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All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous, lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus’d thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine - and thou hast borne it well.
- Prometheus, George Gordon Lord Byron.
“Tasha told me the myth of Prometheus,” he says, one day.
“Tell me,” I say, because it’s obvious - because Loki has always marked out his conversation like a road that I have only to follow.
“He was a titan - a god. He pitied humanity, because they were so tiny and weak when held up against the animals, granted strength and speed by his dull-witted brother. He stole fire from the gods for them, and the king of the gods - Zeus - decreed that he must be punished for this crime. He was bound to a rock, and an eagle came every morning to peck his liver out. His immortality was his curse, because his liver would grow back, and the torture would begin anew each day until the end of time.”
I am silent, and my mind is filled for a moment with flitting images of ravens and ice and golden apples.
“What do you think of that story?” he prompts, impatient.
”I think,” I reply at last, “that you would rather have the eagle.”
He laughs, and - bitterness notwithstanding - I count that as a victory.
“Please,” he had begged, in the beginning. “I’m sorry - I didn’t mean, you know I didn’t mean - no! Please! Don’t leave me here! I didn’t, I swear - father! Father” He had more words than that, but they’d all been said and dismissed and by the time I came to him, he was desperate. He knew already that he had lost.
He cannot crane his neck to see, but I imagine he believes that he is tied down with enchanted chains. I let him believe it.
“You believe me, don’t you?” he said, and I nodded, because of course I did - I have always needed to believe his lies.
“It burns,” he says, “worse than anything.”
“I know,” I say, because I too have been burned in my haste to protect him.
“I love you,” he said, and I believed that as well. “Stay. Please.”
Jormungand is its name - the monstrous serpent that stretches out as far as the eye can see, leaving this underground cavern in both directions and meeting on the other side of Midgard. Loki’s son, by his Jotun woman. It drips poison down, and when he is in a jesting mood he threatens to send it to its room.
At his funeral, they feasted as though he had died in battle and was drinking in Valhalla, not drifting through the cold darkness of space. Something was amiss, but I did not think on it for long. I hardly knew him, after all.
“How is Vali?” he asks, finally. “I meant to teach him poker.”
I swallow, and steel my mind for the conversation that must follow. He was always going to ask, and I have never been a liar, but it still hurts to force the words out.
“He was turned into a wolf,” I say. “He is lost to us.”
“Who did this?” he asks, voice gone dark and focused as though he were capable of vengeance.
“Odin,” I reply.
“What of Nari?”
“Vali tore him apart, mindless. His entrails are the chains that bind you.”
He is silent, and I realise after a moment that I am crying. For my lost sons, for the poison that drips from above, for the time it has been since I last saw the sky. For the soft and frightened look in his eyes that condemns me to be as much a prisoner as he is.
The first time he returned from Midgard - gloriously alive, but somehow a little broken in his mind - he returned in chains and was imprisoned in a tower for his crimes. I was employed to keep him company, to fill the air with sound and little else. It was only supposed to be a job for a few months.
My bowl is filled to the brim again with Jormungand’s poison.
“Prepare yourself,” I say.
“I hate you,” he replies, blankly, and grits his teeth.
I withdraw the bowl, and rush across to the river. I can hear him screaming, and the earth above us shakes when he strains against his bonds. His voice is raw and the agony I hear in his cries cuts me to the bone.
I spill the the poison into the fast-flowing water - I have long since ceased worrying about the river’s destination - and hurry back to his side to shield him from the poison once more.
“You’re getting old, Sigyn,” he grimaces. “You're getting slower each time.”
He is wrong. I am getting faster, and he is getting weaker.
I say nothing.
I used to bring him news, speaking with derision about the hypocrisies of the court, and he would smile around the cruel gag that bound his mouth and magic alike. Once I mistook his laughter for a fit - I had not seen him laugh until then, and could only see his chest shaking. It is difficult, to see someone so vulnerable and tell yourself that they are evil. In time, it becomes impossible to believe.
“Vali ought to befriend Fenrir,” he muses. “They might get along.”
He thinks the monstrous wolves should be friends. My son has become a monster, and my husband has fathered monsters with another woman. I do not appreciate the reminder, and I allow myself to spend the briefest of moments imagining balancing the bowl on his stomach and leaving him to his fate. It comes to nothing, of course.
The Allfather constructed an elegant pair of magical bracelets, that would bind magic as well as the constraints in which he had returned from Midgard. On regaining his silver tongue, the first thing he said was, “Sigyn. You have been a great comfort to me, and I thank you.” Then he said, “Water,” and sat himself down on the bed before he had time to fall.
He wears the bracelets again now.
He tells me of his brother - who comes across as both crueller and nobler than gossip had led me to believe - and the place he had carved out for himself on Midgard. There were six of them - seven, including Loki, for a time - and they protected Midgard together. After a while they all begin to blur, but that doesn’t matter so much - he’s not telling the stories for my benefit.
He fashioned his prison into a fortress, and in the early weeks he denied his brother entry in the one act of cruelty still available to him. I saw his mother on her way out sometimes, her face stained with tears. I do not think anyone else tried to enter.
He tells me about a good soldier, who had slipped into a frozen sleep in the middle of a war where flags and salutes had sent fire and death to haunt city streets across continents. He tells me that somewhere on Midgard is a portrait of himself that he wished he had been able to keep.
When he said to me, “You love me,” I could not deny it. I knew so much of him that I could not help but love him.
“Then it must be returned,” he affirmed, and his smile was like a threat.
He tells me about a woman steeped in blood and betrayal, who found a way out. There is a wistful, almost jealous look in his eyes. I try not to assume, and listen with interest to his stories of her - her knife throwing, her books, her mastery with lies.
“This is what I am,” he said to me on our wedding night, and kissed my hand in a mockery of chivalry. His skin turned blue and his eyes were red as blood - a Jotun. I shivered, and kissed his lips, and he withdrew from me as if he had been burned. I refused to be the one who was afraid.
He tells me about a man whose brilliance with their world’s magic became a curse, who took years to turn it inside out and find the strength that it could lend the world when the timing was right. He tells me about this man’s calming exercises; how he had caught himself up in knots trying to imitate them.
The second time he went to Midgard, he went in peace, arm in arm with his brother; the two princes friends once more, and everything forgiven. He left behind a loving wife and two young sons, and he promised to return to us once the threats to Midgard were dispelled. I thought that we could be happy.
He tells me about a man who changed himself when he was betrayed and emerged stronger and weaker and more alive than ever. He hums unfamiliar tunes and speaks of moving pictures and strange foods, and places the brunt of the blame for these things I cannot hope to understand on this man’s shoulders.
His second trial was as a Jotun, not a prince of Asgard. He had been stripped of that title. His brother spoke in his defence - and yet honestly - then railed against the ruling for days, and then set to pounding on his prison cell with bruised fists and hoarse voice. “He needn’t bother,” he had said, determinedly flippant. “He can’t do anything about it - he’s not king, I made sure of that.”
He tells me about a man who used the weapons of the past with vicious accuracy, who would spend hours a day training and training and training because he was afraid that being good for a human wasn’t enough any more. He laughs as he remembers him falling asleep at the bottom of the stairs and under the table and in doorways, just to get in the way.
“Allfather,” I said, head bowed low but voice ringing out clearly. “I would beg a favour of you.”
He granted my request, knowing that I - weak-bodied and slow-tongued and utterly without magic - could be trusted beyond the barriers. I could not free him, however much I might wish to. My mother cried for days to have lost me as well, and I began to doubt myself almost at once.
I am needed, and so I must stay at my post - I bar myself from sleep. I rest my eyes upon the curve of his jaw and the careless power in his hands and the quick and clever look his face has, even in sleep. I listen to his dream-fed murmurings, and hear scattered names and pleas and whispered words of power; helpless reaching towards spells so dark that I am shocked even now.
They came for him after a month, having finally broken past the magic that concealed us. Odin met them at the gates and turned them away, and I never discovered why they had come. Loki believed that they were here to kill him, but the more I heard of them in later years, the more I doubted it.
Every time the poison falls on his skin, it strips away something of what he used to be - what I thought he was, what I hoped he was. I begin to fear that poison now flows through his veins. He no longer screams, but bears the pain in grim silence with tensed muscles and gritted teeth. This worries me.
“They sound like they were good friends to you,” I say.
“Believe me, they were not.”
“They betrayed you?”
“No,” and there is madness lurking behind his smile. “I betrayed them.”
He did not weep, when the sentence was given, but even he could not summon up an ironic smile.
I think about leaving him.
He did not weep, but I wept enough for the both of us.
I do not leave him.
“I will be revenged,” he says. “I will ally myself with the fire giant Surt, and have him burn their world to the ground.”
“Ragnarok,” I whisper, because it is foretold. “You will die.”
“I know.”
“I will die.”
“I know.”
“Everyone will -“
“I know, Sigyn! That’s the point!”
I ask him for the story of Prometheus again, and I wait for the world to end.
He tells me that Zeus was called the Thunderer, and his lip twists in derision even as his eyes water. “He will be the only one left now,” he says.
“You should tell me some stories of your own,” he suggests, when I have listened for a century.
I do not know where to begin.
I had a life before this one, I am sure of it. I had a home - my parents and my friends and my beautiful boys; all lost to me now. I had more than my eternal purpose and the sound of his voice. I reach back, and I remember.
My earliest memory is a hazy image of a garden in which I was happy. I begin to describe the colours of the sunrise, reasoning that I may as well begin at the beginning. I have all the time in the world.
“Such feasts shalt thou make no more;
O’er all that thou hast which is here within
Shall play the flickering flames,
And thy back shall be burnt with fire.”
- Lokasenna, Poetic Edda