Hi, everyone. I'm sorry it took me so long to continue. This summer is really busy - but this story is getting really nice reviews, and my thanks go out to everyone of you reading and commenting. I re-watch the movies very attentively when I write fanfic, and yes, the "Destroyer scene" is one of my favorite mysteries in terms of character psychology. Loki's first great chance for killing his brother. And he doesn't *blast* Thor. He *slaps* him, and just when everyone thinks, they could maybe live happily ever after... Interesting motivation, really :)

Disclaimer: I do not own Thor, Loki, Fandral, Volstagg, Sif, Frigga and Odin Allfather, I hold no rights to the Marvel characterizations. This is done for fun and love of the movies, and I do not make money out of it.


+++ Chapter 4: Monsters! Everywhere!+++

(### Asgard, 2012 ###)

'Can you hurry up a bit?' asked Volstagg.

'Getting there,' said Fandral. 'Just a sec.'

'So you said five seconds ago.'

'Give me that pickaxe,' said Sif, and since Fandral did not move fast enough for her taste, she dropped her shovel and took the tool from him. She tackled the ground again. 'Some idea, Volstagg, burying your marbles in a crack between solid rock... of course it would've been grown over by now.'

Thor dodged a blazing shaft of fire and spun the Mjolnir. 'It would have been easier, if you had not buried them outside a dragon's layer.' His eyes sparkled. 'But it wouldn't have been this much fun, either.'

The Mjolnir ricochetted off the red-and-golden scales that were the giant reptile's natural armor. The horned head with the large teeth turned away from Volstagg and went for the thunderer instead. Volstagg saw his chance and jumped and scrambled onto the beast's back. He hit it with his battle ax. Although the blade did not even scratch the scaly head, it did serve to divert the dragon from Thor. The thunderer was preparing another attack.

'Hang on,' said Fandral again, devoting himself to pushing pebbles with his foot. No one could claim he had been all words and no work... 'We're only talking inches now.'

Hogun straightened up and touched his forehead with his sleeve. He was standing in a hole up to his waist. 'You were a boy, when you buried your marbles in this place, Volstagg. How deep did you dig?'

'Very deep, obviously,' said Volstagg, without losing the rhythm of his hammering away on the dragon's head. 'I wanted the marbles safe from thieves.'

'You had already buried them within eye-sight of one of the most aggressive creatures of Asgard,' Fandral pointed out.

'Yes, but it was such a small, inffectively aggressive creature, back then.' Volstagg rode the monster bravely and ducked, as the Mjolnir shot past, hit the dragon and returned to Thor's hand.

'How things change with the passage of time,' mused Sif, as she buried her pickax in a claw and, pulling sharply, saved Fandral from getting his head slapped off.

Hogun looked like he'd been hit with an idea, 'Just how many steps north of the cave entrance, did you say, did you hide the box?'

'Seventy-six-and-a-half.'

On this information, Hogun started to act quite strangely: He climbed out of his hole and went past the fighting monster and his slaying comrades. He walked straight back to the cave and briefly checked with the position of sun in the sky. Then he started to walk in northward direction, taking remarkably short strides. This made him approach the excavation site again, but he stopped well before the original hole. He pointed at the ground, 'Dig here, Sif.'

Before long, a metal box was unearthed.

'Seventy-six-and-a-half steps,' Thor said, dealing the raging dragon a final, almost casual blow with the Mjolnir. 'A boy's steps, Volstagg. Not only the dragon has grown. You did, too.'

Sif handed Thor the metal box. He opened it and counted.

'Eight marbles, just like Fandral,' he stated. 'Twenty-six to go. And only one hiding place left to seek out. I suppose that spirit is in for a disappointment.'

'We did what we could,' Fandral said. 'Let Loki figure out how to "silver-tongue" himself out of the rest.'

He didn't say it aloud. But they all felt it: The fact that they had originally engaged on this quest in order to help Thor's brother had constantly faded farther into the background. They were doing things together. Other things than studying maps and riding patrols and fighting for Asgard at the kingdom's borders.

This was fun.

And one dragon slain.

Volstagg was already cutting off the beast's horns to show for their victory.

Everyone turned to Sif. 'Now, to find the last treasure...'

She drew a deep breath.

'Swear you won't tell anybody,' she said.


(### Asgard, almost 1,000 years ago###)

'This isn't right.' Loki squatted at a small brook and held his lantern to both directions, the one the water was coming from, and the other where it disappeared into the dark. The tunnel was broad enough to walk beside the rivulet, but Loki was almost convinced that Thor had not come this way.

He got up and started to retrace his steps. He was confident that he could find back to his starting point, the chamber with the mattress. He knew he had a good sense of directions. A better one than Thor or any of his friends, at any rate. Even the scholar in charge of teaching the boys basic coastal and celestial navigation had once claimed that he had nothing to teach Loki. The boy would simply find his way home, across a vast field of snow, if need be, and with no landmarks or stars to go by. His sense of orientation was that amazing and seemingly designed for just that task. A mystery, like the big swarms of birds that filled the sky over Asgard in springtime and fall, or the salmon swimming upstream, but never, ever in doubt as to what river to choose.

Loki had taken to the image immediately.

But Frigga had given the man real Hel: He was supposed to teach the boys the fundamental craft of navigating, not put follies in their heads. The boys had seldom seen their mother so furiously determined; and on a topic that seemed so comparably irrelevant. They had discussed the matter thoroughly, sitting under a metal rod watching the clouds build and waiting for Thor's lightning to strike (one day, Thor claimed, he'd have some powerful tool to control the thunderstorms. Until then, they'd just have to make do.)

Thor said that Frigga was probably afraid that Loki might become an even more obnoxious smart-aleck, if one confirmed him in his know-it-all manner.

Loki thought his mother was afraid Thor might start a crazy expedition and tie his brother to the ship's figurehead to serve as a living compass...

...Out of the dark, green eyes stared at him.

Well, he thought, unwilling to be roused from his reverie, that was nothing to be afraid of. His own eyes were green, after all.

But they didn't glow in the dark. He'd know. Thor would have told him.

(Thor always told him things that were obvious. Like, "Oops. A real biggie, that one. Did you feel it crackle, brother?")

'Thor,' Loki whispered as he retreated, step by step. Away from those pair of eyes that boded danger, and malice, and ill-will in any way conceivable, 'Thor, you can't mean to do this. Thor, don't leave me alone now...'

("Brother?! You alright?")'

'Thor?! Father will be SO mad at you, I promise, if you think you saw him mad, it's nothing compared to what - '

The thing the green eyes belonged to leapt out into the tunnel. It was the biggest rat that Loki had ever seen. The only rat with a line of scales running along the spine and covering the paws, making them resemble the sharp talons of a bird of prey rather than the limbs of a furred animal.

It lay eyes on Loki and squealed.

Under other circumstances, the squeaky voice on such a monster might have been funny.

As things were, Loki did not feel like laughing. He spun round and bolted. As he had already feared, this creature, other than your avarage ghost and victim of dark-magic curses, had no objection against leaving its territory when food was concerned. And it was hungry.

Eyes fixed on the floor ahead, Loki ran for his life.


(### Asgard, 2012 ###)

Thor looked up at Sif, and his grin threatened to split his face, 'I'd never have thought this could be used as a hiding place.'

'You came here, all on your own, and you climbed this monster and put a bag of marbles between its artificial ribs?' asked Fandral.

'It was the best-protected place I could think of at that time.' Sif was sitting on the shoulders of the "Destroyer", Asgard's ultimate mechanic warrior. Basically, it was nothing more than an empty armour, three times the size of a tall man. The reigning king could bring it alive and send it out to fight Asgard's enemies with deadly blasts of fire.

Right now, it was hollow, bereft of its magic. Sif was clinging to its bulky torso with her legs and digging between the plates of armour with her dagger.

'Best-protected place?' Fandral asked. 'That thing goes right into battle!'

'Yes, but at one-hundred-and-ten-years of age - did you truly believe it could be destroyed by anyone save the king himself?' asked Hogun.

'How did you get behind the restrictive energy field?' asked Thor of Sif.

'I didn't. I lay in waiting until it returned from some battle. The time the Destroyer took for walking down the length of the weapon's vault was ample time for what I had in mind. Without a direct order, it doesn't react to being jumped at, you know.'

'The way she sits up there... Doesn't that remind you of good old fights,' mused Volstagg. 'The five of us on Midgard, on the street of this little town of humans...'

'I do not wish to think of that fight right now,' said Thor curtly. After all, it was the first time he'd begun to sense the extent of Loki's hate for him. Not understood, no, not nearly. That had come much later, on a roof top in another human city, the place called "New York".

'The past is but a foreshadowing of the future, and therefore ever present,' stated Hogun, sharing a piece of wisdom from the complex philosophy of Wanaheim's caste of warriors.

'If I felt like I did nine hundred years ago, I'd be head over heels in love with Sif,' said Fandral matter-of-factly.

'I've heard you crack funnier jokes, Fandral.' Sif produced a bag from between two of the lamellas on the Destroyer's armoured back. She had to pull hard and stopped to widen the gap with her blade, then pulled again.

'Didn't you know?' Fandral insisted. 'Everyone was in love with you – ' (the bag came free and was handed to Thor), 'Other maidens had a collection of unicorns to show for their virtue. You showed a collection of swords to everyone who so much as dared question the virtue of a maid in armor...'

Sif arched her pretty eyebrows, 'Still, I don't believe that everyone – '

'Seventeen,' said Thor, looking in surprise at the objects in his palm and then up at Sif. 'I gave you seventeen of my marbles?'

'See?' said Fandral triumphantly. 'Every one.'

+o+o+o+o+o+

'Now, said Hogun. 'We have put so much effort into retrieving the toys of your childhood. And only nine pieces are yet a-missing. I wonder where Thor will lead us to to find them.'

'Another dragon?' said Volstagg hopefully, touching the two curved horns on his belt.

'An army of magically animated armor?' asked Fandral, anxiously.

'A vicious witch, having taken the queen hostage?' suspected Sif, as Thor halted before a well-known door. He rapped the wood with his knuckles.

Frigga opened the door from within. 'Were you successful, my son?'

'We have retrieved thirty-three marbles, out of forty-two,' he said.

'This is bad news then. Because the chest I had the servants search contained only six of them.' She held out the bag to her son. 'But I am afraid, things cannot be changed easily right now. Go, Thor. Maybe the malicious spirit will be prepared to parley, when it hears what you have done to fulfill the greater part of its demands.'

'I will see what I can do,' Thor promised. 'Come on, my friends. Let's not waste time.'

They all followed behind, as Thor walked down the corridor with long strides. All their faces were vaguely abashed whenever they looked at the bag in Thor hand, the one he had simply knocked on a door to gain.

Finally - 'Somehow,' Fandral said, but very, very softly, 'I feel kinda stupid.'

Hogun cleared his throat. 'Let's face it,' he said. 'It's wonderful, honorable, a matter for taking great personal pride in, the things you did to protect your marbles from potential danger and theft. But, in real life, no-one will be interested in stealing a couple of glass marbles. No-one over one-hundred-and-twenty, that is...'

There was a short silence.

Then, Fandral again, 'Again, thank you so very much, Hogun, for sharing your opinion,' he said. 'That, of course, made me feel a lot better.'


(### Asgard, almost 1,000 years ago###)

Loki knew he had only this one chance of survival: With the rat monster at his heels he must not run into a dead end. The only reason why he still managed to keep his paper-thin lead over the beast was the fact that this maze was laid out in crossroads, curves and bends. Loki, light-weighted and nimble, turned the corners full speed. Sometimes he just grabbed the edge of the wall and let his own momentum carry him around the bend.

The monster, on the other hand, had to slow down a tiny bit, every time, to move its greater mass in the new direction.

But if he should happen to find his way blocked by a wall or part of the ceiling crumbled down...

Well, the "living compass" would have a word or two with Thor, if he survived this! He'd unearth the twisted, molten, blackened metal rod and retrospectively hit the would-be master of lightning over the head with it (something he'd missed out to do earlier, because he'd never been cleanly whacked out of his shoes before...his smoldering shoes...)

Loki turned one last corner and saw the ancient ghost and the blocked corridor.

'You're back,' Georn said. 'How much time has passed?'

'A huge rat is about to eat me,' Loki shouted, even as the ghost spoke. 'You've got to help me.'

'The workmen are yet to follow, I assume? The pickaxes, the hoist, the - '

'Ghosts do know some magical spells, don't they?' Loki ran toward the apparition. 'Can you fight that monster? Burn it, or – or petrify it? Vaporize it, make it vanish into thin air?'

The ghost still tried to look past him, hoping for an army of miners to crash into his tunnel, 'What did the king say?'

'He's not said anything so far,' Loki screamed, desperate. 'Listen to me! Who's going to deliver your message, when I'm dead?'

Then, a new scary idea hit him, Oh, by Hel, if I die in this place, I might find myself stuck in the same curse and forced to spend eternity with this simpleton...

But he had no time to re-consider. The rat monster stood in the corridor. Its eyes fixed on Loki. It charged. Instinctively, Loki raised his arms to protect his head and face. He let himself fall to the ground and closed his eyes tightly. Father - Thor - mother - someone - anyone - please! PLEASE! His scream of terror sounded over the curious crackling noise that accompanied the sudden movement on the floor. It was followed by a loud crack, like a great crystal being shattered with a hammer and breaking into a thousand shards and tiny fragments.

Lokis eyes snapped open again. He found the world of the maze around him significantly changed: The corridor was covered with ice. The walls were coated with glittering ice crystals, the floor was slippery and shiny as if made of glass. Along the ceiling, frost spread in thick veins of deep-blue ice as if the mysterious power at work here had tried to encrust it all, but ran out of magical energy halfway up the walls.

Loki turned around.

In front of the great boulder which the ghost had so desperately tried to move, there lay the dead rat monster. It was frozen solid, as if the cold had surprised it in mid-leap. Freezing it in a wink, so throughly that its neck broke upon impact like a brittle crystalline structure smashed against granite.

'Thank you,' Loki stammered. 'Thank you.'

Miraculously, he did not even feel cold anymore. He felt tired. Bone-weary tired, almost like he himself had worked the spell instead of the helpful ghost. He did not even flinch, when the spell he had worked on his clothes gave out and he stood there in his night-gown, on bare feet. He only sighed, silently cursing the fact that he was not, say, two-hundred years older. A little more experience, and a soul that had learned to draw on its own resources more effectively - and he'd never have to worry about apparel again.

He turned back to the ghost. 'I will deliver your message, I promise... oh. No, don't, that's not very – ' Loki pressed himself against the wall as the ghost started hammering on the frozen boulder. With an deafening noise, even this large and massive rock was cleaved: Ice had eaten its way into the structure, weaving a net of a myriad of tiny branches that cracked stone open as if it were no more solid than the shell of an egg.

Loki made himself small, covering his head with his arms, and waited for the hail of small stones to cease. When he dared straighten up again, the rock was a mere heap of pebbles in the corridor. Apparently, a whole length of the tunnel had collapsed, a long, long time ago.

The ghost immediately started to climb over the debris and disappeared in the darkness beyond.

'Hey, wait for me.' Loki prepared to follow the ghost. It was dangerous, down here. But this faithful workman of Loki's ancestor, Georn, had proven his unbroken loyalty by saving the boy. Loki meant to make use of his advantage for as long as possible.

Stumbling and slipping, he picked his path across the loose gravel. He wished he knew what had happened to him, so he might be able to restore his spell and his shoes... But then again, with leather soles to tread on, he probably would not have noticed he was stepping on something else but stone...

He looked down: His naked foot sat on a skeletal hand that stuck out from under the gravel.


(### Asgard, 2012 ###)

The guards marching down the corridor and stepping in line in front of Loki's prison cell were the first indication that something was afoot.

Loki had dozed off in his reading chair, his book resting in his lap. Now, he got up, saved the volume from falling to the ground and approached the energy grid.

'Stand back,' a guard warned.

'Careful,' Loki said to him in a low voice. He made a gesture that meant nothing but looked impressive. 'Careful.'

Thor entered the prisoner's restricted vision from the left side of the grid. 'Greetings, Loki. Is it your new style to intimidate guards?'

'How about you, Thor? Do you need your friends to back you up on unwelcome tasks?' Loki smiled icily as Sif, Volstagg, Fandral and Hogun stood beside Thor.

'They all own part of what you need,' Thor said. 'Marbles, from childhood days. It was their right to be present.'

Loki clasped his hands behind his back and cracked a forced smile. 'Seems that you've been quite free-handed with your possessions. Or, no – wait.' He paused for emphasis and wrinkled his brow sorrowfully. 'Was that not supposed to be our possessions?'

'I only gave away my share,' Thor said smoothly like he had been expecting just that mockery. He produced a leather bag that was shiny with age. 'Yours, Sif and I have kept for you.'

A greedy look came into Loki's eyes.

'Can your spirit guest watch us from back there?' Thor asked.

'I am watching, crown prince of Asgard,' the locus amoenus confirmed.

Thor emptied the bag into Volstagg's cupped hands. From there, he counted the marbles back into the bag.

'Thirty-nine,' the locus amoenus confirmed, when the warrior's hands were empty once more. 'Three are missing.'

'They cannot be retrieved. I remember losing them on the shore of your lake,' Thor said. 'We had to take Loki home urgently. I could not stay to look for for them.'

'I don't have them either,' the spirit said. 'I am sorry. The bargain is unfulfilled.'

'Unfulfilled?' rumbled Volstagg, before Thor could hinder him. 'You've got thirty-nine out of forty-two marbles.'

'Three missing. Exactly.'

Fandral scratched his head, 'What are we supposed to do, dig up the shore?'

'No point in that,' Loki cut in suddenly. 'You won't find them.'

Hogun said, 'And you know this for sure, because...?'

Loki shrugged nonchalantly. 'I took them.'

'You?' asked Thor. 'But when? How?'

Loki spun round, as if merely hearing the thunderer's voice was causing the imprisoned tricker's temper to flare up, 'You've always been a lousy caretaker of things. They lay in the sand, forgotten. Left to be buried and lost forever. I picked them up.'

'Which, of course, was much better than losing them in the sand,' Thor replied. 'Losing them to your pocket.'

'They should've been mine from the beginning,' Loki spat. 'Odin had no reason to entrust them to you. He should've known better than that.'

'So it was your fault we could never again play a decent game of "Catch the Wolf",' Thor accused him. 'Because, as you well know, it takes forty-two marbles.'

'A game I never enjoyed playing, as you will remember,' Loki said, mimicking Thor's intonation. 'So, why should I care, if you had what you needed?'

'All these years,' Volstagg said, deeply shocked. 'All these years he prevented us from playing "Catch the Wolf". Just so we had to think of other games that were more to his taste to join in...'

'Oh, it was not just me,' Loki said triumphantly. 'Sif was never fond of it, either.'

'Hey!' exclaimed Sif.

'Sif?' asked Thor. 'You were his complice on this?'

'I loved you,' Fandral moaned.

'She said it,' Loki declared, upping the ante although it seemed to break his heart.

'Can I,' Sif said coolly, 'just deactivate the energy grid and kill him, please, Thor?'

'Loki,' Hogun said into the babel of excited voices. 'Where are they now? The marbles you picked up?'

'Are you serious?' Loki frowned. 'That was almost nine-hundred years ago.'

'You don't remember?' Hogun pressed.

'Hmm, - nnnno. No, I don't.' Loki shook his head in a sardonic way that left no doubt what he thought about having to waste his time answering silly questions.

The friends exchanged looks.

'Well, we remembered...' Fandral said.

'We got those marbles as presents from Thor,' Sif said. 'That's what made them memorable, in the first place. But Loki stopped caring once they had come into his possession.'

'They've always been this way to each other, those two. And especially Loki.' Volstagg sighed as if "those two" were not present.

'Let me make a suggestion,' the locus amoenus said. 'It seems those marbles will never be restored to their original number. But I might be contented with another secret.'

'Oh, good heavens,' complained Loki and rolled his eyes.

Thor gestured for silence.

'Well, Loki...' He looked at his brother. 'We did our part to try and help you in your predicament. Now, it's up to you. How many secrets can the famous silver tongue relate, if required?'

'Oh no. Surely, you're not serious.' Loki returned to his reading chair and made a point of sitting down and crossing his legs. 'I won't have Thanos roast my brains with unfathomable, cosmical knowledge just to go blabbing it to an Asgardian swamp spirit as the next opportunity presented itself.'

'But no-one's talking about cosmical knowledge,' Sif said, looking from one comrade to the other for consent. 'Three marbles. How secret does the secret have to be?'

Loki studied the ceiling overhead like he had not noticed it up to now and was utterly surprised to find it there. It was clear that he was not prepared to answer any more silly questions tonight.

It didn't stop anyone from asking them, of course.

'What are we going to do? Fandral asked, clearly at a loss. 'Confine Loki back in the catacombs, until he comes up with something he deems harmless enough to share?'

'Spare me,' said Sif. 'We've all seen last time what he'll "come up with", when he's down there and left to his own devices...'


(### Asgard, almost 1,000 years ago###)

Another boy finding a skeleton's hand holding on to his ankle would probably have been mortally scared.

Not so Loki.

Bones, to him, were something quite natural; everyone had them, including himself. And when he died, his bones would remain and take their own turn at scaring stupid, uneducated children.

No, Loki's thoughts flew ahead: This appeared to be the ghost miner's secret. His reason for being stuck in this corridor, unable to leave this place. Mortal remains sometimes did that kind of thing, tie the soul to the realm of the living forever, or at least until they had withered away. Loki wondered whether he could sell this knowledge to the locus amoenus, to get rid of his debt to the malevolent spirit.

The skeletal hand moved.

Since the place was so cold, what with all the ice and him only wearing a thin night gown, Loki felt the alarm run down his spine like a sizzling hot wave. He broke into a run, but lost his balance when the gravel slipped and moved under his feet. The stones shifted, some falling down, rolling and jumping on the ground. In the end, they revealed a fleshless skull. It had no eyes. And only a dried-up tongue sitting in its jaw.

With it, the ghost voice said, 'Your light, boy.'

Loki yelped and ran. He made it as far as the tunnel. There, he tripped on the frozen ground. Save the lantern! He did, but barely so and at the cost of his balance. A searing pain shot into his ankle and up to his knee. His leg gave way under him; he could not stand. Every attempt to put weight to his foot triggered a repetition of that same excruciating pain. He dragged himself to the wall, put down the light and clutched his injured foot.

Gravel clanked and rumbled.

A bony hand searched purchase on the ground and started to haul itself forward, out of the mess of stones. The arm followed, elbow bone, radial bone clearly discernible. Then, a shoulder. The other hand joined in the effort. Finally, the eyeless head emerged.

Loki started to scream, frantically. He didn't realize he was yelling his brother's name – and neither would he have cared.

He did, however, realize that his desperate effort was being answered, 'Loki? Is that you?' his brother's voice asked, traveling through the maze.

Whether it was a dream or just another hungry monster trying to fool him, Loki was absolutely prepared and willing to take his chances.

His message was summed up easily, 'THOR! Help me! Hurry!'

+++End of Chapter 4+++