Aliora

I hoped that I was doing this right.  It wasn't as though I'd thrown a lot of birthday parties in my day, after all.  Turning to the eight-month-old baby in my arms, I arched a questioning eyebrow. "What do you think, Dave?" I asked with a wry smile. The baby, a small red-headed boy with brilliant green eyes, stared up at me for a moment and then stuffed his fist in his mouth with a low crooning sound. "Yeah…" I sighed.  "That's what I get for asking a baby for advice." Squealing loudly, David Alexander Xanatos squirmed in my arms and tried to grab at one of the streamers that I had hung on the walls.  Taking his tiny hand in mine, I

 "Father, what is that?" The icy landscape was destroyed. Once the land rolled with swirling dunes of snow, sheets of glassy icy reflecting the aurora borealis that always seemed to hang in the sky, but even the lights of the sky had been destroyed leaving only a black forbidden sky. Once tall cathedrals, structures of rigid lines, reflecting the harsh formation of rocks and frost that surrounded them, those that once stood tall and proud were now littered across the landscape in ruins. Once a place of marble colors, of the purest whites and the palest blues, was now ashen and grey, streaked red with both the blood of Jotunn and Asguard. J