MAHOGANY ONCE AGAIN
OLIVIA’S DREAMS GREET HER WITH A FAMILIAR SIGHT. It’s the room from her first dream with Loki, still divided down the middle. Now, though, an oldish TV on a stand is resting on the line. She grins.
“Hey, you did it!” she notes, seeing Loki reading at the dining table on his side of the room. Experimentally, she tries to step onto his side of the room. Her foot makes contact with the other floor without issue. “The barrier’s gone and everything.”
“It was simpler than expected,” he replies, a bit coldly. Olivia notices that the book in his hands is one of her favorites.
“I see you picked up Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” she observes, nodding appreciatively. “Hope you don’t mind if I help myself to one of your books.” He doesn’t even bother to look up, which she takes as answer enough.
Striding over to a bookshelf, she finds that she can’t really make heads nor tails of most of the books’ titles. With that in mind, she just picks the one that sounds the easiest— A Compendium Of Elven Legends.
She reads the first tale in the book. It’s absolutely riddled with words she doesn’t recognize and references to creatures she’s never heard of. Through context clues and general tone, she manages to pick up the rough gist and enjoy it anyways.
The plot— generally— seems to be about a young elf boy in a realm called “Alfheim” who wanders into the forest and encounters a beast. The book isn’t clear as to the exact nature of the beast, but the boy treats it with reverence. His family back in his village, however, reacts to even its name with fear and a certain measure of scorn.
The boy continues returning to the forest to give the beast food and draw pictures of it, and develops a rapport with the creature. Nobody believes a word he says when he tries to tell people. Eventually, the beast asks the boy to follow it to a place with no suffering.
The story is ludicrously vague about how the beast manages to ask the boy anything. It doesn’t specifically state whether it has the ability to speak, or if it simply uses body language to communicate. Honestly, even the wording is tricky. “The beast beseeched the boy follow it” is not an immensely helpful statement.
Either way, the tale ends with the boy wandering into the fog behind this beast and vanishing forever. There is no indication as to whether they truly went someplace good, or if the beast simply killed the boy.
“Creepy,” Olivia comments approvingly to herself. She glances to the list she haphazardly scrawled of words she didn’t understand and then to Loki, wondering if he’d answer her questions.
…probably not. He seems to be in a little bit of a bad mood tonight.
She shrugs it off, turning her attention back to the book. Her eyes fixate on the words, but her mind is elsewhere.
A long moment passes.
Yeah, that’s not gonna fly.
“So… which story’s your favorite?” she inquires at last, shutting the book and turning to look curiously at Loki. He looks up from Harry Potter and spots the book in her hand.
“The third,” he responds, after a thoughtful pause. Olivia nods, but tilts her head curiously.
“How come?” she wonders. He narrows his eyes, then turns away.
“You wouldn’t understand it if I told you,” he replies dismissively. Her eyebrows fly up.
“Try me,” she fires back in challenge, watching him intently. He shakes his head, and then remains still for a moment before abruptly turning. Apparently his eagerness to prove himself right was stronger than his desire not to talk to her.
The conversation quickly spirals into a discussion about Asgardian authors and their tendency to alter foreign tales so they appeal to Asgardian readers. Inventing endings where they should be left ambiguous, dropping in unnecessary fight scenes, and changing the setting are among the more grievous changes he lists.
Thankfully, he doesn’t notice himself becoming more and more comfortable the longer he speaks. It’s nothing short of a miracle that he never realizes he’s actually treating Olivia like his equal.
It would probably embarrass him terribly if he knew.