「 Skill Point ― Orator 」

he was surprised by her, but it wasn’t uncommon for those in the pack to discuss the realm of the gods. Many of them were believers, while he himself was a little closer related to the circle of the gods.

Bicoloured eyes squinted closed as he grinned, turning his head to look at her through the slits.

Who do you think your father is? he chuckled, almost teasingly in his good nature, I am Tyr, Norse god of War and Justice. Don’t let this wolfish body confuse you, perhaps he didn’t realise how much of a revelation he was revealing to the girl, for he said it was such ease.

He continued to watch her, curious of her reaction. She seemed almost in awe previously. Smart, even. Perhaps this one preferred a scroll and quill over brawn and battle.

✦✦✦

Curiosity gnawed at her. He'd spoken of brethren, Asgard, hot springs, magma, things a wolf shouldn't have the slightest idea of, things she shouldn't have the slightest idea of. This place was odd — that much she had picked up quickly — but the way he spoke of mythology had her mind reeling.

She struggled and failed to fix her expression. Her eyes widened in equal parts awe and horror, still glued to the ground and flickering wildly back and forth in her delirious realization. She didn't look up but she could feel his eyes. Eyes, eyes, eyes.

She didn't like it when they saw her.

He spoke of her father and she frowned. She didn't remember her father. Not the important parts, anyway. She couldn't recall his face or his name. She heard his voice in all the awful things he used to spit at her that she'd long since convinced herself were true.

Her father was no god. This wolf was no god, because gods weren't real.

That's just mythology, she murmured, with effort, as a single drop of blood from her nose hit the water's surface and rippled into nothing. It's not real.

It wasn't real. No matter how many nights she'd laid awake wishing it was. No matter how many times she'd prayed to whichever pantheon would listen. A new body, a new life. An escape. It had never happened because it wasn't real. It had never...

It wasn't...

✦✦✦

「 Skill Point ― Orator 」
Bragi

Tyr smiled as he stared wistfully towards the ocean. Just mythology. Not real. The words cut him deep as he searched the explanation. There was none in this strange land, he just came and went from different bodies until finally he was brought back to the realm he knew. He thought of his son, Asgeir and the conversation he had regarding the sun and moon. The way his son was angered by his desire for something unreachable, as though he'd once been able to touch the sky. It didn't make sense then but now, the pieces were beginning to align. Perhaps he wasn't the only one longing for a world that they had once belonged.

Just mythology.

Not all can be explained in this world, Bragi. he hummed thoughtfully, What I know as myself is that I was not born into this body, I possessed it. he was simply maintaining this body, though his mind was split from the reality that was wolf. He was too humanised some might say.

I know many a thing that mythology does not explain, and I miss it. he may not have been entire as a god, his arm missing from his adventures, but he enjoyed the simplicity that came with human kind. You could brew, boil and build. Wolves, they had to think logically without opposable thumbs. He often asked himself why he had not been chosen to return with Freya and the others. It pained him knowing they had returned to Asgard, but he also knew his duty to the mortals in this plain.

They were his responsibilty to help thrive.

✦✦✦

Not all can be explained in this world. Yeah, she was starting to get that. A night sky full of constellations she didn't recognize, a body that was alien and unnatural, a family that wasn't hers and memories of a life she'd never lived. Talk of gods, mythology, possession. Topics that should be foreign to her but which felt as familiar as breathing.

Her head hurt. Her blood ran cold but her body burned, steam wafting up and around her face as she drew soft, desperate gasps of air into her lungs, one after another.

All her life, she'd believed mythology wasn't real. That gods were just antiquated explanations for things people didn't understand, that there would be nothing waiting for her when she died. After all, it was better than the alternative. That the gods were real, and simply choosing to ignore her. That they hated her, damned her to burn for all eternity for daring to believe the body she'd been given was the wrong one.

And yet the longer she spent in this world, the harder it was to ignore. She didn't belong here. She wasn't from here. She was something else, with hands, from somewhere else, in a house, in a city, with people who cared about her and others who thought she'd be better off dead and who she'd probably never get to see again. And every time she thought too hard or for too long about whatever had come before it felt like her head would split open and her insides would liquefy and drain out of every orifice of the body that WASN'T HERS.

Bragi grit her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut and, with effort, repeated, What is this place?

✦✦✦