stones. | I
Yuletide holidays are best spent at the hearth, such to be cozy around a rumbling fire with the comfort of good family. Passing gifts and promises for the new year. Stewing in the shared hope of a better future. In the last few weeks, such scenes of peace and ignoble harmony have played out all over the world, in the many homes of many more mortals.
Loki, however, is no such thing. What’s he been up to? How’s the God of Mischief spending the days?
“LOKI LAUFEYSON! I WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD AND DRINK FROM YOUR SKULL LIKE A GOURD, YOU ASGARDIAN PEST!”
Well enough, he’d suppose.
He’s sat squat behind a boulder, untold branches of Yggdrasil between him and the nearest flamespoke hearth. In fact Loki is in the cave of a cyclopean, where it’s dank, wet and dripping, with said cyclopean howling insult and injury as though all the Nine Hells could hear him. Yes, we know. We know: why, you ask. Why is Loki here? Why’s he here when he would really, just about, want to be anywhere else with the possible exception of Helheim?
The same as it is always, dear reader. It’s because of old Loki. The Loki who died.
Old Loki once disenfranchised the Norn women out of their stones, said to be crystallizations of all the power in fate. There old Loki would soon discover that it was not actually all, but more than enough for his purposes anyway. Later, when old Loki finally tired of the ring around his neck called the God of Evil, he would put these stones to their final use in luring the Void to him during the Siege of Asgardia, wherein he would leap headfist into oblivion’s jaws. Afterward, no-one found the stones’ remains, and most brushed it aside. Perhaps the Norn women had at last been returned their keep.
This Ikol-Loki too believed, because it was easier that way. He has had enough artifacts from his old self to go around hunting after without adding magic fate stones into the mix, thank you very much. Especially when he’s been given the “gift” of all things time and no direction after the conclusion of a particular War of the Realms…
“I SEE YOU, LITTLE GOD! NOW DIE!”
… but we don’t always get what we want. Least of all Loki.
Mister Cyclopean thunders over to the boulder he’s been hiding behind, as expected, and tries to laser-eye his face off, also as expected. The blast misses as Loki reflexively vaults across the iridescent cave sand, wishing that maybe he should have enlisted the help of Hercules, before he realizes that Hercules absolutely most certainly would have laughed him this way to Olympus for the thought. Typical. Because Loki is born to struggle.
“Come on, Laevateinn. Just this once, strike true.”
Laevateinn, affectionately known in Old Norse as damage twig, is Loki’s ancestral blade. Its metal is red like rust and a hilt leather like fraying and falling apart. Now, you might be saying, is this not Loki? The same god that once had the privilege—however brief—of calling himself the Sorcerer Supreme? How come he isn’t blasting Mister Cyclopean Laser-Eyes back straight to his maker in Hades? Simple.
Laevateinn flies.
He can’t, because Mister Cyclopean Laser-Eyes’ laser-eye is a Norn Stone. Hitting it with magic would be, to use an appropriately Hellenic analogy, like Medusa looking into a mirror. Nothing to fear, then, with Laevateinn!—but Laevateinn is Loki’s ancestral blade.
Just before it hits, Laevateinn melts into red-brown goop.
“Surtur’s bones. Of course you did.”
And Loki is ever in the business of giving Loki a hard time.
“HUH? DID YOU INTEND THAT TO HURT ME? PATHETIC! EVEN A WHELP LIKE YOU SHOULD DO BETTER!”
Go ahead, rub salt on the wound, thinks Loki who would have rolled his eyes had he not been busy again dodging a laser-eye. Laevateinn soon reforms on the sand, although uselessly given it’s not in a cyclops’s cranium. A small portal is enough to shunt it back into Loki’s hand for another round, and this time, he decides it’s better to be the one administering than betting on the sword to do it for him. He leaps from sand to air and from air to boulder.
“Watch this,” he says. Mister Cyclopean Laser-Eyes can’t help but to turn around.
Loki smiles, then stabs him through the mouth.
Laevateinn discharges a bolt through him of pure chaos, and it’s over. An enormous THUD! is all that becomes of the cyclops, and Loki didn’t even need Hercules. He calmly saunters over and has the honors of generously and liberally removing the Norn Stone from bejeweled and encrusted eye socket, freeing it from what would have been a most definitely tyrannical—plus, unmentionably boring—prison. In his hand the stone shines iridescent, not unlike the rainbow of a familiar Bifrost. Loki is born to struggle—
It’s pocketed as thus.
—and Loki is also born to triumph.
