- Chapter 54 -
Loki patiently explained each seidr's use and Anthony made salient points while Frey watched. He smiled widely and said, "Do you see sweetling? Anthony is good for Loki. He's what Loki has needed for so very long." He could still hear the grief and pain bleeding into his beloved sister's seidr, but it was no longer crying out. Frey knew that he was going to have to put more effort than normal into getting her to speak with him. It would be worth it if he could talk her through her pain. It would be even better if he could perhaps convince Anthony to allow her to begin writing letters to Loki. Frigga was going to need to re-establish contact with Loki if she was going to heal from the wounds of this day. The main problem was that he wasn't sure he could convince Anthony to allow it. Working around the rage was the main issue.
How he was going to balance everything out eluded Frey when there was so much anger over so many different things. It would be especially hard since much of that anger was perfectly justified. Harder still because he didn't yet know the exact root of Anthony's anger. Frey sighed. He needed ale, a fire, a quiet room, and some time to think. All he had was an angry sister who would probably never forgive him, a quiet Truthkeeper who kept looking at people oddly and more things to learn. The day wasn't over yet. Frey refocused his attention back to the recording they were being shown. He kept a close eye on what Loki was doing. He needed to see if what Anthony told him was accurate. So far it was absolutely accurate.
When her brother spoke, Frigga had to stop herself from cringing. A foolish, angry, disrespectful, overbearing boor wasn't what Loki needed. Loki smiled for the fool though, and shared things with him that he shouldn't have. She didn't understand that, nor did she understand why Frey approved of Stark. He clearly did. There was something about Stark they hadn't seen yet. Frigga wasn't sure it mattered. What she'd already seen was enough to show her a man she didn't like who had no respect for her child. She couldn't imagine that whatever else there was could outweigh that.
The room around McCorrmick strobed deep violet again. The itching pressure returned only briefly this time. He reached up to rub the feeling out of his eyes. When his vision cleared up again the suns in King Odin and Queen Frigga looked just a little different. Inside the King's sun was a small piece of what looked like the Queen's light. Inside her sun was a small piece of the King's light. He frowned slightly and wondered why they swapped some of their light.
.-.-.-.
Uncurling the meager amount of seidr left in her seidr core, Loki allowed it to flow out. She changed it as it flowed. A deep sapphire mist oozed out of her skin to float around her. Runes formed in the mist. As they arranged themselves into runewords they flared out into a pentagon of flowing runewords about five feet in across. It settled onto the floor around her. She tilted her head back, with her eyes closed. Her hands turned over, so her palms were facing up. Runes began rising from the edge of the pentagon at the corners. They rose in straight lines to begin forming the runeword cage. As the runes reached just above her head they turned at a perfect ninety-degree angle and followed along over the bottom pentagon. They ran together into another pentagon over Loki's head, and she closed her hands. When both pentagons completed the runes began to flow between the two of them. Every back and forth created more power for the runes to carry.
After stepped forward with her left foot, Loki turned her right foot to the side to brace herself. The runes flashed deep sapphire as their power amplified within the cage. Small sapphire sparks ignited around her wrists. They formed into bands of sapphire seidr. Matching sparks formed behind her, creating small mooring points. She began collecting the amplified power of the runes in her hands. The bands around Loki's wrists slowly pulled backwards until her arms were nearly straightened out behind her. The runewords flashed a deep sapphire again.
Another brilliant flash of light at the front of the pentagon drew Tony's attention. The runewords at the front of the cage were glowing brighter. He stood and took a step closer. He could read the runes making up the runewords swirling around Loki. "Thurisaz, Rad, Cen, Giefu, Fehu, Lagu. No, not Lagu, Os, and the Rune of Bridging holding it all together," Tony spoke to himself as he tracked each of them. The runewords at the front of the cage grew almost too bright to look at. They dissolved suddenly into a transmutation circle. It was far more complex than anything Tony had learned how to use. "Is that a quad helix formation, no, not quite. Overlapping," Tony thought out loud.
The power Loki needed was collecting in her tight grip. It would power the transmutation circle that the sound would flow through. The transmuted sound would begin the transmutation of her seidr. A fleeting desire to use a better option drifted through her thoughts. This wasn't the most efficient way for her to do this, but her only other option was too dangerous, both for her and for Tony. That he'd used such power accidentally was terrifying. Loki was grateful that he didn't know what he'd done and hadn't done it since. She wasn't going to be the one to teach him that. Intentionally strengthening his all-consuming flames when he still lacked complete control over them would create a threat to the entire Nine Realms. Her King of Machines was dangerous enough on his own. It was all Loki could do to slow him down. A small smile played on her lips as she felt the last of the power she needed come into her grip.
Loki looked forward as her eyes snapped open. They were completely black, iris and white alike. The mooring points snapped loudly. She whipped her hands forward and grabbed the transmutation circle's sides while breathing in deeply. The collected power surged into the transmutation circle causing it to glow brightly as it became empowered. All the runewords twisted together in a whirlwind that surged directly into Loki's open mouth. The sound began slowly but built quickly. Loki exhaled all the blue seidr in a minutes long shriek that shook the room. Tony clapped his hands over his ears and stumbled back as the sound waves buffeted him.
.-.-.-.
From the moment Loki took a hold of the transmutation circle to the moment she stopped screaming the image on the screen wavered and blurred slightly.
"Anthony wasn't mistaken. Loki wielded a fae's seidr without a fae present or a grim talisman," Frey said softly. All colors but orange. An uncomfortable sense of unease oozed from the back of his mind. There's no defending against someone who can wield almost any form of seidr. Frey smiled as he realized that he didn't have to defend. Loki was family to him, and he to her. All he needed to defend against was the triplets setting one of his halls alight, and that was a task he relished.
It was awkward but honest unease that caused Frigga to stare openly before she was able to find her composure again. It was like watching an entirely different mage. Loki had the green seidr of Jotunheim. It was a lovely emerald hue that she was very familiar with. This wasn't that at all. This was the deep blue of the fae but being wielded by her son. Seeing this made two things oddly clear. The first continued to hurt as it was put in front of her again that she didn't know her son as nearly well as she'd thought she did. The second was what came to Frigga as she saw the sapphire seidr Loki was wielding. Even using a different color of seidr, Loki's seidr was still a beautiful shade. She didn't think there would be a shade that Loki could use that wouldn't be beautiful.
It must have been his mentors. They taught Loki to hide these things from me. Odin was very uncomfortable with this display of power. If Loki could wield blue seidr, combined with his knowledge of the use of other seidrs, there was no reason to think that Loki couldn't wield the other types. "All of them but orange, that's mine." Those words were almost as troubling to Odin as Frey's declaration that Loki protected them from an Inquiry to Enlightenment. An even more distressing thought crossed his mind then. If Loki wielded this much power and was still that desperate against whomever he faced in the void, then how powerful was his opponent? That narrowed the list down to two possibilities. Their darkest enemy, the Mad Titan himself, or an unknown warlord from outside the Nine Realms. Odin truly hoped it was the second option. He held onto that hope despite knowing that if an Inquiry was involved then there was only one real option. The thought of a monster like Thanos capturing and torturing his son caused the beast within him to howl furiously. He would need to spill an ocean of blood to slake its thirst. It wouldn't be calm for anything less.
.-.-.-.
Deft control let Loki focus the sound into her seidr. The force of the impact instantaneously foamed the ball of seidr then ignited it. The kibisis contained the emerald inferno. She pulled seidr from the inferno to compose the Spell of Pathways. It would allow her to create a pathway for the transmuted seidr that was outside of her body. As the spell composed, she reached into her burning seidr to touch at the Transmutation Spell on the reginnaglar. The spell pulled up into the middle of the inferno along with the drop of blood. Then she reached into that drop of blood to find her own lifecode. From there she used her lifecode to change the blood into a small collection of cells that could be used as a template to create new eyes. Loki channeled the Transmutation Spell through the newly created pathway. The template from the drop of blood and the Transmutation Spell running along the new pathway were merged together then. It would take a few days for the two spells to form her new eyes from the template. The last of the power in the transmutation circle flowed into the ball of burning seidr. It took the Spell of Pathways and the Enchantment of Elsewhere from her deadened eyes with it. The flames died down into a gently pulsing ball of brilliant emerald light. It was the last thing Loki saw clearly. Her arms dropped to her sides. She looked towards Tony as the green in her eyes was draining away to be replaced by a milky white. "Tony?" she called gently. A deep ache spread through her chest. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she dropped to the floor.
In order to catch her as she fell Tony slid underneath her. His hand went to her throat right away.
"Madam's pulse is strong. I believe she's simply unconscious, sir," Jarvis said reassuringly.
"Thank you, Jarvis," he replied. Tony hugged Loki tightly. He pulled her into his arms and turned towards the rose tank. The lid was already opening. Tony placed Loki on the soft bedding and reached across her to the IV port. "Jarvis, hydration solution and," he risked a clandestine glance over to the door quickly then back to his wife, "and the nimp," Tony said as he worked to get the IV into her right arm. A slippery silver substance slid down the tube and into her arm. The nasal cannula slid easily into place. He opened the port closest to him and pulled up another IV. The needle slid into the crook of her left elbow. Tony leaned over placed a small kiss on her lips. "Sleep tight, beautiful," he whispered. The lid closed smoothly and sealed in place.
Tony pressed a button on the small control panel on the lid of the tank. He put a hand up slightly above the panel and swiped to the right. A pale blue holoscreen appeared as his hand passed over the tank. He tapped the screen with a finger and slid the screen to above the tank and enlarged it to a foot tall by foot and a half long screen. "I want a full scan, Jarvis," Tony said. A series of numbers started rolling up the screen. He looked over them for a moment. "Set it to 45% for twenty minutes then drop it 20% for another thirty and then 10% for another ten. End the run there. Let's check everything, J. Sorry, Jarvis." He almost winced as he said it. He needed to remember that Jarvis wasn't Jay. Old habits were hard to break though.
"Yes, sir," Jarvis replied quietly.
The projection changed from a flat screen to a full-length projection of Loki hovering over the tank. Tony tapped the panel on the tank and the projection changed to her circulatory system with her beating heart at the center. "Looks good, no blockages," Tony muttered as he tapped the button again. The projection changed to Loki's skeleton. "Run a continuous bone scan for me, please." The projection shimmered and changed. The skeletal projection turned white-blue as the scan progressed. When the scan finished it returned to its normal pale blue. Almost every bone scanned showed a spider web of healed breaks and cracks that made them look more like pieced together shrapnel than bones.
.-.-.-.
A sick sense of horror pervaded Odin's thoughts as he looked at the image of Loki's bones. Almost every bone looked to have been shattered. It was only the skull and some upper vertebrae that were intact. You truly broke yourself, came undone, before you faced our enemy. Yet still you won. He remembered the pain of a single, cleanly broken bone. He couldn't imagine the pain the injuries to Loki's bones might have inflicted, or how he might have survived them. Odin wouldn't allow himself to flinch before the image. His heart thumped painfully in his chest. I allowed this to happen. This is my fault. The beast within continued to howl.
Shock widened Sif's eyes slightly. Nearly every bone had been shattered into tiny pieces then put back together. Her thoughts drifted back to a battle with raiders she was in when she'd gone to visit Hogun's village. One of the raiders got a lucky strike on her and broke her sword arm. He paid dearly for it when she switched hands to continue to battle. However, she remembered having to switch hands. She couldn't continue to fight with her broken arm. Sif didn't know how Loki went to battle with all his bones broken and still won. Doing anything other than screaming after that seemed impossible.
It was with wide eyes that Clint looked over the bone scans. Throughout his career with SHIELD he'd gained many scars from many different injuries. Guns shots, stab wounds, concussions, burns, chemical lesions, he'd run the gamut of injuries. Broken bones were always his least favorite. It was the deep pain resonating through his entire limb, making his joints ache as it spread out, that caused him to dislike them so much. What he was looking at was so much worse than anything he'd ever had. Lilith was such a small woman. Those kinds of injuries would be even more detrimental to her, devastating even. He looked away from the screen again. He was still worried for Lilith when he didn't want to be worried about Loki.
The dire howls coming from the cracks in the sphere of silence around King Odin drew a wince from McCorrmick as he heard them. They weren't pleasant on the ears. He preferred the soft ballad coming from the beautiful lady. The thing stuck in the elder King's chest was howling franticly, almost screaming in pain. It was still pushing at the edges of the tiny sun that contained it. The young man didn't want to see it. Hopefully, it would stay put while the old warrior was there.
Seeing Anthony use the rose tank like that always reminded him of a Soul Forge. Frey knew that the rose tank wasn't nearly as powerful as a Soul Forge, but it always looked like it. He wasn't surprised when he saw the Truthkeeper flinch at the image of Loki's bones. His own reaction to seeing them was worse. Scars on bones were difficult to deal with once they hardened. The seidr core often interfered with peeling them off and regenerating new bone. It was better to deal with the injury swiftly to prevent a scar on the bone. Frey was surprised when he noticed that the boy wasn't looking at the screen but at Odin, who was sitting quietly as ever. What are you looking at boy?
.-.-.-.
"Not even a new fracture, excellent," Tony smiled and tapped the screen again. This time Loki's organs were displayed. Tony grasped the projection and moved it. He moved each organ out so he could look at each one individually. "Alright, I need an organ run now," Tony said. He looked at each organ carefully going over each organ's individual read out. "Hm, I don't like the look of her right kidney, it's 2.67% enlarged, and increasing rapidly. There's no toxicity yet, let's keep it that way. I want constant monitoring and begin dialysis, please. Everything else looks good," Tony said.
.-.-.-.
"Dialysis, huh," Bruce said. Organ failure. That's interesting, and not good. It was a little weird and simultaneously not weird when he realized that he didn't like the thought of Lilith's organ's failing, even if she was Loki. It was just bad. He also didn't like the thought of Tony handling that. His friend was a quirky inventor who wasn't trained as a doctor but would need that training if he were going to handle organ failure.
"What is it, Bruce? What is dialysis?" Thor asked. He glanced back and forth from the screen to Bruce. What he was seeing was horrible enough. He was anxious about there being worse since the All-Speak's brief description of 'blood chemical clean' 'machine pump replace' made it sound gruesome.
"The kidneys are organs that help clean the blood. Dialysis is the process of using a special machine to clean the blood by painlessly drawing it out through tubing, running it through the dialysis machine where it's chemically cleaned then painlessly pumped back into the body through tubing. If Loki needs it, then her kidneys are malfunctioning so badly that they can't adequately clean her blood on their own. It's a precursor to organ failure," Bruce explained. What could've caused that?
Sighing, Thor turned back around. "More machines," he muttered. An old and bitter hatred surged forth from his memories. Now it was Stark using machines on Loki instead of the Heal Mistresses. There was always another machine.
Yes, it's disgusting. Anthony brought a portable dialysis machine on one of their early visits and showed him the process from beginning to end. His nephew-by-law explained that this was what was part of what was happening in the tank and several times a week. It was foul for him to watch it happen to his beloved niece knowing that this was what was happening when he couldn't be there. Frey only allowed it because it did provide a tangible benefit to Loki. Her reassurance that the only ill effect it had was causing chills helped ease his disgust with it. He saw the bitter look on his nephew's face and found himself a touch bitter as well. For as powerful and well trained a Heal Meister as he was, he still couldn't bring Loki back to full health. Her organs suffered too much damage from the Void Sickness. Her lifecode was permanently scarred from it. He strongly suspected that there was something else that happened in addition to that which also damaged her insides. He most strongly suspected that it was whatever poorly done healing Anthony conducted to rid Loki of the sickness that did it. It was something he had no firm proof of, however.
The prospect of Loki needing machines to keep him healthy didn't please Frigga. She disliked the idea as much as the wicked scars on her son's bones. Just the sight of those brought tears to her eyes. She wondered why her brother wouldn't have healed Loki's innards. Grief tinted her thoughts again as she wondered if the injury from Lord Hela did so much damage that not even Frey could heal it all. There was no book or tome that she knew of that detailed what might happen to someone with two heartstring who survived the loss of one of them. Frigga still thought that Frey should at least be able to heal Loki's other organs. The scars on the bones were going nowhere. She wanted a certain answer. It was what she didn't have. Loki's health was looking alarmingly precarious. As soon as she was able, Frigga was going to have to sit down and discuss Loki's health with Frey. Hopefully, he'd been allowed to take charge of it. Loki's health was another thing that didn't belong in Stark's hands.
Despair tinged the horror in Odin's thoughts as he looked at the image of Loki's brain while it was briefly on the screen. It was only a small section that concerned him; there was a segment towards the back that was conspicuously missing. A carved out, hollow, hole sat where smooth tissue should be. What have I allowed to happen?! My son ... The beast within him howled in pain.
.-.-.-.
He brought the projection of Loki's womb forward. "Let me see my baby," Tony said happily. The projection showed a side view of a growing fetus. "Oh, hi there, little buddy! How are you doin'? Are you doin' ok?" Tony said with a loving reverence thick in his voice. He looked over the readout under the image. "You're just fine." Tony ran his finger gently over the fetus' image and smiled broadly, "Daddy loves you, baby. I can't wait to meet you. I just can't wait. You're going to be so beautiful, just like your mommy." He looked at the image for just a moment longer before he tapped the button again.
The image changed to a dark grey image of Loki's body. It displayed where the concentrations of seidr were. Her blood vessels were glowing a pale white-blue while her eyes were completely blackened. There was a dim glow in her chest. The only real light came from the baby. Tony's shoulder's slumped and he looked through the window panel at Loki. She has so little seidr left, this isn't healthy. He placed a hand on the window, "I know you don't want to scare Frey, but this would've been a better idea with him around to help Rhodey." He shut down the projection. "Record the new data and add everything to her medical record, Jarvis. Do an analysis of ongoing trends, leave it in the standard place, please."
"Yes, sir. Also, Colonel Rhodes successfully put all of the children to bed except Erik. They're sitting in the living room currently with the colonel reading a story to Erik," Jarvis said quietly.
"He's still awake?" Tony rested his head against the window. The temptation to let his older brother handle his son was a powerful one. He needed to be a better father than that. "I'm sorry, babe. I have to go get Erik to bed. I'll be back in a little bit, I promise." He turned and walked out of the medical lab. A gentle hum from the rose tank was the only noise left in the room.
.-.-.-.
One more down, he kept another thought to himself. "That concludes this file," McCorrmick said. There was an odd mix of fear and grief crying out in the silent noise from the vexed Queen. He tried to listen to the soothing song from the beautiful lady. There was nothing he could do for Queen Frigga.
A warm smile touched Frey's lips at Anthony's sentiments. He too would've preferred to be there. Undoubtedly it would have been enlightening. Ensuring Loki's safety and wellbeing was what he wanted. He was going to have words with her on this also. During that he decided that he'd ask after her medical record. He didn't know what would be in it since it wasn't an official healer's record, but still wanted to see it. Although, the more he saw the more he thought he should speak with Rhodes on all he was doing for Frey's family. Defending Thor, healing Loki, protecting and treating his grandchildren, and now reading with Erik. The boy was often too restless to read with. Frey wondered if Rhodes calmed the boy as he calmed Anthony. Then that he wondered again if Rhodes could teach him how to do it. The thought of being able to sit and read with Erik without the interruptions was a very nice one.
