A Dream.
I do not often dream and remember it after waking, but last night, it came strongly. My brother and I were both together on Midgard before its modern technology took sway, back when it was naught but swords and bows and crude towers on wheels.
We, for some reason, were setting up kingdoms of our own, there, and agreed not to do battle with one another, for which I was pleased. We decided that the dividing line of our lands would be a great river that wound between a mighty plain that, to each side, ran so far that the distant mountains were but grey lines on the horizon. It did not take long to set up my ruling and begin building my home there, so I went to see how my brother’s kingdom was faring.
His lands had become richer under his short rule, lusher and filled with more beasts and people. These beasts had begun to grow and change, developing intelligences far beyond their ancestors before his appearance there, until they could communicate with the humans and form pacts. The trees, too, were darker, wilder, and seemed almost to speak. His palace was a mountain with the interior carved to his liking and the cast off stone used to reinforce a hillside that would obliterate a wolf den and a village, set side by side, were it to slide.
His chaos was inherently aiding his world, helping to bring fruition to things I, in my kingdom, was keeping stagnant. I had had no real growth like this, no evolution of the creatures, but a steady keeping of the status quo, except for expansion of my borders.
I began to ask myself why my brother was so much more successful and I realized that the reason my brother was better than I was because I am fearful of real change, whereas he embraced it, clung to it, and nurtured the changes around him almost like a lover.
After seeing how much better the land was faring under him and wanting to see how much farther his borders had expanded, I began to travel again. The darker, fuller, larger trees stretched across the mountain slopes beyond the plains and the plains were lusher, too, filled with their creatures. His lands stretched past the mountains, the rich greens cascading as waterfalls down their far slopes to swallow much of the range and some leagues beyond, in places.
I was happy for him.
I turned back, then, to my own lands and saw them a disappointment. I returned to Loki’s kingdom and asked him his secret, not expecting an answer, but hoping for one anyway. He told me to cast aside my fear and stop trying to be the one in control. To stop forcing everything to be as I desire. To let those under me make their own choices and to aid them in fulfilling them.
I feel that this information is critical to me, both in the dream and in the real world around me. I think I would do well to take it to heart.
