Blue is the colour of life, yet it remains unloved

by Elicrpse

Summary:

Loki, once the god of lies, now rots in a cell built to erase meaning. No illusions. No voice. Until Thor arrives—not with chains, but with a warning: Midgard is unravelling. Memories shift. People forget. Reality is being rewritten.
Freed into a world that looks like Earth but behaves like fiction, Loki finds himself tangled in a war of edits and echoes. The Fates are watching. The Avengers are wary. And somewhere between myth and algorithm, someone—or something—is rewriting the rules.
With Thor at his side and old enemies for uneasy allies, Loki must decide: To forget or to be forgotten.

Chapter 1: the devil wears chains

The cell was a perfect shape—one no god had ever chosen. A cube, endlessly still. Its silence did not echo; it swallowed.
Loki sat in the centre, cross-legged, eyes half-lidded. He wore no illusions today. Not because he couldn’t—but because the truth was more insulting.
His fingertips traced idle spirals on the stone. Not magic, not mischief. Just something to do in a place where time had stopped being measurable.
The guards no longer spoke to him. That had stopped after the fifth week, when he began responding with vivid details of their dreams—some not yet had.
They feared him in the way people feared mirrors: not for what they showed, but for what they refused to lie about.
And yet, even mirrors crack.
Even gods.
Then came the footsteps.
Heavy. Familiar. Belonging to someone who walked like war and thought like sun.
Thor. Tall as ever. Broader than guilt. Golden as a story children are forced to love. He stood just outside the shimmering energy field that served as both wall and warning.
Loki tilted his head, like a cat considering whether or not to kill a bird it had already broken.
“Well,” Loki drawled. “If it isn’t the prodigal son, returned from whatever battle the poets are still polishing.”
Thor didn’t answer.
Loki’s voice turned sharp, playful. “What is it this time? A war you didn’t start? A monster you can’t understand? Or perhaps the shimmering memory of me keeps you up at night.”
“You’re still insufferable,” Thor said, quiet.
“And you still lack imagination.” Loki stepped forward until the cell’s edge lit up in pale gold between them. “Tell me, did the great Odin send you, with his infinite knowledge he got from trading his eye? Or did you get lonely playing hero on a realm that only ever asked for you?”
Thor’s eyes didn’t rise to the bait. Not this time. Strange.
“I need your help.”
The words were simple. Unarmoured. Honest.
Loki blinked.
Then laughed. “That’s adorable. Say it again. Slower this time.”
“This isn’t a joke, Loki.”
“It never is, for you.”
Thor didn’t flinch. But something in his gaze shifted—like seeing someone inside a reflection.
“I need your help.”
Loki stilled.
There was no mockery in Thor’s tone. No royal command. Just that rare and terrible thing: sincerity. An emotion Thor rarely betrayed, one Loki gratefully ignored. As the great Oscar Wilde said, “In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.” A great deal of sincerity was fatal.
“How tragic,” Loki murmured. “The Golden Prince reduced to begging in a dungeon. Is this the part where I shed a tear and remember the bond of brotherhood?”
“It’s the part,” Thor said, “where you decide whether you want to rot in a story written without you… or help write the next one.”
Apparently Thor had grown a head in the months of his imprisonment. Loki took a slow step toward the barrier, his voice lowering. “The Realms crack. Realities blend. People forget things they swore happened yesterday. Places vanish. Don’t you see? That sounds like the world finally catching up with me.”
Yet to have Thor of all people criticise his speciality, his domain, was cruel. The thought sat down badly in the pit of his stomach, stretching and seething.
He had feared many things in his life. Obscurity was the worst of them.
Thor stepped forward. “I’ve watched Midgard shift under my feet. I’ve spoken to people who don’t remember our battles. Who think the sky was always this colour. Who ask what the Bifrost is.”
Loki said nothing.
“I thought at first it was perhaps you. But this—this is deeper. It’s the seams of the world itself.”
Still, Loki said nothing.
Thor reached to his belt. Pulled free a dagger—not one meant to kill. One meant to carve. The blade was dull on one side and heavier on the other, a gift granted as a rite of passage- not to Thor, but to Loki.
He etched something old into the air. A name. Maybe a memory. The magic flared, golden-white, then shattered the cell barrier in a soundless breath.
Loki stared at the empty air between them.
“No collar?” he asked, voice light. “No cuffs? What’s to stop me from turning into a snake and biting your ankle again?”
“Nothing,” Thor said.
Loki grinned. “You really are bad at this.”
Finally, Loki stepped through the shards of light, brushing dust from his shoulders.
“You’re insane,” he said.
“Probably.”
“And desperate.”
“Definitely.”
Loki smiled like a secret. “Well. Let’s go see what lies we’re standing on.”

 

The Bifrost hit with a scream of light that peeled back the sky. When it vanished, it left two brothers behind—neither quite whole, neither quite free.
They stood in the middle of a city pretending to be New York.
The buildings were close, familiar. But something about them leaned wrong. Too clean. Too symmetrical. Like the memory of a city, not the city itself.
Loki took a slow breath. The air tasted flat. Filtered. Processed.
“So,” he said, “your precious Midgard’s been redecorated.”
Thor’s hammer hung heavy in his hand, but he didn’t move. His gaze swept the skyline like a man counting something that wouldn’t stay still.
A billboard above them blinked: “TONY STARK, FIRST MAN ON THE MOON (AGAIN).”
“Was he?” Loki asked lightly. “I always thought Armstrong had a better jawline.”
Thor said nothing.
A street sign nearby flickered between Lexington Ave and Valhalla Drive. Pedestrians passed, oblivious.
Loki frowned.
He stepped forward, reaching a hand to the flickering sign—but his fingers passed through it like mist.
He flexed them afterward. They still felt solid. The world didn’t.
“Do you know what Asgard used to be?” Loki asked suddenly.
Thor looked at him.
“A story,” Loki said. “Even to its own people. A golden idea built on borrowed bones. What did Father always say? We’re not gods. We’re just… more.”
“And yet,” Thor said, “you wanted to rule them.”
Loki laughed. “Of course I did. Because ruling is just storytelling with consequences. And I—” he paused, watching the sky glitch slightly at the edges— “am very good at stories.”
Thor looked at his brother. Really looked.
“You still think Asgard was yours to rewrite.”
“I think,” Loki said, “Asgard never belonged to anyone. It’s just a shape we keep filling. Sometimes with glory. Sometimes with guilt.”
A long silence.
“Why did you really come?” Thor asked.
Loki hesitated. Then, softly:
“Because if even Midgard can forget the gods… what chance do the rest of us have?”
Thor reached out, placing a hand briefly on his brother’s shoulder. The touch was not affectionate. But it was real.
That mattered.
Loki looked up, eyes narrowing.
There—between the cracks of buildings—something moved.
Not a person. Not a shadow. An edit. He didn’t say it aloud. Not yet.

 

Status, apparently, was no longer displayed extensively on Earth; it seemed to have become a topic people no longer prided themselves in, going as far as to run away from it. Loki, however, was no idiot. For all it's worth and glamour, politics were the same on every planet he went to: a grand play of hypocrisy.
Archaic as the system was, status was the centre of hundreds of people's lives, all of them grappling to the story they could call their own, only for it to be squashed by the bigger opponent.
Loki was not a pessimistic- no, far from it. Reality was pessimistic and Loki would not kneel to the humours of a world he despised. So he deemed himself more optimistic. His mentality, however, could not have been thinking about this situation when his pride refused to be submissive towards the world.
The level of testosterone in this room, all harboured by what he deemed as the highest form of stupidity was enough to rethink a whole new invasion strategy. In this case, he would have put in place a system where man would no longer feel the necessity to demonstrate it's blatant physical strength and "man up".

Only idiots, he thought, the whole lot.
Men, no matter how hard they tried, could never even begin to fathom the damage inflicted by the concept of their own unintended stupidity. Tinkering with the tesseract, for example, was something they had yet learned to regret. He stared at the Stark. Shield. Hydra.
(Or were those last two the same? Even this was becoming for Loki like a show where everyone in it had co-dependency issues. They could not live while the other one flourished.)
"When does the world not hang on an uncertain balance?" Sighed Banner as he rubbed his temple and pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing back his falling glasses.
His comment went ignored.
The captain was sitting to Banner's right, his back straight and his eyes looking forward, glazing the room with a steady look. Loki always thought that he was not the representation of America, but what it wished it had been. How does a man out of his time represent a country which had evolved? Loki could not be rude to him, diplomacy said so. For all his grandiose air, he was just a simple man with grand morals. He supposed it was good to have something to balance Stark's huge ego.
Thor was sitting next to Loki, his hands unconsciously itching to grab Mjolnir. He had never been the one for diplomacy, but Loki couldn't help but feel a surge of pride to see the amount of restraint Thor was inflicting to keep himself calm.
"My friends," he boomed to a degree that made the occupants of the room wince, "we have been assembled in this room to negotiate about a certain threat," Thor stated.
He was the one, after all, that had called them abruptly in the morning, damaging the roof again with the newly repaired Bifrost. He had permission (Loki ignored how he got it) to let Loki temporarily out of the cell to accompany him.
The occupants of the room turned their eyes to Loki, as if the representation of evil madness had appeared in front of them. His appearances were not helping the situation, as his Seidr was still restrained to a certain degree.
To their eyes, Loki was pale to no comparison, ghastly thin and had chained wrists. Their logic to think that the topic about to be discussed was Loki would not have been stupid; but it was wrong- how he enjoyed this!
"Change is coming, dear friends, and we shall embrace it if we must. I am here, not as an avenger, but as a representative of Asgard, House of Odin- and worthy of its name. I am here to rally support and a promise for eventual aid when the time comes."
Thor spoke out with an authority that would accompany a future ruler. A twisted sense of pride and entitlement filled Loki as he gazed at the profile of the would-be-king besides him.
Loki definitely knew it was sooner and nearer than anticipated, but elected to say nothing: why spoil such entertainment?
Thor turned to Loki, ushering him to speak- what is he, a fool?- and when he was met with silence, he simply rested a hand on his shoulder.
There it was, a horrible amount of misplaced protectiveness. When did the sudden decision to thrust a prisoner to the seat overseeing the world nearing a sudden end become a good idea?

Steve leaned forward, the inevitable leader, his brow furrowing. "What kind of threat are we talking about, Thor? We’ve fought aliens, armies, gods—what’s left that could be worse than what we’ve already faced?"
Thor’s jaw tightened as he met Steve’s gaze. "Something much older, much deeper than anything you’ve faced. It’s not just a battle of strength or power. This is about the very core of the universe itself." He paused, glancing briefly at Loki before returning his gaze to the Avengers. "The balance of everything… it is being undone."
Natasha’s eyes narrowed. "Balance? Care to explain?"
Thor hesitated, his gaze flickering to Loki again—almost uncertain for a moment—before speaking again. "There is a force out there, one that transcends even the gods. A power that has manipulated and twisted reality itself for longer than we’ve known. He is known as Thanos."

A heavy silence fell over the room at the name- as if the mention of it held the power of destruction itself.

"Thanos," Tony muttered, sitting back in his chair, clearly mulling the name over. "The name’s not familiar to me. Where the hell did he come from, and why are we just hearing about him now?"

Thor’s expression darkened as he continued. "Thanos is not a name that many should know. He has been banished, his name never even reaching a surface he could carve it into. Not yet. But the truth is, his reach is already here, in ways you do not understand. His influence has already spread far beyond the realms of gods and men."

Steve crossed his arms, his eyes scanning Thor and then briefly flicking to Loki, who was silently observing. "And you think we’re supposed to stop him? Who exactly is this guy? What’s his goal?"

Thor’s gaze turned hard. "Thanos seeks nothing less than the destruction of half the universe. He wields an artifact—a weapon—capable of altering reality itself. The Infinity Gauntlet."

Loki, who had been quietly revelling in the tension building, now leaned forward slightly. His voice was low, taunting. "The Gauntlet, Thor? Really? I thought you were the expert on world-ending weapons, but even you must know that one is not so easily controlled."

Thor’s eyes flashed at Loki’s words, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he turned back to the others. "We are not ready for this. None of us. Thanos’ power is not something we can just fight head-on. He has manipulated the very fabric of existence in ways you cannot imagine. The realms, the worlds... they are unstable. Fractured. And he will not stop until he has everything he seeks."
Loki watched them all carefully. He could see the uncertainty in their eyes. The fear was palpable, but none of them truly understood. Not yet. They were only just beginning to grasp the surface of the madness.
Tony, ever the skeptic, raised an eyebrow. "So what do you want us to do, Thor? You want us to believe this? No offense, but you've always had a flair for the epic adventuristic narrating of battles. What's the proof? How do we know this isn't just another of Loki's schemes?"
Loki stiffened ever so slightly at the mention of his name. "How charming," he muttered under his breath, though his tone was still laced with amusement. He couldn't help but relish the suspicion in Tony’s voice.

Steve, however, didn’t look at Loki. His attention remained fully on Thor. "What do you mean by ‘unstable,’ Thor? Are you saying the entire universe is in danger of collapsing?"
Thor looked at Steve, his expression tight with barely contained urgency. "Yes. Reality itself is beginning to fray. It’s happening slowly, but it is happening. Things are… changing. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve felt it."

Loki glanced toward the window, his gaze distant. The world outside was a facade, flickering like a poorly constructed illusion. He had known something was wrong for far longer than they realized. "Reality… fraying," he murmured, a sardonic smile tugging at his lips. "How very poetic of you."

Thor ignored him, his focus on the group as he continued. "I have elected to make you the first realm aware of his dangers, as if you follow, many of the realms shall proceed too. And I brought Loki here because... there is no one else who understands the power of reality itself as well as he does."
Did it hurt Thor so much that his throat constricted at any compliment directed to his lowly brother, even from himself?
That caused a stir. All eyes turned on Loki, and the room shifted uncomfortably. Tony was the first to speak. "Wait, you brought him here for help? Are you kidding me, Thor? You know he's a bag of wild cats, and we’re supposed to trust him?"

Loki chuckled darkly, amused by their concern. "Trust? No. I don’t expect your trust. I’ve never needed it. But you may find that you need mine." He glanced around the room, his eyes lingering on each of them, enjoying their discomfort. "Isn't it charming, how you're all just now starting to understand the game being played?"

Steve shot Loki a sharp look, his tone cool but firm. "We’ve been through too much to let you get away with this again, Loki. If you're part of this plan, you'd better be on our side."
Loki smirked. "Oh, I'm always on my side, Captain. I just make sure I know which side has the best story to tell."

Thor’s hammer, heavy in his grip, rested at his side, a constant reminder of the weight of responsibility he bore. "You all need to listen," Thor said, his voice filled with the strength of someone who had seen too much. "What I’m telling you is not up for debate. Thanos is coming. And the universe, as we know it, will be destroyed if we don’t stop him."
The Avengers exchanged glances, their minds reeling from the implications. But none of them knew the full truth yet—not the true depth of the chaos Thanos would bring, nor the perilous threads that tied them all together in the unfolding catastrophe.
The meeting was far from over, and the questions were only just beginning to mount. But one thing was clear: the world they knew was about to change in ways they could scarcely comprehend.
And Loki? Loki was watching it all unfold with the kind of twisted satisfaction only a god of mischief could truly appreciate.

The silence that followed Thor’s declaration was weighty, teetering between disbelief and dawning dread. It was Tony, of course, who broke it.

"Okay," Stark said, voice light but eyes sharp, "just to recap: you bust in through our roof—again—drag along your sociopathic sibling like it’s Bring Your War Criminal to Work Day, and now you’re telling us some interstellar Grim Reaper with a blinged-out oven mitt wants to reality-wipe the cosmos?"

Loki gave an exaggerated bow, chains clinking lightly. “I do love a good summary.”

Natasha didn’t laugh. “And you’re expecting us to believe this… Thanos is real, and he’s already affecting our world? That what we’re seeing—what you claim to be happening—is because of him?”

Thor nodded. “He’s been working in shadows, through intermediaries. The Chitauri invasion, the scepter—Loki’s scepter—was not his alone. It was borrowed.”

Eyes turned, once more, to Loki.

“Oh, don’t look so scandalized,” Loki drawled. “What kind of chaos god would I be if I didn’t have friends in low places?”

“You lied,” Steve said flatly. “Even during the invasion, you weren’t acting alone.”

Loki’s eyes glinted. “Does that really surprise you?”

Banner spoke softly, almost to himself. “That scepter… it was the key to unlocking the mind stone. If what you’re saying is true, then Thanos has been laying groundwork for years. Decades.”

Thor gave a grave nod. “He’s patient. Strategic. And entirely without mercy.”

 

“That’s why he’s here,” Thor said, gesturing to his side, Loki, voice low. “Not because I trust him. But because he understands things we don’t. Because, in some perverse twist of fate, he might be the only one who sees the pattern.”

Clint, arms crossed, stared Loki down. “What pattern?”

“The one you’re already part of,” Loki said. “You think all your victories are your own? No. They’re beats in a story. The heroes win. The villain loses. The day is saved. But what happens when someone rewrites the story?”

“Then we write a new one,” Steve said, resolute.

Loki looked at him, and—for a moment—something almost like sorrow passed through his eyes. Did they even see past the metaphors? What a sad and uneventful life it is, the life of a mortal.

“Then I hope,” he said quietly, “that you know how to make it stick.”

Bruce leaned back, eyes wide with thought. “If what you’re saying is true, then it’s not just Thanos we’re dealing with—it’s the collapse of the rules themselves. Physics, time, memory…”

“Why?” Steve asked. “What does he gain from destroying half of everything?”

Thor spoke, slow and grim. This newfound intelligence was clearly taking a toll on him. “In his mind, balance. Mercy. A warped belief that by cutting life in half, he can preserve what’s left. For a greater good.”

“And you believe this,” Clint said. It was a miracle he managed to stay glued to the chair in face of his aggressor. Ever the fake calm and control he caried. One probably wondered if he knew something more than what met the eye. “You know this?”

Thor turned to the window, watching as the skyline glitched again—just for a second.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

The room fell quiet.

Finally, Natasha spoke, always the organiser, maybe even the ritual leader, “Then we have a decision to make.”

Tony sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. Whether we fight a war we can’t win… or trust a god who already lost one.”

Loki smiled thinly, lifting his chained wrists. “Well. At least this time, you’ll know which side I’m on.”

Steve didn’t look convinced. But he nodded. “Then let’s get to work.”

In the corner, the air shimmered. Not enough for anyone to notice—but enough for Loki to feel.

A rewrite had already begun.

And this time, he wasn’t sure who was writing it.

Chapter 2: this is how you lose the war of memory

The room they gave him was elegant in a way only the Stark Tower could afford: sleek, impersonal, expensive. It smelled faintly of metal, glass, and peppermint oil diffusers—probably to hide the scent of weapon polish and nervous sweat. The ceiling was high. The windows, higher. Stark had good taste in things he didn’t have to emotionally invest in.

Loki stood in the centre, arms folded behind his back, eyes skimming across the minimalist furnishings. No illusions again. He felt them tugging at the edge of his mind, like silk threads at a frayed cuff. But he denied them.

He walked slowly toward the window, not quite pacing, letting his thoughts assemble themselves like soldiers before a war. He thought of each of them.

Stark, the man burned bright, fast, and with the reckless flair of someone who feared stillness more than death. His power wasn’t in his suit. It was in his story—one he’d written over trauma, ego, and just enough brilliance to hold it together. But Loki could see the cracks. The way his fingers twitched when no one was looking. The way he watched the skyline, as if waiting for it to fall.

Rogers, a monument dressed as a man. Clean lines, clear eyes, and a loyalty so deeply ingrained it might as well have been carved into bone. Loki didn’t hate him. He hated what Rogers represented—certainty in a world that no longer allowed for it. But beneath the noble façade… there was doubt. Rogers didn’t trust this era. And worse, it didn’t need him the way the last one had.

Romanoff, a predator in silk. She moved like a blade—silent, cold, efficient. Loki respected her more than most. She, at least, didn’t pretend to be good. She just pretended to be useful. A spy, after all, knew the value of illusion. He could feel her eyes on him even now, though she wasn’t in the room.

Banner, a puzzle. A man wearing two masks, one of kindness, the other of rage—and somehow thinking the first kept the second at bay. Loki understood the need for control. Understood the terror of losing it. He pitied him, in a way. The world only ever saw the monster, never the man feeding it.

Barton, The quiet yet very loud one. People always underestimated the quiet ones. Loki hadn’t. He remembered the aim. The precision. The unflinching willingness to kill. He also remembered the haunted look after. Barton, more than the others, carried a debt he didn’t speak of.

And Thor…

Loki’s gaze dropped. Thor was everything Loki wasn’t supposed to be. Glorious. Noble. Loved. But he was also so very predictable. There had been a time when Loki thought predictability was a virtue—that someone as constant as Thor would never leave, never break.

He’d been wrong, of course.

And now Thor brought him here, to this metal throne of a tower, where gods had no temples and the sky was made of LED. Where time didn’t flow—it updated.

They all thought the coming war would be fought with fists and fire.

They were clearly the fools of the village.

The true war was against memory.

Because once enough people forgot what had been, then it never had been. And once reality began to forget itself—well, what better kingdom for a god of lies?

Loki walked to the window. The skyline glimmered, warped ever so slightly, like paint melting from canvas. Somewhere out there, people were living lives that weren’t quite theirs. He wondered if they noticed the edits. The blanks in their days. The stories that no longer added up.

He closed his eyes.

Not to rest. But to remember.

Thanos was coming. But Loki had seen worse than death. He’d seen erasure.

And he would not go quietly.

Not again.

A knock at the door.

He didn’t turn. “You know,” he said aloud, “for all your technology, none of you have learned how to be subtle.”

The door opened. Not Stark. Not Thor. It was the doctor.

“Sorry,” Banner said, adjusting his glasses. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Loki tilted his head. “You’re not interrupting. You’re distracting. There’s a difference.”

Banner gave a tight smile. “You’re not the only one who can feel it. The… distortion.”

Loki said nothing.

Banner stepped in, cautious but unafraid. “There’s something happening in the quantum spectrum. Time fluctuations. Reality bending in on itself. If Thanos is behind this…”

Loki finally looked at him. “Then we are already far too late.”

Banner studied him. “And if he’s not?”

Loki smiled, faintly. “Then something far worse has taken notice of us.”

A long silence. Banner didn’t ask what. Maybe he already knew.

Loki turned back to the window.

“Tell your friends,” he said. “This is not the beginning of the end. That already happened.”
Banner hesitated at the threshold, as if the doorway itself might bite. Then he stepped fully inside, and the lights adjusted around him, casting long, slanted shadows across the pristine floor.

Loki didn’t look away from the skyline. “Let me guess,” he said, “you’ve been running simulations. Graphs, models, equations. All of them inconclusive.”

Banner exhaled through his nose. “Too many variables. Not enough constants.”

Loki hummed in agreement. Although the variables did pose a scientific mishap, they were the most interesting. Elements of forever change. That was excellent marketing for a possible campaign, one would definitely appreciate the lyrical tone of the slogan;

Banner rubbed the back of his neck. “Stark thinks we can anchor reality with tech. Something about baseline resonance and AI-stabilized chrono-lattices.”

Loki chuckled. “Stark thinks he can out-code the apocalypse. Adorable.”

Banner approached slowly. “I think you know more than you’re saying.”

Loki said nothing for a moment. Then: “Do you believe in fate, Dr. Banner?”

“I believe in causality,” Banner replied. “Actions have consequences.”

Loki turned, finally. His eyes were sharper than before. Intrigued. “Causality is a kindness. It suggests the universe has rules. That you can trace a path from mistake to penance. Much like war, only the fools think they're are rules, limits. But what if the road was never real? What if the very memory of that road can be rewritten?”

Banner frowned. “Are you saying someone’s changing the past?” Even if the doctor thought of it more as a metaphor, he was closer to the reality than the others.

“I’m saying,” Loki said, stepping closer, “that we’ve all been walking on a story someone else has started editing.”

There was a pulse then—small, but distinct. A flicker in the room’s light. The air felt briefly too thick, as if the tower itself had inhaled.

Banner blinked. “Did you feel that?”

Loki nodded. “A chapter just closed. Somewhere.”

The comm on Banner’s wrist crackled. “Bruce?” came Stark’s voice, tinged with static. “Get to the lab. Now. We’ve got a situation. Something just… blinked.”

Banner gave Loki a look that was more question than statement.

Loki waved him off. “Go. I’ll catch up.”

Banner left quickly, boots tapping out a rhythm of urgency.

Loki remained in the quiet, listening. Beneath the hum of electricity, something older stirred. Not a sound, exactly, but a resonance. Like the echo of something that hadn’t happened yet.

He walked to the centre of the room and pressed his palm to the glass coffee table. Magic—just a thread—coiled out from his fingers, illuminating an ancient sigil across the surface.

The table responded. Not visibly. But something opened beneath the floor of reality, like a trapdoor only he could feel.

He reached into the magic and pulled—not an object, but a memory.

His own.

Chapter 3: Brother, interrupted

The Avengers Tower was quiet, save for the low hum of the building’s energy systems.
Inside the secure, sterile room they’d set up for Loki’s interrogation, the tension was palpable. Stark and Steve stood by the table, flipping through papers with notes, while Banner was quietly adjusting his glasses, looking over his shoulder at Thor.

"We need to make sure he doesn’t slip through the cracks again,” Stark said, his voice tinged with frustration. "This isn't the first time Loki’s been involved in world-ending schemes. We need to know exactly what we’re dealing with this time."

Steve, leaning against the wall, was scanning the room, his arms folded. "But can we trust him? He's still... Loki. He’s lied to us, manipulated us before. Why would he suddenly change?"

Thor, who had been standing by the door watching them, was silent for a moment. He was clearly uneasy, torn between his loyalty to his brother and the wariness of his actions.

"I trust him," Thor finally said, but his voice was strained, like he was still trying to convince himself. "But I can’t say I fully understand him. Loki’s... tricks, they’re not always what they seem. He was taught by Mother, but even then, I... I never truly knew the depth of his abilities."

Stark shot him a sceptical look. "What do you mean, you ‘never truly knew?’ He’s your brother, Thor. You’ve fought alongside him. You’ve seen what he can do."

Thor shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, I’ve seen him deceive and manipulate, but... his powers, the way he bends reality, I never really asked. I always called it his ‘tricks.’ But our mother, she was a true sorceress. Loki—he always held something back.”

Steve furrowed his brow. "So, you think Loki’s holding back now?"

“I think,” Thor began slowly, “that Loki’s abilities are not as simple as they seem. Our mother taught him much. He has the power to shape illusions, yes, but there’s more to it. Much more.”

Stark’s face twisted in thought. "So, you're saying he’s not just playing games when it comes to Thanos, but we’re supposed to trust him with this kind of power?"

Thor hesitated. “I... I don’t know how far it goes, but Loki is not simply a trickster. He’s capable of more than we understand.”

There was a pause before Banner spoke up, his voice quieter but cutting through the tension. "What exactly do you mean by that, Thor? What are we not seeing? Loki's magic... his manipulation—does it extend beyond what we've seen?"

Thor, a little flustered, gave a weak shrug. "I can’t say for certain. I never had to ask him to explain the limits of his powers. I just... trusted him in battle. He would always know what to do. But, yes, there’s something more. I suspect... I suspect his magic is different now, more complex than it was in our youth."

Steve exchanged a look with Tony, then turned back to Thor. "So, we need to be careful. This isn’t just Loki. This is something bigger."

"Exactly," Stark said, tapping the table. "If Loki’s hiding something, we need to know what it is. So, it’s time we interrogate him. Really get to the bottom of this."

They moved towards the secure room, where Loki had been waiting—impatient, perhaps, but holding his usual air of control. The Avengers filed into the room, Steve leading the charge.

“Loki,” Steve began, his tone calm but firm, “We need to know exactly what’s going on. Not just about Thanos, but everything. We can’t afford any more surprises.”

Loki looked up at him, a slight smirk forming on his lips. "Oh, is that so? How... quaint. You want all the answers from me now?"

Stark waved a hand dismissively. "Not all, but we need something, Loki. You’ve been in the middle of this thing longer than anyone else. You know things we don’t. So, let’s start simple: what does Thanos want, really? Not just the stones—what’s his endgame?"

Loki sighed dramatically, leaning back in his chair. “Thanos is a fool. He desires the stones for power, yes. But power is meaningless if you don’t know how to wield it. I doubt even he truly understands the extent of his reach. What he seeks is a tool, a means to an end. I know him. More than you do, surely.”

"Fine,” Stark said, sceptical yet again. “But how exactly do you know Thanos? You've been working with him. Tell us how he operates. How does he control reality like this?"

Loki didn’t flinch, but there was a brief, sharp look in his eyes. "Thanos doesn’t control reality, not like you think. His method is crude—blunt force. No finesse. He bends reality through sheer willpower, but it’s... ugly. Not like the subtlety of true magic, the kind of power that shapes the world in ways you can’t even see." His voice was steady, but there was something almost wistful in the way he spoke about magic.

Tony frowned. “So you’re saying Thanos is a brute compared to you? You’re the expert in manipulating reality?”

Loki leaned forward, a flash of something darker in his eyes. “I never claimed to be an expert in anything. But I am far more familiar with the ways of magic than any of you could comprehend. I was trained by the greatest sorceress of this realm—the All mother, Frigga.”

Thor, who had been standing at the back of the room, shifted uncomfortably at the mention of Frigga’s name. He stepped forward, his voice gruff. “But Loki, you’ve never really explained your powers to me, not fully. I don’t know how far they go.”

Loki’s eyes turned sharp as he regarded his brother. "Is that so? All these years, and you still think you understand me, Thor?"

Thor shifted uneasily. "It’s not that, Loki. But I never needed to know the depths of your abilities. We’ve always worked together, and I trusted you in battle, just as I trust you now. But I... I don't know everything."

Loki’s lips curled into a faint smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You don’t. And you never will.”

"Is this a game to you?" Stark asked, a slight edge to his voice. "Is that what this is? You think we’re here to entertain you, Loki?"

Loki stood abruptly, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. "You think I’m playing games?" he spat, his voice rising. "I have fought for everything I have! I’ve been used, cast aside, defiant, discarded—and crowned. And every time I’ve had to crawl my way back from the ashes, you were never there! I don’t owe you any explanations, and I won’t stand here and be reduced to your convenient villain for your pathetic little war!"

His anger was palpable now, a raw, dangerous thing that hung heavy in the room. "You think you can question me? You think you know me? I’ve been through realms, faced gods, and stood in the face of death itself. You will not reduce me to your petty interrogations!"
He slammed his hands on the table, leaning over it, his face inches from theirs. “I am not your tool to control, Stark. I am not your trickster to be toyed with, Rogers. I am Loki, and I have earned my place in this universe."

The room was silent, save for Loki’s harsh breathing, as he took a step back and straightened, his anger still simmering beneath the surface.
The Avengers exchanged tense glances. They’d seen Loki lose his temper before—but not like this. Not when the stakes were this high.

But Loki wasn’t done. “I will help you,” he said, his voice lower now, but no less sharp. “But you will never forget who I am. And you will never forget the price of my help.”

Thor was the first to speak after the silence had settled. "Loki..." His voice was heavy with regret, but also understanding.

Loki’s gaze flickered toward him, but he said nothing. The room was too thick with unsaid things, too thick with the weight of everything they had all been through. For the first time, Loki wasn’t sure if he could ever be the ally they needed—no matter how much he wanted to be.

The silence lingered after Loki stormed off, his frustration cutting through the air like a sharp blade. Thor remained standing, staring out the window, his broad shoulders heavy with thought. The Avengers, for once, didn’t know how to break the tension.

Bruce finally broke the silence. “Thor, after everything—why keep defending Loki? You’ve known him longer than any of us.”

The words hung in the air like a challenge, but Thor didn’t respond immediately. He was lost in thought, trying to find the words that wouldn’t make him seem less than the god he was, but also not dismiss the feelings that had been buried inside for millennia.

“You don’t understand,” Thor muttered after a long pause. His voice was low, almost pained. “Loki and I—”

He paused, as if searching for the right words.

“We’ve been through battles together. We’ve fought beside each other since we were... children,” he continued, his gaze now fixed on the horizon outside, as if the memories were too painful to meet their eyes directly. “You cannot imagine what that’s like. To have someone by your side in the face of certain death, knowing they will never leave. Loki and I were shield brothers. I may always address his skills as ‘tricks’, but they were no less valuable. They were weapons. They saved us both more times than I can count.”

Natasha shifted, her eyes narrowing, always quick to cut through a lie. “But that doesn’t mean you can excuse all he’s done.”

Thor turned to face them, his expression conflicted but firm. “Loki doesn’t think like I do,” he said, almost apologetically. “He has never seen the world as I do. But he’s still my brother. My blood.”

Bruce shook his head, almost in disbelief. “Doesn’t it ever make you question why he keeps doing this?”

Thor’s fists clenched at his sides, a muscle in his jaw ticking. “Why? Because war is not a place for morality. It is a place for survival. Loki’s survival was always different from mine, but no less vital. And no, I have never questioned him. He fought by my side, bled with me in battles you can’t even begin to imagine. How can I question that?”

The Avengers exchanged looks, trying to make sense of the god standing before them. To them, war was something they had been forced into, something that defined their lives in the present. To Thor, it was a part of his very being—a constant from the moment he could hold a weapon, something forged into his soul as surely as Mjolnir was.

“It’s not the same, Thor,” Clint said quietly, his voice laced with a mix of confusion and frustration. “You don’t get why we’re questioning him. We didn’t grow up in a place where loyalty meant a life spent on the battlefield, fighting to stay alive with someone who’s been there. For us, loyalty is earned, not just assumed. Not when it comes at the cost of so many innocent lives.”

Thor’s face hardened, but there was a flicker in his eyes—an ancient sorrow, something old and deep. He looked between each of them, the realization that they didn’t share his worldview beginning to take root. It confused him, he who was taught the one respectful view of the great realm of Asgard.

“I never had to earn loyalty,” Thor said, voice thick with a foreign grief. “On Asgard, loyalty wasn’t something we questioned. It was something that bound us. Loki was never just my brother by title—he was my shield-brother. In battle, his mind was his weapon. His magic was his strength. We survived together, time and time again. If not for Loki, I would not be standing here.”

Bruce seemed to hesitate before speaking again. “But we’re not on Asgard, Thor. We’re on Earth. Here, everything is different. Here, loyalty doesn’t mean the same thing.”

Thor’s gaze turned cold, almost confused. “What do you mean? Of course it does.”

“Not to us,” Natasha interjected. Her voice was firm, yet understanding. “Here, loyalty is something that’s earned, something that’s proven. It’s not about blood, it’s not about surviving together through endless battles—it’s about trust. It’s about choices.”

Thor furrowed his brow at her words, as though they made no sense. “But trust comes from surviving together,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur. “Loki and I—he never left me. Even when I did not understand him, even when we fought each other, he was always there.” His tone became more introspective. “How can you not trust someone who stands beside you when the world burns around you?”

Clint shifted in his seat, arms folded. “Because, Thor, there’s always a price for everything. And we’ve seen the cost of Loki’s betrayal. Every time, it’s come with a price.”

Thor’s fists clenched again. He knew this. He knew the price of Loki’s actions, more than anyone. But that didn’t mean he was ready to accept it. Not yet. He wasn’t ready to say that his brother could be so easily reduced to a villain. That he could be so easily discarded. How does one reduce a being that has lived for over 1000 years?

Bruce exchanged a glance with Natasha before looking back at Thor. “And yet you’ve never questioned why. You’ve never asked yourself why Loki does what he does. Why he hurts people, why he manipulates...”

Thor turned away, his back to them, as if he could find the answers in the flickering city lights. Something so largely different was the light: In Asgard it was a reflection of the sun on the gold palace. On Midgard it felt unreal.

“I have no answers for you,” Thor admitted. “Not here, not now.” His voice dropped slightly, weary. “But all I know is this—Loki is my brother. And I will never turn my back on him. Not for anything.”

The silence in the room stretched between them like a vast gulf, each person lost in their thoughts, grappling with the gulf between their worlds.
For the Avengers, Thor’s loyalty felt like blind devotion. Perhaps even a dependency none of them addressed. For Thor, it was the only kind of loyalty that mattered.

The conversation in the Tower had reached an impasse. Thor stood at the centre, hands still resting at his sides, his muscles tense with a frustration that had yet to break through the surface. The Avengers—his friends, his allies—were staring at him with confusion and suspicion, none of them fully understanding where he was coming from. He could feel their eyes, but he did not relent.

“Midgard...,” Thor murmured, his voice distant. “You are so quick to judge. So quick to seek answers that don’t belong to you.”

Clint, arms crossed tightly, looked as though he wanted to speak, but thought better of it. Instead, it was Bruce who finally asked the question that had been simmering beneath the surface.
“Then why, Thor? Why does Loki still deserve your loyalty after everything?”

Thor's jaw tightened at the question, but it wasn’t anger that crossed his face—it was something deeper, more melancholy. His gaze wandered to the tall windows, so different from the vast halls of Asgard.

“As I have previously said, war is not a place for morality,” he said, voice quiet but sure. “It is a place for survival. My brother... his way of surviving was different from mine. His powers—his tricks—they are not what you might call ‘honourable’ or ‘virtuous,’ but they have kept us alive. They have kept me alive, more times than I care to count.”

Thor paused, looking back at the Avengers with a deep, pained look in his eyes. “Loki is my brother, no matter what he has done. His survival, his presence in my life, is just as vital as mine is to his. Without him, there would have been no victories. No battles won. We were brothers—shield brothers, allies in war.”

Bruce leaned forward, clearly struggling to understand. “But Thor—he hurt everyone. He hurt you. And he didn’t just stop there, he—”

Thor's eyes flashed with the beginnings of irritation, but he masked it quickly, his tone growing more impassioned as he spoke.

“You still don’t understand, do you?” Thor’s words were heavy, his accent thick with frustration. “You don’t understand what it is to survive centuries of war. To see your enemies fall and rise again. To see your closest allies—your family—turn on you, again and again, as the battle rages on. You think that betrayal is a choice. For Loki and I, betrayal was just another weapon. Another battle tactic in an endless war.”

Thor paused, the weight of his centuries-old experience pressing heavily on his shoulders. “What you see as betrayal, we see as... survival. A necessary evil in a world that does not care for you, or for your good intentions.”

Clint couldn’t help but let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. Survival at the cost of everyone else’s pain. Sounds like a pretty rough way of looking at the world.”

Thor’s gaze turned cold. “You’re not wrong,” he said, voice clipped. “But I am not from your world. I am not from your Midgard. What you call ‘pain,’ what you call ‘sacrifice’—we view it differently on Asgard. It is an honour to fight and die with those who understand the cost of battle. You call it selfishness. I call it pragmatism.”

It was Natasha who spoke up next, her voice calm but sharp. “So you think the rest of us just don’t get it? That we’re not... worthy of understanding your brother’s actions?”

Thor’s expression softened for a moment, but there was a trace of condescension still lingering in his words. “No,” he said, his tone a bit more restrained. “It is not about worthiness. Midgard is... still a child to the other realms. You are young, all of you. I can see that in the way you fight, the way you love, the way you struggle. I have been warned about your tendencies to do anything for what you call love. As a mortal, how so little emotions must seem grandiose. You have not seen the endless wars we’ve fought. You have not faced the weight of centuries on your shoulders, where survival is the only thing that matters. We were raised to become kings. You think loyalty is about honour and fairness. But it is about trust. And trust, in war, is never fair.”

Thor’s voice carried with a kind of weary authority that seemed to hang in the air for a long moment. He turned his gaze from one Avenger to the next, sensing their discomfort, but unwilling to back down.

“You will rise,” Thor continued, his voice softer now, almost reflective. “You will learn what it is to survive in a world that does not favour you. You will evolve, just as Midgard has always evolved. But... it will take time. And until then, you will never understand the bond Loki and I share. You see betrayal. I see survival.”

The room was silent, each Avenger contemplating Thor’s words. For some, it was like looking at an alien world—one that was ancient and vast, but impossible to understand. The differences in perspective were vast, and yet, the frustration hung in the air, unresolved.

Thor, for all his strength and grandeur, was a child of his own realm, and to him, this Midgard was still something to be understood, something that would grow—eventually. But the Avengers, who had only just begun to understand the depth of war, the cost of loyalty, couldn’t fully grasp the ancient god’s perspective.

The silence between them felt like a chasm—both sides not wrong, yet both sides forever distanced by their different ways of living, of fighting, of surviving.

Thor let out a breath, shaking his head slightly. His gaze flickered toward the window for a moment, the city lights of New York casting a faint glow on his face. The light made his expression seem older, more worn than usual. He spoke again, but this time, it wasn’t with the fervour of someone defending their honour. There was a quiet resignation to his tone.

“It is not so simple for Loki and me. You see, trust is... different for us. For us, trust is not something built on truth or consistency—it is built on something far more... fragile.” Thor’s gaze turned back to the Avengers. “Loki and I have fought side by side for more years than you can imagine. I’ve seen him in battle, I’ve seen his tricks, his illusions, his power—and I’ve come to know one thing above all else: I trust him to never let me fall in battle. He would never leave me in the heat of war. That is what matters to me.”

He paused, his expression tightening as if the weight of his words had struck a raw nerve, but he pressed on. “What Loki and I share is... different from what you all have known. It’s a loyalty born from survival, from the endless wars we’ve fought side by side. It’s not about love or honour, not like Midgard might understand it. It’s a bond forged in the fires of battle. We trust each other to stay alive. That is our pact.”

Bruce, standing at the far end of the room, glanced at Clint, who exchanged a look with Natasha before they both turned their attention back to Thor.

“But trust in battle isn’t the same as trust in life,” Bruce murmured, speaking slowly as he tried to piece the difference together. “You’re saying Loki has saved your life countless times, but—”

“But he’s betrayed me countless times too,” Thor interrupted, his voice rising with a slight edge of frustration. His fist clenched, and for a moment, the weight of centuries of hurt seemed to settle in his bones. “I know that. I know all the times he’s turned against me, and I’ve been angry—furious, even. I’ve felt every ounce of that betrayal like a blade through my chest. But even so, the trust we share in war is something I cannot discard so easily.”

Thor’s eyes darkened, and his shoulders slumped slightly as he took a slow breath. “But I don’t need to explain it to you. You see, in Asgard, trust is not about believing in someone’s honour or virtue—it’s about knowing that, when it comes to survival, they will do what they must. Loki, with all his cunning and lies, has kept me alive countless times. That is what matters to me.”

Clint crossed his arms, a sceptical look on his face. “You really think he wouldn’t turn on you again? That’s not loyalty—it’s repetition.”

Thor’s gaze flashed with a sudden intensity, his posture shifting as if preparing for another battle but he paused, looking each of the Avengers in the eye. “If you could understand the weight of a thousand years of war, of being raised to fight, you would understand what matters. In Asgard, where strength and survival are the only things that define your worth, that kind of trust is sacred. You do not abandon those who fight beside you—no matter what they do outside the field.”

Thor’s gaze softened for a moment, his voice quieter now. “In Asgard, we were raised to be warriors, kings. And what matters in war is strength—the strength to survive, to fight, to lead, to protect. Although Loki never agreed to this principle or view of strength, he never countered it. You do not question your brother’s loyalty, because to do so is to question the very fabric of your own existence. We live and die by the sword, and Loki’s tricks were just as vital to our survival as my hammer.”

Bruce’s brow furrowed as he absorbed Thor’s words. “But that’s just it. You don’t question it. You were raised to fight. You didn’t have time to question loyalty, to question actions. But we—here on Earth—we do. We can’t just fight. We have to understand what’s at stake, what we’re fighting for. And if someone like Loki... keeps betraying you, there’s only so much trust we can have.”

Thor stood straighter, his chest swelling with a mixture of pride and defensiveness. “You are still children in the eyes of the cosmos, struggling to find your place. The bonds you form are different—more fragile, more human. You cannot see beyond your own time, your own struggles. I have seen more than you can imagine. I have seen worlds fall, brothers rise and fall, kingdoms rise and crumble. And through it all, the one constant was Loki at my side. Even when the darkness in his heart tried to swallow him whole, even when he turned his back on me, he never once left me behind when it counted.”

He turned toward the door, his gaze lingering for a moment on his comrades before he spoke again, softer now, almost to himself. “I would rather face betrayal with him beside me than fight alone in a world that does not understand the cost of survival.”

Thor left the room with a heavy silence following him.

The clash of worlds—Asgardian and Midgardian, god and human—was more apparent than ever. Thor, for all his strength and wisdom, was a creature of his world. And that world was one of battle, survival, and the unspoken bonds forged in fire.

But as the Avengers exchanged uneasy glances, they couldn’t help but wonder: How could someone so loyal, so unshakable, trust a person like Loki—a god of lies and chaos—again and again? And what did that say about them, and the cost of the loyalty they had yet to fully understand?

Chapter 4: how to lose a god in ten days

The silence in the Tower was heavier than the nearly daily events Stark would organise before the gods’ arrival, the overbearing sound almost preferable to the suffocation their arrival had created.

Loki had not returned. Not really. His presence in the tower was felt in the subtle shifting of light, in the tension of unanswered questions. It was always that way with him. Even when he wasn’t in the room, he was: his presence, the reflection of his being, one of chaos and instability. How he thrived in these uncertain moments.

In the lab, Banner watched the simulations dissolve—literally. The models they had constructed to track temporal decay no longer rendered correctly. Some frames blinked out of existence. Others duplicated. Some… reversed, like some tragic slideshow effect. Banner was now waiting for the frames to become the terrifying butterfly animation of a young and naïve presentation. The prospect was haunting him, and not even the logs remembered what had been there before, providing no consolation to his poor soul.
The system was trying to forget.
He backed away from the console. “Tony,” he said over the intercom, voice hollow, “I think we’ve lost the ability to measure reality.”
Tony’s voice crackled in, tight and clipped. “Define ‘lost.’”
Banner didn’t answer.

Elsewhere in the tower, Loki stood before a mirror that wasn’t quite a mirror. It reflected him, yes—but slightly off. A breath too late. A posture subtly misaligned. The kind of flaw that didn't belong to the glass, but to the world behind it.
He smiled at his own reflection. "Curious," he murmured. "How much wrong it takes to make something feel more honest."
The mirror blinked. He didn’t.
A knock.
He turned. The spy, the spider, the killer, stood in the doorway, arms loose, gaze unreadable.

“You’re hard to find,” she said.

“You say that like it’s a flaw.”

She stepped inside, not asking permission. “You’ve been off the comms. The team’s not thrilled.”

“I assumed they'd appreciate the silence. I’m told I talk too much.”

Her lips twitched. “You do.”

“And yet, here you are,” he said, watching her with the casual attention of a man used to being hunted—but never caught. “Which begs the question: what do you really want?”

She didn't answer immediately. She looked around the room, assessing—not for threats. For intent.

“Just checking on the unpredictable god locked in our house,” she said. “Routine protocol.”

“Of course. The spider keeping tabs on the wolf.”

Her eyes flicked to him, sharp. “I don’t underestimate you.”

“No,” he said. “You just want to know what I’m not saying.”

A pause. She didn’t blink. “Clint never talked about what you pulled from him.”

“Did he need to?” Loki asked, voice soft. “You and I both know memory is a messy thing. Half truth. Half scent. Half suggestion.”

“That’s three halves.”

“I’m generous,” he smiled.

She moved closer, just a step. Measured. Controlled. “You saw pieces of me. Through him.”

“And yet,” Loki said, “you still walked in here. Alone.”

“I walk into a lot of rooms alone.”

“Yes, but rarely without knowing exactly what’s waiting on the other side.”

Something shifted in the air—thin, almost imperceptible. They were circling it now. Neither naming it. Both knowing.
“You don’t know how much you saw,” she said. Not a question. A test.

He inclined his head, noncommittal. “And you don’t know how much I understood.”

They stood like that for a beat too long—silent, still. A tension that hummed between words, somewhere between flirtation and threat.
“Information’s a currency,” she said. “But you don’t spend it unless you’re trying to buy something.”

“And what do you think I’m buying?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

He stepped closer. Not threatening—never directly. Just enough to test her footing.
“You want leverage,” he said, voice low. “You want to know what I know. About you. About what’s happening. About what comes next.”

“I want balance,” she replied. “In case things… tilt.”
“Things always tilt,” he said. “That’s gravity.”

She didn’t smile. “And you like watching people fall.

“Only if they were standing too high to begin with.”

They stood in silence again. The unspoken history between them suddenly palpable. Clint’s mind. Her face. Fragments traded through a borrowed consciousness neither of them had fully owned.
She tilted her head. “You haven’t asked me what I know about you.”

“I already know,” he said.

“You assume.”

“I observe.”

A slow breath. Natasha stepped back toward the door—but only halfway. A retreat that wasn’t a retreat. A move in the game.
“You’re not as unreadable as you think,” she said.

He arched an eyebrow. “Neither are you.”
For a moment, it seemed like the tension would break. It didn’t. It held—taut and deliberate.

“I’ll let them know you’re alive,” she said.

“How kind.”

She lingered at the doorway. “One more thing.”

He waited.

“If you ever did see something,” she said, eyes locked on his, “something real—you’ll know better than to speak it aloud.”

Loki’s smile was slow and deliberate. “Of course. That’s what makes it powerful.”

In the sub-basement—deep enough that even the tower’s hum gave way to silence—Thor waited, arms crossed, jaw set. The air around him was thick with the kind of stillness that warned of storms.
Loki entered without flourish. No illusion, no smirk. Just him.

“You left,” Loki said flatly, pausing just beyond reach.

“I needed to breathe,” Thor replied, not looking at him.

“A curious instinct,” Loki said, “for someone who commands the sky.”

Thor turned, slow and deliberate. “You think this is a game.”

“No,” Loki said. “I think you don’t know how to lose one.”

Thor’s eyes narrowed. The room contracted.

“You’ve always thought yourself cleverer than everyone else.”

“I’ve only ever thought myself other,” Loki replied.

They stood there, shaped by the same halls, the same crown, the same father—yet utterly different.
“I’ve been thinking,” Thor said, the words sounding like labour. “About what you said. About the way we’re seen.”

Loki arched a brow. “And?”

Thor’s fists flexed. “I don’t like it. But I’ve seen too much now to deny it.”

Loki tilted his head. “So you agree.”

“No,” Thor snapped. “I understand. That doesn’t mean I agree.”

Loki gave a thin smile. “Of course not. That would imply change.”

Thor took a step forward. “You think I don’t change? I’ve bled for change. Fought, lost, rebuilt. Over and over.”

“Yes,” Loki said coolly. “And every time, you rebuild yourself back into the same mold.”

Thor’s voice was thunder in a whisper. “You dare—?”

“You are Asgard, Thor,” Loki cut in. “Even when it’s gone, you carry it in your spine. Every word you speak sounds like a law. Every silence feels like judgment.”

“I speak because others listen,” Thor growled.

“No,” Loki said. “You speak because they were taught to listen. There’s a difference.”

The room pulsed with the unsaid.
Thor’s jaw worked. “So what, then? I’m just the hammer they handed down from one war to the next? A legacy with no soul?”

Loki’s expression flickered—faint sympathy, quickly buried. “That’s not for me to say. But tell me, truly—when was the last time you did something only for yourself? Not for Odin. Not for the throne. Not for the people who expect you to save them.”

Thor’s eyes burned. “I don’t need saving. Not from you.”

Loki stepped forward now, the game forgotten, something raw in his voice. “You don’t need me. That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? You never needed to see me.”
Thor said nothing. But he didn’t move away.

Loki continued, quieter. “They cheered your name. They sculpted you into myth before you’d lived a full life. And me? I was just the shadow that proved your light.”
“You think I asked for any of it?” Thor snapped.

“No,” Loki said. “You just didn’t question it.”

A beat.

Thor’s voice dropped, heavy. “I still don’t trust you.”

“I don’t need your trust,” Loki said. “Just your honesty.”

Thor’s breath caught. Honesty was always one of his main traits, something that Loki vehemently detested.

Loki’s tone changed—cutting, but not cruel. “You think you’re the only one who lost something in that throne room? You think your rage burns hotter because it's loud?”

“I’m angry,” Thor said, “because I still believe something can be salvaged. And you’ve already set fire to the wreckage.”

“Better a fire than rot,” Loki muttered.

Thor stepped forward, imposing. “You don’t get to walk in here and speak like a prophet. You ran. You betrayed. You lied.”

“And you walk like the world owes you obedience.”

They stood chest to chest now, not as warriors—but as brothers. Tired. Proud. Bruised in places no blade could reach.

Loki’s voice dropped into something raw, unguarded. “We’re ideas, brother. Stories. If no one remembers us, we vanish.”

Thor didn’t respond. His breath was slow, heavy.

“You want to be a martyr?” Loki whispered, eyes sharp with meaning. “Fine. I’d rather be a ghost than dust.”

Silence.

Then, quietly, almost reluctantly: “You always say things to hurt.”

“No,” Loki said. “I say things you won’t.”

They stood in the dark for a long time, thunder and mischief, legacy and resentment. Not reconciled—but exposed.
Something had shifted.
Neither of them said goodbye.

The Tower had quieted again. Stark was sealed in the lab, his hands stained with the ghosts of corrupted simulations. Steve had retired to the gym, fists pummeling questions he couldn’t voice. Natasha sat alone in the dim of the kitchen, slowly cleaning a knife that didn’t need cleaning. Banner had vanished to rest, or to run. Thor had returned to the observatory level, staring out into stars he once called home.

Loki moved without sound, without illusion.

He didn’t know why he couldn’t sleep—only that something was pulling. A thread tugged in the back of his mind. Not urgent. Not loud. But insistent. Familiar, in the way that old songs sometimes echoed when no one was singing them.

He drifted to a shadowed hallway few used. The Tower was sleek and modern, all clean lines and engineered warmth, but here, where the corridors narrowed and the glass gave way to steel, it felt colder. Older.

There was no sound when the raven arrived.

It simply was. Perched on a narrow rail, its eyes like ink pressed into pearls. It was not a Midgard bird. It shimmered at the edges—like memory, like dream.
Loki stopped. “Huginn,” he said softly. “Or Muninn?”

The bird tilted its head. Said nothing. Stupid bird, granted the ability of speech but refused to use it to his face out of spite.

“What message does he send now?” Loki asked. “What warning? What leash disguised as a gift?”

The raven did not move. But in its eyes, he saw frost.

Familiar. Hated. His.

Suddenly, the corridor fell away.
Not in sound, not in space—but in time.
The Tower’s walls dissolved, and he was elsewhere. It was clawing at his throat yet again, screeching in his ears. The tumour is his chest, that bore the face of the child he used to be, bellowed in the depths of the tunnels that littered Loki's ribs, a cage of its own making.

Chapter 5: The snow glows white on the mountain tonight

Laufey lay beneath the roots of the world, far from the frost that had once crowned him. The great cold that once encased him in power and vengeance had long since faded. His breath came like brittle smoke, his voice weaker still.
Loki stood at the edge of the hollow, staring at what should not have been possible.

“You’re dead,” he said flatly.

Laufey blinked slowly. “Not entirely.”

“This is impossible,” Loki gritted through closed teeth, though even as he said it, he felt the truth coiling in his throat. Nothing was ever truly gone in the old ways. Not completely. Not if the story refused to end.

“You burned my body in Asgard,” Laufey rasped. “But not my roots.”

“The spell—”

“Cut one branch,” Laufey murmured. “The tree still grows.”

Loki's stomach twisted.

He had struck the killing blow himself. Or thought he had. But it was not Laufey’s physical form that had always mattered—it was what anchored him. Old gods did not die easily. Not if they were bound to myth. To memory. To meaning.

Beneath Yggdrasil, this Laufey endured—not as a living king, but as a remnant of the first frost. A soul spun into the deeper layers of the weave. One that still whispered in ancient looms. Still remembered.

 

And now, it remembered him.
“You left me there,” Loki said, stepping closer. “Tossed me away. A bargaining chip. A child to be used.”

Laufey gave a weak, cold smile. “And still… here you are.”

“I wanted to see if you had answers.”

“No,” said the old king. “You came to see if you were real.”

Loki flinched.

“Because you still don’t know, do you?” Laufey whispered. “If you are trick… or truth.”

A cold wind shivered through the cavern.

Then—without movement, without change—the Norns were simply there.

The fire dimmed to a glow. Shadows curled tighter.

“Child of the cold,” they breathed, “you ask what end awaits you, and what beginning follows. You ask which of the gods will shape what comes next.”

Their spindled fingers brushed the loom. Threads quivered.

“They will tell of the thunderer, whose rage shakes the sky, and the one who drank from the mouth of death. They will honour the beautiful, the bold, the battle-forged. But power lies not in glory.”

“There is one,” they said, “who has worn many faces. Beast and bride. Pawn and king. He has been the lie that saves and the truth that damns.”

Loki stared, throat tight.

“He is the tale that cannot be untold.”

Laufey’s breath came thin now. Hollow. He was not a man dying—he was an echo fading.
But he smiled. Faint. Ghostlike.

“He is carried in voice,” the Norns whispered. “A whisper in the dark. A flicker between truths.”
The loom clicked. The fire hissed.

“We do not spin war. We do not spin love. We spin meaning. And he, born of you, walks the thread of meaning like flame on wind.”

The last thread stilled.

And Laufey, ancient king of frost, gave one final breath—and was gone.

But Loki did not move.
Because something in him had shifted.
Because for the first time in his long, tangled life… he was beginning to see the shape of the thing he truly was.

 

He stood before the mirror, the silence of the room wrapping itself around him like the frost he had just left. The city lights outside filtered in across the windowpane—cold, sterile light. But something in him was warm now. Unsteady, yes. Unresolved. But warm.

Loki stared at his reflection.

His eyes stared back at him—still that same shade of green, sharp and unsettling, like cracked glass left too long in the cold. But even now, they felt like a costume. A veneer laid carefully over something older, deeper. Something that should have been ice-blue, ancient and vast, belonging not to palaces of gold but to storm-choked valleys and the silent frost that breathed without mercy.
They were not the eyes he had been born with.

He had chosen—or perhaps, inherited—them when he became what Odin needed him to be. When the blue of his skin and the crimson chill of Jotunheim had been folded away, locked behind spells and unspoken expectations.

They were the eyes of a prince. Of a trickster. Of a son who passed as Asgardian because to be seen as anything else was to be feared.

But now, as the roots of the world whispered their truths and the memory of Laufey lingered like hoarfrost on his spine, Loki could not help but feel the green had never truly belonged to him. Not really.
They were eyes shaped by someone else’s hand. Crafted, like every lie told to a child too clever for comfort.

And looking into them now—familiar, alien, false—he wondered not who he was...
…but who had written him this way.

“You don’t know what you are,” he whispered again, fingers brushing the edge of the mirror.

But there was something else now—another whisper, one that hadn’t come from his lips.
A memory. Not from Laufey. Not from the Norns.

But from earlier. Faint. As if it had slipped through the seams of the vision.
A shadow. Black wings.
The raven.
It had perched at the edge of the hollow. No sound. No motion. But it had watched. With ancient eyes. And it had not come for Laufey.

It had come for him.

Huginn. Or Muninn. Odin’s eyes in the Nine Realms.
But which? Memory… or Thought?

Loki could not say. And more disturbingly, he could not remember when the raven had appeared in the vision. It felt inserted. Not false—just… unrooted. Like a story spliced into another, one that might have always been there or might have never belonged.

He backed away from the mirror, unsettled now for a different reason.

If the raven had been real—if it had carried Odin’s awareness—then this vision had not been private. Not sacred. Not his.
And Odin, always the tactician, never moved without intent.

Had it been a gift? A warning? A leash?

Had the All-Father sent him into the roots of the world to find something? Or to keep him from finding something else?

The Norns had spoken in riddles, yes—but even their riddles bowed to the will of the gods who still held power in the present. The ones who enforced what parts of prophecy were allowed to bloom. Odin was no longer omnipotent… but he still knew how to play the game of perception.

And Loki had been raised on that game.

He exhaled slowly, grounding himself. But even that felt… wrong.
Was this doubt his own?
Or had it been planted?

He turned away from the mirror, jaw tight.

"That’s how it begins," a voice whispered—his own voice, but not aloud. "The split between what is seen and what is meant. Between story and truth."

He didn’t know when the thought had begun, or if it had even been his.

He touched his temple, fingers cold.
Memory was slippery.
Truth even more so.
And stories… stories were tricksters, just like him.

If Odin had shaped the tale of his beginning—if Laufey had been buried but not gone—then how many threads of Loki’s past had been woven into shape not by time, but by intention?
By someone’s intention?

He was beginning to see the loom.

And worse—he was beginning to wonder if he was part of it, or trapped inside it.

Was Laufey’s dying truth even his to believe?

He sat down slowly, suddenly exhausted. As if remembering a dream that might not have belonged to him.
And somewhere, in the deep threads of himself, a small voice whispered:
"You are not the story. You are the question the story asks to stay alive."

Chapter 6: The Eyes, Chico—Nevermore Lies

Loki arrived back at the Tower somewhere between midnight and morning, though time felt as loose and useless as thread left too long in the rain.

He didn’t walk back—he slipped through. One moment, he was beneath roots older than stars, frost still clinging to the inside of his lungs. The next, he was standing in the Tower’s atrium, boots wet from dew that shouldn’t exist.
For a long time, he just stood there, unmoving, as if to see if he was real enough to trigger the motion lights.

They came on slowly.

Reality blinked back into place.

Loki was cold. Not physically. Not anymore. That kind of cold didn’t come from air.

He was still dressed in his previous garb—dark tunic, leather sleeves, the edges of illusion slightly flickering. Not because he was losing control. Because something underneath was pressing through. Like a truth he hadn’t meant to bury so deep.

The raven’s presence still lingered in his mind like a smudge in the corner of his vision.

It hadn’t said a word—but something in its gaze had whispered: Nevermore, indeed.

Memory or Thought?

He still couldn’t say.

He hadn’t meant to go anywhere. Hadn’t cast a spell, opened a gate, or summoned ancestral echoes. But something had called him. Plucked him from the present like a thread yanked from the weave. The air had shifted. The world had tilted.

And suddenly—Laufey.
Alive, yet not.
Fading, yet speaking.

And the Norns…
He had seen the Norns.
Their words still burned like brandings on the inside of his skull.
Three figures, speaking in riddles, threading fate like prophecy and smoke—witches in all but name.

“He is the tale that cannot be untold.”

Loki clenched his jaw. The silence in the Tower was too loud.

He began walking, slow and deliberate, toward the private wing Thor had refused to use since returning. The others—Banner, Stark, the archer, the spy—they were likely asleep or pretending to be. He didn’t care. Let them sleep. Let them think he was pacing his cage like always.

He just needed—
“Where the hell have you been?”

The voice hit like a thrown blade.

Natasha stood at the end of the hall, barefoot, dressed in black, her eyes sharp despite the hour.

Loki didn’t flinch. But his illusion tightened slightly.

“Getting some air,” he said coolly.

“You don’t breathe,” she shot back.

A pause.

He offered her a faint, mocking smile. “So observant, Agent Romanoff. No wonder they fear you.”

“I don’t care where you slithered off to,” she said, crossing her arms. “But your energy signature dropped. Nothing. Like you blinked out. Stark thought you teleported. I said you don’t do that without flair.”

“Perhaps I’m evolving.”

She stepped closer, unconvinced. “Where did you go?”

Loki held her gaze. “I don’t know.”

That was the truth.

Romanoff studied him, and for a second, her posture shifted—not relaxed, but... recalibrated. Like she wasn’t sure if she was talking to the same version of him from earlier.
“You look different,” she said.

Loki said nothing.

“Not different like you’re lying,” she added. “Different like... something’s changed. Your eyes.”

She meant it as an accusation.
He took it as a wound.

“They’re not my eyes,” he muttered.

She blinked. “What?”

Loki moved past her before he could answer, brushing her shoulder slightly as he passed.
“Wake the others,” he said over his shoulder.

The hallway lights flickered after he passed, but not just once—twice, thrice, like the building itself was stuttering in pain. Too fast to catch but slow enough to claw at the edges of memory. Natasha didn’t follow. She didn’t speak again.
Which was unnatural.

She always said something else.

He moved toward the central floor, half-expecting—half-hoping—to see Tony already there, already furious, already caffeinated. But the briefing room was empty. Too empty. The chairs were twisted out of place—each one tilted just so, as if arranged for a ritual, or a warning. The table's surface rippled faintly at the edges, a wavering heat-haze shimmer, though the air hung cold and suffocatingly still.
He stared harder.

The shimmer pulsed.

Behind him, the doors didn’t hiss open. They breathed—a wet, sucking inhale, like lungs made of rotten leather.
Footsteps echoed. Familiar. Too familiar.

Thor stepped in.

“Brother,” he said.

But his voice was wrong. Flattened, cracked—like a recording played underwater. Thor’s hair clung to his skull, soaked.

There’d been no rain.

Loki said nothing.

Thor stepped closer, and the smile that split his face was too wide, too sharp—fang-like. But it didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes… those eyes were wrong. They bulged, glassy and slick, the irises swirling sickly like a serpent’s tongue flickering out beneath his lashes.

“You look like you’ve seen death,” Thor said, voice crawling through the room like slime.

Loki’s gaze fell on the drip sliding from Thor’s sleeve. It hit the floor with a crack that sounded like shattered bone.

“I saw a grave,” Loki whispered, voice low and broken, “and something inside it still knows how to speak.”

Thor didn’t answer. The smile stretched wider. Too long.

“You’re not dreaming,” he said at last, turning his back.

Loki blinked.
“I never said I was.”

Thor’s footsteps left behind puddles that bubbled and hissed as they evaporated—shapes forming and dissolving in the wet spots. Glyphs? Curses? Or just accidents made flesh.
Thor’s eyes slid up to the walls.

The tower, once sleek steel and glass, now seemed to breathe—panels pulsing, flexing like skin. Shadows twisted and warped, moving just beyond sight.

A thin crack spiderwebbed across one overhead light, but the crack wasn’t inert. It watched him—tiny black tendrils writhing inside like vipers flicking forked tongues.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Behind his lids, the Norns whispered:
Three for the thread, one for the knife,
Spin him thin and split his life.

He opened his eyes.

The crack was gone.

He turned to leave—and Natasha stood there again.

Exactly the same. Same posture. Same measured breath.

“You never answered me,” she said.

“I did.”

“No,” she said, voice like gravel scraping bone. “That was someone else.”

He frowned.

Her eyes were sharp. Yes. But one pupil twisted in on itself—swirling, folding inward like a black hole sucking light in. Not spinning. Hungry. No—hunting.

“Where are the others?” Loki asked, voice low, cautious.

“You told me to wake them,” she said calmly. “So I did.”

She stepped aside.

The conference room wasn’t empty anymore.

Each chair was filled with a figure. Still. Silent.

Too still.

He stepped forward slowly.
The overhead light flickered—intermittent pulses revealing flesh that bent and stretched wrong, skin stretched tight over jagged, crooked bones. Faces too smooth, too featureless. Mouths sealed shut with glistening tongues curled beneath the lips—slimy, forked tongues flickering just under the skin.

Only their eyes moved. All of them.

Wide, gleaming, serpentine eyes that never blinked, never looked away.

All locked on him.

And the raven—
The raven perched on Banner’s chair had no eyes. Instead, hollow sockets leaked thick, black shadow that twisted and coiled like smoke curling from a dying fire. It opened its beak, but no sound came out—only a long, forked tongue slithering out, flicking in the cold air.

Then the voice—his own voice—came from the raven’s throat:
“You are not the story.
You are what the story uses to hold itself together.”

Loki staggered backward.

He blinked—
And the room was empty.
Lights normal. Chairs unoccupied. No Natasha.

His pulse throbbed—too steady, too even, like something had slipped inside and rewired his fear.
The glass panel beside him flickered—not with electricity, but like film fraying at the edges. Frames missing.

In the reflection, his eyes glowed green—
Then blue—
Then a deep, endless black, like a serpent’s slit pupil swallowing the light whole.

He stepped back.

The hallway stretched, exhaling. Somewhere, a wall cracked open—a wet, gurgling noise that sounded eerily like laughter.

Loki turned and walked faster.

Not running.

Not yet.

But the coil in his chest tightened—like a thousand tongues twisting inside his ribs.

Something must have followed him back.

Or worse—

He’d never come back at all.

Chapter 7: “Who Watches the Dreamer?”

Loki reached the stairwell before he realized he wasn’t breathing.

Not because he needed to, but because something deeper—some instinct older than flesh—had simply forgotten how. The Tower shifted around him, space bending in increments too small to track, but enough to disorient. Every door he passed looked familiar, but wrong. Names had slid off placards. Photos on the wall melted into smears of half-formed memory.

This wasn’t a place anymore.
It was a retelling.
A rephrasing.

He gripped the rail, half-expecting it to squirm under his touch. It didn’t—but it was too warm. As if something else had just let go.

“I didn’t follow you,” came a voice behind him. Stark.

Loki turned.

Tony stood four steps above, barefoot, shirt half-buttoned, eyes bloodshot but blazing. He held a mug, but the steam curled downward.

“I didn’t follow you,” he repeated, “but I think something else did.”

Loki’s jaw clenched. “I know.”

Tony descended a step. “The Tower’s AI is glitching. JARVIS tried to restart, then went quiet. Not off. Just... listening. You ever hear silence that feels like breathing?”

Loki didn’t answer.

Tony didn’t seem to care. “We’ve all had nightmares, but this? This is like a nightmare wearing someone else’s dream as a coat. Everyone’s... off. Banner's gamma levels spiked three times while unconscious. Clint muttered something about strings in his teeth. And Thor—”

He stopped.

Loki waited.
“He won’t come out of his room,” Stark finished. “But something inside it is laughing.”

Loki’s mouth was dry.

They stood there for a moment—two broken men in a hallway that didn’t quite fit anymore.

Finally, Loki asked, “Why did you come find me?”

“Because I’m not sure if I’m awake,” Tony said. “And I figured if anyone could break a dream, it’d be you.”

Loki exhaled through his nose. “You assume I haven’t been swallowed too.”

Tony gave a hollow smirk. “Then I guess we find the throat and cut our way out.”

There was a sound then—low, guttural, like metal dragging across bone.
Not from above.
From below.

The basement.

Sublevels no one ever went into, not even Stark. Too many experiments. Too many forgotten projects. Too many lies pretending to be tech.
Loki and Tony both turned at the same time, drawn like threads.

“We need to go down,” Loki said.

“Yeah,” Tony replied. “I figured.”

He handed Loki the mug. Loki stared at it. The steam still flowed downward.

“Drink,” Tony said. “It’s not coffee.”

Loki raised a brow. “What is it?”

“No idea. I made it in a dream.”

Loki drank.

It tasted like memory.
Tony’s face didn’t change as Loki lowered the mug.
But something behind his eyes shifted—like a reel skipping frames, then catching up too fast.

The walls around them sighed. Not creaked, not groaned—sighed, as if the Tower itself was watching them move and regretted it.

Loki handed the mug back. “This isn’t just memory,” he said. “It’s curated.”

Tony cocked his head. “Like a museum?”

“Worse. Like a lie told so often it forgets it was ever false.”

Another sound—closer now. Still from below, but moving upward.
Something knew they were coming.

Tony turned and started down the stairs. “So,” he said over his shoulder, “worst-case scenario?”

Loki followed. “The story is eating us.”

“Cool,” Tony said. “Just checking.”

The stairs bent as they descended, folding tighter with each flight like the Tower wasn’t built to allow this direction. Lights flickered, but only when looked at directly. When ignored, they shone steadily, casting no shadows at all.

By the fourth landing, the walls had started pulsing. Faintly. Like veins under concrete.

Loki stopped. “This place wasn’t made. It grew.”

Tony glanced around. “Is that bad?”

Loki didn’t answer right away. He pressed a palm to the wall. It felt like warm wax and slow heartbeats. “Yes.”

A hum rose beneath their feet—a vibration more felt than heard. Tony grabbed the railing. “Do you hear that?”

“It’s speaking,” Loki said.

“To us?”

“No,” Loki murmured, “through us.”

Tony didn’t ask what that meant. He just kept going.

At sublevel eight, they reached a door. It wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed.
It just wasn’t right.
The hallway beyond it looked flatter, like a painting. The perspective skewed. Angles behaved wrong. Lines drifted slightly when not watched.

Tony stepped through first. The moment he crossed the threshold, his reflection on the polished wall didn’t move.
Loki hesitated. Then followed.

The lights here buzzed with voices. Tiny ones. Whispers that sounded like arguments between forgotten selves.
Loki’s reflection blinked at him.

“Don’t look at the mirrors,” Tony said softly. “They’re remembering things we didn’t do.”

“Or things we will,” Loki replied.

Further in, the corridor opened into a wide lab. One of Stark’s old ones—long abandoned. Tables, cables, empty canisters.

But something stood at the centre.
It looked like a chair.
And a cage.
And a throne.

It pulsed gently with the same heartbeat as the walls.

Tony frowned. “I didn’t build that.”

“No,” Loki said. “But something used your hands.”

A noise—sharp, wet, and sudden—cut through the stillness.
Behind them.
The door was gone.
Only wall remained.

Tony turned slowly. “Okay,” he said, voice carefully neutral. “So what’s the plan now?”

Loki narrowed his eyes.

And then, softly, the throne-cage-chair spoke.

“Tell me a story,” it said.

And it sounded like every voice they’d ever trusted.

The lights stuttered.
Not flickered—stuttered, like they were choking on too many versions of the same second.

Loki turned sharply, heartbeat thudding in rhythms he hadn’t chosen. Something in the walls was breathing again. Louder. Hungrier.
The construct—loom? throne? sarcophagus?—had shifted again when they weren’t looking.

It was leaking.
Black liquid wept from its base, pooling on the floor, thick and shimmering. It smelled like blood and ozone. A heart, cut from time and left to rot.

Tap. Tap.

Tony raised the mug again, hand trembling now. “That’s not the coffee.”

His voice was too calm. That kind of calm that only existed when screaming might break the walls.
Loki’s eyes darted to the corner.

The raven was gone.

But something else was perched there now. Something taller. Human-shaped. Not human.
It was wearing armour made of glinting black feathers and shadow. No face. Just a long, rippling absence where a head should’ve been.

“Is that—” Tony started.

Loki didn’t let him finish. “Don’t name it.”

The air collapsed inward, sucking all sound into a single point behind his sternum. He gasped. Couldn’t breathe again.
Every part of him screamed to run, but his legs remained frozen.

The faceless figure stepped forward—and with it, the floor bent as though it were remembering its own weight. Threads dragged in its wake. Thin, shining lines that crisscrossed the walls and floors now—impossible geometry.

Tony was whispering something. A prayer? A formula? Loki couldn’t hear.
A single thought split his mind:
Was this what Odin feared?
Or was this what Odin sent?

He staggered backward, hands clutching at his temples. Voices were threading through his skull now—his own, yes—but also Thor’s. Frigga’s. Laufey’s. The Norns. A thousand futures that never happened, and all of them were his.

“You were born to die in the shadow of a lie,” a voice crooned—soft, feminine, endless.
The Norns?

“You wrote this, little ghost,” another hissed. Male. Cold. Odin? Thanos?

“You never existed at all.”

“Stop it!” Loki roared, eyes flaring. He thrust out his hand, magic crackling wild and green.
The blast hit the looming figure—and passed through it.

Like it was a memory of violence, not the act itself.

It didn’t even pause.

Instead, the walls peeled back—not physically, but perceptually. One moment they were in the Tower. The next—

They were in the throne room of Asgard.

Then a back alley in Jotunheim.

Then a battlefield littered with the bodies of gods.

Then—
The nursery.

Loki screamed and fell to his knees.

Cribs. Hundreds of them. All of them empty.

Except one.
A small, frost-rimed bundle lay still beneath a torn green cloak. No sound. No breath.

Tony tried to move toward him, but the floor turned to glass beneath his feet, and the reflection wasn’t his own.

“Who made this?” Loki gasped. “WHO MADE THIS?!”

The faceless thing tilted its not-head. Then it opened its hands.
Inside them—more ravens. Dead, broken-necked, glass eyes shining with stars.
They hit the floor one by one.
Each impact reverberated like a memory being erased.

Tony knelt beside Loki. “Hey—HEY. You’re here. Focus. You with me?”

Loki was shaking, mouth moving, no words. Blood running from his nose. He clawed at the floor—trying to hold on. To anything.
The voices wouldn’t stop.

Tony’s hand gripped Loki’s shoulder. Too tight. Too human. Too real.

“Focus,” he hissed. “Come on, man. I need you.”

Loki blinked. The nursery dissolved. The throne room. The war field. The Tower.

Back to the lab. Back to the now.

But the chair—no, the lure—was closer. As if it had inched forward while no one was watching.

The faceless thing was gone.

Tony’s voice cut through the static. “Whatever that was—whoever—if it can pull apart your mind like that, then it knows what you are.”

Loki didn’t answer. His eyes fixed on the dark smear crawling along the floor, where memory and architecture met. He flexed his fingers, slick with half-dried blood, as if testing whether they still belonged to him.

Tony shifted, tone low. “You alright?”

Loki didn’t look at him. “Define ‘alright.’”

A beat.

Then: “No, don’t. I’m not interested in invented metrics.”

Silence again. Not the peaceful kind. The kind that listens.

Tony sat back on his heels, breath shallow. “Okay. So what do we do?”

Loki’s reply came after a delay—like he was answering a different question entirely.
“We don’t follow.”

Tony frowned. “Follow what?”

Loki’s gaze slid toward the not-chair. The liquid shadows recoiled from his stare, or maybe from the sharp edge behind it.

“That,” Loki said softly. “Whatever it is… it wants compliance. Expectation. Patterns.”

“And we’re not giving it any?”

Loki turned toward him slowly, a flicker of that old, dangerous smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “When has that ever been my nature?”

The room warped—screamed, almost—its angles shrieking into spirals, reality fracturing along narrative fault lines.
The chair laughed.
Not audibly. Through them.

Tony doubled over, choking, gagging on something not in his throat. Loki stood firm- but only barely. His feet were braced not on the floor but on belief.
That tenuous conviction that he was real, that this moment was real, or if not—defiant enough to bend the dream out of shape.

The throne didn’t move. But the air did. Around it. Through them.

Tony’s breath came shallow, face pale with a sheen of sweat. “Okay. Then how do we get out of this?”

Loki didn’t answer right away. His eyes stayed on the thing in the centre of the room—still pulsing, still waiting.
“You don’t push through something like this,” he said finally. “You slip out when it isn’t looking.”

Tony glared at him. “You’re saying we wait? You have got to be kidding me!”

“No,” Loki replied, voice low. “I’m saying we stop giving it direction. Stop being part of the shape it expects.”

He lifted a hand—not casting, not threatening. Just… disrupting.
Stillness spread, sharp and sudden.
No command. No gesture of power.
Just the refusal to play along.

The chair began to shudder.
The black ichor at its base splashed backward, as if recoiling from the absence of expectation. The floor rippled. The mirrored walls melted—finally dropping the false light, the stolen voices.
And behind it all… a glimpse.

A window.

The real Avengers Tower. Empty. Lit by sunlight that didn’t blink. Photos on the wall not melting, but anchored. Stark’s lab, dusty and cluttered, not pristine and haunted.

It was faint. A shimmer on the far wall, like heat haze.

Tony saw it, too. “Is that—?”

“Yes,” Loki breathed. “That’s it.”

“But—how do we get through?”

Loki didn’t answer.

Instead, he knelt beside the pooling ink. Reached into it.
Pulled out—
A raven.
Not dead.
It blinked once. Feathers shifting, iridescent with forgotten stars. Then it opened its beak and spoke.

“You named nothing, so now the Name returns.”

The voice was not male or female. Not old or new. Just true.

Tony stared. “What's with all these creepy god things? I seriously don't see the appeal.”

The raven tilted its head, then flapped once—and split. Into two.

One landed on Loki’s shoulder. The other, on the broken throne.

The chair screamed—not sound, but meaning—and cracked down the middle.
Inside it: nothing.
Just an empty space. A cradle. Waiting for belief.

Loki smiled without warmth. “It was a placeholder. A temptation. A parasite made of storytelling logic.”

He stood. The raven on his shoulder clicked once—sharp and final.

The shimmer in the wall grew brighter. Sharper.

Tony stumbled to his feet. “We go now?”

“No,” Loki said. “We test it.”

He turned to face Stark. “Say something no one ever thought you’d say.”

Tony blinked. “What?”

“Say something that doesn’t belong in any version of you. Something unwritten.”

"Just admit you want to hear all my secrets, reindeer games," He joked.

Loki glared.

Tony looked at the portal. At the remnants of the chair. At Loki.

He exhaled. “I wish my father had loved me less.”

A pause.

The shimmer expanded. Stable now. Open.

Loki nodded. “Good.”

“And you?” Tony asked. “Your turn.”

Loki looked up.

At the raven.

At the Tower that wasn't anymore.

At the invisible audience he could feel retreating just beyond perception.

He spoke:
“I don’t want the throne.”

And just like that—
They were breathing air. The cold air supplied by Stark Industries cooling system Tony had installed years previously in the tower due to a massive heat wave in New York.

The lab was cold. Lights hummed. Normal hums. The kind designed by engineers, not nightmares.

Tony stood beside Loki, both breathing hard.
Everything looked… solid.
Right.

Except—
“Where are the others?” Tony asked.

They left the lab, bolted up the stairs. Every floor was correct. The walls no longer pulsed. The placards had names. The photos were memories, not guesses.
Then they reached the common room.

Steve. Natasha. Bruce. Clint. Thor.
All of them… there.
Talking. Laughing. Normal.

Too normal.

Tony hesitated. Loki didn’t.

He walked directly up to Natasha.
She looked up. Smiled. “Hey.”

“Do you remember the stairwell?” he asked.

Her face didn’t change. “What stairwell?”

Loki tilted his head.

“The chair.”

She blinked.
Tilted her head back—exactly the same angle.

Tony stepped up beside him. “You okay?”

Natasha smiled again. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Her eyes didn’t flicker.
But her shadow did.

For half a second, her silhouette split into two—one still, one recoiling.

Loki whispered, “She remembers.”

Tony didn’t look at her. “And that is bad? I thought that meant we were sure it wasn't a psychotic breakdown, cause you know, she is the image of stability?”

Loki’s fingers twitched. “No. That’s dangerous.”

Across the room, Thor stood.

He walked over, eyes bright. Normal.
Too normal.
But in his hand—one thing wrong.

He held a feather. Black. Iridescent.
He handed it to Loki.

And said nothing.

The others didn’t seem to notice.

Tony took a step back.

“So we made it out.”

“No,” Loki murmured. “We made it back.”

He looked at the feather.
Turned it over.
On its edge—barely visible—runes.
Norse.
Just one phrase:

She’s still watching.

 

Somewhere else, there was a throne.
A throne of glass and memory stood empty.
But the walls whispered.
Not words.
Laughter.
And feathers began to fall again.

Chapter 8: "She Watches Still"

The feather still lay where Loki had dropped it.
No one touched it.
Its presence was subtle, but wrong in the way a lull before disaster is wrong—not loud or overtly magical, just… still. The air didn’t hum. No energy pulsed. Yet somehow, the room felt tilted, everything leaning toward that single dark shape—a focal point in a story not yet ready to reveal its purpose.
Clint paced. “Okay, so no one’s picking it up. Great. We’re just gonna let the ominous bird feather sit there like it dropped out of nowhere.”
“It didn’t come from nowhere,” Bruce murmured, eyes fixed on it across the table. “It came from somewhere we don’t have words for.”
“It’s not magic,” Natasha said. “Not exactly. No heat, no glow, no decay.”
Tony frowned, rubbing his temple. “No readings. No temperature shifts. Like it’s not really here—just being remembered into existence.”
Loki hadn’t moved since it fell. Near the far wall, he stood rigid, arms crossed so tightly they seemed foreign.
“You said something when it appeared,” Clint said abruptly, facing him. “Right before you shut down. ‘She’s still watching.’”
Loki said nothing.
Bruce looked up. “You know what it is.”
No answer.
“Loki,” Natasha said quietly. “Talk to us.”
Finally, Loki spoke—low, clipped. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Clint’s voice sharpened. “Try us.”
Thor stepped forward—not imposing, but steady. “You knew the second you saw it. You stopped breathing.”
Loki’s eyes flicked to him briefly.
Thor pressed on gently, “You weren’t surprised. You were… expecting her.”
Loki’s lips thinned, silent.
Bruce glanced around. “So it’s a warning? A signal?”
“No,” Loki murmured. “A reminder.”
Tony’s shoulders tightened. The word dug into something buried—the dream, or not a dream. The room. The crib. A whisper through the walls—neither angry nor threatening. Just… aware. Watching. Waiting.
Natasha tilted her head. “Reminder of what?”
Loki’s mouth moved, sound barely there. “That I haven’t paid what I owe.”
Clint stared. “Owe who?”
Loki finally turned. “She isn’t something you explain.”
Natasha’s voice softened. “But she’s real. You’ve seen her.”
Thor stepped closer, voice gentler. “You’ve dodged your debts before, brother. But she’s not one you can fool.”
Loki didn’t respond. His hands trembled faintly.
Natasha watched him, softer now. “You’ve seen her before, haven’t you?”
Loki closed his eyes. “Once.”
“And?”
“I’ve spent centuries making sure I never would again.”
A heavy silence fell.
Bruce asked, “Then why now?”
Loki said nothing.
Tony—still watching the feather—answered quietly, “Because something’s coming due.”
Loki didn’t correct him.
Clint stepped forward, tense. “Are we really going to pretend this is your private nightmare? We’ve all had the same dreams, the same unease—”
“You’ve been touched by it,” Loki snapped. “I’ve been shaped by it.”
The room fell silent at the weight of those words.
“I know what she is,” Loki continued quietly. “I know what she does. I know why she’s here.”
“Then say it,” Natasha urged. “Help us understand.”
“You can’t,” Loki said. “Not fully. She’s not death, not like you think. She doesn’t end lives. She ends stories. Ties them up. Cuts threads no one else can reach.”
Tony swallowed. The phrase from the psyche-scape echoed—reckoning after the tale is told.
Bruce hesitated. “Who is she to you?”
Loki faltered.
Thor’s voice came slow and deliberate. “She’s bound to you, isn’t she? Not just fate or consequence. There’s blood in it.”
Loki avoided his gaze.
“She’s not your past,” Thor said. “But she’s not your future either. She’s your—”
“Enough,” Loki snapped, too fast, then quieter: “There are bonds we do not speak aloud.”
Clint narrowed his eyes. “So she is someone. Not just a symbol or omen.”
“Is she a person?” Bruce asked. “A god? A ghost?”
“She is what remains,” Loki said. “After truth is told. After choices can’t be undone. The shape those choices leave behind. A body split by consequence.”
The room was silent—not just from the image, but the grief in Loki’s voice.
Bruce’s gaze lingered. “You’re afraid of her.”
Loki didn’t deny it.
Clint crossed his arms. “And we just wait? While the cosmic narrative cop takes receipts?”
“She won’t come for you,” Loki said quickly. “Not unless—” He stopped.
“Unless what?” Tony pressed.
Loki’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Unless the consequences are shared.”
A colder silence followed.
The others exchanged uneasy glances.
“There’s more,” Thor said. “You know there is.”
Loki turned away. “There always is.”
“Tell me,” Thor said softly. “Not them. Just me. You said she was watching you. Not us.”
“She watches the pattern,” Loki said. “I am only part of it. But I cast a long shadow.”
Tony stepped closer to the feather. “So what if we ignore it?”
“She won’t speak,” Loki said. “You’ll know when the moment comes—when the last card is played, when the thread runs out.”
“And then?” Bruce asked.
Loki finally looked up.
“Then... the story pays what it owes.”

Loki didn’t sleep.
Not truly. Not like the others. But sometimes he let the shape of it fall over him. Now, after whatever that was, he couldn’t close his eyes without the dark folding inward like a stage curtain pulled over the stars.
He turned the feather in his fingers. The runes shimmered beneath the light, then vanished—visible only when not sought. He stopped trying to read them.
From across the room, Tony sipped from a glass half-full of silence.
“She,” Tony said finally, not looking at Loki, “doesn’t show up on footage.”
Loki glanced up.
“I checked,” Tony went on. “Every hallway, stair, lab. AI logs restart loops, but no intrusion detection. No thermal signature. No biometrics. Not even the weird quantum crap I installed after Strange got drunk in the elevator.”
Loki said nothing.
Tony met his eyes. “She’s not in the building. But she is.”
Loki’s voice was low. “Some stories refuse to be told. Not because they’re secrets, but because they’re recursive.”
Tony frowned.
“They write themselves, over and over,” Loki continued. “They don’t end. They evolve.”
Tony leaned back, glass resting on his knee. “And we’re caught in one?”
“No,” Loki said. “We woke one up.”

They sat in the common room’s low light, machines humming and people pretending not to remember. Steve was in the gym. Clint in the kitchen. Bruce somewhere else. None mentioned the feather.
It lay on the table, glinting faintly, as if still falling.
Tony stared. “Something’s wrong with the shadows.”
Loki nodded. “They aren’t ours anymore.”
They turned as Thor entered—slow, unsure of his legs. His eyes caught the feather, but he said nothing. Just sat.
After a moment, he whispered, “She was here. I heard her laugh.”
No one asked when.
The feather twitched.

That night—or what passed for night in the Tower’s high-altitude hush—Loki walked the halls.
Every door was closed. Every window showed the city, but the city didn’t feel right. It was waiting. Watching.
He paused at a mirror, didn’t flinch at his reflection. Instead, he studied it, searching for cracks, shadows, signs.
The feather burned in his pocket.
Somewhere deep beneath the Tower’s bones, something moved.

Thor didn’t ask right away.
He watched Loki linger near corners, listening to the world’s seams, studying reflections not to admire, but to guard against.
They all felt the Tower’s wrongness. But Thor felt something else—something familial. He wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
He waited until they were alone in the elevator shaft.
The elevator had stopped working two days ago. Suspended between floors, its panel lit with unreadable symbols. Thor stood beside Loki on the maintenance ladder, both suspended in the metal throat of the building.
“She reminds me of someone,” Thor said, not turning.
Loki said nothing.
“I don’t mean the child,” Thor went on. “Though… her voice rings with old things. Deeper than this realm.”
Still no reply.
“You know her,” Thor said softly. “Don’t you?”
Loki’s hand twitched on the cold rung. “Knowing is not the same as naming.”
Thor exhaled, breath fogging the air. “You fear her.”
Loki laughed briefly. Dry. “No. Fear is too alive for what she brings.”
Thor looked down the shaft into the black where the Tower’s bowels disappeared. “There are stories… I heard them when we were small. Ones Father never told. Ones Mother wouldn’t say aloud.”
Loki tilted his head slightly.
“There was a time,” Thor continued, “when you vanished for a day. You were barely a century old. The snow came early that year. I remember because the frost turned black before it touched the ground.”
Loki didn’t look at him.
“You came back with ash in your hair,” Thor said. “You wouldn’t speak for a week. When you did, you asked Mother if souls could be sewn shut.”
Silence stretched between them.
“She’s not from outside,” Loki said finally. “She’s what waits beneath the skin of endings. What waits when nothing else will.”
Thor’s grip tightened on the ladder.
“I thought… she was gone. Bound. A ghost of a ghost.”
“She doesn’t haunt,” Loki said. “She inherits.”
Thunder rumbled far above, but no storm came.

The Tower began forgetting itself.
Rooms shifted when no one looked. Hallways rewound. Bruce swore the kitchen moved four feet left. Clint found a door behind a bookshelf opening onto another Tower—empty, flickering, with furniture wrapped in plastic and mirrors that breathed.
The girl appeared again.
Not to Loki.
To Steve.
She asked him where he kept his grief.
Then offered him a box with nothing inside.
He hasn’t spoken since.
Tony was next to ask.
Not directly.
Just a passing comment while soldering something that sparked without electricity.
“She’s not from here, right?” he said flatly. “Not this timeline. Not this version.”
Loki didn’t look up. “She predates versioning.”
Tony blinked. “That’s not a thing.”
Loki smiled thinly. “Is now.”

Later, Thor cornered Loki again—in the upper greenhouse, where strange plants grew unbidden.
“She’s tied to you,” Thor said. “There’s blood between you.”
Loki watered moss-like tendrils that pulsed faintly.
“Is that what you think?” Loki murmured.
Thor nodded. “It’s what I feel.”
“She’s not mine,” Loki said. “But I have touched what she waits for.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ll give.”
Thor stepped closer. “If you brought her here—”
“I didn’t,” Loki cut in. “She followed.”
A breath.
“Through dreams. Through fractures. Through promises I didn’t mean to make.”
Thor looked around. Vines curled up the glass walls, casting shifting feather-shaped shadows.
“You should have warned us.”
Loki met his gaze, eyes older than they should be.
“I tried,” he said. “But you thought I spoke in riddles.”
“You were.”
“Yes,” Loki said. “Because that’s the only language she can’t fully hear.”

In the basement, someone started humming.
No one knew who.
They followed the sound, but each hallway led somewhere different: a forest, a flickering hospital waiting room, a fractured Asgard reconstructed from memory.
In each place, a feather.
Always the same.
Burnt at the edge.
Behind the sound—something crawling through stories, not spaces.

The girl appeared one last time.
To Thor.
She offered him a mirror.
When he looked, he saw only bones.
Not his.
Loki’s.
Then hers.
Then his again.
“Tell me,” Thor said, voice breaking. “What is she?”
The girl smiled.
“She’s the part of him,” she said, “he didn’t get to choose.”
And vanished.

Thor found Loki sitting among mirrors, each angled wrong.
“She’s almost done,” Loki said.
“With what?” Thor asked.
“With remembering.”

The Tower was not what it seemed.
Not just a place, but a nexus—a living memory stretched thin across realities.
Somewhere in its twisting halls, the girl waited.
For reckoning.
For debts to be paid.
For the story to end.
But stories never truly end.
They wait for the next telling.

The feather burned in his pocket.
The story was still unfolding.
And they were all part of it.

Chapter 9: The Wanderer observes the dreamer

There are silences even gods do not trust.

This one had weight to it. Not like stone. Not like steel. No, this was the weight of something missing.
It was not silence born of peace, nor the hush before battle. It was a hollow stillness—like the space left behind when a name is forgotten, or when a god is no longer worshipped. It rang without sound, pressed in from the edges of knowing. A silence with intention. A silence that watched.

Loki felt it first. Not in the air, not with his magic, but deep—beneath the thought, beneath the knowing. Like the memory of a sound he hadn't heard yet. Like footsteps behind him that vanished when turned toward.

He walked the corridor like a man walking through an old dream. One where everything was too still, too perfect, too balanced on the verge of collapse. In the Tower’s eastern corridor, where no windows opened and no lights flickered, he stopped walking.

Something had just ended. Quietly. Without flourish. A thread, once taut, had loosened.
Not cut.
Not yet.
But frayed, and fraying still.

He did not sigh. He did not speak. He simply tilted his head, and listened to the hush that no one else could hear.

Elsewhere, the others gathered.
Not for ceremony, not for battle. Just out of habit. The kind mortals mistake for instinct.
Stark in the lab, half-cursing a simulation that no longer followed rules.
Steve, pacing with that soldier's tension that made war feel like religion—devout, precise, a sacrament enacted one step at a time. Each footfall a prayer. Each turn of his head a sermon to discipline. As if walking the perimeter might keep the apocalypse at bay.
Banner, fragmented across screens and calculations that changed each time he blinked.
Thor watched them all, arms folded like gates. He did not speak, but his silence was louder than most men's prayers.

Something was... not wrong. Not yet.

But wrongness, true wrongness, always begins in the spaces where language fails.
In the Tower, the air had started to bend. Only slightly. As if the world had inhaled—and forgotten to exhale.

It was Natasha who spoke first.

"You feel it too."

She wasn't asking.

Loki didn’t look at her. His gaze remained on a wall that was no longer solid. Not truly. The seams of reality were still stitched tight, but the thread had begun to fray.

"Tell me," he said at last, "do you know what a story does, when it's forgotten by its own teller?"

Natasha’s reply was dry. "Becomes legend?"

Loki’s smile barely touched his eyes. "Worse. It becomes hungry."

She didn’t respond, and he didn’t expect her to. But he felt her stay. Watching. Listening. Perhaps understanding more than he let her know.

Gods did not often find good sparring partners in the realm of implication.

In the lab, Stark cursed again. Not at the code. Not even at the tech. But at the absence of what should have been there. Metrics were vanishing. Constants were... fluid. Tony hated poetry. But the system was giving him verse.

"Bruce," he said, too calm, "Tell me we're not in a recursive causal bleed."

Banner’s hands didn’t stop moving. "We're not."

Beat.

"But we might be in something worse."

Loki stood before a mirror that had not always been a mirror. Once, it had been a doorway. Once, it had been a blade. Once, perhaps, it had been nothing at all. He looked into it now, and it reflected him too easily.
Too soon.
Behind him, the tower shifted—imperceptibly. Like a great tree caught in wind no one else could feel.

And then, the whisper came.

Not a voice.

A presence. One Loki had not felt since the far side of the first war.

Since before Midgard had words for apocalypse.

He turned slowly.

The corridor behind him was empty. Except, of course, it wasn’t.

He walked. Not quickly. Not cautiously.
Just... as if drawn.

The hall stretched. Shadows ran longer than their sources. Something in the air cracked—not loud, but sharp, like truth said too clearly.
He stepped through a doorway that had never existed, into a room that had always been there.
The light was wrong.
Not red. Not blue. Something deeper than both, like the first pigment scrawled across cave walls in blood and soot.

A figure stood at the centre.
Not large. Not grand. But final.

Thanos.

But not as he had been.
This was not the warrior. Not the tyrant.
This was something shaped by those things. It was clear to Loki that this was only a vision, a premonition, perhaps even a prayer.
The Infinity Gauntlet was fractured—each stone humming with timelines stolen and bent. His armour was layered with languages that had never been written. His eyes—his eyes were not eyes. They were edits.

Loki did not flinch.

"So," he said, almost conversational, "you’ve finally arrived."

Thanos looked at him, and for a moment, the silence was not silence at all.
It was story.
A paused line. A skipped page.

Loki raised his hand, fingers curled just so. Not a threat. A punctuation.

"Did you come through the cracks I left? Or were you always here, waiting for me to blink?"

Thanos did not answer.

He stepped forward.

Reality trembled. Not with force—but with certainty unravelling.

And behind him, Loki felt it—not fear.

Worse.

Recognition.

The others had begun to notice now. Doors that led to rooms they’d never built. Skies that shifted colours mid-sentence. Memories misfiled in the minds of gods.

Thor’s voice rang down the tower like a bell.
"Loki!"

Loki didn’t look away from Thanos.
But he did speak.
His voice was soft, almost reverent. "And so the final actor steps onto the stage—not summoned, not written, but born of a margin note left too long unguarded."

Thanos took another step. The Gauntlet gleamed, fractured light casting long, crooked shadows.

The mirror behind Loki cracked.
Hairline. Then spidering.
Not shattered. Not yet.

But soon.
And soon, the page would turn.

And far, far below the tower, in the place where shadow met silence, a figure opened her eyes.

Pale. Cold. Unweeping.

She had no name here. Not yet.

But in older tongues, whispered through blood and ice, they had called her many things.
One name echoed now, soft and low, through the roots of what was left, through the feathers left to wither and die, but could not be spoken truly yet.
She did not speak. She did not rise.
She merely watched.
And smiled.

Elsewhere, the sky tore.
Not open. Not wide. Just enough.
Just enough to see through.
And through that hairline fracture in the firmament, three figures leaned, hunched and hooded, their faces more shadow than skin. They smelled of rust and fennel, ink and rot. Their hands were knotted, their eyes milky or missing.
The Norns.
Not young. Never young.
Old as the telling. Older than endings. Old like questions without answers.
They crouched at the breach like carrion birds at a cradle.

"Thread runs thin," croaked the first, mouth sewn with golden twine.
"Thread runs wild," hissed the second, bent double, fingers black with ash and ink.
"Thread runs... back," murmured the third, whose eyes looked inward, seeing time as bone and marrow.

Between them, a great spindle turned—not by touch, not by will, but by momentum too old to stop.
They watched not the world itself, but the margin of it. The edge where story frayed.
And they smiled with mouths that had never spoken truth, only warnings.
Their voices rose—not loud, but felt. Like rot through roots.
“He twists the thread with silver tongue…”
“And yet forgets the loom remembers, suspecting too little at large.”
“Oh, how the tale recoils when stared at too long...”
The Tower shook.
Somewhere far above them, the mirror shattered.
The Norns turned their heads.
Their spindle paused.
And then—
“Ah.”
“There it is.”
“A deviation... delicious.”

Thor found him in the broken hall, where the walls no longer echoed as they should.

Loki stood before the shattered mirror, its shards humming with false reflections—images that moved a heartbeat before their source. Light bent wrong here. Even time walked with a limp.

"Loki," Thor said, voice low, heavy.

Loki didn't turn. "Come to accuse me, brother?"

"Not yet." Thor paused. "Should I?"

The silence between them was no longer just familial. It was forensic. Measured. A space between knives, not embraces.

Loki finally turned. "You feel it, don’t you? The gaps? The seams? The edits?"

Thor’s grip on Stormbreaker—Stormbreaker? Was that right?—tightened. "I feel deception."

Loki smiled thinly. "You always do. It's easier than understanding."

"This tower bends around you," Thor said. "Doors where there were none. Shadows that follow your steps. Even now, the others begin to whisper."

"Let them. I have become used to doubts and deceptions," Loki stepped forward, hands at his sides. "You all see ghosts, and assume I’ve summoned them. But what if I’m just the only one not blind?"

Thor's eyes narrowed. "Then speak plainly."

Loki’s gaze was sharp as ice. “Plain speech is for mortals and fools. What we face is not war. It’s revision. The story has turned in on itself—and someone is holding the pen.”

And Thor said nothing.

Because in his heart, a thought he would not speak was growing teeth.

 

In the war room, the conversation had fractured into sharp, angular bits—suspicion clashing against protocol, instinct bristling against intellect.

“I don’t like it,” Steve said simply. “He’s too calm.”

“You mean Loki?” Banner asked, not looking up from the tablet in his hand.

Steve nodded. “He’s... watching. Waiting. Like this is all part of a plan we’re already behind on.”

Tony, leaning against the far console, arms crossed and eyes scanning a screen full of glitching star maps, didn’t argue. Not immediately.

“Weird thing is,” he said finally, “you’re probably right.”

Natasha leaned against the doorway, arms folded. Unreadable. “The moment he got here, everything started coming undone. Timelines, sensor logs, cosmic background radiation—it’s all... wrong.”

“Correlation isn’t causation,” Bruce offered weakly. “This could all still trace back to Thanos.”

“But it doesn’t feel like him,” Natasha murmured.

Tony turned. “Yeah. That’s what’s bugging me. Thanos is a big, ugly, gauntlet-wearing bulldozer. Brute force. Simple math: half gone, half spared. But this?” He gestured to the projections. “This is... elegant. Subtle. Like someone’s rewriting the rules mid-game and daring us to notice.”

“Which brings us back to Loki,” Steve said.

A silence settled over the room for a beat too long.

Then a voice from the back—gravel-rough and sharper than the rest.

“You all talk like he’s just... interesting.”

They turned. Clint Barton had been silent until now, leaning against the far wall, arms crossed, jaw tight.

“He put a goddamn leash on my mind,” Clint said. “Used me like a weapon and tossed me aside. And now we’re debating whether to listen to him?”

“Clint—” Natasha started, but he shook his head.

“No. I get it. He’s useful. He’s clever. But every time he opens his mouth, I hear my own voice saying things I never chose. Doing things I can’t take back.” His voice was low now, strained. “So forgive me if I don’t jump on the ‘Maybe Loki’s trying to help’ train.”

“None of us are,” Steve said calmly. “But we’d be idiots not to notice the pattern.”

Tony turned slightly toward Clint. “You’re not wrong, Barton. But this—” he tapped the screen—“this isn’t just mischief. This is architecture. And if Loki’s not the one writing it, then he damn well knows who is.”

Clint’s glare didn’t soften. “Yeah? And when exactly has he not known more than he lets on?”

“Since always,” Natasha muttered.

Tony sighed. “What do you think happens to someone when they know they’re a footnote in a story they didn’t write?”

“Depends on the footnote,” Natasha replied. “And how much they remember.”

Clint’s voice was quiet now. Dangerous. “He remembers everything. That’s what scares me.”

Another pause.

Then Bruce said, “Maybe that’s why he’s calm.”

Steve looked over. “What do you mean?”

Bruce glanced up from the tablet. “Maybe he’s not calm because he’s lying. Maybe he’s calm because he knows what’s coming. And we don’t.”

“Still doesn’t make him trustworthy,” Clint said.

“No,” Natasha agreed. “But it makes him necessary.”

Clint didn’t argue.

But he didn’t stop staring at the screen that now showed Loki’s name at the centre of a web of anomalies.
And deep down, no one in that room could tell if they were building a strategy...
…or walking into a narrative already written without them.

 

Down in the archives, where few dared linger, Loki stood alone among the glowing remnants of Earth’s chaotic attempts at archiving the divine.

He was holding a book. Or rather, a mimicry of one. The Tower’s AI systems had tried to reconstruct ancient Norse mythologies from various translations. The result was... charming.
It told stories he’d lived. Badly.
He flipped through a page that claimed he had once turned into a mare, another that accused him of inventing fishnets.
How quaint.

Behind him, a voice: “So which part is true?”

He didn’t turn.

“None of it,” he said. “Or all of it. Depends who’s watching.”

Thor stepped into view, hands behind his back, face unreadable. Again, he reached for Loki in moments of uncertainty. Loki was starting to think that Thor just couldn't resist his presence.

“You always did like stories,” he said.

“I liked control,” Loki replied. “Stories just happened to be the only thing no one knew how to hold properly.”

A silence.

Thor moved closer, his eyes scanning the digital etchings on the floating display.

“There’s news from Vanaheim,” he said. “A whole province vanished. Not destroyed—vanished. The stars above it are missing. Their myths too.”

Loki looked up. Just slightly.

“And you think Thanos did this?”

“I don’t know,” Thor admitted. “But I don’t think I care who did. I care who lets it happen.”

That landed. Loki’s lips twitched—not in amusement.

“I didn’t come to destroy anything,” he said. “Not this time.”

“But you came knowing something,” Thor pressed.

Loki finally met his brother’s gaze.

“I know when the ink begins to dry before the sentence is finished. And I know when I’m being written into a story as the scapegoat.”

“Then tell me what you know,” Thor said. “Truly.”

A long pause.

Loki’s voice, when it came, was quieter than usual. Not smug. Not mocking.

“There is something beneath Thanos,” he said. “A reason the stones respond to him. A reason why, when the gauntlet fractures time, it doesn’t scream. The universe accepts him—not because it agrees with him, but because it’s already rehearsed his arrival.”

He stepped forward, voice lower still. “He is not the villain. Not the first. Not the last. He is... necessary. That’s what frightens me.”

Thor’s mouth opened. But no words came.

Loki continued.

“And I suspect,” he said, “that the reason he feels inevitable is because someone made him that way. Someone who needed the story to fall apart. To hurt.”

“You?” Thor asked.

Loki didn’t respond at first.
Instead, the lights above them flickered—once, then again—just slightly. Not enough to be dramatic. Just enough to be noticed.
A low hum moved through the walls, like a thought passing beneath language.

Loki turned his head, slowly, eyes drifting toward a corner of the room that hadn't been there a moment ago.
He smiled faintly. Not kind. Not cruel.

Just aware.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.

“Does it matter, if I am?”

Thor’s grip on Mjolnir shifted.

The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to breathe.

Loki looked back at him, gaze unreadable.
“If I said no, you’d call it a lie. If I said yes, you’d raise your axe. So tell me, dear brother of mine—what answer would let you sleep tonight?”

He walked past Thor then, slow and unhurried, as if the world itself bent slightly to let him through.

And still, he never answered.
But the Tower trembled all the same.

"Trust frays fastest at the centre," whispered one.
"The thread unravels best when the hand suspects the other," rasped another.
"The brother doubts," sang the third. "So the story blooms."

They turned their blind eyes skyward.
And waited for the next betrayal.
It wouldn’t be long.

Chapter 10: Aparté de la tragédie

(Aparté)

Ladies, gentlemen, and honoured guests,
The sixth act of this tragedy now takes the stage.

Yes—sixth, though no one recalls quite when the fifth ended, nor when the first truly started. This terrible sequencing of events shall be no fault of mine.

The page turned itself, you see. The ink dried in silence, and the actors continued, unaware the script had been revised in the margins.

Ah, but isn’t that always the way?

Like in Shakespeare, where the ghosts speak truer than kings.
Like in Racine, where fate is a corset—laced tight, breathless, inevitable.
Like in Wilde, who warned us that “the world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

And yet here we are—watching gods and mortals alike walk scenes they never auditioned for, reciting lines they didn’t choose.

Observe now the players:
The Trickster, who suspects the play has no author.
The Soldier, who prays that structure is salvation.
The Monster who thinks himself Man, and the Man who fears he is Monster.
The Brother, split in two—one half lightning, the other shadow.
The Widow, whose ledger bleeds redder than the stage curtain.
The Archer, ever aiming for a future just out of reach.
The Iron Mask, who built his armour to escape the role of mortal, only to become its symbol.
Then, far beyond them all,
The Norns, who do not write the story, but weave it—
—and weep as their threads fray and snap in unnatural winds.
And in the wings...
…a figure without name,
a silhouette stitched together from the memory of moments—
—a being with no place in the program,
but with purpose enough to end the play altogether.
The one who watches, who remembers,
who knows this tragedy has been staged before—
and will be again.

Curtains tremble.
Time falters.
The roles begin to slip.
And still, they perform.

You see, dear guests, this is no longer a simple tale of villainy and valour.
This is theatre of the unwritten.
A drama of deletion.
Here, the past is footnoted.
The future? Scribbled over in trembling hands.

We are not in a Shakespearean tragedy where everyone dies nobly.
No, no—this is something older.
More structural.
More intentional.

This is a play in which the very stage begins to doubt its own planks.

Note the silence.

Do you hear it? No? Precisely.

For this is the silence that follows when a story begins to forget itself.

And Loki—poor Loki—he does not walk through this scene as villain or hero, but as... continuity.

He remembers.

And that, in a world unravelling, is the gravest sin of all.

The others—watch them. Listen closely.

They speak of anomalies, of timelines, of doubt—but what they truly fear is this:
That the story they’re in no longer needs them.

Oh, but the audience remains.
You remain.

Which means, for now, the curtain stays open.
The spindle turns.
The thread unravels.

And somewhere offstage, the true playwright smiles—
—because, as Wilde would say,
"The suspense is terrible... I hope it will last."

Lights dim.
Act Six begins.

Exi certitudine.
Intra consequentiam.

Chapter 11: case of the last supper

Notes:

I am officially going mad with this. Thank you for all your support, love you all !

Act VI, scene 1

Ah, welcome again, watchers of woven fate.
You’ve returned, then. Brave, or foolish?
But isn’t that always the coin toss?
The one no god dares rig.

Act Six begins not with a bang—no, that would be too honest.
It begins with hesitation.
With silence straining to hold its breath.
The lights flicker.
Not from lack of power,
but from uncertainty.

Something has changed.
No cue was given, yet here we are:
The orchestra re-tunes itself, the prompter’s box is empty,
and the chorus?
They’ve forgotten their lines.

Yet still the actors pace the boards—faithful, perhaps, or simply blind.

Loki, of course, is first to speak.

Because who else would dare address the audience
when the narrative itself has grown unsure of its purpose?

He steps forward—not centre stage, mind you. That would be too neat.
No, he stands just slightly to the left.

Like a misprint in the margins.
A correction no one requested.
He speaks not to the cast… but to the script itself.

"Who wrote this?" he asks.

"And more to the point… who keeps writing it, even after we bled in every stanza?"

You see, he knows now.

He knows this is not a tragedy of choice, but of structure.

Thanos, the Mad Titan?

He was never the climax. He was punctuation.
A necessary illness, yes—introduced by some knowing hand—
but not the disease.

Oh no.

The disease… is design.

The belief that every story needs an end.
That chaos must be conquered.
That gods must fall in beautiful, symmetrical ways.

And Hel—sweet Hel, daughter of endings, keeper of consequences—
She waits not with scythe or judgment, but ledger and ink.
She doesn’t kill.
She remembers.
She is the editor who never forgets a line.

Her presence begins to manifest now—
in dreams, in déjà vu, in the soft pull of inevitability behind each line of dialogue.
"She’s still watching."
Loki whispers this as the Tower shakes.
Not from battle, but from a story straining to hold its shape.

And Thor? Oh, Thor.
The hero still wielding the wrong kind of strength.
He punches his way through metaphors,
demanding meaning from thunder.
But meaning was never buried in violence—
it was written between it.

Steve prays for duty to save him.

Tony builds new machines from guilt.

Bruce hides.

Natasha bleeds.

Clint listens, too late.

And Loki?

Loki laughs—not because it's funny,
but because the only other option is to scream.

"Do you think I wanted to be this?” he spits at no one in particular.
"I wanted to matter. But meaning… meaning comes at cost.
So I burned the world to show you the ashes.
Because you won’t see the fire until it’s in your lungs."

And though he never speaks it aloud—
imagine his fright
when he caught, perhaps too late,
the glint of reflection in Thanos’ eye.

Not awe.

Recognition.

As if some part of the Titan’s mission,
his logic of balance and sacrifice,
had once been whispered
by a Trickster who now regrets the echo.

He fears, now,
not just what the monster is—
but what it remembers of him.

Now, dear audience, pay close attention.

For the next scene may fracture.

The dialogue may repeat.

Characters may forget which part of the story they’re in.

Some may leave the stage…

Others will vanish from the script entirely.

This is not a malfunction.
This is the system collapsing under its own recursive weight.
And through the cracks…
…something else may slip through.
An improvisation.
A moment unscripted.
A chance.

If—if—any of them are brave enough to step off the stage.
But that is no small ask.

To reject the role written for you?
To look the Playwright in the eye and say no?
That is heresy.
That… is evolution.

So watch now. Closely.

Because the Trickster has remembered too much.
The curtain is threadbare.
And the silence between acts grows longer.
The gods are not yet dead.
But they are… rewriting.

If any of them are bold enough
to put down the badge,
turn in the gun,
and walk off the case.

But that?
That’s blasphemy.
That’s how revolutions start.

So pay attention.
They’re just hiding behind different masks.

You were warned the story would fracture.
You were told the lines might blur.
So don’t ask where we are—ask when.
And even that might be a lie.

Act VI, scene 2

They say memory is the first to fade.

They lie.

The first to vanish here is mercy.
And the town? It’s hungry.

Empty cribs abandoned on cracked sidewalks—once painted white, now splattered with grime and something darker.
Lumps of shattered bone like broken promises strewn beneath their shadows.

The girl’s name was Signa.

Found in her room, hands clenched tight, nails digging into raw palms like she fought the silence swallowing her whole.

Her mouth packed with ash.
Her throat, scorched raw.
Her eyes were frozen wide, glassy and blank—like a witness who’d seen the end of everything and knew better than to blink.

No one claimed her.

She arrived like a cold death whisper three winters past, bringing a silence that swallowed laughter and left screams behind.
People whispered she was cursed. Or worse—chosen.
Her body didn’t bleed. It decomposed on a schedule that seemed dictated by fear.

The town was a tomb disguised as a place to live.
Coal dust mixed with rot and secrets.
Every alley breathed poison.
Every shadow hid hunger.

The detective came late.
Too late.
Called Captain—not a badge, but a scar he wore on his soul.
His eyes were storm clouds, bruised and tired.
He didn’t walk so much as drag himself, weighed down by ghosts in trench coat pockets.
He didn’t speak much—only when the silence cracked like broken glass.

Iron ran the dice tables in the ruins of a theatre where rats feasted on fallen chandeliers and stained velvet seats.
His hands were scarred, fingers cracked like dry earth.
He smoked burnt tobacco from cracked lips and never blinked when the empty cribs stacked up.
He crafted machines from scrap and bone—unholy inventions that whined and sputtered in the dark.
Some whispered he’d been a weapons maker once.
Others swore he was a weapon.

The priest—now just a husk called Doctor—was a man carved from sin and regret.
He wore guilt like a second skin, bloody and raw.
Once, under a moonless sky, he tore a man apart with his bare hands.
No screams, no mercy.
The town never asked why.

Hawk, the barkeep, kept a shotgun beneath his bar and a ledger no one dared read.
He mapped disappearances like a surgeon tracing veins.
Every missing child erased another line on the cracked streets.
He watched the town shift—buildings turning to dust, alleys folding into themselves like rotting flesh.

Black, a woman wrapped in blood-red fabric and memories that bled.
Her limp dragged sharp as a knife’s edge.
Her eyes held a past soaked in fire and ashes.
She sat by Signa’s grave night after night, whispering curses to the dirt, weaving vengeance like a noose.
No one knew her name.

Then the stranger came.
The town didn’t welcome him. But it didn’t stop him, either.
He walked like the sidewalks made room for him.
Carried a cane he didn’t need.
Eyes green, grin wrong.
He introduced himself as Trick.
The name fit like a splinter.
He said he’d been here before. Said the story always started with a missing child and ended in fire.
And he smiled like someone who’s buried too many tiny coffins.

And then there was Brute.
A bruised fist swinging like a hammer of justice in a town that spat poison.
His hands were stained with blood—sometimes his own, mostly theirs.
He didn’t ask questions.
He smashed faces and walls until answers bled out.
His rage was a storm; his hammer, a blunt force verdict.

Signa’s journal was a cryptic scream.
“I was born thrice, dying each time.
This town is a coffin with no lid.
We never came here by choice.
The gods—if they exist—are hiding in shadows, feeding.”

The next body hung from the railway signal.
Nails driven through wrists and ankles.
Eyes gouged, tongues ripped free—stuffed with ash and broken teeth.
Ribs shattered from inside out.
Carved into his chest:
STOP WRITING.

The priest poured acid into the holy water.
Hawk loaded shells in the dark.
Black sharpened her blade until it sang.
Trick smiled, the only sane thing in a world gone mad.
Because he remembered.
Because this town’s hunger never ends.
Because this story?
It’s just beginning.

 

Act VI, scene 3

Captain’s boots hit cracked pavement, each step echoing like a death knell in the deadened town.
His breath fogged the frozen air, but it was the stench beneath the cold—the rot and smoke—that clung to his skin like a curse.
He carried no badge, no hope.
Only the weight of what he’d seen before and the sinking certainty he’d see it again.

The first stop was the girl’s room—Signa’s last refuge.
The walls were scrawled with desperate symbols, frantic scratches like claws fighting for escape.
A twisted tree, branches curling into nooses.
A map of veins leading nowhere.
And words—more warnings than confessions:
“They come when the night forgets to breathe.”
Captain knelt, fingers trembling as he turned a page of her tattered journal.
Ash crumbled between his fingers like burnt promises.
The silence was broken by a knock on the door.

Iron stepped in without invitation.
His eyes were hollow pits, hands twitching with the ghosts of a thousand failed machines.
“You’re chasing ghosts,” Iron muttered.
“But the ghosts here… they bite.”
He spat on the floor, and the spit sizzled, hissing like acid.
Captain didn’t flinch.

Outside, the town shifted.
Shadows stretched like long fingers.
Empty cribs stood like silent sentinels, each one a hollow accusation.
At the bar, Hawk polished a shotgun, his hands steady but eyes haunted.
“The town’s hungry,” he said, voice rough as gravel.
“It eats the children—slow and sweet. Leaves bones and broken dreams.”
The detective nodded, piecing together a puzzle drenched in blood.

Black arrived just as the sun bled out of the sky.
Her red coat was a slash of violence against the gray decay.
She limped closer, knife glinting in the dying light.
“I’ve seen what it leaves behind,” she whispered, voice cracked like dry bones.
“The town remembers. And it never forgets the taste of fear.”

Then, thunder—an explosion of rage and pain.
Thor stormed through the streets, fists smashing walls, carving a path of brutal justice.
“Stop chasing ghosts,” he growled.
“Bring me the monster, or I’ll tear this town to ash.”

Captain’s gaze sharpened.
“The monster’s not just flesh,” he said, voice low.
“It’s what we’ve buried. The sins we feed.”
The investigation was no longer about finding one killer.
It was about surviving the hunger of a town that consumed its own soul—and its children.

And somewhere, watching from the shadows, Trick smiled.
Because he knew how this ended.
Or at least, how it was meant to.

Act VI, scene 4: “Beneath the Cradles”
(Where the earth bleeds and innocence dies.)

Captain’s boots hit wet dirt beneath the cribs—once-white wood now blackened, splintered, crawling with rot and the curl of mold.
The air was thick with the copper tang of old blood, mixed with a sour, sickening sweetness—like decay dressed in perfume.
He knelt beside the nearest cradle, his flashlight trembling.
Inside, a tiny skeleton, fingers curled as if reaching for something lost.
A doll’s cracked face stared up, one eye gouged out.
No soft lullabies here. Only silence.
And the promise that this was no accident.
Iron stepped out from the shadows, flicking a cigarette to life with a snap that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.
His grin was a knife’s edge—cold, cruel, and ready to cut deep.
“Every kid disappears,” he said, voice smooth but brittle, “just before the town decides it’s had enough and eats its fill.”
He pulled a rusted knife from his coat, the blade pocked and stained like it had tasted blood more than once.
“Here’s the signature,” he said, pressing the tip against the cradle’s wood, “a thank-you note from the town. Signed in blood, sealed with fear.”
He shrugged, eyes glinting with dark amusement.
“Guess even monsters like to leave a calling card.”
Captain looked closer: a crude symbol, a spiral bleeding into itself—like a wound that never healed.

The ground beneath their feet was soft, shifting unnaturally.
Suddenly, a scream tore through the night—a child’s voice, high and ragged, cutting through the heavy silence.
They moved fast.

Down a narrow alley, beneath broken fire escapes, they found her.
A girl, no older than seven, huddled, eyes wild and haunted.
Her skin was bruised, pale as death, and her clothes hung in tatters.
Captain reached out, but she recoiled, whispering only one word:
“Hungry.”

Black appeared then, blade drawn, eyes burning with cold fire.
“She’s not lying,” Black said, voice like ice and grit.
“This town feasts on its children—their blood, their fear, their souls.”
She knelt, pulling back the girl’s sleeve to reveal raw, angry marks—like teeth, but not from any animal known to man.

Thor arrived with the fury of a storm, hammer smashing the pavement, shards of stone flying.
“This ends now,” he growled.
But even his godlike strength couldn’t mask the terror in his eyes.

Captain stared into the girl’s haunted gaze and saw it clearly now:
The town wasn’t just eating children—it was devouring its own future,
a ritual older than memory, wrapped in blood and shadow.
The hungry mouths beneath the cribs were not just metaphor.
They were real.

And beneath the earth, something stirred.

Trick’s smile flickered in the darkness.
Because he’d waited a long time for this fire to burn.

Chapter 12: A Court of Fools and Gods

Down the rabbit-hole?
No.
Don’t be quaint.
We were invited.

With tea-stained envelopes, stamped in wax made of melted memories.

The town was never real.
Here, there is no order.

Only a teacup, crooked and colossal, tipped on its side.
The room curves like a smile too wide for its face.
Mushrooms with teeth grin from cracks in the floor.
Flowers hum lullabies in languages that never existed.
The judge’s bench floats, tethered by ribbons of undone lullabies.

And the jury?

Stuffed animals.
Burnt. Eyeless. All grinning.

The gavel is a baby’s rattle.

The bailiff is a goat-headed man chewing a clock and bleeding from the minute hand.

“All rise!” the goat shrieks, voice curdled with glee.

“Court is in tea-ssion!”

Then:
A disembodied voice, clear as crystal and cracked as porcelain, rings out like it’s bouncing off the skull of a god who’s laughed himself inside-out:

“Trial! Trial! All in denial!
Bring forth the Trickster’s latest deeds!”

And just like that—
The teacart rolls out.

The dais tilts.
The lights dim with a dramatic wink.

Above the dais, stitched in crimson thread:
“TRUTH IS A GAME FOR THOSE WHO’VE LOST EVERYTHING ELSE.”

Welcome,
to the Mad Trial of Loki, child of Laufey.
Slayer of kings.
And you're already seated.

They sit around a teacart on a tilting platform.

Thor, brooding in a suit one size too small, sipping from a tankard of literal lightning.

Tony, dressed as a magician with no hat, flipping playing cards made of old blueprints and apology letters he never sent.

Steve, clutching his shield like it might confess something before he does.

Natasha, licking blood from a sugar cube.

Clint, flipping arrows between his fingers like they’re coins he doesn’t trust to land heads-up.

Bruce, nervously stirring a cup that screams when spun.

Loki, naturally, wears a crown of spoons and a cape made of children’s drawings.

But if you looked closely, you’d notice a faint stain—frost-blue at the edges—on the hem.
Remnants of another throne. One he shattered, long ago, with a blade he pretended wasn’t trembling in his hand.

He taps his teacup three times.
The world stutters.

“Court is now in session,” he grins, “And oh, poor Mother was shocked to say the least!”

“What mother?” Steve asks, narrowing his eyes.

Loki’s smile sharpens. “Why, the one who bled ink when she gave birth to me, darling. The one who read me into existence. Titan of life, the squirrels say!”

Tony’s gaze narrows. “Funny you mention… a titan. Care to explain the balance Thanos claims to bring—disease he is?”

Loki’s eyes glint. He pours tea, but the cup never fills. Instead, steam rises—shaping twisted hourglasses and fractured infinity stones.

“Ah, balance,” Loki muses, swirling the phantom tea. “Tell me, when does the hand that breaks the clock stop to wonder if it also winds another? Are we puppets? Or playwrights? Or merely actors in a mad tea party where the guest of honour is never truly present?”

Steve frowns. “Stop dancing around it. Did you know him? Work with him? Or worse—was this all a part of your design?”

Loki claps his hands once, sharply. “Oh! Such delicious suspicion! Like bitter herbs dipped in honey.”

He spreads a deck of cards, revealing each: a laughing Mad Hatter, a grinning Cheshire cat, a fragmented gauntlet.

“A play, dear friends,” Loki says, voice light. “Each act more confounding than the last. Was I the villain? The victim? The vicar? The vulture? Or perhaps merely the jester with the sharpest knives behind the curtain.”

Natasha leans in. “You hide behind riddles and madness, but what if the joke’s on us? What if the nightmare you conjured was never just yours to own?”

Loki’s smile thins. “The nightmare,” he whispers, “is that some stories are written in invisible ink, only legible under the heat of ruin. And some players… well, they don’t even know their own lines until the curtain falls.”

Thor grunts. “Enough. Speak plainly. Did you know Thanos? Did you play your part willingly or were you trapped in the same story as the rest of us?”

“Blap! Blop! Can’t say anything, won’t say anything!” The rolling heads sing.

The prosecutor—a massive talking hare in a lab coat—slams a book down.

It opens to a page that shifts every time you blink.
“Count One: Fathering monsters.
Count Two: Mourning them too theatrically.
Count Three: Parricide. First blood on frozen ground.
Count Four: Manipulating mortals through dramatic monologue and excessive eyeliner.”

“Not guilty on the eyeliner,” Tony mutters.

“Let’s play a game,” Loki offers, voice gleeful, “Two truths and a lie.”
He stands. Cups clink.

“Truth: I once held my own heart in my hand and asked it to stop.”
“Truth: I had six children. Two were metaphors, one was a city, one was a god-eater, one was dead before I named her, and the last… oh, well—you’ll see.”
“Lie: I ever wanted to be king.”

Tony leans forward, reading the clues like code.
“What’s the city?”

“You’ve fought inside it,” Loki says, voice dreamy.
“Tried to protect it. Failed, naturally. But oh, how noble you looked doing it.”

Steve's jaw clenches. “New York.”

“Ding ding!” Loki sings, spinning in place. “Built it myself. Brick by delusion.”

Suddenly Natasha speaks.
“There was a girl, wasn’t there?”

Everyone turns.

Her voice is calm, but her eyes are firecrackers.

“A child you didn’t name. A daughter.”

Loki’s hands tremble.
Only slightly.

“What a rude thing to bring up at tea,” he whispers.

“She’s real,” Natasha insists. “You left her somewhere.”

“I had to,” Loki hisses. “She saw too much. She remembered the first draft.”

The walls groan.

The courtroom darkens.

Bruce drops his teacup. It shatters—and inside the shards: photos.

Children with Loki’s eyes.
Some monstrous.
Some perfectly human.
Some already dead.
Some fading as they’re looked at.

Thor stands.
“You should have told me.”

“And what would you have done, brother?” Loki snaps. “Raised them in Asgard’s golden nursery? Let the All-Father ‘correct’ their forms?”
His voice catches. A flicker.
“Or maybe… maybe you’d have thrown them to the frost.”

Thor’s silence is the only honest answer in the room.

Tony holds up a blueprint.

It’s the Tower.
But something’s… off.

“This isn’t Stark Tower. It’s cradling something.”

“Of course,” Loki says, flippant. “Why do you think you built it so tall? It’s a lullaby in steel. You thought it was for defense. But it was for containment.”

“Of what?” Steve demands.

Loki turns slowly.

“Of her.”

“The one who remembers me as a father. Not a villain. Not a footnote. Not a punchline.”

The courtroom tilts.

All the clocks strike mother.
The judges start chanting in dead tongues.
A door appears.

Just a child’s drawing of one, really.
But it opens anyway.

And behind it—
A nursery, untouched.
A mobile made of stars.

A cradle lined with old maps.
And an empty chair.
The Captain walks toward it.
Steve sees his reflection in the crib.
It’s not his face.
It’s hers.
Eyes like Loki’s.
Smile like regret.
Above them, the chandelier cracks.
One crystal falls.

And then:

“Objection,” Loki says softly.
Everyone freezes.
“I plead guilty,” he continues. “To loving what I shouldn’t.
To naming what the world demanded I forget.
To bringing her into a story that didn’t have room for daughters.”
He bows his head.
“But I will not plead sorry.”

The final gavel hits.

It’s not wood.
It’s a heartbeat.

And under the last cradle?
There is no child.

Only a mirror.

And in that mirror?
You.
Audience.
Reader.
Watcher.

You traced every clue.

You laughed at every jab.

You cheered, maybe.

You pitied, maybe.

But you never stopped it.
And now?

The child is waking.
So tell us—
How do you plead?

Chapter 13: Le Murmure Entre Deux Actes

Narrated by the righteous Loki himself

There is always a silence after the curtain falls.

Not applause. Not outrage.
Just silence—too thick, too still. Like a held breath in a burning house.

I stood in the courtroom as it dissolved, tea turning back to blood, porcelain cracking like bones too long buried.
The nursery faded first.

Of course it did.

That was the cruellest part.

They didn’t follow me when I stepped through the child’s door.
Not Thor. Not Steve. Not Bruce. Not Clint. Not even Natasha, with her needle-glance and knife-mouth.
Only the wind did.

And her.

Hel.

I do not say her name lightly.
She didn’t speak. She never does. As if sentenced to silence, rendered still by a thread to the lips.

She looked at me—same eyes, different judgment—and I remembered every word I’d buried in metaphor.
Every scream I’d dressed in riddle.
Every plea I’d dulled with sarcasm and sequins.

“Father,” she said at last.

No anger. No blame. Just recognition.

And that—
That cut the deepest.

Because blame I could bear. Rage, even more so. I know how to meet a sword mid-swing. But this—this quiet naming— It was not an accusation.
It was a mirror.

And I—
I am not built for mercy without reason.

My mouth opened.
To ask if she hated me.
If she should.

The words congealed behind my teeth.
Because I already knew the answer, didn’t I?

And still, I wanted her to say it.
To shout it. To scream, to sob, to curse me like the others.
At least then it would have been real. Contained.

Manageable.

Hate is a kind of gravity. It holds things in orbit.
But this—this stillness between us—it was weightless. Unmoored.
Not forgiveness.
Not love.
Just… a fact. A scar with a name.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t even flinch.

Just stepped past me, barefoot across frost that bloomed from nowhere— the ground obeying her like breath obeys grief. Each footprint a silence I couldn’t fill.

And I—

I stood there, undone by her indifference. Not her cruelty. Not her judgment. But her indifference.

Because if she had hated me, at least I would still be real to her.
Still something.
A shadow cast by flame.

But I—
I was no longer even the villain in her story. I was a monument. An echo. A father. Simply that.
A title given, not earned.
Etched in ice, and just as cold.

And gods help me—
I wanted her to break me for it. To prove I could still be broken.

They say madness is chaos.
That it’s screaming and sharp turns and wild eyes.

No. Only the fools who have obstinately walked on the path of safe sanity would describe it so lacking.

Madness is quieter than that.
It’s memory with nowhere to land.

It’s a story told in the wrong order, over and over, until even you forget what happened first.
Until you start asking:
Was there ever an innocent version of me?
Was there really?
Or was that just a necessary illusion?
A draft you could believe in, before I was rewritten into something harder to love?

Something sharper.
More useful.

You want to know about Thanos.
You want to believe there was a moment where I could have chosen differently.
And maybe there was.
I could have told them then, too. Would have saved me a lot of trouble and valuable time. Could have spoken plainly.

But I didn’t know how to translate guilt into a language they would understand.
How do you say I didn’t mean to birth an apocalypse in a room full of survivors?

How do you explain that sometimes, the monsters you run from are built in your own image—just taller, louder, and more final?
I didn’t make him.
But I cracked the mirror he climbed through.

Now, the tea party’s gone.
The masks dropped.
The blood dried.
And memory? Memory is all that’s left.

So let the Norns stitch their version.
Let them tidy the timeline, make it legible for bedtime retellings.

Say I was misguided.
Say I was lost.
Say I was still redeemable.

If it helps you sleep.

But remember:
A single moment of kindness does not make a life innocent.
And a single betrayal does not make it monstrous.

What am I, then?
A question you never wanted answered.
Because answers are ugly.
And ambiguity?

Ambiguity is a trickster’s delight.

So go on. Believe I meant well.
That there’s a tender heart beneath all this.

But ask yourself—quietly, honestly—
Is it truly innocence you miss?

Or was it simply the hope that someone like me could have ever belonged to it?

 

Enter the Norns. Exit the Trickster. Curtain held. Breath caught. Memory stirring.

Chapter 14: "Deep into that darkness, I stood there wondering, fearing"

Narrated by Urðr, the Norn of What Has Been

There was once a boy who did not know he was born wrong.
And by “wrong,” we mean unwanted.
And by “unwanted,” we mean… inconvenient.
Not monstrous. Not evil.
Just ill-fitting—the thread that never sat flush against the rest of the weave. The one they kept tugging loose, pretending it was accidental.
We remember him. Of course we do. We’ve been weaving him into endings for longer than the gods would dare admit.
Loki. Laufeyson. Child of cold.
Heir to no throne, only interruption.
They called him Trickster. Traitor. Mad.

Rare were those who simply called him child.

He was small for a god.
Sharp, where Thor was golden.
Quiet, where Thor was loud.
He questioned everything—not to be difficult, but because no one ever gave him answers that made sense.

“Why is might right?”

“Why is truth always what Father says?”

“Why must stories end the same way, every time?”

Even as a boy, he saw the pattern.
Thor would win.
Odin would praise.
The feast would roar.
And Loki would sit with the servants and pretend he liked the taste of ash in his mouth.

Asgard was gold on the outside, rot at the root. They dressed their prejudice in formality. Their bigotry in prophecy.
Their cruelty in rituals of belonging that always stopped one circle short of where Loki stood.
They only murmured about his origins in hushed tones, suspicion tangled with fear—not truly knowing what he was. Never mind the spells that masked his size,
the glamours that painted his skin in colours Asgard could accept, could perhaps even love, for blue was repulsive to the pleasing eye.

He felt the weight of their whispers, the thinly veiled mockery.

“A stranger in their bloodline, wearing their crown? Impossible.”
“He’s sharp, but cunning breeds deceit.”
“A creature raised among gods remains something other.”

Frigga tried.
She loved him—not blindly, but fearfully.
As a mother loves the storm in her child’s eyes, even when she sees it brewing into something history won’t forgive.
She taught him the old ways.
Magic that twisted light into illusion and mirrors into blades.
But love does not protect, it only hides.

Now, here is where the lie begins.
They say Thanos came from the void.
A Titan. A beast. Entropy incarnate.

But we know better.

He was not born.
He was moulded.
Not in flesh. But in idea.

And the idea came from a little boy.

It began not with rage—but with silence.
There had been a war. Another one. The kind Asgard writes into sagas, full of glory and oaths and eternal flame.
But wars are not glory for the ones who bleed.

This one—some border skirmish turned massacre—was beneath notice to the high gods.
Barely a footnote in Odin’s council scrolls.
But on the ground? It was carnage.

Loki had been sent as a diplomat. Unarmed. Barely of age. Barely ripe.
A peace-bearer between realms no one cared to name twice.
Just another ribbon of fire on the map of Nine Worlds.

But the peace never arrived.

What did arrive were the Draugar—scaled nomads from the spiral dusk of Náttvegr—mercenaries in all but name, for even death rejected them, repulsed.
Loki didn’t fight. He couldn’t.
They didn’t care that he was Odin’s son.
He was dressed in velvet and gold and the scent of Asgardian arrogance.
And then they did what war always does to the unarmed and the unwanted.
They ripped through the envoy like parchment. Burned the banners. Struck first, struck again, and never stopped.

Loki tried to speak. Tried to cast. Tried to disappear.
But magic dies when blood clogs the weave.
And his spells stuttered like broken breath.

They caught him.
Dragged him through soot and scream.
They broke his ribs like twigs.
Bent his arm backwards until the bone cracked.
Tore the velvet from his back and left the skin beneath screaming.

He was no longer Loki. No longer a prince. Not even a trickster. Just a shape to be punished. An insult made flesh. A lesson.

He remembered the sound of his own magic failing.
How quiet the world was when pain became silence.
How the gods never came—not even a whisper from Heimdall’s gate.
He woke alone, days later, hidden in a scavenger’s den—wrapped in rags that smelled of ash and blood.

And there, he met Themra.
She was not Asgardian. Not Draugar.
She was Ljósálfar— one of the light-born, veined with starlight—beings who walk the glimmer between leaf and void, uncounted in most cosmologies. Except that she was a traveller, and therefore harboured no identity that could content her beating heart.

Her voice was smoke. Her limbs like liquid shadow.
She did not ask Loki what had happened. She already knew.
Instead, she asked a different question:
“Did your gods do this to you?”

He wanted to say no.

But what came out was, “They let it happen.”
And he was irrevocably right. For if the gods are all knowing and omnipotent, then silence is not ignorance.
It is permission.

Themra nursed him without pity. Without flinching.
She treated his wounds as facts, not tragedies.

“You are learning,” she said once, binding his split hand. “Learning what war is. What it always has been.”

“A theatre?” Loki asked, hoarse.

“A pyramid,” she answered. “Gods at the top. Bodies at the base. Always bleeding.”

And Loki saw it.
Saw the story they sold—of warriors and honour and fate.
But beneath the banners and horns?
Screams. Ruin. Things no poem would admit.

When he left her, healed in body but shattered underneath, she gave him no blessing.
Only one sentence, whispered into his palm:
“Make them remember what they made you forget.”

He returned to Asgard.
And no one asked. No one saw. No one noticed.
Odin spoke of treaties. Thor bragged of victory.
And Loki sat in the corner, whole in flesh, splintered in soul.
The feast roared.
He smiled.
And in that smile, a deathless question:

“If this is what peace protects—then peace must be a lie.”

And the universe—always listening, always hungering—answered.
Not immediately.
Not as fire from the sky.
But slowly.
A logic.
A design.
A mouth without laughter.
A hand that measured death like a farmer measures wheat.

You see, Loki never intended to create Thanos.
He intended to break the story.
But stories do not die quietly.
When you cut one limb, another must grow.

Thanos was not Loki’s child. The irony is not lost on us, either.
But he was his echo.
Loki didn't build him. He inspired him.
With every spell cast in anger.
With every bitter prayer whispered into the fabric of the Nine Realms.
With every wound that asked the cosmos for symmetry.

“If I burn it all down… maybe they’ll finally see me in the light of the fire.”

Imagine the cold, creeping horror that gnawed at him when the truth settled like rot in his bones—that the monster he thought he had escaped, that shadow of annihilation and ruin, was not some alien horror born in the void, but a twisted reflection forged from the fractured mind of a desperate child, trembling with fear and rage; a creature shaped not from flesh but from the dark, fractured fragments of his own haunted hands.

And then—
There was her.
Not just a daughter of womb. Not just an echo of magic.
Hel.
Born of blood and spell and shadow. She was his daughter—biologically by accident, narratively by necessity.
Born not in Asgard. Not in Jotunheim.
But in the negative space between mistakes.

They say he created her through magic.
That one night, in exile, Loki wept over a mirror that wouldn’t lie back—and something stepped through.
She didn’t cry.
She didn’t speak.
She simply stared.
And in her stare, Loki saw the version of himself he could never unmake.

She was what remembered. The secret names. The burnt hands. The shame-glamours.

The whispered joke that the Trickster never wins—only distracts while real gods drink.

We did not weave her.

She wove herself—from all the threads Loki tried to tear out of his own tapestry.
She was not born in fire or frost.
She was born in reversal.

We watched it all, of course.
Odin turning away.
Thor pretending not to notice.
Frigga carrying his name on her breath, her knowing eyes shadowed by the weight of secrets—she saw the truth of his heritage, glimpsed the paths ahead, yet chose silence, letting the story unravel as it must.
The mortals cheered. The credits rolled.

But Loki didn’t die.
He wandered. He wondered. He fractured.

And in the fracture, she waited.

So now, you stand at the brink.
Loki, the liar.
Loki, the unwanted.
Loki, the mirror shard that cut too clean to ignore.

He was meant to be the counterweight to Thor.
The shadow cast by golden armour.
The thing he feared became real.
The fire he fed grew teeth.
The child he forgot became a goddess of consequence.

And now?
She is coming.
Not with vengeance.
With memory.

And memory?
It is the one thing gods cannot unmake.

We are the Norns.
We do not judge.
We observe.

And we tell you this, reader, watcher, fool:
The god you named villain never wanted the crown.
Only the story to make room for his name.

Chapter 15: What Rough Beast

Loki stood alone in the shattered dream space — a realm of echoes, not time. The veil here hung thin, threadbare. Even breath felt intrusive.
He wasn’t dreaming. Not really. Not consciously. But this place had found him.

In the distance, a shoreline unfurled like torn fabric. A sea boiled against it — black, weightless, reflecting no stars.
Six figures stood at the edge of the surf.
Thor. Natasha. Stark. Banner. Rogers. Clint.

And a seventh.

A girl — no, a presence — cloaked in shadows that flickered like memory. Her face shifted when he tried to hold it. Older. Younger. Bleeding. Whole.
When she turned, her eyes found his across the impossible distance — and she reached out.

"Not alone."

A single word, or a plea. It burned in his mind like a rune carved backward through time.

Suddenly, a light fractured the sky — violet, thin as hair — and a second figure stepped behind her.
Something taller. Wrong. Rooted in nothing. It bore no face, no scent, no origin. But its shape hummed with the echoes of old gods. Forgotten gods. The kind even Asgard never spoke of aloud.
The others stood between it and her.
Avengers.
Not by title, but by fate.
The image shattered — not with sound, but with knowing.

Loki awoke in silence, already standing.

Lightning flared across the sky, pink and unnatural. The earth here cracked like old glass, magic leaking through seams in reality. The team moved quickly — down a winding path of warped stone, toward a structure half-swallowed by rock and time.

“She’s not here,” Steve muttered. “Again.”

“She was,” Loki replied, his voice taut with something between irritation and worry.

Natasha narrowed her eyes. “How do you keep finding these places? You always know exactly where to go.”

Loki didn’t break stride. “Because she leaves signals for me. And because I’m the only one who still remembers how to read them.”

Tony huffed. “Right, just a trail of death-realm breadcrumbs?”

Clint muttered, “Great. And here I thought that one was the dramatic sibling.”

Loki glanced back, irritated. “The salt basin at Volgrim’s Teeth was half-dried. A presence had just passed through. The howling trees of Dronnach stopped howling when she left — they never stop. The arcane sinkhole beneath the Mirror Dwell? It was pulsing with decayed ward-magic, keyed to her bloodline. This”—he gestured ahead—“was always her last refuge.”

Bruce frowned. “So she’s leading you?”

“She’s warning me,” Loki corrected. “The difference is survival.”

Steve’s tone was level, but firm. “Why bring us along then? If this is a father-daughter crisis—”

“She’s not just my daughter,” Loki cut in. “And I can’t stop what’s hunting her alone.” He scratched his throat, as if uncomfortable to admit it.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “You’ve fought gods, giants, and half of Manhattan. What makes this different?”

Loki stopped at last.
“Because I didn’t bring you. I saw you.” His voice softened, though not kindly. “A place between places. A shoreline I’ve never stood on. She was there. So were you.”

Clint frowned. “So this is a dream mission? No offense, but I get twitchy following ghost maps.”

Natasha gave him a look. “You’re always twitchy.”

“I’m alive because I’m twitchy, thank you very much.”

Loki ignored them. “I saw you for a reason. That place wasn’t made of dreams. It was memory made forward.”

Bruce asked, “A vision?”

“A trap,” Loki replied. “Or a memory I haven’t had yet. Either way—she wanted you with me. Or something else did.”

They reached the broken threshold. The archway above was seared black, ancient glyphs still smoking faintly.
Loki scanned the air, then moved forward. “Keep your eyes open. They were here too.”

“I’ve got fifty bucks on some kind of hell beast,” Tony muttered, glancing toward the ridgeline. “Any takers?”

“No bet,” Clint said. “My luck? It'll be something that doesn't bleed.”

The wind shifted — cold and heavy with the scent of iron and something older.
Loki crouched at a crumbled pillar, brushing aside a fine layer of ash. Beneath it — a rune. Recently disturbed.

“Second visit in twenty-four hours?” Natasha asked.

“Not mine,” Loki murmured. “The wards are frayed. Scorched. Someone tore through them — not subtly.”

Thor loomed behind him. “Who even knows this place exists?”

“No one,” Loki said. “Or at least — no one who should.”

Inside, the air grew colder. Magic lingered, coiled and watching.

The chamber was carved from old stone. Bone lanterns hung blackened and dead. In the centre: a shallow obsidian basin. Dry — save for a single droplet of green liquid, unnaturally still.
“Blood,” Loki said. To the inquiring eyes of the avengers, he sighed, exasperated, “so because my attire consists of mostly green, I now bleed in the same colour?”

Bruce leaned closer. “Hers?”

Loki nodded. “She came here. Days ago. Likely sensing she was being followed. She left me this—” He gestured to a rune carved beside the basin, sharp and rushed. “A warning. Someone is tracking her.”

Tony narrowed his eyes. “That script isn’t Asgardian.”

“It’s older,” Loki said quietly. “She was always better with the forgotten tongues.”

Steve’s voice was steady. “So she’s running. And whoever’s tracking her… they’re also tracking you.”

Loki straightened, tension rippling across his shoulders. “They’ve already burned through three of her sanctuaries. This was the last safe place before the Withered Vale.”

“You still haven’t told us why she’s so important,” Natasha said. “Or why we’re the ones helping you find her.”

“She’s Loki’s daughter,” Thor began heavily. “That—”

“No,” Loki interrupted, harsh. “That’s not why they want her.”

Bruce frowned. “Then what?”

“She stands on the threshold of life and death,” Loki said. “Not fully one. Not fully the other. She was born between — in the rift — and she hears things none of us can.”

Clint was quiet a moment longer than the rest. “She hears things... like what?”

Loki looked at him — eyes flat, voice low. “Things that call to the dying. That know when souls are almost lost.”

Clint's hand drifted to his bow. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’ve heard a few of those.”

Loki didn’t respond.

Thor stepped forward, jaw tight. “You mean Odin.”

Loki’s expression turned. “Because the last time Odin learned I had something of my own, he banished it. Locked it away or buried it, depending on his mood.”

“You mean—”

“I mean he did nothing,” Loki snapped. “He watched. And when I begged for her to be spared, he told me monsters beget monsters.”

The words hung in the cold air like a slap.

Natasha’s gaze didn’t waver. “You left her to grow up alone.” A small rose bloomed at her feet, inconspicuously.

“I hid her,” Loki said. “From Odin. From the realms. From death itself, some days. You think that was a luxury? I watched her fade from memory just to keep her alive.”

A crack split the ceiling — sharp, violent. One of the outer wards was collapsing.

Bruce flinched. “That wasn’t thunder.”

Loki’s eyes flared. “They’re here.”

Another blast — closer. Dust showered from the ceiling as runes blinked violently across the walls.

Steve pulled up his shield. “Who’s coming?”

“I don’t know,” Loki said. “But they’re using shard-tracing and scent binding. Both forbidden. Someone taught them old magic.”

Tony’s arc reactor glowed brighter. “You keep saying someone. You sure it’s not Odin?”

Loki hesitated — just a breath too long.
Then a roar echoed from the far ridge — not beastly, but hollow. Like something long dead that never stopped walking.

Clint’s expression turned. “That wasn’t human.”

“No,” Loki said. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

Tony activated his repulsors. “So what is this? Cat and mouse?”

“No,” Loki said, grim. “Wolf and hunter. And we’re not the wolf.”

Natasha was already in motion. “Where’s she going?”

Loki strode to the entrance, eyes narrowed westward. “The Withered Vale. If she’s following instinct, she’ll head for the barrows. It’s old magic there. She might find a way to mask herself again.”

Steve glanced at the rune. “She left it for you. She still trusts you.”

Loki’s laugh was bitter. “She shouldn’t.”

Thor stepped close. “And if she’s not the same girl you hid?”

Loki looked away. “Then I pray she doesn’t recognize me.”

Clint notched an arrow without being told.
They didn’t wait for another quake.

They ran.
Into the mist.
Into the fractured wilds of a realm that bled old magic.

The hunt had begun.

The air grew colder as they ran, like breath pulled from the lungs of the land itself.
The trees — if they could still be called that — arched inward unnaturally, bark like old flesh, leaves like stained vellum. The forest narrowed around them, pressing close, and the sky flickered in and out of shadow with no clear source of light.

Clint moved at the flank, bow half-drawn, every nerve humming. He muttered, “This whole place feels like it remembers pain.”

Natasha kept pace beside him. “Because it does.”

Ahead, Thor’s hammer thrummed low — almost uneasy — while Steve advanced with his shield raised, more scout than soldier now.

“Eyes up,” Steve said. “We don’t know what comes through the veil.”

Loki stopped at a fork in the path, hands raised like a diviner reading invisible ink.
“There,” he whispered, turning toward a moss-choked hill half-swallowed by fog. “The barrows are beneath.”

Tony hovered above for a better view. “I’m reading zero heat signatures. No power, no movement, not even rats. Creepy, abandoned tomb? Classic.”

Bruce, breathless and quiet, finally spoke. “She’d go to ground here?”

“She’d become ground here if she had to,” Loki replied. “This was once a burial site for witches who refused the Asgardian Accord. Their bodies refused to rot. Their magic didn’t sleep.”

“So friendly neighbours,” Clint muttered.

Thor moved to Loki’s side, uncomfortable. “You brought us to a graveyard of the exiled dead?”

“I brought us to the only place she might still be alive.”

He took a breath, then pressed a hand to the dirt.
A pulse — faint, ancient — rippled from beneath his palm. The runes across the back of his hand lit up softly.

“She’s inside,” Loki said.

The team pressed deeper into the tomb, the obsidian basin left behind like a dark promise.
The air grew thick — heavy with stale breath and decay.

Clint’s steps slowed. “Guys… you hear that?”

A low murmur curled through the shadowed corridors — faint, indistinct — like whispers folded inside a sigh.

“Voices,” Natasha said, voice barely above breath. “Not alive ones.”

They rounded a corner into a narrow chamber, lit only by the flicker of Bruce’s glowing bioluminescent skin.
The walls were lined with alcoves — each cradling a severed head, their eyes closed, mouths frozen in silent screams or snarls.
Loki’s fingers brushed the nearest skull, lips tightening.
Then—
A sudden, wet gulp echoed.
The head’s eyes snapped open, glassy and unseeing, but focused on them.

“Help…” The voice was a rasp, barely human — like dry leaves scraping stone.

Tony staggered back. “What the hell?”

Another head twitched, lips pulling back to reveal broken teeth.

“Leave…” it hissed. “Or join…”

A third head whispered, voice cracking: “The blood… calls…”

Bruce looked sick, but raised his voice. “They’re trapped in some kind of lingering curse.”

Steve gritted his teeth. “Or warning us.”

The heads began to speak over each other, a chorus of broken pleas and threats:
“Foolish…” “Doom…” “Betrayer…” “The gate…” “Will open…”

Loki’s eyes narrowed, voice low and sharp.
“They’re echoes of the exiled. Their souls bound here, unable to rest. Someone is using them — twisting their pain into a warning or a weapon.”

The chamber walls pulsed faintly, the glow of runes awakening beneath the heads.
Clint’s bow was ready, but he didn’t want to shoot.
Because these heads — these voices — knew things.
Things they wished no one to hear.
The ground shifted. The moss recoiled like something touched it from below.

And then—
A scream.
Muffled. Twisted. Not hers — too old — but it came from beneath the earth, through the stone.

Clint raised his bow. “I’m gonna go ahead and say ‘not friendly’ confirmed.”

The soil ahead cracked open like a breath being exhaled.
From the hollow beneath the moss, a figure rose.
Not the girl.

Something else entirely.

Its skin was pale, veined like candle wax. Its eyes were hollow, but not blind — they watched as if remembering what it once was. And on its chest, glowing faintly beneath torn robes, was a brand: a broken circle, lined with jagged black — a rune of unbinding.

Loki stepped forward slowly. “That mark… it’s from the Depthward Orders. One of the forgotten castes of the Odinson guard.”

Steve raised his shield. “You said no one should know this place exists.”

“I lied,” Loki whispered, then shrugged. “Or someone lied to me.”

The creature opened its mouth. No sound — only wind, blasting outward like a scream turned inside out. Dirt and fog tore back, revealing others rising from shallow graves — not mindless, not chaotic. Summoned. Each bore the same mark. Each knew exactly who they were looking at.
Tony fired first. A burst of energy lit the trees. One of the risen shattered like glass.

“Okay. So they bleed weird,” he called.

Thor launched forward, lightning cracking against his hammer. Clint and Natasha flanked right, arrows and bullets finding soft, unnatural flesh.

But Loki didn’t move.
He stared past the fight — toward a faint shimmer deeper within the hill.
A flicker of movement. A silhouette.

Her.
She was watching — not fleeing.
Her cloak had changed. Black now, but woven with something that shimmered when she moved. Her skin pale, but marked with glowing symbols like veins of gold. Her eyes met his through the fog.
She didn’t look afraid.
Just… wrong.
Like something that had gone too far between death and return.

Loki whispered, “Hel.”

And she smiled — slow. Sad. And then vanished again into the mist below.

Thor called out, “Loki!”
The ground erupted between them. One of the creatures lunged at Loki, knocking him down. Its hand gripped his throat — cold, ancient, and far too strong.
Then an arrow pierced its skull.

Clint stepped into view. “You spacing out on us now, too?”

Loki gasped, recovering. “She was here. I saw her.”

“You sure she’s not just projecting?” Bruce yelled, ducking another blast of wind. “You said she can echo across memory, right?”

“No,” Loki said, wiping blood from his lip. “This wasn’t memory. This was intention.”

Natasha knelt beside one of the fallen undead, brushing the robe aside. Her eyes narrowed.

“There’s something carved under the skin.”

She pressed her knife in and peeled back a layer of flesh.

Thor’s face grew grim, eyes narrowing. “That mark... it’s tied to the Draupnir Ring.”

Steve leaned in. “Draupnir? The golden ring of Odin?” At the odd glances thrown at him, he shrugged. "I like to be educated."

Thor nodded slowly. “Yes. The ring that multiplied itself every nine nights. But this fragment—” he gestured to the broken piece embedded beneath the rune, a twisted band of gold etched with runes of power and rebirth “—is a shard of Draupnir, shattered long ago in the chaos before Ragnarök.”

Bruce frowned. “I thought it was lost forever.”

Thor’s voice dropped. “So did I. But someone has reclaimed a piece. And now they’re using its magic.”

Clint’s eyes narrowed. “Using it to do what?”

Loki’s gaze fixed on the dark fog where Hel had disappeared.
“To bind her fate to the cycles of death and renewal.”

Another tremor shook the barrow.
Loki looked up, eyes fierce, toward the dim sky.

“They don’t want her buried between worlds anymore. They want her reborn.”

Tony lowered his weapon. “Reborn how?”

Loki’s voice was heavy with dread.
“To walk again as a goddess of death — and of life.”
He paused, letting the weight settle in.
“Hel’s realm is the final resting place for half the dead, but she’s been fading — trapped between worlds, weakened by the rift she was born from. Those who seek to rebirth her don’t just want a powerful ally. They want control.”

Steve frowned. “Control of what?”

“Of death itself.” Loki’s eyes burned. “A reborn Hel could unravel the boundaries between life and death, bending the flow of souls, the fate of worlds. Whoever controls her controls the cycle — who lives, who dies, and who returns.”

Natasha whispered, “That kind of power... it could break the natural order.”

Thor growled, “And unleash chaos beyond even Ragnarok’s shadow.”

Tony tightened his grip on his repulsors. “So it’s not just a resurrection. It’s a weapon. A lever to shift the balance.”

Loki nodded. “Exactly. A goddess unbound from death’s mercy is a force no realm can resist.”

Clint swallowed hard. “And the longer we wait, the closer this thing comes.”

Suddenly, the ground beneath them trembled again — more violently this time. Dust fell from the ceiling, and a deep, guttural growl echoed through the chamber, resonating with the ancient magic suffusing the barrows.

Tony’s repulsors flared as he scanned the shadows. “We’re not alone down here. Something’s waking.”

Loki’s eyes darted toward the faint glow deep within the tomb. “She’s close. Closer than any of us dared hope... or fear.”

A cold wind swept through the chamber, carrying a whisper that seemed to curl around their minds.
“Open... the gate...”
And then, silence.

For a heartbeat, the team stood frozen.

Then, from the darkness ahead, a pair of eyes flared open — not human, not fully divine — but something ancient and hungry.

The hunt was no longer just for her.

It was for what she would become.

Chapter 16: the way is shut, first wound of the world

The world held its breath.
The flickering eyes in the dark watched without blinking — no malice, only purpose. The kind of ancient purpose that predates language. The kind that doesn’t stop, even when its wielder has long turned to ash.

Tony broke the silence first. “Tell me I’m not the only one feeling like the ground just judged us.”

“You’re not,” Clint muttered. He gripped his bow tighter.

The barrow trembled again — subtle this time, more like breath than quake. The runes on the wall dimmed, then flared, one by one, as if reacting to a presence drawing nearer.

Steve stepped forward. “Loki. The gate — what is it?”

Loki’s voice was low, distant. “Not a door. Not in the way we think. It’s more... a tether. Between realms. Between endings.”

Natasha glanced at him. “You mean like Hel’s domain?”

“No,” Loki said. “Older. More primal. Even Hel’s kingdom was shaped from this passage. It was the first wound in the world.”

Thor’s knuckles tightened on Mjölnir. “The Tear of Ginnungagap.”

Loki nodded slowly. “The place where everything began — and where even gods fear to end.”

Bruce rubbed his arms as if trying to warm himself. “We’re standing on the original rift?”

“No,” Loki whispered. “We’re above it.”

A silence fell again, heavy and wrong.

Then — footsteps.

Soft. Deliberate.
They turned toward the hall’s far end, where light did not live. From it emerged a figure, robed in black, bare feet pale against the stone.

She was not Hel — not anymore.

This version of her moved like shadow woven into bone. The glowing marks on her skin pulsed softly, and her eyes — one gold, one midnight blue — regarded them without recognition.

“Stop,” Loki called, stepping forward.
She did. Tilting her head, as if trying to place him. Her voice, when it came, was no longer that of a girl.
It was layered — like many voices speaking through one mouth. Some old. Some unborn.

“I remember you.”

Loki swallowed hard. “You’re not her.”

The not-Hel smiled. “No. But she is still in here. As are others. The gate is open, father.”

Clint whispered, “Oh hell...”

Tony raised his repulsors. “Define open.”

Behind her, the stone split — not cracked, but unmade. Darkness bled through, not absence but presence — like something beyond physics, waiting to be known. The gate shimmered with violet and green light, chaotic and beautiful.
From it came whispers.
Old prayers. Death cries. Birth screams. Echoes folded into echoes.

Steve stepped beside Loki. “We shut it. Now.”

But the girl raised her hand.
They froze.
Not by choice — by force. Each of them held in place by a pressure that wasn't weight, but inevitability.

She stepped closer.
“I called you because I am not strong enough alone,” she said. “Not yet. But I will be. When the gate finishes remaking me.”

Thor strained against the invisible grip. “You were never meant to be remade!”

She turned to him. “And yet here I am.”

A laugh — bitter and elegant — came from deeper in the dark. Another figure emerged. This one felt divine.

Not like Odin. Not like Thor.

Older.

His form flickered between shape and suggestion — sometimes tall and cloaked, other times a serpent of shadow, then a tree aflame.

Loki paled. “No.”

The figure smiled with no mouth.

“You know me,” it said.

“You shouldn’t exist,” Loki breathed.

It bowed mockingly. “And yet, here I am.”

Clint asked, “Would someone like to introduce the god of skin-crawling horror?”

Loki’s voice trembled with recognition. “Vé.”

Thor stiffened. “One of the three brothers...”

Natasha frowned. “I thought that was Odin, Vili, and Vé?”

“It was,” Loki said. “Until Vé... tried to open the first gate. Odin sealed him in the void between. He wasn’t killed. He was forgotten.”

Vé nodded. “And now the girl has remembered me. Carried my name through blood. Through dream. Through grief.” His gaze turned to her. “She is mine now.
”
“No,” Loki said, stepping forward. “She is Hel. She is more than your weapon.”

“She is all weapon,” Vé said. “And all wound. That is her glorious purpose.”

The girl turned again to Loki.
“Tell me, father. If you had the power to remake the story — would you?”

He blinked. “What?”

“To undo Ragnarok. To save the children of Vanaheim. To be loved. Would you remake it?”

He did not move. Not an inch.

“Then you understand,” she said, stepping backward — toward the gate.

The rift pulsed. Vé raised his hand. The runes across her skin blazed.

“She will open the gate fully,” Vé said. “And when she does, I will walk again — not forgotten — but as fate itself.”

Thor yelled, “You’ll burn the realms!”

Vé’s voice became thunder: “Only those unworthy to be reborn.”

Then — a shout.
Not from the girl. Not from Vé.

From Steve.

He broke the spell — shield thrown hard, glowing with a rune Loki hadn’t seen since childhood.

The shield struck Vé’s form — not harming, but scattering it briefly.

Natasha moved fast, slashing at the girl’s arm — not to wound, but to disrupt the glowing runes. Sparks flew.

Clint loosed three arrows, one exploding midair into a concussive flash that broke the stillness.

Bruce let out a roar, tearing free from his restraints as Hulk, launching himself at Vé with a ground-shaking leap. Vé countered with a gesture — black tendrils erupting from the floor, slamming Hulk aside with a wave of shrieking, shapeless force.

Thor surged forward, Mjölnir spinning with an electric fury. Lightning cracked through the chamber as he met Vé’s tendrils head-on, blasting shadows apart with every strike. The air shook with divine rage.
Tony flanked wide, repulsors charging. “I’ve got your flank!” he yelled. His blasts strafed the edge of the gate, scorching the tendrils trying to latch onto the girl again. "I don't know what this thing is, but it's not getting a re-entry visa."

Loki ran for her — Hel — his daughter. Her eyes flickered again as he neared. For a second — a flash — they were hers again.
“Hel,” he whispered.

She reached out, fingers trembling.
“I remember your voice,” she said. “You used to tell me stories about monsters.”

“And you,” Loki said, “were never one.”

Her hand touched his cheek.
Then — a scream. Vé surged forward, dark limbs unfurling from his body like serpents of tar, lashing toward them.

Thor intercepted, Mjölnir blazing, shouting a war-cry that cracked stone.

Behind them, Natasha shouted, “Incoming!” — and Clint hurled a shock arrow at the tendrils trying to crawl along the ceiling. Sparks burst again, slowing their advance.

Bruce, dazed but standing, grabbed the stone floor itself and hurled a slab like a discus, slamming it into Vé’s side. Vé stumbled — and for the first time, looked surprised.

Loki gripped Hel’s wrist.
“Come back to me.”

But her body shuddered — the runes fighting.

Then — a quote.
Soft. Broken.
She whispered:
“The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead. And the dead keep it.”

Loki’s breath caught. A line from an old Midgardian book. Tolkien. A tale he read to her once, when she was afraid of the dark.
She remembered.
He pressed his forehead to hers.

“Then let the dead keep it.”

And with all the force of will he had left, he pushed.
Not her.

The gate.

The runes fought back. Vé screamed. The chamber howled.
But Loki commanded the magic now — not as trickster, but as father.

The gate resisted — then cracked. Light burst.
And in that moment, she collapsed — the glow gone, the runes dimmed.

Vé screamed, pulled backward by the unravelling wound.
And in the chaos — just for a heartbeat — Vé locked eyes with Loki and nodded. Not in defeat. In recognition. As if acknowledging something unfinished. Something owed.

“NO—”

Then — silence.
The rift sealed.
Darkness fled.
The chamber lay still.
And in Loki’s arms, she slept.
Only now, did her breath sound like her own.

 

Outside, dawn broke. Not with sun — but with colour.
The mist rolled back. The dead fell silent.

And the team — exhausted, bleeding, hollow — stood around the sleeping goddess of death.

Tony was the first to speak.
“So... that’s a no on brunch?”

Clint dropped to sit against a tree. “I need therapy. Again.”

Natasha smiled faintly. “Don’t we all.” She glanced at the girl, laying down softly, a rose growing at her head.

Thor looked at Loki. “What now?”

Loki’s eyes, rimmed with tears he’d never admit to, lifted toward the clearing sky.
“She’s safe,” he said.

Bruce asked quietly, “For how long?”

Loki looked down.
And said nothing.

The wind changed. Not the breeze of dawn, nor the chill left behind by the gate, but something subtler — a shift in the unseen, the way a room feels different after someone has left… or entered quietly.
Loki felt it first. A tightening in his chest. Not fear. Not dread.

Expectation.

Thor felt it too. He turned slowly, eyes narrowing toward the treeline — not for enemies, but for absence. A shape that should be there. A voice that should have spoken.

“Where is he?” Thor said, quietly, defeated at the step of the truth he had spent so many decades ignoring.

No one needed to ask who.
Loki didn’t answer. Instead, he looked toward the eastern ridgeline — where mist curled unnaturally, holding back the sky. “He should have come.”

Bruce glanced up from where he tended to the girl — Hel, now only herself. “Odin?”

Steve stepped beside Thor. “You think he knew?”

Loki’s jaw worked. “He always knows. He feels when the gates move. When Vé stirs.” His voice dropped. “And yet… nothing.”

Tony crossed his arms. “So what, the All-Father’s pulling a no-call no-show on the apocalypse?”

“Or,” Natasha said softly, “he wanted this to play out.”

A long silence.
Clint broke it, voice dry but wary. “You're telling me Odin let Vé try to come back? Just sat back on his golden throne while Shadowboi tried to eat the universe?”

“No,” Loki said. “Not let.”

He turned to face them, something dangerous kindling behind his eyes. Not fury — not entirely — but a knowing that felt like betrayal wrapped in inevitability.
“He’s waiting.”

Thor frowned. “For what?”

Loki looked at the girl in his arms. “For us to fail.”

Steve didn’t flinch. “Why would Odin want that?”

Loki’s voice was bitter. “Because failure makes it cleaner. If she had opened the gate, if Vé had stepped through — Odin could have struck them both down. Justified it. Burned the wound shut and declared the threat ended.”

“Even if it meant killing her?” Bruce asked.

“Especially then,” Loki said. “She is… anomaly. Legacy he did not sanction. Blood he fears not because it is dark — but because it is free.”

Thor’s voice was low, unreadable. “You think he wanted her destroyed.”

“I think,” Loki said, “he’s afraid she might become something he cannot control. A goddess born of death, but shaped by mercy. That’s not how Odin’s stories are written.”

Tony gave a short, grim chuckle. “Well, someone’s got daddy issues.”

Loki ignored him. He looked instead at the sky.

“Odin hides now, because his world is unmaking itself without him. The old laws are breaking. The dead are remembering their names. Vé was never the only secret he buried.”

Natasha crossed her arms. “So what’s the endgame?”

Loki met her gaze. “That depends on what he fears more — Vé’s return... or mine.”

Thor stepped closer. “We need to confront him.” Surprise was the only apparent emotion on Loki’s face. Perhaps blood does not run thicker than water, in some sense.

“No,” Loki said quickly. “Not yet. If we move too soon, he’ll close the doors — to Asgard, to truth, to her. And I won't risk losing her again.”

Steve nodded. “Then we prepare.”

Tony raised a brow. “For what? Another cosmic dead-god showdown?”

“No,” Loki said, eyes narrowing. “For the reckoning Odin has spent centuries delaying.”

As the others turned, Loki reeled himself, rubbing the middle part of his hand with the other, a gesture he could never get rid of as the question gnawed at him:
how had he not recognised her voice? And most of all, how did Vé grow so weak? What was in the void that hated him so?

Chapter 17: Danger lies before you

The fire was modest — a simple camp flame flickering against the wind. Thor had summoned it with care, not his usual thunderous flair. Around it, the Avengers sat — not as warriors, not as gods, not even as teammates.

Just people. Tired, scarred, and waiting for something they couldn't name.

The girl — Hel — slept beneath Steve’s cloak, her breathing even, her face softened from what it had been in the gate’s chamber. A god of death, cradled by those she had nearly undone.
No one had spoken in a while.

It was Bruce who finally broke the silence.
“She remembers him,” he said, eyes not on the fire, but on the girl. “Loki. Not as a villain. Not as a god. Just... her father.”

Tony gave a quiet scoff. “Well, that makes one of us.”

Natasha didn’t smile, but her gaze flicked toward him in the firelight. “You don’t believe he’s changed?” A rose.

Tony looked at Loki, sitting apart, sharpening a dagger not because it needed it, but because he needed the motion. “I believe he’s complicated. And complications get people killed.”

“No one died,” Clint said softly. “Not yet.”

Loki spoke, not looking up. “A miracle, then. Or a delay.”

Steve stood, brushing off ash. “We need a plan.”

“For what?” Thor asked, leaning back against a tree. “For Odin? For Vé? For whatever’s left behind that gate?”

“For all of it,” Steve said. “We’ve always faced what’s in front of us. But this... this is behind us. Buried. Old as the gods. We need to know what we’re really fighting.”

Loki sheathed the blade and finally looked up. His expression was sharper than the steel.
“You’re not fighting Vé anymore,” he said. “Not directly. That was only the prologue.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “Then what comes next?”

“The consequences,” Loki said.

Before they could question further, Hel stirred.
A sharp intake of breath. A hand that twitched. Then opened.

Loki was at her side instantly, crouching beside her like a shadow cast backward in time.
She blinked. Her eyes were her own now — no flicker of otherworldly colour, no pull of old magic.
Only tiredness.
And something else.

Regret.

“Where are we?” she asked, voice hoarse.

“Safe,” Loki said.

Her brow furrowed. “I saw him. Vé. And others. I was... many.”

“You were enough,” he said quietly. “And you still are.”

She sat up slowly, gripping his arm. “I hurt you.”

“You did what you thought you had to,” he said. “That doesn’t make it right. But it makes it yours.”

The fire crackled between truths.

Hel looked around, taking in the faces. Some she recognized. Some she didn’t.

Then she asked the question none of them wanted to answer:
“Where’s Grandfather?”

Loki hesitated. “Gone.”

She frowned. “Not dead. Just... gone.”

Bruce said, “We think he’s hiding. Watching.”

“Waiting,” Loki added.

“For what?”

Loki didn’t answer.

But Steve did. “For a reason to destroy you.” Loki glared at him.

Hel didn’t flinch. She nodded. “Then he’ll get one. Eventually.”

“No,” Loki said. “We won’t give him that.”

Tony crossed his arms. “You don’t get to decide that, Reformed Dad of the Year.”

Loki stood, slowly. “No. But I will decide what happens to her.”

Thor rose beside him. “And if Odin strikes first?”

“Then he does so not as king,” Loki said.

“But as a coward.”

The words fell like stone into still water.
No one moved. Not even Thor.

Loki didn’t blink.
“A coward,” he said again, “who hides behind righteousness while burying the sins of his own making. Who strikes when it’s safe. Who lets the world tremble just long enough to justify wrath. Odin was never afraid of Vé returning. He was afraid of who might stop him. Who might survive it.”

“You,” Natasha said.

Loki met her gaze. “Her. Because she was born of death, but forged by mercy. Not his kind. Ours.”

Hel touched her chest, feeling where the runes had once burned. “They’re still there,” she whispered. “Faint. Dormant. But they remember.”

Loki’s face darkened. “They’ll try to wake again. Vé was never truly whole. He was a ripple — the echo of an echo. His true form lies deeper.”

Bruce looked up sharply. “Wait, are you saying he’s not gone?”

“I’m saying,” Loki replied, “we only sealed a mouth. The hunger still remains.”

Clint muttered, “That’s... super comforting.”

Hel stood, steady now. “Then we find it. We end it. All of it.”

Tony raised a brow. “Easy there, Emo Queen. You just almost cracked open reality like an egg.”

She looked at him — not insulted, not angry. Simply calm. “Then maybe I owe reality something.”

Steve nodded. “She’s right. We stop waiting for Odin. We stop waiting for anything. We make the next move.”

“Toward what?” Natasha asked.

Loki’s answer was quiet. “Toward the secrets that stayed buried. Toward the first gate.”

Thor blinked. “There’s another gate?”

“There always was,” Loki said. “Vé tried to open it once. But it was sealed — by the first gods. Before Asgard. Before Yggdrasil.”

“Before language,” Hel whispered.

Loki turned to her. “You remember.”

“Not in words,” she said. “But in feeling. In pain.”

Tony exhaled. “And I was hoping for a vacation.”

Loki looked toward the eastern ridgeline — where the mist still lingered.
“If Vé rises again,” he said, “it won’t be through Hel. He’ll find another vessel. Another crack. And the next time, we won’t be standing above the wound.”

Steve met his gaze. “Then we find it first.”

Natasha spoke last. “And we end the war Odin forgot to finish.”

The fire hissed as wind shifted. The trees whispered names they did not remember learning.
And somewhere — far beyond the ridgeline — the world turned a page it had sealed long ago.

Dear friends, remember this, every artifact has an origin, even ones we collect from under the flesh, hidden in the bones.

The fire burned lower now, settling into red pulses like a slow heartbeat.
Steve shifted first, his shield half-buried behind him in the pine needles. “We move at first light. If there’s a path to the first gate, we’ll find it through the ridge pass.”

“No satellites in that mist,” Tony muttered, pulling at a thread in his undershirt. “Like the ridge itself doesn't want to be remembered.”

“Old places don’t,” Loki murmured. “They envy the present.”

No one responded to that.
Bruce stood and walked to the edge of the clearing, glancing at the transport case half-hidden beneath canvas near the Quinjet’s landing gear. The one with reinforced containment seals — subtle runes etched into the latches now, though no one could say who had etched them. Or when.

Tony’s voice came, low and too casual. “It’s still dormant.”

Bruce didn't look back. “I know.”

Natasha followed his gaze. Her arms stayed folded, but her fingers tapped once — twice — then stopped. She said nothing.

Clint leaned closer to the fire, poking at the coals with a twig. “We’ve all seen it,” he said. “What it can do. The ring didn’t just grow there. It was placed. Like a seed.”

No one argued.

Loki’s eyes flicked to the case — no more than a second — but the reflection of the flame in his pupils caught, held, and didn’t seem to move quite right. Like it flickered in time to a different fire altogether.

Hel followed his gaze. “It’s calling, isn’t it?”

The silence was brief, sharp.
Loki tilted his head. “Some echoes take longer to fade.”

Thor exhaled through his nose. “And some never do.”

Hel looked toward the mist. Her fingers curled unconsciously against her palm, as if trying to recall the weight of something long ago taken. “It doesn’t feel like Vé anymore. Whatever’s left... it’s thinner. Hungrier.”

Bruce returned to the fire. “Residual patterning. Like psychic resonance. It’s following the ring’s imprint.”

Tony shot him a glance. “You said it was inert.”

“I said it appears inert.”

“Big difference.”

Loki stood then, slow, as if pulled upward by unseen strings. “The Draugnr was never meant to be wielded. It’s not a weapon.”

“Then what is it?” Natasha asked.

His silence lingered just long enough to feel deliberate.
“A promise,” he said finally. “Or a debt.”

Steve narrowed his eyes. “Whose?”

Loki didn’t answer. Instead, he crouched by the fire again and added a single branch — just one — but the flames flared briefly, too high for the size. For a breath, the light shimmered gold.
Tony noticed. Said nothing.

Hel turned to her father. “You knew it would be found.”

Loki looked at her, and in that moment — just for that moment — his face was unreadable. Not cold. Not guilty. Just... composed.

“You don’t plant something that deep,” he said, “unless you expect it to grow.”

Thor’s hand rested unconsciously on Mjölnir’s handle. His knuckles whitened.
The wind shifted again. The fire hissed. Somewhere in the trees, a raven called once and went silent.

Steve stared into the embers. “We move at dawn.”

Clint nodded. “And if the gate’s guarded?”

“Then we knock,” Natasha said, already turning toward the darkened treeline.

No one noticed Loki slip something into his coat — a sliver of broken gold, no larger than a coin. Barely reflective.
But Hel did.
She said nothing.
For now.

They moved before dawn.
No orders were spoken aloud — just gestures, glances, and the rustle of gear drawn tight. The path east of the ridge was barely a trail, overgrown and silent, as if the world itself had closed the page long ago and resented them for rereading it.

Hel walked at the front. Not because she was told to. She simply did. And no one stopped her.

Steve followed, quiet, shield slung low across his back. Clint ranged behind, half-shadow. Natasha watched the tree line. Thor walked a little apart, gaze ahead, as though trying to remember the shape of a mountain he hadn’t seen in lifetimes.

And Loki—
He walked last.
Not out of humility.
Not out of distrust.
But with a kind of stillness that gave space ahead of him, as if the forest chose not to lean too close.

Tony dropped back to walk beside him, scanning the path with a small device that wasn’t really on. “So, just to clarify,” he said, voice low, “we’re heading toward a gate none of us have seen, led by a girl who used to be a weapon, with a magical ring in a box no one can open — except maybe you — and absolutely zero plan.”

Loki smiled faintly. “Clarity is a matter of angles.”

Tony didn’t return the smile. “And plans?”

“Are the illusions of men who mistake motion for control.”

A pause. Then: “Right,” Tony said, and moved ahead.

The trees thickened, gnarled roots like ribs pressing up from the earth. Hel’s pace never slowed, but her fingers brushed against bark as she passed — lightly, almost reverently.

“Does she know where we’re going?” Bruce asked under his breath.

“She doesn’t,” Natasha replied, eyes on Hel’s back. “But something does.”

They crested a small rise. Beyond it: a clearing, circular, too perfect to be natural. No sound. No wind. Just moss-covered stones, sunk halfway into the soil, as though they had tried once to rise, then changed their minds.
Loki stepped into the clearing last.
His footfall made no sound.
The moment stretched.

Bruce moved forward cautiously, running his hand over one of the stones. “Not recent.”

“No,” Loki said.

“Carving’s gone.”

“Not all of it,” Loki replied, brushing his palm across a nearly invisible seam in the moss.
There — for a breath — the faintest hint of a rune flared. Not light. Not warmth.
Just presence.

Hel tilted her head. “I know this place.”

“How?” Steve asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “But I feel… left here.”

Tony set his gear down slowly. His hands were steady. His mouth was not. “So is this where we bury the ring?”

“No,” Loki said, almost too quickly. “We do not bury what is already seed.”

Natasha’s gaze snapped to him. “You said that last night.”

Loki inclined his head. “Did I?”

No one answered.
A low sound came then — not from the forest, but from beneath.
Faint. Rhythmic.
Not breathing.
Not quite.

Hel stepped to the centre of the clearing. She didn’t look at anyone.

“Something below,” she said. “It remembers me.”

“And the ring?” Thor asked.

She didn’t answer. Her eyes flicked, once, toward Loki.
Then down.
The silence folded in.

Loki exhaled — so soft it could’ve been mistaken for the wind — and knelt beside one of the sunken stones.
He traced a spiral. Not a rune. Just a spiral.
Slowly.
A motion that seemed familiar, but from no place remembered.

When he stood, he looked at Hel.
For a moment — a half-moment — the flicker in his expression wasn’t recognition. Or pride.
It was calculation.
Gone in an instant.

Or… almost.

Steve looked between them. “This is it. The first gate?”

Loki didn’t answer right away.
He turned instead to the centre, eyes narrowing slightly — like someone reading between lines not meant to be read.

“No,” he said, softly, “But it listens.”

The wind didn’t return.
Not yet.
The clearing held its breath.

Steve stepped forward, slowly, to stand beside Hel at the centre. He looked around, taking in the symmetry. The way the moss grew in spirals. The faint, charred lines that crossed each stone — not from fire, but from pressure, like something old and heavy had once tried to rise.

“This gate,” he said finally, “what’s behind it?”

Loki didn’t answer at first.
He moved around the circle again, not aimlessly, but counting. Measuring. His footsteps never quite echoed the way the others’ did.

Bruce answered instead. “If I’m right… the gate’s not just a barrier. It’s a seal. A compression of dimensional strata. Something old — pre-chronological. It’s not just that it hides what’s behind it. It dislocates it.”

Natasha frowned. “From what?”

“From everything,” Bruce said. “Time. Identity. Intention.”

Hel touched the moss at her feet. “Memory.”

Tony, arms crossed, raised a brow. “So, great. We’re trying to open an ancient magical vault full of existential static?”

Bruce shrugged. “More like a fail-safe. If something couldn’t be destroyed… they locked it out of the story entirely.”

Steve looked at Loki. “And you knew about this?”

Loki’s eyes flicked up. “No one truly knows the first gate. Only that it was forged before Yggdrasil, before the weaving of fates. Before words.” He glanced at Hel. “But it was remembered by those born outside of fate.”

Hel’s gaze sharpened. “Like me.”

Loki didn’t nod. But he didn’t deny it.

Clint finally spoke. “What’s behind it, Loki? What did Odin try to erase?”

Loki’s face didn’t change — but a breath passed through his nose, barely audible. Not a sigh. Not quite. Almost... regret. Almost.

“There are stories,” he said carefully. “Of the primordial will. Before gods, before life. A hunger that shaped without thought, that desired before desire had shape. Vé was only a fragment. A shadow. The gate may hold what cast it.”

Bruce went pale. “The source.”

Loki’s lips curved — not quite a smile. Not quite.
“You see now why Odin never wanted it opened,” he said. “He feared Vé. But this... he buried.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “Then why come here? Why bring us here?”

“I didn’t,” Loki said. “Hel did.”

Hel straightened — not in protest, but realization. “It called me.”

Steve looked between them. “Then this isn’t just about sealing Vé. It’s about ending something older.”

“No,” Loki said. “It’s about remembering what came before Vé. Before Asgard. What Odin took… and what he paid to take it.”

Tony exhaled. “Okay. Great. So we’re opening a door into pre-god entropy. Anyone else wanna vote no?”

No one moved.

Thor looked to Loki. “And what if it cannot be sealed again?”

Loki’s face stilled. “Then we make peace with the end of stories.”

A beat.
Then, quietly, Bruce said, “That’s what the ring was for, wasn’t it? Not just power. Not just replication.”

Loki’s eyes didn’t move.
But his hands did — folding together, fingers tapping once. Then still.

“A key,” Bruce whispered. “Made of memory. Planted in flesh.”

Hel touched her chest, her fingers pausing over a place that hadn’t ached since the chamber.

Steve watched them both. “And you gave it shape.”

Loki said nothing.
A silence stretched again — not empty, but heavy.

Finally, Natasha broke it. “If we go through that gate, we don’t just find Vé’s source. We find Odin’s lie.”

Loki looked up at her then, eyes too old for his face.
“I didn’t build the gate,” he said. “But I may have left it open.”

The wind stirred, faint, threading through the trees like something listening again.
And in the sealed case, half-buried in moss and darkened canvas, the ring pulsed — not visibly.
Just once.
Like a breath.

Steve’s hand hovered near his shield. Not from fear. From instinct. The kind that came when history stopped being history — and started bleeding forward.
“We’re going in,” he said. “We don’t know what’s behind it. But we can’t leave it for someone else to find.”

Thor stepped up beside him, hammer in hand. “Then let us face it as warriors. As gods, if we must.”

“No,” Loki said, stepping forward. “Not as gods. That’s how we broke it the first time.”

The others turned. Something had shifted in his voice — not volume, but tone. Like old ice cracking under weight.
“You said this was older than Yggdrasil,” Bruce said. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Loki’s gaze turned skyward — toward branches no tree could reach.
“There was a time before the Nine Realms,” he said. “Before even the Well of Urd whispered the future. Ginnungagap — the yawning void. A chaos that sang itself into form. From that came the first fire, from Muspel. And the first frost, from Niflheim. Where they met, something new stirred.”

Steve nodded slowly. “The first life.”

“Not just life,” Loki corrected. “Will. Before purpose had names.”

He knelt near one of the moss-covered stones. Brushed his fingers across a groove, exposing runes long buried: not Futhark. Not even pre-Runic. Proto-elder glyphs — angular and bent like knotted roots.

Bruce squinted. “I’ve seen symbols like that. In old carvings near Náströnd.”

“The shore of corpses,” Loki murmured. “Yes. Because this is where they were sent. Not the dead. Not even the damned. But the cast-off dreams of the first world. The ones Odin feared would dream back.”

He stood again, drawing a line in the moss with the butt of a dagger. “Odin, Vili, Vé — they made a pact after the killing of Ymir. Vé saw too far. Into what lay beneath the void. And he wanted to wake it.”

“And Odin didn’t?” Steve asked.

“Odin did,” Loki said. “But he wanted to be the only one who remembered.”

That landed. A beat of silence.
Then Natasha stepped into the circle. “What’s the gate, really?”

Loki met her eyes. “It’s not a door. It’s a lens. A fracture in the weave. You don’t walk through it. You’re seen by it.”

Hel flinched.
And for a moment, her eyes — no longer glowing — held the shimmer of snow under black sky.

“The ring,” Bruce said. “That’s how we survive the gaze?”

“Not survive,” Loki said. “Translate.”

Tony unzipped the satchel and pulled the case out. “So this little beauty is basically Google Translate for ancient world-eating consciousness.”

Loki didn’t smile. “Not translation of language. Of self. If you enter the gate unchanged, you are undone. Not killed. Not erased. Rewritten.”

Hel stepped closer. “And if I bring the ring?”

“You remember what you were,” Loki said, “before he shaped you into death.”

Something moved in her. A flicker of rage. Or grief. Or both.
Steve asked, “And what’s beyond the gate, Loki? Not Vé. Not his hunger. What exactly?”

Loki’s voice was quiet. “The last ættir.”

Bruce blinked. “The last bloodline?”

“No,” Loki said. “The first. The last of the unbound. Those who never fit into the Nine Realms. Who whispered the runes before Odin hung himself on Yggdrasil. Who created before creation had rules.”

“Primordial beings,” Bruce murmured.

“They were not evil,” Loki said. “But they were…wrong. By Asgard’s measure. Odin cast them out. Vé tried to bring them back. That was the war beneath the war.”

Clint drew an arrow, just in case. “So if they come through—?”
“The Realms shift,” Loki said. “Not end. Not burn. Change. Fundamentally.”
Natasha looked to Steve. “You were right. This isn’t just about closing a gate.”
Steve nodded. “It’s about what comes after.”
Then the earth shook.
Not violently.
Not like a quake.
Like something breathing just beneath the root line.
Moss shivered. Runes flickered.
And Hel — without prompting — stepped to the centre of the circle.
The ring was in her hand.
It was no longer dormant.
It did not glow. It did not hum.
It bled. A faint shimmer of red across gold, as if the metal remembered too much.
Loki’s eyes narrowed. He took a single step forward — too slow to stop her. Too fast to pretend he hadn’t intended to move.
The ground opened.
Not with force. With invitation.
A spiral of stone descended — ancient steps made of fused bone and volcanic glass, slick with condensation, woven with vines that hadn’t grown in a thousand years.
Hel stepped toward it.
Then paused.
And looked at Loki.
“Did you know it would call me?” she asked.
Loki didn’t answer.
Not directly.
Only a smile — brief, controlled.
But this one… didn’t reach his eyes.
Behind him, tentatively, Clint prepared an arrow. He would be the one to shoot first.

Chapter 18: The Hollow Men

The clearing did not open. It recoiled.

First, the silence grew too complete — a silence with weight, like something listening.
Then the roots writhed — subtly, wetly — and the stone beneath Loki’s boots cracked open, not with force but with a sigh of regret. As if the world itself whispered: Not again.
Beneath them: stairs.
Carved in a spiral.
Leading down.

“Go down, go blind, go backward in breath,”
“The one who knows least will step first to death.”

The voice did not echo. It crawled into their ears, lodged behind their ribs. It had no origin, but all of them heard it — not just in sound, but in intention.
Hel stepped forward without pause.

Steve grabbed her wrist. “Wait. This is a trap.”

She did not meet his eyes. “All thresholds are.”

Her feet found the first step. The spiral accepted her.
The others followed. Not because they trusted her — no one trusted anyone anymore — but because in the dark, there was no retreat.
The descent was not steep. It was slow, spiralling like a thought you couldn’t escape. Every few dozen steps, the rock itself spoke. Not voices in the air — voices in the marrow of the stone.

“Who among you still doubts the task?”

Bruce didn’t hesitate. “I do.”

He said it plainly. Not as weakness — as clarity.

“Then speak it.”

“Why must we awaken what Odin buried?” Bruce said. “Why not seal it forever?”

No answer. Only the next whisper.

“To seal again, you must unseal true.”
“A lock can only hold what it knows is through.”

Tony barked a laugh. It sounded brittle.
“We’re following Norse haikus into the pit of hell. Great plan.”

Loki’s voice was velvet and thorns. “Not haikus. Warnings.”

Tony's eyes lingered on Loki’s hands — loose, but too near his blade. Steve noticed. Everyone was watching everyone else. Not comrades — just survivors with shared targets.

The spiral ended in a chamber that should not have existed.
The ceiling pulsed — not with light, but with sickly root-glow, veins of green-white moving like something half-alive. Shadows leaned the wrong way.
The walls moved. Murals— not painted, not carved, but remembered into being.
Steve stepped closer.
One panel shimmered and twisted:
A god, arms straining to hold shut a great spiral gate.
Behind it, something coiled, unseen but vast. A jaw without hinge. A hunger without shape.

“Names will not serve you,” the wall replied.
“Bring meaning, or bring silence.”

Steve backed away. His shield — for the first time — felt ornamental.
They reached a doorway.
No — a wound.
Black roots grew into the shape of an arch, but there were no hinges, no lock. Just a soft rhythmic pulsing, like breath through rot.

Natasha rolled her shoulders. “Another riddle?”

“I ask you this: what opens without hands?”
“What waits without sleeping?”
“What ends without dying?”

Clint glanced sideways at Natasha. She didn’t look back.
Loki didn’t face the door. He watched Hel.
Everyone was watching someone else.

“Do you know it?” he asked.

Hel nodded once.
She removed her ring — gold coiled into tight spirals. A seal of some kind. She held it before the archway like an offering.

“The answer,” she said softly, “is Will.”

The roots screamed — not sound, but vibration — and then split apart.
Behind them: a hall that bent perception.
Stone twisted. Geometry looped. Every shadow moved just a second too late. A pit lay at the centre— not dug, but formed. A hollow where something had once dreamed and now might wake again.
The walls wept mist. Symbols glowed briefly, then vanished.

Clint muttered, “This is the gate?”

Loki shook his head. “No. This is the question.”

Steve: “Then what are we supposed to do?”

“You must wake it,” came the answer — from every direction and none.
“You must name it. Or it will name you.”

Bruce’s breath fogged. The air had turned cold.
“That sounds... dangerous.”

“Everything meaningful is,” Hel said. But even she sounded distant now. Split, somehow. Like a crack had formed under her voice.

Thor stepped forward, Mjolnir ready. “Do we fight it?”

“No,” Loki whispered. “You survive it.”

The pit breathed in.
A ripple of power pressed against their chests — not from the ground, but from inside their own skulls. A throb of wrong memory.

Then — light. Harsh.
From behind.
A second spiral opened — silent until the moment it arrived.

Natasha drew her blade. “We’re not alone.”

No one answered. No one needed to.
From beyond the spiral, a child’s laugh echoed — sweet, high-pitched, and utterly wrong.
They turned — weapons half-drawn, hands twitching, eyes darting — but saw only shifting fog.
And still — they did not move forward.
Not yet.
They gathered at the edge of the pit in silence, as if the air itself forbade sudden motion.

Then Bruce asked, voice low, “Why aren’t we going in?”

Hel didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she turned the ring in her hand, gold catching the green-glow of the walls.
A spiral within spirals.

She said, almost absently, “Because only one of me would come back.”

Steve frowned. “What do you mean?”

She looked up — not cold, not cryptic — just tired in a way that suggested time had stopped meaning anything to her long ago.
“The ring chooses. And it repeats.”

Loki’s voice was the one that answered next, quiet but sharp. “It copies itself. Every ninth night. Precisely at the edge of void.”

Bruce blinked. “You’re telling me it... what, multiplies?”

Hel nodded. “Eight copies. One original. Every cycle.”

Clint gave a short, sceptical laugh. “Rings don’t do that.”

“This one does,” Loki said. “Because Odin never meant it to be used alone.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed. “Eight of us. Eight rings.”

Hel didn’t look at her, but she spoke as if correcting a student. “Not yet. Right now there’s only one. Mine.”

She held it up, and for the first time, they could see it pulsing faintly — not with magic, but with something older. A rhythm older than breath.

“A seal,” she said. “And a test.”

Steve stepped closer. “So... we wait?”

Hel: “If we all want to survive.”

Tony rubbed the bridge of his nose. “So we’re just gonna hang out in a cursed root-hole while your jewellery spawns backup copies of itself like some weird magical printer?”

“It doesn’t print,” Loki said dryly. “It broods.”

Thor turned to Hel, more solemn now. “You brought us here knowing this.”

“I did.”

“You could have told us.”

“I did tell you,” she said. “I told you the answer was Will.”

Silence.
The air around the pit swirled once, like breath withheld.

Steve exhaled slowly. “And if we go in now?”

Hel’s fingers tightened on the ring. “Then only one of us walks back out. If anyone walks at all.”

The chamber reacted — a soft groan in the stone, a stretch in the geometry that made Clint sway on his feet. The pit was listening.

Bruce crouched by the edge, staring into the mist below. “So we wait nine nights. Then another nine. Until there are eight rings.”

“No,” Hel said. “We wait seven. The eighth appears at the turning of the next.”

Tony paced. “Great. A week in a haunted echo chamber with mood-lighting and no snacks. Why not.”

Natasha leaned against the wall, eyes still tracking the strange shimmer on the murals. “Time doesn’t feel normal here. We don’t even know if it’s really passing.”

Loki looked toward the spiral stairs they’d come down. “It is. But not in a way that favours memory.”

Thor stepped away from the pit. “Then we endure. We’ve done worse.”

Steve nodded. “We wait. Together.”

No one answered out loud. But one by one, they stepped back from the edge. Not in surrender. In agreement.
Because survival now was not about force or valour or blood.

It was about patience.
And trust sharp enough to hurt.

They made camp in the weeping light.
And the ring pulsed once in Hel’s palm — slow and inevitable.
The countdown had already begun.

Steve kept to the edge of the firelight.
He wouldn't strike first.
But he already knew who he’d have to stop.

Chapter 19: Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Notes:

Hi everyone, hope you are all alright!
I am sorry to announce that I will not be able to update this story from mid July until the start of August, so I'm writing as much as I can now to 'soften the blow' in some sorts? Anyways thank you so much for all your support, love you so much :)

They didn’t sleep. Not properly. Not all at once.

The chamber wasn’t made for rest — it had no stillness, only shifts.
Light bled wrong through the walls, and sounds returned twisted. The fire flickered when no wind blew. Sometimes it went out entirely for a heartbeat — or an hour — and none of them could tell which.

On the fourth night, Steve found bruises on his ribs he couldn’t explain.

On the fifth, Clint whispered to Natasha that something was moving just beyond the mist, something walking — not pacing, not hunting, just waiting.

And by the sixth night, it had a shape.

The first time they saw it, it didn’t move.
It stood across the pit. Shadowless. Mouthless. Watching.
Its skin looked like someone had carved flesh from stone and forced it to breathe.
Thor raised Mjolnir. The thing did not flinch.

Bruce asked, “What is it?”

Loki didn’t answer. He just stared at it and whispered, “Too early.”

That was when they began to suspect:
The pit wasn’t just listening. It was inviting.

The seventh night came like a bruise.
The ring — Hel’s ring — pulsed once and split.
Right there in her palm, silently, it birthed a second.
The new ring was smaller, duller. But alive in the same ancient way.
It rolled to the stone, and Thor caught it before it could vanish over the edge.

"One," Hel said simply. "Seven more."
No one spoke for a long time.

That was when the thing moved.
No footsteps. No weight. It was simply... closer.
Its face was different now — not featureless, but shifting.

And for one sick instant, it looked like Steve.

Not perfectly — like memory misremembered.
A version of him with too many teeth. Or none at all.

Tony swore. Clint raised his bow.

Natasha didn’t wait.
She moved without hesitation, blade in hand, slicing the distance with every step. She didn’t ask, didn’t shout. Didn’t wonder if it could be Steve — because Steve was behind her. Because Steve was steady, breathing, real.

This thing was not.
It hissed without breath as she cut it across the throat — or where a throat should’ve been — and black mist boiled out like steam under pressure.

It didn’t die. Not properly.
It folded. Crumpled in on itself like wet parchment, vanishing with a sound like cracking knuckles under water.

They stood in silence.
Even Thor did not cheer.
Even Loki did not mock.
Because now they knew.

The rings would come.
One by one.
In time.
But the things — the intruders, the false shapes, the watchers — they didn’t need rings.
They didn’t need anything.
They had time. They had silence. And they had faces.

They buried what little remained. Not because it needed burial — but because Natasha refused to let the shape of Steve linger in the air like that.
Later, no one said it, but all of them knew:
They had been waiting for the rings.
But now, they were waiting for the next face.

 

On night seven, The ring split.
No flash. No sound. Just a soft crack — like bone bending too long under weight — and a second ring dropped from Hel’s palm onto the stone.
It hit with a note like struck iron.

No one moved.

The first duplication. One down. Six to go.
But something else moved.
From across the pit, again — it stepped into view. Same height as Bruce. Same build. But the walk was wrong. Liquid where it should’ve had mass. Like muscle reimagined through the memory of water.
Natasha’s knife was already out.

This time, it spoke.
“I made my peace,” it said. The voice was Bruce’s — but not this Bruce. The tone was off by decades. Calmer. Defeated. “I went into the gate. I walked out.”

Bruce stepped forward. “No, you didn’t.”

“Yes,” the thing said. “I’m what came back.”

And then it charged.

Tony fired the repulsor before Bruce could blink. It caught the thing in the chest — lifted it clear off the floor and slammed it against the far wall.
But it didn’t fall.

It stuck. Like tar. Then slid back down, skin melting over muscle, reforming, steam hissing off the wound.

“Too soon,” Loki said again. Louder now. “It’s not part of the ritual. It’s something else.”

“From where?” Steve barked.

Hel didn’t answer. Not in words.
She took two steps toward the pit, held up both rings, and spoke into the mist:
“The seal holds. You do not yet feast.”

The thing screamed.
Not in pain — in denial.
Thor lunged. The hammer came down like thunder— but the thing wasn’t there anymore.
It had vanished.

“We’re not just waiting,” Steve said later, breathing hard, eyes scanning the dark. “We’re bleeding time. What is this place really, Hel?”

Hel turned the rings over in her palm.
“Odin’s fail-safe.”

Loki scoffed. “Fail-safe? He buried it.”

“He trapped it,” she corrected. “With a ritual that required eight Will-bound souls. Eight rings. Eight chosen. Only then can the lock truly turn.”

“And what’s behind the lock?” Clint asked.

“Not what,” Hel said. “When.”

Silence. Except for the pulsing stone.
She went on.

“The Spiral is a prison for a being that never truly lived — a hunger caught in unfinished time. Odin stole its birth. Froze its potential. But only temporarily.”

Steve frowned. “So this… all of this… is to keep it frozen?”

“No,” Hel said. “This is to choose the one who will carry it.”

That was the truth.

They weren’t just waiting for rings to appear.
They weren’t just avoiding death.
They were being refined.

Because only one of them could enter the gate fully.
Only one could carry the burden.
The others? They were just ballast. Filters. Trials.
That was the test.

They weren't allmeant to survive.

By the eighth night, they all knew it.
That’s when the second false-thing came — shaped like Clint this time. But the eyes were wrong. Wide, hopeful. Like a man who still had a family waiting for him. It said nothing. Just watched Natasha while she slept.
She slit its throat before anyone else woke.

Tension spiked.
Bruce wouldn’t sleep near Natasha anymore.
Tony booby-trapped his bedroll.

Steve caught Loki whispering to the pit. “You’re planning something.”

Loki didn’t deny it. “I’m planning to live.”

They began splitting watches.
No one trusted anyone to take the last shift.
By the ninth night, everyone was armed at all times — even Bruce.

Because now they knew the truth:
The Spiral didn’t just want the chosen one to carry the burden.
It wanted them to choose themselves.
To fight for it.

That night, the fire flickered blue.
The third ring appeared.
Thor reached for it.
But Hel stopped him.

“No,” she said. “You don’t wear it unless you mean to finish the ritual.”

He scowled. “I do.”

“You think you do,” she said. “But the Spiral knows what’s hollow.”

Later, when they were alone, Steve confronted her.

“All of this — this waiting, this death. It’s not about worth, is it?”

“No.”

“It’s about will.”

Hel nodded. “And you’ve already lost part of yours.”

Then the fourth ring appeared.

Tony was next. He laughed, tried to joke — but didn’t touch it.

Because now the stakes were real.

Each ring wasn’t just permission to enter the gate.
It was intent. A silent contract with something deeper than gods.
If you wore the ring, you were offering yourself.

And once eight wore them — the gate would open.
And the Spiral would choose.

But something else had been watching.
The mist coiled.
A voice spoke in Natasha’s ear while she sat sharpening her blade.

“You could end it now.”

She didn’t turn.

“You’re the only one who won’t hesitate.”

Still, she didn’t turn.

“You know who’ll crack first.”

Her grip tightened. Just slightly.

“You know what Thor will do if it’s Loki.
What Tony will do if it’s himself.
What Bruce will become if it’s any of them.”

The voice exhaled like heat behind her ear.

“You don’t have to wait.”

Later that night, the thing wearing Thor’s face stood too close to Hel’s bedroll.
It loomed too still. Breathing too slow. Watching without watching.

Natasha didn’t hesitate.
She never does.
Her blade was out before thought could catch up — a petal-soft movement, deliberate and precise.
When it hit the floor, it bled wrong — not red, but a dark bloom that curled like bruised silk on stone.
Somewhere near her pack, something faint crumpled — the crushed scent of dried petals. A rose.

She didn’t look. Didn’t speak.
Only cleaned her blade.
She never does anything else.

She cleaned her blade without looking at the others.
She already knew who wouldn’t make it to the eighth night.
And worse — who she might have to kill before then.

Chapter 20: We who are about to die salute you

They hadn’t slept in a week.
Not properly. Not all at once.

The chamber rejected stillness. Time didn’t pass here — it dripped. Slow, irregular, poisonous.
The fire flickered blue now. Not heat. Not light. Just a warning.

On the ninth night, the Spiral gave them another gift.
The fourth ring didn’t fall.
It rose.
Straight out of the pit, hovering like a spider on an invisible thread, spinning just slightly in the air.
Hel caught it before it drifted too far.

No one spoke. Not until she said, “Halfway.”

Thor stepped forward. “Give it to me.”

Hel looked at him. “You already wear one.”

“I’ll bear two.”

“No, you won’t,” Loki said, eyes narrow.

Thor didn’t turn. “Do you doubt my strength, brother?”

“I doubt your math,” Loki said. “Eight rings. Eight hosts. Carrying more than one breaks the lock.”

“It might also break the Spiral,” Tony muttered, arms folded. “Worth testing.”

“No.” Hel slipped the fourth ring into the fold of her cloak. “The gate does not test. It waits.”

“And what exactly is it waiting for?” Steve said, voice low. “Because the more rings we get, the worse this place gets. We need to finish the ritual. Fast.”

Hel gave him a look that made the fire dim.
“Finish it?” she echoed. “You’re not even sure who you are yet.”

Steve stepped forward. “I know exactly—”

“No, you don’t,” Loki cut in, amused. “You think you’re still the man from 1945. But this place — the Spiral — it only cares about what you’ll do next.”

Natasha stood, blade in hand. “We’re wasting time.”

Clint stayed seated. Quiet.

Bruce paced the edge of the firelight. “We need to talk about the imitations.”

They all looked at him.

Bruce kept his voice calm, but his fingers twitched.
“They’re getting better. More accurate. One of them looked like me last night.”

Tony raised a brow. “Yeah? Did it argue about particle decay and mutter in Latin while pacing the pit?”

“No,” Bruce said. “It smiled.”

Everyone went still.

“Big deal,” Clint muttered. “They smile. That’s the trick.”

“No,” Bruce said. “It smiled like I used to. Before the lab. Before the accident. Before…”
He didn’t finish.

Natasha met his eyes. “What did it say?”

Bruce hesitated. “It asked if I missed it.”

“Missed what?” Steve asked.

“Myself.”

The fire hissed.
“That’s the Spiral,” Hel said, voice quiet. “It doesn’t lie. It remembers. Every version of you. Every choice you never made.”

Clint finally stood.
“Well then I hope it enjoys silence. Because I’m not giving it a damn thing.”

Steve turned toward him. “You haven’t said much. Not since the third ring. Something wrong?”

Clint met his eyes. Calm. Cold.
“You keep treating this like a mission.”

“It is a mission.”

“No,” Clint said. “It’s a selection. And I think you already made your pick.”

Steve frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I’ve seen the way you look at the rings. You’re already planning who gets what. You’ve got your eight lined up in that soldier head of yours.”

Natasha stepped between them. “Enough.”

Clint didn’t back down.
“You’re protecting him?” he said, voice sharp. “After what you saw last night?”

Steve blinked. “What’s he talking about?”

Natasha didn’t answer.

Tony stepped in. “Okay, new rule: no secrets, no side-eyes, no dramatic pauses. If something happened—”

“I saw someone take a ring,” Clint said.

Hel’s eyes narrowed.
“When?”

“Last night. During second watch. Someone walked to the pit and pulled the third ring from Hel’s satchel.”

“Who?” Steve demanded.

Clint’s jaw tightened. “I thought it was you.”

Steve stepped back, stunned. “That’s not—”

“—but it wasn’t,” Clint finished. “I followed them into the dark. But they were already gone.”

Loki smirked. “Perhaps the Spiral picked early.”

“Or perhaps,” Natasha said slowly, “someone is lying.”

Bruce stood slowly, cracking his knuckles. “Then we do a count. Right now. Show the rings.”

One by one, they complied.
Thor, Steve, Loki, and Hel revealed theirs. Four.

Tony didn’t move.

“Tony,” Steve said.

“I don’t have it.”

“You sure?”

Tony stepped back. “Don’t turn this on me.”

“I saw you tinkering with something last night,” Bruce said, suddenly sharp.

“Diagnostics.”

“You’ve been muttering to yourself every night,” Natasha added. “Coordinates. Calibrations.”

Tony threw up his hands, eyes bloodshot and jaw tight.

“Because I’m trying to get us out of here!” he snapped. “Unlike some of you, I don’t have a magic hammer, a pit-born sister, or a government pay check. I have science. And science needs data.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Funny. For someone who worships data, you sure pick and choose your truths.”

Tony’s gaze sharpened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you talk like the underdog,” Bruce said, stepping closer, “but you’re not. You’re a billionaire in a battle suit whining about how unfair the universe is.”

Tony laughed once — brittle, humourless. “Right, because I built my suit in a palace, not a cave while dying.”

Clint finally looked up. “You’re a hypocrite, Stark.”

Tony’s head snapped toward him.
“Excuse me?”

“You keep playing the genius martyr card like we don’t all know who you were before the suit,” Clint said. “You sold death for a living. Back then, you didn’t need magic or gods. Just a fat check and no conscience.”

“That was a long time ago,” Tony said coldly.

“Not long enough,” Clint said. “You think this Spiral cares how many charity galas you hosted after? It remembers the man who profited off war. The man who built weapons that made monsters.”

Tony stepped forward. “You want to talk monsters, Barton? How many ghosts do you have from Budapest?”

Clint didn’t flinch. “Fewer than you.”

Steve held up a hand. “Enough—”

“No,” Natasha cut in, eyes sharp. “Let them finish.”

Tony turned to her. “Really? You’re siding with him?”

“I’m not siding with anyone. I just know what it looks like when someone’s trying too hard to outrun their past.” She paused. “And what it looks like when someone’s circling the idea of sacrifice.”

Steve took a step forward. “What are you saying?”

Natasha’s voice was low, deliberate. “I think Stark already made a deal.”

Tony’s jaw clenched. “What deal?”

“The Spiral’s offering something,” she said. “I’ve heard the voices too. Promises. Bargains. Maybe it’s whispering something to you. Maybe you already said yes.”

Tony’s voice cracked with heat. “You really think I’d sell the rest of you out?”

“You’ve done it before,” Bruce said quietly.

Tony blinked. “What?”

“In your own way,” Bruce continued. “Lying to us about your suit count. Poking at the Tesseract without telling anyone. You always justify it in hindsight. But here? The Spiral doesn’t wait for hindsight. It acts on intent.”

Loki smirked from the edge of the firelight. “Delicious, isn’t it? Watching your precious alliance rot from the inside.”

“Shut up,” Steve snapped.

But the damage was done.
Loki spread his arms. “I haven’t had to lift a finger. Your mistrust does the work for me.”

Hel said nothing. Just stood watching, the fourth ring turning slowly in her fingers.

Steve turned back to Tony, voice low. “If you’re hiding something—”

“I’m not,” Tony said. “And if I was? I wouldn’t be the only one.”

He glanced around.

“Everyone’s got blood here. Steve, you’re not just a soldier — you’re a symbol no one consented to. Banner, you made a goddamn bomb out of your own DNA. Natasha? You killed for sport before S.H.I.E.L.D. taught you how to do it for policy.”

“And you?” Clint asked. “What’s your excuse?”

Tony’s voice dropped to a razor’s edge.
“I built things. Things that killed people. And I stopped. Then I started building things to protect them. And now I’m here — trying to build something that’ll keep all of you from getting vaporized by an ancient time-eating nightmare worm." He exhaled. “Forgive me if I get snippy.”

Bruce didn’t blink. “You’re not building to protect us. You’re building to control the outcome.”

“And you’re not angry because you’re suspicious,” Tony shot back. “You’re angry because you know I might actually be right.”

A long silence followed. The fire hummed low.

Finally, Steve spoke.
“We need to be better than this.”

Loki laughed softly. “No, Rogers. You need to stop pretending you’re better.”

Hel looked toward the pit. “The Spiral doesn’t judge your past. It doesn’t care who you were. Only who you are now.”

“And who we’ll become,” Natasha added, almost too quietly.

Clint crossed his arms. “That’s what scares me.”

Loki was watching the pit.
The fire flickered.

Behind them, a new shadow emerged.
It wasn’t a false-face. Not this time.
It was something new.

Taller than any of them. Vaguely humanoid. Covered in veils of shifting bone and ember-red light. No face — just impressions of features.
It didn’t speak.
It hummed.

The sound came from inside their skulls. Like memory dragging its nails across thought.

Natasha gritted her teeth. “Kill it.”

“No,” Hel said. “Watch.”

The thing held up a hand.
And from within that hand—
The fifth ring bloomed.
Made of nothing they recognized.

Tony gasped. “It’s artificial.”

Steve stepped forward. “A trap.”

“No,” Hel said again. “A challenge.”

The Spiral had evolved.
It no longer waited for them to fight each other.
It was choosing contenders of its own.

And worse — they were winning.

The figure stepped back toward the pit.
Still holding the artificial ring.
Then, in silence, it dropped it in.
Gone. Like it had never been.

Steve looked at Hel. “What happens if it completes the ritual before we do?”

Hel’s face was pale. Her voice, flat.

“Then it won’t need a vessel.”

Everyone went silent.

Because that meant the Spiral wouldn’t need to choose anymore.
It would simply arrive.

And that night, for the first time—
Tony double-checked the diagnostics nobody else cared about.
The suit held. The math didn’t lie—
Still, his mind ran darker calculations.
Not just who’d fall before night eight.

But who’d stab him in the back first.
And whether, just maybe—
He’d beat them to it.

Because trust was the deadliest weapon he carried, and the merchant of death never forgets who sold him out.

Chapter 21: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

They almost lost Clint on the twelfth night.

Not to death.
Not to madness.
To choice.

He’d gone walking when the others slept—quietly, deliberately—boots silent against the Spiral’s ashen stone. No destination, not really. Just the edge.
Everyone else had been asleep—except Loki, who sat perfectly still in the dark, watching without comment.
And Natasha, who woke seconds too late, the chill in the air sharper than it had been.

They found Clint standing at the brink.
Eyes wide open.
Body still.
Gaze fixed on something none of them could see.

The sixth ring floated before him, suspended in the air like an unblinking eye. Not on the ground. Not on a pedestal. Just… waiting. Pulsing. Softly.
Not claiming him.
Not offering itself.
Simply there.

“It wants me,” Clint said quietly, barely above a breath.

“Back away from it,” Steve ordered, stepping forward, voice clipped.

Clint didn’t blink. “I think it knows I won’t lie to it.”

Tony was next to arrive, gauntlet already lit. “We made a deal. No one touches anything alone.”

Hel stood furthest back, arms crossed, her expression unreadable beneath her silver hair and ancient gaze. “The Spiral doesn’t care for rules. Only revelations.”

Natasha reached him last. “Clint—come back.”

And he did.
But not before his fingers twitched—just once—reaching forward. Not grasping. Not taking.
Just reaching.
And then pulling away.

The ring shimmered.
Not in anger. Not in hunger.
But in acknowledgment.

It did not fall.
It folded back into itself, like breath exhaled.
Vanishing into the pit.

Rejected.

That was the moment they realized the Spiral could be denied.
That selection wasn’t coronation.
It was confrontation.
A mirror held up—asking.
And the answer could be no.

But not without cost.
Clint collapsed an hour later.
Blood leaking from both nostrils.
His words slurred and strange, caught between waking and dream.

Time slipping sideways.
They thought they were losing him.
For a while, they almost did.
But he survived.
Barely.

In his fevered haze, he spoke in fragments. Not to them, not really. Just out. Words with no anchor. Ghosts of thoughts. None of them made sense—until Natasha, sitting silently beside him, finally caught something.
“He smiled,” Clint murmured. “Not like a god. Like a man. In Stuttgart.”
Her breath hitched.
She remembered.
The crowd.
Clint’s face, tight with shame after Loki’s control was broken.
The way he’d avoided her eyes for days.
He’d said it didn’t hurt.
He’d said it hadn’t been real.

But now—
“I saw myself with him again,” Clint whispered. “This time I didn’t miss.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder, gently. “Clint, you’re here. You’re safe.”

His eyes cracked open, cloudy. “But what if I was never meant to come back? What if I was always the weapon—not the archer?”

He looked at her, and for a moment he wasn’t the Clint she knew. He was something splintered.

Hel murmured from the shadows, almost to herself:
“Now it sees him as unfinished.”

Loki stood alone at the rim.
He hadn’t slept since the fifth ring.
Didn’t seem to need to.
Didn’t seem to want to.

The Spiral had spoken to all of them. Differently.
In dreams.
In mirrored memories.
In broken echoes.

But to Loki?
It had shown nothing.
And that, somehow, was worse.

He stared into the Spiral’s depths, where time folded in on itself like silk drowning in water. The bottom could no longer be seen—not for lack of light, but lack of meaning.
Places like this weren’t forgotten.
They were unwritten.

Footsteps behind him.
Measured.

“You’re getting too close,” Bruce said, scanning the rim’s edge with cautious eyes. “It’s feeding on our proximity.”

Loki didn’t look away. “Everything feeds on something. You, of all people, should understand that.”

“You didn’t answer Hel’s question yesterday.”

“Which one?”

“The one about why you’re really here.”

Loki turned, slowly. The wind twisted the edges of his coat.

“Why are any of us here, Banner?” he said quietly. “To redeem? To atone? To survive?” A pause. “No. We’re here because something remembered us. And now it wants to know why we forgot it.”

Bruce frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’ll get.”

Silence stretched between them.
Then Bruce reached into his pack and pulled out something small.
A piece of mirror. Warped. Melted. Wrong.

“Clint had this. Said it showed him a future that never happened. One where he didn’t exist.”

Loki took it slowly. Turned it in his hand.
All he saw was himself—fractured.

That night, they gathered again.

Clint lay near the fire, pale and silent, eyes closed. He hadn’t spoken since the collapse.

Steve rose first. “We vote. One ring left. We decide who carries it.”

Natasha nodded. “Agreed.”

Tony didn’t look up from his screen. “Democracy in the end times. How quaint.”

“You want to lead?” Steve asked.

Tony’s lips curled. “I want to live.”

Hel held the sixth ring, glowing faintly in her palm.

“One of eight,” she said quietly. “One rejected. One left.”

Steve straightened. “You choose who carries it. You’ve guided us this far.”

But she shook her head. “I’ve walked ahead of you. Not for you.”

She looked around the fire, gaze steady.

“The Spiral doesn’t want a guide. It wants a mirror.”

And they all turned.

To Loki.

He didn’t move.
Didn’t blink.

The firelight bent strangely around him, casting impossible shadows. Like he wasn’t entirely there. Like he was peeling away from the page.
Natasha stepped forward. Her tone was steady, but something colder flickered beneath the surface.

“Have you said yes?”

It wasn’t just a question about intention.
It was suspicion wrapped in concern.
A line drawn in ash and shadow.
She wasn’t asking if Loki planned to take the ring.

She was asking if he already had.

Because Loki — clever, evasive, and always two steps ahead — might not have waited for permission. Might not have needed ritual or witness. The Spiral was strange, yes, but so was he. If anyone could’ve accepted its offer in secret, silently, without ceremony, it was him.

And if that had happened—if the Spiral had already reached him, rooted something into him—they needed to know.
Because that would mean the Spiral wasn’t waiting to choose.

It had already chosen.

And now it was speaking through him.

If that was true, they weren’t standing beside Loki anymore.

They were standing beside its mouthpiece.

Its voice, wearing his face.

The fire crackled.
No one moved.
And Loki, as ever, gave nothing away.

Loki glanced at the ring. Then back at the pit.

“You fear me,” he said.

“We don’t know you,” Natasha replied.

Hel extended the ring. Her voice was calm.

“You don’t have to wear it. But you need to touch it. Just once. Then we’ll know.”

He stared at it. Long and hard.
Then, slowly, he reached out.

His fingers brushed the surface.
And the Spiral responded.
The ground trembled. Not violently. Not enough to throw them off their feet.
But enough to wake something.
The pit didn’t crack.
It remembered.

Bruce checked his scanner—only to find nonsense. Symbols that didn’t exist. Numbers that hadn’t been invented yet.
From the edge of the ring, something grew.

A thread.
Thin.
Glowing.
Alive.

It stretched upward, winding into Loki’s palm like a tether. A connection—not forged, but recognized.

Loki pulled back.
The thread snapped. The ring dimmed. And the Spiral whispered. Not aloud. Inside.

All of them heard it.

Soon.

Loki didn’t move.
Didn’t speak.

He watched the pit shift and breathe.
Not afraid of what might crawl out of the dark.
No—
He was afraid of something else entirely.
He was afraid of who might ask him to open the door.
And that he might say yes.

There was a long silence. The kind that settled in your bones.
Thor stepped closer, his brow furrowed, arms crossed tightly across his chest—not in defiance, but in dread. His voice, when it came, was low.
Almost pleading.

“Brother… if there is still a choice left in you—make it now. Not later. Not after.”

But Loki didn’t look at him.
He kept his eyes on the Spiral.
Hel, from the other side, stood very still. Her voice was different now—not distant, not scholarly. Almost reverent.

“It recognized you,” she said.

Not a guess. A truth.

“It knew you before any of us stood here. It’s not choosing you now. It already did.”

"You have got to be kidding me.." Tony face palmed.

Steve glanced between them, tension radiating from his stance. “What do you mean already did?”

Hel’s gaze didn’t waver.

“The Spiral doesn’t wait like we do. It doesn’t move forward. It folds. Inside itself. Outside time. What touches it—has always touched it.”

She turned to Loki.

“It’s not waiting for your permission. Just your alignment. Your clarity.”

Natasha’s jaw tightened. “Then it’s not asking for consent.”

“No,” Hel said. “But it still listens. It wants to know what he’ll say when it asks again.”

Thor looked stricken. Something like guilt cracked through the worry in his voice.

“You should’ve told us, Loki. If something was happening—if it’s been speaking to you—”

Loki finally turned, slowly, like gravity resisted him.

“It hasn’t spoken,” he said. “Not in words.”

“But you feel it,” Bruce said. “You’ve felt it longer than any of us.”

Loki’s silence was the answer.
And in it, something shifted.
Not just understanding.
Resignation.

The Spiral hadn’t ignored him. It hadn’t been silent.
Its voice was already inside him—so deeply buried he mistook it for his own thoughts.

Chapter 22: Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The fire was not fire.
The ground was not ground.
And the past—was not past.

They thought the Spiral was asleep.

They were wrong.

“Listen now, children of ash and lightning, of circuits and steel.
You walk a story spun by liars.
Let the thread burn back to its source.”

The voice did not speak in a tongue.
It invoked.
From the pit surged a rune-storm—gold, black, green.
Not wind. Not flame.
Memory given hunger.

The air itself twisted.
A great ring burst from the depths—but not like the others.
Cracked. Corrupted. Overflowing with blood that wasn’t blood—possibility unwritten.

The Spiral did not offer.
It accused.

And before them rose the Reckoner.
She wore no face. Only a veil of ancient Vanir runes.
A mask of the First Mother, the one who bore Yggdrasil screaming into being and was forgotten.
Her voice was stone and sky and seiðr all at once.

“BY THE ROOT THAT CAME FIRST, I CALL THE CRIME.”

Thor stepped forward, fury in his breath.

“No more riddles! Who speaks?! Who dares lay claim to my brother’s name like a curse?”

The veil turned to him, rippling with runes.

“You, son of storms, dare shout where truth bleeds?
Ask your father what he gave.”

And the earth split open to show them.
Not a vision.
A confession carved into the marrow of the world.

Odin, cloaked in grey, young but crowned with war, knelt before a Spiral unshaped—before rings, before borders, before even the first lie.
The cosmos was raw. The gods had only just stolen fire from the dark.
And Odin was desperate.

“I would know,” he whispered. “I would know all.”

The Spiral stirred, unspeaking.

It was not a god. It was not an oracle.
It was raw chaos, and it demanded a price.

And Odin gave not an eye—
But a child.
Not Thor.

A son not yet born. A thread not yet spun.
Of cold blood.

He gave the possibility of a child to come—
and bound it to the Spiral.

But the memory did not stop there.
It flinched. Shifted. Widened. Another presence moved within the memory. A ripple in time.
A warding spell, cast from far away, deep beneath the Tree.

And a voice split through the vision— Frigga.

She stepped into the echo like a god into war—uninvited, unafraid. Her form shimmered, half-wrapped in moonlight and white root.
Not a queen now— but a Völva. A daughter of the Old Vanir, who remember when the world still bled possibility.

And she spoke not to the Reckoner.
But to the Spiral itself.

“I knew you once,” she said.
“Before the rings. Before the masks.
You were the hunger between stars.
You whispered not futures—but questions.”

She held out her hands—unarmed, unashamed.
“I named him once. I gave him form before he ever drew breath.
Not to summon him—
But to warn him.
That he was watched. That he was wanted.”

The Spiral pulsed.
And then she turned, trembling, toward Odin.

“You swore to me,” she said, not as queen, but as mother. “You said he was mercy. That he was found, not forged.”

The memory splintered.

Frigga’s voice roared through the pit, present, not illusion.
“YOU GAVE HIM TO THIS.”

The Spiral answered:
”He was payment.”

Thor staggered back.
As if the air had turned to glass.

“No,” he whispered. “No, that’s not… that can’t…”

Lightning trembled in his throat.
It struck the pit—
and was swallowed.
The Spiral would not be broken by its own discarded tools.

He turned to Loki.
Broken.
“Tell me it’s false. Tell me you weren’t—given.”

Loki’s face was unreadable.
His hands clenched.
He looked into the pit.
Into the moment where he had once been unmade.

And then he laughed.
Once.
Sharp.
Cold.

“You think I didn’t feel it? All my life. That hunger. That absence.”

He turned to the Reckoner, arms wide, voice rising.

“Say it! Say what I am! Say what he made me!”

She did not hesitate.

“You are the magic that was never meant to speak.
You are Chaos Incarnate.
Not trickster. Not god.
You are the question the Aesir buried under myth.
You are the hole in the world they tried to seal with lies.”

Tony stepped forward, voice shaking.

“No. No no no, we’re not doing this again. No more god-sins and Spiral sacrifice stories. We fix this. We undo it.”

The Reckoner turned her face—if it could be called that—toward him.
And he stopped.

Because she showed him.
Thousands of Earths.
All ending in Loki.
King. Savior. Tyrant. Ruin.
Not one of them free.

Clint pulled himself upright, staring through the visions.
Eyes red.

“You weren’t rescued. You were built. A blade meant to be thrown.”

Loki rounded on him.

“Don’t compare your leash to mine.”

And then Hel stepped forward.
Barefoot. Calm.
Her shadow stretched longer than it should have, twisting across the Spiral-lit stones like a serpent seeking blood.
But she walked with no fear.

Her eyes met Loki’s.
And for a heartbeat, the storm held its breath.
She didn’t look at him like a daughter might a father.
She looked at him like a mirror might look at the wound that cracked it.
Still. Clear. Unforgiving.

And yet—something softer sat beneath her voice.
Not pity.
But recognition.

“Enough,” she said.

Her voice was a blade drawn in judgment, not rage.

“This isn’t just Loki’s tale. It’s ours.”

She turned slowly, letting her gaze pass over the others — Thor, Tony, Natasha, Clint, Steve, Bruce — like a judge weighing the guilty.
“All of us are entangled now. The Spiral doesn’t tell stories. It eats them.”

She stepped down toward the pit, her black robes trailing like smoke.
In her hand, the sixth ring pulsed—chaos and time coiled tight.

But she stopped.
Right beside Loki.
Close enough to touch.

She didn’t.
Instead, she said quietly—only for him:
“I didn’t ask for your blood, or your name, or the silence you wrapped me in.” Her voice faltered. Just a little. “But I am still yours. And you are still mine. And I will not let them unravel you. Not like this.”

Loki looked at her.
And for the first time since the Reckoner’s revelation,
he blinked.

A flicker of something—recognition, maybe regret—flickered through him.

But she was already turning.
To the Spiral.
She raised the ring high, the light spilling up her arm like wildfire licking bone.

“You want action?” she shouted. “You want war?”

And without another word, she hurled the ring into the pit.
It burst into white flame.

Not heat.

Naming.

Words carved themselves into the air:
“The Final Ring Will Choose the Door.”

Bruce stepped forward.
Voice grim.

“I thought we were trying to stop whatever’s coming.”

Natasha checked her weapon. Slowly.

“We’re already inside it.”

Loki’s shoulders rose.
Something inside him cracked.
Not bone. Not resolve. A tether.

The green in his eyes bled white. Spiral white.

Thor reached for him.

“Brother—”

Loki stepped back.
“Don’t.”
“You don’t get to stop me. Not now. Not after what you are. What you let him be.”

The final ring rose.
It chose.
Not a bearer.
A key.
And it embedded itself into Loki’s chest—like a second heart.

The Spiral split.
A door appeared in the pit.
A real, ancient archway, carved from bone and root and flame.

Built in the first war.
The war that came before Yggdrasil.

It was closed.
For now.

The Reckoner was gone.
But her voice remained.

“The door remembers the bargain. Now it wants what was promised.”

And Loki?

He stood at its threshold. Burning. Broken. Cold. And finally—awake.

Chapter 23: And the darkness rained upon them

Notes:

Little reference to the Skulduggery Pleasant series in these two last chapter titles hehe :)

The Spiral did not sleep again.

The stars overhead had twisted, subtly—enough that Natasha noticed first. Constellations shifted, not as if they moved, but as if they were being rewritten, redrawn with different rules.
Geometry turned traitor, or even more than it ever was. North bled into never. Time no longer kept to itself.

No one spoke for a long time. They stared at Loki.
At the ring glowing beneath his skin like a buried star. Not clutched. Not worn. Embedded.

Thor was the first to move. Just one step.

“Loki…”

Loki didn’t turn. He was watching the door. The one only he could see fully now—the one forged of Spiral bone and ancient fire. Carved with the runes of before-time. A door that wasn’t just waiting to be opened— —it was opening. Slowly. Inward.

“Don’t touch him,” Hel warned, soft but firm.

Thor paused. “He’s my brother.”

“He’s the lock,” she said. “You don’t touch the lock while the key is turning.”

Thor’s breath hitched.

“But why can’t I hold him?” he asked—not as a warrior, not even as a prince. As a brother. A child, standing at the edge of something too vast to understand. “Why can’t I pull him back?”

Bruce swallowed hard, glancing at his readings—though they meant little now- his hands itching to rest on Thor's shoulders. “Because he’s not there, Thor. Not in the way we are.”

“He’s right there!” Thor shouted, the fury rising not as rage but as helplessness. “I can see him—I feel him! He’s my brother! He knows me!”

“He’s the lock,” she said. “You don’t touch the lock while the key is turning.”

Bruce stepped closer to the edge, monitoring instruments that crackled with static. “This is worse than dimensional bleeding. We’re not in the Spiral anymore.”

Steve glanced over. “What does that mean?”

Bruce didn’t look up. “I think we’re in Loki.”

Tony muttered a curse under his breath. “Terrific. Magic inception.”

But Natasha was already moving.
Circling toward Loki’s side, her steps measured, boots quiet against the changing stone.

The Spiral was shifting with every breath, every heartbeat of his. It pulsed through the ground like blood in a god’s vein. And Loki—he was silent. Rigid. Not resisting. Not trembling. Just listening. To something none of them could hear.

Natasha didn't look away. Her breath slow. Controlled. She felt the Spiral’s heat crawling up her spine, the pull of its memory whispering in her bones. But she stayed.
Still.

“I don’t believe in prophecies,” she said at last. “And I don’t believe in inevitabilities.”

Loki laughed, bitter and thin. “You believed in monsters, though.”

“I believed in consequences,” she said, and then—without flinching—she stepped beside him. Not between. With. “But I don’t believe you want this.”

He blinked, then snarled. “How could you tell?”

Natasha didn’t step back. Her gaze was steady—not challenging, but witnessing.

“Because you’re still asking.”

Loki scoffed, a short, cutting sound. “How astute. Truly. Are you planning to hang that on a wall somewhere?”

He turned slightly, fingers twitching like he wanted something to throw—not at her, but at the truth coiling tighter around his throat.

“I ask because that’s what people expect of me,” he went on, voice sharper now, but low. “It saves time. Disappointment’s quicker if you get ahead of it.”

He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “And frankly, if I am turning into some ruinous cosmic nightmare, I’d rather no one say they didn’t see it coming.”

Natasha didn’t blink. “That wasn’t chaos,” she said. “That was fear.”

His jaw shifted. “Well. Thank you, Doctor Romanoff. Please recite all my ills and aches and bill them to the golden throne, I am sure they will adore the extensive payments.”

She didn’t smile. “You’re stalling.”

Loki shrugged, slow and theatrical, shaking his hands beside his head. “Fine. I’m afraid. Terrified. Quaking in my boots. Does that help?”

He gestured vaguely to the Spiral scrawled across the skin of his forearm, still pulsing faintly like a second heartbeat. “You think this is something I wanted?”

Her voice didn’t waver. “Then why are you trying so hard to make it sound like you did?”

He faltered—just for a breath.

She stepped forward, measured. The pawn has advanced and become queen. “Monsters don’t ask. They don’t hesitate, and they don’t wait at doors they could tear down. But you do. Even now.”

The Spiral around them pulsed like a held breath. The light warping around Loki stuttered, like it was struggling to maintain its shape.

“Maybe you don’t like the word ‘monster,’” Natasha said, gentler now, “because someone else gave it to you. And wearing it means you don’t have to be anything else. Because if you’re a monster, then people stop expecting you to change.”

His smile cracked. “Gods don’t change,” he muttered. “They just get rewritten with the ills of the time.”

She didn’t argue. “That’s what he made you think.” Checkmate.

“Don’t,” Loki snapped, a bit too fast. The snake has missed its prey. “Don’t talk about him.”

“Why not?” she asked. “He’s still the one you’re fighting. Even now. You keep claiming you’ve burned the house down, Loki, but you’re still living in its ashes.”

“I left,” he hissed. “I chose different.”

“No,” Natasha said softly. “You chose opposite. That’s not the same.”

Loki flinched, like the words had touched something raw.

“You think you’re becoming something you can’t stop,” she continued, voice steady and relentless, a tambourine. “But if that were true, it would’ve already happened. The Spiral doesn’t ask. It takes. And you haven’t let it.”

He looked at her then, really looked, and something about his expression was smaller. Less god. More ghost.

“You think that’s enough?” he asked, but it didn’t come out like a threat. It was just…tired. “Holding out for a little longer, pretending I still have a choice?”

“No,” she said. “I think it means you still remember who you are.”

He turned his head, slowly, like it hurt. His shoulders hunched, the edge softening.

“And you know how I know?” she added, voice like velvet drawn over steel. “Because you didn’t run. You stood here. With us.”

Loki didn’t answer.

The Spiral screamed—high and silent and deep all at once. A sound of unravelling.

Like gravity had remembered him.
Like guilt had finally found weight.

She turned to Loki again. Voice like steel wrapped in velvet.

“You’re not the only one with ghosts,” she said. “Don’t carry all of them like you deserve them.”

The Spiral screamed.
A psychic shriek. Like glass shattering in thought.
And Loki buckled.
He fell to one knee—hands clutching his sides, green light searing out from the seams of his form.
Thor surged forward, desperate, but Natasha caught his arm.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “If you touch him now, it might bind him harder.”

“Then what do I do?” Thor asked.

His voice was breaking.

“Talk to him,” Steve said. “Not as an elder. As his brother.”

So Thor knelt.

“You remember Alfheim?” he whispered. “When we stole that cart of starlight pears and blamed it on the crows?”

A shudder rippled through Loki.

“The Queen made us scrub the library stairs for five days,” Thor went on, laughing softly through the ache. “But you didn’t care. You said—what did you say? That it was worth it to see me smile.”

And then Hel stepped forward. Palm open.

“Let me bear it.”

Everyone turned. Loki stared.

“You—?”

“I was forged in your shadow,” she said. “Let me carry the weight.”

The Spiral shuddered. The echo split. Fractured. But the seal refused. It must be him. Thor shouted, stepping forward— —and Loki moved. In a blur of magic and motion, he caught Hel’s wrist.

“No.”

“I will not damn you for my origin,” he said.

His voice was soft now. But filled with finality. “I am not what he made me.”

Loki's grip tightened on Hel’s wrist, not cruelly—but with a trembling that betrayed more than magic ever could. The Spiral’s glow surged, angry and alive, curling around his spine like a thing that resented being denied.

“I am not what he made me,” he said again, quieter this time, as if testing the shape of it in his mouth. As if it was a spell that might break if spoken too loudly.

Hel met his eyes. And this time, she didn’t try to take the weight.
She nodded.

Behind them, the Spiral door had stopped opening.
Not shut.
But waiting.
Loki let go of her wrist slowly, then straightened, staggering as if his body were half a breath out of sync with the world. The runes along his arms flared and dimmed like a heartbeat too strong to stop.

“Then be something else,” Steve said quietly, stepping forward. Not a command. A plea.

Loki glanced at him, and for a second, he looked… amused. Truly amused. “Captain Rogers. Ever the optimist.”

Tony snorted. “And yet you’re still listening. Which either means we’re growing on you, or you’ve completely lost control of your situation.”

Loki let out a breath—not quite a laugh, but something shaped like one. “Oh, I lost control the moment I agreed to follow any of you into this accursed death helix.”

“You didn’t follow,” Natasha said. “You led. Whether you meant to or not.”

His gaze flicked to her, then away. He didn't argue.

The Spiral had gone almost still around them. Not silent, not dead—but...waiting.

Bruce watched the shifting patterns in the air, narrowing his eyes. “Something’s changing. The frequency—if you can call it that—it’s stabilizing.”

“Stabilizing?” Thor repeated, still kneeling beside Loki. “Is that good?”

Bruce exhaled. “It’s… not bad.”

“High praise,” Tony muttered.

Loki didn’t respond. His eyes were on the door now, half-lidded, like someone listening for a sound too far away to hear clearly. He took a step forward—then paused.

“It’s not done with me,” he said.

“No,” Natasha said, voice level. “But it doesn’t own you.”

He looked at her. And for once, there was no smirk, no twist of irony. Just weariness. And something just behind it—something ancient and unhealed.

“Then what now?” he asked, softly.

“The door is waiting for you,” Hel said. “But not to devour you. To answer you.”

“Answer me?” Loki echoed, dry. “What questions do you think I haven’t already asked the universe? Or screamed into the abyss?”

“Maybe it’s time to stop asking the abyss,” Natasha said.

Loki stepped forward.
Just once.

The Spiral didn’t resist. It shifted. Yielded.

The door pulsed with a pale gold light, no longer devouring but beckoning. Runes rearranged themselves mid-glow, becoming language—memory—invitation.
Thor moved to rise, but Loki raised a hand.

“Not yet.”

He looked at them all. One by one.

Steve, standing like a sentinel in a war that never ended.

Tony, masking fear with sarcasm, but his silence louder than the snark.

Bruce, reading the moment like a fault line, knowing logic couldn't hold it.

Clint, arrow nocked but lowered, aiming only if hope failed.

Natasha, steady and still and unflinching.

Hel, forged in shadow, shining anyway.

Thor, still on one knee, refusing to let go.

Loki took a breath. Held it.

And then walked through the door.

The Spiral did not scream this time.

It sang—an ancient melody woven from fate and fire, calling to one who watches unseen: Frigga’s hand stirring quietly in the shadows, ready to shape what must come.

After all, she was the voice Loki had struggled to recognize—
a presence that had whispered through the cracks of his memory, a girl cloaked in shifting shadows, her face flickering between youth and sorrow, whole and broken.
She had reached out across impossible distance, her eyes finding his with a silent promise: Not alone.

Chapter 24: what the false heart doth know

Notes:

This is likely the last chapter I am publishing before my summer break so I hope you enjoy, thank you so much for your incredible support, love you all!

Loki breathes in darkness.
It fills his lungs like memory — slow, ancient, and unkind.

It doesn’t frighten him.
Not yet.

Fear, he’s learned, is for men who still believe they can be forgiven — or worse, that they deserve to be.
He’s not entirely sure he’s either. Maybe he was, once. Long ago. But this place isn’t built for maybes.
This isn’t that kind of place.

There is no Spiral anymore. No door to test. No grand path to follow or clever journey to outwit.
Just him.
Alone.

Stripped of myth.
Stripped of theatre. Of context. Of the lie of meaning.
No stage left to stand on, no mask to wear, no script to lean into.
No one left to lie to but himself — and gods, he’s always been very good at that.

He stands on ground that hums like memory.
Not alive, but not entirely dead either — warm, pulseless, familiar in the way rot becomes familiar when you’ve worn it long enough, when you stop noticing the stink because it’s soaked into your skin.

He flexes his hands. Slowly. Deliberately.
Still his.
Still dangerous. Still too much for anyone — even himself — to fully hold.
But lately, there’s been doubt. A crack in the illusion.
He wonders if he’s still dangerous enough — or if it’s only the illusion he enjoys now, the theatre of control.
Some days, he plays god.
Other days, he’s just a fractured reflection of one, staring back through broken glass.

He waits.
Waits for the Spiral to speak, to whisper some riddle, some challenge, some test.
It doesn’t.
Of course not.
Mirrors don’t speak. They watch.

So he walks.
There is no path, only the compulsion to move forward.
A gnawing sense that if he stops, something will catch up — something quieter and sharper than fate. As if he might outrun the version of himself that still feels too much, too deeply, too real.
Each step is contradiction.
He is real.
He is not real.
He is the man who lived.
He is the lie they survived.

And then —
The voice comes.
Behind him.
Closer than it should be. Too close.
Too familiar.

“You always do this.”

He turns.
And sees himself.
Younger.
Unburdened. Untouched by truth. Wearing green and gold like they meant invincibility instead of inheritance.
Eyes bright with belief — in love, in destiny, in his own cleverness.

“You walk away before they can love you.”

Loki’s lips twist. A smirk. A shield.

“Maybe I just know what their love does.”

“You mean what yours does.” The younger version tilts his head, smiling just enough to make it hurt.

“To them. To you.”

“Every time someone gets close,” he says, “you tear open the wound and say, ‘Look how deep it goes’ — like that’s proof of your worth.”

Loki turns.
Keeps walking.
The voice doesn’t follow.
But its shadow does.
Clinging to him like smoke — like memory — like guilt he no longer pretends to shake off.
He wonders, for a breath, for a heartbeat, who he might be without the audience in his head.
Without the silent applause of his own shame.

Then the cold returns.
Not frost — not exactly — but the memory of it.
The air thickens. The light bruises. And beneath his next step, the ground shifts.

Roots.

He knows them. Not as vines or branches or leaves, but as bindings. Old, knotted things — not alive but never quite dead.
He sees the hollow again. Though it isn’t really here. It’s inside him. It always was. And in it —

Laufey.

Lying beneath the world.
Half-form. Half-remnant. Not a man, not truly.
More myth than memory. More ghost than god.

“You again,” Loki breathes.

Laufey doesn’t open his eyes.
But he speaks — or something like it.
Voice like crackling rime. Like brittle frost clinging to dead leaves.

“You keep looking for endings,” he murmurs. “But you were born of stories that do not end.”

Loki’s mouth goes dry. “You’re not real.”

Laufey smiles faintly.

“Neither are you. Not in the way they want you to be.”

Loki crouches low.
Not reverent — never that — but reluctant. Suspicious. Tired.

“You still think I need you,” he says, bitterness thick in his throat. “Some scrap of blood to anchor myself.”

But Laufey is already fading.
Not with fire this time — but silence.

“You don’t need me,” comes the reply. “You just still don’t understand what it means... that you survived me.”

The moment breaks like thin ice.
Snaps beneath the weight of its own truth.
He is alone again.

Then — Frigga.
But not softened. Not dulled by memory or grief. This Frigga stands tall as storm light, sharp as prophecy. A queen who knew how to make peace because she first learned how to wage war.
The woman who taught him magic, yes — but also taught him silence. Strategy. Strength.

“You are not a broken thing,” she says. “You are a mirror they feared would reflect their worst.”

He wants to run to her.
To collapse.
To beg — for forgiveness, for guidance, for a moment of peace.
But even now, pride binds him.
Even now, he doesn’t know if he wants comfort — or just the illusion that he doesn’t need it.

“Why didn’t you stop them?” he wants to ask.
Why didn’t you stop me?

But the words never leave his lips.
And she vanishes before they can become real.

And now he is somewhere else.
A library. Or maybe a mausoleum pretending to be one. The shelves are made of bone and breath and things he thought he buried. They spiral inward like guilt.

At the centre, a figure.
Hel.
She sits cross-legged. Still. Her silence isn’t passive. It is judgment.

“I waited,” she says without looking at him. “You always take the long way to admit what you already know.”

He kneels beside her. Though he hates it. Hates the meaning behind the gesture.

“You hate me.”

“No,” she replies. “That would mean I expected more.”

He flinches.

“I didn’t ask you to follow.”

“I didn’t follow,” she says. “I belonged. You just couldn’t look at me without remembering the parts of yourself you carved out and called ‘necessary evil.’”

He looks around.
Everything is unravelling. Thread by thread. No fire. No collapse. Just quiet, merciless undoing.

“This isn’t real,” he says.

She finally looks up.
Her eyes hold something like mercy.
But it cuts like cruelty.

“Neither are you,” she says. “Not the version you wear for Thor. Not the one you sell to the multiverse. Not even the one that cries when no one’s watching.”

He feels it now —
The unmaking.
The Spiral wasn’t consuming him. It was mirroring him. Holding up the shattered selves — and asking:
Which one is the lie?

All of them, he would say.

None of them, he would whisper.

“What are you willing to become,” Hel asks, “when no one is left to witness it?”

He knows the answer. He always has.

Anything.

It has always been anything.

“I don’t know how to come back,” he says.

Not to her. To himself. To the last shard of self still trembling beneath the weight of fear.

Hel touches his hand. Her voice is almost kind.

“Then don’t.”

A beat.

“Just wake up.”

He closes his eyes.
And this time, he doesn’t resist the dissolution.

He lets the lies go first. Then the masks. Then the man.

And the Spiral continues. Only now, it curves outward. Into light. Into noise. Into breath.

He blinks —
And the world collapses.

 

Thor sees it first.
Not the light. Not the shift.
But the way the air pulls inward — Like breath before a word. Like the moment before a name is spoken after too long unspoken.

And then Loki is there.

Flat on the ground. Eyes open. Breathing.

No magic. No explosion. No triumphant return. Just a man. Lying in the dust. Looking up at a sky that — for the first time — looks like sky.

“Brother?”

Thor’s voice is hoarse. Small. A whisper trying not to become a plea. He says it like he’s said it a thousand times. Like the word itself is sacred.

Like maybe if he says it gently enough, Loki won’t vanish this time.

Loki turns his head. Slowly. And smiles. It’s weak, but it’s real.

A crack of sunlight through centuries of storms.

“You always did take forever,” Loki says, the words barely more than breath.

Thor lets out something between a laugh and a sob, and sinks to the ground beside him. The armour creaks. The dust stirs. He doesn’t reach out. Not yet.

Because they’ve learned — hard and often — that touch can be both salvation and rupture.
But he stays.

He’s always stayed, even when it looked like he hadn’t.
Loki closes his eyes.

“I was lost.”

“I know.” A pause.

“Are you still?”

Loki doesn’t answer right away.
Because that’s the thing about Thor — he asks questions like he wants the truth, not just a performance of it.
Like he sees Loki even when Loki doesn’t want to be seen.

His fingers curl into the dirt.
It feels solid. Real. Honest in its simplicity.
His other hand reaches — not to hold, not to cling — but just to touch.
To know something is still there.
And Thor lets him.

And gods — it means more than he can say.
They don’t speak again for a long time.
Because they never needed to fill silence with noise.
Not really.

They’ve shared silences heavier than war.
Sat in ruined halls and funeral pyres and held the weight of unspoken apologies.
Fought side by side and back to back and against each other — and still somehow found their way back here.

To dust. To sky. To this. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But presence.
And that is something.

Loki breathes in the air like it might be enough to hold him together.
Thor watches him like he’s afraid to look away — like something precious he’s already lost once and can’t bear to lose again.
The sun shifts. A breeze stirs.

And for the first time in too long, Loki feels the ache of possibility.

“Next time,” Loki says — so quiet, it’s almost a secret, “maybe don’t let me go alone.”

Thor’s voice cracks.
Not because he’s weak.
But because he’s carried this too long, too fiercely.

“I won’t.”

And this time — this one time —
Loki believes him.

They sit there a while longer.
Gods stripped of war.
Brothers stripped of myth.
Not saved.
Not healed.
But still here.
The others could and would wait for a bit longer.

Yet this gnawing feeling, that so many questions were left out in the void, unanswered, could never leave Loki's soul.

Who did Clint shoot first? What betrayals ran so deep behind the curtains of the stage, no one even saw them, even if they were present, screaming for recognition?

And through this all,
Thor never once mentioned the truth.

Never spoke of the moment when the battlefield fell silent. Not because the fight had ended, but because of the shot that shattered the fragile truce.
Not the arrow Clint fired many times, but the mercy Thor denied.

He never admitted that, in the chaos of battle and broken timelines, there had been a decision—one he made alone, one he made for Loki.

Because if the others had known, if any of them had known what Loki was, what he could still do- they’d have never let him leave that cell.

Not even in chains.

Thor had seen it—that split second when Loki faltered, when his magic cracked and bled out, when the brother who had been trickster, prisoner, god, was just a man begging for salvation.

And Thor stepped forward, the weight of centuries heavy on his shoulders, and stopped the hand that could have ended it all.

Not because he trusted Loki’s innocence. Not because he believed Loki deserved grace.

But because if Loki died there, the myths they’d lived for would die with him.

The stories, the very essence of Asgard itself, hidden behind the facades of war and violence— they needed Loki to stay alive.

As much as they needed the lie of loyalty, as much as Thor needed the impossible hope that his brother could still choose to be something more.

So Thor kept silent. Kept the truth buried beneath his hammer and his oath.

Because some sacrifices are not made in fire and blood, but in silence and shame.

And so, the brother who looked like the hero, the warrior who thundered and roared, became the keeper of the greatest lie of all:

That Loki could still be saved—
even if it meant Thor had to betray everything else.
He would do anything for Loki, but it was no secret for the rest of them. They had known.
He would be the one to shoot first.
He already knew who he’d have to stop.
she might have to kill before then.
He’d beat them to it.

Chapter 25: Doubt truth to be a liar

Loki has always loved stories.
But he never loved how they end.
Because endings are not truth. They are decisions.
And the difference between a tale of redemption or ruin is not whether the hero fell — but whether enough people agreed to look away when he did.

He feels that weight now, heavy as chains without the iron.
The others stand around him, saying nothing, watching him breathe, exist. Norns know when they arrived, he could not remember. Perhaps by Thor’s call, announcing that he had existed the spiral’s plane of existence (maybe unscathed) and had decided to grace them with his appearance.

But in their silence that welcomed him back to a surer reality, he hears something worse than accusation. He hears agreement.
See, history is written like this.
By pauses. By omissions. By the choice not to say the word that would split the ground open. He knew that with Odin, with Laufey, with the Norns, and even with himself, history had taken dramatic turns. Falsifying something that relied on people’s malleable opinion was too easy.

And gods, he could feel it—
Thor was holding something back. He could see it in the way he carried his hands, in the tension in his shoulders that even in face of war and death, did not lower him down so deeply.
But it was not out of cruelty. That would have been easier. Cruelty he could endure. Cruelty he could answer with teeth and fire.
No. This silence is mercy. And mercy is always the crueller cage.

He studies them.
Clint’s jaw locked too tightly. Natasha’s stillness like a blade waiting to be drawn. Bruce’s eyes restless, reading equations that don’t exist. Steve, straight-backed, as if posture might excuse silence. Stark, his trembling hands hidden behind his back. Thor—his brother—looking at him with too much devotion, too much guilt.

Something has been done.
He knows it in his marrow.
Something was chosen for him, about him, without him.
And now… no one will speak.

“Why,” Loki says at last, his voice calm, almost gentle, “do you look at me as though I’m already lost?”

Thor flinches. A small thing, but Loki sees it. Always, he sees it.

“Brother,” Thor begins, soft, pleading, as though the word itself might erase the question.
But it doesn’t.

The silence after drips like blood from a wound.
And Loki realises — none of them will answer him. Not yet. Not until it is too late.
So he does what he has always done. He weaves his own thread.

He remembers fragments. Not Spiral fragments — those were fever, vision, undoing. These are different. Sharper. Real.
The clash of battle. When? He could not identify.
A silence in the middle of chaos.
An arrow loosed, swift as judgment.
And then—nothing.
No pain. No piercing.
Just the strange certainty that something should have ended — and didn’t.

He looks at Clint. “You fired.”

Clint doesn’t answer. His bow hand twitches.

He looks at Thor. “And you stopped it.”

Thor swallows, but no words come.
Ah.
There it is.
The lie that birthed the silence.

Loki laughs. It is thin, cracked, full of something older than joy.
“So this is it,” he murmurs. “Not prophecy. Not destiny. Not some ancient door. Just a choice. A hand raised at the right moment, and all of you agreed to call it something else.”

“Loki—” Natasha starts, but he cuts her off with a sharp look.

“No. Don’t you see? This is how it works. This is how truth is made. Not by gods, not by monsters, but by consensus. By enough of you nodding in the same silence until it becomes history, like 2 plus 2 equals 5.”

His eyes glitter, fevered. “I should be dead. That’s the truth. But you chose not to say it. You buried it under mercy, and now here I stand—still dangerous, still unbearable—because you could not decide whether to let me live or to let me die.”

Thor steps forward, desperate now. “I could not lose you.”

The words land like a dagger.
Not because they are cruel.
But because they are true.
And Loki hates him for it.
The betrayal is not the arrow.
It is not the silence.
It is not even Thor’s hand swatting death aside.

The betrayal is this:
That they all agreed to pretend he was still free, still himself, still more than a weapon.
That they let him carry a life he no longer owns.
That they sat and watched while his story became theirs to decide.
Loki stares at them all, and for a heartbeat, he is every version of himself at once. The prince. The prisoner. The monster. The brother. The lie. Then at Thor.

Thor has never cared for stories.
But he has always believed in their endings.
Endings meant order. They meant that a battle was won, or lost. That the world turned, bruised but steady. That a brother either stood beside him or fell.
But the Spiral had no endings. It twisted, frayed, bled into itself until every thread felt unfinished. And so when the moment came — that arrow, that breath, that choice — Thor did what he had always done. He forced an ending.
He saved Loki.
The ground still trembles in his memory, the arrow shattered by Mjolnir’s strike, the silence that followed louder than any thunder. He remembers the eyes on him — Clint’s burning with shock, Natasha’s narrowed like a blade, Banner’s trembling, Steve’s quiet judgment, Stark’s clenched jaw.
And in that silence, Thor felt the oldest weight: not his hammer, not his crown, but his father’s voice.

“Mercy can be a greater chain than death.”

He had hated those words once. Now he understood them.
Because in sparing Loki, he had bound him tighter than any cell. Tighter than the cube Odin had locked him in. Tighter even than love.
Later, when the smoke cleared and the bodies cooled, he stood before Odin and Frigga.

Odin’s one eye was hard as the edge of a blade. “You have doomed us all, boy. The Norns cut threads for a reason. You tangled them.”

Frigga’s voice was softer, but no less merciless. “You did not save your brother, Thor. You condemned him to a story he cannot escape.”

Thor’s hands shook. Not even in battle had they shaken so. “He is my brother,” proud even in his shame, said only, “I could not lose him.”

But even as he spoke it, he knew. This was no mercy. This was the crueller cage.

 

Thor has always trusted strength.
But this time, strength was useless.

Returning from the wreckage in New York caused by his brother, he was spiralling. No hammer, no storm, no roar of thunder could free Loki. Not because the prison was unbreakable—it wasn’t. Thor could have shattered it as he had shattered fortresses.

But because the true bars were silence.
Silence of the guards, who had learned not to speak Loki’s name.
Silence of the court, who bowed to Odin’s decree.
Silence of Odin himself, who believed that forgetting Loki was safer than forgiving him.

And Thor—Thor could not bear it.

The first move was Frigga.

He found her in the garden, where roses bloomed without season. She was pruning them, as if the world had not frayed at its edges.

“Mother,” he said, bowing as he had not since boyhood. “I cannot leave him there.”

Her shears paused. “You think him wasted. But the world thinks him poison.”

“Poison,” Thor said, “is still part of the body. If it is ignored, it festers. If it is understood, it can become cure.”

Frigga’s lips curved faintly, sorrow pulling them down. “You would risk all Nine Realms for your brother?” Show me the heart you propose on a platter, my son. The Norns will be agreeable.

“I would risk myself,” Thor said. “And without him, I cannot protect the rest.”
She said nothing more. But the next day, the guards at the dungeon turned their eyes away as Thor passed. He did not ask if she had commanded it. He did not want to know.

The second move was the Council.

Generals argued for chains. Diplomats demanded assurances. Elders warned of omens and betrayal.
Thor stood tall. “The fraying of Midgard spreads. Realms falter, memory falters. If Loki remains caged, so too do the answers he carries—and the child he has left on Midgard, the one who may yet guide him toward purpose, remains orphaned in intent as well as in blood.”

One elder spat, “And if the Trickster caused this fraying?”

“Then who better to end it?” Thor returned. “Would you rather stumble blind, or place the knife in the hand that knows where to cut? And consider—if he acts, it will not be recklessly. The boy, his son, anchors him to reason. We do not ask for trust, only for leverage.”

The Council muttered, restless. In the end, they gave no blessing. But they did not forbid him either. In stalemate, Thor found room to act.

The third move was Heimdall.

At the Bifrost’s edge, Thor found him staring into horizons that broke and stitched themselves again.

“You already know,” Thor said.

Heimdall’s golden eyes flickered. “I know every path but one—the one where you do not ask me this.”

Thor swallowed. “Will you let me take him?”

Heimdall’s gaze narrowed. “Your brother is a fracture. And so is this fraying of Midgard. Yet I see another: the boy he has left on Earth. Sometimes the child bears the weight of his father’s choices—and can guide him back from ruin. Will this tether suffice to restrain him?”

Thor’s voice was firm. “It must. The boy is not a threat, nor a weapon. Only a reason to hold fast. For Midgard’s sake, for the realms’ sake, for all we hope to preserve—Loki must live, and act with purpose.”

Heimdall lowered his sword. “Go. But understand: the path you carve will not close again. And even the best intentions can fracture under the weight of family.”

 

The fourth move was death itself.

Thor found Hel waiting in the shadow of the root of Yggdrasil, where the light of Midgard dared not wander. She was taller than mountains, darker than night, her eyes the same as Loki’s—though sharper, colder, and filled with a patience that measured lifetimes.

“You summoned me,” she said, voice like ice cracking.

Thor bowed slightly. “I need the Book—the one where names are crossed when life ends. Loki’s life.”

Hel’s gaze sharpened, and a shadow of sadness flickered in her eyes. “You would ask your brother’s daughter to interfere with Lady Death’s judgment?”

“Because,” Thor said, “the fraying of Midgard spreads. Only he can speak its language. If he dies… all is lost. If he lives… there is hope.”

She laughed then, low and strange, echoing both Loki and something ancient beyond him. “You think you command me. You forget I am his daughter. And yet, I see his spark, yours, and… the child.” Her eyes darkened, a storm gathering in their depths. “Your reasoning is practical. You see the boy as a tether, a guarantee that Loki will not stray. But you fail to see—he is my brother too. My reckoning, my burden.”

Thor’s chest tightened. “I do not speak of him lightly. I speak of him only as assurance—nothing more. My concern is the realms, not vengeance.”

Hel studied him, a predator weighing prey against predator, daughter against father, consequence against intent. “You will not lie to me, Thunderer. This child… will he be a reason for Loki to act justly, or merely a reminder of what can be lost?”

“Both,” Thor said. “And that is why I must ask this of you. Not as Death. Not as judge. But as family. Keep his name unmarked—for now—so that his father has a reason to hold fast.”

She paused, the shadows shifting around her like living things. “Very well. I will not cross him lightly. But… for you, brotherless Thunderer, his name will remain open. Remember this: life borrowed is debt deferred, not erased. And know this—blood is heavier than honor, and consequences deeper than intent.”

Thor nodded, feeling the chill of eternity wrap around his heart. “Then I will pay it.”

She smiled thinly, a mixture of pride and warning, and faded, leaving only shadow—and the echo of words Thor could not unhear.

 

And still, the Avengers.

“So let me get this straight,” Stark said, pacing the hangar. “You want to take your genocidal brother out of Asgard’s cosmic jail and bring him here. For what—family bonding? Intergalactic therapy?”

Thor’s jaw tightened. “Because the fraying of midgard will not end peacefully. And he is the only one who can speak its tongue.”

Banner shook his head, muttering about equations that wouldn’t hold. Natasha said nothing, her silence sharper than any blade. Steve folded his arms, soldier-still.

And Clint—Clint met Thor’s eyes. His voice was flat, deadly calm: “If he slips once, I’ll be the one to end him.”

Thor nodded. “Then you will not stand alone.”

It was not reassurance. It was oath.

The last move was Odin.

Thor found him alone in the great hall, ravens restless on their perches.

“You think you are merciful,” Odin said, one eye gleaming. “But what you do is weakness. You free him, and you unmake the order I bled to build.”

“Then let it be on me,” Thor said.

“It will be,” Odin answered, voice low as thunder. “Every choice you make binds more than yourself. It binds your realm. It binds your brother’s doom to your hand. Do you swear, Thor Odinson, that if Loki betrays you again—if he risks the Nine Realms, or Midgard—you will end him yourself?”

Thor hesitated. He thought of Loki’s laugh, sharp as broken glass. He thought of their mother’s tears, of the Avengers’ mistrust, of the Spiral’s endless hunger.

“Yes,” Thor said.

A lie.

So it was not by force that Loki was freed.

Not by pardon, not by trial.
But by bargains whispered in gardens, by debates drowned in politics, by Heimdall’s quiet mercy, by Frigga’s love, by Odin’s damning silence, by Avengers too wary to stop him—and by Hel, who allowed the Book to remain open for one more life.

Thor told himself it had cost little.
A few words. A few looks. A few promises.
He did not yet understand—
what he had spent was not coin, but truth.
And the debt would be endless.

Chapter 26: I am a man more sinned against than sinning

Notes:

I am going mad.

“What did you do to me?”

The words crack the chamber like thunder. Loki staggers forward, clutching at his chest as though he might rip it open and prove he is still split inside. His body shakes violently, green fire spitting from his skin, twisting into wild serpents of flame that scorch the stones.
Thor steps forward, but Loki reels back with a shriek.

“You think me blind? You think I cannot feel it? I was gone, Thor—gone! The Spiral unwound, the gate opened, and I stepped through! I felt her arms—I tasted peace—” His breath breaks, voice collapsing into a ragged sob. “And you dragged me back!”

His magic lashes the walls; cracks spiderweb across the stone.

“I WAS DEAD!” Loki roars, fists clenched, eyes blazing with emerald fire. “I crossed the threshold, brother! I was free! And you ripped me from her embrace!”

The Avengers exchange stricken glances, the green fire painting them in a ghastly glow.
Natasha’s voice cuts the silence, cool but shaken. “The Spiral… it wasn’t—”

“Say it!” Loki whirls on her, hair whipping, teeth bared. “Say what you all knew! The Spiral was no curse—it was a door! A stair that led down and down and down—until her!”

“Her?” Banner breathes, voice tight.
“Death.” Loki’s voice drops to a near whisper. “The Lady of the Veil. She named me beloved. She never turned her face from me.” His hands tremble. “And you—Thor, you stole me back.”

Thor’s fists clench, thunder rumbling faintly above.

Loki laughs, shrill, jagged, deranged. “All of you—you watched me rot, watched me crawl, listened to my screams, and not one of you spoke truth! You left me chained in the dark while you traded whispers!”

His gaze slashes to Hel, who lowers her eyes. Loki’s face twists, venom dripping from his tongue. “You knew most of all, daughter. Silent shade—always watching, never warning. Faithless and treacherous as your sire.”

Thor tries to step in, but Loki silences him with a raised, trembling hand, pacing like a beast trapped in a burning cage. His voice shakes, venom building into hysteria.

“You can’t even say it. Shall I? Shall I tell them what you all try to bury?”

The Avengers tense, weapons half-raised but uncertain.

“My son,” Loki spits. “My curse. My blood, chained in shadow. The child you pretend does not exist.”

Steve stiffens. Natasha’s eyes narrow. Clint glances sharply between Thor and Loki.

Banner whispers, “He’s telling the truth…”

“Not another fucking child,” Tony says, jaw tight, gaze hollow.

Thor growls, thunder in his throat. “Enough.”

“Enough?” Loki wheels on him, his body convulsing. “Say it, Thor! Tell them why you would drag me from death itself! Tell them what monster waits for my fall!”

And Thor breaks, voice a storm.

“Because if you fall, Loki—your son devours the Nine! Without you, all realms burn! The prophecy binds you as surely as chains! Death of existence, all because of you. ”

The words hammer the chamber into silence.
The Avengers stare, horrified.
But Loki’s laughter erupts again—high, wild, hollow. “So that is all I am. Not brother. Not kin. Not son. I am leash. Anchor. Warden of a beast.”

Thor’s voice trembles with rage. “You are necessary.”

The word slices deeper than any blade. He sounded exactly like the father who raised him.

Loki staggers back as if struck. His hands claw at his own skin, dragging across his chest, his arms, staring at himself like he does not recognize what he sees. His laughter sputters, devolving into a rasp.

“What did you do to me?” he whispers—not to Thor now, but to his own body, his own trembling hands. His gaze flickers wild, lost, as though something inside him no longer fits.

The Avengers exchange concerned looks.
Clint’s voice breaks the silence, low, almost involuntary.

“What did you do?”

Loki freezes. His eyes burn with madness and memory. A shiver of recognition—an old, festering horror—rises like bile in his throat.

“Loki, what have you done?”

“I was only a child,” he breathes. His knees buckle slightly; he curls in on himself, hugging his arms to his chest as if seeking the comfort of a small, forgotten body. His voice cracks, high and trembling.
“Alone. Unseen. I had been attacked during a diplomatic negotiation on another realm, sent by royal decree. No one noticed when I returned, the burns and cuts on my legs, bruises covering me like ornaments on my arms. So I prayed into the dark for justice, for fire, for the universe to notice me. And it did—not with mercy. Not with love—but with hunger. With a mirror that burned my own face back at me.”

His green fire flickers wildly, forming brief, almost childlike shapes—a doll, a toy, a tiny figure trembling in a corner. Loki sways slightly on his feet, rocking as if to soothe some phantom pain, his body betraying the small, desperate boy inside him.

Loki wails, a sound both adult and childlike, curling further, green flames flickering into grotesque, fleeting shapes—a doll, a shadowed boy, a faceless echo of Thanos. The chamber shrinks under the weight of his confession.

“Thanos…” Natasha breathes, her voice tight.

“Yes,” Loki whispers, thin, brittle, cracking like ice. “Not some alien conqueror, not a cosmic tyrant… but my echo, my torment. A child of my own shadow, born before I had even fathered another. He was the answer to my prayers… the only way I thought I could erase what I feared most. My son.”

Steve staggers back, jaw slack. “You… you wanted Thanos to—”

“To burn Midgard!” Loki snaps, green fire lashing like whips. “To erase prophecy, to bury my child before he could even walk, before he could breathe, before the universe could measure his worth. I prayed for devastation, for annihilation… anything to make the boy, my own blood, vanish.”

Clint stumbles backward, whispering, “Oh… my god…”

Banner steps closer, voice pale and trembling. “You… you created a monster to destroy… your own child?”

“Yes!” Loki shrieks, body rocking on its knees, curling in on itself, arms wrapped tight as though hugging the small, desperate boy he once was. “I was only a child when I shaped him! I prayed into the void, and it answered! But not with mercy, not with love—only hunger, only shadow, only torment given flesh! He became the instrument of my own guilt, my own fear!”

Loki screams, voice fracturing into high, infantile cries.
His laughter fractures into a scream, tearing out of his throat like a storm ripping mountains apart:
“I HAVE ABANDONED MY CHILD!”

The chamber shakes, dust raining from the ceiling. Green fire explodes outward, rattling the walls.
The Avengers recoil—Steve pales, frozen in shock; Natasha’s hand trembles as if reaching out but unsure; Clint mutters a curse under his breath, wide-eyed; Banner steps back, white-faced, muttering,
“No… no, this can’t be.”

Hel lifts her gaze at last, tears burning down her face, and her voice cracks: “And you wonder why I watch you now, father? Because I am the child you left alive. Because I am what remains of your shadow and your mistake. And yet you cry victim?”

Loki ignores her and curls tighter, rocking, infantile shapes flickering in the firelight around him, green flames shaping twisted toys, fragments of a small boy. “I was too young… too damned young,” he whispers, voice breaking, raw and tremulous. “I sired my son before I knew how to even be… me. Too young to hold life, too young to love, too young to bear what I created. And I—left him. Alone. Unseen. Chained in prophecy I could not yet understand.”

Steve takes a half-step forward, voice thick with disbelief. “You… you were a child yourself?”

“Yes!” Loki snaps, voice high, cracking. “I was a boy crying into the dark. My magic, my rage, my prayers… they built him, a mirror of my own fear. Thanos was my shadow, my torment made flesh, sent to erase what I could not bear to face: my own child, my blood, my failure!”

Natasha swallows, voice barely a whisper. “All this… all this time?”

Loki’s gaze snaps to her, blazing, manic. “You think I am cruel? You think I am mad? I am both. I was made mad by my own helplessness! By being too young, too fragile, too unseen to save what I already created!”

Banner shakes his head, horrified, stepping back as if physically recoiling. “And now you… you were dragged back—brought back—to watch it unfold?”

“Do you see me?” Loki wails, curling further. “To watch the doom I prayed to avoid! To witness the shadow I birthed destroy what I loved—or would have loved! I am leash, keeper of monsters, father of guilt and terror! And now… I am trapped, my son’s doom… the Nine Realms’ doom… my own damnation!”

Hel kneels slightly, her voice softening, mournful but firm. “You are my father. And because of that, I am bound to you. But I am also your child. I will bear your truth, Loki, and maybe, only maybe, hold the remnants of what remains.”

The chamber is silent but for the crackling of green fire, shadows trembling like the ghosts of Loki’s fractured childhood. He rocks slightly on the floor, whispering, then points an accusing finger towards the figure that was retreating further away from his body: Thor.

“You saved me not from death—but for doom. My son’s doom. The Realms’ doom. You did not save me, Thor—you damned me. All of it… all of it is my curse. And I—”

He falters, rocking slightly, a small, anguished boy trapped inside a god, a father, a destroyer, green flames flickering around him like the broken echoes of every choice he ever made.
Never alone, she said. He was always alone.

Chapter 27: Cowards die many times before their deaths

“What did you give her, Thor?”

Loki’s words cracked the air like glass shattering. His fire lashed violently against the stone, scorching deep scars into the walls. He staggered forward, sweat shining on his brow, his voice jagged with hysteria.

“Tell them!” he spat. His magic flared green and violent, his eyes wild. “You had to have done something to reap me out! Tell them what you paid to drag me back from her arms!”

Thor did not answer. His silence was thunder smothered — unbearable, suffocating.

The Avengers exchanged uncertain glances. Stark’s brow furrowed, Clint’s fingers twitched toward his bowstring. Banner muttered under his breath, “What price?”

“Say it! Say it, before I tear it from your throat myself!”

Thor’s shoulders shook, and still he stood in silence.

“Coward,” Loki spat. His laughter was sharp and desperate. “You preach of honour, of truth, and yet you cannot even—” He raised his hand, a dagger flashing into existence.

“He did not just take out a dagger,” Tony said, mouth agape.

At last, Thor’s voice broke, heavy and strained as if pulled from the bottom of the sea.

“I swore an oath.”

Loki froze. His fire guttered low, but dangerously contained. His eyes narrowed to slits. “An oath. To whom?”

Thor’s face was pale, drawn tight with something worse than fear. He looked not at Loki, but at the floor, as though the truth itself burned to be spoken. “To Father. To the Norns. To Death.”
The words dropped like stones into a lake—rippling outward, choking the air.

Loki’s lips parted. A hollow laugh caught in his throat. “And what was this oath, brother mine?”

Thor’s chest heaved. His voice came low, heavy, thunder coiled in grief.

“That if you should betray us again—if you faltered, if you doomed the Nine—then I would be the one to end you.”

The silence was brutal.
Even the Avengers, who had seen monsters rise and fall, who had stood against gods and armies, seemed stunned into stillness. Banner’s jaw worked soundlessly. Natasha’s hand twitched toward her belt. Clint lowered his bow inch by inch, eyes darting between them. Stark muttered a curse under his breath.

Only Loki moved. He began to laugh. Thin. Hollow. Cracked at the edges.
“There it is,” he rasped. “The truth laid bare at last. Not brother. Not kin. Not son. Just leash. Just executioner. Father’s hound, sent to keep me bound until the day you are ordered to bite.”

“Loki—”

“You sound exactly like him.”

The words fell into the room like lead.
“Death herself?” Steve repeated slowly. His voice was steady, but his grip on the shield tightened. “You mean… death as in…?”

“Not a concept,” Natasha said quietly, her eyes fixed on Hel, who watched in silence. “A person. A sovereign.”

“Not a sovereign,” Hel corrected, her voice rolling cold and final. “The sovereign.”

Tony blinked, his sarcasm breaking thin against the weight of it. “Okay, timeout. You’re saying there’s an actual ledger keeper of the afterlife? Someone decides who… what… checks in?”

Hel’s gaze turned to him, expression unreadable. “There is no choice. Only claim. The worthy die with honour and are carried to Valhalla. The rest are written into my keeping, their names crossed from the halls of the living. It has ever been so.”

“And you—” Loki’s voice rasped, broken laughter laced through it. “You bargained with her. To keep my name open.”

Thor’s silence was answer enough.

Banner frowned, his mind racing. “Why would a bargain even be necessary? If he lived, he lived.”

“No.” Thor shook his head. “He did not live. He had fallen. I watched it—I felt it. His body cold, his breath gone. His name was already in her book, half-crossed. Father demanded it be sealed, to keep him there.”

Hel’s withered hand rose. The air around them tore like fabric ripping apart. Shadows thickened, swallowing the fire’s glow. Loki’s magic faltered, guttering low.

From that darkness, a figure emerged.
She did not walk. She arrived. One moment, the space was void. The next, she stood there, as though she had always been.

Lady Death.
Her form shimmered between beauty and void — a woman shrouded in mourning, her skin pale as bone, her eyes unfathomable wells where stars drowned. In her arms she carried Nafnafjǫlskrár- The Scroll of Names Counted Many, the book of death- cradled like both child and weapon. Its pages whispered like restless spirits, names bleeding and reforming with every breath.

The Avengers froze, their lungs seized by the weight of her presence.

Hel bowed her head, her voice reverent and cold. “Mother. Keeper. She who claims.”

Tony blinked hard. “Wait. Mother? She’s your—”

Hel’s gaze flickered to him, her ruined side darkening. “Not my blood. I am Loki’s daughter, born of his chaos. But Death is the root of every underworld. To name her Mother is not lineage. It is respect. Fear. The title of the First Sovereign.”

Tony’s mouth shut instantly.

Lady Death regarded them all, her voice neither loud nor soft, but absolute.
“The child speaks true. She is not of me, but beneath me. All thrones of endings rest on my hand. And all names pass through my keeping.”

The Book stirred in her grasp. Ink bled across its open pages, restless and alive. There — Loki’s name glowed faintly, half-erased, caught between presence and absence.

Loki’s breath caught. His eyes widened in horror. “I’ve seen you,” he whispered. “In death. In dreams. You were always there.”

Lady Death turned her gaze upon him, her words falling like stone.
“You were mine the moment you were born. Your thread spun black, your name written in my pages. Never once did it touch Valhalla’s light. You were never theirs, Trickster. You were always mine.”

Loki trembled, fury and despair twisting in his voice.

Thor stepped forward, anguish breaking through. “I begged her — begged Death to let his name go unwritten. To give him one more chance beneath the sun, to shine on us once more.”

Clint’s voice cut through the silence, rough and bitter. “If that’s true… then why us? Why are we tied into this circus act?”

Hel’s gaze burned cold as she looked upon them, one by one.
“Because you all defied the Book.”

The Avengers froze. Like deer in headlights.
“You had him in your grasp,” Hel said. “He lay broken, the name half-faded. And yet you — mortals who had every right to strike the killing blow — did not. Some chose mercy. Others chose hesitation. And in that choice, you bound yourselves to him. His name twisted, unravelled, and rewove around yours. By sparing him, you wrote yourselves into his prophecy.”

Banner shook his head violently. “That’s not… that’s not how death works.”

“It is exactly how death works,” Hel replied. Her voice carried the weight of grave soil. “Every life you spare becomes a thread tied to your own. Every mercy carries weight. Every hesitation binds you to the consequence of what that spared soul becomes. When he falls — and he will fall — each of you will feel the echo.”
“Aren’t you convinced that your life is a mosaic of people you see, meet, encounter?”

They nodded, hesitantly.

“Life is but a mirror to death, isn’t it not?” She smiled at the mortals’ dawning realisation.

The fire guttered low, shadows trembling across the walls.

Tony broke the silence at last, voice sharp but hollow. “So we’re all tangled in the trickster’s noose. Great. Just… fantastic. Jarvis is never going to forgive me.”

Lady Death turned her gaze upon them, and the Book’s ink shifted, glowing as if the words themselves judged.

“Natasha Romanoff — you will lose redemption. When his thread ends, so too will your chance at absolution. The world will remember you as killer, not saviour.”

“Clint Barton — you will lose legacy. No matter whose hand ends their life, it will be your arrow the world recalls. Betrayal will stain your name.”

“Bruce Banner — you will lose balance. When he falls, your fragile peace shatters, and the monster will remain.”

“Steve Rogers — you will lose faith. When Loki breaks, your creed will break with him. You will be the soldier who no longer believes.”

“Anthony Stark — you will lose legacy. What you build will crumble with him. History will call you ruin, not saviour.”

Finally, her gaze rested on Thor. The silence pressed down like the weight of the cosmos.
“And you, Thor Odinson — you begged for his name to remain unwritten. But names cannot be denied forever. When he falls, it will be your hand that casts him down. And what you lose will not be crown, nor hammer, but truth. You will end your brother without ever knowing if he was villain or victim, monster or martyr. That knowledge will die with him.”
Thor bent beneath her words, the strength gone from his frame.

Loki laughed, jagged and cracked. “So my life is not mine. My death not mine. Even my damnation already written.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I should have been left in your book.”
Lady Death said nothing. Her silence was ownership. Final.

And none of them — not even Thor — could speak against it.

Chapter 28: What is done can not be undone

He lied.
Some might say by nature, by want of a spectacle; for falsehood was the breath he lived on. But then, it wouldn’t have been a lie, for he never tricked everyone into believing something entirely inconceivable, he had not misled or deceived anyone for that matter.

So it was nothing but the truth, then. It was by no fault of his, of course, that no one grasped the turn of phrase he had presented them.

He had, in fact, abandoned his child.

But by no means did that mean the boy was never seen, never recognised, completely left alone from the start. No—he had held him. He had spoken to him, answered the small questions that only children ask, the ones that tear straight through the armour of gods.

Yet presence is not the same as permanence. He had been there only long enough to plant questions in the boy’s heart that no one else could answer, only long enough to shape a shadow that would stretch across his every year. To visit is not to remain. To touch is not to hold. His voice, though remembered, was like a lantern that burned itself out—warming the boy only once, yet leaving him forever chasing its faint glow.

For the gods are cruel in their affections: they give a taste of eternity and then withdraw, leaving mortals famished for what they cannot name. He had given the boy a glimpse of greatness, then sealed the door behind him. What was that, if not abandonment? He had poured into his son a spark, a glimmer of fire, and then smothered it with distance. The boy, left behind, bore not only absence but the unbearable ache of having known presence once. The gods wound most deeply not with their wrath, but with their touch withdrawn.

Attachment had never been his sin—continuity was. He believed presence could be portioned, rationed like coin. He believed a child could survive on fragments, that love could be delivered like rain: in brief, necessary showers, then withheld again. He mistook sufficiency for abundance, mistook glimpses for devotion. He believed wrong. The boy knew it, even if he could not yet name the knowledge. He would carry it like marrow, a quiet ache that no godly words could mend.

Abandonment: to yield what was held. To loose one’s grasp. To set adrift what was once anchored. To leave behind, knowing it lives still. That was the truth.

And he, if nothing else, was precisewith his words.

Lady Death rested her steady gaze on him. Of course she would know. Much like the Norns themselves, Lady Death had the utmost infinite knowledge of life and death, but hers was a knowledge gentler, heavier. She did not accuse him—she had no need. She simply bore witness, and in her gaze he felt the unbearable truth: that leaving a child is not a single act, but an endless one. Every day thereafter is another abandonment. And she saw each of them, counted them, weighed them like coins on her eternal scales.

But her silence did not remain silence. In the marrow of his bones, he began to hear her voice—soft at first, insistent soon after. Tell them. Tell them the truth.
It was not spoken aloud; the Avengers never stirred when the words pressed against his skull. Yet the command threaded itself through his every thought, each repetition striking like a hammer against stone. Tell them. Tell them the truth.

They were there, as always. Stark tinkering at the edge of the firelight, muttering to himself about impossible repairs. Rogers seated upright, gaze unwavering, a sentinel even at rest. Romanoff leaning into shadow, silent but sharp, her eyes flitting over him with surgical precision. Barton sprawled casually, laughter quick to his lips though it never touched his eyes. Banner hunched, quiet, his voice always a fraction too gentle, as though he feared breaking what he touched. Thor—his brother—sitting nearest, broad shoulders bent forward, grief thick around him like storm clouds.

And Death pressed their faces into his skull, her whispers lashing with merciless rhythm. Tell them. Tell them the truth.

Steve, breaking the silence one night with a voice too heavy for comfort: “Sometimes it’s family that makes us who we are. Even when it hurts.”

Her voice rose with his. Tell them.

Clint, grinning over his drink: “Kids have a way of forcing you to see yourself, huh?”

Her voice lashed, venom sharp. Tell them.

Natasha, quiet as a knife: “Secrets rot. They always do.”

Her voice thundered now. Tell them. Tell them the truth.

Even Thor, foolish, earnest Thor, had said it—his voice trembling with some stubborn hope. “Brother… I would stand beside you, no matter the cost, if only you would trust me.”
Her words became a roar in his veins. Tell them. Tell them the truth.

Unlike the Norns, she did not weave. She cut. She ended. And this was her cutting—not of his life, not yet, but of his peace. Until he yielded, until he confessed, she would plague him with her command. Tell them. Tell them the truth.

Why? Because their fates were now tethered to his, entwined in prophecy, bound in her ledger. His silence was not only his curse but theirs. If he did not tell them, they would walk blind into the jaws of his son, into the unravelling of realms, into doom written in green fire and shadow. They had already lost too much to ignorance. He had already cost them more than they knew.

Lady Death’s eyes, vast and pitiless, bore into him. And Loki knew: there would be no escape. Not for him. Not for them. Not until he spoke.
Lady Death’s silence lingered like frost. No breath stirred, no fire cracked. The chamber itself seemed to hold still, waiting.
Then her voice, low, relentless, cut the stillness.
“Tell them.”

Loki stiffened, every muscle tensed as though the word itself was a blade pressed to his spine.
Her eyes did not move from him. “Tell them what you buried. Tell them the truth.”
His breath hitched, sharp and ragged. “They know enough.”

But she stepped closer — or perhaps the space simply yielded until she was there, at his side, towering without motion. Her shadow stretched long and consuming, swallowing the green flames.
“They know nothing,” she said, her tone neither cruel nor kind. “They see prophecy. They see ruin. They see leash and monster. But they do not see you. They cannot hold what you will not speak.”

Her gaze flickered down, to the floor, to the twisted shapes his flames had birthed again without his consent — a doll, a cradle, a faceless boy.
“You think silence shields them? No. Silence damns them. Already they are bound to you — threads knotted, fates tied. Every lie you tell corrodes their chance to survive you.” Her voice dropped, heavy and absolute. “If you would not damn them further, Trickster… speak.”

Loki’s lips parted, trembling, but no sound came. His throat convulsed like he might retch.
Thor stepped forward, voice low, almost pleading. “Brother—”

“Do not call me that!” Loki snapped, voice cracking like glass. His chest heaved, hands clawing at his own skin. “Do not speak as though you ever knew me!”

But the whispers rose again. Not from Thor. Not from any Avenger. From her.
“Tell them. Tell them. Tell them.”

Each repetition was soft as breath, yet filled the chamber, worming into every ear. Natasha’s brow furrowed, her hand twitching toward her temple as if to silence the echo. Steve gritted his teeth. Banner shook his head as though to clear it.

Clint swore under his breath. “You hear that too? It’s not just him, right?”

“She’s in our heads,” Tony muttered, jaw tight. “Fantastic. Death has a one-track mind.”

“Tell them,” Lady Death said again, and now her voice thundered, shaking the chamber, rattling the weapons at their belts. “Tell them before I carve it from you myself.”

Loki doubled over with a strangled cry, clutching his temples. “Enough!”

His flames flared wildly, wrapping the chamber in green light. And in that blaze, the Avengers saw not a god, not a villain, but a child — small, trembling, eyes wide and wet with fear.

Steve’s voice broke through, soft but resolute. “Loki… if this matters to her — if it matters to all of us — then you have to tell us. Whatever it is, we need to know.”

Natasha’s gaze sharpened, her voice flat but cutting. “If you don’t, we’ll walk blind into whatever’s coming. And that helps no one. Not you. Not us.”

Thor’s hand reached forward, hesitant, as though he dared hope to bridge the chasm. “Do not make me beg you, Loki. Please.”

The voices pressed harder. The whispers became a chant.
“Tell them. Tell them. Tell them.”

Lady Death’s gaze burned into him, not cruel but inescapable. “If you speak, they may yet stand with you. If you do not, they will fall because of you. Their blood will stain your silence.”

Loki shuddered, laughter breaking jagged from his lips. “You think truth will free me? It will chain me tighter. They will despise me. Hate me. Kill me—”

“No,” Lady Death said, her voice iron. “They will see you. And whether they turn away or stand beside you — that is the only choice you will ever own.”

The Avengers stood frozen, the weight of her words pressing heavy on them all. Banner swallowed hard. Clint shifted uneasily. Natasha’s gaze never left Loki’s. Steve took one step closer, steady as ever.
Tony muttered, voice hollow, “Well, Trickster? Cards on the table. Because I’m not dying tangled in a prophecy you’re too cowardly to spit out.”

Silence fell again. Every eye burned into him. Every breath seemed to wait on his next word.
And still, beneath it all, the whispers throbbed like a heartbeat.
Tell them. Tell them. Tell them.

The green flames writhed violently around him, casting grotesque, flickering shadows across the chamber walls. Shapes formed and vanished — a child’s hand, a crown, a clawed silhouette, a face both familiar and terrifying.

“I… I held him,” Loki whispered, voice breaking, raw as exposed nerve. “I spoke to him. I answered his small, piercing questions. I… I let him know he was mine. And I… I left him. Knowing he lived. Knowing… knowing what he was capable of.”

Hel stepped closer, her pale hand on his shoulder, grounding him even as the chamber trembled. “Speak it fully, father. The truth does not end at the edge of your guilt. They must understand. Only then will the weight of prophecy shift.”

“I cannot!” Loki shrieked, throwing his hands into the air, green fire lashing violently. “I cannot tell them everything! They will hate me! They will fear him! They cannot bear it—”

Lady Death’s eyes burned into his, infinite and merciless. “You think silence protects them. It does not. It only drags the chain of your choices behind them. Tell them the whole truth, or I will carve it from you.”

Steve’s hand tightened on his shield. “Loki… if you don’t tell us, if you keep this shadow hidden, we step blindly into the storm. You cannot protect anyone alone. Not him, not us.”

Natasha’s gaze was sharp, relentless. “We’ve faced monsters before. But this… this is different. If you hide what you know, the consequences will crush us all.”

Loki’s flames writhed into the shape of a small boy, his face shifting in agony and laughter. “He lived,” Loki whispered, voice cracking. “I… I saw him. I held him. I… loved him. And I… I set him adrift. I left him knowing he would live. Knowing he would carry the curse I could not bear to face. Knowing… knowing he would become what I feared most.”

Banner’s hands shook. “You knew him, and you still left him?”

“Yes!” Loki’s scream pierced the chamber. “I knew him! I saw his face! I heard his laugh! I felt his hands! And I… I let him go! Because to hold him was to risk… everything. Because love would have blinded me to fate! Because the child I bore… my son… could not be spared from prophecy, not even by me!”

The Avengers recoiled at the rawness of it. Steve’s jaw clenched, Natasha’s fingers twitched, Banner’s face was pale, Clint muttered under his breath. Tony’s eyes darted between Loki and the ghostly flames, a hollow dread in his voice.

Hel’s pale hand rested on his shoulder, steady, unflinching. “Then let them see it. Let them grasp the weight of what you carried, and what your silence almost destroyed. Only truth can spare them the ruin your fear wrought.”

The chamber grew silent. The Avengers’ faces were pale, horror and disbelief etched into every line. Tony’s jaw was tight. Natasha’s hands were clenched. Steve’s gaze was steady but haunted. Banner’s whole body trembled. Clint whispered under his breath, muttering a curse he could not stop.

And Loki, trembling, green flames curling weakly around his form, breathed out at last, the words heavy with despair, wonder, and inevitability:
“He is on Midgard… on Earth.”

The chamber held its breath, the weight of revelation settling like a tide over all present. Every eye widened, every heart caught in a frozen moment of comprehension. The prophecy, the curse, the hunger, the shadow of Thanos — it was not some distant, cosmic threat. It was here. It was real. And it was the son he had loved, held, and abandoned.

Lady Death’s eyes bore into him, infinite and unyielding. Hel’s hand remained on his shoulder, a cold anchor in the storm. And Loki, finally, let the truth settle — heavy, undeniable, and irrevocable.

Loki’s body shivered, the last of the green flames flickering weakly across the chamber. His hands pressed to his face, then fell to his knees. “Do you think it simple?” he murmured, voice broken, almost pleading. “To leave a child… and yet never truly leave him? To abandon, and yet remain?”

Steve stepped closer, cautious but steady. “Loki… help us understand. You’ve told us he’s here, on Midgard… but how? How can a father abandon and protect at once?”

Loki’s laughter broke, hollow and jagged. “A father… a god… must measure every action against what is inevitable. I held him long enough for him to know me, to feel the spark of my presence. Enough to shape the man he must become… and no more. To stay too close would have endangered him. To intervene would have unravelled everything. And yet…” His voice trembled, thick with grief, “…yet I watched. From shadows. From distance. From oceans. From the corners of his life I could reach without touching. I did not leave him to die. I left him to survive. To grow. To endure what only he could endure.”

Natasha’s brow furrowed. “So it wasn’t cruelty. It was… strategy? Or fear?”

Loki’s eyes, wet and wild, flicked to each of them in turn. “It was love. And terror. And hope, twisted into something unbearable. I had to let him walk a path no one else could guide. And now… now he is here. On Midgard. My son. My fault. My burden. My hope.”

"You have done well, Trickster." Lady Death said, as she rested her solid hand on Loki's sunken shoulders. "Mother remains proud of you."

The laugh of a little boy, the now recurring sound of a broken crib echoing in the room once more. Another child to haunt him, to inherit his treacherous self and cowardice.

The gods fear thee, Trickster. Don’t you see the price rolling down in their blood? The vengeance you had asked may come to serve you once more, through the life of a son.

What a mirror this is, abandoning the idea of a son for protection. Aren’t you eeringly similar to the Alföðr, little one?

Notes:

First time writing so i hope you guys enjoy :) Don't mind the mistakes if there are some, or please just signal them out to me!
I was inspired by a fanfic that I absolutely loved, please check it out! The Prestige by black_feather_fiction
I hope to update sooner, please give me any requests or ideas if you'd like :)
Thank you, hope you are having a nice day!