CHAPTER ELEVEN
The three set out into the snow the next day optimistically, feeling warm and well-rested, their nagging hunger from the past day sated. Their outlook quickly dissipated as the hours went on, the snow stubbornly continuing to fall faster than their footprints could leave their mark in the path. Even Loki's scattershot attempts at melting the snow before them with magic were fruitless. It seemed not to matter how fast they pressed or thawed the snow out of their way: the blizzard raged on.
Loki screwed his eyes nearly shut against the sleet battering his face and let his breath out in a short puff. He watched the condensation linger in the air for a split second before the gale carried it away into the whiteout. He shivered. It was bitterly cold, even he could feel it. His nose and fingertips tingled with the beginnings of numbness, shutting down in rebellion.
"Loki!" Jane's voice—in all likelihood, no more than ten feet away—seemed to come to him from a great distance. The sound practically drowned in the low howling of the wind.
He turned to look at her; perhaps reading her face would make the hearing simpler.
"We have to find shelter," she yelled at him. "There's no use in trying to fight through this blizzard, I can barely see my hand in front of my face."
He suppressed a shudder as the cold wind plastered his coat to his back. "Just a few more miles," he shouted. "We need to keep moving if our rations are to hold out till we reach a city."
"At this rate, we won't need rations! We'll be frozen to death within the hour!"
Loki pursed his lips. Killing the mortals would be counterproductive. He realized that Darcy hadn't said anything snarky since they began walking in the morning and turned to ask for her vote.
"What about you?" he said. "Could you make it a mile or two more?"
She gave a visible shudder, her teeth chattering. Loki saw with a start that her cheeks were practically scarlet against her pale skin. Her lips, on the other hand, were missing their pink hue; they were slowly blending in to the rest of her skin and turning faintly blue.
"I'll be okay," she said. Her words were muffled as she buried her face in her scarf. As Loki watched, her features vanished into the fabric until she was nothing but a pair of eyes staring back at him, snowflakes refusing to melt from her eyelashes. Loki grimaced. Even though he could scarcely hear her over the storm, he was able to detect the quiver in her voice.
"You're right," he called to Jane. "It's too risky. I'm not familiar enough with human physiology to tell when you are becoming sick from the cold. We will stop for shelter." He turned around in a small circle, searching for any break in the canvas of white, some indication that there was a cave nearby.
Just when he was about to give up hope and instruct them to dig a shelter in the snow itself, he saw it: a flash of blue on the horizon, a few yards away.
He pointed at it. "There!" he said, tapping Jane on the shoulder.
She squinted. "That doesn't look like a cave," she yelled. "It's too bright."
"Do you want to take shelter or not?"
She glared at him for a moment. She sighed reluctantly and began trudging through the snow towards their destination.
Loki's eyes widened as he came to the cave.
It was enormous, stretching back and branching out farther than he could see—and all of the walls were glowing as if lit from within by some bright cerulean fire.
He turned on the spot, eyes roving the cavern walls intensely, feasting upon the majesty of what he was seeing.
"What is this place?" Jane asked breathlessly as she set her bag down with a muffled noise.
"I don't know," said Loki. "Some sort of geological anomaly, perhaps." He peered closer at the wall closest to him; he realized with a start that the whole cave was riddled with tiny etchings. "It appears this grotto was inhabited before. I can't read it, but these cracks in the wall seem to be inscriptions, some early hieroglyphic form of writing."
Darcy came up beside him and squinted over his shoulder. "Yeah," she said absently. "It does look like writing of some sort." She brushed her fingertip along the ridges. Loki followed its path curiously. She tapped one of the characters after a second of roaming the wall. "This symbol is repeated," she said. "A few times, actually. It must be a letter or a common word in their language. Maybe I can figure it out…hieroglyphics are usually just really mutant pictures of things."
"You do that," he murmured. He turned to Jane, who had begun bustling around the entrance of the cave setting up for the night. "How much food is left?"
"Enough," she said briefly. "Assuming we aren't delayed any further."
He nodded. "No more unscheduled stops, then." He lit the fire without asking; he had grown used to the routine. He glanced at Darcy and found her still intently studying the writing on the wall. "We need water, I assume."
Jane nodded. "A few handfuls of snow should do it."
"I'll fetch extra," he said. "I didn't think of it before, but you've been exerting yourselves by trekking through this blizzard. You need to rehydrate, as do I.
He ducked out of the cave without further comment. He didn't care to answer to the questions Jane was sure to ask about his behavior. He was being far too open with these mortals. He needed to stop.
Squiggly…stripe…box-type thing…pointy-box-three-triangle-thing…
Darcy frowned, moving closer to the wall. "Jane, take a look at this…"
Jane stepped over to stand behind her. "What am I supposed to be looking at?" she asked.
"Is it just me, or does that pointy thing look like a crown to you?"
Jane wrinkled her nose. "Maybe?" she said hesitantly. "It might be. I don't know if I'd look at it and immediately think 'crown,' but it could pass for one."
"Pass for what?"
Darcy craned her neck. Loki was standing at the mouth of the cave looking rumpled with a heaping pot full of snow. She jerked her head at the cave wall. "It's one of the symbols," she said. "I think it looks like a crown.
His eyes narrowed; in the light, they seemed to be steely gray instead of green. She could practically see the cogs turning in his mind. "A crown?" he repeated skeptically.
She nodded. "It's like a box with three little triangles sticking out the top." She gestured with her finger as if to draw the figure in mid-air.
Loki set the pot down beside the fire and glided across the cavern to examine the wall. Darcy stepped out of the way as he drew near to allow him a closer look at the inscription.
He frowned. "You may be right," he muttered. "It's hard to make out, but…" He rubbed the mark absently with his fingertips, brushing away the ice and dirt in the crevasses of the text.
Jane gasped. "Oh my God…"
Darcy turned to look at her. In her peripheral vision, she glimpsed something and suddenly realized that it was Loki she should be staring at. She stifled a yell.
"Holy…" she sputtered incoherently. "What the hell is going on?"
Loki froze. He didn't reply for a very long time. He just stared back at her like a deer in the headlights, his eyes shockingly scarlet against his bright blue skin.
"I can explain," he said in a low voice.
"You're a Frost Giant?"
Loki pressed his lips together in a thin line. This was not part of the plan. He glanced between Jane and Darcy pleadingly, hoping that they might feel pity for him and not pursue the matter too harshly.
Jane might fall for the big, green eyes. She looked confused and worried, not angry. But Darcy…
Loki was taken aback by the sudden chill in her gaze. She didn't look her usual bubbly self. Something about her posture changed all at once. He knew that stance. He had seen it in Thor almost every day. He had seen it in Sif when one of the other warriors made one too many jokes about women. She was on the attack.
"I think the politically correct term is Jotun-Asgardian," Darcy said scathingly. "Isn't that right, Loki? Or is that even your real name?"
He swallowed, mentally calculating his options.
Lie. You can tell them you are shapeshifting, that this is all just a joke.
No, they know I can't. My magic is too weak.
Then tell them you are as confused as they are. Act like this development is news to you as much as it is to them.
But Loki's expression had already given him away. He wore not the face of a man fallen victim to some strange magic—his face was that of a thief caught in the act, a child with his hand in the cookie jar.
His mischief mantra began to kick in. Keep the lie simple. The less complicated, the less chance there is for them to find holes in it.
What could be more uncomplicated than the truth?
"I am not in disguise," he said quietly. "I am who I have said that I am. I am Loki, son…" His voice broke. "Son of Laufey," he finished in a low voice.
"Laufey?" Jane asked in a whisper. "No, that can't be right. You're Thor's brother. He told me stories, you grew up with him. You…"
Something in Loki's chest twisted uncomfortably. Thor had told stories about him?
"No," he interrupted her. "I was stolen from Jotunheim as a baby. I grew up believing that I was Thor's brother." His face darkened. "Until our battle, that is."
He glanced at his hands, and was relieved to find them turning back to their usual pale state. He looked up at the woman with a sigh, and continued.
"A jotun caught me by the hand in that fight. I should have frozen into a block of ice, or at least lost my hand temporarily. Instead," he said, "this happened."
"Why aren't you a Frost Giant all the time, then?" Jane asked. "How do you appear to be a god in your natural state…do you have to shapeshift?"
"No…" Loki paused. "I don't know. All I know is that I seem to be, for all intensive purposes, a god. I become a frost giant when I am in contact with any artifact or person containing jotun magic. Once contact is broken, I revert to my god form, unless I shapeshift to maintain the appearance of a Frost Giant."
Jane kept shaking her head, trying to make sense of this new information. Darcy just stared at him emotionlessly. Her face didn't move, didn't flinch. She just stood there with her blue eyes fixed on his face.
"Why didn't you tell us?" she asked.
"I didn't think it was necessary," he murmured.
"You lied," she said coldly, her voice rising. "You deliberately didn't tell us something important about yourself. I thought…" She trailed off, the brief spark of feeling in her eyes fading away as she realized where she was. She sighed and stared at her feet. "I'm going exploring in the tunnels," she said to Jane stiffly. "Let me know when dinner's on."
And she stormed off, leaving Jane to prepare dinner and Loki to puzzle out why he felt so sick all of a sudden.
Darcy didn't look up as a pair of light footsteps came down the passageway.
"Darcy..."
She continued staring at the wall, pretending to read the inscriptions. "Leave me alone."
"Darcy, my omission was not meant to deceive or slight the two of you. It was merely..."
"Go away. Please."
Loki didn't try to continue his speech. He just stood beside her and stared at her profile silhouetted against the blue wall.
She tried to ignore him. But after several seconds, she found that it was very difficult to stare straight ahead when someone else was burning a hole in her cheek with their eyes. She turned to meet his gaze. Against her will, her glare softened slightly when she saw his eyes, pale olive and wide open, devoid of their usual mischief. He looked...honest.
"Why didn't you tell me-us?" she asked quietly. He began to speak, but Darcy cut him off. "And don't say that you didn't have to. You've told me things that I didn't need to know before. Why is this any different?" She was overcome with a sudden suspicion. Her heart sank. "Or were you lying all along? About your daughter, about the pranks, about everything?"
"I haven't yet lied to you," he said.
"Yet?" Darcy crossed her arms. "But it's on the agenda? You will lie to me, you just haven't gotten around to it yet?"
"No—"
"So what are you going to lie to us about, then? Were you planning to betray us when we—"
"I have not and I will not ever lie to you!" he burst out. Darcy froze mid-syllable, stunned into silence by the abrupt change in his voice. This wasn't the Loki she had seen in the last week. There was no forethought, no composure to the man before her. This was raw and broken. This was...Darcy wasn't sure what it was. Hatred? Love? Whatever it was, it seemed to be consuming him from the inside, gnawing at his voice and his eyes.
He shook his head furiously and placed his fist against the wall. "Do you think that I chose to be a monster?" he said harshly. "Do you think that I wanted to be like this? A thief? A liar? A manipulator? The villain?" He let out a soft, mad laugh vacant of humor. "All I wanted was to be useful," he said in a low voice. "All I wanted was to have some grand destiny like my brother did. To be the hero. To be the one who changed the world."
His eyes flashed as he turned to stare at her once again. She backed away slightly. He seemed slightly demented. "I never cared about fame! I never cared about the women, or the crown, or any of those things." His voice cracked. He seemed to be coming down from his euphoric façade, falling back into his usual reserved temper. "I cared about my family," he said hoarsely. "I cared about my brother…my mother…my father…I loved them."
He leaned against the wall again, closing his eyes. His breathing hitched. "Yet nothing I ever did was ever good enough for them." He opened his eyes, his zeal abruptly mounting again. He glared at the gleaming wall as if trying to shatter it with a look. "Nobody ever pulled me aside to tell me how well I had done in the battle, protecting the others from hidden foes they failed to notice. Nobody ever praised me for my spells, for my magic. Nobody saw me!" His voice shook. "They feared me. They all knew, long before I did…"
"They knew that you were a frost giant and they didn't tell you?" Darcy asked. She was almost surprised at the sound of her own voice: too soft, too high in the hallway resonating with Loki's furious tenor.
He gave a hollow chuckle. "Frost giant," he scoffed. "No, they never knew that I was the monster their children searched for under their beds before they went to sleep at night. Not consciously. But they always knew, somehow, in their hearts, that I was the one to be afraid of. That I was something to be hated…to be alienated."
He glanced at Darcy. "I always wanted a destiny. It just wasn't the one I wanted." His eyes seemed to be peering right into her core as he spoke now. She couldn't even begin to formulate a question. He was giving her all the answers without speaking, just by looking at her. "I am the Destroyer," he said quietly. "I am the one who will bring about Ragnarok, the end of time, for the entire universe. That is my fate. I am destined to obliterate everything that I once held dear. My home, my family, Asgard…And not just the people and places I care about. I will destroy the whole universe. Every living being in every realm that has ever existed will die, because of me."
He looked down at the ground, the tension melting from his shoulders without warning. He seemed defeated. "That is why I did not tell you or Jane what I am," he said in a low tone. "Because to say that I am a frost giant would be a lie. It would not be the whole truth. There are not words for what I am…for what I am destined to become." He swallowed harshly. "I could not tell you. I can scarcely tell myself."
He turned away from her, gazing somewhere down the passageway into the dim glow of the deeper caverns. Darcy could swear she caught the glint of a tear on his cheek. "I do not want to be a villain. It is just my nature. It is who I am: the one to be feared."
Darcy felt like something in her ribcage was about to explode...his pain was overwhelming to be in contact with, even secondhand. She felt the impulse to make some sort of comforting gesture and placed a hand on his shoulder.
He began to shake it off, but stilled after a fraction of a second as he realized her intent.
"I'm not afraid of you," she said quietly.
He continued staring at the ground. "You should be."
Darcy stood there for a few minutes, leaving her hand on his shoulder, feeling the cold radiating through his clothing. Loki did not say anything more...but he did not tell her to leave.