Summary: Frigga sees many things that are yet to come. Her weaving is of the entangled threads of two fates. A mother's heart is a place of joy and sorrow, the endurance of many things.

A spinner-song

Frigga was proud of her yarns. They were said to be things of magic, spun not of linseed and wool but of wind and light, of shadows under moist boulders, of the flight of birds and sprightliness of fishes. They were things of wonderment, and everyone who would see them gazed at them in astonishment.

She was but a young girl when she started to spin threads. Her distaff had been a beautiful fretwork, a betrothal gift from her father Fjörgynn to her beloved mother, and it descended to Frigga when her mother grew old and impatient with artisan craftworks, her fingers no more deft and swift. Later, when the son of Borr had been courting her, trying to gain something more beyond cold-minded truce between Vanaheim and Asgard, he carved one for her out of the branch of an ash tree. A work of excellence, a symbol of love and faith with the protection of ancient runes, and Frigga owned it with pride. When Odin had presented it to her and she held it among her finger, she caught glimpses of who this young and boisterous king (not so much unlike their firstborn would be many years later) would grow into. She knew then that he would do wonderful things and make a wise king, and her heart settled. She had seen it, the glory he would bring upon Asgard, but she had seen the grief and pain, too. For Odin was a wise king but there had never existed things of flawlessness.

Spools of many colors were sitting in Frigga's dowry chest, waiting for centuries to be woven. Silvers and golds, the colors of stars and rainbows, the tones of rain and summer breeze, of spring and crisp winter, of fallen leaves and the sparkle of morning dew. There were dark colors too, of heavy clouds, of stormy nights, of doubt and forlornness, of the many types of fear she had only heard about in sad ballads. She would grow to know them later, each of them, one by one, but back then they had been no more than looming shadows in lowly sung syllables on a windy night around the warmth of a hearth. She hid these yarns deep at the bottom of the chest for she never planned to use them.

Before her betrothal, she had woven gifts that brought naught but merriment and joy, and her heart had been light. She would make many things, cushion covers and tapestries, bedclothes and carpets, little trinkets and grandiose gifts meant to bring fertility to the bride, warmth to a home and easy sleep for the newborn. Those had been fine, lovely things but naïve in their innocence. They served their purpose, though, brought blessing and protection. They didn't sit upon her chest like heavy weighs. They didn't keep her up late at night like the ones she would weave among the golden walls of Valaskjálf many centuries later, burdened with dark prophecies and the eternal worries of a queen, wife and mother.

.-.-.

Frigga had started to knot her threads into formless shapes long before she knew the meaning of them. They were colors of a story she half remembered, a story that had not yet been. Her fingers tended the yarns with delicacy and caress, an unconscious dance around the shuttle as new and new lines stroke up to the previous ones in a velvety embrace, and she sang over her work along with the handmaidens surrounding her. She sang about warmth and light, she sang about love and valor, and her heart swelled with joy. Her handmaidens were weaving with golden smiles and bright eyes, and their words fell upon the threads with purity, and the ancient magic their songs held oozed into the mysterious shapes as they worked. It was a work of joy and hope. They were weaving promises and the shimmering specter of a bright future.

Only when already a strip, the width of an arm, was pouring off her heddles did Frigga feel the flicker of a promise in her womb.

.-.-.

Their firstborn, a thing of greatness, of magnitude. The thought glowed in her eyes, and Asgard was a joyous place those days. The bedclothes grew longer with carefree waves, and their songs flew with the spring breeze over the lush green lands of the golden realm.

Their firstborn, a thing of merriment, but of clamor and ferocity, too. The joyous days turned into the cold clinks of metal against stone-hard ice. Her weaving faltered, her yarns mingled, and the songs turned quiet like the groans of the wintry winds among bare trees. A dark menace was lurking beyond the edge of light.

She knew then that she was expecting a son.

A son who was conceived at time of peace and would be brought to life amidst blood and pain, the cries of war. He would be a great warrior, Frigga felt it with the confidence of a seer, a warrior of such bravery that would be looked up to across the realms.

.-.-.

Her labor called her away from the loom when the shuttle fell from her nimble fingers as her boisterous son, not a creature of indolence, inflicted the first pains on her. It slipped in her mind as an afterthought that there would be more to come because children were to cause just as much hurt as much joy.

She gave birth to their firstborn under the watchful eyes of the Nornir, and she caught the smile on Urðr's wrinkled lips, she saw the sprightly nod Verðandi gave, and closed her eyes against the lone tear on Skuld's ageless face.

Odin was summoned with the news of the childbirth, and stayed away from the war against Jötunheim for a few days. An island of calmness amidst the stormy sea, and their firstborn was the blinding lightning cutting through the clouds over Asgard. They named him Thor because already his first cries were thunderous, and Frigga saw he would create storms around himself and in other people's hearts forever.

Frigga had already loved him the moment she felt the new life blossom in her body, and maybe even before that, back in Vanaheim when she had dreamt of a golden child in gilded halls. When she looked upon him for the first time, she knew he would be in every fiber of his being his father's son with his mother's heart, and she only loved him more.

.-.-.

Frigga resumed the work afterwards, twining the yarns and singing to herself like it was a secret she feared to share. Thor demanded her strength, patience and care with relentless obstinance, and she could claim only the wee hours of the morning for herself to sit on her stool by the loom. It became a lonely work and a slow one that wrought only barbed wires around her heart, and unblessed foreboding.

There was a break in the pattern, in the colors, in the carefree, heartwarming design as if by the looming darkness of dawn she couldn't see her work clearly. Her shuttle flew on a mournful course, and she thought of the Nornir, she thought of a wrinkled smile, a nod, but mostly she thought of a heavy tear.

The bedclothes grew long but always one shade darker and one shape more skewed that they should have been. Where she had used ruby reds that sweetened her smile, and warm golds that made her heart rejoice when she had been carrying Thor under her heart, now she pulled forth other threads, too, colors she didn't understand and couldn't explain, dark tones that upset her, and Frigga blamed it on the once again lonely times she sank into after Odin's departure.

She finished the bedclothes with a heavy heart, folded and locked it up in a cabinet, and never thought of it again.

That night she cradled Thor close to her chest, and dreamt of threads that ran deep between Yggdrasil's roots, and she tore at them but they kept gushing up like a horrible fount, blood reds and lightning whites and icy blues and doleful greens. They tangled up with other yarns in a cobwebby picture she had never sewn, and flowed off her loom like a shadow, like thunder, like a thing so cold that it froze her to the bones, and she realized for all the power a mother's heart held, she could not form a new shape of what the Nornir wove.

.-.-.

There were legends of children raised by wolves. During the harshest winters the beasts would come down from the icy heights of the mountains, and the children would follow them, wild and visceral creatures who listened to the wolves' commands and howled along with them.

Frigga had heard these tales sung many times when the darkness would be the longest and the cold the hardest.

She had a dream one night, like a reflection on the surface of a current, reversed and shivering. She saw a child who bore and raised wolves, and the beasts would listen to its commands, and darkness would reign.

In her dream, the world was no more.

.-.-.

Those were sad years that sat heavily upon her heart, with Odin faraway in a war that brought naught but loneliness and suffering, a millennium of fragile truce and irreparable resentment. She had seen it. She had seen a whole realm condemned to imprisonment within ice and slow decay. She had seen how it would wedge irreconcilable enmity and inglorious bedtime tales of monsters between two races.

Only Thor could steal warmth into her heart that nursed her worried mind with delicate touches in exchange for the caress she treated him with.

Sometimes when she looked upon him, upon the son who grew strong and loud, a creature full of life, she mused it was rather the summer sun that gave birth to her child than her. Her wayward son had love so great and endless that she fancied it would be enough for the whole of Asgard. She hadn't seen it yet that it would indeed be enough for everyone and even more. It would be enough for everyone but the one who he would later strive to make see it, the one he would love the most of all living things with everything he had until it hurt, until naught was left, and even beyond that.

Those were sad years but the second winter after Thor's birth finally brought the end of the war.

.-.-.

Odin returned under the shroud of darkness as if he was the one who wound up defeated, and Frigga mused there could be no such thing as victor in warfare.

She knew he would be coming that evening even before Heimdall opened the Bifröst for the once golden army. That day her yarns had wrapped around the spindle with an ease she had not encountered for long years, and Frigga saw the light tingling in the depth of the wool like a promise. There was darkness there, too, a lurking tone of loss and of something that would change many things around them forever.

She was in Odin's arms as soon as his steps fell against the heavy carpets, a familiar sound she would hear in her dreams and in the loneliest hours of the night when the world was but an echo.

"It is over, my dear," Odin said but there was only weariness in his voice.

Frigga wound her arms around the unyielding metal of war that enveloped Odin's body, and pressed her cheek against the horrible marks covering his face. Odin cradled a bundle in the crook of his arm, a dirty knot of his own torn cape, and Frigga looked at it through the haze of joy and the shredded edges of a vision she might have seen once in the otherworldly state between sleep and consciousness.

"It is a babe," she whispered. Its eyes were fey and the undefinable color of a newborn. A sensation rose inside her, the shadow of a thought but she swallowed it down.

"Yes, it is," Odin nodded but Frigga's attention was pulled back by the blackened, bloodied hole in his face where once his eye sat brightly, the same color as his son's, reflecting wisdom deep as Mimir's well.

"Oh, my love," she touched the temple chiseled to cutting sharp by centuries of steering the realms on the shallow waters of peace. "We shall have Eir tend to this now."

Odin let her lead the way to the healer's chambers. They left the babe, silent behind heavy eyelids, on their marriage bed, in the bloody rags of war and wreckage.

.-.-.

Dawn stroked feeble patches of light across the carpets when they returned. The foreign package, like a dark reminder of the war, still sat atop the bed. They hadn't spoken of it while Odin let Eir extort her efforts where naught was left to save.

"A boy," Frigga bent over it, unfolding the shreds of the cape where the infant hadn't kicked it off.

The babe was asleep. Frigga watched the dried tear stains around the dark lashes, and with gnawing guilt that seeped into her chest like morning frost she realized they had done a cruel thing. She swore to herself then that she would never again let this child cry himself into sleep. But this was something even the most caring mother's heart could only hope for.

"This foundling will be our child," she said because she had felt it: the strings that pulled at her when she looked at the babe. A son who would not give her the pain of childbirth but would give pain of other nature, greater and more permanent than any physical kind.

Odin squinted at her with a familiar glint of awe in his lone eye. It would take a long time before she got used to this sight.

"Yes, he will," Odin smiled. "He is Laufey's offspring. Abandoned, due to his size. I found him, and thought of Thor."

Frigga smiled, her eyes soft yet knowing. Odin hadn't seen his own son for long months, and in his memories Thor was not so different from the child in the rags. But she also knew his designs, plans that were not yet fully wrought in his head, and Frigga hoped they would never be. For her a child was a subject of protection, of love. Odin saw beyond the tendrils of caress but Frigga understood the castings of a king, and she couldn't blame him for it. But she could also read the king who had been her husband for centuries, and there had never been a rock that was unyielding to the slow assault of patient water. This child would never be other than their child.

"Unneeded," she murmured, and the word was heavy like the imprisonment to which Odin condemned the child's homeland.

"Jötunheim is a cruel world, only the strongest can survive. They raise generations of warriors. Someone with his size would fail to be one."

Frigga laid a soft blanket over the babe, tugging him in carefully.

"And you bring him here where the greatest values of a man are strength and valiance."

There was a falter in Odin's motions. "His size would be no disadvantage here, he would feel no different."

Frigga stayed silent. There were ways even the All-father was blind to. This boy, she looked at the child, would not be a warrior, not even in Asgard. He would be cast out, and the hurt that would have been surrounded him in Jötunheim would follow him here. This fate he would not avoid. She saw it, and her heart ached.

"A Jötun in Asgard. After the suffering the Great War brought on us. Fate is not gracious to this one."

"He does not have to know," Odin claimed, and Frigga started. "Not until later. He will be raised as ours, Thor's brother, second in heir. An Áss."

"You would lie to him."

"It is for his protection. How would the people of Asgard take him?"

"He is our son, no one would dare speak foully of him."

But Odin stood unyielding and his words were of a king's.

She couldn't imagine how it would be for the child when he learnt the truth, with the skewed view of an Áss over the race they had fought for blood-stained years. The race he would grow to despise, maybe hate, the race he would fight with wooden swords and the superstitious fear of children on the playground. They would raise him under the shroud of lies, clad in pink skinned illusions. How would he ever believe them again?

She will think later that maybe it was a twisted jibe of fate that the boy showed a penchant for lies and illusions as if he subconsciously knew everything around him was a net of lies of misguided intentions.

.-.-.

Odin named him Loki. He said the boy was found at the close of war.

Frigga held him in her arms, kissed the soft forehead, and thought of another close, a greater one, the end of all things.

.-.-.

She sensed Odin's hesitation at showing her the child's real looks but he had no great insight into the workings of a mother's heart. She looked upon the pale skin the color of the clearest tarn, the arabesque of markings, and she only loved him more.

.-.-.

"Tiny." This was Thor's first word upon meeting his new brother. He kissed the infant with the inconsiderate roughness of children, and Loki started to cry.

Frigga's smile was a knowing one as she hugged her sons, both in tears, both hurt in a different way. This is how it always would be, she thought. Among all emotions love had the wickedest ways.

.-.-.

For her guilt to pass, years would have to come and go, Frigga believed.

She feared the little amount of love this child received in the first hours of his existence, the abandonment it started with, would shape and determine his future. Even she had ignored him in the frantic event of Odin's return, and she could not forgive herself because the knowledge was a looming darkness over her visions.

The beginning would shadow over his whole life, cast a shade over his acts, over his thoughts. It would sprout fear and doubt and destruction of the sort that left more ruins inward than outward. No amount of love would ever be enough for him, and he would forever doubt what was offered to him. She pondered that maybe all affection they gave him would drain through the hole of those few hours when he had lain abandoned.

She saw it in the threads running between her fingers from distaff to spindle. She wondered if the Nornir were present at the birth of frost giants, too. She wondered what they had measured when Loki was born; she wondered if they had shed tears or tore at their fine robes.

In the threads, there was a vision, there was a dark promise. Frigga saw that everyone would make their own mistakes, even she would, and she could not help it. She saw how it would send all of them into misery, into immeasurable pain, and she would be able to do naught to prevent it.

It was the greatest curse of a seer.

.-.-.

Sleep evaded her. There was an idea, ominous, lingering behind her eyelids and her fingers were like pieces of iron held into flames until they would grow pliant. She dreamt of her shuttle, of strings pulling at her limbs. She was naught but a means in the hands of something greater, a quill for a thought to turn into words. There were secrets hidden in the stars, and sometimes she was given the gift to read them.

Sometimes it was a curse.

The star lights painted the pallid skin of her midnight son silvery-blue, and they drew lines across her mind, ethereal like gossamer caught on withering autumn branches, intricate like markings across blue skin. She would forever remember that color, even when she remembered nothing else. She smiled as she opened her dowry chest and touched the yarns she had never wanted to. The color of the moon. The color of the sun. Her two sons, so different yet the same.

She was spinning the threads for many nights, and she sang along with the nightingales, with the moonlight, she sang of times that had not yet been. The tapestry grew into long plaines of something dark and fearsome, and something beautiful, too. She wove shapes between the rows, stories of great pain and of love that would sail away like blind ships never finding shore in the dark, of a great wolf swallowing the sun and his brother swallowing the moon, casting the world into darkness, and of a great snake living underwater with scales large as green islands on the sea, biting its own tail and when it stops, the world is no more. It was a painful vision of a son, one that would clench a mother's heart.

When her work was wrought, she spread the tapestry and her handmaidens flinched from it, their soft faces morphed into expressions of confusion and abhorrence, and Frigga realized that it would be part of the future too. That his son would never be understood, and people would forever shrink back from him.

Her handmaidens cried over the dark fabric for they felt it would be a future involving all of them. They asked her what troubled her, whose tapestry she just wove, and Frigga told them not.

Her heart was an aching knot in her chest and she sent her ladies away.

For many hours she was sitting over her work and watched the threads of many colors, the blood reds, the poison greens and jealousy yellows, the lonely whites and bitter blacks and ash greys. There were silver lines woven among them that gave her comfort, swirling playful threads sparkling with moon halo: the seiðr of a mage. And then, there was another line, golden like the sun, and it twirled around the silvers, they entwined and parted, and the golden disappeared for long planes. But it always returned in the end. And they clashed and ripped at each other and ran along in perfect unison before parting again. An eternal feud. Eternal belonging.

Her heart fluttered with an old memory, and she hurried to a drawer where she kept the bedclothes she had woven when she carried Thor under her heart. She recalled the pain so great it had left her crumpled like a fallen leaf when she had put down the shuttle and looked at the bedclothes: the rich reds and warm goldens that made up almost the entirety of the tapestry mingled with dark tones and a silver patch that had upset her so greatly that she locked up the cloth as if locks and bolts could keep back what had been sewn in the stars.

Now that she was holding the two against one another, she recognized the pattern, she recognized the moonlit threads that interrupted the red-golden waves. And she recognized the sunlit threads that mingled with the dark patterns in her new work.

Two lives that would forever entwine in pain and love so deep that it oozed into hatred and despair, too great to be contained in but one simple term. Her two sons. Her heart ached for them but she was grateful for the golden line in the new tapestry, the never ceasing bright undulations it stole into the darkness with incessant stubbornness: a character her older son already possessed.

She put the new tapestry beside the old one, and she thought they were visions only she had to see and live with.

.-.-.

When it was raining for days, the palace with its five hundred rooms and a half could only hardly be enough for two princes locked up among its walls. Her sons were still children, and where there was one, there was the other. Their world was a small one, five hundred rooms and a half, small yet infinite for the universe they built within it of monsters and heroes, of adventures they never went alone to – they built worlds and span stories like only children were able to. Together, always together. They didn't understand what separation meant, and maybe they would never do.

Frigga wished they would never grow up, never replace the imaginary realms with the real ones full of real monsters and things that could divide them.

"Children, you should know better than coming here and pulling my chambers apart."

Two pairs of innocent eyes and a wooden sword looked at her from beside yawning drawers and unfurled woven fancywork. Her yarns ran in million directions like the branches of Yggdrasil. Like the gossamer fate-lines among its tiny twigs.

"We are on a quest, and we need to put up the tents for the night, mother. There are wolves lurking around our camp."

Her Thor was a warrior already. When he was a mere toddler, she had caught him many times eying the lone guards in the palace, the sunlight glinting off their weapons had drawn his eyes like bright gemstones. He hadn't changed much in that aspect, fancied by weaponry and reckless acts. When they played, he would lead his younger brother to unnamable dangers and Loki would always follow. She yearned to lock up everything they were now and believed in, everything they hadn't started to question, in an unbreakable crystal, perfectly cut, forever unaltered.

"We need draperies. Can we take these?"

Frigga frowned upon them, upon the tapestries she had imprisoned many years agone. "Put those back, my dears."

And her Loki was the observer, the wise. He would be a scholar in many years to come and he would be as careless as his brother, cunning and impish and bound by naught but something he would forever lack and never understand. Something Thor would pour on him, uncounted and with earnest heart, and Loki would not believe still.

"These are ours, aren't they?" he asked quietly.

Thor, who found the greatest pleasure in everything he could label as mine and not yet saw the dissonance the word could awaken in others, was haste to spread her work on the floor, scooping over his own.

"Why have you not given them to us yet? This one is mine, yes?" A sturdy finger ran along a volatile silver line, moonlit fickle thread, forever unbound yet forever bound at the same time, and Thor mumbled in reverence. "I have never seen a prettier thing, mother."

Frigga watched him solemnly, with sudden tears prickling her eyes. He was still so young. He still didn't understand what it meant to love someone so dearly that everything would pale in its light. He didn't see how it could break even the strongest heart, but even that heart, pierced and split, could do naught but love still.

The younger prince watched his own tapestry in silence, studying the airy waves and the monstrous shapes with fearful curiosity, and Frigga's heart clenched at the sight of the old wisdom in his eyes. He still didn't understand many things either, but his insights showed him older than his age.

"Is it the future, mother?"

Ghostly echoes and old dreams seeped into her mind and the ancient terror reared its head up: that for all her ability to see what was yet to come and for all the devotion of a mother's heart she was not able to tear the cobwebs the Nornir span for the ones she loved. But there was something she had learnt over the long centuries of seeing many things slip away beyond her reach: there were numberless lines in a cobweb, and not all of them were leading to the same point, and the notion consoled her.

"No, dear. The future is not a thing carved into stone. There are many possible paths, and the tapestry shows one of them." She kneeled before her younger son, her hands like soft cages encircling Loki's narrow shoulders. It was something he had to understand. "Nothing is decided yet. Never forget: where there is a will there is a way."

There was a worried line on Loki's forehead that was foreign on a face so young. "And how should I recognize the right path?"

"That I cannot tell. No one can but your heart. You need to choose the path that gives you and your beloved ones the least heartbreak, even if it is a path the hardest to walk."

"I will not cause you pain, mother," he embraced her with all the honesty of his age, drilling his face in the soft flesh of her chest.

But you will, Frigga thought as she stroked his raven hair. Oh you will break my heart and your beloved ones', too. And I shall love you still.

.-.-.

It was not that she loved any of his sons more or less than the other. A mother's heart could beat but in one rhythm. She loved Loki differently because she understood that while she had to compete for the affection of her firstborn for Thor's warrior spirit clang onto his father with the thirst of a young boy for an ideal to look up to, Thor bestowed his feelings freely, while Loki's love was a fragile thing, hard to win but easy to lose. It was a thing, if won, Loki would keep it close to his heart like the finest of pearls from the depth of the seas. She loved him just all the more because she knew there would be but a few pearls her reserved son would ever dare to collect.

.-.-.

Their differences emerged slowly but those were fickle things that held them together just as much as they kept them apart. When he was in doubt, Loki oft searched his mother's company and Frigga cherished every moment of it like it was the last. There would yet be times when he would keep his hurt close to his heart and lock them there. Such ache could only fester and ruin in its wake.

These precious times Frigga would dismiss her handmaidens, and Loki would sit on a stool across from her, rolls of deep scarlet yarns wound around his slender hands as Frigga span the spindle in patient silence for many hours.

"Whatever happens in the future, mother," Loki started one day, his words heavy on his tongue, and Frigga's hands halted in their motions, "know this: there were times when I only ever wanted to protect you. Times when I wanted no harm to come to you or father or Thor."

It saddened her how an old tapestry could implant the seeds of doubt and dread in her son. "I know this, my dear. And I shall never forget."

"Good." And the fleeting smile upon her son's lips was also a treasure she wished to weave into something eternal so she would forever see it even when it would appear no more.

Thor, forever searching, forever unmindful, busted in suddenly, and Frigga watched him tenderly. It was still true: where there was one, there was the other.

"Come on, brother, I have been chasing you for hours. I have a quest you cannot miss."

"I am fairly sure I can. You don't need me there, Thor."

"How can you say that? Of course I do."

"To have someone you can order around?"

Frigga watched her two sons silently, she watched as, flustered and hurt, Thor glared at his brother, and something stirred its ugly head in her chest; a ghostly echo, an old vision. Two bright lines of different nature clashing and parting in endless cycles.

"No! Because you are my brother and I love you."

"Yes." Loki lowered his hands, the yarns pooling in his lap like a tangled fate. Frigga knew the cruel words even before he would utter them, knew their cruelty would cut deeper in Loki than it would in Thor. "I am your brother and this is the only reason why you love me. People love their siblings. It is a natural thing and comes without thinking."

"No, it—"

"If I weren't your brother, you wouldn't love me, Thor."

It was a horrible thing to say, and Frigga couldn't help but grasp at her heart. The patterns of an old tapestry loomed in her mind, and she felt the burden of every step that hadn't been done yet hammer a nail in her chest. It wasn't even premonition anymore. The seeds were already planted and she knew not how to uproot them. A silver line, forever running away and farther, forever alone and yearning; a golden line, forever chasing, forever caring. Her two sons in eternal belonging. It should be so simple, and it was not. A thing that would build and destroy with the same stroke.

"As my assumption exists solely in theory, I will never be able to convince you," Loki shrugged, and Frigga's heart darkened at the thought of a lie they had woven around their family, strings cutting stealthy wounds that would bleed only much later when the lies would be lifted. For lies and secrets were things to be unconcealed.

Thor, bless his simple and endless heart, squeezed his brother's shoulder affectionately.

"Yes, and that being said, you come with me now, my forever beloved little brother," and Thor pulled him up from the stool like he was naught but Thor's extension, and many ways Loki indeed was, just as much as Thor was his.

As he staggered to his feet, Loki dropped the yarns helplessly and they spilled from his fingers like blood, and Frigga squeezed her eyes before the flood of images committed into eternity in the intricate weavings of soft harmless threads.

Where there is will, there is way, she repeated but it felt like a prayer. It felt like naught but wistful thinking.