The relationship Ragnar had with Nerian was not, truly, despite what both of them claimed was not a master and slave relationship. He did not make her do his work for him. He did not treat her like she was dirt beneath his toes. He might not have viewed her as an equal, and they might have disagreed on many, many things only proving to frustrate and irritate each other profusely but he wasn’t sure that he viewed her as a slave either. He did not rape her, as his kinsmen did to their slaves, and though her stories of her Gods and temples proved to confuse him at times he was fascinated by her way of life, regardless -- even if he did not agree with it. He treated her quite well, took care of her, protected her and though he had yet to tell her, even respected her. For her resilience. Perhaps that was why he had always called her Priestess instead of ‘slave’. He had stolen her from her home on a raid, yes, he had killed and slaughtered just as his kinsmen had, yes, but they had a strange sort of …tentative friendship.
“Is it?” Ragnar murmured when Thistle attempted to assure him that ambition and greed were not the same thing; from a certain perspective they could almost line up to be of the same vein. “The raids were routine. Every month in a different pack and then again the next year. We did not steal it all, just as we did not kill them all. If they did not rebuild we would have no one to raid.” It was tactful, selfish in a sense (from the outsider point of view), but sensible from the Vikings’ point of view; and it was all that Ragnar knew. His ancestors had been raiding since the dawn of time, he suspected - it was just something that had been passed down, like the fairness of their coat color. It was coded into their DNA and nurtured through their culture. “I know my Gods. I know they exist, I have seen Odinn many times, I have felt him possess my body and leave a sliver of himself behind.” Ragnar’s Gods were not some unimaginable deity - his culture knew them well, knew their faces, knew their names. Whereas Ragnar struggled to know how Nerian’s God even existed when he had no face, no name, no story of origin. Where did he come from, where did he live, how did he know everything?
“He must be Loki,” Ragnar spoke with resolution as if there was no other logical explanation and truly, to the silver Viking there wasn’t. “She has not been able to tell me where he began, what he looks like, what his name is. It is because his is Loki pretending. Loki is a trickster, a God of magic. He can take many forms and is good at spinning tales. It is the only way.” It wasn’t but Ragnar was a bigot and made sense of things in the only way he knew how. "She can believe whatever she wants - anyone can. That is the freedom we are given but I know it is true."
