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The spinning stars turned black. Claws embedded in every inch of him, raking back and tearing him open. The ground shot upwards and struck him. He rolled, tumbling downhill like a tumble-weed from Texas, grasping at dead grass that ripped out of the ground. He reached for the sky and realized his hand was empty.
Mjolnir.
It didn’t answer his call.
Thor landed at the bottom of the sheer hill, striking a boulder. With a crack like mocking thunder it broke in two, gaping apart like jaws poised to swallow as he fell through the split to the ground on the other side. His momentum at last lost, he arched his back, tried to roll onto his knees, managing only to curl on his side.
The ground was far too wet for a land in drought. Through his blurred vision black wavering figures raced down after him. His head would not lift from the ground. His sodden hair dragged and tangled in the dried weeds. He spat out liquid that glowed like embers in the dying light. Thor dragged one arm around his torso where his armor proved useless.
These injuries, senseless, were impossible in the real world.
Unworthy?
Mjolnir.
That was a fissure in space, the thing that had swallowed Mjolnir, like the others. Like the children who screamed, the fathers who cursed, the mothers who dropped as if struck dead with one blow. All swallowed up, and the ground gaping open.
They were here, coming. Slight figures with bows and spears, the stinking blackness of an abyss clinging to them.
Thor wondered if he had closed his eyes, because the world had grown dark and shapeless.
Dimly, he thought of someone who liked to perform the impossible.
“End this!”
The voice came from far away, and Thor, hesitating in the center, had to ponder which one of the two worlds it came from. His reflexes answered the question for him, and his eyes opened. The blurred silhouetted shapes, much closer, had come to a halt. Another figure, a few yards away, stood between him and them with one hand outstretched.
“End this now! Leave him!”
The shadowy figures spoke as one, voices as soft and clear as whispers that float across a lake. “Why should you choose who lives and who dies? We are not under your power, Laufeyson.”
Loki.
The shadows remained hazes, but his defender came into sharp focus.
Thor’s thought came as amused, relieved, aghast, overjoyed, and homesick.
Impossible.
Loki’s voice became clearer as Thor found himself more solidly in this world. “Yet it is my power you are using.”
The fissures. Mjolnir.
The shadowy figures let out a breath in unison, like a sigh of revelation. It took on multiple tones, a musical chord that rose in the wind and vanished. “It’s too late for regrets, Laufeyson.” The shadowy shapes shifted. Thor turned his head. Across the fields the stick-thin figures gathered in far circles. He tried to speak and failed.
Loki took one step backwards, holding an arm to the side. “I don’t have regrets. He was not meant to be here.”
“He is.” They were moving forward again.
Thor glanced behind, stretched out his fingers along the ground, the sharp, dry grasses catching on his skin. His throat rattled in a desperate whisper. “Loki.”
“You will leave him be,” Loki straightened. “Or I retract my power from you.”
The shapes stopped, looked at each other, cocked heads, as if puzzled. Then the harmonious sigh came again, with a warble like laughter. “Your lifeforce was our bargain, Laufeyson.”
Thor’s indescribable wound throbbed.
“Well, Thor was not.” Loki backed up again until only a few feet away. Thor could have reached out and grasped the tails of his coat. Loki held out both of his hands, but not in the protective stance of before. Thor had seen that stance many times before, when he had been on the opposing side.
He lifted his head from the ground. “Loki!”
Loki ignored him, instead fixing his cold stare on the shapes. “If you touch him,” he murmured in a low tone, “I will kill you.”
The sigh became an off-key hiss. The shapes all around darted in. Thor lurched himself up and reached out, but the silent explosion cut short his attempts. It threw him back down to the ground, in a strange, painless crash. Wind and light and dark rushed outwards from Loki’s form, taking Thor’s hair from the ground and throwing it backwards, wringing away the blood. The shapes, too, flew backwards, the light cutting apart their shadows. The dim sky’s clouds boiled and twisted.
And then all was still. The prairie empty, and silent. Thor lay on the ground, Loki standing at his feet, facing away from him, arms outstretched, head bowed. Thor sat up, no evidence of blood anywhere, but a throbbing pain in all of his limbs.
Loki’s arms came down, and so did the rest of him. Thor lurched forward again, onto his knees, catching Loki as he fell.
“Loki!”
Loki stared at the sky, his legs stretched out on the ground, completely limp with his upper body supported in Thor’s arms. He remained there for several long, agonizing seconds, and then he blinked and looked into Thor’s eyes.
“Well, Big Brother, isn’t this an odd turn of events.”
“You fool!” Thor burst out, angry and relieved at the absence of pain or evidence of injury on Loki’s person.
Loki raised his eyebrows. “Me? You were the one in the wrong place at the wrong time. What in Odin’s name are you doing on Muspelheim?”
“Why shouldn’t I be on Muspelheim? I do travel for my own amusement now and again!”
Loki, without moving his head, glanced around at the empty prairie around him. “…I never have understood your definition of amusement.”
Thor had the sudden urge to toss Loki like a rag doll in false exasperation, as he had done so many times before, long ago. But something held him back. Instead he gripped Loki’s shoulder. “What were you doing?” He spoke in a desperate whisper, of longing and hurting desire to understand how this—how Loki—could be so like, and yet so unlike, himself, for any length of time, and especially for this long.
Loki made no reaction to this. He stared past Thor at the sky for several moments before again meeting his gaze. “I’m afraid you haven’t been very fond of me of late.”
Thor, for an instant, was struck dumb. He stumbled over a version of recovery. “Well, I’ve—no, I—not you, Loki, but…I can’t say I’m proud of your actions.”
The corners of Loki’s mouth twitched upwards in a smile. “I hope I’ve made you proud now.” A sensation like the first hints of a coming plague froze Thor’s marrow. He looked down into Loki’s smiling face and gentle eyes. His brother said in a softer tone, “It was literal, you know.”
Thor abandoned and crushed any remaining desires to throw Loki off. “Loki,” he said slowly. “Why won’t you sit up?
Loki, strangely, was still smiling. “What they said about my lifeforce…”
This blow hurt more than the impossible one, and was even more unfeasible.
“Quite so,” Loki continued, as if Thor had answered. “I’ll be dead within the hour, I’m afraid.”
All of Thor’s reason and purpose left him. “But I thought…”
“Thought what?” Loki’s gaze searched his face. “That I had a plan? That they were no match for my prowess? That in my ingenuity I would never allow my own life to be risked?” His gaze returned to the sky. “Unfortunately, you being here did not enter my plans, and I have to follow my own rules, though they break many others. And perhaps in my cleverness I could have found a way, if I’d had the time, but I did not. You were dying.” Thor opened his mouth, but Loki interrupted him before he spoke. “No, believe me, you were. You may have felt that you were reviving, but that was merely a psychological response at the sight of me. I know my magic better than you, Thor, I know what it was doing, and I’ve learned to sense the exact moment when a soul is next to Hel or Valhalla’s door. Another moment and you would have dropped to the ground, lifeless.”
Thor shook his head. “This isn’t possible.”
Loki looked amused. “There you go again, distrusting the word of the carpenter who fashioned what was to be your scaffolding.”
Thor felt at that moment he could have torn the sky apart. “Why are you so calm?”
“Calm?” Loki mused on this. “Am I calm? Yes, I suppose I am. I’m not sure, to be honest. But it’s certain that I have no regrets.”
Thor leaned over him, speaking in a pleading whisper. “Nothing whatsoever?”
Loki looked steadily back at him. “Would you rather me go into hysterics?”
No regrets, Thor thought bitterly. No, no regrets. He does not allow himself to feel regret. Thor, at the moment, did not let himself feel pain. He’d become good at that, watching comrades fall in battle.
Loki let out a small gasp, his eyes widening. Thor gripped his shoulder again. Loki blinked. “Well now, that was interesting.”
Thor didn’t ask him what he meant. He’d seen similar looks in the faces of warriors fighting to draw breath. He brushed granules of stray soil from Loki’s face. “Are you in pain?”
“Not particularly.” Loki seized up a moment later, and then said in a more roughened voice, “But I take that back now.” His lips pressed together so that the white spread across his cheeks.
Thor felt himself beginning to lose hold. He was skilled at walls, but not this skilled. He forced his voice to come out in a clear tone. “Can you sense the location of your own soul?”
Loki barked out a laugh that clashed with the air and spoke shakily through the thin line of his lips, “Cheer up, Thor. Technically I’m dying in battle, and for once I am fighting on the right side. Valhalla may yet be our meeting place.”
That was the last thing he ever said. But above that, Thor ever remembered Loki’s last laugh, sudden and harsh; an ugly, dying tone that was ill-matched with the teasing mischief dancing in his eyes.