LOKI LAUFEYSON
GOD OF MISCHIEF
FORMER PRINCE OF ASGARD
MIDTOWN AIRSPACE, MANHATTAN
He felt it before he beheld it.
That was the phantom hand that pulled him from his hiding; the very force that turned his swift skiff back toward the apex of the tower, when every cold, pragmatic calculation pointed toward distance, regrouping, and the patient, serpentine winding of a plot that could afford to bide its time.
It was no clamour of sound, nor a spectacle for the eye.
It was a resonance beyond the ken of mortal senses, vibrating through the bedrock of the island the way deep magic once echoed through the halls of Himinbjorg, felt heavy in the chest, sharp behind the eyes, and in that precise, supernatural marrow where Asgardian senses register the presence of a power that had no rightful business festering in the soil of Midgard.
Seidr.
—No.
Not yours.
Never yours.
You are a thief of arts, a boy playing with scraps from Frigga’s table.—
Except it was not Seidr precisely.
It possessed the grand quality of Seidr, the fundamental texture of a sovereign will shaped into physical reality, yet the make of it was wretchedly wrong.
It was built upon principles he did not recognize, structured in geometries that corresponded to nothing of his accumulated lore of the Nine Realms.
In any other circumstance, he might have been seduced by the prospect of a novel magic, a new riddle to unravel; but given the reality that the Seid-madur currently emitting this power was the very obstacle barring his Chitauri host from conquest, his singular, bloody priority was the slaughter of the mortal.
The wretched island spread beneath him like a map of dust as he cleaved through the billowing smoke, cloaked in illusions, drifting like a ghost through the airspace above his vanguard.
Below, the tide of battle had mutated in the span of mere minutes, mutated in ways that stoked the embers of his fury the Chitauri formations fracturing and degrading in a manner that owed nothing to the clumsy efforts of his brother and his mortal pets.
He looked upward.
—They break because you are a poor commander.
A lesser king.
All your efforts a feast to failure.—
The barrier suspended above the tower’s crown was the fountainhead of this blasphemy.
He had discerned that much from afar, the emerald wall sealing his portal with a finality that his leviathans had been unable to breach from the ether.
What he had failed to comprehend until he drew close was the sheer magnitude of the working.
It was not merely a barrier; it was a tapestry woven across the heavens, tearing into his forces.
From this altitude, the light bled across the island like luminous veins through living stone, each pulse feeding from the selfsame source, all of it originating from the solitary figure suspended above the tower’s peak. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
He passed his brother without pausing.
Thor stood amidst the tempest two blocks eastward, Mjolnir trailing arcs of weeping lightning, hewing through a formation of skiffs performing, with tedious perfection, the slaughter he was best suited for.
Loki watched him for a fleeting breath from behind his shroud of glamour.
He watched the hammer cleave the sky, return, and strike again.
In that watching, he felt the heavy ache of that particular, uncomplicated emotion he had spent centuries refusing to name.
—Look at the golden favorite.
See how they love him?
He will drag you back in chains.
He never loved you.
To him, you are a monster to be tamed, a snake to be sent out on his whim.—
Loki tore his eyes away, the whisper burning like ash in his mind.
The figure above the tower loomed larger as his skiff closed the distance.
He was mortal.
That was the primary truth, stark and glaring from a distance in the way that mortality is ever naked to those old enough to know the gulf between a creature of mere decades and a being of millennia.
A youth, in all likelihood, though Midgardians were ever difficult to age with precision.
His garb was a garment of deep emerald that caught the sun, enveloped in a radiant green aura that cloaked him from head to toe like a second, burning skin.
His eyes were the most striking sacrilege.
Even from this distance, through the refracting veil of the cloaking spell, Loki could see the green of them; a vivid, concentrated, impossible emerald that drowned the white and pupil alike.
The mortal was whispering, chanting the same incantation over and over, his lips moving in the strict, rhythmic cadence of a litany rehearsed unto madness.
The same phrase, unyielding, barely audible even from ten feet behind him: “In brightest day, in blackest night…”
Loki brought his skiff to a halt directly in the mortal’s shadow.
“No evil shall escape my sight.”
He reached for the scepter.
“Let those who worship evils might.”
The azure gem at its tip had been flickering erratically since the mortal had first bathed the island in this green defilement agitated in a manner Loki had never yet witnessed.
In the presence of whatever force this mortal was channeling, the scepter pulsed continuously, a rapid, violent blue heartbeat that illuminated the cloaked air around his fingers in alternating hues of emerald and sapphire.
It was like a furious argument being conducted in the language of light.
Feed us his mind.
Or are you afraid?
Are you a coward, Laufey’s whelp?—
He lined the deadly tip up.
“Beware my power.”
The mortal’s back filled his vision, the suit’s fierce glow rendering him an easy mark to center in the scepter’s alignment.
One clean, precise touch between the cosmic gem and the spine, and whatever grand design was powering this barrier would collapse the very instant the mortal’s mind was no longer his own.
The portal would tear wide once more.
The army would finish what it had begun.
And Midgard would bow beneath his scepter before the sun could journey another degree across the sky.
Loki smiled, a cruel, cold twisting of his lips, savoring the glorious prospect of turning this Seid-madur’s own arts against the very city he sought to shield.
The anticipation brought him that fleeting, sharp joy he only ever derived at the steep expense of others.
“Green Lanterns light.”
He let the cruelty linger, tasting it, exactly as long as he desired.
Then, he cast aside his cloak.
“In brightest day, in blackest night…”
And then just at the apex of his victory, a familiar, mechanical whine struck his ears from somewhere below and behind, ascending in volume at a velocity that suggested whoever was generating that metal shriek was far closer than his comfort could allow.
Loki had precisely enough time to process the threat before the repulsor blast took him sideways, tearing him violently from the skiff.
The vessel surged forward without him.
“You know,” Stark’s voice echoed, distorted and mocking through the iron visor, “for a god, you really have terrible situational awareness.”
Loki fell.
—Failing.
Again.
Pathetic.
A god of not— The scepter slipped from his grasp.
The grand tower rushed upward to claim him.
The scepter plummeted beside him in a separate, mocking arc.
The final vision granted to him before the tower’s upper terrace introduced itself brutally to his spine was the emerald phantom above the portal, still whispering, utterly undisturbed, his barrier intact, his eyes still burning with that impossible, unquenchable green.
Then the terrace arrived, and the breath was driven from his body in one singular, agonizing rush.