Age 13
Temple of Hagalaz, Asgard
I had questioned the purpose of the mirror they'd installed in my room; it was the only new addition besides the small chest of clothes. However, it quickly became clear what it was for. Eldmara wanted me to see the scars on my face, the bruises and cuts that covered most of my body, and the raging fire that illuminated all the wounds that hadn't healed. We'd only been away from Asgard for four months, but I already looked like a vastly different person. I had dressed myself in the same outfit I'd worn to my first appearance in court, even though I hated it, because it was the only thing I owned that wasn't torn or covered in blood.
So that's where Mina found me, staring at my broken self. I'd lost weight, my hair had been chopped off, and I couldn't quite stand up straight. Yet, considering what I'd been through, I was lucky to be alive.
"We need to get going." I tried not to be frustrated with Mina. She was just as much a slave as I was, but she never had to enter the ring, or face the spectators that screamed in savage delight. Her place was to keep me in line, no matter the means, and when Eldmara wanted results, it was Mina she used.
"What do you think the king wants? It has to be big for Eldmara to actually heed the invitation and risk coming back." I try to talk to Mina when I get the chance, but she usually closes off. I don't blame her.
"Hard to say, but it's got the High Priestess in bad mood."
"She's always in a bad mood."
Mina turns out to be right, but Eldmara knows she can't risk anymore physical abuse so I just have to endure the frigid cold that surrounds me even in the midst of Asgard's eternal summer. I temper it with the beautiful sights of the city. I dream of this shade of gold, strong but gentle.
We arrive at the palace fairly quickly. I think of the last time I was here, whole, but naive and unknowing. The throne room is the same as it was, same solemnity, same occupants, with the addition of a woman in gold standing next to the king. A guard announces us, which feels redundant, since they obviously watched us approach. I don't look up farther than my own feet; I hurt too much to risk defiance. I don't need to give Eldmara another reason to beat me when we get out of here.
"Good, you're here. As you know, I've been planning an expedition to Niflheim for quite some time, and I've decided to go ahead with it. Every future king should have a worthwhile quest under their belt and since we're only a couple years out from Thor's coronation, we running out of time. We've sent ahead a preliminary scouting party, and they're running into a consistent problem keeping light sources functional." I'm surprised to hear so many words from the king, because he had seemed so terse the first time.
"It's the fog," the woman in gold adds. "It puts the torches out and I can't get any of my enchantments to hold. We need a light source that doesn't need to be relit every five minutes."
Eldmara obviously thinks this isn't worth her time. I think I understand what they're getting at, but it seems too good to be true. "Well, I know some helpful spells, but I'm no sorceress. Perhaps Mina…"
"Don't play coy with me, Eldmara, you know what we're after. We want the girl." Odin resumes his blunt demeanor. I tense, knowing Eldmara will never go for it.
"I'm not sure I can meet that request, Your Highness. She's still learning to control her powers; she's in the middle of training."
"It's not a request. It's a requisition." The temperature in the room drops before Odin even finishes his sentence. Ice forms on the floor, spiraling out in sickly patterns. It's illuminated by my own light that betrays my fear. I remove my gaze from the floor, knowing that if something happens, I want to be ready.
"You can't have her. I won't allow it." I realize that the whole room is just at tense as I am. The guards are holding their weapons tighter, Thor's fists are clenched, and Loki makes eye contact with me, one arm behind his back like he's about to draw a knife.
"There's no need for a scene, Eldmara," the woman in gold says. I think she must be the queen by the way she handles the situation. "You can't possibly think it would end well. We have the right to requisition any resource or personnel for royal expeditions for up to a year. Besides, it looks like the 'training' you've put her through has been… ineffectual. For an expedition of this caliber, she'll need proper army training, so we'll already return her in better condition than you left her." The queen manages to diffuse, placate, and insult Eldmara in one go. There is one last tense moment before the ice disappears and everyone relaxes.
"Very well. I suppose some time here might do her some good. I'll leave her with you." She shoots me one last glare before stalking off. Everyone relaxes a little bit me. I wait for the other shoe to drop, for her to turn around and blast everyone with ice and rage. She doesn't. She takes Mina and leaves, and I turn my back on the king to watch them as they disappear out of sight.
"She threw less of a tantrum than I expected," the queen remarks.
"Yes, well, I still think this was unnecessary," Odin replies, and I turn back to them, unsure of what to do. I'm still on edge, and even more confused. Why would they risk my mistress's anger if the king of Asgard thought it was unnecessary? It didn't bode well. "She's your responsibility, Loki, as you requested." That doesn't sound good either. "Come Thor, we need to discuss other… accomodations for the trip." Thor looks likes he wants to stay, but he follows his father out of the room.
Loki and the queen descend the steps of the dais and come toward me. I give them another bow, unsure of the etiquette, of everything really. The queen has a pleasant smile on her face, but Loki glares at the hallway behind me as they approach, only shifting his gaze to me right before they reach me.
"What did she do to you?" I wince at his words, his anger a tone I am all too familiar with. I assume a position of defense on instinct, shoulders hunched, head down, braced for impact. It doesn't come. Instead there is a gentle touch on my arm.
"Oh, dear, it must be much worse than we feared." It's the queen, and the kindness in her eyes let me relax a little. "It's ok. You're safe here, we won't hurt you. I'm Frigga, and I'm afraid I can't stay, but you can trust us." Then, to Loki, "Don't press her, she's been through a lot and she'll tell us when she's ready." She walks away without another word.
"I'm sorry," Loki says. "I didn't realize… Come, you should see a healer." He goes to guide me by the elbow, or perhaps put an arm around my shoulder, but decided against it. He still looked angry, but it was controlled now. We walk down the hallway in silence for a little bit before he speaks again. "You don't have to be silent, you know. Eldmara may not have welcomed questions, but I do. You must have many."
I realize, with a start, that I don't know if I trust him. He answered my question before, but he didn't try to save me from my mistress, even though he must have known that Eldmara's intentions were to hurt me. This could all be a ruse to break me further. No. No, I didn't believe that. Still, all that questions had brought me so far were pain. There was only one way I'd know for sure that I wasn't in the same position as before, and that was to ask anyway. So I didn't hold back.
"Why didn't you stop Eldmara from taking me before? You knew I'd been kidnapped, and I thought you wanted to help, but you let her take me. I know we're not on Earth anymore, but what kind of place lets people get away with kidnapping and torturing kids?" I immediately regret the venom in my voice, waiting for the ice that always comes when I forget to hold my tongue. Nothing happens. It takes Loki a long moment to reply.
"I did want to help you, but I couldn't just take you away just like that." He paused. "Eldmara is… an anomaly in the court. Honestly, we've been trying to find a way to bring her down for longer than I've been alive. She's the only High Priestess of the Cults that's still around, a fact attributed to that enchanted headdress she wears. That's what fuels her ice abilities. It makes her difficult to control by force, which means we have to do it through politics. Unfortunately, she also refutes the newer laws banning slavery and interrupting apprenticeships, and we can't stop her without a large enough force, which would have to include the combined effort of the royal family, something we normally couldn't risk. When you came to court, I thought it might give us the opening we need, but I had to do some planning before we made a move. I am sorry it took so long."
It was a lot to process, and I didn't understand most of it, but I understood why he'd been so angry. He thought my pain was his fault. I relaxed ever so slightly, starting to believe him when he said I wasn't in any more danger.
"However, Eldmara can't ignore an official requisition order, it's an old enough law that she'd feel politically weak subverting it. I'm a little surprised, we had more of a case prepared had she argued it, but she folded, perhaps a little too easily." He looked worried for a second, then shook his head. "Don't worry about it though, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."
I wasn't especially worried about Eldmara at the moment, something else he said peaked my interest.
"So I'm a slave?" It wasn't a new concept, I had just realized that there was legal power behind it. Loki's face dropped, and I knew he was trying to soften the blow.
"While in Eldmara's…" He struggles to find the right word. "...jurisdiction, yes. Midgardians have different legal rights now, but to her, they don't have any. You are property to her." This is said with vehement anger, but changes to equally potent insistence. "But that changes while you are here. We're not yet in a position to free you, but your official status in Asgard starting now is a ward of the state. Technically, my ward."
I chew on that, trying to decide how much I trust him. I desperately want to, everything he's told me is in line with what I've observed. It's just so hard to to believe that people care. Given what I've been through the last two months, I doubt that anyone could care enough to risk angering someone as powerful as Eldmara. Everyone I'd met had tried to appease her. She was destruction incarnate, and it was a miracle I wasn't still in her grasp. And for what? It dawned on me. I was to be Loki's and Asgard's tool, just as I'd been Eldmara's slave and Sakaar's entertainment.
Apparently, I don't have to respond. We've reached our destination as Loki guides me into a darker room with torches lining the wall. There's a group of women in grey uniforms gathered around a table, not unlike the altar in the temple. I stiffen a little bit, but I allow Loki to guide me to it.
"Sit up here," one of the women says. I try to follow the command, but the table is just barely too high for me to get up on my own. Hands on my waist boost me up, but before I even get seated, Loki has backed away, almost to the wall. The women (doctors? healers?) have little computer screens that they push close to my body in all different places. I think they must be scanning me, but it makes me nervous.
"Can you give me a description of your injuries?" I have to swallow before I can answer. The part of me that has been beaten into submission by Eldmara doesn't want to reveal anything, fearing retribution. But I also want to feel better.
"I'm cut up all over, but mostly on my back. I think some ribs are broken." I realized as I spoke that I didn't really know the full extent of my injuries. I felt them, but it was difficult to remember all the injuries I had sustained and which pain came from which.
"Oh my. We will need to do a full body scan then. Lie back for me." I lay down, still uncomfortable. My heart starts to beat a little bit faster, and I glow a little bit brighter.
A reddish-orange light appears above me, for a second taking the shape of my body, before it becomes a fuzzy and indistinct blob. The women frowns and uses her fingers to manipulate lines and dials of light in the air next to me. The body reappears, and I realize that it's my body before it fades again. My heart beats even faster. I realize that the discomfort doesn't come from the similarity to the altar room in the temple, but to the numberless hospital rooms that I saw my mother in during the various stages of her cancer. I start to shake a little, and the display above goes haywire.
"Miss, I need you to calm down. We can't get a clear picture if you're agitated, it makes your abilities tamper with the soul forge." I try to calm down, to steady my heart and the frantic energy I feel coming off me, but I can't. I close my eyes and I see scan and needles and I can smell the sterile hospital smell even in these stone walls. I can't do it.
"Can you give us the room?" Loki's voice is quiet, like he's trying not to be heard, but there's no other noise in the room, so I hear him easy. "I think I can talk her down." There's a chorus of "yes, Your Majesty" and I watch the last of them leave the room as I sit up.
"I'm sorry," I don't know why I'm apologizing except that I don't know what else to do. "I…" I don't know how to explain it.
"What's wrong?"
I take a deep breath, my heart still racing, light still glowing, and now tears threatening. "It reminds me of the hospital." I pause and he waits. My voice is small when I start again, and I stare at the floor, unable to meet his gaze. "My mom had cancer. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and I visited her a lot. I actually had to be quarantined once because of an accident and…. all the machines and the being examined and not knowing what's going on… they just freak me out."
Loki gives a small smile, of all things, then nods. "Ignorance is often the root of most fears." He walks closer and picks up a screen from the side table before coming to join me where I sit on the table. "This is a vitals monitor. When they scanned you, it attuned itself to your body and can relay simple information like heart rate, blood pressure, life force, brain activity, and the like." He sets it back on the table and points to the one I'm sitting on. "This is a soul forge, it transfers molecular energy from one place to another." I stare at him blankly. "It's like a three dimensional mirror. It mimics your body with light based on the energy from inside your own body. We can see what's happening inside of you, from infections to internal injuries. Your abilities act up when your agitated?" I nod. "The excess of energy is difficult for the machine to handle, especially with how dynamic it is. Did that help?"
"Yes" I let out the breath I didn't know I was holding in. It makes more sense now, and I start to relax.
"Do you think we can try again?"
"Yeah." He goes to fetch the healers, and comes back to stand by me. I lay back down on the table, my light dim and the rest of me calm. A hand holds mine.
"I'll be right here." The machine starts up again and comes into focus, allowing the the healer's to do their work without interference. They work their way through my body, cataloging the injuries and making plans to deal with them. I'm still not sure I understand everything they tell me, but Loki does, and his jaw tightens with anger again.
"Overall, there's less damage than I expected." The women doesn't look cheerful, but suspicious. "Actually, there's less damage than there should be. You've clearly had injuries that haven't healed but are less than they should be, especially for a Midgardian. I'm going to take a blood sample." I tense a little bit, but Loki squeeze my hand and I relax. She puts a box-like device on my arm, but I don't feel a needle, just a little bit of pressure. There's no hole when she pulls it off, and we wait in silence.
"Interesting." The healer murmurs, more to herself than anything.
"What?" Loki asks. The light from the soul forge changes from a view of my body to several different display, and I sit up to take a better look at them. There's a string of DNA, I think, and some words in a script I don't recognize.
"See this section here? It's not consistent with our data on Midgardian biology. It's extra coding, but very subtle, and not recent, likely inherited. There's trace of a trigger too, some of these genes used to be dormant. The extra bases and the pattern… it looks Kree." The healer looks bewildered. A faint memory is triggered in my head.
"Eldmara," I said, and everyone's attention turns to me. "When they put the fire in me, she said I'd been 'strengthened by Kree treachery' or something. What's Kree?"
"The Kree are a cruel race of beings that like to experiment on others to fuel their empire. We'd heard rumors that they'd been experimenting on humans, but we hadn't had proof before." Loki answers, intrigued. I process what that means fairly quickly.
"Aliens? Aliens experimented on humans?" I'm dismayed for a second, and then more puzzle pieces fall into place. "Wait… When I was 12, my dad had this box, and we were alone, and he threw it at the wall, and this smoke came out, and then this rock covered me like a cocoon, and after that… I was stronger than my dad, and I didn't get cold or hot very easily." I know I should tell them about the hospital too, but everyone is staring at me again, and I've lost my nerve. It doesn't matter. The healer nods and starts talking instead.
"The new coding does look like it would create more resilient cells than a normal Midgardian's. It explains the wounds, and also why you're not as volatile as we assumed you'd be. The Eternal Flame is difficult to control, but if the vessel housing it was fortified against denaturation and promoted stability, it would grant you some innate control over its natural state of chaos." She's started to lose me again, and I start to realize how tired I am.
"Not to just take this new information for granted, but I think your focus should be on her injuries, Lady Eir." Loki must have noticed my drooping shoulders.
"Of course, Your Highness. I don't think she'll much more than a week in the infirmary, and then she'll be ready for training." Eir left us to rustle through a cabinet of medical supplies.
"I can't stay, but I'll come check on you later." Loki squeezed my hand again. "With all that we've just discovered, I must confer with my mother. Get some rest." He doesn't wait for a response, which is good, because I'm not sure what to say. The subject had been changed very abruptly, and I wasn't sure why.
But before I knew it, Loki was already gone, and I was left to ponder the new developments. As my wounds were treated, I came to two conclusions. The first was that no matter what happened to me now, it couldn't be worse than what Eldmara had done to me.
I also decided that, at least for now, I was going to trust Loki.