Diverted Inversion

"Diverted Inversion" is a [SEASON NUMBER] thread started on [IRL DATE] and finished on [IRL DATE].
==Summary==
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==Full Text==
Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, in thick forest overlooked by a gloomy gray sunset, the undergrowth rustled wildly as a young, flustered man tripped out of the bushes and rolled once down the mild slope beneath his bare feet, staining his sweatpants brown and green. Yun’s landings were normally far more graceful than this, but he hadn’t been aiming properly–he’d left in a complete panic, already in the beginning throes of choked breaths and tight throat. On his knees, he paused and desperately gripped his own forearms, which stung heavily, and minuscule beads of blood smeared across his palms. His first jump after returning to the Modern timeline was already taking a toll on him. Jin would be upset, especially for leaving without saying anything, and even more so because he was using seidr so early. But these were the most dire circumstances he believed he could witness.
Yun swallowed, gritted his teeth and prepared himself for more pain. “Urðr,” he said aloud. His tattoos began to flicker, and his eyes watered from the burning sensation they caused. “I don’t know how to pray. I’ve never done it before. You know that.” A scarlet drop speckled his knee, followed by a second. “I’m trying not to be stupid here…I’m no good if I maim myself. I just want to help.” He paused, tilting his head up to the sky. The pale gold stripes of light on the horizon flashed off of his glasses, the last dregs of warmth sliding across his face. The air was full of the sounds of rustling forest and grass, with no audible reply.
“I need you so I can do that,” Yun continued, with full heart. “I need something, anything–” He hissed and cupped his elbow; he briefly sensed the stomach-turning smell of seared flesh before the breeze snatched it away. “I literally just need you to tell me what’s going on with Verðandi. That’s it.”
Still nothing, even after waiting several absurdly long minutes. The sky was slowly dimming as time passed. The last few messages he had exchanged with Dario, Milae and Moirai tumbled through his mind. His pulse raced faster, reflected in a few bright waves through his seal, mimicking a wary cuttlefish. “Are you okay–are you in danger? Any of you?”
The lack of an answer remained, but now it was thoroughly agitating him; even though it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, its timing was unsettling. “Guðir fjandinn hafi það–” Yun started to his feet, turning to head back into the treeline, and almost slipped and fell again as he essentially tripped over someone underneath his feet. “AAH!”
They remained unfazed, grinning up at him struggling to keep his balance as they lounged on their back against the hill. “You think too much, you know?”
Yun was horrified. He was questioning if he was awake, because he couldn’t possibly be seeing a half-breed in the modern timeline, let alone this half-breed. “D-Duri–?”
She cocked her head at him, from where it was nestled in her hooves tucked behind her neck. “Are we testing each other again? You’ve told me my name. Should you tell me yours, again?”
“You can’t be here–there’s–”
“But I am. I can help.” She sat up, eye to eye with how they were arranged on the grassy downgrade. The blue of her eyes was vibrant, almost painfully so, and it only solidified what Yun remembered further, and what Milae had told him on the walk back to see Dario for the last time. The impossibility of her presence, because that blue only existed any more in the right eye of the First Bookkeeper. Even worse, he could feel her presence, in a powerful, humming buzz that rippled across his very skin. It made no sense at all.
Duri seemed disappointed by his reaction, making guilt boil within him. “What’s wrong?”
Yun tried to steady his breath, hearing it whistle slightly in his throat. “I–I didn’t think I would see you here, that’s–that’s all.” A teal glimmer caught the back of his pupil as he twisted to look around them, making sure they were alone. “What do you mean, you can help?”
“The Golden Timeline is having trouble, isn’t it? But you’re stuck here.” Yun’s heart clenched at the reminder. “Don’t you want to help them?”
Blood dribbled from Yun’s fingertips as the seidr that coursed through his very body echoed in alarm, sounds that only he could hear. “You heard me talking already,” he said cautiously.
“Of course I did.”
“I can’t jump there. I used everything to fight Frigga…”
Instead of answering, Duri lifted her arm and held out her hoof. Yun stared it down, seeing the fringes of her slightly-curled fur shifting in the fading light. He finally met her eyes in question. Their shade was still frighteningly familiar.
“I can help,” she repeated.
Yun made to wipe the excess blood from his right arm, and as he lifted it up to his sternum, the dark markings on his hand approached some minimum amount of distance to Duri, and the glow from his arms suddenly rotated through a new, second color–deep gold. The abrupt light threw abnormal shadows across the nearby trees and logs, like a match being struck. Yun’s stomach dropped through the ground. They both paused, watching the hue flare and die back down into sea-blue. The wind picked up in a howl for several seconds before dwindling again.
The seidkonur had Duri fixed with an intense stare now. “I need to ask you something first,” he finally said. Duri’s ears flicked forwards, but she allowed him to continue. “What was the last thing you said to Milae?”
Duri looked as though she might scoff, but Yun hovered his hand above hers and raised his eyebrows, intending to take it as soon as she gave him a satisfactory answer. She caught onto this and scorn turned to several moments of thought.
“I believe it was telling him to stand aside in High Central.” The alpaca looked melancholy at the memory. “He was right, of course. But that didn’t stop her, did it?” Another wave of gold traveled up Yun’s arm, along with a dark chill down his spine.
Of course. The last time Milae saw Duri was while I was fighting in GT. There are no more Eirs left, because Frigga took them all before coming to find me. And she hasn’t cussed once…
Yun’s bloody fingers slowly curled into a loose fist, not pulling away, but not accepting the outstretched hoof, either. Duri seemed to either not notice or not care. “Now, let me ask you something.” Yun swore he heard the ruffle of feathers and the familiar twang of thread underneath the sounds of an oncoming storm. “Who am I?”
He took a breath, his chances and the obvious bait. “Verðandi,” he offered. The ancient name fell from his mouth and caused another ripple in the space between them.
“Then why do you hesitate?” The wind was reaching dangerously high speeds. “We have met before. My sisters and I have always cared for the Loom. Its well-being is your responsibility as much as it is mine.” In the flashes between blinks, Yun saw a deep brown hand stretched out to him, clad in silvered armor and long, canvas sleeves. A few thick, tawny brown feathers whipped past them, tumbling wildly through the air to catch in the grass at their feet.
“I’m gonna take a stab in the dark here and guess that you want a seidkonur,” he said, voice growing stronger. She narrowed her eyes at his tone. “Feeling left out? Why hold off until the last minute? Seems desperate to me.”
“You have some nerve.” Annoyance clouded Duri’s words, the first true sign of negative emotion Yun had witnessed from her. It was hard to believe what was happening. He started slowly backing down the hill as she got to her feet, rising much taller than he was used to, and in another blink, he saw the last rays of sunlight gleam across impressions of a breastplate inlaid with brightly colored stained glass, white vestments waving like flags around her hips, as well as long cascades of black curls. “Disobeying a direct order from the Nornir. You dare turn down an untouched well of seidr?”
“Yeah, I would,” he challenged, nearly faint with adrenaline. His mind felt like it was working overtime. “It’s not your seidr, and it’s not their order, either.”
“You speak nonsense.”
The air felt electrically charged, as though lightning were about to strike between them. The energy sparked against the inside of Yun’s lungs and across his forearms and chest. A sense of do-or-die was rapidly oncoming. The young man took a trembling breath. Behind his back, his hands curled into fists, preparing. “Maybe I’m off a little bit. You tell me. That is Verðandi’s seidr. But it’s not yours.”
The shivering hallucinations paused, and the alpaca half-breed stood plainly before him once more, gathering power completely scattered and abated for several breathless moments. Then she smiled wryly, a completely foreign and unnerving expression on her muzzle.
I’m so fucked.
“And what gave it away, sweetheart?” she said pleasantly, but Yun could hear the undercurrent of seething acid beneath.
“Duri hates making friends,” the seidkonur said through shallow breaths. He wanted to run, but he had to confirm, first. He had to. “The only person who got that close to her, but would’ve also missed what happened to Juro…is you, Illuminar. And I have a pretty bad feeling that becoming Verðandi’s seidkonur would probably behold me to you, too. So thanks. But no thanks. ”
The ensuing staredown was short, but extremely intense. Duri blinked first, and Yun noticed with a shock that her pupils were now vertical slits instead of horizontal squares.
“You know,” she finally said, “despite the nature of the talents of my dear old friend…I still do not have any more time to waste on this.”
She very abruptly clapped her hands above her forehead, and began to spread them apart, and thousands of shimmering, delicate chains were connected to her palms like stretching honey. Yun whipped around at the sound of a clean, clear note, almost the sound of radar in its scope and distance. Like the dawning of a new sun, a huge circle of light broke the west horizon in blinding radiance, and through it, the blazing silhouettes of several massive metal links began to materialize with alarming speed, arcing across the sky and out of view overhead. The mouth of the gargantuan tear in the sky pinwheeled with golden sparks and smoke, and the size of the chain cutting through the sky was made clear by the relative size of the clouds scudding underneath them, and the faint haziness that relayed distance, like the moon’s appearance in the daytime.
Two much smaller openings tore the nearby air asunder and before Yun could properly react, two spectral chains raced towards his wrists and seemed to pierce straight through them, insubstantial as they were. He cried out at the sensation, and tried to pull away to activate his seal, but the movement was stopped short by the new bindings, the links only stretching so far before rattling and keeping his arms behind his back. The only gore came from his bleeding tattoos, but otherwise the chains functioned exactly as they appeared to. The guise of Duri melted away as the truly solid form of Verðandi took her place, a nine-foot-tall woman built strong and tough, well-armored, with majestic bronze-and-brown wings, like those of a bird of prey. Instead of Duri’s piercing blue, her eyes were now molten solid gold, bright against her dark skin, inscrutably watching Yun as he struggled on his knees before her. Dangling behind her calves, held in both hands and chiming like church bells, a whip made of chain hung threateningly, the same whip that Verdandi herself had wielded in the past when she was channeling the Norn’s power. Her attention shifted from Yun to her hand, uncurling two fingers to inspect several splashes of blood that she must’ve caught from Yun’s near-handshake.
“If only this were given willingly, you little pest. You could have helped me wield the power of entire worlds.” He watched the golden links jingle and sway before his face, trying not to hyperventilate at the thought of them ripping the soul out of his body like they did to Rhenco.
“You said I was a waste of time–” Yun intended to sound nonchalant, calm and collected, but the words instead came out as a beg, and it felt horrible.
“Currently you are. You were a bother, invoking my name in whatever clever little tin can and string that you were speaking to your friends with. Now you are only a problem for the future.” Kezia turned Verðandi’s head to the side, as though listening to something inaudible. “And right on time, it sounds like the subhuman raiders have finally found my little present.”
Yun’s heart skipped a beat, clinging to the hope that the rebels had found whatever tomb Milae had referenced. It was the last thought he had before his mind was engulfed in pure gold. His body gasped and jerked as a third, larger chain extended right through his back and torso to the ground, centered on his seal, and every line of its markings lit up with psychedelic platinums and teals. His glasses fell to the grass and his eyes were wide and sightless, matching Verðandi’s metallic lack of iris and pupil.
“That will have to do,” she sighed, stepping past him and gazing skyward at the titanic chain casting a new dawn across the earth. The birds in the forest around her were chattering in confusion at the sudden brightness, and in the far distance, the roar of some kind of aircraft could be heard, both in response to the supernatural phenomena. She idly wondered what the process she had just initiated might look like as it spread through the nearby timelines, threading them one by one. But right now, she had other places to be.
“Get comfortable. I’ll be back for you later, heimskingi.” And her form faded into holographic light, leaving a single, heavy brown feather to land in front of Yun’s frozen body.
Category:BOTGD 2
Category:Events
Category:Act III
Category:Yun
Category:Verðandi
Category:Kezia Maithres