The strangers words rung hollow. It meant nothing to her, that her warning had been ignored. It was for the benefit of the stranger, to warn before attacking. Her anger simmered, as it always did. A burning inside her that bled into her day far too often. Instead of walking towards her or allowing the defiance to continue, she turned to face her. Violet eyes meeting
This was a stranger. And yet, she felt familiar. For the first time in her memory, the fierce, instinctual urge to strike was replaced by a paralyzing numbness. The hand on her sword fell to her side. She could not bring herself to attack. She hesitated. To the Vanir warrior princess, hesitation was a fatal flaw, a weakness she had spent a lifetime beating out of her. She was absolute in her judgment and ruthless in her execution. Yet, she couldn't harm the woman in front of her. And she had no idea why.
There was a haunting resonance in her posture, a ghost of a memory tugging at the edges her mind that she could neither grasp nor name.
The woman circled her, but Sigyn did not raise her hand to her sword again. Not yet.
'What is your name?' Names are heavy things, but for her, they were structural. They were iron rivets driven into her before she was old enough to stand as her own woman in the Norns eyes.
Sigyn had been called many names, each a heavy cloak stitched by the expectations of others. To the frost-bitten, isolated clans of the Jotun, she was Angrboda. The "Bringer of Distress", a title whispered with fear and resentment, casting her as an omen of ruin before she had even learned to steady her own hands. To the Vanir, her adoptive family who cloaked their cold pragmatism in the guise of salvation, she was Sigyn, the "Bringer of Victory." It was a name that stung with the sharp aftermath of a title that was merely a description, a functional label branding her as an accessory to someone else's triumph. To Mephisto, she had been Asmodeus, his son, a weapon of destruction meant to bring his enemies to ruin. Only one person, her sole friend in the vast, indifferent cosmos, had ever looked past what she could do, and rather who she was, to call her Calliope.
And yet, this fractured identity was the only reality she had ever known. She had no memories of a time before the labels, no baseline of what it felt like to simply exist without a burden attached to her.
"I am Sigyn, of Vanaheim. Now..may I ask, who are you?'"
This woman's magic, she could feel it, and she didn't understand why. For years she had carried the absolute certainty that she was a cosmic anomaly. She had thought herself the only entity ever forged from the magic of the stones. Was that what this was? Someone else created by the stones like her?
"...And why does your seidr..call out to mine?"
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