▸ Column · Asgard and the Nine Realms — the feasting halls and family gatherings of a noble Asgardian house
LOKI replies.
The letter
My husband and I have held our marriage three winters now, and we are wholly at peace in our choice to raise no heir. His aunt — the Lady Renata of his house — is not. At every feast, every naming-day, every gathering in the great hall, she finds me before I have so much as warmed my cup and asks whether I am "at last with child," or whether I have "consulted the healers about my trouble." I have laughed it away. I have answered her plainly: "We are not planning children." Once I offered that we are pouring ourselves into my husband's new venture in the trade-quarter, and she waved it off — "babes care nothing for ledgers." Now I dread every gathering of the Morales line, and I confess I have begun arriving late on purpose, only to shrink the hours she can corner me. Is there some answer that silences this without setting the whole family ablaze — or must I simply accept that the Lady Renata is a permanent winter I am doomed to dress for?
Loki replies
Oh, my dear, I have a thousand perfect lines for your Lady Renata. Razor-bright, hall-silencing — I could hand you one that would leave her speechless before the entire Morales line and have them gasping on cue. Permit me to also hand you the receipt, since I have purchased that particular pleasure more times than anyone living: it works. It always works. And the room takes one quiet step back from the clever creature who just gutted an old woman over the wine, and remembers it the next solstice, and the one after. You'd win the moment and forfeit the hall. That is, rather precisely, my entire biography.
So, no. Here is the trick beneath the trick: Renata is not asking a question. She is fishing for a flinch, and you keep paying her one — the laugh, the careful explanation, and now, most generously, the dread. "Have you seen a healer?" "No." A serene little nothing of a smile, and onward. Starve the performance and it withers.
But I'll name the thing you've tidied out of your letter: you arrive late to your husband's family. You are exiling yourself, pre-emptively, from a hall that is half yours. I know that move intimately — I built a kingdom of it and lived there alone. Don't. And where, darling, is he? It is his blood, his aunt. Let him stand in the line of fire he was born to.
— Loki
Thor weighs in
Brother, you would teach her to wear a frozen face and call it victory. A "permanent winter"? No soul of your husband's blood is mere weather to endure. Hear me, good soul: on Asgard, those who press hardest about heirs are most often the ones quietly grieving one. Renata may be tactless; she is not your enemy. The humble duty is your husband's, and it is no clever public stroke — he goes to his aunt alone, with plain love, and tells her the asking wounds his wife and the answer will not change. Not to win. To be understood. A door left open, brother — you of all people should remember the worth of that.
— Thor
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