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Bitter cold had numbed half of his body, waking him to constant twilight and biting wind. His joints popped and cracked in protest as he fumbled on unforgiving ice, forcing his wracked form to its feet. Behind him lay the gaping mouth of the cavern, snow drifting in to conceal the rock formations.
Even for a Jotun, wind so fierce held little comfort, and Loki turned away from the outside, the dark caves calling in sweet siren voices that promised serenity and comfort. He shuffled across the ice-covered rock. The walls around him glowed faintly, lighting the way for wayward travelers with ethereal majesty. In his peripheral vision they seemed to shift, serpentine shadows slithering through gloom and anonymity.
The ice around him hummed soft as a mouse’s whisper. Frigid walls grew more and more narrow until he had to stoop to get through, but the siren song would not relinquish his mind.
Crawling on blistered hands and aching knees, he finally emerged into a cavern so vast as to hide the opposite wall in obscurity. The song amplified against the glistening ceiling, its source now unrecognizable amid the echoing cacophony.
Movement belied a great gray-green ophidian figure lounging on the shores of a silvery subterranean well. Perforated wings dragged across the jagged ice as it undulated among a feast of cadavers, its beaked snout rooting through for the most decomposed. It threw these choice meals into the air, snapping and choking them down its chasmal maw as the scales on its bloated neck stretched apart in accommodation.
A twisting structure emerged from an unseen part of the ceiling, winding its way along the sparkling wall, wetted by the quietly breaking waves. It was to this pulsing root the wyrm was anchored, its prehensile tail coiled about the velvety surface like the meandering scars displayed on blue Jotnar skin.
It crawled chin-first beside the struggling taproot, tattered wings fluttering uselessly like broken limbs, and latched onto a point not high off the ground with a fierce grip. As it gnawed, the metallic smell of blood reached Loki’s nose from broken and trickling teeth in the serpent’s jaw.
The formless, shifting shapes of the outer caves had followed Loki into the inner chamber and they writhed interwoven into a humanoid form. The trickster turned as the blush of half-life bloomed on feminine cheeks and rippled across the creature until his own Hela’s sultry voice rang through the cavern.
“Daddy, why do you come? Naglfar is not yet finished.”
Entranced, Loki reached for her hands, bringing each to his wind-chapped lips in turn.
“No, no, darling, the cock has not crowed, and Balder still lives,” he replied, his eyes darting across her features as if focus evaded his pupils.
“I seem to be lost, have been for quite some time now. Wandering. Not sure how I got here. Woke up in the doorway…” he rambled.
Fingers emanating the chill of the grave covered his mouth and he looked up, willing his eyes to adjust as his daughter wrapped veiled arms around his shoulders and cradled his head against her neck. He slumped against her, his traitorous body enveloped by oppressive fatigue, and succumbed to sleep.
~*~
The second time Loki awoke in the hyperborean underworld, it was on a bed richly decorated with lavish blankets as soft and warm as the fur on a cat’s belly. Hela drifted through the door carrying trays of fruit as he propped his pillows against the headboard. Seated next to his knees on the narrow mattress, she slid the trays onto an intricately carved trunk next to the bed.
Loki indulged himself on overripe fruit while they conversed. Hela’s hand rested on her father’s knee, clutching as if he might vanish at any time and her touch would tether his mind to this plane.
“I should have died,” he mused around a mouthful of juicy sustenance.
“Daddy, you know you can’t,” she chastised, her brow furrowing.
Startled, Loki’s gaze swept to her face, juice dripping from the corners of his mouth as if he were a vampire after a fresh kill. “What?”
When the Aesir had thrown her into the frozen wastes, hordes of shades clamoring at the gates, she had been apprised of all that would happen to their precious Asgard. The Norns had decreed it, so it must come to pass, but the Aesir would not die silently. Everyone in the Nine Realms knew Loki’s inevitable betrayal would spur the Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok.
“You can’t die. You have to be here to lead my army to the Vigrid Plain. The Norns won’t allow for deviation,” she soothed, kissing her fingers and glancing them across her forehead.
Balder lying dead; the great serpent dripping acid venom onto Loki’s forehead; the doubly-damned battle with Heimdall—long-forgotten pieces slipped through his memory, stirred fragments of warnings told centuries ago.
“No!” he screeched, the tray clattering to the icy floor as spindly fingers crushed red juice from his hand.
Hela jumped, her hands pressing her father’s shoulders down to the bed all too easily, his gaunt frame flailing in pathetic mockery of resistance.
“Daddy!” she screamed, green eyes brimming with tears, “It can’t be helped! Let it go.”
“It is my choice, damn you!” The seething baritone echoed from the chilling sheets of the walls. “You cannot take that from me!”
Hela’s head shook slowly, the corners of her mouth turned down as trickles exposed lively warmth across her deathly pale cheeks.
“I’m sorry, but it’s not. The Norns will not allow it.” She kissed her fingers again, an absurd motion to forces none had seen in centuries.
“My dear, honestly,” his voice quivered with the tremor of his body, “damn the Norns. Three old women foretelling only doom and damnation, forgotten and forgetting all that they purport to control—you let these govern your life?”
“The Allfather lets them govern my life,” she began. “He and all who offered no aid when I was cast down here. I do not blame you, daddy. I have had a millennium to forgive you, and I realize now what position he put you in, but that doesn’t change the truth.
“I collect the nails like it was prophesied and I build my boat so that one day you may avenge my brothers and me. Until then, you cannot come back here. My gates are closed to you. If you try to enter again, you will find yourself transported elsewhere.
“I’m sorry, daddy. I truly am.”
The soft graze of pallid lips upon his forehead signaled the end of their visit. Loki found himself once more in the doorway, snow already drifted over the imprint his body had made on the floor. He glanced at the eerie light on the walls and sighed, trudging into the storm.
Svartalfheim lay ten days’ travel, and he might find sympathy among the dark elves.