The library was one of the oldest parts of the palace, built before even the unification of the Nine Realms, when the title of AllFather was nonexistent and the king of Asgard was but only that. In the early days it had been something between a museum and a dump, a place where returning travelers could deposit their souvenirs collected from the far ends of the galaxy. Now, the shelves sagged with the burden of ancient knowledge that stretched all the way to the painted ceiling, some accessible only by sliding ladders several stories high. There something sacred about this place, the age-bronzed walls that guarded their wisdom with such archaic resolution. One could feel the weight in the air. Whispers of the past seemed to linger in the corners like cobwebs …
Find me.
Loki startled awake, his notes flying every which way as he whipped from the table. His heart was racing, but he wasn’t sure why.
He had fallen asleep, it seemed. That wasn’t altogether shocking—it was late, and these past few weeks Loki had been developing a habit of dozing off over his studies. But there was something else. His pulse pounded in his ears.
Had … had someone spoken? That had seemed so clear—he could practically feel the puff of breath rolling down the back of his neck. He glanced around, half expecting to find some silent patron smirking behind the bookshelves, masking gleeful giggles at the chance to prank the prankster prince. But there was no one, aside from the snub-nosed librarian scribbling at her desk. Loki was alone.
It must have been a dream, he reasoned. Yes, that was perfectly feasible. Dreams could be like that, tiny slivers of panic that faded as thoroughly as they struck. Now that he thought of it, Loki couldn’t even say what the voice had even said, had there been a voice at all. There hadn’t, he decided. There couldn’t have been. He was just tired.
Loki thought nothing more of it. He collected his things and returned to his rooms.
He dreamt again that night. Of what, Loki couldn’t quite say—the memory evaded him when he awoke in the morning. But it had been something unpleasant. Just trying to remember sent chills slithering down his spine. Loki was happy to leave it forgotten.
Something was off at sparring practice. Loki had never considered himself particularly adept with a sword, but today the handle felt absolutely foreign in his grasp. He tripped right into Fandral’s poorly concealed feint and found himself sprawled out in the dirt, his brother’s resounding laughter ringing in his ears.
“So!” Thor chuckled, offering him a hand. “It seems the trickster has been out-tricked!”
Loki didn’t take it. There was another sound ringing in his ears, something quiet, despondent. Guttural.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
His brother only frowned at him. “Hear what?”
Dinner was loud and raucous, more so than usual. The palace was welcoming guests from across the realm in celebration of the millennial anniversary of the end of the Asgard-Jotunheim War. The festivities had yet to officially begin, but still the din of the Great Hall left his eardrums pounding.
Loki escaped to the library first chance he got, but even there he found it difficult to focus. The librarian rummaged through her desk, stamping books with a fervor that made his skull rattle. Loki found himself reading the same three lines of script over and over again until his eyes watered.
There was someone staring at him.
He could feel their eyes on the back of his head, drinking in his presence like a parched dog. He whipped around once, twice, three times—but there was only vacant air behind him. Still, Loki couldn’t shake the feeling.
Find me.
He woke to heaving darkness and silent screams, flinging his pillow into the wall in a frantic act of defense. The torch had gone out. He fumbled for it, nearly knocking it over in his panic. There was something there, someone there, they were watching him— he could feel them there!
The flame cast shadows across an empty room.
Loki collapsed against his bed, panting. Someone had been there. Even if they weren’t there now, someone had been there. He eyed the door leading to the sitting room, shut as tight as he had left it upon going to sleep. Had someone used that door? Was that how they had made their escape? He could check, but …
What if it was waiting for him on the other side?
The maid found him in the morning, hunched over and sleeping in the chair at the foot of his bed, a still-flickering torch at his side and a dagger clutched in his fist. His sputtering explanations sounded like nonsense, even to him. Loki had to laugh at himself—when had he last allowed himself to be so wound up by a nightmare? His brother would have a field day if he knew of it. The whole thing was ridiculous. Loki resolved to put it behind him.
Whispers followed him through the empty halls and into the library, tickling the hairs on his neck with their incoherency. He forced himself to ignore them. They weren’t real, just some lingering disquiet from the night before. It was nothing.
It was nothing.
Someone had spilled ink on his notebook. Loki frowned at the scarlet stain on the corner of the page, wondering how he hadn’t noticed it before. It wasn’t his doing—red ink was a rarity, and Loki certainly wouldn’t waste it on his study notes. Although he was at a loss for who else could be the culprit. Could someone passing by his table have, whether by accident or on purpose, dropped it on his paper? Loki wasn’t sure how that made any sense, but he couldn’t fathom another explanation. He turned the page and kept on working.
His head hurt. At the feast, the air seemed to be vibrating at a frequency too high for his brain to manage. Odin stood and gave a rousing speech of victory long held, of children saved and peace sustained by the battles of a thousand years ago.
“Stripped of their powers, the Frost Giants are rendered incapable of expanding their bloody conquest. Today we celebrate their defeat and mourn those we lost to their violent deeds.”
Loki clapped along to the hall’s riotous applause, but spent dinner picking at his food out of a sense of propriety rather than actual hunger, resisting the urge to press his hands to his ears like a petulant child. He managed for perhaps half an hour before he could take no more of it and asked his mother to be excused. Queen Frigga held him in a look of concern for a moment before acquiescing.
His dream that night was vivid, violent, one that seemed to slice through the very tendrils of his memory and left him gasping on his bedroom floor, struggling against a tangled noose of sheets and blankets. And there was that breath again, that little gasp of air against the top of his spine.
Find me.
“Who?” he shouted at the darkness, voice rough and thick with tears. “Who are you?”
But the darkness held no response.
He asked the healers if they had anything to induce sleep. Deep, dreamless sleep, free of torment and paranoia. That would fix everything. He was certain of it.
Lady Eir raised an eyebrow. “Are you having nightmares, my prince?”
Loki inhaled. “Something along those lines.” He forced what was supposed to be an easy smile to distract from the childishness of his confession.
“And what are these nightmares about?” she asked.
“I—I’m not sure. I don’t remember most of them.” He hoped that would be enough, but Lady Eir only sat back expectantly. Loki sighed. “Darkness? Cold? Something—” he gulped. “Something horrific.”
It had been chasing him. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it didn’t matter. It was Death, and it chased him through the cold with a venomous cackle, ice shredding his palms as he scrambled on hands and knees for an escape he knew he wouldn’t reach.
But the healer wouldn’t give him anything, not even a sleeping draught. “The Norns have seen fit to send you a message, my prince,” she said. “You should listen to what they have to say.”
Loki argued—what did the Norns have to gain by depriving him of sleep?—but she wouldn’t be moved. Eventually he had to leave for his lesson, frustrated but still determined. He’d ask his mother to petition on his behalf.
The ink spot had spread. Barely—he could almost convince himself that it looked no different, that he was merely remembering it wrong—but it had bled through to the other pages as well. That was different.
As was the swirling symbol in the middle of the stain.
Loki stared at it, the sound of his instructor’s voice fading into a nebulous drone. It seemed almost runic, although Loki had never seen a rune like it before. It was too curved, a series of looping ovals connected in the middle, like a sheaf of grain laid on the ground. A square was drawn in the middle of it. He rubbed his finger across it as if to wipe it away, blot it out and pretend it never existed. It didn’t budge.
The whispers in his ears returned, louder and clearer than ever before.
Find me.
Frigga peered at the page he had set in front of her, brow furrowing into a frown. “Loki, I don’t understand—”
“The symbol!” he insisted, pointing at the ink blot. “Are you familiar with it?”
“What symbol?”
“What symbol?” he repeated incredulously. “The one right there!”
Frigga let out an uneasy laugh. “Darling, there’s nothing there.”
“What—” Loki blanched. What could she mean? The strange character was right in front of her, clear as day. “No, right there! In the corner. How can you miss it?”
His mother was eyeing him with thinly veiled concern. “Are you feeling well, Loki?”
She reached forward as if to feel his forehead for fever. Loki flinched, twisting to avoid her hand.
“Of course I’m feeling well!” he snapped. “I’m not some crazed maniac! It’s right there!”
“Loki—”
He snatched the notebook from her desk. “Forget I asked.”
Storming out of his mother’s rooms, he nearly trampled a servant girl in his haste. She stuttered back, apologies on her lips, but Loki jerked her forward.
“Do you see that?” he demanded, thrusting the notebook in front of her. “The symbol in the corner of the page?”
The girl looked up at him with wide eyes. “N-no, my prince.”
“Don’t lie to me!” He gripped her arm and yanked her closer. “You see it, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. Loki dimly realized she was crying. “My prince, I’m sorry—”
Loki released her, watching as she scrambled away down the hall. A puff of breath rolled down his neck.
Find me.
He tried to stay up that night. He sat at his desk and read by candlelight, praying that the words on the page would protect him from the dark, creeping things that lurked beyond the veil of sleep. But the inky letters seemed to bleed red before his eyes, twisting like snakes into those enigmatic loops.
Find me.
They covered the pages, then kept going, staining the wood of his desk, gushing down his walls, drowning his vision in a scarlet filter.
Find me find me find me find me—
“Have you seen this symbol before?”
The librarian was staring at him like he was a madman. Loki knew he probably looked like a madman—he hadn’t bothered to check the mirror before setting out at the crack of dawn. Weeks of sleepless nights were taking a toll on him. The circles under his eyes had grown so dark that his brother asked him the day before who had socked him.
He tapped the paper. “Have you?”
She glanced down at the figure he had drawn for her and let out a hiss through clenched teeth. “Where have you seen this my prince?”
“Why?” Loki frowned. “Do you know it?”
“This looks to be a Jotun rune.” When she looked up again, her gaze was tinged with suspicion. “My prince—”
“Jotun?” he repeated. He hadn’t been sure what he expected, but that certainly wasn’t it. The Frost Giants … they were villains. Monstrous, horrific creatures, vanquished and trapped in the icy end corner of the Nine Realms. Why would he dream in their language?
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“Fairly. Their characters tend to be written in more of a curved fashion, as you see here.” The librarian followed the arch with her finger. “But your highness, I must ask where you’ve seen—”
But Loki had already left.
He found it within an hour. Or, at least something similar to it. Once he knew what he was searching for, it was straightforward enough. It was in a tome of Jotun language, denoting only the most archaic of characters. This one was missing the square, but it was as close as anything he could find. A regional symbol used only by a local few. It held many translations, but the most common was simple: mother.
All at once, Loki felt as though he might be sick. When he looked down again, he saw that someone had drawn the rune again in the corner of the page, angry red on the page.
Find me.
Find me.
Find me.
“Brother, where were you?” Thor clapped him on the back, an affectionate gesture that still sent him stumbling. “You missed the first day of competition!”
“Oh.” Loki ached in a way he hadn’t words to explain. The whispers writhed behind him.
“Father sent someone looking, but we ended up having to start without you.” Thor dragged him forward, arm around his shoulder. “Mother wants to see you—she was worried, you should talk to her …”
Mother.
Vega.
Loki jumped, whipping around, but of course no one was there.
“What’s wrong?” Thor frowned.
Loki didn’t say anything, didn’t bother to ask if his brother had heard the disembodied voice because he already knew the answer.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Did you say Mother wanted to see me?”
“You’ve not been well, Loki,” said Frigga. They walked side by side through the palace gardens, a sea of autumn’s faded reds and oranges littering the brick paths. She studied him with concern, but Loki wasn’t listening. He tensed at the wind moaning through the skeletal branches, clear enough to be a voice of its own.
“You’re suffering,” she continued. “Your father and I, we both see it. Thor as well. What ails you, my son? What is it that—”
“Vega,” he interrupts. He was sure he’s never spoken it before, but the name felt familiar on his tongue. “Does that name mean anything to you? Vega?”
His mother frowned. “No. Should it?”
Loki stared at the ground, at the leaves swirling gentle curves in the wind as if transcribing invisible messages in the air itself.
Find me.
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
Vega was a common name on Jotunheim, he found. It’s meaning was simple: to fight, to kill, to slay—fitting, for a Frost Giant woman. But as popular as it was, it didn’t seem to be the name of anyone important. No king would let his daughter share a name with half the commoners under his rule, and as a result there were no Vega’s kept in official record books.
Loki sighed, pressing his hands to his temples. Across the room, the librarian was glaring at him—she didn’t seem to trust him since he first brought her his question. Or perhaps she never trusted him, and his interest in Jotun culture merely gave her a reason to show it.
Find me.
“I’m trying,” he muttered.
“My prince!” He jumped to find a servant staring down at him. “My prince, the King requests your presence.”
Odin didn’t even turn away from his writing at the desk when he walked in. Loki stood in the doorway, clutching his wrist because he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands.
“You summoned me, sir?”
His father beckoned to the seat across from him. “Sit down.”
Loki followed the order. Odin kept writing. “Your mother worries that you are ill.”
Ah. His mother was behind this little meeting. That made more sense.
“I’m fine, sir.” Loki inhaled. “I just haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Oh?” Odin dipped his quill into the inkwell. “Is there a reason?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
Only then did his father stop to look up at him. “You can lie better than that.”
He waited. Loki stared at the desk.
“I hear you’ve taken an interest in Jotunheim,” Odin continued. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with why you can’t sleep, now would it?”
Norns help me. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.
“Why?” his father paused, eyebrows raised. “Should you be?”
Loki was silent.
Odin shook his head. “Go see Lady Eir. Get a sleeping draught. I won’t have my sons wasting away in their own beds.”
“I already tried that,” he muttered. “She wouldn’t give me one.”
“Wouldn’t give you one?” His father frowned.
“No, she said—” Only then Loki realized he had said too much—Odin was staring at him with the AllFather’s intensity—but it was too late to go back now. He sighed. “She said that the Norns were sending me a message and that I needed to listen.”
“So it’s dreams then?”
Loki wanted to hit himself. Surely, Thor wasn’t tormented by nightmares to the point of illness. And surely, his father was well aware of that that. But still, he nodded.
“About Jotunheim?”
He shrugged, still looking away. “I don’t know.”
Odin was studying him with a strange look. For a moment, it looked as though he might say something, but then he corked the inkwell.
“I’ll have Lady Eir send you something to help you sleep,” he said. “Tonight. I’ve had enough of this nonsense.”
Loki nodded. His mouth tasted like blood. “Yes, sir.”
When the healer’s apprentice came to drop the sleeping draught off at his room that night, Loki listened to her instructions. He smiled, princely as can be, and thanked her profusely. Then he marched into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. The mirror was covered with red runes—six looping ovals tied together like a sheave of wheat, a perfect square in the middle.
Find me, they whispered. Vega. Find me.
“How?” he asked, speaking to the ceiling. “Where? Where do I look?”
Find me.
Loki turned and froze.
There was a girl in his mirror. A Jotun girl, tall and slender, with ruby eyes and thick raven braids cascading down her bare shoulders. The front of her dress was ripped and drenched in blood; shredded flesh tangled with the fabric. She smiled, bearing crimson-stained fangs.
Loki couldn’t move. His pulse pounded in his eardrums. It seemed his tongue had turned to a desert.
He swallowed. “Vega?”
She smiled wider. Her eyes were glossy. She reached out, as if to touch his face, but her fingers only brushed against the wrong side of the glass.
“Who are you?” he croaked. “What do you want from me?”
Vega frowned. She pressed two fingers to her chest, that grisly cavern of flesh and blood, before pulling them away, soaked in red. Loki flinched.
She dragged her fingers across the mirror, a gory piece of art. First she painted the sheaf, the mother symbol he had read in the book. Then she painted the square in the middle, the mirror squeaking as smeared her blood to color it in. Finished, she tapped the rune with a satisfied smile.
“I don’t know what that means,” he pleaded. His heart was beating so fast that he could no longer feel it. “Is it mother?”
She tilted her head and tapped the glass again.
Loki opened his mouth—
But she was gone. There was another person in the mirror now—a boy. A Jotun boy, his hair slicked back with grease, Vega’s markings marring his face. He stared at Loki in confusion.
Loki stuttered. “Who—”
The boy’s lips moved at the same time as Loki’s. Loki froze. So did the boy. All at once, he realized that the boy was wearing his clothes.
Loki looked down at his hands and screamed.
They told him his mother found him on the bathroom floor, shaking and sobbing and completely incoherent. They told him that he was fine, that he had likely experienced some kind of psychotic break due to stress and lack of sleep. They didn’t say if his skin was blue when they found him. Loki was afraid to ask.
Thor came to visit while they still had him bedridden—watching him for “returning symptoms” they said, but Loki knew it was because he was crazy. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing his brilliant older brother, but Thor said nothing about his current state. He babbled on about the festival, the games, the competitions he’d won, the competitors he’d beaten.
“You should have seen it, Loki!” he grinned. “This man from Vanaheim—he was bigger than Volstagg, just towering over everyone! They all said I couldn’t win against him, but I had him on the ground in less than a minute—”
Loki nodded, hanging on to his brother’s every word. Thor’s mindless conversation wasn’t exactly interesting, but his voice was louder than the whispers, so Loki clung to it.
“It’s a shame that you’ve missed practically the whole thing,” he said sadly. “But Lady Eir says that you should be able to attend the final night, as long as everything stays as it is. I hope it does, brother—you must be there for the final feast! It’s going to be the greatest celebration Asgard’s ever laid eyes on.”
“Is it?” Loki murmured.
“Yes, of course! Would I lie to you?” he laughed. “I’m trying to convince Father to let us bring out the Casket of Ancient Winters at the end and hold it up for all to see.”
The thought of his brother wielding the ancient source of Jotun power was enough to pull a laugh from his throat.
“You can’t hold the Casket,” he scoffed. “You’ll turn to ice!”
“Not with our hands, obviously,” Thor snorted. “I mean to hoist it above the crowd, on a platform or something of that sort.”
“Why?”
“Because!” Thor cried, jumping to his feet in excitement. “What greater symbol is there of Asgard’s victory? It’s the source of all their strength, the motherload of their power, and we took it from them! I think that merits a celebration, don’t you?”
The motherload of their power.
A sheaf of wheat for mother. A square for ... for …
For what was the Casket of Ancient Winters if not the mother of winter?
“Loki?” Thor was peering down at him, eyes awash with thinly veiled panic. “Loki, what happened? Are you all right?”
Loki forced a smile. “Oh yes, I’m fine,” he said. “What was it you were saying?”
Odin’s vault was never left undefended, but the guards didn’t question him when he told them he required access. At the end of the hall, the blue light flickered like a flame.
When he and Thor were little, their heads were filled with stories of the Casket, how it leveled whole armies of him with a command from its wielder, how a single touch could turn flesh and bone into ice, how it would spread through your body in minutes unless you had the forethought to chop off the offending limb. It was dangerous, but a thrilling kind of danger, the kind that seems too wild to exist outside of a child’s imagination. But here, standing alone before it for the first time, Loki believed every single one of them.
And yet, he knew it couldn’t hurt him.
It was cold, colder than anything he had ever touched before—that much was clear before he had even brought his shaking hands all the way to its side. He closed his eyes and closed his fingers around it …
The castle is on fire. The light flickers behind her, angry and wild as tongues of flame howl at the night sky, but Vega doesn’t dare to look. Gasping for breath in the frosted paradise that had so quickly turned to a hellscape, she clutches the baby to her breast and prays to the Norns, or whoever else is listening.
He must live. Please, he must live.
The sword at her hip is not her own. Vega lifted it from a corpse before she ran. It’s bloodied and dull from battle, and it clearly hadn’t served its master very well, but it’s all she has. The courtyard is littered with bodies, and she finds herself grateful—grateful for the wild shadows that mask the faces of warriors she might have recognized from youth, and more grateful still for her son’s infancy. He will not remember this night.
The temple is not far. She pushes on, stumbling on rocks and snow and corpses but never stopping. The cries of battle still ring in her ears. The death shrieks grow with the flames.
Will the temple bring safety? Vega doesn’t know. Across Jotunheim, it is known that to spill blood on sacred ground is to bring a curse upon your lineage. The temples serve as sanctuaries, safe havens from the violence of war. But the men burning Utgard are not Jotun. The barbarity of the Asgardian warrior seemingly knows no bounds. Would Odin’s troops respect the temple’s sanctity? She had heard stories, violent stories of Jotun women and children massacred even after they surrendered to Asgardian forces. Vega clings to the infant tighter. She’ll not let that happen. They will not take her child from her today.
He’s a good baby. All this violence, all this destruction, and he sleeps peacefully against her chest. She can feel his little heartbeat through the thin furs. They told her that he was too small, that he would not live to see a sunrise, but he had more of his father in him than the royal midwives were willing to admit, and he fought. Fought the elements, fought the fever, fought the strings of fate itself, and he survived.
And now she must fight for him.
She is calling him Lopt. For now. Laufey hasn’t been able to pick an official name, because of the war—she wonders if her lover even knows he is now father to a son. But she likes Lopt. It’s soft, light and airy. Sweet. Safe. She doesn’t think Laufey will disagree. If he’s still here to disagree.
There’s the temple, just ahead of her now. Vega cries out before she can stop herself, a visceral sob of relief. She drags herself up the carved steps and rushes to the altar.
Maybe they would survive this after all. Her, Lopt, and Laufey. Vega imagines the look that will be on his face when she places their child in his arms.
“My lord, your son.”
Lopt is his first son. A bastard son, but still the first. Laufey isn’t concerned with the baby’s legitimacy any more than she is—Vega remembers how he kissed her when she first told him she was carrying his child.
“He’ll have his mother’s eyes.”
The sound of footsteps stuns her from her thoughts—footsteps, and now voices, reverberating against the ice. Foreign voices, accents that she doesn’t want to recognize. Her own blood runs cold in her veins.
There’s two of them—one giving orders to the other in a tone that couldn’t help but command respect. She can see their forms, silhouetted against the night’s fire-streaked sky. Even from here, she can see that the commander wears a horned helm.
Odin.
He’s walking towards the altar, towards them. She ducks behind it, clutching Lopt to her chest in a vice-grip. Even now he doesn’t cry. He looks up at her sleepily, his ruby eyes soft and trusting. Vega inhales. Tears burn in her own eyes—when she blinks, they trickle out, leaving hot, shameful trails down the sides of her cheeks. The king of Asgard, here. If he knew how close he was to possessing Laufey’s only son …
No.
He’ll not have him. He’ll not have her baby. Vega presses a kiss to her son’s forehead.
“You must stay quiet, little Lo,” she whispers. He doesn’t say anything as she tucks him into the basket below the altar.
The voices have stopped. The soldier has left. Only Odin remains. His steps are slow, measured, pacing the length of the room as if examining every foot of it. She waits with bated breath, tread following steady tread, until all at once they stop.
“I see you there.”
His voice is gravelly. Vega’s breath catches in her throat. Gripping the hilt at her waist, she stands.
The self-proclaimed AllFather is wounded. An angry socket glares from where his left eye should be, the rest of his face caked in blood. Good. She has the advantage.
“The battle is over. Your people have surrendered.” He takes a step forward, his voice even and measured. “Best to join the others.”
Vega draws. “Stay away from me.”
His laugh comes out in a puff of air. “You’ve lost, girl.” He takes another step forward, gloved hand at the hilt at his own waist. “Don’t do something stupid.”
“I could warn you of the same.”
She doesn’t know who moves first. There’s only the clash of steel, resounding against the chamber walls. Her sword is weak, but her arms are strong, and she beats him back across the room, away from where her baby hides. Call me girl, does he? Vega is the only daughter in a family of brothers, and her time with them taught her well. This Asgardian ass shouldn’t have underestimated her.
He is blocking her well enough, but he’s blind to one side, and Vega has every intention of utilizing that advantage. She swipes him from the left, and although the sword is too blunt to cut very deep, the force is enough to send him reeling backwards.
She advances on him, a wild, feral thing with flames in her eyes. She’s going to kill him. This barbaric, tyrannical excuse for a king—she’s going to kill him. She will save her son, avenge her people, end this war, all in one stroke—
“Your Majesty!”
Vega barely has enough time to glance up before the dagger buries itself in her shoulder. She screams, her sword slipping through her grip and clattering to the floor. The soldier who had returned for his king is running at her. She rips his blade from her flesh and slashes as this throat. He falls, his body seizing as he gurgles on his own blood.
Suddenly there’s a blade, a different blade, bursting from her chest.
Vega can only choke before she joins the Asgardian on the floor.
Odin rips the sword from her back, ignoring her shriek of pain. He walks around her, those same slow, measured steps as he stoops to check the soldier’s pulse. On the stone, Vega gags. She can’t seem to get enough air.
A baby’s wail breaks through the silence of the temple. Odin straightens, eyes towards the altar.
No.
Vega screams as he walks from her, sounds without words as she tries to drag herself to her infant.
Not him, Norns have mercy, not him!
When the Asgardian King returns, he cradles her child in his arms. Lopt’s cries echo across the temple walls, piercing the dark of the night.
“No!” she howls. The taste of blood floods her tongue. He’ll kill him. He’ll kill him. But her limbs are stone, her life force draining out on the frozen rock around her. She can’t reach her sword.
Odin looks at her, his face concealed by shadow. The light is fading.
She gasps. The sound is rough and ragged. “Lo!”
But it’s too late. The last she knows of the world is the sound of her baby’s panicked squalls, clutched in the arms of her killer …
Loki was ripped from the vision by a hand at his collar, crashing against the smooth stone of the vault floor. The casket tumbled down beside him.
“Are you mad?” Odin bellowed.
On the floor, Loki clawed at his breastplate, half expecting to find a sword erupting from his own chest.
“You—I—” he heaved, gasping for words, for anything. “You—you killed her!”
A kind of realization seemed to dawn on the King’s features. His brow softened, taking a
slow, measured
step forward. “Loki—”
Loki scrambled backwards on the ground, his limbs shaking too much to stand. “Stay away from me!”
Odin stopped in his tracks. He gave a defeated nod. “Very well.”
Loki didn’t know how long they sat there. He didn’t know anything anymore. He just clung to his knees and sobbed.
How could this be? How could this happen to him? Did they know? Did they all know? Did Thor, did mother? Was that why they treated him differently? Was that why they hated him? But why was he here for them to hate? Why had he been taken? Ripped from the basket in which he had been stowed, where he had been safe, while outside—
“You killed her,” he whispered. “You killed my—” No, he couldn’t say the word, couldn’t comprehend it. The world was spinning too fast and there was nothing for him to hang on to.
He wanted his father to deny it. Tell him that he was mad. Tell him that none of it was true. But Odin’s voice was even, somber.
“Yes, I did.” He heaved a breath, sitting down on the platform. “She attacked me, and she killed my squire. If not for him, she would have killed me too.” The King sighed again. Loki had never known him to look so old. “I didn’t realize what it was she was defending.”
It.
Loki stared at his hands. Most of the color had faded from his skin, but the tips of his fingers remained stained a vibrant blue.
It hurt.
Everything hurt.
“Why?” was all he could gasp.
“Why?” Odin laughed, but the sound held no humor. “I had just orphaned a child. You think I’d leave you to die as well?”
I wish you did.
“But—” Loki drew a shaky breath. He hated it. He hated his tears, hated the sound of his own voice. He hated everything. “Why did you take me? Why couldn’t you leave me there with—” his voice caught in his throat “—them?”
Why did you have to lie?
“Loki,” he sighed, shaking his head. “What happened—it doesn’t matter now. You are my son, and I love you as such.”
The blue had nearly gone now. Only the faintest bit remained, small enough to be overlooked by the everyday passerby, but Loki knew it was there. There were other questions he could ask, but his tongue felt like lead.
“I know the first part is a lie,” he whispered. “So why should I believe the second?”
He stood. His legs trembled, but he was steady enough. Odin said nothing. He only watched as the stolen son walked from the vault.
For hours they knocked at his door—Frigga, Thor, Frigga, Fandral, Sif, Frigga, a servant, a different servant, Frigga, and Frigga again. Oh, how he wanted to open the door to Frigga. She stood out there, crying, begging him to talk to her, and Loki wanted nothing more than to fall into her arms and let her tell him everything would be just fine. He wanted to cry into her shoulder and call her mother and believe her lies.
Because that’s all it would be. Frigga had known. He could lay there and wonder about all the others, but Frigga had known. That was certain. She had known he wasn’t hers. And yet there she had stood, all his life, kissing his head and calling him son.
I love you as such.
You could lie better than that.
Although perhaps that wasn’t fair. Because they had lied, constantly, perpetually, unceasingly, and he had believed it all.
When the whispers returned, it was a comfort. Loki followed them to the bathroom, to the mirror, where she waited for him on the other side.
“It was a lie,” he breathed, hating the way his voice broke. “It was all a lie.”
Vega frowned, a sad, sorrowful gaze. She reached towards him, blocked once more by the glass. Exhaling, Loki brushed his fingers against the mirror, against hers. He could almost imagine he truly felt her touch.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” he murmured, watching the way his breath fogged up the glass. The tears were hot on his cheeks. “I don’t know what to do.”
She pressed her hand to her chest.
Lopt. My Lopt.
Had he once feared the puff of breath at his ear? How could that have been? It felt like a lullaby, soft and sweet and safe. Loki exhaled. It felt like release.
“What would you have me do?” he asked.
Softly, sweetly, his mother bared her bloodstained fangs and grinned.