Day 14 - Wind (part 2/5)

 The day you arrive in Asgard, you select a woolen chiton dyed the purple of your uncle’s house, trimmed in fine gold thread. It is a concession to the Aesir sensibilities, you say, because you have heard and seen pictures that suggest their women wear gowns that show hardly anything. 

 

(It is practical–a peplos would leave too much of you bare, and though it is high summer, you step onto their shimmering bridge and feel gooseflesh raise along your arms. You will not wear a himation yet, and you will not wear their strange garments, too tight and too heavy by far. You are Sigyn of Njord’s house, Sigyn of the Vanir, and you will not allow Asgard to take that from you even as you wed one of its princes.)

 

You expect layered clothes that scarce show skin. Your uncle has told you much of the rainbow bridge and sweeping vista and the water that spills into nothing–he had snorted at Asgard’s calling it an ocean–and it too you expect to some extent. Gold buildings, alien and different, vast construction that does not allow the air to breeze through as your uncle’s halls do. 

 

You do not expect how loud the strange spill of water into nothing is, nor how pale the Aesir are. Pale as if they’ve never walked a full day in the sun.

 

(Perhaps they have not. The stars here are so bright and it is yet day. The thought makes you homesick already for the cruel heat of Vanaheim’s sun that properly hides the sky until night falls.)

 

He, the prince, is also pale, though you are not sure if he is in truth paler than his brother or it is only more apparent with the sweep of his dark hair and the hue of his clothes. In either case, his skin is the colour of fine goat’s cheese.

 

(You hope Asgard has goat’s cheese; your uncle has told you they do not often have olives or dates, and you wonder what else they do not have. And if not, perhaps you will be able to acquire a few goat’s of your own, though, perhaps, it will be out of your reach yet. Aesir nobles are warriors all, and their women do not do such work, or so you have been told.)

 

His eyes are full of mirth; no less than expected, from what tales have been whispered of him through the realms.Their colour, though, oh the colour–green green green, green of the hills you have left behind, familiar green.

 

If there is nothing else, at least his eyes will please you.

30 Days - Order

 Something is out of place.

 

He pauses as he walks in, but he cannot place what it is immediately. His eyes roam over the bookcase and then the desk. Everything is still alphabetical, the papers are still lined up exactly an inch from the corner. The laptop is off and closed, the chair two inches from fully flush to the desk’s edge.

 

Not the desk then.

 

He walks into his room, setting his bookbag down exactly an inch from the wall and half a foot from the door. Already it feels like his skin is itching, an his hand twitches.

 

Something is off, and he has no idea what it is.

 

“Thomas?” his mother calls hours later, “it’s dinner.”

 

He freezes, in the middle of remaking the bed for the fourth time, trying to smooth the sheets, trying to get a sense of right back.