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writernotwaiting · 7 years

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Fallen Angels--ch. 24

Chapter 24 – Before: “Break, Burn, and Make Me New” Chapter Summary: In which a lot of stuff happens, which to summarize would be very spoilery. This chapter picks up action directly following those in chapter 23. This chapter could be considered a companion piece to chapters 5 and 6 which contain references/flashbacks to the events here. Warning for some completely predictable violence. Rating: E for the story overall. If you are under 18, go read something else! Characters: Loki, Sigyn, Thor, Anna (ofc), Balder (might-as-well-be-omc), Amora (a might-as-well-be ofc), Odin, Elli (a stone giantess and might-as-well-be-ofc), Cyril (omc), Tyr Story Description: a post-apocalyptic, MCU-Norse mythos mash-up; science fiction/fantasy

I will re-blog with the tags. I would be glad to add to or remove from the tag list at your request.

Bless you, again to @icybluepenguin, without whom this chapter would be a skeleton of its current self.

Ch. 1: Walking with unblest feet   Ch. 23: Seven for a Secret Ch. 25: ?

Threads began to unravel.

The book of the Norns was no longer in the main archives, but now housed in a restricted section. No access for Outlanders.

Loki found his time increasingly scripted by duties at court, and was unable to follow Amora to her estate for anything more than short trips.

Loki and Balder were overheard in a shouting match, and rumors began to circulate that Loki had threatened his brother.

Sigyn’s patients asked her to stop coming, afraid of the shadow that followed her.

Loki was sent on a restricted assignment to Utgard while Amora and Balder planned another holiday to her estate.

Sigyn paced.

Paced their suite of rooms.

Paced the public gardens.

Paced the halls.

Paced the kitchen gardens.

Paced the walls of the city.

Everyone learned to give her a wide berth.

Three weeks after Loki departed, Thor arrived at her door, shoulders thrown back in challenge, demanding Loki’s whereabouts.

Sigyn’s hackles rose at Thor’s aggressiveness and she squared off, straightening her own shoulders as she answered, “Playing fetch for your father—you know exactly where he is.”

“He should have returned by now. The terms of his commission were clearly delineated. Where has he gone?”

“I am his wife, not his jailer, Thor. How would I know?”

“If he has gone to cause trouble for Balder . . .”

“Why would he bother trailing after that parasite?”

Thor took a step into Sigyn’s space, fingers itching near Mjolnir. “I have heard of his threats.”

She stood her ground and hissed back, “What threats?”

“Loki has made it very clear that Balder is not safe.”

“Where did you hear this?” Sigyn’s mouth curled up in derision.

“My lieutenant informed me just yesterday. He said his wife—“

“His wife?!? And where did his wife hear of it? From her waiting woman? Who no doubt heard it from her sister, who sits in the hallways listening at doorways trying to glean whose daughter-in-law has cheated on such-and-such’s husband!” Sigyn stepped forward until their faces were inches apart.

“Do not mock my officers, Sigyn. They are honest and true-hearted.”

“They are gullible fools.”

Thor lowered his voice to a menacing growl. “Mark me, Sigyn, I will travel to Balder’s estate myself. And if I find your husband lurking about with mischief in his heart, it will not go well for him.”

“Oh! He’s my husband now? Not your brother? I knew your blood would tell eventually—Odin’s Golden Son! Where is the warrior who stood by my husband’s side as shieldbrother?” She stepped back then, and her eyes raked up and down Thor’s frame. “Your measure comes something short of the boy you used to be.”

Thor growled at her through clenched teeth and slammed the door as he stormed out, only to hear a great crash as something smashed into the door behind him.

Inside, Sigyn shook with frustrated rage and anxiety, her throat so tight it closed off her breath. Amora is setting a trap! Fly home, you stupid, stupid magpie. Stop chasing shiny things, and come home!

Come home he did.

In chains.

Dragged down to the prison by his brother as a dead weight, bruised and singed.

Not only was Sigyn not allowed to see him, the Allfather placed her under house arrest, not even permitted to leave her rooms.

No one could, or would, give her a clear accounting as to what had happened, just vague outlines. Amora’s estate empty. A portal to another world. A battle in a great temple. One rumor insisted Loki shot Balder with an arrow. Another that Frigga was run through as she threw herself in front of her youngest son. Someone else insisted that Loki had lured both Balder and Frigga to their deaths beneath a collapsing roof, or that they were cut to ribbons by shattered glass. Amora, by one account, was gravely injured trying valiantly to save her husband, while another described her as magically restrained and forced to watch her husband’s death.

Loki somehow responsible for all.

A trial to be held within days.

A mockery of a trial. Sigyn sat stiff in a chair gazing blindly out her window. How convenient they have a monster to blame.

*****

Odin presided from his great throne, Thor on his right.

Einherjahr escorted a heavily bound Loki to the front of the courtroom, walls echoing with the dull thud of boots, the clanking of chains, and the murmuration of lookers on. Odin stood watching in silence for long minutes before he spoke.

“Loki, I find myself at a loss for words when I contemplate your deeds. I fail to understand the source of your bottomless resentment. I do not know from whence the roots of this bitterness grew.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed with spite, voice dripping with venom. “Do you truly not understand, Allfather?”

“Silence! I did not give you leave to speak.”

The corner of Loki’s mouth quirked up, but his eyes remained glacier hard.

“You stand accused of monstrous crimes, and the punishment shall match their enormity.”

“My guilt, then, has been pre-determined? I will be permitted no defense? Custom dictates that I at least offer some testimony.”

Amora screamed from across the courtroom with a maniacal ferocity — “Do not let him speak, Allfather! Do not permit his Jotun lies to profane your halls with slander.”

Loki wheeled around to face her, narrowed his eyes, readying his arsenal against her. Just as he drew breath to speak, however, the great echo of Gungir’s staff rang out against the marble steps. “Silence!” Light blinded the onlookers, and when the waves of sound finally died, Loki was on his back, tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth, and Odin motioned to the guards to restrain him. “If you will not be silent on command, you will be silent on compulsion.”

Odin then called to an executioner who had been waiting in the shadows of the dais, a great bear of a man, larger even than Thor. In his meaty fist he held no axe. Instead he wielded a great needle threaded with thick, dark sinew.

It took four Einherjar to hold him still, but when he was at last hauled to his feet, Loki’s mouth was sealed shut — sutured with hideous black stitches, blood dripping down his chin and staining his shirt. Loki’s eyes fixed on Odin, while Thor kept his eyes anchored in the middle distance, jaw clenched tight to keep down the bile in his throat.

By then, Odin once again sat stiff upon his throne, ready to deliver his final sentence. “Loki, you have utterly rejected the beneficence offered you, preferring exile over a carefully chosen marriage, preferring the company of strangers over the glittering opulence of the home offered you by the parents who rescued you from certain death and raised you as their own child. You stole the time stone from the Norns, hiding it somewhere on that abandoned realm called Midgard. You refuse to reveal its location so it may be returned. You slaughtered my son, Balder, when he tried to retrieve it. Frigga . . .” Odin fairly roared out this last, “Frigga brutally cut down in the melee that followed.”

He paused here to regain his breath before finishing. “You are sentenced to silence, Silvertongue, silence and solitude until I see fit to release you, or until the end of days.”

The crowd murmured its approval, but for Amora it was not enough. She kept her eyes locked hungrily on the blood oozing from Loki’s wounds, and she goaded Odin further, “And what of his wife?”

Odin’s gaze slowly swung to her face, surprisingly cold. “She will remain where she is, under house arrest. Alone.”

Amora shrieked in panic, tearing her eyes from Loki to Odin, “That’s not enough! She is party to his crimes, and an untrained seider-wielder. She is dangerous!”

The Allfather held her stare in silence as though he had happened upon a new and particularly grotesque insect. After an uncomfortably long pause, he once more slammed the butt of his spear to the floor, “Sigyn will remain as she is.” He clenched his teeth, jaw working as he fought for control then turned to face the rest of the courtroom. “None shall harm her, but neither shall any aid come to her. This is my final word.”

Odin turned and strode out of the hall, even as Amora gathered herself for another attack. He didn’t wait to watch as his adopted son was forced from the room to his cell, didn’t turn to speak to his remaining son who stood half dazed next to him, didn’t pause to listen to the singing of the blood in his own ears.

*****

The staff fought over who would deliver the news to Sigyn. When no one else would go, a scullery maid in rags was tasked with delivering the news to Sigyn. Because the poor girl trembled so, Sigyn allowed her to retreat before she began to break things.

Hours later, the howling started. It was not just unnaturally loud; it was thunderous. It shook the walls. Thor heard the heartache from across the palace in his own rooms and could not sleep.

In the morning, Eir went to Odin, pleading, “Let me go to her. She will harm herself.”

His cold eye never blinked, but didn’t seem to see anything, either. “She is a healer. Let her heal herself,” his voice numb and flat.

Thor bowed his head, shaken by the trial and the ache at the heart of Sigyn’s screams. “Perhaps Sigyn did not know what Loki did. His wife should not be punished for the crimes of her husband.”

Odin’s head snapped around to face him. “Pitch mars all it touches. He is no longer my son. She was never your sister-in-law.” If there was an odd hitch to Odin’s pronouncement, Thor did not catch it.

Suddenly the howling stopped. Odin stood and retired alone to his study.

The palace itself seemed to breathe a deep sigh of relief, but in the depths of the prison, Loki felt a pressure building, felt the air press against his ears. He clenched his fists tight, knowing deep in his chest the reservoir of power that had been building over the last century, barely held in check by Sigyn’s dogged will to do for others. He wondered how that rage would manifest itself once released, and a fatalistic, maniacal, triumphant hysteria bubbled up within him, as he paced the perimeter of his cell with the neurotic intensity of a tiger locked in a too-small cage.

The following morning, the keening began.

As it started softly, it raised gooseflesh on the arms of the guards stationed outside Sigyn’s rooms, the air charged with potential energy. The sound might have been a mourning cry, but more fierce. It might have been the wailing of gulls, but more constant. It was a little bit like the cold winter wind whistling through bare cupboards or ill-caulked windows, but more powerful—the wailing cry of a banshee in the wasteland.

As it gathered strength, babes on the other side of the palace began to cry. Servants cowered in the depths of the kitchens. It beat on Loki’s heart even in his basement prison—he could feel its vibration through the stone of the foundations themselves and he sank to his hands and knees to absorb it.

As it built further, the guards stopped their ears, grown men began to sob, stopping in their tracks, paralyzed by grief.

Loki sat on the floor of his cell, his hands flat on the stone before him, absorbing the humming vibrations. Tears coursed down his cheeks, even as a smile split his face and pulled painfully at the stitches in his mouth.

They would not be not forgotten.

No one would ever forget.

But he also knew with same certainty with which he knew his bones could break that Sigyn was about to make a terrible sacrifice for their vindication. For their vengeance.

Because make no mistake, the truth would out, and Amora would pay.

As the keening neared its peak, light began to glow from beneath Sigyn’s door and stream out of her windows—white hot in its intensity. Odin himself rounded the corner, face rigid with a mixture of fury and fear as the sound finally reached the top of its crescendo, a great flash blew the doors from their hinges, the force great enough to knock even the Allfather against the wall.

When he finally picked his way through the debris, he and his guards stood dumbfounded at the threshold — both at what they saw, and at what they did not. Wisps of white ash swirled across the floor. All else was burned clean — the furniture, hangings, books, everything. Red heat still radiated from the stone floor, but nothing was left.

And Sigyn was gone.

Not 30 minutes after Odin returned to his desk, servants gasping for breath ran to report, “All of the enforcers have collapsed.”

“Collapsed?” He demanded. “Explain.”

“They turned rigid, and fell over when touched. Some just broke to pieces like unfired clay.”

The Allfather sent to Amora for an explanation, but the mystery only deepened. “She is gone,” came the message. “Everything inside her rooms is like a great swirling storm had rushed through her apartments. All her things—books, clothes, toiletries, vases, everything—scattered in great heaps, fires smolder in the sitting room. Her handmaid seemingly turned to lifeless clay. Lady Amora is gone.”

Odin called on Heimdall, whose far-seeing eyes searched through the nine realms, there was no time to send out search parties. Even as Odin stood by his side, The Watcher reported a great flash on Midgard, centered on the temple where Balder and Frigga had been killed. The temple crammed with panicked mortals. A statue fashioned precisely like Loki, stood rigid in the sanctuary. Amora frantically destroying relics and setting fires throughout. Sigyn apparently trying to move the mortals from out of the temple basement. Amora running down the stairs. An explosion.

Suddenly a tremendous flash, followed by a shockwave as great as an asteroid crashing into the earth’s crust. And then nothing. Silence.

Sigyn was gone.

Odin sank to his knees, Gungir falling with a crash to the observatory floor, Thor dumbfounded by his side.

Loki needed no messenger to tell him the news. As soon as the flagstones ceased their humming, he knew.

He knew, and his heart screamed.

His very soul howled with such force it shattered Odin’s spell. His mouth tore open, bleeding his anguish, because he knew. They had their revenge. The stone had been found. A trail would prove Amora’s guilt.

But Sigyn was gone.

#Fallen Angels #Loki #Sigyn #logyn #fan fiction #MCU #norse mythology #mash up #AU #post-apocalyptic

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