Loge has a terrible dream. He’s in a temple, surrounded by snake men, and they’re killing his friends, and then there’s an icy cold blast in a dark void, but luckily he wakes up here, safe and sound.
In the stone circle.
In the snow, and fir trees.
The place he sometimes goes when he’s… asleep.
Oh.
Loge struggles to draw breath. His chest hurts, the air barely passing his lips despite no obvious reason. He can’t speak.
The woman who looks like his mother but definitely isn’t her is here too. She looks at him, worried.
She is both young and old, sometimes with the features of a fox, sometimes a bird, sometimes a woman.
She is both his tutor and his guardian, the source of much of his magic, but not all of it.
“You did well, Loge. But the chill dark wind has caught you, and you should be heading Sessrúmnir in Folkvang.
But I cannot take you there.
That place has been lost to me, and to your people for many lifetimes.
If I had a small portion of my old power, it would be possible to take you all there…”
She gestures, and mist swirls around the outside of the stone circle. Among the trees now stand many people, old and young, man and woman, short and tall. Some have the mark of Elfblood, others of Giants.
And there stands Loge’s mother, wearing the harem clothes of the City of Brass. She looks strange without a smile for him.
“I sense your friends have a new plan Loge. Your string is not yet cut… Perhaps you could still help me, help your family after all.”
She gestures again. In the centre of the stone circle, a familiar city forms in miniature out of mist. Not Sigil, unmappable and ever changing. This is the old home.
The City of Brass, on the Plane of Fire.
“Within the City of Brass, a nation of slaves lives. Once they knew our ways as their own, but now they are so far removed that only stories remain.
Help them to believe again Loge.
Free them.”
More conjuring. A figure this time. A short, wide frame, a long beard, wearing the clothes of a slave in the gem mines.
Unmistakably an Azer – a fire dwarf.
Unmistakably an Azer he had once known well.
“Time to wake up Loge.
Free them.”
Loge looked up to his Patron, then to his real mother. She smiled
Loge struggled towards her, as if swimming through honey, and the world went white and loud.
jot jot ïota 