and she wasn’t, and that was the end of that, because she’d have been dead long ago if she hadn’t grown up.

He just didn’t understand, and she hated wasting her thought on someone who was so clearly hopeless. Especially here, where none of that was important.

She hated how sorry she felt for herself at night, when she couldn’t sleep for the day behind and the one ahead. She kept telling herself enough, enough, enough, but it didn’t work when there was nothing to distract her. Nothing to read, nothing to write, just a whole lot of time and not a lot she wanted to spend it doing.

Outside, on the castle roof, things were very clear. There were no stars; this was still the underworld. Instead, there was a calm, cool, dark eternity that she appreciated, a blanket over the white expanse of snowfield that surrounded Hel’s immediate domain. It was extraordinarily cold, but she found herself craving the clarity that the night and her sword at her side brought. She had done her best work in the cold, if this sword was proof. If you could call it good work, rather than the culmination of raw talent and desperate circumstance.

At least it provided some light on nights like this one. That was pretty much all she wanted.

She had only a short time to waste before her next ‘diplomatic’ excursion into Asgard proper; Hel had taken to sending her on errands that amounted to intimidating the humans under her watchful eye into doing what she wanted. Seemed that being an ‘ambassador’ amounted to small-time gangster in Asgard, but it wasn’t a position Illyana particularly hated -- it was simple. Clean. Easy.

And it meant she got free reign to go where she pleased. Maybe one of these days she’d have some luck.

Not likely, she told herself irritably, casting a small heat spell to ward off the worst of the cold. At least she could play at spellcasting here, where the magic flowed like streams. Not like Limbo, since Limbo was hers, but enough that she could stockpile the magic until she had enough to keep herself safe. It wasn’t much, here where she had no clothes of her own, no worldly posessions, certainly no friends or even people she could talk to, but it was something.

The only other thing she really had was the conviction that she would escape: That somehow, sometime, the moment would present itself to her, and she would be ready to untangle the threads of pure power and possession that curled with her when she moved. She did not require the fantastical belief in gods that some people did: She knew herself, and that was enough, even in the night’s total darkness and the blinding days.

She didn’t need faith.

So she sat crosslegged in the wasteland for the second time in her life; looked at the sky, snow and wind tangling in her hair, and waited.