khavah

khavah (all living things)

She is born from fire.  Strange, isn’t it, that a creature of ice needs a fiery soul, but the creation of familiars has always been a right of passage and trial by fire for the jotunn.  Loki has always been a little unsure of the process, because he is no more jotnar than he is aesir, and the frost giants hide their secrets well.

But he knows the creation of souls involves fire, and blood, and a pain that the weak cannot bear.  (Those who are too weak do not get a familiar from the fires of their world, no recompense for their pain and suffering.  The weak are sent back naked and alone, and the jotunn cast them out.)

Were he a proper frost giant, Loki would know her already.  He is much, much older than a century, and he would have known her from youth.  He knows not if he would have been any different for it.  Jotunn children are not denied their souls, after all.  They are a reward, and if the child fails, well.  Most of the outcast don’t live to reach adulthood anyway. 

So, Loki thinks, eyeing her, had I been raised a jotnar, I would have been already dead.

She, in the form of a warg, grins at him.  “Yes,” she agrees.  “But you would have passed the trial.”

“How do you know?” he asks.  He has not yet recovered from his falling, and he doesn’t recognize the world around him.  “Even among the giants I was the runt.  Unwanted.”

There is no pity in her, this creature whom he supposes must be his heart.  “But you lived,” she says. 

He has no answer.

-----

He learns, after a time, that she has chosen no name for herself, and no permanent shape, and that she has been with him since he was a babe.

“It’s the crossing that does it,” she explains, this time in the shape of a horse with six long, spindly legs.  She keeps pace with him easily, even as he tries to run from her. 

I am still weak from my falling, he tells himself.  That’s why I can’t escape from her.    “What do you mean?” he says instead.  He pretends that he’s not afraid of her.  It won’t to, to be afraid of his own familiar.

“In the depths of Jotunhiem, far below the ice, there is a land of fire,” she explains.  “In the center of the fire, there is a door.  Behind this door is the northern range of mountains, and to cross through it is to cross through the space between worlds.”

Loki frowns.  He knows better than to say that it is not possible, because he has used such doors himself, but he doesn’t understand. 

“Frost giants are born with us,” she continues.  Her hooves clatter against cold, foreign stone.  Whatever this realm is, it is a miserable, hard place.  Fitting, he thinks.  “But to see us, you must first break apart.  The door is a space between worlds.  To go through it you must change yourself.  To change yourself, you must know your heart.”

“I don’t understand,” he says again, annoyed now. 

She laughs.  “My dear,” she says.  “If you were meant to, what use would you have for me?”

Loki bares his teeth.  “I have no use for you now,” he says.  “You are unnatural.”

She laughs again, harder, vicious and edged.  “My dear,” she hisses, taking the form of a winged serpent, feather and scale brushing his cheek, “do you still believe you are just aesir?” 

Loki, again, has no answer.

-----

The Chitauri do not have familiars, much like the inhabitants of Asgard.  They are ugly things, and they are delighted to find a lonely, wounded god.

As they take him, she fights. 

Loki does not.  He has long since learned the futility of fighting creatures that are bigger and stronger than he is head on, and he doesn’t have enough seidr in him to fend them away.  He does not struggle when they grab him, but she flips from warg to horse to fae, creatures from all of the nine realms with a speed that makes him dizzy.

When they get hold of her, it doesn’t hurt him.  Loki has always heard that the familiar refuses to be touched by any but their jotnar, but then, he is not wholly giant, is he?  She has said as much—he is not aesir or jotnar.  He is an outcast, and it makes sense that his soul is a little broken because of it.

“You shouldn’t resist,” he tells her, abandoning Allspeak in favor of something the foul creatures won’t understand.  “They’re stronger than you are.”

“If I surrendered to everything that was more powerful than me, I would have died long ago,” she hisses.  She is in the winged serpent form again, fangs bared and dripping. She seems to prefer it over any other shape, but she does not settle into it as other giant familiars do. 

“You will die faster if you fight everything head on,” he says dryly.  He can’t understand how she is so different from him, when she is supposed to be his reflection. 

“Coward,” spits his familiar.

“Survivor,” Loki corrects.

This time, it is she who has no answer.

-----

As a young child, before he learned to control his magic, he had these dreams.  He can barely remember them now.  They’re relics of another life, centuries ago, of a creature who believed himself to be purely aesir, second son of Odin Allfather and Frigga the Seer-of-All-That-Is.  He was a prince. 

He does remember, though, the unsettling quality of these dreams.  He remembers running in them, and scales beneath his hands, and a voice inside his ears whispering run, Loki, run, these people are not who they claim to be. 

He would wake up from these dreams panting, restless, seidr-fire at his fingertips.  He wouldn’t sleep for days after them, and everything he touched frosted over and turned to smooth ice.

Finally, when Loki was about a century old, Odin took him to the witches.  “Mend what is broken in my son,” he demanded, and the witches knew.  They took him into their lair and laid him down.  They pressed cedarwood into his hands and his mouth, and closed his eyes while they drew runes on his skin.

When they were finished, they cast their spell, and he could not speak for screaming. 

But the dreams and the voice in his ears stopped. He was healed.

 “You have made your ancestors proud today,” Odin said gently, gathering him up and carrying him home.  “You were very brave, my son.”

Loki had smiled.

-----

(It is not until he falls from the Bifrost into the holes between universes that he realizes what Odin had done; the witches had cut them apart.

On Midgard, this process is called intercision, and preforming it is a crime worse than murder.  Loki doesn’t get why, not really. 

He is actually rather grateful.)

-----

The Chitauri maim her, carve lines into her flickering body, tear out her fur, pull her teeth, break her legs, anything and everything to goad a reaction from him.

He doesn’t feel her hurts. 

“Is that normal?” he asks, tone dry and clinical.  He really doesn’t care what happens to her.  She is proof that he is not what he wants to be.  No King of Asgard ever had a familiar.  Besides, he has been divorced from her for so long that he doesn’t know what he’d do with her, really.  He has no use for a familiar.

She eyes him, her eyes crimson and dark with pain. “No,” she snarls, in her warg shape again.  “But then, we’ve never been normal, have we?”

She has a point there. 

-----

“Brother, why do you look behind you,” Thor complained, when they were six or seven centuries old and on their first forbidden journey, somewhere deep in Alfhiem.  “Only a coward searches for his shadow.”

“At least I can find mine,” Loki shot back, searching the leafy shade.  “Mother says that the one who looks behind him guards himself carefully from those with cowardly hearts.”

Thor scoffed, cutting at the trees.  They withered and died at his touch, but at Loki’s, they came alive again, wreathed in seidr-flame.  Thor saw and shook his head.  “You know what Father says about magic, little brother.  Tis a woman’s work, and not for warrior-men like ourselves.”

“Don’t let Sif hear you say that,” Loki said, grinning, but the damage was done.  He withdrew his hands, and left the trees wounded. 

“And stop looking at your shadow!” Thor complained.  “Honestly, you’re so full of women’s ways.  You’re no fun to adventure with!  You act like a coward.”

“I’m no coward,” Loki said.  “I’m being vigilant.  I think someone’s following us.”

Thor only snorted, shaking his head.  “Brother, there’s no one there.”

Loki reluctantly turned away, but he thought that he saw, just for a moment, the shadow of a thing with wings. 

Alfhiem is strange, he thought, and turned away.

-----

He does not know how long he has been the Chitauri’s captive when they bring him before The Speaker.  He only knows that his familiar is scarred and angry and he cannot feel her pain nor hear her thoughts, but her weight is strangely comfortable in his arms.

(Not that he will ever admit that.  He maintains that he does not need her; he will never need her.  If he is to be King of Asgard again, as is his right, he will have no use for a giant’s familiar.) 

“You are a strange one,” The Speaker says. 

Loki says nothing.

“We have tortured your soul for many cycles, and yet you do not break.  Why is that, giantling?”

“I am no frost giant,” Loki says, tone clipped.  He sets his wounded familiar down onto the rough stone.  She does not protest, and he rather thinks that being in his arms is as strange for her as it is for him. 

The Speaker of the Chitauri and for He Who Dwells Behind the Stars laughs coldly.  “You wear an aesir’s shape, but you are not one of them,” he hisses.  “But I suppose you are not a frost giant, either.  You do not comfort your soul, and even the coldest North-dweller will cradle his heart to his breast.  So what are you, then?”

“The rightful King of Asgard,” Loki says, chin raised.  This is what he has fixated on, these long months—perhaps years—of watching her be tortured in his stead.  He is the rightful King.  Thor was cast out, and he, the younger son, ascended.  Thor and Odin have robbed him of what is his, and he burns. 

(He looks down at his severed soul, and his anger grows.  He does not know her, because she was cut away.  He might have known her had Odin not interfered.  What kind of god would he be if she had been allowed at his side, all those centuries ago?)

“Little creature, you dream too small,” The Speaker chided. 

“I dream well, for what I am,” Loki shot back.

“You have no greater ambitions?  Why settle for Asgard when you could have the universe?  When your reach could stretch to the farthest star?”  The Speaker points out into the distance, at a universe that heaves and spins around them, and suddenly, Loki knows where he is, and laughs.

“I did not think that Hel was such a barren place,” he says.  “Our stories paint it rather prettily.”

The Speaker shakes his ugly head. “You are not in Hel, little god,” he rasps. 

“Then where?” 

“What used to be the land of the dead,” says his familiar, lifting herself off the ground.  She takes on her winged serpent’s shape again, iridescent.  “Am I right?”

The Speaker, if he is surprised, doesn’t show it. “Yes,” he says.  “This is the place where all dead souls go.”

Loki frowns.  “Not Hel?” he wonders.  “Not Valhalla?  Or the Migardian Heaven?”

“There is no such place,” The Speaker says sternly.  “There is here, and what comes after.”

“Which is?”  Loki didn’t think that he was dead.  He certainly feels alive.  He still bleeds, still hungers, still thinks and feels like a living thing. 

The Speaker shrugs.  “I know not, and don’t care to know,” he says.  “My Master and I are not interested in the realm after death.”

“What, then, are you interested in?” 

The Speaker smiles, and he has many rows of terrible red teeth.  If Loki was still a child, he would be frightened, but he has seen his familiar with many more teeth, and he doesn’t have any fear left in him.  (Just the burning, overwhelming anger.) 

“We are interested in you,” says The Speaker, sidling closer.  Disgusting creature.  Loki almost wishes that he would touch him.  He might not have his full strength, but he has enough seidr to end this miserable thing. 

(Though, says the cool, dry part of his mind that might have been a winged serpent, had Odin not cut it away, isn’t he already dead?)

“Why?”  Loki asks. 

“Because you are not one of us,” says The Speaker. Behind him, the Chitauri rustle in their thousands, their millions, all tilting their heads back to look up at the ocean of universes spread across the sky.  Each one is a destination, Loki knows, a doorway into another life.  One of those stars is Asgard.  Another is Jotunheim.  “You have not yet died.”

“Really?  I thought not,” Loki says, uncaring, because it matters little if he is dead or not.  He is still not in Asgard, saddled with a useless familiar and a weakness created by the breaking Bifrost. 

The Speaker hisses.  “You do not understand,” he says accusingly, drawing himself up tall.  He is still not as tall as Loki, and the familiar at his feet snarls a challenge.  “You do not belong here.”

“Thank you,” Loki says drolly.  “I am aware.”

“I mean that you can leave, should you so choose,” The Speaker says empathetically.  Loki does not understand, but judging from the way his familiar goes stiff, she does. 

Loki is having none of this.  He doesn’t care for the Chitauri, does not care what they want.  He wants to go home.  “By that reasoning, I may take my leave, then?”  he says, turning smartly on his heel.  “I bid you good day, Speaker.”

“Do not dismiss me, little god,” The Speaker snarls, but Loki is already walking away, his familiar limping at his heels.  “You do not know the way out!  You will be lost without us!”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Loki calls over his shoulder (he does not look back), and his familiar huffs a pained laugh.  The sounds of the Chitauri fade, and they are alone again, walking across bare rock with the universe turning above them. 

-----

His true father named him Ahiga.  In the frost giant tongue this means something beyond Loki’s grasp, for he was raised speaking the tongue of aesir and whenever he tries it in Allspeak, he cannot find a translation. 

His true name is lost with his true father.  Perhaps this is fitting. After all, Loki killed Laufey.  By Asgardian law, he is Laufeyson no more. He is whomever he chooses to be, and Laufey and Ahiga are lost.

“Not necessarily lost,” says the familiar.  She tends to her wounds with slow, awkward licks, in the shape of an Earth creature called a cat. 

“You could tell what I was thinking?” he asks, curious.  He didn’t feel her inside his mind, and no one can trick Loki. 

She blinks, looking suitably smug.  “I know you,” she says.  “You can’t hide anything from me.”

He raises an eyebrow.  “Oh, I doubt that,” he says.  “They call me the God of Lies, you know.”

“And many other names besides,” she retorts, “but you and I both know that you can lie to Thor all you want, but you were never very good at lying to yourself.  You’re too clever for that.”

“You’re wrong,” he says, flatly.  His tone brokers no argument, but she is rising to one anyway.  “I am very good at lying to myself.”

She gives him a feline smile.  “My dear,” she says.  “We both know that you always knew you were no true aesir.  That you were different.”

“You’re wrong,” Loki snaps, and he hates her, he hates her, and he turns away to leave her alone with her hurts. 

Her laughter follows him across the barren rock, inescapable.

-----

It was Thor who taught him cruelty.  Not Odin, not Frigga, not the many laughing warriors of his father’s court, but Thor. 

Thor, whom he loved.  Thor, who loved him back.  Thor who laughed at him with his friends, Thor who would not leave his side when he was sick or injured.  Thor, who praised Loki’s abilities when they saved his life but openly mocked them at court. 

Thor, who saw his little brother looking behind him at his own soul and said, “Don’t be a coward, brother.”

“I hate him for it,” his familiar reveals, when they have wandered and wandered and not found their way out of this hell, but only deeper in.  (It seems that there are no doors down here, no pathways for a cunning soul to escape.  High above are the roots of the World Tree, tethered to the brightest stars, but Loki does not have the means or the strength to climb to them.) 

Loki, down here in his hell, thinks that he might hate Thor for it too.  He can certainly understand, anyway.  After all, he chose to let go on the Bifrost.  He chose this, his death, his hell.  Her. 

And it was Thor who pushed him into it, Thor who used to love him but stopped, somehow, when he found that mortal woman on Midgard.

Anger turns to lead in his gut, and that lead into hatred’s ice, seeping through him, cooling him to the core.  His skin wavers, torn for a moment between aesir and jotunn.  It settles halfway in between, with his skin gone sickly pale and intricately carved.

His familiar’s eyes flicker crimson. 

Hatred.  He hates Thor.  He hates Thor.  He hates Thor.  Thor abandoned him.  Thor chose Midgard.  Thor chose their liar of a father, chose to believe what others told him instead of finding his own way. 

“What do you know,” Loki says, when it has been months in the realms of the dead, or perhaps years.  Hatred has hardened his heart.  Most of her wounds have healed.  “We have something in common.”

-----

He dreams, sometimes, of Ragnarok.  It is only a rumor among his people, whispers started by Odin when he dueled Laufey on Midgard and formed a religion there.  He is sure that Ragnarok will not come to pass.  For one, Loki has done nothing so base as birth a giant snake (or a six-legged horse, for that matter.  Despite his status as outcast, he had his choice of lovers on Asgard, and none of them had four legs).  For another, it has already happened.

Or so his familiar says. 

“How do you know?” he asked her, two centuries into his exile.  By now he tolerates her presence.  He does not curse her, does not demand that she leave him be.  He does not touch her, not yet, but he allows her to rest at his side. 

“I was not allowed in Asgard,” she said, warg-formed, fangs dripping.  “Odin’s witches cast me out.  When you traveled to other places, I was allowed to go, but Asgard was barred to me.  And so I wandered, waiting for you to cross into another realm.  I traveled to all of the nine realms, and then more besides.  The universe is dark and full of stars, my dear one.  There are many doors for me to open.”

“And you saw Ragnarok?”  His tone was skeptical.  He can barely believe this is the true land of the dead, let alone that his familiar has seen the end of the universe.

“Not ours,” she explained.  “But of another world where their souls reside inside their bodies, and another of a world where they were as small as insects and twice as vicious, and another where a man loved a woman and a woman loved a man, and their love for their child was so great they fell into an abyss to save her.” 

Loki didn’t believe her.  “This cannot be so,” he said.  “What of our universe?”

She shrugged, swapping fur for scales, and she was iridescent.  He could see the universes in her sleek feathers, and her eyes were full of stars.  “Perhaps its time will come,” she allowed.  “But there will be no Ragnarok.  Our world will not regenerate itself exactly as it was.  You will not be born again, not in that sense.  When we die, we will become everything else.  The story does not repeat itself.”

Loki, who never really believed in Ragnarok anyway, was nonetheless a little disappointed.  He liked to think that someday, he could have made different choices.  He could have done it over again, and then, he would not fail.  

“More’s the pity,” he murmured. She had wounded him, his familiar.  Wounded him in a way he could not explain. 

She had no mercy for him. 

He still dreams of Ragnarok, though.  A clean, purging fire.  Stronger than hatred, than love.  Stronger than anything, wiping all else clean. 

It would have been nice. 

-----

Four centuries in, Loki is going mad.  He has been along for too long, and now not even the Chitauri come to him.  (They tried, in the beginning, to harass him, to woo him.  After he killed eighty-six of them, they stopped trying.  This was about two centuries ago.)  He is alone on the rocks beneath the stars, and she is no help at all.

“You are supposed to be my familiar,” he hisses, venom dripping from his words.  She blinks, unimpressed. 

“Hatred makes you strong,” she says.  “Can’t you feel it?  Think of Asgard.”

Loki does, and it is only a poison in his veins.  He hates them all.  They who made him outcast, they who lied to him.  They who mocked him, who stole him from his home.  Who split his soul apart, and then wondered why he was a monster.

His skin has taken on a blueish cast now, and her eyes are permanently crimson.  They wander the barren land of the dead—the true land of the dead, where all souls drain after death, Loki has seen them come, every shape and size, all lonely, wailing things—and rend any soul they come across.

“Hey,” squawks a creature with a woman’s head and a bird’s body, circling high overhead with the universes shimmering in her wings.  “Just what do you think  you’re doing, eh?  He coulda had a story.”

“A story,” Loki spits, seidr gathering at his fingers.  He is so angry and hateful by this point that he will kill her and feast on her heart.  He wants to, trembles with it.  He bets that she tastes like the finest boar.  “What use do you have for stories, creature?”

The thing sniffs, flying high to avoid his fire.  “More’n you,” she retorts.  “Stories are the only good thing in the world, you know.  We trade freedom for ‘em.”

“Freedom,” he hisses.  His familiar comes close.  Freedom to be a monster, an abomination.  Freedom to be severed from his soul.  Freedom to wander, and wander, and wander.  “Freedom is life’s great lie.”

“True enough,” agrees the creature.  “But hey, it’s pretty one, isn’t it?”

“All that glitters,” Loki says.  This makes the bird-woman laughs, and she drifts closer.  Almost within range.

“That’s a pretty daemon you’ve got there,” she croons.  “Strange.  Didn’t think we let them down here, but you know.  Things have been a little weird lately.  Universes mixing, Dust spreading, gods dying left and right.”

“Daemon?” he says.  The term strikes something in him, deep and resounding.  He looks at his familiar, and she, wolf again, blinks up at him.  “What is that?”

“What she is,” the creature says, gesturing with a wing.  “Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“Well, learn something new every day, even down here in the pit,” she cackles.  “Say, can you tell me a story?  I’ll let you out for it.”

“Out?”

“You know, back into the universe.  So you and your daemon can become Dust and new things.  Isn’t that what you all want?”

“I am not dead,” he says. 

“Oh.”  The creature lands a few feet away, scratching at her scraggly hair.  “Huh.  Well, stranger things have happened.”

“What are you?”  he asks, curious now.  Some of his hatred and wild anger has dimmed. 

“A harpy,” the creature says.  “We watch over this place.  We used to keep all of you boxed in here, you know.  Every soul from every world that ever lived.  Got awful crowed.”

“It’s not now,” he points out, looking around.  The rock is still and barren.  He hasn’t seen another soul in a decade. 

The harpy nods. “We started letting ‘em out,” she says.  “There are ways, you know.” She points up.  “Through the stars.  We’ll take you, for a price.”

“What price is this?” he demands.  He could get out, he could leave, he could take his throne again—

“It doesn’t work that way,” his familiar—daemon?—says, brushing against his leg.  He fights to not recoil from her touch.  “You aren’t dead.  The crossing over would kill you.”

“It didn’t before,” he hisses, but she’s right.  He knows that she is right, and it makes him angry.  He wants to leave. 

“Yeah, out,” continues the harpy.  “For the price of your story.  Your life, with no lies.  If you lie, we leave you here, and you become one of Them.”

“Them?”

“You know,” says the harpy.  “The maimed ones.  The ugly ones.”

“The Chitauri,” Loki murmurs. 

“Those are the ones.  They’re the souls who have lied to us.  We don’t take them, and after a while, they change.  They lose themselves, become those things.  Pitiful, really.”

“See?”  his familiar says.  “You don’t know what truth is.  You would be trapped here, forever.  Slowly turning into one of them.”

“So how do I get out of here?” Loki says.  “I will not stay forever.”

The harpy shrugs. 

“Tell you what,” he begins, an idea forming in his mind.  “If I can tell you a story—the greatest story you have ever heard—will you show me the path out?”

“No,” says the harpy, bored already, “but nice try.”

She flies away.

His familiar sighs.  “Pity,” she says.  “I would have liked to hear this story.”

-----

He is dreaming, and it is Ragnarok again.  He is dreaming that he is as vast as the sky and as light as space, and light and dark live in him in equal measure. 

He is pregnant with the universe.  It strains inside of him, aching to be born, but for it to come, the current world must die.

The problem is, he is the current world.  It is alive on him.  Yggdrasil is his spine.  Asgard is his right eye, Jotunheim his left.  His ribs are Midgard and Vanaheim, and his heart is fiery Niflheim.  In his belly are all the corpses of Hel, and his hands are Vanaheim’s blessings. 

On the surface of his skin, he is the space and the sky and the earth and the oceans, and each breath he takes is the breath of billions of lives. 

If he births the new universe he can feel swelling inside him, this one will die. 

But there is a voice beside him, gentle and serpent-smooth.  Let go, it says, let go.  All things have their time.

If I let go, I will die, he argues.  He does not want to die.  He is too young.  He has too much work left, and the universe lives on his skin.

But it is inside you also, says the voice.  Look.

And he does, and for the first time, he sees himself. He is not Loki, frost giant or aesir, he is a serpent, and he is sleek and worlds live on his scales.  On the outside, he has grown dark, dull, and dim.  His worlds are corrupted and black.  Hatred covers all, and his open wounds bleed still, refusing to close.

And now look again, says the voice, and he is inside his skin, and the universe there is not formed yet but it is beautiful, all golden Dust and light. 

So you see, says the voice, it is time.  It is time….

He dies quietly, with no one but the voice to mourn.  Loki crumbles up and blows away, his rotted, infected skin sloughing off, worlds dying within him—

And then, he is gone.  His very self unwinds.  He is drifting apart, and the voice within him dies—

And then, there is the universe, and it is born of fire and dust and newness, and the voice is within him again, and he is every world, every rock, every life, he beats and burns with it.

And she is there, his familiar, serpent-formed and magnificent.  The universe is her cloak of scales, and she is its mother, tethered to it, of it, becoming it.

You see, she says, smugly.  All living things must die.

-----

Loki awakes, and she is flush against his skin. 

It doesn’t feel very strange, not now.  Not after all this time.  Hesitantly, he rubs his thumb down her back.  She is in her favored form again, feathers and scales tickling his chin, and her body is the color of the Bifrost.

“What was that?” he asks her, and her eyes gleam. 

“Destiny,” she says.  “We are made to for the unmaking.”

Loki is not so sure.  “It was just a dream,” he says.  He does not particularly want to die, still.  Even though he has spent centuries here at the bottom of the world and it has driven him quite mad. 

She laughs.  “Nothing is just a dream,” she says.  “Everything has meaning, if only you can read it.” 

“So what does that mean, unmaking?” Loki wonders.  He paces, suddenly full of a restless, desperate energy.

She watches him through hooded eyes.  “Tell me, dear one,” she says.  “Does Loki the Prince still exist?” 

He looks down at himself.  His fine clothes are dusty and torn, and he has lost what little weight he had.  He is too pale to be aesir and the markings of a giant mar his skin.  He can feel the shadows under his eyes, and the wildness gleaming there. He has a familiar, a daemon. 

“No,” he says slowly.  “I rather think that he has died.”

“Does Loki the trickster still exist?”

No, because he has not played a harmless joke on a soul in half a millennia.   

“Does Loki the coward still draw breath?” 

No, because he does not look behind him now (he has no need, his soul walks beside him) and he does not shy away from violence. 

“Does Odin’s son?  Does Laufey’s son?  Does Thor’s brother?”

Loki considers all these bonds, known and unknown.  “No,” he says.  “I have broken them all.”

His daemon bares her sharp, dripping fangs at him.  “And what is Loki now?”

He thinks on that, for a moment.  “The rightful King of Asgard,” he snarls.  “The liberator.  Yours.”

She laughs again, drapping around his shoulders.  “You see,” she says.  “Ragnarok.  The weaker self has passed away, and from the ashes, something transcendent has arisen.  The story has begun anew.”

He likes that word.  Transcendent.  His familiar takes the shape of a bird, a Midgardian legend, red and gold-feathered with fire trailing her flight.  She circles him once, twice, a light in the crushing darkness, and drops back to his shoulder in feathered serpent form again.

“We are more than what we were,” she hisses.  They are not whole, not yet—most likely not ever, because those bonds, once cut, do not easily repair—but she is his and he is hers.  They belong to each other.  His hatred is not for her to bear.  That falls on Thor’s shoulders, on Odin’s.  Her hatred, likewise, is for the ones who cut her and banished her, not him.

Separate, they are weaker things.  But together, working in harmony—

“Come,” Loki says.  He feels the beginning of the end—a serpent, looped around himself—tingling at the place where her smooth, shimmering scales meet the pale skin of his throat.  Her feathers brush against his ears and wrists.  Seidr simmers. 

“We have a door to walk through.”

-----

The deal with Chitauri is easy enough.  Loki, even after a few hundred years of not talking, is still the silver-tongued (not just a liar but the Father of Lies) and so he convinces them that Midgard is his goal.  He will get them their Tessaract, and they will let him into the human world.

Of course, they do not know that his Khavah (for that is her name, they decided, for they herald the eve of all that once was) has her eyes on Asgard’s star.  Of course, they do not know that they are merely tools, and that he is not so easily manipulated.  Of course, they do not know that the creature they see, flinching, pale, feverish Loki, is naught but dust and ash.  Of course, they do not see that inside he burns and rises. 

They give him an army, and a way out.

Khavah is laughing as they walk against the Yggdrasil (they are the serpent that gnaws at its roots) hands and scales brushing the old, warm bark.  She leaves feathers everywhere as she flickers between forms, warg, horse, feathered serpent always, always.

“Are you ready, my dear one?” she asks.

Loki smiles.  An apple grows from the lowermost branches and he realizes that he is starving.  He hasn’t eaten in half a millennia.  He plucks the fruit without a thought, relishing the crunch.  Juice drips down his chin, and she chuckles, lapping it up. 

“Come, my friend,” he says.  “We have a throne to regain.”