Part 2 - Chp 7
Tony.
Tony spins around. He’s… on a plain. There’s frost, steam rising through cracks in ground. The world shudders, goes still.
“I’m dreaming,” he says out loud, but the words twist off his tongue, live and iridescent things that shimmer, twine around each other serpentine, eating themselves, before the air hisses “I am awake” with his voice.
This makes sense. He is awake, here.
In the distance he sees a mountain. He starts walking. The steam, when it rushes up near him, is hot--venting, escaping. He looks at the ground, but it’s only a shell, a case. Dirt-covered, but glossy beneath. This is a forge--this is where things die. This is where things are born.
This makes sense.
“You should not be here,” a magpie says, tilting its head.
“I don’t know where else I would go,” Tony tells it and keeps walking. This is true--this is home. Forges, creation, hard rock and simple truths. Tested. Tony can think of no where else he belongs but a forge, creating.
The magpie huffs, then it settles on his shoulder. Its claws dig into his shirt, draw blood, and it says, “You’re going to die.”
Tony laughs. Of course he is; don’t they all?
“Suit yourself,” the magpie says, but it doesn’t leave.
***
There are voices here. They do not all make sense. Some babble, broken things full of numbers and nonsense syllables joined together in an endless stream; others talk as if conversing though Tony never hears the other party. Some are silent--these are the loudest.
Tony and the magpie are alone.
“Who are they?” Tony asks.
“You.” The magpie leans, beak tugging Tony’s ear. “Fragments. All that was and is and will be. He keeps you here.” It starts to preen a wing. Tony adjusts his balance so the magpie does not fall off. “You could go back. He won’t let you leave. Selfish thing, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree does it?”
“No,” Tony says decisively. “I don’t think so.”
***
The mountain does not get closer. It does not get bigger or smaller; it simply is.
“I need to go there,” Tony tells the magpie.
“Then go.”
Tony frowns at it. This, walking--it’s not working. He can tell that already. He needs to go to the mountain, though, and he starts to think. The magpie jumps off his shoulder to the ground, scratching and pecking idly.
Tony has no armour here, or he’d fly. He doesn’t think flying would work either. That’s not how one moves.
Not space.
Everything is exactly the same distance away, always. He’s going about this the wrong way. He thinks about the words, before, how even now they burn his tongue a little when he speaks aloud.
“I’m at the mountain,” he tells the magpie at the mouth of the cave in the side of the mountain.
“Now you’ve got it,” the magpie preens. “Last chance to go back. You know how now.”
“No,” Tony says, standing. “I need to know…” he doesn’t remember, but the words do, and they form in the air, hang unspoken for him to read aloud like a cue card.
what’s happened
He doesn’t know why he needs to know what’s happened, so he doesn’t say the words.
“Dangerous, that,” the magpie says, craning to read what hovers before him.
“I don’t think it’s right,” Tony says.
“Nothing is ever right.”
“I need to know.” That feels right.
“Your funeral.” There’s no one to say anything, only Tony at the edge of a cave.
He goes in.
***
It is dark, but Tony knows the way. He’s been here before.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a boy says. His eyes are wide and green and familiar; his eyes are wide and red and familiar. He twists his blue and white hands. “We aren’t well. You won’t be able to leave. We need you not here.”
“Do you ever let me leave?” Tony asks honestly.
The boy laughs, bitter.
“Sometimes. Most times you free yourself.”
“It’s what I do,” Tony agrees.
“You should still leave.”
“There’s no way back,” Tony points out, because there isn’t. There’s only forward and what will come to be; Tony does not repeat himself except he all the ways he does.
“You are going to die.”
“I know.”
Loki sighs, then holds out his hand.
Tony takes it.
He’s somewhen else. Beneath his feet shines refracted light, rainbows harnessed into a bridge that spans reality.
“Die well,” the boy tells him, and then Tony is falling.
***
Tony.
He’s dead, soft and weightless and black.
Tony.
He has hands, he can create--he lives. He blinks, and he is in the cave--where it ends. The walls are threaded with faint blue light that sets his teeth on edge, and they twist up out of the ground, wrap around the vast shadow before him.
Tony, and stars die.
The shadow is watching him. The blue twists and writhes like the ripple of water over not-skin, muzzle a not-mouth. The light refracts as it passes through the shadow and casts three shapes on the wall writ large: a snake, a wolf, a woman.
“I need you,” Tony says. The words hang in the air, and the great shadow tilts its heads. Blue crackles and spits and hisses.
All need me. I am the rightful king. None exist without me.
“No.”
Truth the shadow says and the blue light trills agreement.
Tony picks up a hammer that is there because he needs it. He brings it down on a blue line that runs by his foot. The stone shatters and the shadow’s screams tear the air.
There’s green, now, somewhere in the shadow’s depths.
“This is not who you are.”
It is who we are. We rule, forever. We do not change. We—
The pain tears through Tony, twists him inside out, and he blinks his vision clear. He picks the hammer back up.
“Let him go,” Tony says; the blue sings truth-truth-truth. When Tony destroys the third fragile line, he falls over, hands over his ears to block the not-sound.
I will devour you whole the shadow snarls.
“That’s better,” Tony says, raising the hammer up over his head.
Stay the same the blue hums in Tony’s bones; everything hangs for a moment, then Tony shoves it aside and brings the hammer down.
This time, he’s bleeding when he pulls himself up. The shadow watches him, eyes green and fire and brilliant. They gleam red as the light slips off them, and they are hungry.
His shape has started to change.
I will devour everything.
“Good,” Tony rasps. “Make room for the new.”
The shadow cocks its head like a magpie.
Consume?
“Create,” Tony agrees, and shatters the last line.