100 Prompts:: Avengers ~ Loki ((warnings unknown at this time))
1. Breathe
What allowed a god to breathe in the vacuum of space? The airless realms between the stars grew still, silent as he passed far beyond his brother's cry and drifted into darkness, sliding between stars. But he breathed, and he lived, and both were hateful to him.
Utterly alone, he curled up as he tumbled through the aether, feeling nothing but the agony twisting his heart so that his stomach tightened and his teeth clenched. Not even the frozen nothingness touched him, hardly worse than the bite of Jotunheim. As he fell, glowing particles of dust and light passed around him like ripples in black water, trailing him in sweeps and eddies that spread outward, farther and farther, until they faded again.
Still he fell. Hours? Days? He did not try to measure time, so consumed with jealousy and grief that he thought he might burn up in his own intensity. Straight though a nebula like a comet, flinging up great swirls of a luminous tide, gasping in a cosmic miasma as it burned him and then let go, sending him out the other side as if he were diving into deep waters. With his back to his fall, he watched the universe slip away, the stars hovering on the surface of a universal ocean, growing distant and dark.
He would fall into a star—he was certain of it—and lose himself in a single instant of blazing torture. Closing his eyes, he tucked his head slightly and wondered how long his descent would last, flung out of heaven to a distant hell.
It could be hours or centuries, his waiting to die, and until then—no longer the god of mischief or chaos, he would become a god of falling, of descent and disappearance and an empty altar stone. A forgotten god in a pantheon of warriors, the caught breath between the lightning and thunder.
A faint glow warned him of something behind where he could not see, but instead of a burning star, he felt the weak gravity of a moon and the buoyant updraft of a faint atmosphere. Drifting down, he exerted his tired magic to slow his descent and landed gently on silver rock and sand, with small plumes billowing around him and then settling once more.
He lay still, content to merely breathe. Should he rise, he should have to try to live. Better here to wait for death, his numbed senses taking the stars for blurs and the thin line of light for the edge of the horizon. His breath came slower, became shallow. Somewhere nearby, coming closer, he heard the ominous rumbling of thunder and had the strangest fancy that perhaps his brother had somehow followed him after all.
: : :