Thor gritted his teeth so tightly that he thought his jaw would shatter with another minimal increase of the applied pressure.
But he ignored the pain, felt it as an annoying side effect, than as a real distraction of the continuously intended observation.
Laboriously he kept his vigorous body in the shadows of one of the in rectilinearly symmetry sequenced columns, looked at the scenery with growing suspicion. He calmly leaned against the cool, to the ceiling towering stone and folded his arms, covering the subliminal shaking of hid clenched fists from inquisitive eyes.
Six guards had positioned themselves into a circle, peppered with weapons, kept the prisoner strict in the middle. The Spearheads glittered reddish in the light glow of the setting sun. To the Aesir they appeared like a blood-soaked omen, telling of death and grief. The invisible weight, which was resting upon his chest since the moment he had to give Loki to custody of the royal army squeezed the breath from his lungs, got heavier with every fatal thought.
The trembling of his hands hasted its rhythm, although he convulsively dug them into the metal of his armor.
Since henceforth three days Odin discussed with his wife about the persistence of the existence, that once was called son by them and little brother by Thor in the next room, sealed from all eyes and ears,.
Today the final decision should be made and opened to the citizens of Asgard.
The audience hall, in which hundreds of representatives of the common folk had gathered, was almost overflowing because of the impatient murmuring. Everywhere there were incessant whispers and hisses. Speculations from the strangest kind were getting into the air through snapping flows, hovering in the atmosphere like a malevolent, unfortunate veil. Thor never thought that he would have to compare the race of the Aesirs with a nodular bundle of snakes, romping annoyed in a basket and wrestling for the best place.
But now this unlikely case had occurred and what hurt him the most was the fact, that he couldn´t take amiss their malady comments, neither their malicious joy.
Everyone knew what crimes Loki had committed on Midgard, what catastrophe he nearly had caused and what nefarious dream he had indulged.
The god of thunder himself was not able to deny the cruelty with which his brother had slaughtered the human beings and with which icy calculation he manipulatively had used them for his own purposes, and then had thrown them away like wasted toys.
They had been unrecognizable tools for him, trained dogs, for which it was proper to eat a piece of raw meat and to be sent for hunting afterwards.
He wanted to be a god, in a world, which had no need for a god from his norse caliber.
He had brought chaos across the countries and destruction across the cities. He had raised again the taboo to his personal law.
No, The Aesirs didn´t made guilty of injustice, when they claimed the silvertongue had unfolded to a thoroughly depraved creature.
Although Thor would have destroyed every male exemplar that would have the foolhardiness to stand by his side and whisper such spiteful sentences with laughter into his ear.
And he would have felt no remorse by hearing their crushing bones.
Because Thor still had hope.
It might sound paradox, virtually insane and completely off the reality, but he still had hope. Hoped for something he did not know to designate, even though it was relentless in his mind. Hoped for forgiveness, possibly for a new beginning.
Sometime, somewhere, somehow.
In this moment he hoped for a milder punishment than that, which tried to dominate his nightmares for several nights and urged him hour by hour deeper into the blame rolling his intestines because of fear and drove shiny beads of sweat on his forehead just with the mere imagination. Execution he thought and the word remained bitter on his tongue.
In this second the sonorous sound of opening doors announced the arrival of the majesties. They walked together to the throne, but always kept an irreconcilable distance of few centimeters, almost as thorns would get into their bodies with another approximation.
Every muscle strand in the thundergod's body involuntarily tensed with this picture, and it almost seemed as if his very own reflexes prepared him for an approaching battle. Each of his senses remained sharpened to the utmost. When Odin set down on his seat of power he magisterially knocked on the shiny parquet.
The sign.
They had made a decision.
The whispering stopped, hypnotically all the glances hung on the aged, authoritative figure, waiting for the judgment.
The allfather cleared his throat.
His face lacked any expression, when he started so talk.
With an across boarded gaze to the crowd Thor realized that many Aesirs instinctively held their breath because of the voltage.
He shared this phenomenon with them as well – but his matched more nervous than agitated origin.
He quickly looked at his mother, who dutifully stood beside her husband; he tried to derive eye contact and to read the development of this miserable occassion.
He met her glance, quicker than he hoped to and he startled when he saw revealing tears shimmering under her eyelids.
Frigga never cried.
Unless her grief included one of her sons.
Immediately Thor turned his head to the king, almost craned his neck. His father's eyes were animated by unusual coldness. Hard and unyielding like weathered rocks.
The blood roared in the crown prince's ears, reminded him of remote thunderous rumbling. A storm moved on in these halls, he could feel it like animals felt the approaching arrival of an earthquake.
"Loki Laufeyson", the loud voice finally boomed through the silent hall, "Do you confess to have led Midgard into an early Ragnarok, to have committed a pact with the Chitauri and to have excruciatingly killed thousands of human beings?"
Thor glanced at his brother, tried to filter the slightest emotion from the marble profile, framed by night black hair. But it was of no avail. The jotun made no expression, kept looking strictly to the allfather.
"Guilty. In every accusatory point, father." He replied scornful, lacked any sign of remorse.
Thor gulped, looked back to Odin.
His eyes seemed to have petrified in seconds, the iris dark like the coal mountains from Svartaflheim. Never before the god of Thunder had seen similar abhorrence in the allfather's face.
Loki met this development with simple arrogance, forming a scrawny smile around his haggard mouth.
"So", Odin portentously started , "you have definitively proved that no drop of my blood flows in your veins. Your whole existence has become a shame for this kingdom and it torments me that I myself wanted to take you in our ancestry. If I had left you to your destiny at that time in Jotunheim none of your sins would burden my sleep today." He took a deep breath, let every just spoken word influence the crowd to his feet.
"But I won´t make this mistake a second time." He added gloomily.
A certain murmur went through the crowd, got with an impalpable wave to the last man and to the last woman.
Thor on the other hand felt as if someone had given him a targeted hit in the stomach. A voice, deep in his innermost, pushed him to scream out his mind, to stop the time, and to hold back the decision, which the allfather was up to make.
But his throat constricted, his tongue grew weary. The horror let him freeze to an unreared doll and it was, as if this war was decided without him.
He felt more than he saw, that his father rose from his throne. His vision blurred to an opaque mash made out of colors, strange and familiar, beloved faces.
He blinked several times but it brought nothing.
He felt dizzy.
"I announce the verdict."
Odin's grip on the slim rod of Gungnir strengthened.
"You, Loki Laufeyson, will be beheaded with tomorrow's first sunbeam on the public space, in front of all onlookers' eyes, that your evil being will cause no creature´s harm anymore. May Helheim take your tainted soul from us!"
A few seconds passed. From somewhere a miserably restrained cough was heard.
Then the folk burst into deafening cheers, clapped, whistled, and praised the verdict from their hallowed allfather. Even the guards showed their uninhibited consent, jeered and laughed, pulled more at the prisoner's chains to force him on his knees.
But for Loki it was easy to keep his balance, although it gave him much effort to show no pain in his distorted face by the unimaginative tug at his limbs. Instead he concentrated on other facts, tried to eradicate the burning from his maltreated bones.
For the first time since he moved into these halls he vaguely turned to the side, attentively surveyed the place where he had perceived the presence of a too known individual. To his mild surprise he noticed that it has vanished without any sign.
Just the column with little cracks remaining of buried fingertips told him that there had ever stood a person.