Sigyn sleeps fitfully, but the movement is smoother, and as another tight breath passes, she squeezes her friend's hand. "Shhh," Sif's voice seems to reach her, and she stills. "That's it, darling. Rest easy; you're alright."
There are no footsteps, no rustle of the curtains as Frigga enters, just the slightest shift in the air as the shimmering apparition blinks into view by the bedside. She studies Sif's careworn face before turning her attention back to her favored helper.
Frigga brushes an intangible hand over her forehead, as though to smooth back Sigyn's sweat slicked hair. She may feel it, the brush of the All-Mother's magic, and her eyelashes flutter. The other leans over, hand still in Sigyn's and reaches to push back the wayward strands in earnest.
"What news had Lady Eir?" Frigga asks.
"There's fever, but she's stable. Lady Eir believes she will awaken soon," a smile and a relieved sigh. "Her breathing is labored but steady, and I see some colour returned to her."
Frigga nods, and a moment passes in silence interrupted only by the shifting of crisp infirmary linens and ragged breath.
"Sif doesn't call her darling."
Loki stiffens, a sidelong glare in Sif's borrowed eyes up at her mother finds her watching expectantly. "They've taken her to eat and gather supplies. We must leave for Alfheim at once, and this is the only way Sif would leave her."
Her mother sighs. "Why not stay as yourself?"
The bitter laugh that slips free doesn't suit Sif's form. "It's Sif she calls for in her delirium. I highly doubt she'd find my presence wanted, let alone comforting— In fact, should anyone ask, I was never here."
"You don't think she should know who saved her?"
"Thor saved her," Loki replies, clipped. "Or haven't you heard? It's the talk of the palace."
"Loki—" she knows that tone, that gentle prodding. But thankfully a herd of echoing footsteps interrupts. Sigyn's hand is warm even for her, too warm from the fever, but Loki drops it as if it were a hot coal before the others reach them, and instead sits with Sif's hands folded demurely in Sif's lap.
Sigyn's now empty grasp curls around the bedsheets, a soft, fragile murmur escaping from still-pale lips as the curtain parts and the group pushes their way through. Sif, she's trying to say, Sif.
The warriors three shuffle in, with a deferential nod to the Queen's apparition, but the real Sif, now armored, rushes past at the sound of her friend's distress, nudging the imposter out of the way with a sharp look at her apparent neglect. Loki backs away without complaint, retreating to the furthest corner of the now cramped curtained space, and with a thought she is herself again.
There's an empty pad of note paper and pencil left on the bedside table by some healer, and, unseen, Loki scribbles a few lines before tearing the slip free.
"I'm here, Sige," Sif assures, taking up the other girl's hand, but as Sigyn's eyes flutter open, pupils blown huge and unfocused, she doesn't calm, still frantic and confused and mumbling her friend's name. Sif drags the chair closer to the bedside to try and sooth whatever fevered nightmare Sigyn is having, shushing her, repeating reassurance that she's here, that Sigyn is safe now, that the worst is over.
Frigga takes a weightless step forward until she's shoulder to shoulder with Sif and smiles down gently at the recovering ásynja. "Shh," she says, passing a hand over Sigyn's face and a glimmer of her magic through the apparition. It's a spell Loki knows well. "Rest now."
Her grasp on Sif's hand loosens as she sinks back into the pillows, breathing slowing and eyes fluttering shut into deep, dreamless sleep.
Sif leaves reluctantly, torn between concern for her friend and rekindled hatred of Lorelei, but Volstagg finally convinces her that Sigyn will be well watched-over, and nearly shaking with rage, fists white-knuckled, she and Loki head for the stables.
"I'll kill her," Sif vows as they stalk across the courtyard.
"I wouldn't." Loki replies, unphased by Sif's look of outrage. Her own fury runs cold. "Lorelei is proud. If you kill her, she's dead. If you bring her back alive, she spends the rest of her miserable life in a cage, with the knowledge that you've bested her. And that will eat her alive." The smile that pulls at her lips is humourless and cruel. "Then Nidhogg can have her."
Sif's eyes narrow. "You seem to know her well," she says, her voice as steely as her gaze.
"I understand her type," Loki replies, nonchalant, as though she hadn't noticed Sif's tone.
Attendants rush to serve them when they reach the stables, and as Loki makes some adjustments to Sinir's tack, she's surprised to see not Sif's immense black warhorse, but a smaller, swifter, dapple-grey palfrey brought out to her. Hófvarpnir was technically Frigga's but had been procured for, and made available to, Sigyn for all of Frigga's business and her own pleasure, a gift in all but explicit terms. Meant for travel and trekking through fields and forest paths, the mare had no armor of her own. Instead, Hófvarpnir was adorned in Sigyn's adoration, laid out in the loving stitches and brushstrokes of the floral patterns decorating her saddle pad and tack.
"Not T'barr?" Loki asks from Sinir's saddle when Sif leads the mare out to meet them.
"We're not going to war," she says as she swings herself into the saddle and nudges the horse forward. "We're going hunting."
Loki falls behind for a moment as they make their way to the bifrost, stopping at the first Einherjar they passed along the way. She pulls the folded paper from her pocket, and hands it to the guard who studies the list scrawled in pencil with a raised eyebrow. "A request from the All-Mother," the princess explains. "For Mimir, at your earliest convenience."
The bifrost crashes down in it's usual rush of light and colour, and to Loki's surprise, Alfdis is waiting for them already when the blinding hues recede. The Elven princess has her sunrise-pink hair pulled back, dressed for travel, her lithe form perched atop a powerful winged mount.
"Can't thank you enough for the heads-up, Kiki," She says, gesturing to the shimmering dome visible over the treetops against Alfheim's violet sky, skimming the tips of the capital's highest towers. "Seems we've been able to lock everything down in time. No one but me in or out." Her smile twitches into a sardonic grimace. "Summit's ruined, naturally."
Sif glances at Loki, an eyebrow raised as they follow after Alfdis. Kiki? She mouths, so as not to interrupt the Light Elf's continued explanation. Loki can only shrug. The elven crown princess does as she pleases, and to argue is a headache at best.
Alfdis can take them to the valley, she tells them, but no farther. With more than half of the palace's guard and sorcerers useless against Lorelei, Alfdis and her mother remain the Elven capitol's best defence, and they can't spare her for long. Especially with the Nine's most prominent mages amassed inside. The assembled sorcerers and the palace's own mages have been pooling their talents to try and track Lorelei and Haldor but have thus far been unsuccessful. They still have no idea how she managed to conjure enough dark energy to get between realms— some trick of Amora's, no doubt. Alfdis scratches nervously at a crystal dangling from one pointed ear as says it.
Loki has no doubt the elves have some knowledge of the shadowpaths. They are, it seems, as keen to keep that secret as she is.
"Of course she has to do this during the biggest event of the decade, of course she would," Alfdis says, rolling her huge bright eyes. She fumes for a beat before she glances over and remembers her company. "….as well as abducting your beau, Sif," she adds as an afterthought she thinks more thoughtful than it is. "And poisoning Sigyn… and the attempted prince-napping, of course. Dreadful business."
Alfdis, for all her charms, had never been the most sympathetic of friends. She, as most Ljósálfar seemed to, drifts through life with a kind of blithe indifference that Loki had always rather envied. It made her an excellent companion, but a terrible comfort.
They travel for hours away from the glistening domed city, deeper and deeper into the dark elven forest, as flickers of light begin to gleam between trees. As they press on the glow intensifies, casting the forest in the eerie light of phosphorescent toadstools and motes of their drifting spores.
Finally the trees begin to thin, and light floods back through the forest as they draw closer to a stark horizon cast by a steep precipice that stretches far into the distance. Alfdis stops her mount at the edge, the winged horse unbothered by the sheer drop, and gestures over the sunken valley.
A set of long carved into the slope, a meandering zig-zag down just wide enough for a trek to be on the viable side of perilous. The winding path meets the ground far below and carves a path that vanishes into the thick mist settled in the canyon. It's colours seem to shift, a dense glittering fog obscuring the shapes of the forest below.
They've arrived.
Alfdis tosses over her supplies to add to their own. "There's the most recent map of the area in there. Don't eat anything you didn't bring in with you— and if the plants start offering directions, ignore them. They lie. Never take directions from anything sedentary, really."
Sif just blinks at her, perturbed. She's never been this far out into the wildlands before, but Loki just rolls her eyes. "This is hardly my first time in Alfheim, Disa."
Alfdis nods, and with a nudge her horse begins to stretch its huge white wings. "Best of luck. We'll keep trying." And in a moment, she's picked up a gallop along the edge and taken to the air to soar a wide arc towards home.
"Well," says Loki, urging Sinir forward, towards the sloping path and down into the sparkling haze, "Shall we?"
A day's travel through the eerie landscape yields nothing but spooked horses and a heavy sense of dread. They ignore beckoning noises that sound far too much like their names whispered through the trees, movements from the corner of their eyes. Through determination and experience they push down Sif's constant feeling, and Loki's concrete certainty, that they are being watched at every turn by unseen eyes in the underbrush.
It's for the horses' sakes when they finally make camp, too uneasy and driven to crave rest themselves. The wood they gather burns with an uncanny blue sheen as they sit around the fire, working half-heartedly at some of their provisions, the dried meat and cheese, at least, familiar.
"The dagger Lorelei used," Sif says after a long silence, her face lit by flickering shadows and her eyes never leaving the flames. "If I didn't know better, I would say it was one of yours."
"Well," Loki's smile is tight and doesn't quite reach her eyes, "how fortunate for us both that you know better."
Sif eyes her suspiciously when she elects to take the first watch, and sleeps with her sheathed sword in her grip.
Days of combing the valley yields nothing but dwindling supplies and mounting frustration as they follow the trail of Lorelei's flight, marked by the missing elven men from every village they find. Finally, on a dreary, damp, sparkling dew drenched morning, Frigga appears to them. Her father had awakened at last and was at work enchanting a device to cage Lorelei's power.
Weary and wrathful from their fruitless chase, the pair turn their horses towards the nearest clearing where Heimdall might have room to bring them home.
Author's Notes: This one is shorter than I had planned. Initially I was going to break this one in two sections but I've sort of followed one perspective for each chapter so far, so I may as well keep that pattern.
Ok full disclosure: obviously we don't have much MCU canon on Alfheim and I've just sort of looked at the wikia so really just based on like... Idk my deep desire for the Ljosalfar to have that like dnd feywild/typical fey mythology mix of being fun and whimsical and simultaneously vaguely terrifying. 2
A huge thank you to anyone who's read and enjoyed 3 Hopefully will have part 4/4 done and up soon.