Don't open your eyes
Says the voice in your head the only thing holding you together, the last glimmer of sanity in a world without time or gravity.
Don't open your eyes
It's the only thing that matters, keep the last of the energy from escaping. Some vague fiction of life, all you have left to cling to like a dog fighting for the last sucked dry scrap of leather in the boneyard at the end of time.
You feel a chill slide of shining scales, cold as a ghost against one ankle.
The giants beat with clubs on ringing shields, their black beast unbound barks with bloody fangs at the white gold moon of Jotunhiem and the signal fires on the mountains are lit to call forth the ice warriors to storm the golden keep of the Asa.
Don't open your eyes
Because the pounding, war drums do not sound for you, here in this cave beneath the earth beneath Yggrasil's spreading writhing roots.
There are numberless serpents in the roots of the tree.
Another touch, this one lingering, the heavy, sinuous slide of cold blooded venom.
Don't open your eyes
You imprisoned in the darkest cave of the nine realms, tied, bound, gagged, burned, stuck like a roast bore, spread eagle on the unforgiving stone.
Your flesh trembles, slick with sweat and the grime of your imprisonment.
And it's touching you, running it's softly groping underbelly up your arms and across your back and between your legs and it's icy cold and constricting chorded muscles around your throat.
Don't fucking open your eyes
It's body is heavy where it clutches to yours, the sliding grip of it, constantly in motion on your cheek, your groin, your chest.
And you can't escape, can't move, can't breathe because it's bigger than you and more powerful than you and its body is constructed of a million gripping plates of icy slick scale.
But it's everywhere and there's no room to breathe no space which isn't occupied by that twisting cold flesh against your own.
"Come on Loki, open your eyes."
And the voice is not trusted but it's alive and it's something, something to cling to, so you open your eyes and the dark pours in.
For a moment you stare at the black, so much grander than the dark behind your eyelids, so much deeper. For a moment, in your blindness you forget the creature wrapped around your limbs. You blink and you realize that the world is very far away and that you could not wake up if you wanted to. You are trapped, trapped in the long suffering nightmares of chaos.
You don't see the strike coming but you feel the snake's body tense. The blow throws your head back and you gasp in pain. Time and reality shift in blinding white hot flashes of agony. You can feel the black worm's reptilian breath on your cheek, its long hollow fangs buried, one in the eye socket, one in the cheek, tearing the skin, pulling muscle tight. The hot burn of poison taints your blood, flesh, swollen red and raw grates into where the serpent holds you, clutching it's thick body around the desperately straining column of your neck.
"You're talking to a dead man Steve."
You can feel the ground shake.