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Thor is a foolish man.
True, Mjölnir hasn't much of a leg to stand on – none at all, in fact – but there is only so much a man can take before he should realise there's a leash around his neck. Every word his own father throws his way is orders, praise that's backhanded at best, or the occasional barbed words of dismissal when displeased. Sons are supposed to be obedient, yes, sons are supposed to obey their fathers and be loyal to none moreso than the men who raised them, but this? This isn't the loyalty of a son to his father. This is the loyalty of a trained dog to its master.
Like before, the hammer doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to being a weapon in the hand of a foolish master, but men aren't supposed to be the one wielded: they're supposed to be the wielders, and Thor is to all a weapon in his father's hand. It's not right. Odin has no respect for the natural order, true, but there is disrespect and then there is /violation/.
When you raise a dog to bite, it grows gnarled, scared, toothy, like a mangled tree grown around boulders. Men are less predictable. When you raise a man to be a weapon, he grows sullen, obedient, prone to dulling himself to dull that niggling ache in the base of his chest. Or he grows stiff, sharp, pressing at the bars of his gilded cage until he shatters himself on the steel because he'd rather be broken pieces than leashed whole.
Thor is the first. Mjölnir wants to hope it is the second.
Mjölnir was made as a masterpiece, the first great work of the Huldra brothers. Almost, so desperately, tantalisingly close to flawless, asides from that one little issue with its handle from a single, glass-pointed moment of distraction.
But imperfection hadn't rendered it a mistake, something to be discarded as scrap. What had made it a mistake was the hand of the wielder it had been placed in.
Is one of the greatest works of smithing ever forged supposed to have so much blood dripping from its faces? Sinking into the fine carvings, dripping mashed bone and brains like the glaciers from the wreckage of Njördholm. So many other great works were simply hung up, ceremonial things, beautiful things meant to be admired and so rarely used. Perhaps being used is a privilege. Perhaps it is a burden.
...No weapon should have another forged just to make amends for its creation. A masterpiece, almost perfect, but a /mistake/. Something that needs to be made up for.
No weapon should be raised against innocents on the orders of a madman. No weapon should be raised against innocents in the drunken hand of a man who can't fit perfectly into the shape of an unthinking tool, no matter how hard he dulls his mind to try. No masterpiece – no weapon at all, not one – should be this wretched legacy.
Thamur, whose body crushed Njordholm. Aurvandil, husband of Gróa. Järnsaxa, daughter of the ocean waves, mother of Magni.
...Fjörgyn, wife of Odin, mother of Thor. Even her people, giving her her last rites, had sent her beyond where the Thunder could find her, and maybe, just maybe, both Mjölnir and its wielder think they were right to do so.
Modi, son of Thor, not killed directly by its blows but dead because of it nonetheless. Thor and Sif's boy, believed unworthy despite all he achieved, even in death.
Like it said, Thor is a foolish man.
It understands what it is to be a mistake, to be a creature of cruelty and bloodshed, wielded by a foolish hand; but it is a weapon, and Thor is a man. Thor can choose whose head into which he swings. Thor can choose who he bows his head to, if any at all. Thor can choose to put down his anger, to turn to his father and say no. Enough. Enough blood spilt, enough lives shattered by my hands. I'm done.
(Sometimes you have poured too much down blood the drain to let yourself admit it was all for nothing.)
(Sometimes you have poured too much blood down the drain to allow yourself to continue.)
A legacy is not so easily dropped. A father who made his own son into a weapon is not so easily disobeyed.
Thor, foolish, brave Thor who had finally done the right thing, died by the Allfather's hand at Ragnarok in front of his daughter. He turned to scattered cloud with his hand outstretched, reaching for her in his final moments.
Thrúd, brave, dear, misguided Thrúd, fledgling Valkry r ie, daughter of the god of the storm and the goddess of the rollings fields, sees it all. Sees the lies of her grandfather laid bare in her father's blood. In the foreign god who had put aside his weapons, in the Jötunn champion who had avoided shedding the blood of innocents. In the grandfather who lies to her face after spearing his son, her father, through the heart.
Odin raises Mjölnir and hucks it directly into Thrúd's stomach when she charges at him. Mjölnir is the lightning, the rain transformed, the mistake of the Huldra Brothers and the bane of giantkind, but its master has said no more.
There are many animals that eat their young. Many men that dispose of broken weapons. Stress, starvation, lack of resources: nutrients, steel, no animal would let such things go to waste.
But only a fool disposes of a weapon that misbehaved but once. And among the kingdoms of all matter of man and beast under the sun, there is only one kind of man who kills his own kin: a monster.
Mjölnir is a weapon, and a weapon cannot hate its wielder, no matter how foolish or bloodthirsty or cruel that wielder is. But Odin is not its wielder, and even if every piece of grain in the Nine Realms were inscribed with the word it would not be equal to one ounce of the hate it feels for the father of Thor Odinson in this single, stormswept moment.
And so it speaks.
Thrúd is just barely a war goddess, a fledgling, the born lady of strength and the forest rather than the endless grind of war's march. Even Tyr, diplomat, traveller, trained warrior in a thousand approaches, hears only through patience and respect.
But Thrúd, lady of the battlefield, does not have to be a being of war itself to hear the weapon that has spent so long in her father's hand.
TAKE ME.
Her hand twitches down to its leather-wrapped, bloodstained handle, where the hammer has buried itself into her abdomen. The bane of the Jotun. The favoured weapon of the storm god. The greatest mistake of the Huldra brothers. The weapon her grandfather used to tear her away from the battlefield, and from him, after what she saw.
USE ME.
Thrúd, fledgling Valkyrie, daughter of the storm and the rolling fields, takes Mjölnir by the hilt and gives it her first order.
"Take me to my grandfather."
A monster is not always such a bad thing to be.
But a monster has slain the father of Thrúd Thorsdottir, and that monster is a terrible thing to be.