Loki lay on his bench with the book closed on his chest, turning his mother's words over for the hundredth time, looking for the seam in them.
You have only to understand the lesson it was made to teach you.
What lesson? That mortality was unpleasant? He had that one. He collected it every morning, waking with a little less of himself than he had gone to sleep with. That life was precious? Absurd. Life had never been precious. There had only ever been too much of it scattered uselessly across the universe.
He had tried a dozen answers and every one of them fell apart the moment he pushed on it.
And Thor had done this in three days.
That was the part he could not get past. Thor, who had never in his life examined a thought he could throw a hammer at instead. Thor had stood on that lowly planet with nothing at all and found the answer inside a week. Which meant either the lock had gone easy on him, or the question was so simple that a clever man would walk straight past it a thousand times without realizing it.
Loki did not like either possibility, which was why he was still turning them over when he heard the movement.
It came from the far end of the corridor. A crack, like wood snapping in a blazing fire.
He stood up smoothly and stepped to the shimmering wall of his cell, looking sideways down the long row of golden cages. All along the row, other prisoners were doing the same.
The crack came again. Then a third time, much faster.
And the light in the far cell changed. Asgard's clean gold went to a deep, sick orange, the colour of a forge lit inside a living thing.
Loki watched with quiet interest as the prisoners' cellmates started shouting in panic. Hardened marauders, veterans of a dozen worlds, pressed themselves flat against the far walls of their cages to put another six feet between themselves and the thing currently transforming.
Heavy boots came down the corridor at a run. Six Einherjar, spears levelled, shouting orders at the cell to stand down.
Nothing answered them. Instead, the light inside flared to a blinding peak, and when it dimmed there was something standing in the doorway.
What came out of it had to bow its head under a ceiling built for Asgardians. Its skin had gone to cracked black plate with orange burning through every seam, and the horned mask was not a mask anymore.
It was the face.
"Well," Loki said quietly. "That explains the walk."
The creature considered the barrier in front of it. A wall of light built to hold rogue gods and rampaging monsters. It hit the barrier once, and then a second time, and the light came apart into a million falling sparks.
The guards charged. The creature met them.
What followed was not a fight. It was a slaughter. The guards were Einherjar, brave and equipped by the finest armoury in the Nine Realms, and they did everything correctly, and it mattered not at all. The creature tore through them with terrifying ease. It did not gloat and it did not roar. It simply put them down, one after another, stepped over their broken bodies, and turned to look at the long row of cells.
Then, it began opening them.
Not with any key. He ripped the magical barriers down with his bare hands, freeing the worst scum of the Nine Realms.
The dungeon instantly descended into absolute chaos. Alarms began to shriek from the ceiling. Freed prisoners poured out into the corridor, roaring their fury, grabbing fallen spears, and looking for blood.
The creature marched slowly down the row, destroying everything in his path.
Soon it reached Loki's cell and stopped. The dark slots of the bone mask locked onto the former prince, and orange light poured through the cracks in its skin and lit his fine furnished cage like a hearth.
Loki looked up at it. Outwardly his posture was relaxed, hands behind his back, chin held high. Inwardly his mortal heart was hammering against his ribs, and a cold spike of adrenaline went through him, and it was the primal, inescapable terror of a fragile creature standing in front of an apex predator.
The old Loki would not have paid this brute any serious attention at all. An illusion and a flick of a dagger would have ended it. But this Loki, the powerless one, had no magic to cast. If that glowing fist came through the light, his head would simply cave in.
He forced his trembling face into a mask of polite amusement.
"You have a great deal to be getting on with," Loki said pleasantly, his voice perfectly smooth. "Do not let me keep you."
The creature stared blankly at him for one long second. Then, it raised a massive fist and punched straight through the glowing barrier.
The wall of light came apart in a shower of golden sparks that rained down around Loki's boots. From behind the bone plate came a short, harsh breath of sound. It could have been anything, but it was almost certainly a laugh.
Then the creature simply turned and walked away, leaving Loki standing completely exposed in a doorway with no door in it.
Loki did not move. He stood in his ruined cell and felt the panic rising sharply in his throat.
Outside in the corridor, a full-scale riot was raging. And the current winning side was composed entirely of violent, bloodthirsty prisoners who possessed no love for anything Asgardian. Which very much included him.
A filthy, heavily scarred marauder stepped over a fallen guard and locked eyes with the man in the cell. The raider's cruel smile widened, revealing broken teeth.
"Odinson."
The word carried over the din. Three more raiders stopped what they were doing and turned. They gripped stolen spears and heavy blades. A group quickly formed, their eyes fixed hungrily on the vulnerable, unarmed prince of the realm that had put them in these cages.
Loki made a split-second, desperate decision. He knew with absolute certainty that if he stayed in this cell, his fragile body would be violently torn to pieces.
He stepped smoothly out of the cell and walked briskly down the corridor, projecting every ounce of royal arrogance he could muster. He walked right past the advancing marauders and straight up to the slow-walking, magma-infused beast.
"You look to be in a hurry," Loki called out, falling into step perfectly beside the towering monster as if they were old friends. "Let me be a good host and show you around."
The creature paused, glancing down at the pale man walking beside him. It did not say a word, but it did not strike him either. It simply turned back forward and allowed the Asgardian to lead the way toward the upper levels.
Behind them, the bloodthirsty marauders immediately scattered, backing away in terror. None of them were foolish enough to approach the walking nightmare just to get a piece of a fallen prince.
Loki walked calmly ahead, his face a perfect mask of confidence. But internally, he was cursing Arthur Hayes with a thoroughness he usually reserved for Odin.
He was a god. He was the rightful King of Jotunheim and a Prince of Asgard. And now he was forced to act like a lowly servant, guiding a mindless brute through his own home simply to keep his fragile mortal skin intact. All because the Midgardian wizard had stripped his powers away.
He had bowed to Thanos once. He had hated every second of it and hated the memory more. But Thanos had been a titan, and bowing to a titan was simple strategy.
This thing was a brute. He would not have troubled to learn its name, and now he had to play tour guide for it to survive the afternoon.
The indignity burned like acid in his veins. He gathered up every drop of it and filed it away, carefully, and aimed all of it at the wizard in New York.
Then he did his humiliating work, and led the beast upward into the palace.
—-
High above the chaos of the dungeons, in a serene, sunlit room of the golden palace, Frigga stood beside Jane and Thor.
The heavy atmosphere in the room had finally lifted. The elven working was gone. It had taken the Queen of Asgard less than half an hour to unpick it, thread by thread.
Jane was sitting up, looking incredibly relieved.
"That's it? It's out?"
"It is out," Frigga confirmed.
Thor had just opened his mouth to say something when the alarms began.
"The cells." Thor was already moving, hammer swinging up into his grip.
"Go." Frigga was on her feet, and her voice was steel from the first word. "I will keep her safe."
Thor did not look back. He spun Mjolnir once and was gone through the arch, a streak of white light tearing down toward the lower city.
Frigga turned to Jane. "Come with me. And stay close."
—
Far out along the rainbow bridge, alone in the observatory, Heimdall drove his sword into the central pedestal.
He had seen nothing. No enemy. His gaze had swept the dark between the realms a hundred times since the prince carried the order out to him, and a hundred times the dark had shown him stars and dust and silence. There was no danger in sight.
He drove the sword in anyway.
Precaution, the prince had said. In case Arthur was right.
Heimdall turned the blade.
The shield rose from the palace first, a dome of blinding, solid gold, and raced outward across the city, over towers and gardens and rooftops and the harbour and the bridge, ring beyond ring, until the whole capital sat inside a bowl of light. It met itself at the horizon and clicked into place.
Then Heimdall waited. Waited for Thor to clean up the trouble in the dungeons and come out along the bridge to say all of it had been a false alarm and there was no need to keep the shield.
He did not have to wait. Not because the order came, but because three seconds later the sky exploded.
Something enormous slammed into the dome at full speed. Something even Heimdall had not seen coming. The stealth field shattered on impact, and for one instant the whole city could see it, a sleek black dagger of a ship, revealed in the very act of dying, crumpling against Asgard's shield and detonating in a vast silent bloom of fire. The burning debris slid down the curve of the golden light and rained into the sea beyond the city, harmless, hissing.
For a second, nothing else moved.
Then the empty sky dissolved. The dark working that had been hiding them from Heimdall's sight came apart all at once, and where a moment ago there had been nothing but clean morning cloud and the last of the early stars, the sky was suddenly full.
Dozens of colossal black blade-ships hung motionless in the upper air, each one large enough to blot out a district, and between and beneath them swarmed hundreds of smaller, razor-edged fighters, close and silent and countless. Lightless. Already in position. Already aimed.
And Heimdall understood in one cold instant that they had not just arrived. They had been there, above his city, inside his sky, for hours.
The Dark Elves had come.