The Arch-Druid, revered Shaman, and esteemed leader of the Alfar tribe of the Bifrost Isles. A figure of mystery and wisdom, he is known for his enigmatic nature and unparalleled mastery over druidic magic. Regarded as one of the most powerful druids in the Isles, he alone possesses the rare ability to locate the ever-shifting Yggdrasil and commune with its ancient consciousness.
Appearance
Loki is bald and broad-bearded — the beard long, bushy, and silver-threaded with age. He is never seen without his hat, a worn wide-brimmed thing he has worn so long that people have stopped noticing it. Beneath it, shaved flush against the skull, is a horn. He shaves it regularly. It grows back. The hat stays.
Lævateinn
He wields Lævateinn, a legendary staff forged from a sacred branch of Yggdrasil. Imbued with the tree's ancient power, this artifact serves as a conduit for immense druidic magic, embodying the forces of nature, renewal, and primal wisdom. Occasionally — rarely — it resists him for a fraction of a second before the magic flows. He has never told anyone.
Ratatoskr
Beneath his hat, curled against the shaved stub of the horn he has hidden for centuries, lives a Lumwick he calls Ratatoskr. The creature is old, as lumwicks go — its frost-veining deep and branching, its tail tip luminous even in full daylight. It arrived uninvited decades ago and never left. When Loki moves through Alfheim, it rides unseen. When he communes with Yggdrasil, it orients toward the tree before he has found it himself. Its feet have been warm against him for so long he no longer notices.
The Alfar Heritage
Loki has never named what he carries. The horn, he has always told himself, is a mark — a blessing, the land choosing him, the tree speaking through his blood. He is not the only Alfar to show such signs. Others carry them faintly: a differently coloured eye, a small stub that never fully grows in, features that pass unremarked in a long-lived people. In Loki the contamination concentrated. He is the most extreme case.
What he has not resolved is the growing unease. Fey creatures react to him wrong — not with deference, but with the wariness of something that cannot classify what it is sensing. Yggdrasil holds something back from him: a moment of resistance before the communion opens, like breathing through cloth. He has attributed this to his own limits. He is less certain of that than he was a century ago. He has not yet named the question.
His connection with the land is older than memory. Whether it is entirely his own is a question he has not yet asked aloud.