When Sif enters the prison room the following morning, the temperature has fallen markedly from its normal threshold.
She makes quick work of the muzzle and cuffs, places before him his morning bread and cheese, his goblet of water. The room falls to silence as the breakfast is consumed, and Sif props herself against the perimeter of Loki's cell, surveys him with sleepless eyes.
His final words of the previous day are a mass upon her consciousness, as though Mjolnir itself has been dropped to her breast. She cannot clearly think for the memory of his tone, the curious words. A flare of enmity worms through her defenses and stains her features. Loki smiles, mirthlessly.
"You wish to say something," he quips with such easy casualty that she knows it to be farcical, knows of the resentment propagating in his chest.
Sif crosses her arms, betraying nothing. "Who is to speak when there is nothing to say? Only a fool."
"How clever you must think yourself," he tells her quietly. "How fine a warrior, to so hungrily collect your victories on a string like the bladders of livestock."
"You wish to provoke me," she says. "It is futile."
"I wish to dismantle that infuriating coat of armor with which you are so wisely shielding yourself," he simpers, "and your tongue with it."
Loki's sneer pulls at the corners of his lips as if by an invisible thread, alarmingly unstable and twitching with something Sif can identify as neither anger nor glee. She beckons her body to remain still against the arc of the crystal, pores carefully over a next possible move.
"You would so hastily put out my tongue," she begins slowly, clenching her knuckles against the wall, "even when it has drawn so many sighs from your lips?"
It is a crooked play, and she knows it, and she forces down the sudden sensation of sickness which grips her stomach as the man balks.
Then he laughs.
He tosses his head back and howls, unrestrained and violent and shrill; his face churns with blood, his eyes crazed as he pounds his fists into the floor.
A pair of guards rush then into the chamber, one young and one elderly and richly bearded, both toting spears held stiff before panicked faces. They look to Sif for direction. She does not give it.
"Look at you. The Loki which I know would laugh at your behavior," Sif says then, a final vestige, and the thread snaps.
"And what do you know of me?" he retorts, pallid features contorting in rage. "You understand nothing of the burdens I carry, nothing of the child scrounging in his brother's footsteps, nothing of the man I was forced to become! You mock me with your presence, taunt me with your flesh; and for what purpose?" He grasps the stem of the metal goblet between long fingers before pitching it to the ground, his face blanched white. "What am I to you, a warrior of this realm? What am I, in light of the golden glory of my brother?"
She does not speak, does not move to touch her knives. When three more armed guards surge into the room like lightning, she does not turn to look at them, but senses their footfalls.
"Stop," she orders, and curses the unsteadiness of her voice.
"It is the folly of the shadow," he continues, his eyes wild, "which arises from the light's brilliance. Inevitable, and yet feared by every whimpering child who lies awake in his mother's bed at night!"
He's laughing now, easily, unsoundly. Sometime between the choked breaths, .
"You were never destined to become a shadow," Sif says, carefully, her fingers hovering above a tongue-shaped dagger. "It was avarice and jealousy that led you to this cell."
The laughter ceases abruptly. She watches Loki clutch a leg to his chest.
"You know nothing, always knew nothing," he breathes, and with a hand braced against the floor, moves to stand. Two of the guards adopt fighting stances, arms at the ready, while the third moves to leave, perhaps to alert the kingdom; he stops in his tracks at a single glance from Sif.
"Wait," she orders him. "Please."
"Was it truly inevitable?" he asks her, drawing closer to her arched form. "That the great golden son of Odin would rise to be ruler, despite every rash judgement, every defiance to the realm of Asgard, to his King? Is it due to his stature, or his smile, or his regal command of the skies?"
He steps closer, and she arches back, glancing to the sealed door of reinforced crystal behind her.
"Or is it simply because this-" he lurches forward, and suddenly there are five raven-haired gods of mischief within the enclosure and Sif is shouting at the guards to remain still without truly understanding the reasons behind such a foolish gesture, "is not considered an admirable ability for a king to possess?"
The five Lokis circle around her, engulfing her, and then from the five there are ten, and from those ten more; and the sorcery continues until the space is teeming with Lokis that are not truly Lokis but specters of shadow and magic: a nightmare manifest in swirling tendrils of black and grey and green eyes that smolder like emerald coals.
"Lady Sif, please!" the shortest guard cries in alarm, "I think it would be wisest if-"
"And so you see," the Lokis chant, a simultaneous outburst of metal bitterness emanating from innumerable sets of bloodred lips, "that not ten, not fifty, not one hundred of me could hope to prove more worthy in this kingdom's eyes... than he."
The implications are dismally plain.
"So this is the fate you have chosen," Sif says with a ragged breath, and somehow in the calamity she's come face to face with three of the copies, her wavering fingers the sole outlier belying a heavy calm. "Either to rule the kingdom which incited your hand with a cruel fist, or to waste in chains within its walls."
Then, tersely, she drops the dagger and straightens herself, choosing the Loki with the darkest eyes and gazing directly into them.
"What do I know of you," she whispers, and her face is a tablet of stone. "You are called Loki, son of Odin, prince of Asgard. You are what some realms would refer to as a god. You originated as one of the Frost Giants, a secret unknown to most of the kingdom, and were taken in in confidence by the All-Father."
"What are you doing?" the closest Loki barks, but the words have no bearing.
"As a child, you were quiet and studious. You prize knowledge to an extent that is lost upon many of the warriors of this realm," she says, ethereally calm. "You were a friend and a challenge, a confidante to a girl struggling to prove her worth in a world dominated by men. You enjoyed playing petty tricks on your brother, whom you both loved and feared."
He's wavering now, the Loki that holds her gaze, and unbeknownst to the room at large, four of the copies vanish without so much as a hiss into the air.
She grabs at the tie restraining her hair, pulls, watches his face as it streams across her shoulders like dark rain.
"You are the reason my hair is dark," she says quietly. "When I was a young child and you not much older, you cast some form of spell that caused it to grow in this color. It had been yellow, before."
Seven copies gone. Ten. "You knew all of this?" the Loki asks, and she nods.
"You have committed acts unforgivable to this realm and to another," she continues. "You would have your own blood bow to you, your own brother in chains, groveling at your feet." Her hands are upon her knives once more, and deftly she swings a polished blade in a wide arc, causing the last remaining copies to stagger back, crumple, melt into the one original form who stumbles and falls to his knees before the warrior woman just as so many had fallen before him. As Sif herself had, once before.
"I could kill you," she breathes. "So often I have dreamed of killing you, and I cannot. You have asked me this day what you are." She closes their distance, lifts her hand to her mouth and rips off the gauntlet protecting it with her teeth. Reaches, and grasps his jaw with flaming fingertips.
"You are the shadow that haunts me in the night," she says, a breath on the wind, and when he closes his eyes, she knows it is a gesture of spite to them both. "I -" she stops then, abrupt, and turns her head only slightly leftward; and before she can register the handmotion, even allow it to be entertained, her dagger lies embedded in the hollow of stone directly between his legs.
She releases his jaw from her fingers.
When Sif turns to open the enclosure door, she finds herself staring out at the lances of no fewer than twenty armed guards, some of whom watch her with awestricken faces while others gaze in bewilderment at a visibly shocked Thor, who stands with his mother near the room's exit doors, a rather apologetic-looking squatty guard just behind them.
That night she is unvisited by dreams of any sort, because she does not sleep.
The look in Sif's eyes as she braced to stand, facing the helmed prince who stood so complacently before Odin's great throne, affected Loki more than any gaze he had yet lived to see.
His words of war and Jotunheim and continuity for the good of Asgard fell like violent hail about her ears. His smile, which began and ended with the sight of her friends pulling her back, incensed her.
It was inevitable, perhaps, that they should fall to violence.
She had known it and she had foreseen it and now fear had taken the form of reality in this most horribly splendid apparition, a promise of devastation as sure as winter's frost in the creases of his mouth.
"We're done."
The so-called Warriors Three stood all too quickly, and he feasted upon their fear, imbibed the sensation of power like an excellent wine; and he tamed a flicker of elation when he saw her remain steadfast in place, undaunted by his gaze.
Her lips drew into an impenetrable line, the corners of her mouth turned a hair's breadth upward in contempt, an expression very nearly passable as a sort of perverse sneer. She wanted a fight; they both did in their different ways. But Sif didn't trust herself to touch Loki, and the warriors didn't trust her not to. So she glared.
The ire twisting Sif's features delighted Loki. He did not hear the strike of her boots as she left, nor the rapid whispers of her friends. He did not hear anything all save for the tone of her voice in his head when she had addressed him as her king.