Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To the inattentive eye, there is a kind of order and uniformity to trees--even cosmic ones.

The branches consistently flower, grow foliage, and then end from time to time; the form is, on average, recognizably similar to others of its kind. It takes a simple wisdom to recognize that trees are the epitome of chaos. A tangled mess of gnarled roots and starting places and ending places, each tree unlike the others and reliable only in its pursuit of the sun.

For Loki, ever the lover of chaos, the disorder of Yggdrasil is familiar. He is swept along the starlit wastes of the cosmos in the embrace of something as impervious to definition as himself. It is inconceivable; it is beautiful. It is Yggdrasil, the great tree connecting the realms, the living, the dead...

He is the latter. This is all part of the plan.

Two thoughts occur to a usually eloquent mind as he speeds towards an uncertain fate:

The first, That hurt.

The second, This is not like the last time.

Heimdall's last moments are a swift flaring, and his life and magic are spent. He arrives at the gates of Valhalla bearing the pain and grief of the slaughter of Asgard just moments before, bent under the load of a hundred souls, but blood must dry. This ache, like all others, dissolves. He finds he can stand upright; he is in the deeps of a dark, motionless night, at the edge of a great shaft of light pouring from the gates. Furthermore, he finds he still has his sword, and his Sight has dimmed.

Try as he might, he cannot quite see Thor.

This thought passes, and Heimdall heaves a deep sigh. The gate before him is made of woven strands of gold--swathes of growing, living gold, interlocked with ancient hilts and sheathes bearing the names of the Allfathers. He reaches out a steady hand and gives the gate a gentle nudge. It opens.

Someone arrives behind him with a thud, and then a sound of surprise.

“Loki,” Heimdall says, without turning, still peering onward into the white light.

Muffled swearing.

Loki finds his feet, and then he is beside Heimdall, perhaps establishing a record as the most disgruntled Valhalla acceptee. “Alright,” he says, gazing wide-eyed at the gates. “Suffice it to say this comes as a surprise to everyone.”

“How are they?” Heimdall asks softly.

“The living? I’m afraid I’m only a little behind you. Give them time, they’ll be joining us soon.”

“And Thor?”

Heimdall looks at Loki for the first time; he watches the marrs of death fade from the prince’s face and neck, wondering absently how Loki made his last stand—what way he, the deathless, managed to sacrifice himself, and if he felt it worth it.

“Alive,” says Loki. “I made sure of that.”

The gates open in full, and the deep thrum of Heimdall’s unquenched heart quickens a little. His vision at last adjusts to the brilliant green and blue beyond. A figure stands beyond the threshold, and with her, the spires of a city, of great shields engilded by dawn, like the Asgard of old—

“Come,” Heimdall says, his hair stirred by a breeze. “Let’s rest.”

But Loki lingers at the threshold, even now. For a moment that same breeze flutters his veil of calm and Heimdall discerns the keen longing beneath—the relief, the confusion, the wry cynicism—but then it is gone. Heimdall is reminded of Frigga.

“She waits for you.”

“And if I go in,” Loki says, in a low rush of words, “I may never leave. I did not—anticipate—Valhalla, I thought—"

“Hel?”

“Helheimr has, understandably, far more Ways back than Valhalla. After a brief excursion in the former I think I have better chances there. Willing aid, people who will prove themselves and fight, even unto a second death.”

“Back,” Heimdall echoes. A small smile, and Loki seems a little ruffled at what he interprets from Heimdall as pride. "To help Thor?"

"To kill Thanos," Loki says, as if they are somehow not the very same ends.

"You think you stand a chance against him?”

“Perhaps not. But what more can we lose?”

It is strange to see the man in the shaft of blinding sunlight; Heimdall cannot think of the last time Loki had not been half in the gloom of some spell, or that of ships and twilight halls. Like them, and perhaps time itself, the figure beyond the gate stands still. “If you’re certain," Heimdall says softly, "then my duty remains to Asgard. I'll come with you."

“I’d be understating if I said you’ve fulfilled your duty, Heimdall.” A pause, and a gleaming shift of eyes. “I doubt you will find warriors willing, but if you want to help, the best in Valhalla could put a few dents in his gauntlet.”

“And if I do?”

Loki is already moving, quickly reclaimed by the starstrewn void beyond; the darkness ebbs and flows into his hair and smothers the light of his eyes. “Then Thor is in for one hell of a surprise.”

The eyes of Valhalla gaze into the heart of night, and see its heir—son of Asgard—turn away. Frigga is moved. She who had long watched her sons in their wayfaring, and who waits twice at the opening of the glade, first for Odin and then Loki. A young man, a Midgardian whose company and conversation she has valued of late, a man with a voice like bold and lilting music, joins her at the threshold. “Was that him?”

She smiles wryly in answer. “It seems he has no intention of remaining dead after all.”

“And the war? Is that still going to happen?”

“It will do more than happen, Pietro,” Frigga raises her head in recognition as the curtains of shadow part to admit Heimdall, the sentry of eld. “It will come here.”

“To Valhalla? How?”

Heimdall bows deeply to the Queen. The three stand at the nexus of a new age; the age of Thanos, and a terror of a million souls, and the opening gates of the worlds beyond. Perhaps the very shattering of Yggdrasil.

“Your son is on his way to Hel,” Heimdall says, rising.

“Yes,” Frigga says. “So I’ve oft been told.”

Chapter Text

A ship is racing across the black expanse, overworked and overfilled with a chaos of panicked people, and at its helm is a woman who finds herself unpleasantly taken by a feeling of familiarity. She is running; it is what she thought she did best for an age, and a compelling instinct she thought she had overcome when she ran into danger just a few days prior.

Instead, Brunnhilde must sustain one more blow, and one more flight. There is no certainty that they will see any of those left behind again. Thor, with his stubborn-headed courage.

Somewhere, someone is weeping. A man is calling out to his children.

The last Valkyrie looks about her at the last of Asgard, and she grimfacedly urges the ship onward. Urges it to go faster. Wills it to go faster. It is little more than an escape pod and not meant for more than a brief excursion into space, and even now she can see its systems are failing one by one. Like Thor and the others, they will not last long.

“Well,” she says, fingers itching for a bottle but holding steadfast to the controls, “for as long as we do last…”

Just one last time, she thinks of them, behind. Dozens of Asgardians, none of them fighters except for those four, all of whom being incredibly reckless. Thor and his friends, and his brother. They will fly into the face of death--

A cold shiver passes over her. It is electric; it reminds her of a fever, of a wreath of fire, and suddenly, the world is falling away, and she wants to scream, to have escaped with so few and to lose them all the same--it must be some ill magic--the Valkyrie falls, a wave of light streaming through the vessel and beyond. As it passes some of it snags in her mind. When the screams of alarm have quieted and the light passed on, Korg and some of the Asgardians gather around Brunnhilde. She lies with her hair in a dark pool around her head.

When her eyes open, they are gold.

In a black expanse of a different sort, one grey waste of starlight and ice, and a thousand silences, a woman stands with her back to the cosmos and listens to its heartbeat. It has quickened, the pace of change has quickened, and all the days and nights have been honed to one singular battle that brews just beyond her sight.

The Ancient One sighs. She stands alone, as she did for many a century, but at present she is powerless to stand against anything; she must content herself with the keen fringe of reality, and content herself little. It is a strange comfort, then, when she feels him arrive.

Something more pleasant than dread, but only just.

A sharp wisp of a shape that obscures the stars, the man appears as if of the ice itself, and walks with an uneasy grace through the rubble, knowingly or unknowingly towards where she stands out of sight. The Ancient One long kept watch over Earth. She knows this particular figment well; it is that cataclysm of a man that wandered from planet to lawless planet, and found nothing but ruin on Earth six years prior.

“I see you filled Hela’s thankless place,” he says, and though he is still far away, the wind carries his voice softly up from the stones around her.

It’s a trick she taught the children of Kamartaj.

With little more use for shadows, the Ancient One steps out in her folds of cold light, and the dead inspect each other as he threads his way up the valley. Loki, she names him. He is not as she expected; dead men seldom are.

“You have an air of magic about you,” she says evenly. “Seidr.”

“And you are?”

The wind swirls silently around her layers of cloth and brings them eye to eye; two motes of color in a wasteland. “The Ancient One.” Master of the Mystic Arts. Sorcerer Supreme. Child of the Khallasdin.

Unsurprisingly, the man smiles, like one put to a challenge. “Ah, you’re Midgardian. Ancient is relative.”

“Ancient by human standards, then,” she says. “What little you may know of them.”

Loki finds this, too, amusing, but no smile of his can reach his eyes. Not now. All at once, she feels the touch of a dark figure on him, a life spent in a final pained gasp, and a cord around his heart stretching back to the worlds of the living. She has seen such men before. She has lost students to such men.

The deathless, or those who craft themselves as deathless.

“Unfortunately, I am not here to mingle with the frostbitten and the long-sleeping,” Loki folds his hands, almost diplomatically. “I have a certain aim in mind--namely cutting out a particular enemy’s still-beating heart, and for better or for worse saving the Universe in the process--and I wonder if you might--?”

There is a rumble in the distance, and ancient sorcerers both turn in the middle of his recruitment pitch to bear witness to a flash of light and what sounds like a far-off echo of bellows and laughter.

“Pay them no heed,” the Ancient One says softly. “They are restless.”

“Restless enough to blow a hole in Helheim.” Loki’s smile, which had faltered, is briefly renewed by a mad energy of one who recognizes kindred. “I like it. This may be less difficult than I imagined.”

“Thanos.”

He looks at her sharply. “What of him?”

“I have, quite literally, heard his name on the threads of the universe. I had wondered when he might move at last. It is him that you ride to war against, with an army of dead at your back, yes?”

“Ideally,” Loki says, wary of a ploy. “Though at present I seem to have an army of one.”

“Two.”

At this, both turn back from the flashes of light and weigh their options, few as they are. That was a promise and introduction as only the dead can give. Thinly pursed lips betray surprise and cheer, as if to say, Well, that was quick. She cannot tell if he knows what, exactly, he’s getting. Gods are often blinded.

He now needs no army.

“You will have little difficulty finding the dead,” the Ancient One says quietly. “They are all around us. They are us. You will have to coax them out, however.”

“Yes, as I recall, ghosts are a tad stricken with shyness,” Loki says, pointing to the source of the only sound for miles. “These ones have gall. We’ll start there, shall we?”

It’s not fun, not exactly. Nothing can be fun in this sunless shithole of a place. But it is something to do, something beyond remorse or even thought, and Yondu Udonta does not like to think too hard about anything right now.

It’s the Kree bastard that tried to wipe out Xandar, Ronan.

Like some Titans of old, he and the thunderous man are locked in vicious battle for all eternity—all of several months, that is, if such a thing can exist here—but neither are very sure if the other can even “die,” or if they’d want them to. Sometimes, neither man has a weapon beyond the terrain and his own bored rage. Other times, as now, they lock weapons and fire, and miss, the shrieking crack of it resounding on black cliffs. Neither can remember ever getting tired. Ronan is currently punching that boredom out of him, but another hour or so and he’ll get his hands on a blaster again, and the sorry sonofabitch will have his turn.

The Kree’s face is contorted in a toothful snarl, and Yondu—ever separated from his arrow—must fight the urge to whistle him to a second demise.

He slams him down onto the rocks.

“Gentlemen,” someone shouts, and the momentary distraction allows Yondu time enough to sink a heavy blow into Ronan’s throat. Winded and coughing, the Kree staggers back. A well aimed kick to the ribs and he goes down. Something breaks.

“Stop!”

This is a commander’s voice, a woman’s voice, and Yondu finds himself frozen to the ground.

“Release me, witch!” Ronan howls.

The cloaked woman lowers her hood, and Yondu, who had spent a lifetime among men and women honed sharp as nails, finds himself shuddering despite himself at the keen eyes and bare head. Beside her steps some scrawny jackass, smiling appraisingly.

Yondu spits. “My first edge in a week! What the hell kinda business you have sticking your nose in it?

“You said it yourself,” the man says. “Hell’s business. I am Loki, of Asgard, and I have a proposition—“

“You can take your proposition and shove it, kid."

“—regarding an escape from this place.”

Ronan fights his way into a sitting position, an unflinching contempt on his face for the indignity of it all, and locks eyes with Loki. “I have heard of you. One of Thanos’ failed henchmen.”

“You have experience in that area,” Loki says. “Care to put it to use?”

The woman, though a picture of patience, speaks over them, hand outstretched. “Be it for revenge or love, life bids you return. War comes to all worlds. They cannot fight Thanos alone.”

Yondu and Ronan glance sideways at each other, weighing—as the two before them did—the reality of their plight. Yondu’s sneer deepens. Go to war with these dead idiots? It’s something Quill would do. Yeah, the boy would be all over it. Some kind of misplaced hope for humanity or some shit like that. The greater good. Maybe just getting back at Thanos. He feels the eyes of the strangers' on him, and for the briefest of moments allows himself to imagine an eternity of this, the sheer apathy of it.

“Fine,” Yondu says. “There’s no escape from here anyway. I’d like to see you try. You coming, Kree?”

Chapter Text

Loki at last pinpoints what is so strange about the Ancient One.

Cast out, robbed of a warrior’s place in the halls of the so-called glorious dead--she seems to him to be content. Unhurried, unslighted. For as little as all realms trust Loki, he trusts the steadfastly content even less. He can recall no such feeling, recoiling in the face of it. Fabricate it, perhaps; some vague childhood memory of sleeping soundly, but in his heart of hearts, he is a storm of glacial self-reflection and unease and shapeless desires, and dust will never settle long enough for something as naive as contentment.

“Defender of your world,” Loki says, spreading his hands, “and you end up here. With what, dare I ask, did Valhalla find fault?”

The Ancient One graces him with one of her humorless smiles, which is lost almost as soon as it is formed. “The very nature of what I am. I made a...sacrifice. For what I considered, and still consider, the good of a fragile Earth.”

“The price of longevity,” he surmises. “Ah. Well, with gods are found the deepest hypocrisies. Was it worth it? Your fragile Earth?”

“Yes,” she says. “I drew power from dark. The light endures still, if falteringly, because of it. That is all I can rightly say.”

They have reached the edge of, quite literally, an abyss. In the distance, there is a plateau and something of a horizon, but nothing except a powerful spell of flight could carry them over the black. Ever-present wind has picked up, green and white cloth streaming in the wind. The blue fellow, the Kree--they are behind them, each with a gap of several paces between them as if to resist their more homicidal urges, and if Loki were not already circumstantially indestructible, he might well expect a knife in the back, or just a good shove off the edge of the cliff.

Instincts die hard. He braces for it anyway.

“What is this?”

Instead of a knife in the back, it is the grating voice of the mercenary, which is almost worse. Each time he hears it Loki wishes his ears had been spared the displeasure, army or no army.

“This,” the Ancient One says, without turning, “is where things get strange. I assume none of you are familiar with astral experiences?”

“Familiar enough to know I’m not terribly fond of them.”

“Witchcraft,” the Kree mutters. “If that is all you have to offer, do not expect my help.”

Udonta stands shiftily beyond an arm’s reach of the Ancient One, but he gives Ronan a sour glare. “Do you want to kill Thanos or not, asshole? Better for the rest of us if your murderous hide chickens out.”

Loki, despite better sense and a thousand quips on the edge of his tongue regarding their easily goaded new friends, is drawn to the very edge. The deep, silky black of it seems fills his gaze, widens his eyes. If one did not look back, or at his own feet, one might very well be in that abyssal chasm. He has fallen forever before. The years wilt. He is again on the edge of the Bifrost, his brother’s anguish growing small above him, and ahead is months of cold and the acrid taste of his own blood...

“Fella looks like he’s gonna jump,” Udonta chuckles, but he has the sharp breath of a man who is trying not to seem scared shitless.

Long, white fingers appear from the Ancient One’s swathes of sleeves, and Ronan’s lips curl. “Keep your magic, witch,” he says. “I will have none of it.”

“Very well. Come,” the Ancient One says. She gestures to Udonta, and reluctantly, he approaches. The cornered animal airs intensify.

Seeming to tear his gaze away, Loki turns back. “I’m familiar with the ways of Hel. If it’s a question of magic, my own will be sufficient.”

“What exactly are we doing?” Udonta demands. “I ain’t actually jumping.”

The Ancient One weaves patterns of the air, golden geometric shapes that wheel and pitch around the three of them like living entities. “Flying, falling,” she says absently. “The difference is a distinction in the mind.”

“The difference is that in one, you end up splattered at the bottom.”

Loki gives a low, attentive laugh. “And if there is no bottom? It’s only right to be afraid, you’re practically made of glass.”

“You really know how to sell a cause, boy.”

Boy. “I’m jumping too, am I not?”

With gritted teeth, the Kree steps into the orb of light. The four are silent, and make their way to the edge with as much dignity and self-control as they can muster. Loki indulges in one of his mad smiles; he’d be lying if he said the prospect of yet another uncertain abyss did not stir a deep terror, but he feels every particle of his being blaze with it, with life and impulse, as he did with a dagger to Thanos’ throat, with a city burning at his feet, with the unfelt touch of ice.

“If this does not culminate with me ripping Thanos’ skull from his shoulders,” Ronan growls, “I will not hesitate to kill all of you as recompense.”

The Ancient One’s hands snap outwards, sending a wave of energy swirling from them towards the darkness. “I wish you luck. You can’t kill the dead.”

“Therein lies our advantage,” Loki smirks.

They leap.

Heimdall, at last, can see no more than any other man. Perhaps less; he feels an onslaught of nearsightedness, an irony he did not know Valhalla could entertain. Part of him is passively grateful for a release, for of late all the realms have shaken with fire and water, but for all of his silent observation, it is not in Heimdall’s nature to turn away. He must see events’ course, and their end. He must know what fate is met.

He seeks audience with the Allfathers.

There is a hall, in the heart of Valhalla, where the roof is topped with interwoven shields which catch the sun and raise it in its flight. Cool marble and morning shadow are always within, and the golden rays of noon as well. There is noise, there is a chaos of feasts and revelry--Heimdall smiles, but skirts his way through them. Leagues of them. Time slips through his fingers and hitches on his lips.

“Heimdall,” Odin greets him, a touch of youth on his brow. “We heard your call to us. You did well to defend my son and the last of Asgard.”

Heimdall bows. Behind Odin is great figures in their thrones, so many as to dazzle the eye, but each commanding a respect of their own. Fierce eyes, beards braided with ivory and silver, swords resting at their right hand. Here sit the conquerors. There is even a seat for Thor, and Heimdall stifles another smile.

His king would never take it.

“I bring news of Loki,” Heimdall says.

The name rises like a fell breeze, carrying news of bittersweet things, colder things. In these halls, it has a certain potency, an infamy, of one who is expected but never welcomed in. Someone just outside.

“He breaks his mother’s heart by refusing our offer,” one of the Allfathers says. Heimdall recognizes it to be Bor. He looks as hewn from stone as once did the olden statues on Asgard. “I cannot fathom the boy’s capacity for such grave foolishness.”

Frigga sweeps into the throne room with exquisite timing. She has shedded her attendants and the Midgardian that she seems to have taken under her wing; she stands before the Allfathers with a powerfully expectant look.

“Allmother,” Odin says.

“I would have you know for what purpose your son turns away.”

When it is clear she waits for Heimdall to say his piece, he stands at full height and encompasses all of them in his gaze.

Loki’s plan, as ever, strikes of a note of discord into the great hall upon its explanation. There are few among them with patience for a wayward Odinson, but Odin himself is silent, and it is now him that Heimdall watches for a sign. The old king’s single eye shines overbright. It then falls to Frigga.

“This is not the nature of things,” Odin says, at last. Perhaps to her alone. “For the dead to swear oaths to each other and war with the living. Why does he do this?”

It is not for anyone to say, for sure, why the man does anything. Easier to make summative statements; to water down his character. Why? Heimdall thinks of Loki’s revenge, his vision of defeating Thanos.

“For Thor.”

Pietro Maximoff, even in death, is fast as hell. Which makes him an excellent eavesdropper, though when at it here, when every door and stairwell speaks of ancient power, he feels a child. This is maybe why the Queen and others have taken to him. A child. Being a fully grown human indoctrinated in both war and all manner of things which age a man, he does not like it, but he likes the company, and he is seldom lonely.

When Heimdall emerges from audience with the old men, Pietro is waiting.

The man is statuesque, somehow reminding Pietro of some kind of army sergeant or gladiator. He is duly intimidated, though he would never admit it.

“I’m going,” Pietro says. I want to see my sister. “I want to fight.”

He assumes the gladiator chap is about to dismiss him gently, or tell him that it is for warriors to decide such things, and so he all but vanishes and returns with a dagger in his hands, brandishing it with a grin, hilt-first.

“Where did you get that?”

“From the belt of that tall guy with the sideways horns,” Pietro says. “Let’s just say I’m really quick on my feet.”

Heimdall’s lips thin. “You just stole the dagger of Buri.”

“Does that mean I’m in?”

Chapter Text

Brunnhilde wakes to find that some of the systems have stabilized, though the oxygen levels are still plummeting steadily. And she can’t exactly tell everyone to hold their breath.

Oh. Spinning before her eyes, also, are the Realms. All the realms.

With a warrior’s instincts, she surges to her feet, drawing her sword—

The forests of Vanaheim are burning—a girl runs with glenflowers in her hair, the edges of her dress are smoldering, the fibers blackening—

A man leaves his bed for the last time and looks out of a window, a drop of rain races down the glass, it is Midgard—machines are roaring down the streets—a weapon fires—a drum, and a new king—

The forge of the dwarves is dark—

Four figures step to the edge of an abyss, and leap, their bodies left behind—

She manages to shake it, or just inadvertently hits her head hard enough against one of the panels of the ship. This is, crudely put, fucking weird. Though the stream of visions stop, she can hardly call them visions—she sees through the ship and the stars, she sees through space itself. These are not figments of things that might be, or have been. They are happening now.

“You alright, miss?”

It’s Korg, the sentient rock man. The Valkyrie has herself wedged against one of the walls in the control room, sword drawn, the Asgardians and escaped Sakaarans keeping a radius of several feet from her.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Totally fine. I just got hit by some magic or something. Nothing to worry about.”

But no one believes her. Her expression is hollow, her eyes remaining a faintly glinting gold. Brunnhilde takes a deep gulp of air to steady herself. This is like the worst hangover she has ever experienced, amplified a thousand times stronger still, colder and deeper in her mind than pain.

“How many are on here?”

Of course, the unspoken question is, How many left?

“Several score,” a woman says, and the Valkyrie finds herself fascinated by the trickle of blood from her lip, its meandering path—what the hell is wrong with her, and the sheer overwhelming clarity of all things?

Their fragmented words rush over her ears, all of their whispers and unconscious fears, their attentions fixed as much to her eyes as to their impending end. Among them, repeated, are the words Heimdall and Bifrost, and an awful certainty settles in her gut.

“Where do we go? They might be following us.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“We might,” Brunnhilde raises her voice over them, over the lingering panic, and a relative hush falls. She is an anachronism to them, some kind of ghost. A Valkyrie when all were destroyed a millennia ago. They are all children, and she is as lost as them, but in their eyes is a need that she must fill or squander half of their people’s sacrifice.

“We might die, yeah. There’s a good eighty or ninety of us here, I’d wager, and if any of the other escape pods were used, maybe a few hundred escaped. But truth be told, we’re in a vacuum, and we’ve no provisions except what’s on us. The air is running low. Not much time is left.”

The murmurs are renewed, rolling out from her in a wave.

“Tell you what, though,” she forges on, “we’re not going to take it lying down, not after what’s just happened. Do you hear that, Asgardians? Not a single person here is going to or—or they’ll have me to contend with. We’ve got to send out a distress signal, on all channels.”

The Sight.

Shapes flicker on the edge of her vision, and Brunnhilde forces them out of her mind. Whatever the hell that was, it’s not helping anyone right now, certainly not these people, they’re frightened as it is—

There are worlds not far away. Worlds you can see.

“Korg,” she says, “send the signal, would you? Refugees, ship attacked, and so on.”

When they draw away from her, Brunnhilde sheaths the sword and presses her back against the wall. There is a throbbing in her head, behind her eyes. The dark forge, the girl with the flowers, images running together into a reality, a single moment. She knows what this is, though she knows not how it came to be, and she hates it. She hates that it has to be her.

She knows what it means, too.

Heimdall, the watchman, is dead. Which can only mean Thor is dead, and his stupid brother, and Banner, and all of them, damn them—

Brunnhilde jaw clenches, and her fists with it. This is not how she ends.

Willingly or unwillingly, she will never be sure, the Valkyrie opens her eyes and her mind and looks beyond the thin walls of the vessel, into the dark, into the realms, and she sees.

A planet—they are nearing a broken planet, close enough to land, maybe a jump away—pillars of ice and caverns. Old malice.

Jotunheim.

The Ancient One feels her body, which is already a mere shade, fall at the edge of the cliff. Her soul sails outwards and downwards, and she has just enough time to see that her allies of the moment are with her and her magic has run its course.

Where they tread now, few return.

Ronan knows the workings of ill magic as well as any. He has seen it, felt its ruin, and watched the children of Thanos, the Black Order in particular, in their work. He, who has massacred in the name of the Titan, could never quite stomach such unnatural shifts in the substance of reality.

This is far worse. He is falling, too self-contained to scream but screaming nonetheless. If this is where they find their dead warriors, he would rather face Thanos alone.

Disembodied, Yondu finds himself light as air and hurtling through the black. He is swearing at high speed, curses directed mostly at the sorceress chick and her greasy friend and whatever conspiracy they’re running. He wonders in a momentum-fueled haze whether it would have been worse to just keep sparring with the Kree for all of time. Probably.

Loki feels himself dissolve. While first he panics, he thinks of the ship, and Thor’s silent scream, and the hand around his neck. Again it is the sharp blossom of pain at the base of his neck, and then nothing.

All at once it is a relief to dissolve.

“Though we are of and among them,” the Ancient One’s voice is both a roar and a whisper in his ears, “the dead may try to overtake your mind. They’ve slept longer than us and forgotten much. We must remind them.”

“I anticipate they won’t like that.”

Though their astral forms seem to be falling—some fool is screaming curses, somewhere close by—Loki perceives that they are neither falling, nor moving at all. They are buried deep. Drowning, rather. They might as well have been entombed by the pupil of some great eye.

He looks for the dead, and he finds them. Or they find him.

There are billions, and touching each soul is to be cut to the bone.

Dust. Motes of dust swirl in the light.

What passes for music plays with tinny abandon from some device nearby—the word rises in his mind as if from great depth. Radio. A Midgardian invention. He returns to himself slowly, and the first thing to arrive is cynicism, his mouth twisting in recognition of one of the many places in the universe that he might well be throttled for a second time. Earth.

“English breakfast alright?”

Bizarrely, after weeks of being hurtled from one crisis to another, Loki is sitting at a table in what must be a kitchen judging by the herbs and assorted pans hanging from the wall. It is not unpleasant; something is cooking on a tiny stove, and a kettle is boiling. He feels out of place. The turn of phrase escapes him: a knife in a nursery, or something like that.

“Ah,” Loki says. “So those not allotted everlasting battles get...domestic bliss?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

No, he’s getting slow, or his senses are numbed by the shock. This is not Midgard, or at least not the one he had so sagely invaded a few years prior—this is a younger time. The whirr of their mechanized progress is not yet as loud in his head.

That may just be because it is an illusion. The illusory god can recognize such handiwork.

His host’s back is to him. He gleans what he can of her from her offer of what appears to be tea, and her turned back. The muted sound of traffic, being so inexplicably ordinary, sets his teeth on edge.

“I know who you are,” she says. Not an American.

“I wish I could say the same. All I’ve got is that, for one, you are somewhat recently deceased, and for another, probably either peacefully or dishonorably.”

She turns, two steaming cups in her hand. A bright smattering of color that humans are so fond of is evident on her lips, but it belies an even mouth and calmly intelligent eyes. “For a Norse deity notorious for his articulate charm, I would think you might manage introductions a little better.”

Loki allows himself a sip of tea, and it isn't half bad, though the knowledge that the warmth of it on his palm is not real sets a strange ache in his throat. His fingers whiten in their grip. He dealt in illusions, lived in them, but they were always a choice.

“I’ll try again, shall I? Whose eternal home do I have the pleasure of falling into?”

“You may call me Miss Carter,” she says. “Agent Carter, if you have those where you come from. Under other circumstances, I don’t think we’d get along, but you seemed so clueless I couldn’t help myself.”

“Do you intend to try to consume my mind or something of that sort?”

“I won’t be consuming anything. I had thought you might hold a decent conversation,” she mirrors the sip, gesturing at the grey light and the vague world rushing by outside the window. “Not all of us meet our deaths on battlefields. Even if we lived on them.”

Loki gives her a pale-eyed stare, absently swirling the tea and then setting it down on the table. Interesting. His knowledge of Midgardian women is confined to their scientists and spies; this is the first soldier.

“Tell me about yourself,” Carter says. “Seems like something ghosts ought to be good at.”

Ah. When was the last time someone had made such a request?

I, Loki, Prince of Asgard...Odinson...The rightful King of Jotunheim, God of Mischief...

With the slightest of shivers, Loki searches for something reasonably concise and palatable to what seems to be a human of a bygone era. “Gloriously ignoble, but probably not entirely awful when it comes down to it. Erstwhile King of—several places.” He thinks for a moment, admittedly still somewhat delirious from disembodiment and then a tremendous fall. “I rather like the color green.”

Raised eyebrows, and the smudged lips part slowly and genuinely.

“That’s a new one. Quite Shakespearean. We definitely wouldn’t get along, Your Highness, but I’m sure our contention would be the height of comedy.”

The silence stretches between them. It’s not unwelcome, and threatens to spill into something interminable. Loki feels his time slipping away. Is this woman really going to help defeat Thanos? Might his search not be better spent elsewhere?

If he has learned anything from their precious New York, it is not to underestimate the sheer, blasted grit of these people. They may be mayflies, but they can damn well bite.

“When the time comes, would you take up arms," Loki asks, "for one final battle?”

This sparks a gleam in her eyes. Not just a soldier, he thinks. A commander.

“Unquestionably,” she says.

The next one hurts.

Not simply because it’s Laufey, dredging up all manner of buried rage and despair, but because the Frost Giant actually drives a spear of ice into and clean through Loki's side.

Chapter Text

Deep in the darkest heart of Helheimr, a woman stirs. She is formless; Asgard is in ruins, scattered and irreparably broken, and thus, so is she. In some ways she is more intimately connected to the stones and the people of the world than was any of its much-hailed kings and Allfathers. She sleeps in rage and spite, and something like pity for them all—they were fools, and blind to her vision. She of formless thought thinks all of this and sighs.

Hela has not even the wasteland of Hel to preside over. Another has taken up the watch, if not the guardianship; a being of strength and power not unlike herself, but unquestionably the weaker.

While she cannot, yet, conquer the long death she is goddess of, Hela resolves to make it hell for the Ancient One.

Let her try and pass unseen through the depths of Helheimr.

The Ancient One knows she has collided with a similarly ancient entity when it tries to snap her astral form from her body. This is, of course, a gross miscalculation. She feels the wind stir the cold dust of the cliffside, far above or below, wherever her body is. She knows that she is not alone; something massive and very much corporeal approaches the four motionless figures of herself, Loki, and their two willing accomplices. Very likely intending to push them off of the edge.

First, of course, she must deal with this entity.

“What kind of nerve,” hisses a most certainly pissed off demoness, with a kind of drab amusement, “must you have, that you think you can usurp my place?”

“I think nothing,” the Ancient One says, and the voice manifests in front of her as a cruelly beautiful shape of sharp black and green, and a—well, very impractical helmet. “I only know my bounds, and that you are overcome.”

“Oh, you will find I have life enough,” Hela says, and they stand eye to eye. “I see you have thrown in your lot with Odin’s war trophy.”

The Ancient One circles her, lowering her hood once more. “I thought he lacked honor almost intolerably, but now, by comparison, he seems pleasant.” She raises her hands, light dimmed by the shifting swathes of shadow that Hela carries on her person.

“Draw on your magic, bitch,” Hela laughs, her teeth bared. “It will do you no good.”

The Allfathers expressly forbid that Heimdall lead warriors from their deaths unto a second, and far more lasting, destruction. Privately, he can think of no greater an appeal to the Asgardian spirit, and the popular unslakable lust for what is deemed by the powers to be justice. He can also think of no greater betrayal—sworn to the throne of Asgard, and now to disobey all of them in mad pursuit of an army to lead with the dishonored Odinson against Thanos.

So, of course, he and Frigga begin at once.

The Warriors Three are in the midst of some reenactment of a past victory, Fandral being bowled over by a pike by Volstagg. To them, they make no mention of Loki, though he is perhaps implicit in the call to arms; it is the news of Thor, and the destruction of Asgard, that rouses them.

“And Hela?” Hogun asks. “What of the sorceress?”

“Destroyed, with the realm,” Heimdall says, and Frigga’s expression is unreadable. “Though I hold out hope that the people of Asgard endure.”

At least some of them.

It is no great surprise that they leap at the chance to help Thor, though Frigga warns them that it may be a long time before the gates of Valhalla open, if at all.

Left to the fleet-footed Midgardian, Maximoff, is the pursuit of as many fallen warriors as he can find.

To his great delight, he at last has an excuse to talk to the Valkyries.

“What say the Allfathers of such a madcap scheme? And who, exactly, is leading this army?”

As far as Pietro can tell, from what he can gather of Asgardian politics, there are no two worse questions that the Valkyrie lieutenant could have asked. They stand or slouch, or spar, in a large group of actual goddesses—maybe not by Asgard’s standards but very much by his—and Pietro tries to formulate a reply for this. He was never really into the nuances of diplomacy.

The Captain, a woman of significant stature and piercing blue eyes, has until now remained silent, but she interrupts before he can embarrass himself. “Tell me, boy, what hear you of our sister? The Valkyrie?”

A murmur of approval spreads from the source of the inquiry.

“Eh,” Pietro says. “She’s—doing great. Fighting the good fight.”

They stand at the edge of a grove of trees which spreads for an indeterminable distance in either direction, and all along this edge, looks are exchanged among the women.

Pietro itches to make a bolt for it, if nothing else to impress, but mostly to flee their stares. He takes a deep breath. “Listen,” he says. “Where I come from, a lot of people think that you die, you go to heaven, an old man and his son look after you. That’s what I was told, anyway. No mention of gods, plural, or warrior women. But now I’m here. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I look for my parents, but this place is huge; in the meantime, I decide to help a guy out and try to defeat a universal evil.”

If anything, more of them are staring now.

“You’re welcome to stay,” he continues. “And fight each other. But there’s only a hundred or so of you, so I guess that gets boring after about half a year. Or so. Or, you can come help a madman kill a madman, except the latter is really powerful and wants to wipe out half the universe. And you can find out what happened to your sister,” Pietro adds. And I can find out what happened to mine.

The Captain turns from him, as if to address the other Valkyries, but no words are said. The discussion passes in a torrent of raised eyes and silent movements. Fingers tighten on swords. Pietro holds his breath.

“Very well,” the Captain says, at long last. “Kára, Hrist—ready the horses.”

The skies of Jotunheim are especially dark, of late.

The planet is dying, faster now, as if the heatdeath portending the end of frost and of the very Universe has quickened. Naefonr knows he is likely the last king of the Jotnar, and he sits alone on a throne of ice, gazing out at that expanse with a simmering contempt for the beam of brilliant light that—having once all but devastated the realm—will never come again.

Asgard is dead, or so the word is. Soon enough, lest they join them, the Jotnar will spread to other worlds, or they would if they had not so few sorcerers among them. Food is scarce, loyalty scarcer. Yes, the times are grim indeed.

Naefonr is not, however, in an ill mood when he sees the bright mote on the horizon.

It is too early to be the faroff sun, a fickle and inconstant thing; he surmises it is an object, a rock blazing down from the reaches of the sky.

He is almost amused. What foolish scrap would fall here, of all forsaken places? Did the elder spirits now throw stones as well, to mock his once-proud race? For boredom, as much as anything else, Naefonr goes out with a company to meet it, and see what might be left. Perhaps it is a ship, something salvageable. The ice melts where the rock has landed roughly, scraping a dark path into the clifface, and the king realizes that it is, indeed, a ship—a small thing, nothing for such duress. His inexplicable good mood vanishes as soon as the doors open.

It is a woman.

Inescapably Asgardian or their kin, like nothing which has cursed these slopes for some time. She walks without weapons. Or at least visible ones.

“Identify yourself, woman,” Naefonr’s general, Graimsde, demands hoarsely. “You tread here on Jotnar lands.”

Until she is close enough to distinguish clearly from the gleaming ice, she does not speak. Her bold armor and skin of a rich, living dark that does not occur naturally on Jotunheim mark her as an alien, and Naefonr’s own skin crawls. As if I have not troubles enough.

“I am Brunnhilde,” she calls up to them, in a voice which betrays neither fear nor courage. “I am the last Valkyrie, sworn to serve the throne of Asgard.”

There are sharp intakes of breath, growls, and the like from Naefonr’s company of prized soldiers; all of them have lost unspeakably to the throne of Asgard and its many pawns. So much for being dead.

“I know I curse your lands with my every step,” the woman says. “We are not, and never have been, welcome, as you’ve not been welcome in our halls. But our ship was attacked, and we are the only survivors. Your planet was the only one close enough—”

A guttural curse bursts from Naefonr’s eldest, at his left hand. Consciously or unconsciously, great sheets of ice have begun to form along the young Frost Giant’s forearms. “So you bring your wars and skirmishes here. Why should we not kill you all, and put an end to it?”

The sentiment is echoed with increasing volume all around the clearing, their voices rasping against the ice, and the Asgardian is soon nearly surrounded. Still she does not flinch. Her eyes lock with Naefonr’s—how could she know that his is the authority? But she knows well enough.

“Kill us,” the Valkyrie says, “and you lose your last, best hope of getting off this planet. Our ship still has viable communications, with some repairs.”

“How many are you?”

Naefonr, speaking at last, silences the low oaths and threats. The woman glances, once, back at the ship.

“Eighty Asgardians,” she says. “Ten others—a Kronan and some Sakaarans.”

The stream of unfamiliar words, abrasive as they are on her tongue, offends his ears, and the shouts rise again. Naefonr senses that tenuous peace will not long last. Heads will roll soon enough.

“Do not trust her, lord,” Graimsde mutters. “They are host to liars and turncoats.”

“Why would I lie?” she raises her voice above them. “We have lost everything. We wouldn’t come here unless we were without hope. It is known well enough that you are marooned, your planet sick, your people starving—”

“Cut off her forked tongue!”

Eldest Laendr steps in front of Naefonr, as if to shield him from her cursed truths. “Do you know to whom you speak? This is Naefonr, son of Laufey, King of this ailing planet.”

“Quiet,” Naefonr says, and again the wind alone commands their attention, sending the lone woman’s hair streaming like a war pennant. Looking down, he closes the space between them. She is small, even for her kind, but undeniably bold. “You bring death here. Asgardian death. We have long had our fill of it, woman—your King killed my father.”

In truth, he feels little vengeance for him—it is the eldest son’s lot to expect his king father’s death—but he knows of the Asgardian compulsion for honor, so it is duly noted when this does not ruffle her.

“And your ancestors killed mine, and they yours,” she says. “You are King now. Would you doom your people for revenge?”

Naefonr smiles, teeth gleaming. “And what prevents me from killing your refugees, and taking your machines?”

“Nothing,” the woman says. “Though I wish you luck using them. They’ve got really, really small buttons.”

The King blinks. The Valkyrie doesn’t.

His guards and son look at Naefonr with a dozen scarlet eyes, each saying something along the lines of, By the northern spirits, please let me cleave this woman’s head from her shoulders. He raises a hand, and with soft complaints, weapons are stowed, ice melted back into skin.

Naefonr sighs, and looks to Graimsde. “Take them. Take all of them.”

Chapter Text

The Sanctuary, seven Midgardian years before the massacre of Asgard.

The first time Loki dies, he makes a discovery.

Like most spectacular wretches, he is better loved dead than for his nature. It is slow, a slow death, because he is damn near impervious to the cold of the vacuum, and so he is left with a lot of frozen time to feel the impact of the act and to imagine Frigga’s face in his failing eyes. Her face, and all other faces. Every face he has ever seen or worn. If there are tears, they freeze at once. They glass over his eyes. They are trapped, crystalline.

He is not something to be pitied, not after what he has done, but he would spit pity back into whatever dared harbor it for him.

Long he walks, wandering the joyless slopes of Helheimr, learning their senseless patterns and tiring of them, before his father finds him. His real father, killed by his own hand.

“Hello, Father. A grand reunion this is.”

“Better to have thrown an abomination to the depths,” Laufey spits, “than to have left you alive, even for that long.”

“Looks rather like I’ve just saved you the trouble, doesn’t it?”

They might have torn each other apart, even then, had his body not been found on the outskirts a region of space few dare live, let alone die. Floating through void. Someone—he thinks now it was one of the Black Order—revives him, perhaps for the entertainment of Thanos or for their own. Loki is, however, not then alive in the true sense of the word, if there is one; it is only by the freezing nature of his body that he does not rot from his own bones. He is aware enough to feel pain and heat and certainly to blindly curse his puppeteers, but he is little more than a bloodless husk.

It is Thanos who revives him fully, Thanos who leads him back through the gates of Hel. Back to life.

His eyes open to a dark haze, and a blur of faces—wake up, prince, you have a grander purpose—

Kneel—

I will never—

Now, Laufey’s blade of ice cracks inside of the wound, splintering off and shattering, and the Frost Giant stands back to survey his work. Loki is for a moment paralyzed by the sensation of returning to his Jotun form, something he was not aware a glamoured projection of himself could even do. It has been a long time.

The pain of the blade, real or imagined, comes next. He grits his teeth to stop the scream, and settles for an emphatic Midgardian, “Well, fuck.”

You cannot kill the dead. But the dead do feel.

Laufey laughs. He actually laughs; a deep, grating sound, almost quiet enough to be gentle, had he not just impaled his patricidal son. “Now you feel it. The pain of it.”

“No,” Loki says, his soul flickering. “No, I think my version was marginally more dramatic. Considering you didn’t expect it, and I wholly expected that.”

“And deserved it,” Laufey’s laugh cuts off abruptly. “Jotunheim is in ruin. Your paltry ambition killed my people.”

“My,” Loki says, “my people.”

“That heightens your crimes.”

“I have never denied them.”

This is a lie, of course. He gets to his feet, cocking his head to one side, insubstantial flesh slowly losing its secret hue. Loki feels the shards of ice melt. If he is unsteady, it is lost on Laufey, for their two souls ebb and flow out of reality.

He cannot tell if he can be damaged more than he already has, though just the thought seems a challenge. One made for his most vicious whims.

“We’ll meet again,” Laufey says, just eyes in the dark now, the faintest gleams of embossed skin. “I will never be finished with you.”

“Promises, promises.”

God knows how Yondu recognizes her.

He never met the woman. Even Quill, all choked up about her dying for pretty much forever, never lended much of a description to her name—Meredith, Yondu reckons, though he’s always gotten 'm' names a little mixed up—beyond the fact that she was pretty much the most beautiful, gentlest Terran to ever walk the forsaken planet.

It doesn’t occur to Yondu to be a little queasy in retrospect about pretty much abducting her kid; to him, it’s his kid too, his damn Quill, and they can share custody from beyond the grave.

They’re in a machine. Some kind of transport vehicle, sky blue. The wind is roaring past their ears and the music is cranked up, and immediately Yondu sees the resemblance.

“Hey,” the woman shouts, grinning. “Figured you’d show up eventually. Where to?”

“Where to? Aw, hell,” Yondu twists in his seat, and miles of country are flying by them, miles of alien country, Terran by the looks of it. Suburbs, cities, grasslands. “Somewhere with a beach. Yeah, somewhere nice and sunny. I think I deserve a beach.”

“Sounds good to me!”

And they’re there. It’s a little spooky, but Yondu supposes that things don’t have to make much sense once you’re dead. Time can loosen up a little, cut you a break now and then.

She stops the transport, twists a key. Yondu oggles at the beach for a second, the miles and lucid miles of it. It seems pretty damn real, no astral stuff in sight. Then he gets his first good look at her. Her hair is short, spilling out in gold wisps from a sunhat tied around her neck, as if it’s growing back from being sheared off. She’s got the face you sometimes see on the new recruits, the kind of wide-eyed awe. But she ain’t stupid. No, not mama Quill.

Her son got all the stupid from Ego. And maybe Yondu himself.

“Well,” Meredith says, trying and failing to be solemn. “You’re really blue. Like I knew you were blue but this is like, outer space blue. Smurf blue.”

Yondu’s not sure this is the first thing he would have expected from anyone’s mother. “D’you not have blue people round here?”

“Not real ones,” she says.

“You mean you got fake blue people? Man,” Yondu says. “That seems racist.”

This inadvertently gets a laugh out of her. They’re up out of the transport and walking along the beach, and Yondu barely notices that their feet don’t leave track marks in the sand. “I’m going to cut to the chase,” Meredith says. “I know why you’re here. You’re looking for fighters.”

Yondu isn’t really one for this kind of thing, but, after all, he’s spent his life recruiting and shepherding a bunch of fighting jackasses. This seems different. “Well,” he says, “if Quill isn’t full of crap, it sounds like you were a fighter in your day.”

“He’s a sweet kid,” she says. “My battle wasn’t exactly cosmic.”

“To him it was,” Yondu says, and clears his throat awkwardly. “I ain’t gonna drag you out of retirement or anything like that, though. I figure some people should rest.”

Meredith looks at him, her expression unreadable. “Thank you. For looking after Peter.”

“His ma raised him up right. I just knocked a little more fight into him, is all.”

“It might well save his life.”

Tremors spread through the water. At first, Yondu only half notices them, but soon the waves are lapping at where they just stepped, and cracks are appearing in the sand. Like an illusion is lifting. When he looks back at Meredith, her eyes are black, her skin shredded by—shit, is that fur? Instinctively his hand goes for his blaster, but he doesn’t have one.

“Wake up,” the thing says, with Meredith’s voice. “You can’t die, but you can be buried deeper than you can climb.”

Like a band snapping back into place, Yondu feels himself ripping, tearing upwards, and the grey light of the wasteland is almost blinding after the abyss—

He flies to his feet.

It takes a second for him to get his bearings. It’s weird, the three of them actually looking dead for once, being gods and monsters and all; the woman is lying with her hands folded, the Asgardian seems sleeping, head buried in his arm, and Ronan is folded backward on his legs. Yondu hopes the Kree gets one hell of a cramp in them if he ever snaps out of it.

Just one little nudge. One little nudge with the end of his boot. Woke up to see him fall off the edge; what a shame, I’ll miss that noisy little shit. But the ground shakes, drawing his attention away.

Oh. He’d almost forgotten.

Moving steadily closer at almost a run is a massive shape, taking the hills in its stride.

“That’s a big dog,” Yondu says, grimacing. “That’s a bigass dog.” Then, “Where’s that dumb tree when you need him?”

One asset: an inconsistent, probably imagined blaster. Two and a half liabilities: astrally projecting allies, on the edge of a cliff. Though it’s probably more than they deserve, Yondu considerately drags their unconscious bodies away from the edge and up against the nearest cliff face, and whirls around to track the progress of the Insanely Bigass Dog. Things are not looking good.

“I can’t die, though. Can’t die twice. That just ain’t right,” he mutters, his blaster now humming to life in his hand. The beast is close enough, now, to see rows of teeth, and the breath from its nostrils makes clouds in the air.

It skids to stop just a few hundred paces from him, lifts its head, and howls.

“Shut up!” Yondu shouts. “You’re as dead as me, mutt, and you know it!”

“And will that stop you from feeling your bones crushed, Man?”

“Gotta catch me first.”

He waits until it’s in range and fires, the bolt of energy snapping against its hide but seemingly going no further. It lunges, jaw closing shut with the sound and force of a steel door. Yondu leaps onto its back. He fires, twice.

“I was just on a beach,” Yondu shouts, “on a nice beach, and then your mangy ass had to come mess it up—”

The beast slams its side against the rock outcropping, dislodging a huge sheet of ice and snow, and Yondu with it. He rolls, featureless sky and arm-length teeth all spinning together in a lethal game of chance, and winds up underneath its ribs. Again, he fires.

Yondu narrowly avoids being crushed under it, scrambling to his feet and running, and it’s back on his heels in seconds.

“I serve the one to whom all things here belong. Including you—and your weapon.”

If only he had his arrow. He could carve that thing up without batting an eyelash. At least—

Aw hell, his blaster vanishes from his hands. This kind of trippy thing wasn’t an issue when it was just the Kree. But now?

“Could use a little help,” Yondu calls back to the sleeping forms, panting angrily. He finds himself dodging the beast’s snaps unpleasantly close to the edge, the abyssal black is just a misstep away. “What gives, mutt? We weren’t bothering you!”

But it seems to have tired of talking, and at last he trips, making use of the beast’s momentum over him to land a good, if useless, kick to its flank. It, too, comes dangerously close to falling, but manages to catch itself before the plunge.

It turns on him before he can get to his feet again.

The maw of its mouth, at least, seems big enough to swallow him whole—saliva drips from the teeth like rainfall, and a sneering Yondu resists the urge to close his eyes.

Chapter Text

The Valkyrie has been privy to her fair share of dungeons, but this sets a certain chill in her, and not just because of the cold. Their breaths are silver, swirling over the gleams of ice fragments to be stepped over, and all of them shiver violently. Bruised and ashen limbs tremble all around her like a pulse. Apart from this, they are silent, watchful. Holding their breath.

They’re going to die if they stay here long, she thinks.

Brunnhilde resists the urge to retreat into herself, lest a blank or wild expression betray her. The smaller Jotun, the one they call Laendr, is watching her with a narrow gaze.

He says something in that deep, grating lilt of Jotnar speech, and Brunnhilde tenses; the Asgardians are being herded aside, and a freezing touch to her armor from one of the guards jolts her in the direction of a separate cell.

“Ah, sir,” Korg is calling to her. “Valkyrie. Where do you think they’re taking us?” Then, cheerfully, “Is the revolution still on?”

But the Kronan and the last of the Asgardians are already receding, the towering figures of the Frost Giants following and surrounding them deeper into the dark.

Her jaw clenching, Brunnhilde meets the keen eyes of Laendr. “So what of them? Will they be fed? Warmed? We’re no use to you frozen through.”

“You are not guests,” he says, as if it is answer enough. The common tongue sounds foreign to him; he does not like the taste of it.

“We’re not enemies either.”

“Ha. Crawl to us in Asgardian colors, and you expect friendship?”

She steps into her cell without prodding and does not touch the slick bars. She has been disarmed of her swords, so the Valkyrie’s only blow is to flash a sharp, white smile. “Well, it was that, or die in space.”

There are deep mutters, creaking ice, and moving shadows, and then she is alone. She expects no audience with the king until she and her fellow prisoners are half-dead; they will bargain with their lives, then, rather than their minds.

Brunnhilde’s mind now is racing such that it takes a moment for her to realize her fingers are trembling. She grits her teeth—pull yourself together—but this is something else. This is a deeper chill, a sickness that coils in her throat and her core. Once again, she itches for release from the withdrawal.

Scarlet fabric, a man is limp, he is hurtling unnaturally through the air, up into the light— it hangs from his neck, a green jewel which cannot—

A seed planted in a well—Yggdrasil—

A woman phases between realities, she is screaming and torn, she is in pain and that pain is hatred, it is clear on her face, she will kill if she must—

A baby is being born, life, its wails sift through the universe, sorting the life from death—

Brunnhilde staggers back, blindly slashing the air with her outstretched palms. Everything, everything, it all seeps into her mind, the dripping, whispers leagues away, the howl of the wind, the roar of the heart of stars.

“Enough!”

“Yes. It is enough. No, it is the end.”

Tensing, the Valkyrie whirls, and her eyes, in all their strange madness, make themselves useful. They pierce the dark and discern another figure crouching in, no, mostly submerged in what appears to be a pool, half in the interior of the cell and half trailing into another. The fact that it is water and not ice does not escape Brunnhilde’s notice.

“I wasn’t aware I was sharing room and board,” Brunnhilde says. She knows by some intuition that if she could just exert herself, concentrate—she could see the figure even under dark water.

“Sight,” the person proclaims, seemingly without reason. Despite herself the Valkyrie flinches. It is a young voice, worn ragged as if from crying or screaming. Or lack of use.

“Who are you? A prisoner?”

Low laughter, of a kind. “Not like you. I come and go, I am the seasons, I am trapped, I am in hell.”

All in one breath, this string of poetic nonsense serves only to set Brunnhilde more sharply on edge, if possible. She takes a step closer. It is some sort of woman; she sees dark hair spilling in a deeper black around the pale forehead, white eyes. Another step. All slick with water.

The edge of the Valkyrie’s boot is doused in the edge of the pool, and she stops abruptly.

“Well, this is really creepy and all,” Brunnhilde says, “but I’ve got a lot of serious planning to do. You can either introduce yourself or shut up.”

For a time there is no answer, only the white eyes, so Brunnhilde takes to pacing. Ten careless steps to one wall, her attention half on the pool lest it try to seize her. Ten steps back. Something scrapes under her boot—metal, she thinks. Metal and fabric. Brunnhilde is about to bend to touch it with an ungloved hand when there is the sound of disturbed water, and her aqueous roommate has risen slightly into view.

Definitely a woman.

“I would bid you come closer,” she says, with a stronger voice, like a thread of iron, “but you already have the Sight.”

Fully alert, Brunnhilde stops again. “What do you know of it?”

“We give and take it.”

Unnervingly, for a fleeting moment, there is not one woman but—three. Brunnhilde blinks in rapid succession, and there is only one, there is three, there is one.

“Stop it.”

“Poor woman,” says the woman. “Truly a shieldmaiden among men. And while she sleeps, her people fall.”

Unsure what to make of this, Brunnhilde tries to conjure to mind one of the many tales she was told in that faroff window of memory. A time millennias past of fields and horselords, when she was a child. A witch, a woman, in a pool. Three women. It seems a thing which should have an easy name to it.

“You’re a Norn,” Brunnhilde says. “Maybe all of them.” When there is a dripping smile in response, she adds, “This is the Waters of Sights.”

“Very clever.”

“But Asgard was destroyed, the Norn Cave—”

“In every realm lies a reflection,” the Norn says, almost consolingly. Though anything which passes those lips in the dark can bear no comfort. “She searched for answers, found naught, and came here.”

The Valkyrie glances at the discarded armor, which still has a dull sheen to it. How many years had it lain? How long since the Frost Giants thought her drowned, or did they even know of the creature they kept?

Brunnhilde looks back. “Was it voluntary? Did she give herself up to you voluntarily?”

Do slaves give themselves up voluntarily?

Silence. It cannot be surprise, for the Norns must foresee even the questions asked of them. But their silence is answer enough, and they know it. Brunnhilde weighs the risk, the likelihood they know, too, her every heartbeat, whim, and thought.

She cannot believe that.

“Okay, I’m coming to you,” she says, taking a step into the water. The woman does not stir, just stands half in the water, bare skin deathly pale from lack of sunlight. When they are but a foot apart and Valkyrie’s few layers of clothes spreading around her like the woman’s hair, any onlooker would have found it strange—two people with eyes alight, gold and the other white.

Brunnhilde seizes the woman by the arm and gives a tremendous tug, and finds she does not move in the slightest. It is as if she is has taken root.

The Norns laugh, and the sound echoes around the cell and out into the intervening hallways, where surely some guards hear it and wonder.

“Valiant, Valkyrie,” they say, with three voices. “But misled. We do not keep her here to torture her.”

“What is she, then? A vessel? An amusement?”

Brunnhilde dares look down at the water for a moment, and how it moves around her, grows heavy as liquid metal, or ice, if it ever was. If the slow heatdeath of the planet had not melted it forever.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

Again, no answer, and Brunnhilde is left fighting back that prickling feeling of sickness, that chill. Her fingers tremble. She clenches them; this is no time for that.

“You lust for your liquid poison,” the Norn says, watching. “We know too well, daughter. Kneel. Take a draught of the water. It will stay your cravings forever.”

Wondering why she cares, the Valkyrie feels a brief flaring of hatred for that stolen voice. It was not the Norns’ to take, anymore than it is their right to take her pain, if it is not a veiled threat. You who enslaved hundreds. A thousand.

Ah, what the Hel.

Brunnhilde punches the woman squarely in the jaw, knocking her almost fully back into the water. She seizes her again, and pulls with all her might. Something gives way, hopefully not the woman’s arm, and she is half up onto flat stone, they are almost out of the pool.

Again, the laughter, but it is faster now, fainter, as if the woman cannot breathe. “You forget who gave you your Sight, child—”

“I never asked for it,” Brunnhilde grunts, giving another great tug. Her boots slide against stone smoothed by water, almost back into the water.

“Your fate, fool—”

“Is my own.”

They are out. Gasping, the woman of the water falls to her knees, something not ungraceful. The dark sheet of her hair streams. Keeping a good distance from the pool, Brunnhilde pushes her off of her, every muscle taut and expecting a fight, but the white is fading from the woman’s skin and eyes like breath on a mirror.

Healing. The life of the Aesir, Brunnhilde suspects. This must be an Asgardian.

“Where am I? Who are you? Get back!”

“I’m as back as I can go,” Brunnhilde says, feeling the edge of an abandoned shield dig into her spine. “You’re in a cell on Jotunheim. Who are you, if not a Norn?”

The woman mouths the word almost blankly, and then in her irises a fierce glint replaces the last of the white.

“My name was—is—Sif. Lady Sif.”

Loki is lost.

Laughable, really. He spent a lifetime learning the secret ways and high passes and back doors of the realms, Helheim included, but he was never tempted or allowed the time to delve into the heart of rich, unremitting black that leaks from the cracks on its surface.

And now he is here, walking on the unseen, searching for the unseen. His hair and swathes of green, flowing as though through empty space, take their time in following him.

“No need to be shy,” he says. “I feel your eyes. I feel the absence of your breath.” He stops, casting a searching gaze and finding nothing. “Ghosts have no quarrel with each other.”

“These ghosts may.”

The shadows part to admit a mirror. How—poetic.

This is the first time Loki has seen himself since he gazed out at the expanse from the ship and faced his reflection in the glass, formless and of pitted eyes. He looks absently to his neck, but this is an imperfect reflection.

He again recognizes a mirage, of a kind. No, he recognizes—those awfully glittering eyes and hair only beginning to grow wild. This fellow is several years his younger. Just fallen from the Bifrost, by the look of him, or otherwise mortally betrayed.

“Is there a way back?”

“Yes,” Loki says, cautiously. “A long one.”

A step in either direction lends depth to his younger self. An imperfect reflection, but a perfect illusion. Or else something very different. At this, there is a cold smile, and Loki matches it, albeit a little wearily.

“You expected something rather different, did you not?”

“Enough with these expectations,” Loki says. “I heard it well enough the first time with Laufey.”

“What?”

“Nevermind. How came you by my face?”

“A thousand years or so,” says the other, “and a lot of time indoors.”

Loki’s lips tighten such that they vanish altogether. He has not the patience. “Get out of my way,” he says. “One of me is quite enough.”

“Aren’t you curious how it is we meet?”

“No,” he lies. He is idly fascinated, but to linger here spells an uncertain term of darkness; he does not care for the void closing in around him. Where are the voices, the shifting multitudes of the dead? They’ve vanished.

Something is not right.

The smile of his ghost, for lack of better term, gleams with something sharp. “You left me here.”

There is something almost petulant in his tone, and Loki looks past him for a path of the air, deeper into Hel and away. “Sorry,” he says. “My mistake. I’m unaccustomed to minding children.”

“Ooh,” says the other, primly. “So self-deprecating. But we are both of us unwhole.” Pale hands disappear behind his back. “No longer.”

Loki has no time to consider what this means, because they are locked in a vicious swirl of blows, of blades, before he can think. Unlike Laufey, this gaunt shade wants to win, to drag him against the dark and rent his astral flesh from his bones. Or at least that’s what it seems.

They are winded before long, the younger a fighter only in words and the elder wearier by the hour, and absent-minded.

—pass too closely to each other, and Loki feels pale, translucent, as if fading away.

He kicks his mirror image dizzyingly away from himself, into the dark. We are both of us unwhole. Cryptic enough that he takes the moment’s respite to delve into his memory. What had happened when Thanos revived him, led him back from Hel? What of the great Walls?

When the other claws his way back into their lightless netherworld, the carapace of souls, he has a trickle of blood from his nose. Loki laughs. The sound echoes. He laughs, and he sidesteps a coolly seething swipe—and embraces him.

The fragment of his soul puts up a vicious struggle (ever unwilling to be hugged), but Loki finds his strength in all that has happened since the Bifrost, in the mayflies, the Asgardians, the sun promised to his brother.

Strange to find solace in battles lost.

There is a Flickering, and then there are no longer two Loki’s, warring strangely in the abyss. There is only one, looking alone, and somehow wilder, but alive. Alive in death.

He wipes the blood from his face and carries on.

There is a burst of blinding light, and the insanely big Dog is stunned, at least long enough for Yondu to roll his ass out of the way of those jaws. Not today, mutt. Yondu has had his fill of melodramatic ends.

“About time,” he shouts, not even looking for the source of the light.

But he finds it nonetheless. It’s the weird woman arisen, her skin sallow as though in illness. Her hands are outstretched, like she’s giving a sermon or something, but a low, deliberate stream of sounds are filling the air. Words, but wilder than Yondu has heard. Music. Chanting, maybe. He doesn’t care for it at all.

He’s about to plug his ears and run several expletives away from the Bigass Dog when it cowers, and is—very gone. Either into the abyss, or dissolved like sand.

Sand. Yondu had been on a beach.

He scratches his head, still half sprawled on the ashen frost. “You’re welcome. I just saved y’all from being eaten. Like, three or four times.”

“And what have you to show for it?”

This, of course, pisses him off. “Well I’m sorry I don’t speak whatever the hell that was that you just vomited out—“

“Silence,” she says. He twists around to get a better look at her, brow furrowed with about a dozen heavy-hitting insults.

The Ancient One—that seems to be what she calls herself, though she doesn’t look very ancient, but who is he to judge—stands, breathing deeply for a few moments. She looks down at her hands, and then at the horizon, as though listening.

Yondu’s eyes narrow. “What happened to you down there, anyway?”

But any desire for or thought of an answer is lost, for like the silent, explosive light of a distant blast, a warm light has filled the woman’s face and the top of her figure. Yondu finds his feet and turns to find the source of this light and—

“Well, damn,” he says.

It’s the sun. A crimson sun rising over Hel.

The cliffs are black spires by contrast. He’d waited on some blasted sun, or just stars, even, for a year. He’d taken to fighting his delightful Kree friend so as to not go mad when the sky neither stirred nor spun. “That’s not possible.”

The Ancient One looks on.

“Darling,” she says, “you have no idea what’s possible.”

Chapter Text

For them of a death without the blade, or a life without honor—we bid them silent sleep, and keep silent watch.

Because the faint truth of existence, overshadowed and drowned out by promises of glory or threats of everlasting torture, is that almost everyone you meet, love, kill—not strictly in that order—will find again your snuffed out soul. Time waxes long for the dead.

Imagined and true agony are indistinguishable, so Ronan feels both.

A seething mass of dark impulses and darker means in life, murderer and conqueror, he does not pass so softly as his Asgardian accomplice, and so those that were not onward to Valhalla have found him. It is even possible that some of them could have found a place in those golden halls, but they chose to lie in wait in the silent deeps of Helheim, like a flock of eyeless crows awaiting a carrion feast. They tear at his soul, they are awed that such a creature even has one; they overwhelm him with their numbers.

The vengeful dead.

Ronan howls, cursing the witch and the Asgardian. They knew this would happen, they wanted to kill me—

You are already dead, the crows remind him, the children, the weak, the warriors, the lovers, the fiends. For man, there is no hell but of his own making.

Crushed beneath the swell of forms, Ronan casts them off momentarily and roars the only name beyond his own which retains meaning. It echoes in the abyssal places, resounding off the mountains under the earth, growing in dark, heathen strands, abiding on the wind. It is loved and hated here, with the dead.

Thanos.

All at once, he is no longer the object of the dishonorable dead’s fury. He is floating, unmoored, and around him the name pools in rivets of whispers. They remember. These are no warriors, but in their numbers, they will roar out of the dark places. They will come for Thanos.

All at once, Ronan is forgotten.

For a time, Frigga could not remember what it was that made her first feel so strongly that Valhalla looked nothing like Asgard. It was, in its golden spires and dawning light, a replica. Older, perhaps. Younger. A world of conflict and peace rolled together in a kind of tension, which hums in the air like bowstrings. A world, not like others, but once itself a planet. Now something else, one gathering of souls in a shallow dip in spacetime, apart.

The gold is not stolen. That’s what it is. The heavy scent of blossoms on the air does not hide old blood; it’s simply blossoms.

A voice behind her does not stir her from her thoughts, and so at last, a hand alights on her shoulder. She turns. It is Odin. He has the look of one of his more wayward ravens, though he has long since foregone their darkling colors; it is something about his ruffled air, or that barely discernible loss of composure that Frigga knows too well.

“He means no grave error,” she says.

“Does he not always? He errs like he breathes.”

Frigga’s smile twists. “A dead man rarely does either.”

Odin joins her on the edge of the balcony. He cannot know that she is awaiting word from her dear Midgardian friend— word from the Valkyries, word of a war brewing in Valhallan morning. One she herself is stirring.

He cannot know, but he knows all the same.

“I speak too harshly,” Odin says, in a voice softer and older than, in life, he would ever have laid bare to his sons. “All those long years we chastised him for the same dark urges that ruled me in my youth. Before you knew me,” he adds, as if it's not a tale worn old by many secret tellings.

The Allmother draws in a deep breath of air, and thinks it a perfect illusion. “I have always known you, as I have always known Loki. In how one mind recognizes another.” She pauses. She follows, with her gaze, a single knotted vine in its twisting route down to the courtyard. “It is Thor that has shown himself to be a wiser and gentler hand. No, it is both. In the end.”

Odin looks at her out of the corner of his eye, weighing what she may do, and what she may already be doing. If ever there is a moment to bid her cease any scheme she is forming, now is the time.

“Frigga,” he says, and she smiles, as one does after a long day without respite. “I must show you something.”

The hall is empty of souls, of clashing swords and clinking goblets, and roaring hearths, though the light would seem to speak of midday. This is a quiet place. But for the nature of Valhalla, one might almost think it a tomb.

Through its center, like a fracture in the air itself, is what could only be described as a branch. Or perhaps a root, depending on the direction one orients oneself. It is strangely luminous, as though light moves scarcely seen just underneath its outer shell. Though it seems smooth to the touch, deep cracks run through its bark and fluidly into the floor itself. The stone is broken.

It is a strange sight, even for Valhalla.

“Yggdrasil, yes,” Frigga says.

Odin waves his hand in a gesture that encompasses all of it, and perhaps what is beyond. “It has never been simply a tree. You know this.”

“What I know of it is the deep magic which has seeped through it and into our lifeforce. It, and we, are energy. It is how we have come to be here, even when our flesh is lost.” Frigga is uncertain what it is, exactly, her husband could tell her of such things, but as always, having said her piece, she listens with an open mind.

For once, they two look very small, under its great shadow and greater light.

Speaking in a strange near-whisper, Odin peers up at it. “Did you ever wonder, then, how this primeval force of life and light came to take the form of a tree, as we know it?” He seems to sense that she will speak of the Nine, now Eight, Realms. “Did you wonder of the space between the branches?”

Darkness. The void between the realms. These would be the obvious answers, but by her ancient craft, Frigga knows the flow of energy does not cease beyond the branches and the roots. There are other places than these.

“Barriers,” she says. “The branches divide space into portions distinct from each other.”

“And those six singularities from the beginning of the universe,” he says, “the Infinity Stones, as we call them. In the darkness between the realms, they were kept apart.”

Frigga, despite herself, feels a deep chill. “Yet they draw closer by the hour.”

“Yes. As they have for an eternity. Drawing back together into a single force.”

Like the vines of the courtyard, the deep cracks run in wild disarray across the entirety of the behemoth branch, or root. Yggdrasil as a mechanism for containing the end, holding it at bay—

“Was this, then, inevitable?”

Frigga is not sure if she speaks of the war for infinite forces, or Thanos himself, or the great cracks that speak of a greater fracture. Time stands on the edge of a blade. It does not seem Odin will answer, but he looks at his wife with bright and terrible knowing.

“Yggdrasil groans with every recovered Stone. I fear to try to leave Valhalla, or Hel—to break the barriers between the worlds—could see it fall.”

Loki feels the dead traveling along with him, like dark disciples.

Never in his life had he navigated the eddies of a crowd and thought, I am one of you. He does not think it now.

Even the weariness has passed; he walks as one in a dream, knowing not whether he is doing any good, or if he ever has. Is this an army? Soldiers are not silent.

“Speak,” he whispers. There is darkness, there is light, and then there is madness. He follows footpaths into the wild night forests, and with all the world walking with him, he’s alone. More loudly, more coldly: “Speak!”

“Of what?”

He gives a sharp look towards the voice, and though it takes him a moment to find her, it’s a little girl this time. He has lost count of them, the innumerable stories, the kitchens and the cities and the manor houses and the casinos and the cliffs, all covered in the flock of souls spinning endlessly onward. Depravity and beauty. He’s lost all reckoning of good and ill, for it’s so quiet.

This child is not Asgardian, Midgardian, Jotun, Vanir, nor even any strange shade of creature which he had seen on Sakaar; her eyes are bright, many, and gold, and she stands but a foot tall, scarcely halfway to his knees, though she walks as if she is a child of middling age.

“What was your name?” she asks. “Are you a giant?”

He tells her his name, and yes. He tells her it still is his name.

A pause, and he asks her what hers is.

“Jjanai.”

An old voice in his head speaks of war, and Thanos, and revenge, and perhaps even his brother—and the utter uselessness of children. Keep going. You are onward!

An older voice once wondered if he might ever have lived to see any. Could he have dared bring a person into the world, and curse them with what he had lived and done, and what he was? They would be something strange. Unwelcome, and ever so fragile. How to keep a child from shattering?

He waves a slender hand to send the phantom thought on its way, as though ridding the air of cobwebs. It’s gone now. That world is gone. There is no future save one, and it ends with Thanos' end.

“I don’t suppose you might know where we are,” he says to Jjanai. She looks up at the giant trustingly, as though he himself knows the way, by nature of being able to see so far.

“No,” she says. “But if you catch hold of the sun, you might go up with it.”

“That’s a fool thing to say,” he says, quite liking it. “No sun has seen the slopes of Hel for a million years.”

Jjanai’s many eyes turn ever upward, to where there is the mere thought of leaves; the shape of them, silver and insubstantial. “I’ve been waiting for it.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time, I’m afraid.”

She laughs, and is gone, and all at once there is a golden light on the horizon (there is a horizon? He’s in an abyss) and all around he can see the now armored host, he is no longer alone in the forest—

Oh gods, the sun!

Loki shields his eyes, such is the shock of it. He realizes after a spell of standing there, watching this bulbous sphere of deep gold glide upwards in the silence, that he is smiling. His lip cracks from its earlier wound at his own hands and bleeds anew, a strange detail he hardly notices. The sun is a thousand times larger than any star could be in an unburnt sky. It swallows up the whole of his vision, the whole of the world. Brilliant disk that could blind a planet.

He catches hold of it—

A man will scream, holding open a threshold in space, a beam of light pouring through him as a star is awoken from death. Loki knows him. This man will do this with the agony of his entire people on his shoulders, his last thoughts of the family he saw perish. And he’ll relight that great oafish forge of a heart, somehow still too gentle for a king’s.

Loki holds fast to the sun, and maybe it burns him, but with a curious gesture he pours what strength he has into that man. Perhaps only in spirit. After all, the man may have strength enough; he has always boasted as much.

But Loki likes to think it will keep him alive, when it finally comes to this singular moment in the heart of things.

“Thor,” he says. “You reckless bastard. Stay alive long enough for me to prove you wrong.”

For the final and only time, the star burns, and together burning they hold back the dark.

—and he wakes on the surface of Hel in the ruddy light, where the sorceress is about to slit a man’s throat with a sword of glass.

Chapter Text

Though the cloth is mildewed and the armor tinged with frost, together they have a way of restoring vitality to the shieldmaiden. She is all muscle and scars underneath, the light through the crossed bars of their cell making distinct lines on a form not altogether unpleasant. And then the armor somehow polishes her, makes her look older.

Sif. The name is unfamiliar to Brunnhilde, so she can only guess that this is another young warrior from after her time. And so it’s fallen to Brunnhilde: the unfortunate duty of informing Sif that her world, people, and king are all toast.

“Your eyes,” Sif says, pausing in the middle of buckling her swordbelt. Her hand hovers over the metal, emotions unreadable.

“I assume they’re gold, right?”

Sif gives her a funny look. “Assume? Do you not know your own face?”

“Not anymore, no. I could ask you the same question.”

The shieldmaiden tightens the belt and retrieves her sword, laying a light finger on the edge of the blade. It cuts her, though not deeply. By some strange intuition Brunnhilde wonders if she does this to measure the spell of time she has been imprisoned by the Norns. “They look as though they once belonged to someone else,” Sif says, more quietly.

“He’s gone. Heimdall’s dead.” When the woman looks at her, stricken by a pale shock, Brunnhilde takes a deep breath. “I assume his magic passed to me. Someone’s got to be the watcher.”

“Then why are you not at your post?”

Another deep breath. “Asgard’s gone too.”

For a several moments, the silence of the dungeon is so deep that Brunnhilde can hear the pacing of feet in high places, the rolling of wheels somewhere in the wastes of the city, the deep knoll of what sounds like a bell. She feels suddenly very tired.

“Destroyed?” Sif says finally, a stone mask set on her expression. When Brunnhilde nods, she says, “How?”

Time waxes quickly for the living, but the Valkyrie fills several minutes of cold with the last few weeks. The arrival of Thor and his brother, the escape from Sakaar, fighting Hela. The blaze of swords and of Surtur tearing Asgard asunder. Sif says nothing all throughout, her hands occupied by the cleaning and sharpening of her sword, eyes moving more quickly than the task demands.

Towards the end, Brunnhilde begins to run out of words.

She is in the engine room when it happens, the deep groan and shudder of the ship as something tears through it, a bolt of energy, probably. She is moving before she even knows they are under attack. Her blades have not left her side, nor her armor. She doesn't know how she felt the urgent sense of something coming, but now something has arrived.

Brunnhilde rounds the corner too quickly, one of the many people running, and slams into someone. She hopes it is the king. Instead it’s Lackey.

“Where the hell is the beast—”

“I don’t know,” she snaps, “Where’s Thor?”

He hesitates. “Back this way.”

They forego dignity and run. By the whites of his eyes he’s afraid, and not hiding it, and she tries not to care. She tries not to consider what could frighten an absolute imp. She tries to remember they just defeated the goddess of death.

Thor is with Heimdall, herding the Asgardians towards the escape pods.

It all happens too quickly, under the low utterance of the name, Thanos. He is sending her with them, he is bidding her take care of the people and get as many out as you can. She stands rooted to the spot. Her duty is to the throne—

“And the throne bids you go,” Thor says. “We’ll follow. Just as soon as we’ve beaten this bastard to Hel.”

Loki looks at him sharply, and Heimdall says, “They’re coming through the breach,” and Brunnhilde knows that there will be no following.

But she swears, and she goes. Because she’s damn well sure none of them are going to and these pods of civilians can’t fly themselves. She hates Thor for the order. She hates herself for following it.

A distress call is made, and the ship shudders again and again.

Her last sight of them is a flash of a look over her shoulder at the three shadows, all in their dull glinting silver and gold. Thor gripping his brother by the shoulder. Heimdall’s eyes glowing with a light of their own as he watches her go, and nods.

“They’re dead,” Brunnhilde says.

“How can you be sure of it?”

It is the first Sif has spoken since Brunnhilde started, and something in that immediate hope pisses her off. It’s reckless to hope, and with an endangered species suddenly in her charge, Brunnhilde has a very limited recklessness quotient. But she herself has more questions than answers and so cannot argue. Her bones ache. She wants to undo everything since the Bifrost, and maybe before.

“If you have the Sight,” Sif says, her voice only threatening to break, “can you not look? Cast your gaze out towards where it happened?”

“I’m not sure I can,” Brunnhilde says. Yet. I’m not sure I want to. “What about you? How did you end up in the world’s creepiest bathwater?” She has no sooner finished speaking than she turns her head sharply at the scattered rhythm of feet and metal coming close.

“A story for another time,” Sif says, hearing it too, the flat side of her sword pressed almost to her cheek as she holds herself rigidly beside the door.

“If you want to help what’s left of Asgard, you’ll stay hidden until I see how we stand with the king.”

Sif’s jaw tightens, but she draws in a long breath and steps back into the shadows, almost to the pool.

As the footsteps grow deafening, Brunnhilde can only pray, for the sake of the rest of the Asgardians, that Jotuns cannot see much better in the dark than the average man. Such prayers are, of course, pointless.

The gods are dead.

Sure of step, Heimdall has found his way to Valhalla’s Bifrost, and across the streaming colors to Valhalla’s observatory. Golden cogs and a deep window of night just beyond give him the impression that nothing at all has changed. Odin is on the throne, Frigga watching over Asgard as Heimdall does its exterior, and the princes in their self-imposed exile for the love of mortals or adulation. Every calamity seems to spell Asgard’s end, but in retrospect are nothing but tremors. Hardly anything at all. Nothing compared to Ragnarok.

He does something he would never have, were this the actual time and moment of years past, and he alive and actually standing guard. He closes his eyes.

“I want to help.”

Without starting at this new voice, Heimdall folds his hands in front of him, leaning on the Bifrost sword. He smiles. “Did you bring your Midgardian weapons with you?”

His companion sits heavily on the platform, grunting. “Would’ve if I’d thought I’d need them. I come in here often,” he adds suddenly. “Been wondering if that would work. The Bifrost, I mean.”

“We’ll have to find out,” Heimdall says, opening his eyes. “What’s your name, Executioner?”

If the title irks him, or the misdeeds with it, the man doesn’t show it. “Skurge.”

“What say you to your first, and only, Execution?”

“Of who?”

Heimdall smiles again, the slightest twist of his lips. In slow strides he returns Hofund to its place. “You come to pledge your help to a secret cause without knowing its purpose?”

“I just wanted to, ah, get out a bit.”

A strange red light flickers, and both of them turn. It is from the void of stars, though it is not one of them, nor is it the usual brilliance of someone traveling via the Bifrost. There, and then gone, and then there again stronger still. It grows until it nearly swallows the darkness.

“Is that a person?” Skurge squints, and sure enough, there is a dark outline of someone in the red-white light.

Heimdall is met by the bizarre, lucid sensation of being unable to part the veil of distance and see. He’s stuck where he is, mired in ordinary or near-sightedness. “Yes, I believe it is a woman.”

The red pulsates, burgeoning like a fire, and the woman grows clearer. Her hair is flying as though in wind, her skin a deep green shade that is alien to Asgard. She is falling. She is screaming.

Then she is gone, and with her, the light.

Heimdall and Skurge look at each other. Witnesses to some nameless sign.

“Excuse me,” Heimdall says softly. “I must speak with Queen Frigga.”

From his place next to a sheer cliff face and not the black void, Loki has been moved. Around him are deep scratches in the earth and what look like large prints in the finer sediments. Blinking in the bizarre light of the rising sun, he props himself up on his elbows to watch the sorceress at the abyssal edge, and though she was not looking at him, she senses he has awoken and pauses before she strikes the blow to the Kree’s neck.

Silence. Both wait to see what the other will do.

A slow smile spreads on Loki’s face. “Well, by all means, don’t let me stop you. I have never been partial to Kree.” He sits up further. “Though I fail to see what that accomplishes.”

The Ancient One mirrors his smile and, with one fluid movement, releases the limp Kree to the abyss. He does not so much fall as become enfolded in it. She stands and brushes her hands on her cloak, and something in the way she approaches puts Loki ill at ease. He is quick to find his feet.

“I’m only to ask once,” she says, her smile never wavering. “I’ve left you for last because I was hoping you’d wake up before I made up my mind.”

Loki’s eyes dart once beyond her, and there is no sign of the Centaurian. “I don’t doubt they’re imbeciles but an army does, in fact, require some—”

“Shut up and let me finish. Now, in all honesty I’d much prefer residence in this body, considering even her monkey brain has quite a lot of witchcraft filed away in it, but unfortunately—not Asgardian. Went splat on some Midgardian street.” The sorceress takes nonchalant notice of the twin blades summoned lightly to his fingertips, and smiles more broadly. “Hmm. You’ve got the stench of death on you more than your brother did, so you’re not entirely unsalvageable. Anything to say for yourself?”

“I have never met someone with, potentially, a greater aptitude than me for devious monologuing,” Loki says. “But I would reconsider. I think we’d make excellent allies, given we now have a common goal.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Escaping from Hel is just part one. And I’ve done it before.”

Loki’s mind, still reeling from whatever just happened in the deeps of Hel, races on ahead at a speed. The Ancient One must still exist, in some form, no matter how deeply her invader has taken root.

He knows better than most that even insidious invasions of the mind only cause the soul to retreat.

“Hela,” he says, in a cautionary tone, not about to be possessed himself.

But something snaps in her eyes, and her mind is made.

She brings the cliff down on him.

He moves quickly, deflecting the blow as best he can, but is pinned under the crushing weight of a boulder. He breaks through, feeling a terrible tingling at the edge of his mind, like an unseen attack accompanied the physical one—

Hela in the Ancient One’s form is upon him with the glass sword, and it takes all of his reflexes to stop it at his chest and knock her aside. The wheeling spells of fire are on her arms again. Rolling to his feet, Loki is forced to dodge them like arrows, sending a wave of his own green magic at her, and the colors run together, exploding where they meet.

“This is pointless,” she says, laughing, when their spells dissipate. “Hel is mine, and you with it. All who crawl on it are my subjects.”

“That has a lovely ring to it, sister dear. Did you practice?”

She opens up the very ground he is standing on, and he splits off into two, the illusion rushing at her with bared teeth and blades while he clings to the edge, feet swinging. He is up onto the surface again, and she has dispatched his illusion.

The slopes of Hel tremble, and where they clash, they flare brighter than the sun.

Ebony Maw surveys the wasteland and is unimpressed. The silence is oppressive and the landscape exceedingly dull. He cannot bear to think of how it was he came to be here; the failure of it, the humiliation of being bested by a squealing child, all his long years spent in a matter of chance—

He feels a shift in things and looks to the horizon. Even now, in this place, he can scarcely believe it. He recognizes it as clearly as if it were written in the sky, what little sky there is beside this terrible bulb of a sun, for though the magic is not as elegantly hewn as his own, it is unmistakable.

The signature of his pupil.

Chapter Text

The unforgiving rock of the cliff buckles and thrashes like liquid under Hela’s spells. Cursing the Ancient One’s capacity for parlor tricks, Loki is swallowed up by the stone. He’s drowning in it. He aims a kick at her (for she's standing smugly erect on the cliff face, contrary to gravity) but he is slowed by what feels like molten lead, the force of magic streaming outwards and sending her skirting backwards for a moment, to no avail. In an undignified lunge, he manages to free one arm.

That’s when the Black Order’s chief knave shows his ugly face. Ebony Maw is standing, a small, sharp silhouette, and looking up at them. Almost curiously.

More than a bit preoccupied, Loki notes Maw in the corner of his vision, and somewhere in his stormy thoughts it registers that he would very much like to rip that fellow limb from limb, like some heathen Svartalf Kursed. But the stone flows over his head and solidifies until naught but his eyes, nose, and arm are free to the air.

If eyes could speak, his would be saying many things unfit for Allspeak.

“That wasn’t so difficult,” Hela says, in the Ancient One’s soft drawl, looking down at him. At that moment, she too, notices Ebony Maw—perhaps in Loki’s look askance. She turns and, in the part of her profile that’s visible, her face contorts.

A mind at war with itself, for a moment. The Ancient One stirring.

Recognition, Loki thinks sharply, and then realizes his moment is at hand.

Under the stone, he allows the Asgardian glamour to slip, the freezing skin of a Frost Giant cracking the stone where it is most malleable or rife with minerals. He breaks from it where he can, dislodging Hela from her locked-knee stance while she’s distracted, she falls right beside him—

His palm makes contact with her forehead, and she’s already lost.

Her name meant little bird, among the people that lived in the mountains that the sun set alight

She learned, she became

Maw wasn’t so enamored with balance yet, he still believed in chaos, trusted things to right or destroy themselves accordingly, she was not afraid although they left the Earth and traveled in the far places and people of many shades (for she needed a teacher to tend this spark before it rent the mountains from their roots)

But Earth was so fragile, so pale a thing from afar, already under threat from the unseen

Hela wrenches herself from the barrage of the Ancient One’s memories, snarling. But Loki doesn’t release his hold on the goddess of death’s consciousness, and moored as it is to both his magic and its stolen form, it is between them. Slipping.

Like a loosed arrow, the Ancient One is free, and he is not.

Damn.

The Ancient One’s eyes clear, and just for a moment, they see each other and what must be done, but Hela's power has already fallen through space and taken up residence in the Asgardian’s mind, as had been her intention. Blinking, the Ancient One comes to her senses and re-entraps Loki and Hela together in the cliff.

Were it not for their running out of time, their circumstance might almost be comical.

“Do you think this will hold me?” Hela laughs, her sneer fitting itself to Loki’s face.

“For the moment,” the Ancient One says absently, inspecting her subject with the same surgeon’s concentration that had born Stephen Strange through his studies. The Asgardian’s eyes seem ever unsure as to whether they are green or blue; right now they are a flaring color, the reflective glass of the sky, and terribly cold.

She sees her own reflection in them and is reminded of drawing venom from a viper wound.

Free of the suffocating vastness of the deeper places, the Ancient One feels at once the precision and mastery of her art. Hela’s taunts grow more and more feeble, her attempts to call on the land or the wolfish demons of the abyss stifled. Likewise, Loki grows still, his only apparent movement being an occasional spasm of his face, lips moving soundlessly as the Ancient One weaves magic of the air. Her fingers flutter above them both.

She feels her Master of almost a millenia past watching her from the bottom of the cliff. Patient. Appraising.

do you want a montage of my life? I have none to give you—I have lived too many

‘little bird’ is a kind thing to call a child; to Midgardian tongues, Loki means ‘to break’

The line of the Ancient One’s mouth dips downward. It couldn’t just be easy, of course. Where Hela begins and Loki ends is a difficult division to make; they are both old and embittered creatures, fire and frost, and neither. The Ancient One knows Loki only as a vague threat of years past, easily dealt with by people other than herself, and she has neither guide nor frame of reference as to how to save his mind.

It is like creating a portrait of someone you have never seen.

She delves into what she knows of Hela from her brief occupation, and sees two brothers standing on a cliff. Two kings or two princes, depending on who is doing the remembering, but both damned.

What of Thor? the Ancient One probes the alien mind, and it is—

Brother, but the twist of the word, the shape of it, divides goddess from god.

In one clawed, sweeping motion, she draws them both from their stone prison, and Hela is cast out, forming and reforming, like a slender and monstrous shadow, coming again for the Ancient One (they struggle and are neither one nor the other) and the Ancient One throws her with all of her might into that great, dark wound in the ground.

And she is gone, for the moment.

Loki has plummeted. The Ancient One follows, walking the vertical length of the cliff to its end, where the Asgardian lies among the boulders and she and Ebony Maw at last stand face to face.

Sif expects to feel gutted, or lost, or something. Some terrible fracture to her person.

She has returned to life and sanity, and yet cannot help but feel like it is the reverse—she or the world has gone mad, and nothing since her last sight of Asgard, an almost careless glance over her shoulder, has been real. But she is not gutted, or lost. She is not even numb. With the immutable stillness of someone who trained for centuries, she stands in the deepest shadows of the cell on Jotunheim and stares at the pool.

The Allfather sent her looking for the Infinity Stones, as had been her wish. She sought out the Waters of Sights, and when they would not admit her on Asgard, Midgard, or Vanaheim, she had entered Jotunheim with distasteful stillness, unsure of what she might find. What she found was madness, and shame. She was not there to defend her people or her King. Her throat burns, and Sif bites her lip to keep from further dishonor to her sword. She will not shed tears for them, not yet. She will not think of Thor, perhaps, dying alone; surely left for last after watching Heimdall and his brother fall.

No, she will not consider his death at all.

But she still counts off in her mind the names of the dead, or at least that which she can surmise from the Valkyrie—a Valkyrie! and she, who had so long coveted their fierce sisterhood—and the list runs long indeed. Among them, though, she cannot tell if her Warriors Three, in all their grave love of battle, were fallen.

So she breaks out of the cell.

It is no flimsy thing, and no small feat; her fingers bleed and smart at the sheer cold of the bars. To pick a lock on Jotunheim is a task for only the most troubled minds, with time and will enough, although it is not exactly Sif’s area of expertise. She does it nonetheless. Quite a lot of swearing is involved.

The corridors run long and without much order to them, and less light. Sif almost wishes she will happen upon a Frost Giant; her sword has too long lain still, and her heart is pounding with it all. But first she must find what’s left of Asgard.

“Valkyrie,” a voice says softly, almost as soon as she thinks it. The source of it is from a cell door, almost above her, and for a baffling moment she thinks it is a Jotun.

She squints, and it’s a Kronan.

“I’m not her,” she says quickly. “I’m a prisoner too. Or I was.”

“I see that you’re not her now,” the Kronan says. “Not that I’m implying Asgardians all look alike or anything, because that’s not what I’m implying. Actually I’m not really implying anything.”

Sif approaches the door and looks beyond the Kronan’s rocky bulk, and a long, cheerless room is filled with people, most of them looking intently through the dark at her. Her heart falls as quickly as it rose. So few of us left.

Somehow, someone recognizes her, and her name spreads in whispers throughout the room.

“I’m going to get you out,” she says sternly, a plan loosely knitting itself together in her mind.

“I was going to suggest that,” the Kronan says, “but I didn’t want to assume anything.”

The locks on this door are large, and rusted with age and water. Sif realizes quickly that they will not be so easy as her cell’s. There’s only one thing for it: by slyness or the sword, preferably the latter, she must get the keys. She turns to look at the dark maw of passageway ahead.

“I will return,” she promises the whispering faces, her eyes falling to a little girl with dark, thick braids. Looking at her she feels, all too suddenly, the weight of these people; they are bruised and near helpless. But it is a weight she is not unaccustomed to bearing, and they are all she has left.

Sif steps back from the barred doorway and is gone.

The Valkyrie has never seen a female Frost Giant before. At least not up close—there remains a possibility she’d met one in battle. This one stands at least half of Brunnhilde’s height taller than her, with visage no less severe than that of her male counterparts. She seems to be formed of all angles and weathered skin. Older, maybe, than the Jotun King and his court.

“I’d like to speak with the King,” Brunnhilde says. “Naefonr Laufeyson.”

“Our names sound like broken fragments in your mouths,” the Frost Giant says, in a voice surprisingly deep. “Do not desecrate them again.”

“Sorry,” Brunnhilde says flatly. “I wasn’t exactly given a crash course in Jotun customs.”

The woman circles her, long lines of what look like beads shifting from where they have been threaded through her horns. Gleaming skin and eyes are moving in the shadows as a dozen Frost Giants stand guard around the edge of the square. With little regard, Brunnhilde notes all of this, and the sun shining sallowly behind the mountains, and the strange constellations.

She has spent so long in the lights and the chasmic portals of Sakaar, it is strange to see the stars at all. Stars in the day, and a sun that circles and never rises. What madness would ever compel a people to live here?

“What are you?” the Frost Giant asks.

“An Asgardian. A Valkyrie.”

“I know these things,” she says impatiently, her etched skin creasing. She draws close to scrutinize Brunnhilde’s face, who makes an effort not to flinch at her freezing clouds of breath. “You have the taint of Asgardian witchcraft on you, and I wonder.”

“I pose no threat to your King, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Brunnhilde says, amid low hisses from the darkness. “I don’t really understand it myself.”

“How can you? Your people grasp little of seidr. You seize at fate with the unguided hands of children. But far more dangerous,” she smiles, and it is not a friendly smile.

“How is it you speak our tongue so well?”

“I listen,” the Frost Giant gestures vaguely at the sky. “You are noisy. Or you were.”

Brunnhilde’s jaw tightens. So carefully must she tread, with the fate of a people resting on her. A people she had guided to this place, planet and city, just to extend their lives a little longer, as though they are candles in the wind.

Damn you, Thor, I did not ask for this.

Something, perhaps the weight of this thought or the want of drink or the exhaustion of many long days without sleep, makes her slip. Her mind, seized up as it is in her present surroundings, drifts for a moment, and she sees through the very mountains and through the void—

A single flame glows in a wasteland that used to be a city, or a planet.

One remains on Earth, the amber light has joined the others and now he is coming, and an android of some kind stands before a window and his voice slips through space as though through air

(he speaks of not valuing one life above others)

The gauntlet is slowly filling.

Thor’s face, tilted downwards as though in defeat. But living, breathing defeat. He is alive.

—Brunnhilde snaps back to her own mind, with a rush of shock and hope and fury at the terrible timing of it, for now the Frost Giant woman has seen the stars move in her eyes. Eyes gold and overbright, and not hers.

She looms over her. “What is it you saw?”

Before Brunnhilde could even think of answering, the steps of a Jotun guard pound across the flagstones and he enters the square with long strides.

“Farbauti,” he says, and then a string of words Brunnhilde cannot understand. They fall like arrows, clattering together, with a harsh musicality to them. There is a flash of something like rage on the female Jotun’s face, and she turns on Brunnhilde, raising an arm as if to strike her. The blow does not fall, though Brunnhilde braces for it.

“Fool! What have you done?” she demands. “She’s free.”

“Who?”

“The Seer. Now they will kill her. But no matter,” Farbauti says, with sudden calmness, and looks appraisingly at the Valkyrie. “We have another.”