Beneath the Cracked Ice
By Rey
Something goes wronger when Thor confronts Laufey in Jötunheim. It leads to the discovery of many, many wrong things, as well as many, many right ones, not to mention all the added dirt and gold and those in between.
Story notes: Yet another fossil that has been gathering dust in my drive. Written up to 2 1/2 chapters out of probable 7 at the time of publication. More diverse but as intense as Winter's Treasures, for those who have read that other story; just intense in a different way. 'Good' read for those who would like to read all the sordid details of the generations prior to Thor and Loki. My chance to develop the sadly minor characters of the Warriors Three and Sif, as well as show my tweaks of the names I found in the smatterings of Norse lore I found online. (My apologies, for those who might be offended by this.) And, last but not least, hope you'll like this story! It's been yet another labour of love, more than a year in making.
Rey
Chapter 1
Oddities
(Loki)
Note: The bolded dialogue is taken from the film script for Thor on IMSDB, as well as the actual film, with some shuffling about and artistic license.
The moment the Bifrost deposits the small company of warriors and one semi-unwanted tagalong on the ice, Loki shivers.
Not because he cannot stand the cold, like how his companions are suffering, except for Thor.
No, he loves it, too much.
The landscape is dark and desolate as far as eyes can see, lit from above by three moons – one white-grey, the other white-brown, and the last coal-red – half obscured by hanging clouds. Jagged spires of ice and icy cliffs are intersperced with mounds of ice scree and rough snow, and slick patches of ice hide in quite inopportune places, ready to trip an unwary traveller into ravines or snowdrifts with questionable depths. A fierce wind blows almost nonstop across the empty wasteland, sometimes carrying with it bits of ice scree and a smattering of snowflakes.
But it feels invigorating, instead of freezing: pretty cold but fresh with the brisk bite of impending snowfall, not dry and not wet but damp enough to hydrate thirsty skin that often chafes under Asgard's relentless sunlight.
In fact, he wonders if the soles of his feet will like the wintry touch just as much, if he shucks off his boots and puts them on that patch of softer snow ahead….
He dares not speak about all of it, however. He has already been called all sorts of unsavoury names in Asgard, the gentlest of those being "weird," "baffling" and "fickle." He would rather avoid being mocked by his own supposed allies in enemy territory in an unsanctioned trip. The present situation is already dire enough, and leans more and more towards disastrous.
The ruins of a city loom on the darkened horizon. The ragged, jagged edges of toppled edifices, broken walls and jutting foundation pillars gleam just faintly under the subdued light of the three moons, and he cannot but wonder how they looked before the æsir came.
The dwellings of monsters….
He blinks, draws in a sharp breath, and goes to a standstill for a moment.
The environment has changed, ever so slightly, on the thought of "monsters." The icy plane has shifted into a vaguely ring-like formation, the natural roughness of the wasteland is now a mass of brittle breakages, and the void yawns here and there like it never did before, as if the company were tredding a fragile plateau swimming in the void rather than an actual planet – or even a magically maintained asteroid such as Asgard.
To say that it is disorienting would be a vast understatement.
To say that a frisson of fear is running up and down his spine would be far from the truth, as well – far milder.
He is dealing with a powerful, talented mage; or worse, a group of powerful, talented mages. – But how? How can monsters master something as delicate as seiðr? How can they manage to conduct Workings without their greatest weapon? How can a race of giant brutes even think of applying such a subtle deception as part of their defences?
Potant deception, at that. The distance to the ruined settlement is not getting shorter, despite how long the small, miserable company he is part of has been picking its way stubbornly onwards, in-between the holes and cracks and other obstacles. Are they even heading in the right direction? Or is this a seiðr-born maze?
They are target boards for the jötnar, regardless.
Now, is it only his imagination, or are there indeed shadows flitting about on the edge of his vision? But if it is real, why has nobody else noticed it?
His breaths grow ragged. The damp chill of the air is no longer welcoming. Wistful imaginings of ice-bound experimentations fly cleanly out of his paranoia-hounded mind.
They are target boards for the jötnar, and none of his companions realise it.
In fact, Thor, up ahead, is saying jovially, "It feels good, doesn't it? To be together again, adventuring on another world?" And that big oaf's posse, they immediately complain about various things, except for the dangers looming all round them.
So much for calling themselves "warriors of great renown."
He dearly wants to bash their heads together, or at least transfer his vision to their eyes through seiðr, so that they may notice for themselves the trap they are walking so blithely into. But they will not appreciate the first option, however much they tolerate it from Thor, and, ironically, they will appreciate the latter even less, given the source and medium – a womanly, trickery-filled art from a wily argr.
Then, at long last, the small, miserable company trudges amidst the first of the ruins, and the hidden jötnar spring the trap, almost visibly crowding them.
"Where are they?" Sif abruptly speaks, her voice tense as a taut bowstring.
`All around us, so close by they can clobber us without stepping forward. It's too late already to fret,` he wants to say, but his mouth feels terribly dry, and his tongue is stuck to his palate. – This is not what he invisioned when he thought of disrupting Thor's coronation using the jötnar. He never wants his lout of a brother to die, not the said lout's posse either, let alone himself, but the prospect is getting more and more than likely by each step they take.
After all, there is tense, shrewd hostility in the air, and it doesn't originate from the increasingly nervous æsir he is trailing after.
The foreign tension sharpens and hardens into icy outrage, quite unfortunately for the æsir, when Thor scoffs in response, loud enough for all to hear, "Hiding. As cowards always do."
`Oh, Thor. You idiot.`
It goes only downhill from there, fast.
"What is your business here, Asgardians?" one of their hostile escorts calls from up ahead, near one of the largest semi-intact edifices, clear across the large, pockmarked square. Given the deathly atmosphere and the rampant hostility between their realms, Loki is honestly surprised by the monster's politeness.
The politeness that Thor spits on, by hollering, "I speak only to your king, not to his foot soldiers."
Their hostile escorts step menacingly out of the shadows, just so, with icy weapons drawn: towering, shaven-headed blue giants with glowing, glowering red eyes and craggy faces, naked but for the markings on their skin and the loincloth round their waist.
Those books in the library did not lie.
He wishes he were ensconced comfortably at his desk at home, however, when learning that, especially when one ice blade gets too close to the top of his head.
`Damn it. I don't want to be skewered by a monster because of that lout!` So, forsaking any thought of guarding the rear of the procession, which has long been a moot point already anyway, he quickens his steps and slips himself in-between the Warriors Three and Sif, to walk beside his brother – his still determined, still cocksure brother.
Only to stop short all too soon after, when yet another frost giant materialises beneath the cracked roof of the huge building up ahead, blending among the other frost giants and yet not. He resumes walking only because of the force of the marching intruders and their jötnar escorts. But in his mind, he is still paces behind, freezing up and staring at that particular monster.
Not as tall and broad as many in the vicinity, yet not glaringly shorter either as to attract swift attention. Clad in finer loincloth: softer in hue and make, and looking a little more luxurious with the thin lines of what might be the chips of some gleaming stone decorating it. Wreathed in solemn authority and coiled might, startlingly regal for the reputation of its kind.
But it is flanked by several others cloaked in similarly visible air of power and leadership, and they are mostly larger than that one is.
What, then, makes that one different?
His nerves are jangling a merry cacophony inside of him when the company reaches the broken edifice, all too soon in his opinion. And there, under the eave of the building's portico, all too close to the six of them, sits the mystifying jötun in an armchair seemingly made of ice, still flanked by its – `Standing, quite probably ready for a fight.` – powerful retinue from all sides but the immediate front.
And it speaks, in a calm tone that nonetheless radiates menace in each deep, gravelly sound it makes, "You have come a long way to die, Asgardians."
The proclamation frightens him, but not because of its content, which is just the blunt truth made even more blatant.
There is something familiar in that alien voice; bone-deep familiar, inexplicable to his conscious mind, to his rigid, rigorous reasoning. He has to employ all of his courtly demeanour, not to give out a shiver of unease or an air of perturbation.
Inwardly, still, it is another matter entirely.
What makes Laufey – of all the frost giants – familiar to him? Because this is almost undoubtably the King of the Jötnar itself, in the flesh, in its element, in its realm, surrounded by its numerous warriors and courtiers. Thor demanded to speak with the King, after all, however rude and bratty that oaf sounded, and Jötunheim would not dare to deny him, for fear of incurring Asgard's wrath for the second time in slightly more than a thousand years.
Worse for his nerves, his oversensitive senses are beginning to pick up something from the environment during the next few exchanges; something that is not the thickening hostility in the air, nor the wall of giant bodies all round him and his companions, and neither the weather that is turning wet and charged as if before a thunderstorm. The sensation develops slowly and almost unnoticeably, coating over the Asgardians like fine mist, but staying there stubbornly like snowflakes.
He has just realised that it is a scanning spell of some sort, when Laufey looks right at him on Thor's demand to know how some frost giants managed to get into the weapons' vault, gazing as if right into his soul with a pair of unnerving, monstrous red glowing eyes set beneath ridged brow.
He draws a deep breath surreptitiously. Seiðr rises up close to his skin, ready for use.
And still, his heart skips a beat when the jötun then proclaims, whilst yet looking right into his eyes, "The House of Odin is full of traitors." – `How did he know?! How did he know it was I? Impossible! He must be bluffing.`
His mind is the next thing that gets stalled, when the monster parries Thor's predictable outrage over the accusation with a snarled, "Your father is a murderer and a thief."
Laufey says more things, things that seem to be geared towards inciting Thor's easily stoked wrath, and Thor answers in his predictably explosive manner. But even as the situation escalates and Loki tries his best to contain it, two words continuously jam the thoughts of the younger Odinson: "murderer" and "thief."
What would the King of Asgard, guardian of the Nine Realms, steal? Let alone from a barren land of brutish, uncivilised monsters?
Who would one murder in a war? The rule of a battle itself, by its nature, is "kill or be killed," and a war as great and devastating as the æsir-jötnar war a millennium ago would not be deserving of something as singular, as specific, as intentional as "murder." A man can murder a rival or three; a man can even murder a group of innocents in their sanctuary; but whole troops of the enemy on a chaotic battlefield…?
And the sheer emotion in those ridiculous accusations, however inscrutable it was….
He is going to ask his father when he is home once more and has mulled over this conundrum.
After he has born the brunt of the King's ire, most likely. But he will not grouse overmuch against the punishment if only it means he has managed to bring himself and his oaf of a brother safely back home in the first place.
To that effect, once Laufey has unexpectedly – and rather civilly for the situation – allowed it, he quickly herds Thor back to where they have come from, with the Warriors Three and Sif acting as – a very, very flimsy – barrier round the two of them.
He refuses to analyse how Laufey delivered the permission, to pick apart the emotions that so thickly layered the heavy words. He just refuses. He has no wish whatsoever to sympathise with a monster, let alone the king of those monsters.
But Thor drags his feet, almost visibly so, and–
"Run back home, little princess."
–The oaf so eagerly retraces his steps towards Laufey and its ilk, just so, raising his damn hammer high. And, in response, the scanning spell that has been coating the Asgardians flows into a containment Working, like water rushing down from a height into a more compact container through a smooth channel.
Unfortunately, however, Mjolnir is launched towards the loud-mouthed jötun standing to Laufey's left before the invisible restraints solidify, snapping into place, rooting the Asgardians including Loki where they stand.
"Damn," Loki curses under his breath, blood draining from his face, as he watches the damn hammer shoot towards the surprised – and maybe frightened? – jötun's chest. `We're dead.`
And then, right before his eyes, another – far taller, far bigger – frost giant rushes forward, and catches Mjolnir in its paws, just as, all round him, invisible currents of seiðr rush towards the executor of the unbelievable feat, as if air being sucked into a vacuum container.
As if supporting the hammer-catcher in its no-doubt seiðr-aided effort.
Loki goggles. His mind blanks out for a moment. `Impossible!`
His mind has chosen a very, very bad time to take some respite, it turns out.
The thoroughly flabbergasted second prince of Asgard returns to reality by sheer force of will, but it has been too late.
He is already dangling far above the icy, pockmarked, debris-strewn ground, caught by the back of his coat, at a level with his captor's midriff, separated arm-spans away from his companions.
"A deed for a deed," calls his captor, breaking the tense, freezing – in both senses of the word – silence.
And the atmosphere turns bloodthirsty, despite the fact that the frost giants are saying nothing overt – or at all, really.
Just grinning widely, showing rows of black, sharp teeth under glowing red eyes.
"Don't you dare hurt my brother!" Thor squawks, so audibly confused and angry and panicked, and Loki fights not to groan aloud.
His captor laughs, predictably, sounding like so much gravel crunching together. "Your sibling, eh? Did you not just tell them to know their place? Maybe their place is dangling up here, paying for your wrongs?" it purrs. And, in a more literal demonstration of the threat, a nearby jötun makes a show of readying a humongous ice club.
`Thor, you fool! You utter fool!`
Loki begins to flail about, perhaps all too predictably. But he cannot just stay still when he is about to be bashed into pieces without the safety net of his – so recently and so cleverly bound – seiðr!
"Brother!" Thor hollers, even more panicked now, and maybe also a smidge afraid, when all that the hapless younger ás can achieve is choking loudly on his own coat's collar and making more of the damn blue giant brutes let out more of that gravelly laugh.
Lacking any other recourse to succour his soon-to-be-pulverised bones, he catches Laufey's gaze and holds it fast. He stares deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, drinking in something that he does not know but understands all too well, in a level that his mind, let alone his words, cannot – will not – grasp. `If I am to die right now, let me die at home.`
The ice club swishes towards him.
The previous currents of foreign seiðr, honed to a point, rushes towards him in kind, into him, and latches into something that he never knew has always been there – something not of himself, restricting, a cloudy barrier between him and the universe at large.
The ice club touches him.
He screams.
The barrier breaks.
Home rushes towards him, envelops him in flesh and scent and seiðr and soul, and brings him away.
He sinks into oblivion gratefully.
He is home.