Disclaimer: The characters and story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me, alas; this story is not for sale or profit.
A/N: Welcome back for Part III! If you are finding me for the first time, this story is a sequel, the third part in a series; I would recommend reading the preceding stories first.
Reading order: Feed the Rain - Mark of the Beast - The Serpent of Eden
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The Serpent of Eden
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Prologue
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"And the Lord God said unto the serpent: Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed before every other creature... and I will put enmity between thee and the woman…
[But] the serpent was more cunning than any other creature that the Lord God hath made…"
- Genesis, chapter 3
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The sun was just rising over the Nethermount, refracting dazzlingly through the mists over the Fields of Eternity and lancing in bright arcs along the crystalline spires soaring high over the mountaintop. They scattered rainbows amongst the fragrant shadows under the trees of Idunn's Garden, and lit the golden apples hanging ripe and heavy from the boughs with a glittering silvery gleam. At the heart of the garden, ensconced within a wall of dusky rose quartz, a lone figure crouched amongst its roots of the tallest, darkest, heartiest tree of all. The deep green of his clothing and the dark fall of his hair blended almost seamlessly with the shadows under the leaves, as though he were fading into the fabric of the garden itself.
Loki could admit there were days he almost wished he were. He might have been, once, when the blue spider had whispered at the edge of his mind, needling him towards the edge of sanity. Now, though... now he was quiet inside. The cool, sweet quiet of the garden was broken only by the distant murmur of water tumbling over rocks and the wind singing hauntingly through the crystals. The only interruption in the solitude here was the yearly harvest, when the younglings came to choose their golden apples; otherwise, though in no way forbidden, the garden remained empty as a tomb. It even had its share of ghosts, and despite its ethereal beauty, the Asgardians found the place deeply disturbing in a way Loki never had. When he let himself, he very nearly basked in the place and its elusive peace. It was idyllic, restful, safe from judges, false friends and accusing eyes, and just next door to the greatest library in all the worlds.
He could, perhaps, be content here.
But there was still something missing. Something vital. And without it he could never be satisfied, here or anywhere.
His hands traced ancient patterns over the gnarled roots and broken paving stones of the surrounding walk. Wherever he touched, the moss and stone blackened as though burned by a searing fire. Delicate black lines flowed from his fingertips until, with a flourish, Loki completed the line of scrollwork and raised his head, his hair falling away from the angular planes of his face as his eyes trailed up the rough, knotted lines of the trunk. Pressing his lips together thoughtfully, he looked back down, considering the vellum scroll spread on the ground beside him.
The Guardian had told him true; the spell matrix laid out on the scroll was detailed, yet obviously incomplete. Heimdall had little talent for spellcraft, and other no blueprint for this working existed. It had never been recorded in ink before its inception, and the spell had claimed the lives of nine of the ten magic masters that had cast it. The surviving master had fallen on Jotunheim during the Ice War, so that all that was left of their great working was the stalwart Guardian they had sacrificed themselves to create. He'd meant it, when he said it was a pity that there would never be another like Heimdall; obnoxiously upright as he could be, he truly was a wonder.
It mattered little now, though. The framework Heimdall had remembered and recorded was sufficient for a master of Loki's degree to build upon. And besides, he had no intention of reconstructing the spell matrix that had made the Guardian. What he had in mind was something new, similar in nature, but fundamentally distinct.
His eyes traveled over the archaic shapes, lighting on one line in particular that was repeated again and again. He shook his head.
"Not far-sight…" he muttered, his eyes unfocused and distant as his mind danced with magical matrices and scrollwork. "…near-sight? Close sight? No… no, insight. That's it…!"
Touching his fingers to the tree roots once more, he added new curves and angles to the pattern – only slightly different than the figures on the vellum, but enough to alter the spell fundamentally. Rising, he moved slowly around the tree, adding the same detail to each line of the spell.
When the last tracing had been struck, Loki stood back and surveyed his work with a critical eye. Long flowing ribbons of scrollwork radiated out from the tree in a wagon wheel, each spoke reaching almost to the border of the inner garden, branded meticulously into the ground. The corner of his lip quirked up in satisfaction and he bent to gather up Heimdall's scroll. He smoothed his fingers over the rich material, tracing the characters thoughtfully with his fingertips…
He paused, staring down at his hand.
It always hit him at the strangest times. And always as heavily as the first time. Sometimes if he kept busy he could almost forget. But it always came back to the truth.
Not my hand. Not really…
His fingers curled slowly into a fist.
The Tesseract's magic was gone from inside him. But the crack in his heart that had let it in was still there, a quiet chasm left ringingly empty, begging dangerously to be filled. It was a weakness; it needed to be patched.
Yet now he must not flinch from it. Rather than a stumbling block, the terrible truth would, for once, serve him.
With a gesture and a thought, he stowed Heimdall's scroll in his anti-space for safe keeping. His eyes fell closed and his senses turned inward, tracing his magic deep into the seat of his being. There he found it, where it had lay hidden all his life: a knot of magic, pulled tight by pure instinct, tense and unyielding as his clenched fist.
This is necessary, he reminded himself staunchly. I cannot run from it, and I cannot fight it. I must face it.
I must face myself.
Else how could he ever expect Jane to?
Daydreams of her smile, her laugh, her bright eyes and her brighter spirit danced with sweet wicked fantasies of her soft lips and softer curves. Memory and imagination swayed and flickered together like shadows in the flames rising in his mind, only to be swallowed up, insubstantial as echoes, into that emptiness where his heart should be. They would never have form or life unless he could overcome this squeamishness that plagued him.
With slow, deliberate concentration, Loki relaxed that tight fist inside, uncurling each magical digit with methodical purpose, until his mental fingers fanned wide. A tension he'd never known was there flowed out of him, leaving him feeling curiously buoyant for an instant. But a bone-deep foreboding seized him and kept him earthbound as he felt the unknotting of the magic begin to take effect. He battled his fear into submission, refusing to bow to cowardice. With a trepidation that bordered on terror, he made himself open his eyes.
The fingers of his hand had unfurled with the fingers inside his mind. He watched, breathless, as the pale skin darkened, seeming to bruise, the veins beneath its surface blackening as though with rot, before the stretch of flesh flushed a bright, icy blue. Heavy, raised ridges puckered into existence, patterning the alien hide his skin had become as his fingernails darkened, thickened and lengthened into claws. His eyes seemed frozen wide open, staring, unable to look away. They stung as much with the dryness of the air as with the sudden, shameful temptation of tears, but moments later they stopped straining to water with want of blinking, and he knew they were no longer green. He clenched his teeth against revulsion, only to realize they had shifted and sharpened inside his mouth.
Shapeshifter… his mind hissed accusingly. Face yourself.
It wasn't part of the spell. Not really. But it was necessary all the same. He had to look. He had to see.
He raised his head and drew his clawed hand through the air in a circle. The air shimmered and swirled with silver, and solidified into a mirror. He tried not to notice the crackling rim of ice or the sheen of frost that accompanied the formation of the reflective surface. It manifested without conscious effort when he was in this form. A natural defense mechanism, he knew, for when a Jotun saw something frightening. Or something it wanted to kill.
He stared at the reflection before him.
Red eyes like two pools of fresh blood stared back at him, hard and fixed with grim determination. More thick blue hide. More sharp, disfiguring ridges. An alien monster. But… the hair was unchanged, and the bone structure of the face was familiar. The lips, the nose, the shape of the eyes, all remained more or less untouched. The way those hideous crimson orbs narrowed with recognition, the way the thick brow drew together, troubled, a hundred little shifts in expression and mannerism…
He saw himself inside the monster.
"What makes us who we are is our choices."
"Oh, Jane…" he murmured, his voice bitter, irrationally irritated to watch the monster in the mirror speak her name. "What choice do I have in this...?"
He stared the monster down for another heartbeat, disgust and simmering rage a poor veil for the hopeless despair that threatened his composure from underneath. Half a dozen times already he'd tried to acknowledge his true face. He was no closer to accepting it. Even so, the truth was inescapable.
I'm a monster. Cursed by birth. It makes no matter how well I choose. No choice I make can change that. The truth of it reverberated through the chasm inside, until his eyes fell closed against the hollow ache. Could she learn to love a monster?
His resolve broke and he spun away from the terrible truth the mirror told, banishing it with a sharp wave of his arm. The crackling and tinkling of fracturing ice crystals was like salt in an open wound. His fists clenched again, his clawed nails biting into the flesh of his palms. The sharp sting was bracing, clearing the mire from his mind, helping him focus.
"Enough," he proclaimed to the empty air. He could torment himself later. Time was short and he would not get a second chance at this. Not to mention, he had little desire to remain in this form any longer than necessary.
He stepped down from the tree's overgrown roots, his boots crunching in the melting ice shards, and followed the burned ribbon of scrollwork to its end near the perimeter of the inner garden. There he rounded on the tree and planted his feet, bracing himself, and closed his eyes once more.
Again he sent himself inward, shoving aside all his disquiet and disgust and longing and pain, like sweeping back obscuring curtains, opening wide, empty swaths of space within his mind. A vacuum waiting to be filled.
From deep inside, he felt its approach: magic rising.
He coaxed it on, feeling it swell and expand inside him. On a typical day, he would seize it, shape it and send it forth with a thought or gesture. His mind flexed instinctively to do so, but he made himself relax as the tide rose within him. There was a quiet creaking and crackling, and try as he might, Loki could not avoid noticing the spreading carpet of frost radiating along the ground in a delicate latticework from where he stood. He spared a moment's worry for the trees – to his knowledge, the weather in the garden had never been anything but temperate – but the magic suffused his bones and burned in his blood, and he had no concentration to spare on idle thought.
When the magic ceased to well up on its own he reached deeper inside and drew more up by force, slowly, inexorably filling himself to bursting with magic, like reaching down into the heart of the Wyvern's Maw on Muspelheim, until it blasted him with a volcanic heat beyond description. It was enough to burn a normal magic master from the inside out…
But Loki was no ordinary magic master. Loki was one of the best.
And Loki was also a Frost Giant.
The crackling latticework of ice now formed a halo around him, as the hoarfrost nearest him began to melt before the roaring fire inside; but though Loki felt the heat, the instinct of his physical nature took over, countering the flame with the essence of ice. Ice crystals formed on his skin, only to melt into gleaming beads, refreezing and melting again and again. Time lost meaning, and he stood, silent, still and patient as a seed in the earth, drinking the power and waiting.
Until at length, the seed cracked to spill forth a rush of green.
His eyes snapped open, the green glowing in their red depths for a long, tense instant, before they overflowed with inner light seeking to escape. Energy shimmered from his skin and hair, his ugly ridges luminescent as a green lava flow under a network of fault lines. Light pooled in his palms, spilling from his limbs into the air in a nimbus of green sparks. The sheer volume of verdant energy roaring through him begged undeniably for release.
Reaching deep, he pulled one final swell of power into his flesh. He gasped. Too much… too much! Green fire broke over his form, catching, engulfing him. But not consuming him. It shone through his blue flesh like sunlight shining through deep waters, lighting the shadows of the inner garden with shifting shafts of emerald and turquoise.
The burst shook him, driving him to one knee. He knelt there, tense as a bowstring, endeavoring to breathe around the enormity of the energy he was holding. Hesitating. A disturbing thought rose through the rampant green fire in his mind.
The power boiling through his blood was vast, unwieldy… overwhelming. It had killed nine of the ten Asgardians that had ever touched it, and the only reason he was not yet a pile of smoldering ash on the ground was because he was a being made to kill heat.
Jane was a mortal, finite and fragile as spun glass.
Can she survive this?
The magic surged inside him with a nearly devastating momentum, demanding release. He groaned, bowing his head as a sharp, fiery agony tore at him despite the frost.
She can… she must… she will…
She would have to. It was too late to turn back now.
"Nothing is born without pain," he breathed breathlessly.
The trees made no answer, but he imagined that, for just an instant, he could feel them watching as he created something that had not existed in the Garden since before the time of the Great Beginning.
Change.
Swiftly, before he could lose his grip on the magic - or change his mind - he stretched his burning hand out to the ground. His fingertips brushed the scorch mark of the spell, lighting them with green fire.
"Nngh… aah! AAARGH!"
It burst from him in a torrent of scouring pain and liquid light, flowing into the scrollwork, leaving him to collapse onto hands and knees, claws digging into the brittle veneer of ice, fighting to pull enough air into his burning lungs. He raised his head just enough to watch it erupt away in a violent pulse, and in spite of the quandaries on his mind and the burning in his body, a ghost of a smile found his face.
"After the rain…" he murmured, panting, "comes the sun."
The magic caught like wildfire, energy racing along the charred black pattern of the spell like sparks along a fuse. The ribbon began to undulate, writhing with a living vitality. But the fire did not stop when it reached the end of the ribbon at the base of the tree. It flowed onward, up the trunk. And carried the pattern with it.
The black scrollwork strained against inertia for an instant, then burst forth like a striking snake. And like a snake, the symbols left the ground and slithered up the trunk of the tree, coiling around it in a livid spiral of living light, constricting and swirling up the branches until it kissed each gleaming apples with a warm golden glow.
The spell was not finished. As the first ribbon found its place on the tree, the second ribbon to the east spontaneously caught fire, welling with green flame to follow the first. Then came the next, then the next, each ribbon winding in time around the great apple tree, patterns twining together into an ever more complex weave. On and on it went until, with the last strand of the spell, the tree was no longer a tree, but a great green and gold jewel awash in glittering fire, refracting through the intricate facets of the spellwork to birth a power far greater than the sum of its elements. It was no longer merely shapes and energy. It was now a kiln of creation.
Loki sat back on his heels and watched, rapt, as the final ribbon fastened itself in place, reveling for a long, heady instant in the power and wonder of the magic he'd wrought. The light hung suspended in gossamer curtains around the tree, thrumming, ready. The magic pulsed brighter, and brighter still, and began to hum, buzzing almost musically, like a kicked goldfly hive. The power pulled at his every sense.
Carefully, uncertain of his strength after wielding such a wealth of magic, he levered himself to his feet. The instant the fire was fully gone from his flesh, his mental fingers slammed closed, and between one heartbeat and the next, the Frost Giant was gone, and the Aesir Prince had returned. Slowly he approached the blinding tree. Reaching into his traveler's cloak, he withdrew his little vial of stolen blood. He considered the tree as his footsteps stilled between two of its shining roots, picking out the weave beyond the glare of the magic, reading the patterns in the scrollwork one last time. Doubt still gnawed at the edges of his thoughts. He glanced down at the vial.
She will survive this. I will see to it. On my life, no matter what it takes, she will not burn...
He uncapped the vial and upended it against the trunk. The last few beads of blood flowed out like crimson tears to splash against the glowing wood.
The tree pulsed hard enough to make the mountain shiver, quivering and drinking the blood through its very bark.
"Ye shall not surely die…" he quoted the old Midgardian myth, smirking with dark amusement as the whole world turned white with light, the hum climbing, its harmonics condensing to a single crystalline note, "…in the day ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods…"
Blinding light exploded in a kinetic wave through a sudden cacophonous roar. The sound rolled out, a nearly physical thing, then rebounded, drawing in to the tree with sonic force as the magic found its purpose. A jarring pop was followed by a deafening silence, and then all the light went out of the world.
Loki was blinking owlishly for a full half minute before his vision began to return. The furiously blazing light was gone, but the full darkness under the trees of the inner garden had not returned. Now, each golden apple of the great tree gave off a warm, gentle luminescence, hanging like glimmering lanterns from the labyrinthine weave of the branches, enriching the fragrant air of the arboreal hall with a golden glow.
Loki didn't fight the soft smile that rose to his lips as he pulled a low hanging branch down so that he could examine his creation, admiring the way the golden patterns of the spell caught the ambient light, sealed into the very flesh of the fruit. His eyes strayed inexorably to the hand that held the apple. His hand was pale and familiar again, but he was beyond pretending, and a pang of longing sparked in his chest at the tableau: the dichotomy of life and death wrapped in secrets and cradled in devastating knowledge.
His smile turned wicked with renewed anticipation that swept any lingering doubts aside.
"My gift to you, Jane," he declared quietly, releasing the branch to bounce back up into the lower canopy. He watched it sway there, so deceptively simple and sweet, aromatic and alluring, tempting the senses, begging to be bitten. Drawing deeply on the apple scented air, he curbed a capricious urge to laugh out loud with triumph and expectation.
He had crafted the ultimate forbidden fruit. Now all he had to do was convince Jane to take a bite.
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TBC
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A/N: So it begins again! Thanks to everyone who has stuck with the story so far, and thanks to everyone who reviewed my previous stories; look forward to hearing your thoughts on this one as well! Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome. Sorry this prologue is so short, next chapter will be longer!
PS - For those of you who were disappointed that we didn't get to see Loki take his bath (chapter 4 of Mark of the Beast), it might be that I let the muse talk me into writing that scene... which might have taken a slight turn for the naughty... which is why its not posted on this site, but on the AdultFanFiction archive. The link to that little oneshot, Lies and Illusions, can be found on my profile page if anyone is curious what Loki gets up to when he's alone in the bath... *hides under a rock*.
Thanks for reading, more to come soon!