Fettered
by Elizabeth Vongvisith
He comes
slowly towards you each time,
as if to linger, looking at your awful size,
proud and regretful and awed by you,
his mobile and expressive face smooth
as glass, but wearing the shadow
of an old pain, and as he nears,
graceful and measured steps echoing,
your ears go up, and you scent him –
familiar as the day you were born,
O mighty Fenrir, Great Wolf, there
fettered and imprisoned all alone
at the barren edge of the worlds.
And then he suddenly stops
only a few feet away, and you see it,
scent it too, that grief he tries to hide behind
his twisted smile, but you feel it anyway.
He watches you, fire-red hair streaming
in the cold winds that never cease here.
You growl softly, not in anger or hatred,
but just to remind him you are
not so much of a beast as all that.
As if he could have forgotten.
Now he kneels beside you and takes
your sword-pinned head in his arms
a wide embrace around your enormous neck,
and whispers my son, my poor son,
while you growl again, pitched higher now,
an acknowledgment of his pain at seeing you there.
You have been bound for an age, and it is
by his doing as much as theirs, you know.
But you don’t bear him the same ill will.
You cannot. You know he loves you completely –
and he loved the dangerous, chaotic madness
showing in your yellow eyes as a newborn cub
when first he lifted you in his arms
and your sharp little teeth, snapping blindly,
drew the first blood you would ever taste.
His.
The sight of you trapped here
draws blood from his heart each time,
just as you drew blood from his naked arm
so long ago, and you tilt your head
and listen for his heartbeat, strong and alive
in your ear as he strokes your fur and murmurs
things no one else hears from him but you.
You wonder once again, as you always do, if this chain,
this sword, these spells should all burst asunder now,
would you rise and open your jaws wide,
swallow him up, crunch his bones to powder
and drink all of his steaming blood, and also
if he would scream and struggle before the end.
Or if Loki, your own father,
your beloved sire, would simply smile
in that way he has, and fall silently under
the restless fury he helped bring into the worlds.
Artwork by Faile.