Fantasy short. One of Odin’s record-keepers interviews the god Loki.
Here’s a big one! 13.6k, rated M for violence, featuring some Loki and Baldr, some Odin scheming off-screen. Lots of delving into and playing with the stories, but with an angel thrown in for flavour.
It is not the only of Loki’s living spaces.
He has homes throughout the realm of Midgard, let alone the others, and this has been his favourite for some months — it’s his habit to move continuously and constantly from one place to the next, one city or town or island or stronghold to the other, but of late, he’s enjoyed this area.
It’s a small town, but not so small that people have particularly taken notice of the man in the top floor of one of their more neglected apartment buildings. He hasn’t deigned to speak much to those locally, although with his hair, the jewellery he wears, and the tattoos on his skin, he has heard passers-by gossip and make commentary, assuming him to be a Parisian if not a foreigner.
It’s thick forestry nearby and he’s enjoyed the relief from the cities and towns, has spent many days walking in the forest with his bare feet on the ground, enjoying the feeling of dirt under his feet, the earth slightly wet and clinging to his skin, the grass staining his soles.
The mud easily washes off whenever he returns home and bathes his feet before climbing the ladder up to the sixth floor (he has used the front door of the building precisely once), but the equally sticky, unnerving sensation of blood clinging to his hands, caking under his fingernails and sticking fast in the spaces between his fingers, won’t wash away so easily.
The woman in his living room is quite beautiful, bald-headed and dark-skinned, her lips thin, her eyes very large. They’re a very dark colour, the colour of her irises so black as to seem a natural extension of the pupil, flecked only in places with dark grey, and they’re ringed with a very thin line of shining gold.
She’s sitting primly beside the open fireplace, the fire crackling behind her, her back straight, her hands folded into her lap. She’s unnervingly thin, her cheeks slightly hollowed and slight shadows under her eyes — her head seems slightly too large for her too-thin neck and narrow shoulders.
“Are those Kayser-Fleischer rings?” asks Loki as he glances from the woman to the door and the central window, his runic defences still resting in place, unbroken and uninterrupted.
“Kayser-Fleischer rings are caused by deposits of copper in the Descemet’s membrane, and are typically accompanied by other unnatural accumulations of copper within the body,” she says serenely: there is a warmth in her voice, which is not abnormally high in pitch, but has a breathless quality to it. “The rings banding my eyes are a bleeding-through of my celestial nature. If I bleed, I bleed the same colour.”
“Ichor?” asks Loki, arching one eyebrow.
“Blood,” she says. “But it is gold. Be you Loki of the Völuspá?”
Loki’s wry smile drops from his face as he stares at her, his eyes narrowing, his hands coming to rest on his waist, his weight shifting back on his heels. “Odin sent you,” he says disgustedly.
“Yes,” she says, still serene. “Be you Loki?”
“Be you an angel?”
“Yes. Will you have me ask you a third time?”
“I am Loki,” he says. “Who are you?”
“Varði is my name.”
“Varði is a boy’s name,” mutters Loki as he pours water into the kettle and sets it on the stove to boil. “He didn’t tell you that when he gave it to you?”
“Are you a boy?” asks the angel. Loki wonders if he coached her to say that, or if she knows well enough how to cut someone on her own.
“It should be Varda,” maintains Loki.
“Would you prefer to call me so?”
“Odin named you?”
“He did.”
“How did he come by you?”
“He came by me, Fallen, and took me to his breast, protected me.”
Loki lets out a low, scornful noise, imagining it, an angel Fallen that Odin came by. That’s not right at all, not usual, and it makes something twist in the base of his gut, a mix of disgust and fear and distant anxiety. “Is that what he told you?” he asks, almost rhetorical, but before she can answer — and she is going to answer, her lips parting in preparation — he asks, “Who are you? Why has he sent you here?”
“I am a record-keeper,” she says. “I take note of journeys and battles, ardours and labours.”
“For Odin?”
“For the records.”
“The records,” repeats Loki. “Am I to take that to mean you don’t mean his personal ones?”
“They are everyone’s records,” says Varði.
Loki sets the water aside, now boiling, and pulls out several jars from the shelf, setting them in a row. The angel watches him with polite interest, her gaze fixed on the movements of his hands as he scoops out dried flowers and leaves, blending them to his preference before he readies them to steep.
“Will you tell me of Baldr?” asks Varði after several more moments of silence.
“Baldr is dead,” says Loki.
“He was dead,” agrees Varði. “And then he lived — and then he died again. And then he lived. And then he died again.”
“You’re missing out a few hundred repetitions,” says Loki, meeting her gold-ringed gaze in challenge, but she doesn’t flinch away from him, doesn’t show any response at all. She just looks back at him, placid and unaffected, which he can’t help but think is a smokescreen for something or other.
“Will you tell me of him?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” asks Loki, and even before it comes out of his mouth he feels his teeth grow closer to fangs, feels the urge to let his teeth gnash, to let his mouth snarl. “He’ll be out of Hel again soon enough.”
“I am asking for the records,” says Varði.
“You’re asking me?”
“That is what is happening, yes,” she says.
He almost smiles at that, but something stops his lips from curving — the desire still to snarl, maybe, or perhaps just the almost-certainty that she knows more than she is showing, is more than she appears.
“What do you know?” he asks her.
“Almost nothing,” she says, as if it doesn’t trouble her at all. “I have not lived very long.”
“Haven’t you?”
“No, no,” she says in quiet, musing tones, her gaze flitting away from Loki for a moment as she appears to look inward. “I am younger than the sun and the moon, the Earth and the planets, the stars and all beyond them; I am younger than the water and the soil, the stone and the wind. I am younger than almost all of Creation.”
“Than Creation? Who sold you that turn of phrase?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Whose creation is it?”
Her voice is confident as she answers, “The sons of Bestla,” but there’s a catch in her face, perhaps a slight narrowing of her own eyes, that prompts him to correct her.
“The three sons of Bestla created Midgard when they slew the giant Ymir,” Loki tells her as he touches the back of his fingers to the kettle, feeling the heat of the water before he lifts it and pours some into a pot. “Ymir was the first of the giants, so big and so great that when Odin, Vili, and Vé slew him as he slept, blood ran from his body in rivers that drowned all the other giants that lived, bar a couple who were able to escape the deluge. The sons of Bestla then dragged the body of Ymir, dead and mostly of its lifeblood, to the Ginnungagap, wherein they threw it. This empty, yawning void made up most of the universe, sandwiched between Niflheim and Muspelheim, and from this corpse, they created much. They made oceans and lakes, rivers and streams, from what remained of Ymir’s blood, that which had cooled in his veins and had not drained away; from his flesh came land, from his bones, mountains, from his teeth, the rocks and stones. His hair became the trees and grasses, and his eyelashes became Midgard — Earth.”
“I did not ask for this story,” says Varði. “I know it already.”
“All of Creation, you said,” Loki reminds her, “and you said the sun and the stars, mentioned the other planets, even. Did the sons of Bestla make those?”
“I know the story of the sun and moon,” says Varði. “I know of the man Mundilfari and his son and daughter, his arrogance in naming them for their bright shine and beauty, and that they were later put into the sky to become them. Odin did not mention it was in your nature to take offence to such unimportant turns of phrase.”
“There is no such thing as an unimportant turn of phrase, Varði,” Loki warns her, stirring the infusion and looking at the water as it changes colour, taking on a red-tinged golden colour. “As a record-keeper you ought know that.”
“Will you tell me now of Baldr?”
“Am I being hounded for his most recent death?”
“Am I a hound?”
“You’re Odin’s dog, from what I can see.”
“I am no dog,” says Varði. For the first time, he hears the slightest strain of emotion in emotion in her voice, defensive, mildly angry. “I am a record-keeper.”
Loki stares at Varði, and unblinking, Varði stares back at him.
Loki takes in a slow breath through his nose, feeling the air sink down into his lungs, filling them to their brim before he exhales through his mouth, his lips forming a tightly controlled O. He brings the pot over and sets it down on the coffee table in front of the fire, one cup in front of himself, the other in front of Varði.
“Will you tell me now of Baldr?” asks Varði again.
“If you take some tea.”
Varði looks down at the pot, her brow furrowing slightly, and then she gives a nod of her head. “Yes,” she says, and watches him pour.
“I was in a night club in Mumbai, and — ”
“No, no,” Varði interrupts him, and although she is cupping her cup of tea in her palms, about to take her first sip from it, there’s suddenly a leather bound book on her lap that hadn’t been there a moment before: it is open, and dark blue ink with a familiar spell is beginning to etch itself across the heavy parchment pages. “From the beginning, please.”
“The beginning?” Loki repeats. “Surely you know the story.”
“I know the story,” Varði agrees. “But I am the record-keeper. This is your record. No one will tell the story as you do.”
Loki sets his jaw, and as one they take sips from their respective cups, the tea mildly astringent but with a floral note to it, powdery, ever so slightly sweet. The fragrance soothes him, and he feels his body relax, his shoulders easing back to make contact with his armchair, his legs coming up to fold beneath him. There is a natural liquidity to his body at times, the instinct of a shapeshifter to change forms when altering position, much as water changes its shape when transferred from one vessel to the next.
His hips melt beneath him, all of the bones of his legs merging into one, the bones of his feet, too, into a single tail. His denim jeans take no umbrage with it and simply follow suit — they know better than to complain by now.
“Very well,” says Loki. “Baldr was born on a summer’s day. Even from that moment, he was beautiful and admired, doted on by all around him. He was golden-skinned and golden-haired, and even his eyes were golden — not like yours. They were the gold-white of sunlight, such that looking him in the eyes, even as you bounced him on your knee, would be to burn your own.”
“Did you bounce him on your knee?” asks Varði.
“I did not,” Loki answers. “I was young when Baldr was born, as yet a stripling. A teenager, you might say now, a young teenager — this being long before such a word existed, before the idea of a teenager, I mean. Even then, they didn’t trust me to hold the babe. I was a student of Baldr’s mother, Frigg, who taught me magic.”
“Why?”
“Why didn’t they trust me, or why did Frigg teach me?”
“Yes,” says Varði.
Loki’s lips twitch. “Be careful, Varda. I’m beginning to like you.”
“It does not matter whether you like me or not,” says Varði. “I am here to keep the record.”
Loki huffs out a quiet chuckle, and he slides his thumb against the handle of his mug as he looks across at her. He doesn’t often dwell on thoughts of his childhood, not when it was so long ago, and when the memories themselves are so layered when he looks back on them.
“Don’t you know the story?” he asks.
“Not this one. Tell me, please.”
“How many stories will I tell you today, girl?”
“Am I a girl?” asks Varði.
Loki thinks on it, staring into the fire for a few moments, its warm hearth somewhat out of place compared to the rest of the apartment and all of its sleek modernities. “I was born of Farbauti and Laufey, a pair of Jötnar. They were not themselves magic users, but their home was built over a seiðr-river, a home they built themselves, or… Their house was made of them and the magic too.” His lips twitch, the memory washing over him like warm water, his father correcting his brother one day, saying, no, boy, we did not build our house over the river. The house came together of them both, was built around them when they met with their ankles in the water, their hands touching. “My brothers and I were all natural kin of the forces about us — Helblindi of the cold and the frost, Byleistr of the storm and the wind. Where they commanded water in its different forms, I was a natural spark, a flame — my parents struggled to control me, any more than someone might attempt to control wildfire once it is started. I was known to lead my brothers into trouble, causing mild havoc.”
“What havoc?” asks Varði.
“I’m already three stories deep, Varda, I’m not backtracking a fourth time.”
Varði smiles at him, raising her palms in a gesture of peace. Text continues to flow over the surface of the open page in her lap.
“In any case, I was caught one day at my mischief, by Odin himself. He was intrigued by me, by my skill. In me he saw a mirror of sorts, I think — cunning and cold, many-layered and many-faced, as he is. He declared that I was uncontrolled and unstudied, that this was not merely a matter of discipline, but a failure of tutelage. He bade his wife teach me, and the labour I was to give in exchange was to aid in the keeping of her home at Fensalir. This involved helping her gather ingredients, perform tasks in her household, entertaining her elder sons, Hermod and Hodr. They were my juniors, but not still babes in arms.
“And she resented having me in her home.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps she was jealous of my magical prowess, even at so young an age. Perhaps she was jealous that her husband evidently desired me, a young boy, more than he did her.”
Varði looks at him with the mildest interest, and nothing else. “Is that true?” she asks.
“Sometimes,” Loki nearly says, but doesn’t. He enjoys to tell the truth at unlikely times, enjoys to spell out truth where it will best eat at a situation, and at this moment, he doesn’t desire to be entirely truthful. How is he to explain it to her, that sometimes things are true because sometimes they are real, and sometimes they are not? That either way, they are true, and either way, they aren’t? “No,” is what he says aloud. “Frigg resented having me in her home because I was an unkind and angry young man. I scarcely eased her labours, only added to them, and I frequently quarrelled with her. She taught me all she could, and rather than acknowledge and absorb her lessons, I would argue with her, attempt to disprove her knowledge, and prove her correct in the process. Time and time again, this happened, and with each event I grew only more rude and more obnoxious. I saw myself a hostage in her home — to her, I was a weight around her neck, a wild beast she was obliged to keep in her home and her company. As I grew older, I grew worse; she grew tired. Her patience for my provocation waned, and my patience for provoking her only grew.
“When Baldr was born,” he goes on, “I sensed weakness in her. She was caring for three sons, plus me, a wildcat; Odin had many children by other women, and he lied to her constantly. It weighed on her. Not his whoring or his fathering other children, but the way that he lied to her. He withheld knowledge from her, mislead her when it amused him — about me, about his love affairs, his battles, about all manner of things. Frigg had found it charming when first they met, Odin’s games, his riddles, his double meanings, but she had her limits, and she has learned with time how much it hurts to leave a loophole in a contract.”
Varði’s book has text across both of its thick pages now, and as he watches the last letter inscribe itself upon the second page, it turns over, more writing beginning anew. It feels strangely haunting, looking at the page as the letters appear and hearing no working of pen or quill or pencil.
The ink is dry before it’s finished being inscribed, and with the pages looking as old and weathered as they do, Loki could almost believe the book is already as old as he is, and that these words were written centuries ago.
“Frigg is a völva — a user of magic, but also, a seeress. She is connected to the ebbs and flows of seiðr. Has Odin explained it to you, Varda? What it is to be a völva?” The question is rhetorical, and he ignores the way that she nods her head. “Fate is a tapestry made of woven thread, and upon these threads are our lives played out. Fate is the past and the present and the future all at once — it is known before we ever reach it, much the same as the past. A völva, being of magic, can feel these threads about her, can play on them, bend them, and look forward, see them as and before they are woven. Predict the future — a future. Nothing is certain.”
“The past and the future are the same, both certain, and yet, they are uncertain?”
“Precisely,” says Loki, and Varði smiles at him wryly, undeterred.
“Are you a völva?” she asks.
“No,” says Loki. “A völva is a woman.”
“Aren’t you a woman?” asks Varði.
Loki laughs, tipping his head to one side and focusing on taking a drink of his tea, swilling it upon his tongue, around his mouth. His tail is coiled beneath him, a fine support for his back, for the weight of his body.
“Man or woman,” he says, “are like the past and present. They exist, seemingly certain but in truth, somewhat malleable, either side of what is real, what is current, what is alive.”
“Why call me Varda, then?”
“Because you are a woman.”
“Why am I a woman, and you are not?”
“Are you a god?”
“Are you?”
The laughter catches Loki by the throat, fluttering out of him, and he is surprised by how it feels in his chest, warm and glowing, the cheer so easy and all-encompassing. It has been some time since he has felt so easy, and some time longer since he has felt so easy and not been drunk to the gills.
“Where has Odin been keeping you?” Loki asks softly. “I like your company far better than his.”
“I’ve been busy,” says Varði. “Keeping records.”
“Of course.”
“Baldr, a babe,” she reminds him, and Loki nods his head.
“Three children by Odin has the Lady Frigg. Hermodr and Hodr and Baldr. By the Lady Jörd, he had others — Thor, of course, and his brother Meili; by others, Vidar and Vali. There are others besides, of course, but those are the ones you will have heard of, who you might have met, hm?”
“Týr?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” Varði echoes dryly, as if it’s his fault.
“Hermod and Hodr I spent time with,” Loki says. “I was a little older than each of them, but by the time Baldr was born, although they were a few years my junior, each of them were bigger than me, and far stronger. Thor was the same age as me — perhaps he is a little older, perhaps a little younger. Perhaps he is old enough to be my sire, or the reverse.”
“He is younger than you,” pronounces Varði, not as if correcting the record, but in the tone of one who has been given a choice between two paths by a skald, and is declaring what sort of story she would like to hear tonight. “By a month, maybe, or even less than that.”
“Alright,” says Loki. “My junior, then, but only just. He was bigger than me too, and stronger. His younger brothers would run rampant around me in the course of my day’s labours, and they would make a game of lifting and carrying me, wrestling with me. It was… They were not unkind to me. They were not bad boys.” The feeling that gnaws in his chest is not guilt, and Loki refuses to consider it as such. “At that time, it seemed to them that I was just another brother — they did not wholly understand what separated and what bound us. I was not a slave, after all, and not exactly a prisoner, and yet I was not a guest — I was part of their household, even, in a way their half-brothers were not.
“Thor was different. Old enough to understand what he was and what I was — old enough to see that I was not unlike his father, and that I was not unlike his mother, either.”
“He was jealous of you?”
“No,” Loki answers, although the question gives him pause. He wonders if Thor would give the same answer — but then, Thor would be like as not to give no answer at all, and declare himself above such petty matters as the keeping of records. “No, I don’t think so. Thor has never envied that which I share with his father, or his father’s wives — those qualities are not ones Thor holds in good stead, let alone ones that he should desire for himself. If he would not outright describe these shared traits as distasteful and dishonourable, he certainly wouldn’t praise them. But he was old enough to agree with Frigg that I didn’t belong there, and Frigg and Thor had a fairly convivial relationship — he favoured her, and he was protective of her. He would spend time with Hermod and Hodr, play with them, but if they were occupied, he would search me out. I had little time to myself — when I was not tending the household or the garden alongside Frigg, I spent my hours in study, largely with texts Odin desired I should read. When he was home, he would test me on their contents, and if I hadn’t studied enough, he would punish me. Take away some privileges of mine, advise Frigg to cut my meals, lengthen my labour in the fields. Beat me, of course, or hurt me with magic.
“Thor would occasionally steal texts of mine, or hide them, such that I would lose track of all Odin had asked me to study and be left with a glaring gap — Odin would then be furious, naturally. If I had allowed Thor to get the better of me, then I was not learning to be keen and aware of my surroundings, was letting my guard down; if I had allowed him to steal or hide a magical object or book or scroll, it meant that I was being careless with the things Odin loaned me.
“When Baldr was born, Frigg was exceptionally tired and withdrawn — the pregnancy had weighed on her in its later stages, and the labour was long and very taxing. Baldr carried much magic in him, when he was born, and this left her deficient in it for some months, a year, after his birth. She was exhausted and unwell, but at the same time, protective of him, as I said, and we quarrelled over her lack of trust in me when she was not, in my eyes, able to care sufficiently for Baldr without my aid. Other people did assist, of course — other women, other friends, but at times I would see her lifting Baldr in her arms, trembling with the weight of him, and yet she would snarl at me were I to attempt to take him.”
“How did that make you feel?” asks Varða.
“My feelings are not the subject of this record,” says Loki, and dislikes the amount of irritation that shows through in his voice — too defensive. Best to backtrack, or at the very least, give the appearance he is. “But I was young, and I came to resent the additional difficulty Baldr brought into what I already felt was an overtaxed and thankless life. He was a light to all except me, upon whom he cast a heavy shadow. We argued one day, Frigg and I — it was at a dinner, and we had fallen into bickering over the table where all of those around could hear us. I was normally far more careful than that, as was she — it didn’t reflect well on us, or on Odin, that I, as his ward, should be on such obviously hostile terms with his wife and the mistress of the household I lived in. Someone said something in praise of Baldr, and I made some snippy, sarcastic reply. Frigg said that had I been born to her instead of Baldr, she would have killed me as a babe — after which, she said I was an ugly, deceitful child, ungrateful, charmless, a liar, a betrayer, a snake. She spoke for some time on my flaws and failings, to the entertainment of everyone gathered there, all of them laughing at me. I flew into a rage, and it was Thor who hauled me from the hall and threw me in the mud. We fought, injured one another, until Odin came and pulled us apart.
“I declared I wouldn’t suffer under the roof of his wife no longer, called her and Odin himself some choice names — he backhanded me and bade me be quiet. I returned to live amongst the Jötnar again, but my parents wouldn’t have me in their home, and I had spent many years away. I didn’t really know the customs of my people as I ought have, and I always felt out of step with them — as I did with the Æsir and Vanir. I married my first wife, a Jötunn woman, raised our children together.”
“What children?” asks Varði.
Loki is looking at the floor instead of at her face, tracing the knots in the wooden boards and the subtle ways they reflect and absorb the flickering firelight. A heavy pit has replaced his stomach, and he feels empty with the gnawing emptiness with it, the grief raw and aching in a way no other feeling could be.
“You know what children,” he whispers, and his gaze flits up to meet hers. He doesn’t know if he imagines it or not, the flicker of regret around her eyes.
“Hel, Fenrir, Jörmungandr.”
Loki exhales. “Yes.” His eyes ache. “I parted ways with Angrboða after the binding of my children.”
“The binding of them, ho — ”
“You know those tales,” says Loki, finds himself almost barking the words, his teeth threatening to sharpen, his mouth to lengthen into a snout. “You will not bleed them from me, not today.”
Varði’s book turns a page, and her face is a silent mask.
“After this, I returned to the Æsir and lived among them again.”
“Why?”
“Odin drank with me after the binding of my children,” murmurs Loki. “I believed at the time, allowed myself to… I let myself believe that his hands were tied, that he regretted it, that it pained him almost as much as it did me. He was convincing in his kindness, and I was desperate for it, as I had so rarely experienced his kindness before. He counselled me return with them, marry. Be his advisor and his companion, which I was, for a time. Frigg and Baldr both had visions in their dreams of my leading to his death, but no one told me, lest to tell me would be to place the idea in my head. Never mind that they’d just taken my children from their home and bound them, knowing that they would follow the threads of fate forward.”
“Perhaps Odin was fond of you,” says Varði.
“Perhaps,” says Loki. “Perhaps he thought Ragnarok would come all the sooner, if they let themselves make an enemy of me — perhaps he was right. The Æsir never did care for me, even at that time, but they were not entirely unfriendly. It depended on their senses of humour — some of them despised me, saw me as a liar and hated me for it, others saw the humour in my manner, my jokes, my wit. I was less bitter, then, not so caustic as I am now. My venom has strengthened with age, as is the case with any snake.”
“Are you a snake?” asks Varði.
“I played many games and jokes on the others,” says Loki. “For some of which I was punished or beaten, for others I was rewarded and prized. I was oft in Odin’s house, lived there, played there, worked there, rested there. Now and then it was natural that I should cross paths with different of his children — Baldr I avoided most. He hurt my eyes.”
He feels them sting now, almost to tears — there is a burning in them that is somehow hard to distinguish, because regularly he is plagued by the future-pain of what will come, when he will be bound by his own son’s entrails and made to have venom drip into his eyes; regularly, again, he thinks of Baldr, or lays eyes on him, and his eyes sting as though he is looking at the sun himself, and they need to tear up to protect themselves.
He remembers the first time he ever laid eyes on him, when he was still a babe in arms — he was a shining beacon of light, and it did sting, but he almost felt himself accustom to it, felt himself crave the radiance of it. And then he realised how much everyone around him loved the babe, how they worshiped him, desired to hold him and coo over him and compliment him, and he resisted it, the call of that sunlight child, the brightness of him.
“Who did you avoid least?” asks Varði.
Loki looks down at his own hands, at the tattoos that coil around his fingers and up his wrist, disappearing under his bracelets. “Iðunn. Until I… That friendship has not stood the test of time, nor the test of my actions. Others, here and there — all roads lead back to Odin. When he travelled abroad, I travelled with him — as his advisor, his trusted friend. At other times, I would act as vanguard, scout ahead of his party. And I would protect his sons.”
“What did protecting them entail?”
“Accompanying them. Guarding their camps, watching over them when I didn’t sleep myself.” He sighs. “Reporting on their actions to their father, of course, but that wasn’t really protection. Hermod and I would frequently walk alongside each other, with him serving as Odin’s boy, as his messenger, and then… And I spent time with Hodr. Hermod was keen and sharp — He had drawn his father’s ire as a young man, and Odin had at once rewarded and punished him by decreeing Hermod should act as his servant. Not… Not in a way that humiliated him unduly, but in a way that kept him close at hand, you understand? Hermod was as one of Odin’s hands, or as one of his ravens. Hermod recognised a kinsman in me, in the shared nature of our positions, that to be close to the Allfather was not a privilege extended to many — not even, at times, his own wives, not even Thor, who is undoubtedly his favourite of his sons — and yet at the same time, that closeness was cutting. Odin is as a man made up of thorns, and to be close to him is to be pricked by them whether he intends it or not — and frequently, he does.”
“And Hodr?”
“Hodr is blind. He was blind even as a babe — when I first joined Odin’s household, I had no idea at first. He ran so fast, moved so quickly and with such agility, such accuracy, wrestling with me, knocking me, as Hermod did. I did not see that he was sightless until some weeks in Frigg’s household. He knew his home and his mother’s gardens very well, and moved through them at great speed, playing and roughhousing with his brothers — with Hermod, with Thor. I trained with him, played with him. I liked his company.
“They could be bothersome at times, but they were not unkind. It was sometimes like having little brothers of my own — I resented my feelings of imprisonment, that I had no choice to leave, if I desired, but at the same time, it was companionable. Hermod would barge into my room when I was studying and pore over my books, read over my shoulder. He would ask me questions about the nature of my research, the magic I was practising, the notes I was making on the texts that were out of his reach — that were too dense for him to make sense of, or were in tongues he could not fathom. It was a compliment, in many ways, that he desired my attention, that he actually took an interest in what I was, who I was. Many of the other boys my age, of the Æsir, they preferred to fight than to read and study; those that did study did not, as I did, delve into strange texts and dead tongues, or old and twisted magics, as I did. Hermod took an interest — he knew that to follow my studies would enable him to better please his father, which motivated him, but his interest never felt false or forced.
“Hodr was different. He could not read or write, He told me in his gentle, affable way that he was glad of the fact, because to study sounded very dull, and I sounded dull, too. He had a habit of announcing a man’s flaws so warmly, in such friendly terms, that you would find yourself almost thanking him for it.”
A distant warmth gathers in his chest, but the memory is tinged with loss, as is every memory he has, at this point.
“He enjoyed to train with me, because with my magic, I could employ his senses to engage his attention — changes in temperature, sound, texture, even air pressure. Shapeshifting from one form to another, he would learn to strike me in different ways, to aim for different targets. Now and then he would even tell Thor or Hermod that he had no interest in training with them when I was available, because they didn’t make it a game as I did. Which flattered me, of course. Warmed me. I understood what it was to be blind in a way they did not.”
The words come out of his mouth without his really thinking of it — he feels as if his every sentence is flowing from him like water, and he shifts his jaw experimentally. Varði’s magic is subtle, but undeniably present, encouraging him to speak.
Part of him rails against it, against any binding, even one as small as this one, and yet there is such relief in this magic. It feels good to unwind this tangled tale. It feels good to speak on it.
“I enjoyed my time with Hodr and Hermod respectively,” murmurs Loki. “Once I was no longer serving in Lady Frigg’s household, once I was my own man rather than Odin’s alone, it took the outside pressure from our interactions. They liked me on their own terms. To go abroad with them and protect Odin’s interests, however, meant also to go abroad with Thor, with Baldr.
“Thor is brash by his nature — he thinks with his fists or his cock before he does his brain, and while he has a very keen mind, it is known he doesn’t always employ it as a first resort. He can be… emotional. Volatile. Baldr was always the smiling face between them, and rarely lost his temper. He was good-natured and warm, was… He was beautiful, such that no one would desire to harm him, to march against him, and even if they were not deterred by his beauty, his invulnerability meant that few soldiers would undertake the risk. You can fall in battle, but your opponent cannot — what are you to do but yield or die?”
“His invulnerability?” Varði repeats, raising one eyebrow.
Loki reaches up and rubs against his throat, squeezing gently and feeling the tightness in it under his thumb and fingertips.
“The Lady Frigg adored him, her son, her beautiful boy. Oft, as I told you, she compared him to me when I was in her home. When he was a boy, she began to have visions of a future. Many of us are plagued by such things, by visions of the future, sensations of what is to come. As gods, we exist in all directions of time, Varda. Mortals experience some defining moments of their pasts and carry those moments with them, remember them, their selves and their experiences informed by those memories — we as gods similarly remember our futures and are informed by them at the same time.
“Around about our early years Thor, Tyr, and I each began to experience our first future pains. Some mornings I would wake and find my vision failing me, my eyes and my body sore. Hodr would come into my room and tease about it — I wasn’t blind yet, after all, so unlike him, I had little to complain about.”
“You will be blind?” asks Varði, and she seems genuinely interested by the question, engaged and focused on him. This is the first thing he’s said so far, perhaps, that she doesn’t already know — but then, maybe she knows this too. At the shoulder of the Allfather, it’s difficult to know where the limitations of her knowledge might be.
“I am here,” says Loki quietly. “At the same time, I am bound by the entrails of my son to a great mountain, a serpent poised over me, drops of black venom dripping from its fangs and into my eyes. My wife, Sigyn, she holds a bowl over my face to catch it, but whenever she steps away to empty it, it hits my face.”
For a moment, he lets his mask fall — Varði is glancing down at her journal when he does it, so it is a moment before she looks up again and lays her eyes on his face. They widen the tiniest amount, her lips shifting into the slightest of frowns, and while she does not entirely recoil, she does flinch back ever so slightly.
The worst of the scarring is of course around his eyes, the acid blanching his skin extremely white, his eyelashes turned from pale red to white and ashy blond; there are a few bleached edges in his eyebrows as well, and some spattered droplets down his nose, at his cheeks, the sides of his face.
He can only see her because he’s concentrating his magic as a lens: his pupils and irises alike have been melted away, his eyes bleached white as well. Some of the skin is melted, the edges of his eyelids with a strange effect to them.
“It’s hardly just me, of course,” Loki tells her, watching her face as she schools it back to neutrality. “Tyr feels a pain in his wrist, feels the bite of teeth through tendons and flesh and cracking bone, and sometimes feels the other bites, the ragged cuts of claws through his flesh, wrenching through him. Thor feels the phantom of venom in his veins, feels his bones breaking at being crushed and constricted. It was a natural part of our pubescence for us, as young gods — many of those around us, our mentors, their parents, they had always known the same, and would tell us as much.
“Hodr felt similar pains of his own death when he was old enough. But, Baldr — ”
He sighs.
“As I said, Frigg had visions of his death when he was as yet a babe in arms, continued to have them from time to time as he grew older — Baldr began to have similar dreams. Dreams of dying, of being in Hel, of being cold, alone. He did not, as we did, experience the future pains of what was to come for him. He didn’t remember it, as we remember our deaths. No one wants for the coming of Ragnarök, for the end of all things, but it is a fact of life. Things live, things die. Things begin, and they come to an end.
“Frigg became obsessed with Baldr’s survival. She… Yes, he dreamed of Hel, but he did not have recollections of our deaths, as we did. Surely, this meant that his destiny was flexible. Of all the losses she could suffer, why this one? Why the loss of her most beloved boy, her dearest son? It plagued her. With no knowledge of how precisely he would die, without any clues in Baldr’s own recollection, she could not act to protect him, to estimate what would come for him — and this frightened him, too. Worse than frightened him, it… depressed him, saddened him. He struggled to come to terms with the looming spectre of his death as we did ours. So sad was he, at times, his light would almost go out. A sad thing to see in a boy as yet so young.
“I was a mother myself, by that point, and I did understand how it ailed her, to see her son so…” He remembers it, remembers the feeling, the raw ache in his chest. He’d been angry with her. Was that where it all began, in the end? Was that what prompted everything? Was he simply angry with a mother afraid for the death of her son, when his own child, Svaðilfari, was bound in servitude for eternity to Odin? He hadn’t even yet had his next three children, those too to be bound and chained, nor yet suffered the death of his last. “I did understand her grief. Her anxiety. But I felt she was overly self-indulgent in her discussions of it — in how she spoke to Baldr, in how she spoke of it herself. I counselled that she ought be more considerate of the facts, and she was furious with me, screamed at me to go from her house and not to return. With her children grown, each of them adults, less work on her shoulders — most of all because I myself had matured and was no longer a presence in her household — she had grown not to like me, but to like me better. Our rapport had never been stronger until that quarrel.
“She went to Odin,” Loki murmurs. “Told him her plans, I believe. Of course, he was delighted and encouraged it — Baldr is beloved by him, and he, too, is bound to die come Ragnarök, after all. Anything that might turn the course of destiny to save them both, or even just save his son, would be welcomed.
“She first went to every living thing upon the Earth,” says Loki, “every beast there was that walked on the ground, she went to them and bade them promise that they would never harm her son. He was as yet young, at this point, untried and untested as a warrior. He had fought no beast, yet. But then Frigg went further. She bade the seas and rivers not to drown him. She bade the air and the clouds not to whip at his skin, or push him from cliff or precipice. She bade the elements not to burn him, nor shock him, nor freeze him, nor crush him. She bade the metals not to cut him or poison him. She went to the trees and the flowers, the sharks and whales, the birds and flying beasts. Everything there was in the realms that hung from the Yggdrasil, she made promise her — they would never harm her son.
“And of course, all these things, they loved Baldr as anybody loves Baldr.”
“Even you?”
Loki raises his eyebrows, looking at her sceptically. “You don’t think that a silly question, given the circumstances?”
“Perhaps you loved him once,” says Varði.
“What would you know of love?” Loki asks. “Who have you loved, Varda?”
“No one,” Varði tells him simply, shrugging her shoulders. “This isn’t my story, though.”
“What sort of love do you imagine I would hold for Baldr?”
“You were in his household since he was a babe,” says Varði. “A mother’s love, maybe. Or a brother’s love.” Loki almost laughs, feeling it bubble in his throat behind sharpening teeth. “Or perhaps you love him as everyone loves him. Perhaps you love him as one loves sunlight.”
“Not everyone loves sunlight,” Loki murmurs.
“Do you?” asks Varði.
“All of the things that there were — those things that could swear an oath — did swear,” Loki continues as if she hasn’t said anything. “And with her voyage of all the realms complete, she returned home. She arrived home to a great dinner, to a feast, came in from the pouring rain with water slick down the back of her cloak, dripping on the floor, a sword in her hand. She bade Baldr get to his feet and face her. He was a boy, he was…” Loki works his jaw. His blood tingles in his veins, flowing more freely than it ought. “He was sitting with us. He was between Thor and Hermod, trapped in by their big shoulders. He was laughing before she came in — for the first time in some months, he was well. Frigg is a good mother. She loves her children fiercely and with great ardour, but she is… She is a woman of extremes. She obsesses over the details, struggles to draw herself from them when she is preoccupied by them — there is a reason she and Odin suit one another so well.
“Without Frigg there, Baldr was able to work through some of his feelings on his own terms. He grew into himself, developed, began the process of coming to terms with his future, laughing and joking alongside his peers. She was not cruel, you understand, and she did not intend to bolster his anxieties — just as he did not mean to bolster hers with his own emotions. They were too close, that was all — separation cuts mother and child, but so too does too much of the opposite. A little distance was good for Baldr.
“When she came in, she was a woman wild. Her hair was drenched, her skirts muddied — she had fallen at some point the day before and bloodied her elbows, so that there was blood on the front of her tunic, too. Her eyes were wide and full of magic. He was terrified when she called on him to come before her — the room was thick with silence. No one dared breathe.
“Baldr moved to stand — Thor and Hermod on his either side, crowded in a little, that he not come out from the bench; I moved to stand, to block her view of him. She’d never looked on me with such venom as she snarled at me to sit, and I dropped into my seat again. It was excruciating, watching him leave the table and walk to meet her in the middle of the room — his footwraps had no hard sole, and they ordinarily made almost no sound on the stone floors, yet his every step seemed as loud as a thunderclap. I nudged Thor, nudged Hermod. Tried to whisper to them to stand, to tell them to face her, to speak with her, to — we didn’t know what was wrong. The storm raged outside, and yet a greater storm raged in her.
“I’d never been frightened of her before, of Frigg. Even when she’d hit me, or shocked me, even when she’d threatened me. I had never for a moment believed that for all her dislike of me, that she was a cruel or dangerous woman. She would never harm me unduly, and I deserved it, provoking her ire — surely, she would never harm anyone else, least of all her own son, whom she loved so well.
“But in that moment, I doubted it. In that moment, I thought her mad. Crazed, somehow, driven to it by grief at a death that had not yet come, that would not come for some time.
“We had not seen the sword yet. She threw back one shoulder, her cloak falling back, and we all saw the glint of her blade, gripping it by the hilt in one hand, its tip pointed toward the ground. It, too, dripped with water.
“Baldr stopped, when he saw it. He stopped and stared at it, looked alarmed at her, too. His jaw was agape, his eyes wide — he shone brightly, but underneath the radiance, his skin had blanched, the blood draining from his face.
“He said, “Mother?” in so soft a voice. It was tremulous and weak — he was a confident boy, and I’d never heard him speak so quietly, and with such a quaver, bar when he had been ill or feverish. He raised his hands, both of them, palm up, in a gesture of peace — can you imagine it? Before a hall of dozens, a child of ten raising his palms and stammering out, “Peace,”?
“We were all of us stuck. Still as though we were encased in ice, none of us dared even to breathe. And then she swung, and all of us cried out at once — a cacophony of voices, every one of us screaming at her to stop, to leave him be, to not harm her son. We were each of us lunging clumsily in his direction, but we were too far away, too slow. The boy had barely yet fought with real weapons — most of his practice was with wooden blades, and certainly he’d never faced a warrior whilst unarmed and unarmoured, as he was now.
“The sword struck him — he was cowering away from her, his arms raised over his head and the blade aimed true between them, against his head. Its sharp edge kissed his brow with the gentlest of caresses.”
Loki feels sick at the recollection, remembers well how his stomach lurched, how he did not understand, comprehend, what it was he was seeing as Frigg stood there with the blade in her hand, resting so near to Baldr’s head and yet not cutting him, not touching him. It was as though the light he radiated had formed a sort of shield.
The room had gone silent again, a wholly different feel to it in the second iteration — the dread and growing fear had been replaced with stunned fascination, with bewilderment.
“Do you see?” she had cried, laughing freely, tears shining on her cheeks. “Nothing will harm him. Nothing will harm my son, for he will carry my protection — I have taken oaths from all things in all realms, and none shall do him harm. Baldr the Bright will be Baldr the Undying!”
“There was relief, of course,” Loki says. Frigg’s words echo in his ears, making his head feel full and fuzzy. He does not dwell on these memories often, and he finds himself unused to their weight. “The room descended into cheers and laughter, delight that Frigg should have such success — relief that she had not, in fact, been gripped by madness and compelled to murder her young son. Everyone tried their own weapons at him, threw things at him, tried to poison him, cast spells on him. Naught affected him but laughter — he laughed so much he might have done himself injury, were it not that he was now invulnerable.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What weapon did you try on him?” asks Varði. “What spell?”
Loki shakes his head. “I didn’t,” he says. “The display… sickened me. I could not conceive of what she had done, could not comprehend it. It angered me more than any cruel name Frigg had never called me, any indignity that I had suffered, any injury.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because — Because it was not right. Baldr, like all things, like all of us, would die. She had dreamt of it, and so had he. Death was his due, as it is all of ours.” He hears the heat in his voice, and he feels the bubble of his temper under his skin, his flesh threatening to shift and turn, his teeth aching, his fingernails sharper already. He controls himself, but only just. “All things loved Baldr — good. What a good thing, to be lovable. But death is not a punishment for the unloved. It is the great equalizer — it is a natural law. As is a mother’s grief.
“Even for the Bright and the Radiant and the Loved-by-All. Even for the mothers of such people. It was more than unfair. It was more than unjust. It was wrong. Wrong at its very core, wrong on every level. It sickened me. Made me feel… out of alignment. Like the universe itself was out of alignment.”
Everyone had been far too distracted by the cheer and levity of the evening to notice that Loki had quietly taken his leave, retiring to his own home to bury himself in his studies and do his best not to think about it, not to dwell on it.
Dwell on it he had.
“To return to my point,” he says, “I avoided Baldr, as he grew older, as he grew into a young man. His situation sat ill with me. He retained a humility one might not have expected with his invulnerability — he was sweet and good-natured, treated violence as something of a last resort. Thirsted for conquest, of course, naturally wished to please the Allfather, but wanted it as bloodless as possible.
“My reputation had altered by the time he was a man. I was far less trusted, looked upon with more suspicion. My friendships with Hermod and Hodr remained somewhat robust, and Thor and I…” He lets out a low laugh, realises how bitter it sounds only once it’s out of his mouth. “Baldr would attempt to seek out my company at times, to eke out why I so hated him. He couldn’t comprehend it, you see — everyone adored him. Everyone loved him. How could it be that I did not? Didn’t he deserve it? What was wrong with me, that I would stand against the tides of the universe itself, against the natural force to compel all who lived and died to adore him?
“I would mock him for it, naturally. For his naivety, for his appearances of sweetness, his hypocrisy in wanting to conquer but not wanting to bloody his blade. Something about him infuriated me, though, set my temper alight, set some instinct into play. I hated him. Loathed him. To look at him was to look at a sort of crack in the fabric of the universe, or perhaps an infection embedded in its flesh.
“I delved into it, later. After the binding of my own children. The death of my son. The death of Narfi weighed heavily on my heart. People mocked me for it. I deserved it, they said, had earned it — would earn it, for my part in the end of all things that would come. Frigg made the error of stating explicitly the iniquity of our situations — we had been fighting, as we always did when our paths crossed, snarling insults at one another. She said she was blessed, that her son would go undying whereas mine, as we spoke, was pickled and jarred, to be used when needed.
“I was not motivated purely by spite,” Loki adds. “It was merely that spite reminded me of the state of affairs and brought it to the surface — I had put it for so long out of my head, learned to repress my aversion to the situation. To her, it was purely personal — to save herself a mother’s grief, and to save her son from dying. But imagine that she had twisted the fabric of the universe in some other way. That she had condemned any boiling water to freeze instead. That she had compelled the earth to spin backward upon its axis. She was not just a woman with a beloved son. She was trying to subvert fate itself, and certain fate — Baldr was prophesied to die, and die he would.
“If I had to bring the event about myself, so be it.”
He reaches forward to pour himself more tea, and because Varði holds out her cup, he pours for her as well. She isn’t looking at his face, almost pointedly, and only looks at him properly again when he lets the scarring drain away from his features, putting on the usual mask he wears to disguise it.
“You know what comes next, of course,” he says.
“It isn’t about what I know or don’t know,” says Varði. “I am — ”
“The record-keeper, yes, that much has sunk in,” says Loki dryly. He sips at his tea, and Varði sips at hers. She keeps his gaze with an air of challenge, which is somewhat funny given that she could scarcely stand to look at him a moment ago.
He should like to be offended by it, perhaps even hurt, but there are few shapeshifters alive who do not know the value in fear, disgust, revulsion at one’s features, natural or unnatural. Whatever that distinction means.
“I began to investigate,” Loki says finally, when the silence has gone on too long for him to feel comfortable beneath its surface. Even water snakes come up for air. “In one form or other, I trudged about the Nine Realms, listening at doors, wearing faces that were not my own, morphing between one body and the next. I burrowed beneath the earth, flew into the sky, dived beneath the waves. From one plane to another I walked and walked, made my inquiries, my demands of every thing — living or otherwise — I encountered. I learned nothing, of course. Every beast and animal, every plant and mineral, every element, every force, even magic itself. All had sworn the oath Frigg had demanded of them. No chink in Baldr’s armour revealed itself.
“I had reached my last resort — I went to Frigg herself. Disguised myself as a friend and sister of hers, wore her face and her cloak, drank ale with her. We spoke long, long into the night, until she was drunk. I asked, “Frigg, dear sister of mine. Did all things swear not to harm my nephew Baldr?”
“She said, “Nearly all things.”
“I said, “You mean one outlier remains?”
“She put her hand upon mine, her cheeks red with the drink, her head swaying on her shoulders. In softest tones, she said, “Yes, dear sister, but only one. When I travelled the Realms in search of all that might harm my son, I neglected to ask an oath of only one thing. Mistletoe. It was as yet too young, you see, to swear an oath and be bound by it.” She sighed, then, and looked into the flames. “Mistletoe is now old enough that it might harm my son — and old enough, too, to swear an oath. I ought go to it now.”
“I said, “Yes, yes. Do so, sister.” She stood, and I said, “No, no, not tonight. Not tonight — on the morrow.” Frigg could scarce keep her eyes open, and as I had done before, I guided her to her bed, eased her down, blanketed her, departed. When she woke she had no recollection of our conversation, and I had already begun to gather the mistletoe.”
He breathes in, and the air feels cold where it passes over his tongue and into his lungs. He thinks of Hel — not the realm, but his daughter bound to rule it — and the cold, cold air that surrounds her.
“It was not unusual,” he says, “for the same game to erupt around Baldr as always does. Everyone would get drunk, feast, be merry — and throw weapons at him. Or attempt to drown him, or light him aflame. You know. It never seemed to get old. Hodr, blind, had rarely taken part in these games. It took very little coaxing to guide his hand the third or fourth time this had occurred after my conversation with Frigg. We were good friends, as I told you. I had sold off some spears whilst feigning myself a traveller earlier that week — amongst my wares had been spears of mistletoe. Arrows, too, although I didn’t use them — except, of course, in the version of this story where I did.”
“But this is the true version.”
“There are no true versions of anything, girl,” Loki says lowly. “Least of all in the stories of gods.”
“You don’t remember?” asks Varði. Her little book isn’t writing this down, and Loki wonders idly if it’s because it’s irrelevant to the story, or simply that she already knows it — or perhaps that she doesn’t.
“Of course I remember,” Loki says. “I remember crafting the spears — I remember crafting the arrows. I remember crafting darts and bolts, caltrops, blades, a garrot. I crafted all manner of weapons of mistletoe, Varda, and I remember every way by which Baldr died by them. A god exists in every direction of time at once — one also exists at the junction of one story and another. One story and every other.”
Varði seems unimpressed. “So you do remember,” she says.
Loki restrains the urge to roll his eyes. “I guided Hodr’s hand to a spear. I told him where to throw it — the first missed. As did the second. The third bounced directly off his brother’s belly, and Baldr laughed, clapped his hands, praised his brother’s good aim. Hodr’s hand went for another spear — one of mine, this time. “A little higher,” I whispered in his ear. “Go for his head.” The spear sailed through the air.”
Loki remembers it well. He has to stop the smile from coming to his lips at the pure chaos of the moment, how wide Baldr’s glowing eyes had gotten — he had never quite gotten used to looking at his face directly, had never learned to look upon him as the others did without his eyes stinging, but in that moment he did. The spear sailed true, although it had not hit Baldr’s head — it had pierced through his throat, forcing him to stagger back. All the air had gone out of the mead hall, drawn into everyone’s lungs with the collective gasp of horror and shock, time for a moment suspended.
He had never felt so quite well-fed in his life before that moment — few times since has a plot culminated so gloriously in success, in such complete satisfaction. The room had erupted in screams and yells and sounds of horror, and everyone had run forward.
“The spear struck through the centre of Baldr’s neck, his throat. He choked, his eyes bulging, glowing light seeming to stream from them as they brimmed over with tears. He had never been injured in his adult life, hadn’t experienced so much as a papercut or a bruise — his hands went to the spear, tried to pull it free. All he did was jostle it in the wound, put worse pressure on his straining throat. He coughed up blood. He couldn’t even scream.”
Varði looks at him impassively, unmoved by this description — or perhaps just unimpressed by his relish.
“He died, naturally,” Loki murmurs. “It hardly took him long.”
“And then?” Varði prompts him.
“All descended into chaos. There was a great fear and horror amongst the gods, for the fall of Baldr is the first step in what will come of our worst futures — the very first step on the road to Ragnarök. The first domino to fall, if you will. Frigg, of course, was distraught. She was screaming, raging at the sky, utterly beside herself with grief. Who had known? Who had told that secret? Who had exposed her most beloved son’s only vulnerability?
“For days after, it was Baldr’s brothers, his father, that attended the funeral plans. Baldr’s wife, Nanna, she was… She was a very happy woman. She had never quite learned to be unhappy, in fact — part of the reason she married a man who would not, and could not die. Like Frigg, she was paralysed by the death of a man whom she had held so dear. She wandered disconsolately, mute, her eyes downcast. She was a woman entirely unfamiliar with grief, one who had devoted the whole of her life, in fact, to avoiding it — how could she cope with a grief so all-encompassing?
“Frigg, meanwhile, drowned her sorrows. She yelled so loudly that her voice was hoarse and broken when she spoke. She grabbed people in the streets, grasped friends and strangers alike by their shoulders and demanded of them, “Did you know? Did I tell you? Did you kill my son?”
“Of course, she followed the breadcrumbs I had left. That a Ljósálf trader had been by, that he had sold off various traps and weapons he’d made, and, yes, they had been made of mistletoe. She sent agents to research him, found that he had a cabin some ways south, that he had a home filled with traps of various materials. Another agent even found his body — dead, fallen down a cliff while checking tracks, feasted upon by wolves. All of this was unlucky happenstance — the natural law of life and death re-establishing itself.
“Frigg, of course, was unsatisfied with this turn of events.
“She began to ask all around her, demanding that they should go to Hel and petition the mistress of that realm for her son’s release. All feared to make the journey. Hodr offered, of course, he was… He was distraught at what he had done. That he had killed his own brother, that…” Guilt burns in him like an acid. Hodr had cried long and hard in the days after — when Vali had come for him, he hadn’t even fought it. He’d tipped his head back, shown his throat, let Vali slit him open. “So Hermod offered instead. He was a messenger, after all — his father’s servant. It was right that he should go and petition the death-goddess for the return of his brother.”
“Hel Lokisdottir,” says Varði.
Odin has trained her well, he thinks, that she should say these things so clearly, so cleanly, with such a natural severity. “Yes,” whispers Loki. “Hel Lokisdottir. And riding on the back of Sleipnir Lokison.”
Varði glances away from him, and Loki’s smile is thin.
“A funeral pyre was made of Baldur’s ship, and there were… There were minor difficulties in the course of the funeral. There are other tales about it — I don’t care to relate them. In some of them, Nanna dies — or died before. In others, she died later — in others still, she lived. You’d have to ask her herself what her answer would be.
“Meanwhile, Hermod rode for many days and nights into the land of Hel. It was no easy journey — I had made it myself, in secret, time and time again. Hermod came to me and asked me how it was made, how I found it. I told him I had never made such a journey. Naturally, he didn’t believe me. There were tears in his eyes as he begged me tell him how. I had faith enough in my daughter’s steadfastness in her position. I told him the way.
“When he made his way to Hel, Hermod met my daughter for the first time. Baldr was seated beside her in a place of honour — he was quiet, downcast. Gone was his sunny personality, the light blotted out of him. Hermod stayed overnight and then begged Hel, please. Let us take him home.
“Hel remarked, “But he is home.” And there was quite a bit of back and forth between them — I’ve heard Hermod and Hel both relate the story to different effects and different extents. In any case, the final words between them were these: “Go home, Hermod. You say that Baldr is beloved by all in the Nine Realms — if that is so, go across the cosmos and have all weep for him. If every being weeps for Baldr, as once all beings pledged never to harm him, then I will return him to you. On a sea of these tears he will sail home to you on the very ship you burned him in.” Always a poet, my daughter. Profound grief and eternal imprisonment will do that to a girl.”
Varði looks down at her book as a page turns over, a new line of text beginning. It seems to Loki they’ve filled quite a few pages out already.
“Hermod went to everybody and everything in the Nine Realms, as he was bid. All beings shed tears for Baldr. All except for one being.”
“You,” says Varði.
“The giantess Þokk,” Loki corrects her.
“A giantess with no lineage, no history.”
“Messenger after messenger fell upon her home,” Loki murmurs. “To each who came to her, she said, “Hel will keep what she has. Why should she return what is rightfully hers?” And so Baldr stayed in Hel. Condemned there.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing,” says Loki, and spreads his hands. “You’ve heard the Midgardians tell it, I’m sure. Baldr remained in Hel for all eternity.”
Varði’s brow furrows. She’s not keen on irony, Loki supposes, which is unfortunate, given that today she’s trapped between Odin and Loki both.
“Very well,” he says quietly. “Some years ago, in a…” He slowly shakes his head, because the rage bubbles up within him all at once, and his body threatens to burst into a new form spontaneously, fur threatening to sprout from his back, claws from his fingers, fangs from his teeth. He huffs out a sound, almost involuntary, a growl. A chuff. “Somehow,” he whispers, “Baldr escaped Hel. I know not how. I know not why. I saw him in a… There was a feasting hall. Music, laughter, singing. He appeared from nowhere — I hadn’t seen him enter.
“The light that shone from him, I hadn’t seen it in… in centuries. Millennia. I never thought to see its like again, and my eyes stung and burned. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t conceive of what lay before me, and then I was so, so… angry. It unsettled a deep fury in me and before I knew what was happening, instinct overtook me. Here before me was a man who was meant to be dead — people have described the dread that necromancy inspires in them, the natural aversion, well, this was that sensation multiplied a thousandfold. I became aware of myself and my surroundings some minutes after I was done ripping him limb from limb, Baldr’s heart my most recent meal. The room was a mess of blood and viscera, the crowd having dispersed, fleeing, screaming. I had no idea what had happened.”
He takes a sip of his tea. “Until it happened again. And again. And again, and again — he seeks me out, you see. He lives for, sometimes, months at a time, and then he…” His throat feels thick, his tongue too big for his mouth, and he clenches and unclenches his fists. “Everyone counsels him, naturally, to keep his distance from me. They put it down to the relationship between myself and my daughter as much as my bitterness toward his situation — but Baldr has always, always been a fool. Desperate for everyone’s approval. Even mine.”
He thinks of all the ways Baldr has died by his hand — by his claw, by his teeth, by his bite, his wrenching claw, by his killing blow; by knife, by sword, by axe, by hammer, by shieldfall; by brick, by drill, by magic, by screwdriver, by every tool. How many times has Loki drowned him? How many more has Loki clutched him about the throat, squeezed the life back out of him that has been breathed into a body that ought be dead? How many times has Loki felt the snap of his neck or the break in his spine?
How intimate it is, to kill a man. How much more intimate it is to kill him time and time again.
“How many times?”
“Hundreds. Thousands.”
“The last time?”
“Mumbai. I told you — I began to tell you. In a nightclub in Mumbai. The music was so loud, the lights flashing, and I could feel it in my breast, feel the reverberation from the speakers. It was no unusual night. I was drunk, dancing, enjoying myself, enjoying the energy on the air — that sweet thrum of chaos, of pure life. Then… There he was. Just like the first time. I ripped him to shreds.”
It’s a lie, of course.
The last time was here, was right here, the two of them in these very seats. When Baldr had held up his hands, palms to the sky, and said, “Peace, peace,” Loki had thought of how he had done that to his own mother so many years ago, when he was as yet just a boy.
“Why do you do it?” asks Varði quietly.
“Why? Why does a horse swat at a fly with its tail? Why does a beast snap its teeth at a hunter who wishes it harm? Why does a man cringe from the sight of rot and gore? It is instinct, Varda. A bone deep and biting need to correct what is wrong, and Baldr is wrong.”
He doesn’t mean to do it, to allow his god voice to come through, but it thrums from deep within him like a roll of thunder. Varði must not be used to hearing such things — she flinches back from him, shudders, looks honestly frightened for a moment.
“I do what needs to be done,” whispers Loki. “He is no longer of this world — he does not belong here.”
“Peace, peace,” Baldr had begged. His skin had been warm under Loki’s palms as Loki had cupped his cheeks, and when Loki snapped his neck he thought the glare would burn out his eyes a second time over.
“Everyone loves him,” Loki says, hears the growl, hears the snap of his own teeth, and goes on anyway. “Everybody loves him, sweet Baldr, Baldr of the radiant and glorious light. He is as bloodied and storied as any other warrior. If he wanted to live, he would fight back. He never has yet.”
“Hasn’t he?” asks Varði.
“Not hard enough to matter. That’s it, Varda. That’s the end of this story.”
“The end,” repeats Varði softly. “Do you think there’s an end that will come? A time where you’ll kill him for good?”
“I’ll keep killing him, if that’s what you mean.”
“It isn’t,” Varði says. “Why do you kill him?”
“I’ve told you why.”
“Is it because you feel guilty?”
“What?”
“Guilty,” says Varði. “You killed him. You said yourself, you loved him as much as anybody else, although you tried not to. Is it guilt that makes you do it?”
“No.”
“Do you ever miss him?”
“How could I miss him? He was hardly a figure in my life.”
“Would you have liked him to be?”
“What sort of idiot question is that?”
“You wished Frigg would keep your company. You kept Hermod’s, and Hodr’s. Thor’s, even. Why not Baldr’s?”
“I couldn’t bear to look at him. His eyes — ”
“Was it his eyes or was it another future-pain?” asks Varði. “Perhaps you couldn’t bear to look at him because you would see in his eyes that you betrayed him.”
“Betray him!? Betray him how, pray tell, girl? What oath did I swear him? What pledge did I make? It wasn’t I who said I would never stand against him, not I who — ”
“Odin took you into his household. You swore you’d protect his hearth, and his children — you desired, time and time again, that they treat you as one of their own, that they see you as a brother, and in return you — ”
“Hold your tongue!”
She flinches back again this time, more powerfully than before, and he blinks his eyes rapidly to try to force back the sting, but his tongue is too big for his mouth and his throat feels thick. His teeth aren’t sharpening, nor his ears, and there’s no fur sprouting on the back of his neck, because he’s spent some time now trying to force back the transformation, even his tail replaced with legs that hardly seem to fit him — not a wolf, he is left in the shape of a man.
Unlike wolves, men cry.
The sob that comes out of his throat is ragged and ugly, heaves from the depths of him and somewhat undermines the strength of his god voice released a moment ago — the tears are so hot on his cheeks he feels as though they might burn him, his body shuddering. The tears fall hot and heavy from his eyes, landing onto his knees, streaking down his cheeks. He can taste the salt on his lips, his body shuddering, his breaths heavy and hard.
Varði closes her book very gently, carefully, and smooths a delicately-manicured palm over the leatherbound surface of its cover. Her expression is — Pained. Or…
Apologetic.
He stares at her, tears still dripping from his eyes whenever he blinks, as his hand goes up to his mouth, tracing his lips with the tips of his fingers. He feels very cold, all of a sudden — his blood no longer has that hot tingle to it, and his tongue no longer feels quite so loose.
“I am a record-keeper,” says Varði, answering the question he hasn’t yet posed her, hasn’t yet demanded of her.
He stares at her, and yet his rage is impotent now, the natural spark in him dampened by this flow of tears. “You,” he growls, his fingers going up to touch his cheeks, the underside of his eyes. “I wondered,” he says, “I wondered, how, how, when I have never shed so much as a single tear for him — ”
He can feel it. Loki can feel it now, feel the chain broken, feel the oath unmade, feel the fire stamped out.
“My name, Varði,” she says, almost gently as she stands to her feet, “it is not from the Icelandic. I am much older than that — it is no diminutive. My name comes from vörðr.”
“Vörðr,” Loki repeats, dizzied by it. “You are, you…”
“It was Baldr who found me,” says Varði. “When I Fell. I was often with him, when not with his father, I… I went to Hel when he did. I cannot die, of course, it was…” The gold in her eyes shines brightly. “The Allfather did send me, but I just knew that if you — “
“Get out,” says Loki, and the angel looks small in front of him, her record clutched against her breast, her lips downturned. “Out. Out!”
The door slams as she goes, she’s in such a hurry to leave, and he wants to break something, wants to scream, wants to howl, wants to burn everything down, wants —
There’s a knock at the door, and Loki freezes in the middle of his apartment floor, turning his head toward it.
“Loki,” says Baldr from the other side of the door. “If we could only talk — ”
The howl that bursts from him is primal, but in its aftermath his eyes are dry — four paws hit the ground instead of two legs, his bulk so huge it fills the room, such that he can only open the door by tearing it from its hinges.
Baldr flees from him as fast as he can, but Loki, as ever, is faster.
Want some more Loki?
Try:
- A Stranger’s Visit — 3.6k, rated T. MB. A priest of Freyr receives a strange visitation. A little bit of Norse godliness versus Norse priestliness. Featuring Esben. Adapted from a TweetFic. On Medium / / On Patreon.
- Loki’s Favour — 2.4k. MB. Magical weirdness and oddity here, with cockwarming, banter, and an edge of divine danger. A bit more of Loki! On Medium / / On Patreon.
- Agreements and Curses — 20k, rated M, MB. A young man is dispatched to a fae land and joins the princes’ retinue. As part of an exchange program between the magical city from which he hails and the fae island state of Einsamal, a young man is sent as a child to explore fable and adventure, and in the process falls in love with one of the princes. The prince, a child of Loki, faces his own trials. With Princes Loptr and Fenris, Boniface Nottingham, and Loki. On Medium / / On Patreon.
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