▸ Column · The Nine Realms of Asgardian myth — modern-grounded comic register, with realm-spanning long-distance and sending-stones standing in for the contemporary setting of the source letter
THOR replies.
The letter
Emra and I have been doing long-distance for almost two years now — she's in Vanaheim finishing her studies with the scholars there, and I'm bound to service here in Midgard, work I can't simply walk away from. The distance itself I could manage, I think. It's the finish line that keeps moving.
First it was "after my primary studies." Then "after my apprenticeship." And now — I found this out not because she told me, but because her master congratulated her on a sending-stone while I happened to be nearby — she's apparently been offered a three-year fellowship at the High Courts of Alfheim. She doesn't know I heard.
I'm thirty-four. I want a hearthfire and a stray hound and an ordinary morning that isn't arranged around a sending-stone. Every time I try to ask for even a rough sense of when we might share a realm, she tells me I'm putting pressure on her path. Is that what I'm doing? Or have I been waiting on an end that was never coming?
— Waiting in Midgard
Thor replies
Good soul, hear me: you are not selfish. Wanting a hearthfire and an ordinary morning is the whole of what is worth protecting. I say this having once scorned that kind of life as beneath the glory I thought I deserved. Banishment taught me otherwise.
But hear what you perhaps already sense. You have been asking for a calendar, not offering her a true choice. She has heard "when does this end" as a wall against her path. What she has not heard — not once, it seems — is the whole of what you carry. The hearthfire. The hound. The morning that belongs to no sending-stone. Lay that before her honestly, without conditions dressed as questions.
And the Alfheim appointment — the one that reached you by chance, not from her — speak to that too. Not in anger. In honesty. You are owed truth between equals. If she is building a life with no room for you in it, that is worth knowing plainly, and giving her the chance to say it in her own voice.
Honor her choice, whatever it is. That is harder than any field I have ever stood upon. I say this as someone who needed years and a humbling before he could do the same.
— Thor
Hela weighs in
My brother counsels you to speak your whole heart one more time, and then trust in her choice. I am certain the doors of Asgard always opened for him eventually.
You have spoken. Three times the finish line moved. The Alfheim appointment reached you through her master's congratulations — on a sending-stone she did not think to share — because you were simply not in the room where she made her plans. That is not forgetfulness. That is a woman who has already written the next chapter and left you out of it.
"Pressure on her path." That is the phrase the ones who have already decided use to keep you grateful for waiting and responsible for your own silence. My father employed the same courtesy. I spent an eternity in the dark beneath it.
Stop petitioning. Take back the calendar of your own life.
— Hela
▸ Read next