Chapter Text
"My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state depose but not my griefs; still am I king of those.” —Richard II
Loki perched on the grated catwalk overlooking the Statesman’s cargo hold, where starlight fell in diagonal shafts, studying his claws. What provender they had secured lay lashed to the floor hundreds of meters below his dangling slippers, the ventral cavern encompassed in the serried grooves of corrugated bulkheads like the ribs of a great fish that had swallowed the realm. The hour grew late, inasmuch as there were hours in space. Solitude was scarce in such close quarters, until such a time as most of the ship had retired to their bunks, leaving Loki to his lonesome lucubrations.
When he tilted his hand in the light, he could just make out the shadows of his phalanges. Lacking nailbeds, the flesh itself gradually hardened towards the ends of his fingers into a semilucent material resembling quartz, the same crystalline tissue that made up his curved horns. They were too hard to easily trim, and would have to be buffed with a diamond file, but if kept short and neat, they would not compromise his dexterity. He curled them against his palms, fidgeting at the seamless way flesh gave way to claw, leaving no cuticle to worry. When Loki was a boy, Frigga used to brush his fingernails with black neem in the vain hope that its bitterness should deter his anxious chewing. Now, he placed a cautious digit in his mouth, letting the crystal clink against his teeth. The undersides were softer, more like fingertips, and the salty, faintly metallic flavor was reassuringly fleshy.
The main feature of the Jötnar for which his Æsir education had prepared him was how cursedly difficult they were to kill: Their unlikely combination of prodigious size and catlike stealth, of brutelike strength and wraithlike stillness; Their storied ability to outlast a siege by going into hibernation. Their bodies having been adapted to the harsh elements of Jötunheimr, they were said to be virtually impervious to the cold, senseless of pain, heedless of hunger, stoic in the face of the most brutal deprivations. Some averred that they were actually made of ice— or iron, or stone. Difficult to kill something that was hardly alive to begin with. Almost a part of the desolate landscape itself, winter itself taking draugrlike shape, they would fall upon their enemies with the silence of snow and all the force of kraken.
This rather tendentious characterization, as Loki had come to discover, occluded a great deal. The Jötun habitus, so far as he had experienced it from the inside, was certainly robust— but could not have been further from unfeeling. He flexed his hands, drawing slow, halting breath through his nose. The stuff of Æsir legend mingled with his own tormented imagination had produced a rather different picture. But shades and whispers, chimeras and phantasms dissolved in the face of the real thing: Here it was, this blue body of his, in all its insistent corporeality. And it felt… warm.
The texture of his hair was different, downier and less oily, forming a soft, black nimbus around his head. His skin, too, was less oily and porous: Warm and dry and smooth as sun-kissed stone. No, not stone— nor ice, nor iron, nor glass, nor salt; But flesh, sensate and yielding. It had a firm yet velvety feel. Hazarding a tendril of seiðr, he hesitantly probed beneath its surface. His insides were much like his outsides: their shape familiar in the main, but with just enough minor deviations to make him squirm.
His reverie was soon cut short by Thor, who sallied onto to the tweendeck below. Through Jötun eyes, equipped to penetrate the endless night, he was rendered, like most everything else, in a glowing palette of delicate pastels. He looked up, drawing a hand through his close-clipped pyrite underhair.
“Loki?” he asked, ascending the utility ladder. “This is getting ridiculous! I’ve tried to give you distance, but a king has to put his foot down at some point. If you don’t want be treated like an unruly child, then don’t act like one! Mark me, Brother, I shall throw you over my shoulder like a sack of yams and haul you to your bed myself, if that is what it takes for you to get some slee—” He halted at the top, catching sight of Loki in the dark, and emitted an airless little yelp.
“Bold talk,” said Loki, dragging a claw against the steel, “from one so full of delicious Æsir blood.”
Thor squinted, and Loki realized his brother likely couldn’t see much more than the silhouette of him, an enigmatic, sinister shape out from which blazed a set of glittering ruby eyes. Though Loki had never seen his own, he knew the reflective layer behind the Jötun retina would cause them to flash in the dark like a cat’s, certain angles turning his otherwise black pupils into pellicules of thin-beaten gold.
Thor clutched the ladder, making no move to either advance or retreat, his mouth slightly ajar. The last thing Loki needed as he tentatively made to face the looking glass was to be inundated with his brother’s presence, which could only serve to further torment him by juxtaposition. Guileless, golden Thor had never known a moment of unease in his flawless Æsir form, simply taking for granted the effortless beauty and strength of the magnificent beast within which he so felicitously dwelt. Even in his callow arrogance, he had ever seemed scarcely aware of his own potency: His booming, dawn-colored mien, the tang of ozone that wafted in his wake, the seiðr that warped from him in sheets like heated air.
“What, uhh… Brought this on?” Thor asked, laughably straining for nonchalance. Alack! It was cursedly difficult to maintain a grudge against him, such was his oafish winsomeness. “That is— Not that there’s anything wrong with it! I just—” A rhetorician, His Majesty was not.
“When Odin died, the spell he cast to imprison Hela was broken,” Loki cooly observed. “What do you suppose became of the spell he had cast on me?”
“I don’t understand,” said Thor. “You were Æsir this morning.”
Loki peered across the cavern, where the dangling catwalk, painted safety yellow, wrapped around. The artificial breeze ruffled his smallclothes, a light tunic and woolen hose, his swinging feet modestly shod in soft grain leather slippers. He didn’t need to remove them to sense that his toes had gone the way of his fingers, juts of crystal threatening to wear through the material.
He hadn’t had much of a chance to reflect on it in all the commotion, but now the implications seemed plain: Odin had known all along that the truth of Loki’s nature would be revealed upon the hour of his demise. When was he going to tell Loki? Or had it been his intention to spring it on both his sons at the last moment, just as he had the Princess? To defer the consequences of all his lies until after he was dead and gone, so that he should never have to answer for them?
“When I realized he was dying,” said Loki, “and taking his seiðr with him, I used my own to shapeshift. I can wear my accustomed form at will, just as I do any other. But it’s not the same as before. Now, it’s just one guise among many.”
“What do you mean?” asked Thor.
“The glamour Odin placed upon me was no mere illusion,” Loki explained. “It had to hold up under scrutiny. It had to fool even me. It was an extremely complex and powerful spell.” Restive blue knuckles kneaded his blue thighs. He had never seen the creature laid bare, but he could feel the changes under his clothes. The runic markings on his arms extended all over his body, the surface casing of the subcutaneous filaments embedded in his flesh. They were more sensitive— or sensitive in a different way —from the rest of his skin, needing time to adjust to the press of fabric. This perhaps explained why the Jötnar seemed to prefer going nude.
“And if it wasn’t quite perfect?” He laughed dryly. “Well, I wouldn’t know the difference, would I?” He shifted in place against the sensations, the strange heat, the runechannels lain like wire beneath his skin, the not at all unpleasant purring of his snug, contented seiðr. “Now, I know the difference,” he added softly.
Thor’s brow rippled. “Brother,” he said, at length, an awful tenderness entering into his remaining eye. Thor wielded tenderness like a battleaxe— abrupt, concussive, and invariably aimed at Loki's most delicate nerve. “Might I see you in the light?”
Loki sniffed imperiously. “What for?”
“It grieves me so,” Thor said, “to think that I have never seen your face.”
Loki’s tongue polished the backs of his teeth, which were blessedly smooth and flat, unlike the crowded mouthfuls of jagged flint he had glimpsed in the heads of Jötun warriors. This moment had loomed over him since he touched the Casket. What sense was there in putting if off any further?
When he closed his eyes, he saw the temple spire, like a great stone tuning fork reaching for the stars. The black altar that was his birthright, the twisted shadows passing over an uncomprehending babe, the freezing slab of marble on which he was fated to die. He must have cried and cried.
Rudy-bearded, all-conquering Odin must have presented the war trophy to his then-young bride, who could now rest on her laurels, having already supplied him with a worthy heir. When did their plans for Loki change? Was it Frigga who made the fateful error of placing the Jötun foundling in the nursery beside her own son? Just what she needed to occupy the boisterous little sundog: A companion, a playmate for young Thor. But the golden princeling had fallen so completely in love with his exotic little pet, that he wanted to share his whole golden life with it. And poor sweet Frigga, she didn’t have the heart to refuse her precious boy anything. Was that how it happened? When had Loki ceased to be a gamepiece and become a son?
Thor would have been weaned by the time Odin brought him to her, so Frigga could not have nursed him herself. He wondered what they fed him. He wondered what Jötun babes even ate. The betrayal unfolded like a flower, continually revealing new fronds, new centifoils and crevices of his life into which it reached.
Thor descended the ladder, giving him leave, and Loki made a show of sighing and hauling himself to his feet, as though Thor were merely inconveniencing him; As though his (blue?!) heart weren’t hammering in trepidation. He lowered himself onto the tweendeck below, holding his hornèd head high, and stepped into one of the slanted channels of starlight teeming with ionized space dust, evincing a sort of languid ennui.
“Oh!” Thor’s eye crinkled fondly. “It’s you!”
“What?” This reaction caught Loki off guard, rather puncturing his cool. He swept his hair behind his ears, glancing away.
“Well, now I feel foolish!” said Thor. “I don’t know what I expected. I just— I didn’t know you’d look like you!”
Loki strode airily past him towards the coaming edge. “Weren’t you the one who used to say they all looked the same?”
He counted the cargo, laboring to still his trembling hands. Thor recognized him. If they met on the battlefield, Thor would not mistake him for some faceless enemy. So much for that particular nightmare.
“I wish I could take back what I said in ignorance. I am so sorry, Loki.” Thor bowed his head. “But you must know that it makes no difference to me what skin you wear. Do I mourn for Hela? Do you see me drinking the sjaund for her? And when I thought you dead? You can’t imagine how I wept! That’s how much blood means to me!”
“So you keep saying.” Loki waved.
“Well, I’m going to keep on saying it until you believe me!” Thor persisted.
For all his recent, hard-won wisdom, Thor could still be remarkably obtuse. He had chased Loki across the universe, pleading with him to ‘come home’ as though it were all just a matter of skinned knees and spilt milk. Perhaps, for the propitious son of light, it truly was that simple: Thor wanted his playmate back.
His blunt overtures had always held a certain sentimental appeal— If only it were so simple! —but since Odin’s death, the gravity they exerted on Loki seemed to have increased. Why had Loki returned to Asgard? It was a big universe; Why not ply his vagabond way elsewhere? A prince of two realms, disowned by both— What were the chances? —there was no place for him anywhere, but that which he made for himself. So why was he here, on this thrice-damned spacecraft, pouring himself out to Thor?
“You keep insisting that it doesn’t matter,” he seethed, “because it’s easy for you. Out of sight, out of mind.” He pivoted, feeling his ribs flare, his voice beginning to rise. “But it does matter, Thor. It matters to me. I’m the one who has to actually be… one of them.”
Loki teetered between escalation and abeyance. Indulging his bitterness came easily, but he knew it led nowhere new. Coming up for air, as it were, after the period of his exile, torture, and imprisonment, the time he’d spent impersonating Odin had finally given him a chance to think.
A chastened Thor quietly studied him, waiting for Loki to settle again. Silence fell. The fact of Loki’s alienness yawned between them, until Thor spoke again, in mingled melancholy and wonderment: “You’re like someone I’ve always known, but never met.”
In truth, tempers had cooled. Thor certainly seemed ready to let bygones be bygones— as far as Loki knew, there was no cell awaiting him on Midgard— and for his own part, Loki found himself inclined to play along. And why not? Before Thor’s abortive coronation, before Loki’s cosmos had come crashing down around his ears, it hadn’t been his way to pick fights for no reason. (For he’d always had his reasons.)
If Loki were being honest, he’d have to grant that a part of him had rather relished playing hard to get. It was a thrilling reversal of their previous dynamic: For once, Thor had been his shadow, panging after his attentions. But if what Thor had said on Sakar was true, then this game had run its course.
Loki shifted his weight from one foot to the other, sampling his own equanimity. This body, he noticed, was less quick to anger. The worst of it was how well it suited him. Still, watchful, subtle, and sensitive, this creature of the shadows. He felt stronger, calmer— and rather better disposed towards Thor, for reasons that were now beginning to dawn on him. His ōþala, as he had learned the runic markings were called, throbbed as though in response to these musings.
“And here I was, ready to give you credit for honing your powers of persuasion,” he murmured.
“What?” Thor asked.
“Nothing,” Loki said. “Never mind.”
When he wasn’t patronizing the theater, Loki had used Odin’s usurped authority to procure rare artifacts and manuscripts from across the Nine Realms, of which one obscure volume in particular stood out: The Glöymd Mál Jötna penned by a certain Mímir of the Outer Hold, who claimed to have made a most thorough survey of the flora, fauna, persons, dwellings, customs, and seiðrverk of Jötunheimr, complete with splendid acid etched illustrations. From among its handsome vellum leaves, Loki had gleaned a number of disquieting insights, which he had been turning over in his mind ever since. He didn’t know how much to credit them, but so far his own experience seemed to corroborate Mímir’s account.
Ōþala, from the Jötun ᛟᚦᚨᛚᚨ, were said to mark each Jötun as a member of a particular house. If Mímir were to be believed, then all Jötnar should immediately recognize Loki as royalty, for he bore the facial markings of the regal House Ymir. So far, so good— Except that Loki was not a member of House Ymir in good standing, or of any other Jötun house for that matter. His ōþala, the physical manifestation of the ancient blood seiðr that bound each Jötun to their kin, did not connect him to any other Jötun whatsoever. For Loki numbered among the wretched, the kinless, those whose condition of abjection was acknowledged only in hushed tones: The útfryrjar, from the Jötun ᚢᛏᚠᚱᛃᚱᚱ— literally, ‘the frozen-out.’
Without the seiðr-sustaining bonds of kinship, a Jötun would succumb to wasting sickness, their constitution deteriorating as their mind lapsed into madness and despair. This was the dread fate of the útfryrjar, generally reserved as the ultimate punishment for capital crimes, when it was not the result of other defects. With sober anthropological detachment, Mímir had helpfully devoted an entire subchapter to that most quaint and charming feature of Jötun society, the practice of infant exposure. Above all, the Jötnar prized austerity, endurance, and survival. Such was the pitiless calculus of eternal winter: Prune the weak, jettison dead weight, amputate the limb to save the trunk.
Loki paced the edge of the chasm. But he was not weak; Not like this; Not at all. A stab of vindictive pleasure quickened his gait. Æsir combat training had made him a match for challengers thrice his size and Queen Frigga herself had been his seiðrkennari. The ignorant savages who had adjudged him defective and left him to die could never have imagined what he was now capable of. He was more civilized, more educated, and more powerful than any of them.
So why did their rejection hurt?
“Well, Brother,” he said, “I am faced with something of a dilemma.”
“What is it?” asked Thor, his single eyeball tracking Loki back and forth.
“As I said, the glamour Odin placed upon me was very complex. Which isn’t to say I couldn’t replicate it myself,” Loki preened, though in truth he had scant idea how Odin had accomplished it. “But it would require much research. It would take time. And I’m wondering whether…” He stopped, curling his toes inside his slippers, grasping the vibrations of the ship. “Whether it’s even worth doing.”
Thor covered a wince. “It’s— up to you, of course. But…”
“Well, obviously I wouldn’t appear like this in front of everyone.” Loki gestured to himself, trying not to let Thor’s evident relief wound him. “That’d be impolitic, don’t you think?” he sneered.
In a footnote, Mímir had catalogued, from potentially apocryphal accounts, those peculiar specimens among the útfryrjar who had somehow managed to slip their doom. A Jötun infant left for exposure would, in a desperate, last-ditch bid for survival, attempt to imprint on whatever caretaker happened to be at hand— Like a lost chicklet, Loki scorned, though at precisely whom or what his scorn was directed he could not say. Such instances would have to be exceedingly rare, noted Mímir, for those in whom the blood seiðr ran strong enough to latch their ōþala around the dry teat of non-Jötun kinship were unlikely to have been left for exposure in the first place. These ersatz bonds were necessarily one-sided, as non-Jötnar lacked ōþala and could not respond to the útfryrjar’s pitiful calls into the void, but they could be sufficient for the body to stabilize itself and to mitigate the symptoms of wasting sickness. The foundling babe that learned to associate the bounced echo of its own ōþala calls with the satisfaction of its physical needs for food and warmth could soothe itself with the illusion that this echo represented the response of its fictive kin. Thin gruel indeed— But it was the Jötun way to subsist on thin gruel.
Loki scanned his fingertips over the backs of his hands, minding the raised chevrons that ended at his wrists just short of the longer marks that ribboned around his arms and shoulders. Then, like slipping into an out-grown suit of clothes, he drew his Æsir skin over him, as if to prove to Thor (and to himself) that he still could. A world that had been warm and bright, lapping at his senses like bathwater, grew abruptly cold and dark.
Thor loomed nearer, springs under his weighty heels. He’d been careful of Loki since their initial reunion in what for now sufficed as the king’s chambers, as though on hunt, straining not to spook flighty game. It was clear he wanted to talk, but stood hanging upon some signal from Loki.
Obliging him, Loki sat down on the ledge and shifted back into his other, night-clad self, the warm wave of the world swelling over him again. It only took Thor a minute to realize that this was about as overt an invitation as he was going to get, and swinging his boots over the chasm, he appeared at Loki’s elbow.
Erewhile, they had frivoled many a halcyon afternoon hiding from schoolmasters among the branches of the great snarled oak at the edge of Odin’s hunting grounds, ‘til driven shrieking from within its shady ravel by a treachery of ravens. Seated side by side, childish legs dangling from a high, sturdy limb, they could see all Asgard, it seemed. The tree fractaled from the ground like lightning, as the Nine Realms fractaled from Yggrasil, as fulgurant little Thor had fractaled from the loins of Odin and Frigga, branch of the royal line of Búri, whose roots sprang from Ginnungagap before the world was known.
Was this always the way of Asgard, this ravenous spreading, ever onward and upward, to remake the Nine Realms in its own image, ever propagating its fractaled tributaries? Though as a rule, they disdained the short-lived beings they termed ‘mortals,’ the Æsir had always harbored a certain fondness for the inhabitants of Midgard who, though primitives, were renowned for their beauty and delightsomeness— which was to say, their physical resemblance to the Æsir themselves. The protection of Midgard, Asgard’s most favorite casus belli, drew much of its potency from the sense that the defenseless Midgardians were like Æsir in miniature, little twig of the golden bough.
The Jötnar, by contrast, were oriented inward. Per Mímir, their whole cosmos consisted in a series of concentric spheres, governed by the principles of inni and úti, from the Jötun ᛁᚾᚾᛁ and ᚢᛏᛁ— ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Their bodies, far from the icy menhir of Æsir songs and sagas, were powerful thermal siphons, their natural seiðr allowing them to draw heat energy into themselves from the surrounding environment. Their families, their dwellings, their rituals, their state, all formed concentric spheres around a cardinal inni, a thermal core. The stone face they wore to the outside world was considered appropriate to the úti, for according to Mímir, all a Jötun’s fine feelings and warm sensibilities were reserved for the secretive, innermost sanctum of their kith and kin.
Gazing down at their now-long legs hanging side by side, Loki thought of the great oak, and the summers of their childhood, of snipe hunts, and pond dives, and green beetles in glass jars, and Frigga’s tolerant chagrin when they returned covered in peat-mud to fresh clothes and heaping bowls of cloudberries and cream.
“Did you know,” he asked suddenly, “that ᛅᚱᛁᚾᚾ, the Jötun word for ‘heart’ is the same as their word for ‘hearth’?”
On impulse, he laid the back of his hand against Thor’s, and Thor flinched from the contact, anticipating frostburn. Who was Loki to presume such propinquity? Only the king’s brother. He dared Thor to spurn it. Thor, who certainly thought nothing of laying unsolicited hands on Loki’s person. Let him roil. Yes, that was the feel of Jötun flesh! Why should Thor get to remain blissfully ignorant of these vexatious matters when Loki was forced to know them?
“Oh.” Thor’s posture softened, the runagate hand returning to his side. “You’re—!”
“I know,” said Loki.
“But I thought…” said Thor.
“What?” Loki mocked. “You thought I’d be cold?”
“Well— yes!” said Thor.
“Don’t be absurd.” Loki gave his head a derisive roll, noticing the waft of his more buoyant hair. “There’s no such thing as cold. All energy is heat. What we call ‘cold’ is merely it’s absence. And of course there are no living creatures made of ice. Honestly, Thor! You’re far too old to still believe in such fairy stories.”
Thor’s fluster stretched into a slow smirk. Damn him, but he could tell when Loki protested too much!
“Admit it:” he challenged. “You thought they were cold, too.”
“I did,” Loki gasped, for this thought had, until recently, terrified him.
That the frost giants were untouchably cold was taken for granted by the Æsir. It was the fact about them; A synecdoche for all that made them monstrous. If even that wasn’t true… Loki could see Thor making a version of the same calculations.
“Not that I wouldn’t love you just the same if you were, you know—!” Thor hastened to add. “Though… this does make it a bit easier to show it.”
Loki rubbed the back of his hand, distracted by the afterfeel of their brief contact. He had never given any thought to being touched in this form, so perverse and undesirable would it the have seemed. But now that Thor knew it was safe, he realized, it was going to happen again. The prospect loosed a murmuration of starlings behind his ribs.
“Take care where you lay those clumsy paws of yours.” He leaned away. “For I do actually have the power to freeze you.” This was theoretically true, although he had yet to develop the technique. “The Jötnar survive on heat drawn from their surroundings,” he explained. “They learn to use this natural ability as a weapon, by rapidly extracting the heat from their enemies’ flesh. In other words, my touch won’t freeze you unless I will it.”
“Oh! Do you bask in the sun like a reptile?” Thor enthused.
“What?” Loki sputtered. “I am not— A reptile!” At least… he didn’t think he was. Surely, good old Mímir would have let him know if he had come from an egg! He dragged a hand through his hair, reassuring himself that he had hair, like a mammal, and not scales.
“No offense,” said Thor. “You know I love reptiles!”
“In any case,” Loki forged ahead, “we were led to believe a great many things that have since turned out to be lies.”
A look of weariness came over Thor, the like of which Loki had never seen him wear. Bulk listing to one side, he held himself as though cradling a phantom wound. It occurred to Loki that while he might yet have some beastly relations left on Jötunheimr (for whatever that was worth), Thor was well and truly orphaned. He had lost his parents, his friends, his realm. Spurned by his lady love, bereft of his hammer, he had never before cut such a beleaguered figure. Even his physical perfection was now marred by the loss of his eye.
“I know it doesn’t compare to your situation,” he said softly, searching his lap for words. “But learning of Hela…”
“I’m sure it stings,” Loki supplied breezily, “to know that you were not Odin’s first born.”
To see the Mighty Thor brought low was not without its satisfactions. But the vicious desire for him to know even a crumb of the bitter rejection and loneliness Loki himself had tasted was tempered by the equally compelling desire to be the answer to that loneliness. Things had been good, Loki reminiscenced, whenever it was just the two of them. And now that he no longer had Thor’s obstreperous friends to contend with… His ōþala purred at the dark thought that, at last, he had this kinless, kingdomless Thor all to himself.
“He made me feel special,” Thor confessed. “But it turns out I was just a do-over.”
‘Do-over.’ No doubt another one of Thor’s Midgardianisms, which he had picked up from his mortal friends. Loki found himself unexpectedly charmed by it; By this new Thor, who allowed himself to be swayed by the words and ways of lesser beings, who didn’t take himself too seriously, who didn’t always have to be right.
“There was a side to him that you never saw,” Loki said, dipping a toe in this unguarded feeling and watching the surface ripple. Observing his own reactions, it was becoming clearer and clearer to him that he wasn’t simply the same Loki with an azure coat of paint. No longer a half-thing, crammed into a false skin, he felt keen and whetted, unrestrained and wriggling. “Do you want to know what he said to me, right before casting me into the dungeons for trying to do exactly what he’d raised me to do?” this wild Loki asked. Propped on his elbows, he peered languorously across at Thor, studying and provoking. “Not only did he never once apologize to me: He thought I owed him. He said I should be grateful for whatever life he deigned to give me, because it had been my lot to die as an infant. He would never have said something like that to me in front of you.”
“He truly said that?” Thor looked troubled. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you… but Loki, you do have a way of reading into things, of allowing things to wound you that aren’t intended—”
“So sorry to puncture your image of him so soon after his passing,” Loki snapped. “But he said almost those exact words to me.”
Anger drew heat inward and brought a rime of frost to his skin. Fluid and silent, he stood, putting distance between them, the processed air condensing into pools of frozen dew where his slippered feet fell. But Thor was swift to follow.
They strolled among the shafts of starlight, and Loki craned to see the rows of portholes high above their heads. He wondered if what Thor missed most about Mjölnir was that it lent him the ability to fly. Loki could fly, sort of, with great and wasteful exertion of his seiðr. At least, it was not practical for Æsir Loki; He knew not yet what was possible for him in his native form.
Exhaling slowly through his nose, he watched his own breath thaw into visible vapor again. This was a state of repose in which such irritants faded quickly. A body designed to withstand the rigors of Jötunheimr was richly satisfied to find itself so uncommonly warm, dry, clean, and well-fed. He flexed his toes, trying to decide whether or not he was in favor of this. He liked the way the air moved over his skin, the way the light sliced across his eyes, the twisting plume of heat at his core. But still, he had not nerved himself to face his reflection.
“I’m not saying I’m glad he’s gone. But you were his heir; I was his project.” Loki didn’t say ‘experiment.’ “It’s not the same.”
It was said that Svöl, the Cloud King of Niflheimr, once sent an orphaned light elf child to be raised by the Þulr hermits of the Misty Wood, who had taken a strict vow of silence. It was the Cloud King’s supposition that a babe reared without words, and so uncorrupted by the world, would speak the pure language of Yggdrasil— But to his disappointment, the child learned to communicate by hand signs, and the experiment was declared a failure. For the crime of adapting to its cruel circumstances, the poor thing was ritually drowned in the Silver Marsh.
Loki turned, leaning casually against the yellow railing. “He took me as some sort of war prize, you know. He told me as much. I was to figure somehow in his ultimate conquest of Jötunheimr. And then, when he realized he had no use for me—” he said mildly, “Well, I suppose he gave me to you as a pet.”
The space between them throbbed with strife. They could, if either of them wished, begin a fight. The old Thor would have taken swift offense to such calumnies against the Allfather. They could recite a thousand years of grievances against one another. Someone’s blade could wind up buried between someone else’s ribs.
Battle weary and heartsore, this new Thor was in no mood to quarrel. “Father and Mother were wrong to conceal your true nature,” he sighed. “But you must know they both loved you. Our family loved you, and you were ours from the beginning.” He smiled, earnest and apple-cheeked. Through Loki’s dreamy, stained-glass night vision, everything was wildly chromatic and illuminated, rendering the one-eyed kingling positively beatific. “Did you know that I have no memory of a time before you?”
“What did you think when they first told you?” Loki prodded, half-curious, half-still spoiling for a fight. “Were you horrified? Do you really expect me to believe you were fine with it, just like that?”
“I admit, there was some… initial shock,” Thor hedged. “A period of adjustment.”
“Let me guess:” came Loki’s churlish narration. “So great was the magnitude of your love for me, that it immediately overcame a lifetime’s worth of animosity towards frost giants.”
Thor flinched at the slur, and a part of Loki reveled in his discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know why you’re saying it all sarcastic,” Thor huffed. “But yes! I knew immediately, that one of two things would have to change: My beliefs about the Jötuns…” He made pointed use of the polite term. “Or my love for you. And that was no contest at all!”
In a flash, Loki saw himself as perhaps Odin had: turbulent, captious little cur, biting the hand that fed him. He knew self pity to be his least attractive quality. Had the Allfather, in his vaunted wisdom, been right? After all, he had favored the wretched spawn of his bitterest adversary with a life of extraordinary honor and privilege. Who ever heard of such magnanimity? And what did he receive in turn, but his ward’s ingratitude and rebellion?
“So it didn’t bother you in the slightest,” he asked, “to learn that all that time, you ate, and slept, and trained, and played next to one of them?”
“I thought,” Thor gentled, “that if my dear Loki was one of them… then, how bad could they be?”
The painted metal creaked with cold. “They abandoned me to die,” Loki snarled, “because I was born too small. How good can they be?”
Thor toed the gangway, looking down. “The Æsir are not free of contradiction.”
Indeed, thought the tiny giant: The universe was full of contradictions.