The Gospel of Loki

After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith; start a war; change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster; topple walls; scale mountains - hey, a story can even raise the dead. And that's why the King of Stories ended up being the King of the gods; because writing history and making history are only the breadth of a page apart.

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

Change isn't always comfortable, but it is a fact of life.

A demon, if you prefer the term; although to be honest, the difference between god and a demon is really only a matter of perspective.

Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.

Loki, that's me. Loki, the Light-Bringer, the misunderstood, the elusive, the handsome and modest hero of this particular tissue of lies.

They tell you revenge isn't worth it. I say there's nothing finer.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. No one's immune to bribery.

Sticks and stones may break my bones’, as they say in the Middle Worlds, but with the right words you can build a world and make yourself the king of it.

Always look on the bright side. And if there is no bright side? Look away.

There were a few compensations to having corporeal Aspect. Food (jam tarts were my favourites); drink (mostly wine and mead); setting things on fire; sex (although I was still extremely confused by all the taboos surrounding this - no animals, no siblings, no men, no married women, no demons - frankly, it was amazing to me that anyone had sex at all, with so many rules against it).

From this I think we can all conclude that the cow was the primary instigator of everything that followed - war, Tribulation, the End of the Worlds. Lesson One: never trust a rumiant.

Better a king in the gutter,' he said, 'than a slave in an emperor's place

And Odin should have known from the first that perfect Order does not bend; it simply stands until it breaks, which is why it rarely survives for any meaningful length of time.

Clever folk aren’t popular, by and large. They arouse suspicion. They don’t fit in.

I don’t pretend to know much about love, but that’s how great love comes to an end, not in the flames of passion, but in the silence of regret.

Well, that’s history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue, and for the most part written by folk who weren’t even there.

I'm sorry. You went too far.' Lovely. What an epitaph.

I'm only keeping in touch with you for the sake of the children. Way to look after our son, by the way. I let you have him for the weekend and before I know it he's chained underground, awaiting Last Times and stinking of mead.

Even the damned can dream - infact, it's part of their torment. To escape, even for a second or two, to forget reality and drift, only to be yanked back into the waking world like a fish caught on a line... Yes. In some ways that's even worse than to have no relief at all. That second of two, on awakening, when anything still seems possible

All words have power, of course, but names are the most potent of all, which is why the gods had so many.

Not that a promise means much to a demon - or a god.

And when you fall from that parapet,the sound you'll be hearing as you go down will be me,laughing my head off.

When the going gets tough, choose your cliché.

Thor had always been popular. Big and strong and good-natured and about as bright as your average Labrador,

a man often meets his destiny running to avoid it,

That's how religions and histories make their way into the world, not through battles and conquests, but through poems and kennings and songs, passed through generations and written down by scholars and scribes. . . . After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith, start a war, change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster, topple walls, scale mountains--Hey, a story can even raise the dead. And that's why the King of Stories ended up being King of the gods, because writing history and making history are only the breadth of a page apart.