He was alone. Alone in the black, nothing to help him survive but his magic and whatever remained of his wits. They were the dark with tearing claws and gouging teeth. The pain of each cut was enough to force him to the ground, but he knew what awaited him if he falls, so he would rise, again and again he would force his broken body to rise and he would run. There was nowhere safe for him to go, nowhere to rest and heal, nowhere that didn't hold pain and terror beyond imagining. So he ran, he ran and ran and when he couldn't run anymore he felt a pair of jaws lock around his ankle to drag him down. He screamed and lashed out blindly. A set of claws ripped through his arm and then there was nothing but pain. Claws and teeth came at him from all sides slicing and tearing and ripping. He screamed until he could scream no more and even then he couldn't know if he had lost his voice of if they had torn his throat out. If he could die he would have taken his life long before this, but there was no such fate for him, he felt ever slice every stab, the branding irons twisted into his organs, and the flesh carved off and fed into hungry mouths, the sharp points thrust into his head and pulled out only to be screwed back in. his eyes set on fire and then frozen and set back in his head. He was kept alive and awake. He cried out begging for mercy, for pity, for death, but none were forthcoming. Then the voices would come, when he was too weak to run from them they would come and whisper to him. When he tried to move away or shut his ears or close his mind to the voices there would be more pain and he would have taken the pain and gladly if it had meant the words would have stopped, but they were not that kind. He knew the voices and he knew their the ones he hd ever loved, showing him his darkest blackest days. Those quite words from the mouths f his loved ones telling him everything he had ever thought in his deepest despair and rage was true and worse than he could ever imagine. They did more damage with their soft whispers and hard truths than any sharp claws and burning irons could have done. It was because of the voices he could feel his mind slipping, His will running from him even as he ran from the claws. His sanity leaving him and the ones once loved pulling it from him.
He was nothing, nothing but a shadow, not even worthy of the light that created him. He was a monster, despised by everyone even himself. How had he not seen this sooner? How could he have hidden his true nature from his family? He sickened himself to think that they had been forced to be in his presence. The people he had loved more than life itself had been contaminated by his filth. He was a monster, a vile, evil revolting thing that should have been left to die in the cold ice when he was child. Why had he been wrested from his deserved fate? Why had he been forced to live? Now he welcomed the pain, the searing pain that brought tears to his eyes and a smile to his lips. He laughed as the agony and despair overflowed and drenched his burning flesh like liquid flame. He tried to scream when his heart and lungs were wrenched from his chest, but all that came out was the hysterical laughter of a man that has found his end. He wished he could die. The voices told him he should have died when he was first born, but he had lived and all he wished now was to right that wrong by dyeing now. That was his world, his whole existence, the voices of all those he had ever loved running thought his head, as he laughed at the unthinkable pain that never ended.
A little voice that he didn't know started to make an appearance in his head. Bit by bit it became more than a light whisper in the dark. The voice became clearer and stronger, holding its own against the tempest of hate and fear. It said different things. It said the other voices were wrong. They had betrayed him. They had cheated him of his death as a child and now abandoned him to this world of pain, terror, and insanity. The other voiced had torn him down with his own hate, and fear, and loathing, throwing stone after heavy stone to break his spirit and mind. This voice was the first kind thing he had ever known. He begged the new voice for death, pleaded with it for mercy and to grant him oblivion. beseeched on his hands and knees for it to end him, but it had other plans for him. It took the stones that broke him and built a wall. The other voices were muted and far away, not gone but if he focused he could almost drown them out. The voice sat next to him and helped him learn to use the wall. How to make it stronger so the voices were now only whispers. For a time those were the happiest times his sad miserable excuse for a life provided. The pain never ended it was always there threatening to break into him and tear his spine form his back or fling him to the ground and force him to claw out his own liver, but the voice simply pushed it back and he could almost forget there were iron spikes tearing him apart. When he could focus on the voice and what it said and make its words his world. He could melt away from the pain that continued to wrack his body in new and terrifying ways, where the other voices meant nothing and he felt almost at deaths door. There was no such mercy for him. The voice had other things to do, other places to be. It had plans and it could not accomplish them like this. He begged it not to go, each and every time he would do anything to keep it with him. Yet each and every time the voice left, promising it would be back as soon as it could, then it was gone and it was like it had never come, the pain doubled and the voices came back, and the only sign the voice had been there at all was there was the soft touch it layed against his cheek. It was pitiful how he clung to it like a child at his mother's dress skirts, but the voice was the only thing that he had, the only thing that kept him from that place of despair. When the voice returned as it had promised, he would weep and shudder and implore it again to end him. Yet it would never do it smiling sadly down at him as he clutched at it and comforted him as he built back his wall and endured the pain till it was nothing more than a passing agony. The times between the voices leaving became shorter, and the time spent away proceeded to lengthen. Until the voice told him it must leave for a great period of time and it did not know if it would be able to return. It told him it would do what it could for him but if it did not return it asked only that he not look for death.
"If this is life how could it be preferable to death?" he asked "I am only a shell of mind and body that hangs here between this hell and the peace closest to oblivion."
"No. this is nothing but a dull shadow of life. There is so much more than what you know. Turn your mind back. Do you remember the people that sent you here." The voice soothed. He tried with all his might to remember a time that was not all pain and darkness. "As you hung over the edge of the rainbow bridge dangling from your brothers' grasp. How your father held fast to him, and told you 'NO'." he remembered, like a light suddenly flickering on in the dark he remembered. His life before the pit, why he was a monster, what he had done, how he fell. There was a fire burning through him and he screamed. He had not screamed in so long it tore his throat. He burned. He burned with such bloodlust his vision went red. He wanted them dead at his feet. They had sent him to the black pit and left him to slowly rot away. He was a monster and they had let him fall. Not even monsters deserved this.
"Do you remember?" the voice was just that, a voice. It seemed far in the rush of hate coursing thought his veins like blood.
"I remember." He stood for the first time in far too long. He stood up on his own two feet tall and proud. Radiating the loathing he felt like a physical wave that could rend flesh from bone. His magic that he had forgot swept thought his body, sending out sparks and flames that licked up the side of his body and bathed him in the purifying light. The claws and fangs renewed their efforts to pull him back to his despair, but he held firm. His hate was like steel and iron welded to every one of his broken bones, wrapping around the fragments of his soul and locking it away. He let out a terrible roar that carried the promise of such blood and destruction that even the claws and fangs cowered back. Leaving him for the first time in his memory, and the surge of power that came with his first taste of relief could have sent him flying were he not collapsing into the arms of the voice a moment later.
"You remember?"
"Yes." he was exhausted and he remembered what sleep was as he started to fight its sly fingers. He saw what shadows would await him.
"You are free of this place now."
"I will never be free of it. It shall haunt my sleep for as long as I live."
"You will rise above it."
"NO! Monsters do not deserve to forget hell." The voice looked at him with a question it did not need to ask poised on its lips. "When I have done what needs to be done. When Odin lies broken and bloodied at my feet, and Thor sees himself and his precious all father for what they truly are and is crushed by the truth, when the nine realms cry out in fear of my shadow and cower in their homes at the mention of my name then I shall find the death that has been denied me and there meet my peace and oblivion."
"You remember your name?" the voice was surprised. He pulled away from the voice and stood. He stood as a king looking upon his kingdom. He looked out upon the blackness, upon the pain and fear and despair and cold cloying hell that would never end and would never leave him. He looked out and he was unafraid, he stood there with but one thought set firmly in his existence.
"My name is LOKI of Asgard and i am burdened with glorious purpose."
