[Hammerbase] Ghost of Asgard Castle

When this autumn is over, everything will be back to normal.Thor had no doubts about it.This autumn, he has too many things to do.

The portraits of the ancestors watched him silently from the gallery as he strode toward the main hall of the castle, passing through the slender shadows cast by the pillars of the gallery.

In total, this was the fifth autumn he and Rocky had spent together.And their relationship seems to have changed since then.

First, there was the riot on the northern border of Asgard. Several bloody clashes broke out between some mercenary regiments employed by local lords and the border garrison of Nurmhaydn, and both sides suffered injuries.After a series of lengthy negotiations on this matter, there is still no satisfactory result for both parties.The old agreement is no longer applicable to this tense situation. Many clauses need to be added and changed, and the interests needed to maintain peace must be re-divided, which should be what Loki is best at.Thor may know how to knock down enemies with the fastest speed on the battlefield, but it is too much for him to apply this vigorous style of acting to negotiations.As a natural general, he is familiar with the way of using troops and knows every outpost in the northern garrison, but he is always burned by the traps hidden between words and words.

He needs Loki.

But Odin refused his request.At the first sign of tension, his brother was grounded.There is no reason, just because of his delicate status, he is no longer suitable to attend any important occasions.The father said that this is what the people also mean.

Over the years, the Asgardians have never paid so much attention to the "second prince" from the north.At the beginning of the negotiation, they thought that this member of the royal family of Numhaydon would be a good bargaining chip, but they found that the people of Numhaydon had long regarded him as a "wild dog raised by enemy wolves" and disdain to recognize his royal status .Except for sending him away to maintain the superficial peace, whether he is dead or alive is of no value to them now.And the Asgardians themselves lacked the most basic trust in him and regarded him as a traitor and traitor.Especially when they found that the hostage could not be exchanged for the ransom they wanted, they expressed their dissatisfaction and suspicion in a more direct way.

Rumors circulated among the neighbors, clearly pointing out that all misfortunes and conspiracies were instigated by this evil traitor, including the small town on the frontier that was scorched by mercenary infighting, and was destroyed by thieves and robbers. Empty villages, and even a plague that has recently been rampant on the outskirts of Asgard.On the leaflets distributed in the streets and alleys, his name was painted with a pair of curved horns, listed together with various legendary monsters, and was thrown into the fire to be burned amidst the fierce roar of the onlookers.

It's all too obvious that a demon with a pretty harmless face has spent years performing illusions to gain the trust of the Asgardian royal family for its evil.People sighed.Pity his generous and kind brother, blinded by his own kindness.

For all this, Odin has only one request - Loki must remain silent.As long as he does nothing, people will keep aiming at this obvious target.Meanwhile, Thor's tense negotiations with Nummhaydon won't be affected by much public opinion, at least.He will get more respite as he waits for the rage to calm down.Even if his immature diplomacy had blundered, there would have been word immediately that the source of the blunder was attributable to the name everyone expected to hear.

That sounds unfair, but Rocky doesn't disagree.After talking with his father, he avoided everyone and lived a life equivalent to house arrest in a small study somewhere deep in the castle.

Thor's footsteps stopped in front of the window at the corner of the corridor, and he saw a corner of the courtyard through the window hole.The vegetation there is withered, and the summer flowers and trees have become dead wood.When he was young, he had promised his brother there that one day he would inherit the throne and he would rule the country with him.

"There is only one crown, but it can be worn on the heads of both of us." Thor saw the boy smiling confidently, and put his hand on the other boy's shoulder. "If you don't accept...then I'll give you the best fief near the Asgard port, where there is plenty of sunshine and warm sea breeze. We can meet each other from time to time, and we can go to the same place in spring and autumn hunting grounds."

The young Loki turned his back to the grown-up Thor, his face couldn't be seen clearly, but he remembered the smiling expression.Now he will smile like this, when he conceives a picture in his mind that is extremely beautiful but will never be touched.Like this time.

He started to miss the feeling of their last kiss, and every now and then he would start to rub the knuckles of his right hand unconsciously.

In that little room, he begged Loki, in an almost humble way, to come back to him, or at least join him in persuading his father to withdraw his order to silence him.It's not what he deserves.

In the darkness, those thin lips that he had traced countless times with his lips and teeth suddenly tightened.Loki rejects the kiss and rejects him too.

"So you're not the king yet, Thor." He felt some warm, salty fluid spread from the corners of their mouths that were next to each other, mixing together and making it impossible to tell each other apart. "You don't know how to act. Put on your mask of justice and virtue and stand in the center of the stage, and there will be people who will respect you as king. And I," Loki whispered in his ear, "I will be at your feet fools and jesters."

They never met again after that.Until "that thing" happened.

Thor left from the window and continued walking towards the hall.He was about to meet his younger brother again, but his mood was very contradictory, and his steps were hesitant.Half looking forward, half sad.

Fandral was waiting for him in the hall.As soon as Thor's figure appeared, he stepped forward quickly and told him the current situation.

"...I found him. Heimdall was the first to discover it. I told him not to report to His Majesty the King, but to inform you directly." Fandral understood Thor's gaze, and he said hesitantly. "Loki...he looks terrible and doesn't let anyone near him. Heimdall and I got kicked out by him."

The two of them came to the most hidden wine cellar door in the underground of the castle, and the picked copper lock was hung on the wooden door that was concealed.Fandral opened the door for him, but instead of following, he just stepped back silently.

How familiar the wine cellar is to Thor, the bottles and cans neatly arranged on these shelves have accompanied him through many sultry summer afternoons, although in the end he still hasn't developed the habit of looking at the signs before drinking.While missing Xia Tian, ​​he restrained himself from thinking about the other figure who was by his side at that time.

After walking two steps forward, the tip of his nose smelled a strong smell of alcohol.Due to the long-term exposure to the air, the smell of this wine is mixed with the smell of earth and oak barrels, and it has a pungent sour smell. No one wants to stay in this smell for a long time.

Thor stepped on a few shards of wine bottles with the sole of his boot.On the ground next to the shard, there was a large patch of fresh liquor still wet.Empty wine bottles were piled up like a mountain, and most of them were lying on the ground in a mess.Looking forward along them, Loki was sitting where the bottles were piled up the most.

He looked thinner than when we last parted.His cheeks were sunken deeply, and a morbid flush appeared on his pale face.With bare feet and disheveled clothes, he barely sat up straight with his back against the wall of the wine cellar.

When he heard someone coming in, his expression didn't change a bit, and he subconsciously picked up the wine bottle closest to him and threw it towards the place where the footsteps came from.

The bottle shattered a long way from Thor.This weak resistance movement is not accurate, but it is enough to express the meaning of the sender.

"Get out," he heard Loki yell in a hoarse voice.His eyes were red, his eyes were loose, and his loose hair fell messily on his forehead with his movements.The hand that threw the wine bottle was half-raised warily, making a defensive gesture, as if there were invisible enemies all around.

Thor tried his best to ignore everything in front of him and the emotions surging in his heart.

"Come back with me." He walked towards Loki, kicking over the wine bottles along the way.The bottle tumbled to Loki's side, and he grabbed it, but couldn't throw a second one in time.

"Go away." When Thor knelt down in front of him and looked at him, he still had no expression.

"You've been hiding here for nearly three days," Thor said. "You didn't even attend the funeral of your mother."

Frigg.When the name was mentioned, Loki only had a slight reaction. "She is not my mother. My mother died in Nurmhaydon." He gritted his teeth, his face contorted with pain. "I'm not her son, I'm not qualified to be there."

"Don't say what you mean, Loki. She is your mother, and you love her. And she loves you more than me, we both know that." Thor is also trying to suppress the excess emotion in his voice. This man is much more fragile than he appears. "You're just... tormented by your own guilt."

"I don't understand what you mean." Loki's eyes turned cold. "I have a clear conscience about her death."

"I didn't say that you were guilty of your mother's death, you thought so." Thor's tone became more and more serious, and he knew he had to go on. "Loki, you've been lying."

He stopped, staring into those red eyes, trying to see something in those empty eyes.He was waiting for Loki to say it himself.

"I didn't do anything." All he waited for was this cold answer. "I was still locked in that small room when she died, and I never stepped out of the door."

Finally got to this point.Thor felt a throbbing pain somewhere in his heart.

"Loki, remember that little trick you showed me when we first met? I said I'd find the answer myself." Thor did find the answer, and he got even more. "There is more than one secret passage in the castle."

"Since I discovered those secret passages, I have marked them in my own way and checked them from time to time. I used the same method we learned when hunting. In the days when the queen mother passed away, one of the secret passages It has been used. Before that, only the two of us knew it existed." Thor said his conclusion. "It's true that you didn't step out of the room...but you showed the assassin the way."

A few days before Frigga's death, a group of refugees from the north arrived outside the castle.Displaced by hunger and plague, they wandered all the way to the city of Asgard to seek help from their benevolent royal family.The always soft-hearted queen mother could not see anyone suffering, she went to meet the refugees in person, gave them gold coins, clothes and food, and left them overnight in the empty farmhouse of the castle.

The next day, one of them, a half-year-old boy, died, supposedly from illness.When people washed his body, they discovered that she was a girl who shaved her hair short and dressed up as a boy for her livelihood.But no one among the refugees knew the poor girl, so after the refugees left, her emaciated body was carried to the open space on the outskirts of the city, and burned together with those who died in the plague.The day after these things happened, his mother died in her bedroom.

The murderer was a child.He should have thought of it earlier.Only the child's thin and flexible body can pass through the narrow secret passage and climb to the heavily guarded royal bedroom along the ventilation pipe.The deadly cock was covered with a layer of wax, mixed with the finest ambergris and benzoin, and disguised as the most common incense.The killer didn't even have to do it herself, she licked off the outermost layer of camouflage, threw it through the vent into the incense burner that would soon be lit, and her job was done.

Needless to say, she did it perfectly.At the beginning, even if Thor found out that the secret passage had been used, he didn't know how the assassin succeeded.Until he found a withered iris petal stuck in a corner near the vent of the bedroom.This season, the flowering period of irises outside the castle is early.But because my mother likes it, there is always a bouquet prepared for her in the vase on the bedside of the bedroom.He remembered that the mother pinned the flower on the child's chest on the day of comforting the refugees.The girl did not throw away this beautiful flower, but always cherished it by her side.Even when she was on a mission to kill the kind woman who gave her flowers.

He found the incense burner directly below the ventilation duct, still with unburned ashes inside.He knelt down and gently picked up a suspicious red spot with his fingers. An originally vague idea surfaced like that, and it was clearly and sadly displayed in front of him.He didn't want to doubt his brother.But Loki has always been in charge of selecting the spices used in the bedroom every day, and he also arranged the position of the censer by himself.After Loki was placed under house arrest, Heimdall still faithfully implemented the rules set by him every day.

"I think it's not your intention to assist this assassination plan." He squeezed Loki's chin, forcing him to raise his head and meet his gaze. "You are only responsible for providing information. It's like you have been secretly meeting with a mysterious person behind our backs—"

"It's me who underestimated you, dear brother." Loki laughed as he did when he was a child when Thor's fingers pinched his chin. "There's something in that empty mind of yours but muscles. I'm the one who got tricked."

"You admit it?"

"I didn't admit anything." Loki raised his head, his left hand firmly grasping his wrist. "Even if I did something, you are an accomplice."

"That's right. I'm not in a position to say anything about you—there's no proof, and I can't get the whole truth. But whatever mistakes I've made in the past out of carelessness and credulity, I'll take responsibility for my words and deeds. All you have to do is Come with me to my father and tell him everything you know." Thor found sadly that when he heard these words, Loki still had that resentful look and refused to compromise at all. "It's not clear to you, the original target of this plan is our father. But he happened to not return to the palace that day, and we talked in front of the palace all night. We were talking...about you."

Loki's attempts to free himself from his grasp slowed suddenly.He looked at Thor with the eyes of a wounded cub.

"Father, what...how?"

"Unfortunately, the father still thinks you are not trustworthy. Now it seems that his suspicion is very correct, and I was wrong." Thor finally chose to tell the truth.So the last gleam of anticipation in Loki's eyes flickered twice, and then completely extinguished.

"Don't be afraid, I will accompany you until the king gives you a fair verdict."

"Give me a fair verdict, or the shackles?" Loki finally broke free from his hand, and fell to the ground laughing wildly. "I've seen one, and there's even a muzzle next to it. Why not just bring it along? They've been ready since the first day I got here!"

This man is on the verge of madness.Thor told himself that you must bring him back from that perilous brink, or lose him forever.

He stood up, grabbed Loki by the collar, and pulled him hard from the floor.

"You must come with me," he said.

Loki's face was close at hand.His haggard face, wet eyes, trembling lips, and a strange soul hidden under this familiar skin.

"Brother." He heard the tormented soul say the address in a bloody voice, as if it was a sharp knife stuck in his throat. "I always thought that I could become like you. As long as I work hard enough, one day I will also gain the approval, trust, attention and love of others. I thought I had already got one of them." The pair kissed His lips opened and closed before his eyes, speaking in flat tones the most vicious hatred.

"Thank you for telling me how wrong I was."

By the time Thor sensed something was wrong, it was too late.The gleaming dagger sank deep into his waist.And it was Loki's trembling right hand that was holding the hilt of the delicate dagger tightly.

It all happened so suddenly that Thor didn't even feel pain when he fell.After the initial coolness, there is a warm, numb, damp heat that makes the blood vessels swell and the mind relaxes, and spreads around the wound.The blood just gushes from there.

Loki pulled out the dagger, threw it on the floor next to his head, turned and ran for the door.His bare feet stepped on the fragments of wine bottles scattered on the ground, and his hobbled steps left a series of crooked red marks on the messy ground.

"The price, we only need a little price." The icon painted on the glass of the main hall appeared in his gradually blurred vision.He saw her weeping secretly. "From his chest, from your belly and back."

Then the icon was transformed into a singer playing the harp, repeating the same words in a melancholy tune.

"The blood of a lover is as good as the blood of an enemy. The blood of a lover is as good as that of an enemy."

The singer's obsidian pupils were black and deep, and Thor saw his own face in them.Sad, painful, and hopeless.

He can't save anyone.

After trying to understand this point, his consciousness also sank into the boundless darkness.