A/N:
Hello all! I am so sorry this took so long to post and it isn't even very long! Inspiration was in short supply this time, but I hope that will be over soon. I've just had so many things to write that I opted to write nothing. Yeah, because that makes sense.
ANy who, thanks again for reading! Your support and comments are greatly appreciated!
One Hundred and One Days
Hel wasn't anything Loki was expecting it to be. Standing on a precipice over the realm, Loki could see much. To one side looked as one might think of when imagining Hell. All bright red fire and burning suffering. Loki sneered at that. How predictable.
To the other side, however, was desolate and grey. Empty. There didn't seem to be any substance to it. Just hard, unrelenting rock. There was no feeling to it, not like the burning passion for pain coming from the burning realm. There was just…nothing.
A shiver ran up Loki's spine. That Hel was more intimidating to him than all the bluster of the other Hell.
"Where to, meat?" the Hel wolf demanded. Loki ignored the barb and opened his mouth to tell him when he suddenly snapped his jaw shut. He himself had no idea.
"Give me a moment," he grumbled, trying to buy himself time. That was when Ikol flew in front of his face, nearly knocking him off the Helwolf's back. Loki's eyes followed the bird's flight path until he disappeared around the bend to his left.
Dismounting, Loki followed. The Helwolf's unhappy growl rumbled after him, one that he blatantly ignored. Loki took the path that led him away from the precipice and closer to the nothingness of Hela's hell. His narrowed eyes searched for the mysterious bird and found him resting silently upon a ledge jutting out of the side of the cliff walls that rose up around them.
"What is it now, Ikol?" Loki called up to him. "You only ever bother me when you want something, so out with it."
At first Ikol said nothing and stared at him with those fathomless black eyes. Then, with a twitch of his narrow head, he said, "You didn't think you could just walk into Hela's realm and demand that she help you, did you?"
Loki clenched his gloved hands into fists. "You dragged me down here just so you could tell me that she won't even help me?" That cold anger buried deep inside him made his eyes burn.
"I never said that she wouldn't help you, little Loki," Ikol crooned. "I only inform you that her help will not come without a price."
Loki turned away from the bird sharply and paced the space before the bird looking down at him from the ledge. He ripped off his hood in one swift and frustrated movement. His nearly shoulder length black hair fell in his eyes. He should have had Sigyn cut it before he left. The thought of Sigyn made his gut clench. The look on her face, the touch of her lips…
Loki ground his teeth. There was no time to think about that. He would go back once he had Thor and not a moment before.
"And pray tell, Almighty Magpie," Loki snapped. "What price would that be?"
"The Disir."
Loki stopped his incessant pacing to glance up at Ikol. "The what?"
"Soul eaters." He explained tersely, as if Loki should have already known this. And maybe he should have, in another life perhaps. "Valkyries, cursed by Bor for eating the gods. They are in the hands of Mephisto."
Loki looked over his shoulder before he turned away from Ikol and placed to the edge of the cliff he stood upon to peer out over the burning realm far to his right. "Mephisto…" he said the name as if he were testing the sound of it on his lips, trying to see if they remembered saying it before. The name turned in his mind like an echo without an origin.
"Yes, the ruler of Hell." Ikol reminded him. "You had lent him the Disir for one hundred and one days. Those one hundred and one days have come and gone. It is time you reclaimed them. Use them as your bargaining chip to place Hela in a position where she has to lend you her aid."
Loki found himself nodding along to Ikol's plan. He stilled his head and glanced over his shoulder at the bird with a mischievous smile on his lips. "My how cunning you are, Ikol."
"I learned from the best," Ikol quipped before lifting himself into the air and flying off to only the gods knew where.
Loki watched his retreat with his thin lips pressed tightly together. He raised his hands and lifted his hood to cover his head once more, his narrowed and angry eyes never leaving the bird's fleeting form.
Silently, he returned to the Helwolf, who sat chewing on something that Loki didn't want to look close enough to identify. He spat it out over the cliff when he saw Loki approaching.
"I was hoping you would not return," he said. Something like amusement at his own words spread across his foul face.
"Ah, well then you would miss me too much," Loki replied with feigned lightheartedness as he mounted the HelWolf's back. His heart was anything but light at this point. Before Garm could make another attempt at insulting him, Loki said, "It looks like we're going to have to make a pit stop in Mephisto's realm. It seems I have forgotten something."
Garm grumbled, as he so frequently did and leaped off the cliff, away from the cold and distant feeling realm of Hela and into the Inferno of Mephisto's Hell.