He had been within the deepest reaches of the Void. That much she had seen. An army had been amassed to his command. The AllFather himself, even with all his ways was unable to glean as much as she had.
Odin had had a sense during his time in the places to which he would sometimes go. He had gone there after her discovery. He had caught a glimpse. But only that.
"And Heimdall can see none of him or that realm."
Frigga scoffed.
Odin did not choose to address her scorn of the Gatekeeper. Instead he continued, "Nor can he tell me ought of the power that sustains our son."
That stilled her, and she wondered at the oddness of it – noted as she'd marveled, but ignored it in the preeminent joy that her child was living, by whatever means it had come about.
Odin did not long share her unquestioning joy. He worried after something he would not speak to her in as many words as it plagued him.
"Long has he been lost in that Outer Darkness," he told her. "Who knows what he might have found, or," he brushed a lock of hair from her face, "what might have found him, in the Dark," his eye searched hers, "Little enough of our son yet may remain."
"Loki is strong," she said.
Odin regarded her a long moment.
"In the history of all peoples," he said, turning away, "None has survived what he has undergone."
For the first time, uncertainty flickered in her breast and soured to anger, "Are you unhappy to learn that our son is alive? After all this time?"
Odin sighed. He came back to her, taking both her hands within his again. "I merely seek to gentle the blow, Frigga, should he return to us, altered from the boy you knew," he quieted, "You did not see him at the end."
"Odin," he turned away from her and she pressed, following him. She came before him and, gentling, she traced her hand across the weary lines of his face. "What is it that you will not tell me?"
Odin closed his eye and for a long moment, he did not answer.
"He was desperate," he said, finally.
Frigga watched him as he looked down, over the ledge of the balcony, looking out over their city.
"Raving, Frigga," he turned from the view of the lights, flickering on in the cascading dark as the sun slid away, and his eye made her afraid. "Sick with wounds he would not let me heal. And if that," a bitter smile twisted his lips, "was as far as he had progressed in a mere day,"
His hand on the railing shook, and Frigga took it in her own.
Odin looked out over the land, "He will not believe me, that I could not see him, by any of my power."
Sighing, he turned and he looked at her without wavering, "How is it to be with him after a year, far from our care, amid the powers that lurk beyond the shadow of Yggdrasil, where the very Fates themselves must rally to go? No," he shook his head, "My hope, is not strong that he will be unaltered if he return to us."
He turned away from her.
Frigga drew close beside him, looking out over the city, to the sea beyond.
She took a long breath, breathing the cool of the night. "When," she said, finally.
Odin lowered his head in a kind of assent.
"When, he comes back to us," she said, "our task will be less simple." She glanced up at him, then out again over the lights. "But he is yet our son, Odin. No matter what the forces without may have done to him."
Odin said nothing. But in the descending dark, he took her hand.
