In Loki's Honor

I floated in a featureless void, next to Loki. I was in the shape most familiar to me, Haru. The one immortalized in my worshippers’ imaginarium as the Goddess.

The fog in my mind was lifted and I had no trouble using my mental faculties or accessing the memories of the dozens of lives I lived in the past. It seemed the Broodmother’s Curse was lifted in this place. I suspected it was no courtesy on Loki’s part. Two familiar items floated next to me. [Kel’Caldor’s Phylactery] and the [Insatiable Sage’s Encyclopedia] , two of three unique artifacts bound to my very soul.

I glanced at the adopted Aesir deity with a questioning look. If my artifacts followed me when I left Yznarian this time, why didn’t the third follow? I didn’t voice the question, though. The Norse god grinned and then showed me a handful of cracked golden orbs.

It was a shocking sight. Divine cores were supposed to be indestructible though I never put one to the test. The faint essence coming from them was familiar. The Gods and Goddesses of Yznarian, my enemies and, in choice occasions, collaborators and patrons, were no more. What happened to their souls, divorced from the cores they wielded for more than ten thousand years, was anyone’s guess.

“What are these for?” I asked, loathing to hear the answer.

“A new Divine Core for you. A real one. The Wisp of Creation core, currently inhabited by your mother Rosalinda, must remain behind in the world. Bereft of the System Core, the gauntlet that keeps demons from crossing over dimensions and taking over the world requires someone to keep it running. A deity. I need you to relinquish the Wisp of Creation to her.”

“What if I don’t?” I made a feeble attempt at defiance.

Loki’s answer was factual and poignant. He pulled no punches. “The demons get free reign of the world and feast on a banquet of souls. When and if you return, there will be no living thing in that Demiplane to greet you. Not even the fairies. Especially not the fairies.”

Though all his arrogance and shortcomings, Wyxnos did this one essential job, keeping the demons from invading the world. It required an absurd amount of energy and dedication, something he did selflessly. Perhaps if I could make use of the wisdom I have now back then, we could’ve found a middle ground and cooperated. Perhaps things would be different now. Alas, not even deities could rewrite history and change the past.

My fruity friend from the future who visited me a few months ago and took me to a jaunt through some other worlds told me that his time traveling shenanigans was allowed because he wasn’t breaking causality. The fortuitous day he chose to visit was one of two where the divide between realities was the weakest. I’d suffered a lot of weird events during these days through my lives. The point was, while time travel was possible, changing the past wasn’t. Causality and Fate were not forces to be trifled with.

“If I relinquish Pandora, would you give me one of these second-hand cores?”

“All of them,” Loki chuckled but he sounded like these cracked cores were worth shit. “The Dvergar we’re visiting next can forge you a new Divine Core out of these scraps of Orichalcum, one that should be stronger than Pandora.”

Ironically, letting Rosalinda take Pandora off my hands was exactly the plan when the Yznarian Pantheon did that switcheroo during the Centaur war. I had no problem with that. My hesitation was because I wasn’t sure what Loki stood to win in this exchange. Cracked as they were, these divine cores must have had some value, even to someone as lofty as Loki. As if he was reading my mind, Loki continued.

“It is in my interest that this little world you sunk your roots into survives. Though you may believe otherwise, we are still allies. The boons I bestow upon you are payment for services rendered in the future. Take them.”

He meant “table scraps” when he said “boons”. I was a penny stock in Loki’s portfolio. Most of these “boons” were actually my own achievements, denied through the System and then handed back to me with fanfare to secure my cooperation if not my loyalty. When I threatened to stand my ground, he threatened me with enmity. We were not allies. I was a minion, some experiment that might lead to some interesting results in the future. But one in which he invested little. Most of what Loki spent on me was repaid through the Divine Siphon feature. I believed that he even had already profited from all this.

The lack of agency was frustrating. Before, I was hopping back and forth like a flea in a sardine can circus. Now, the only thing that changed was the stage. Yet, what choice did I have? Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of freedom notwithstanding. Damn. I could pick enmity and roll the dice, couldn’t I? Yet, the instinct of self-preservation was holding me back.

“Should be?”

He grinned. “Will be. I will commission the forging of your new Divine core myself. You have my word.”

Loki was a trickster and a liar. But he wasn’t dishonorable. None of the Aesir was. Were they less of a bunch of absolute assholes because they were honorable? No. It just meant they wouldn’t go back on their word but what wasn’t bound by these very words was fair game. The trick laid in getting them to commit to something.

I hesitated. Loki’s grin faded.

“Are you sure you want to stay with the Dvergar Loremaster as a female?”

That irritated me. Was the Dvergar society sexist? It could be. Wasn’t it part of the Norse mythology, where the role of the females was… Wait. That might be just the popular consensus, and that could be radically wrong. I schooled my expression and asked.

“Is the Dvergar society sexist?”

“No. I mean, does having established gender roles that neither gender feels dissatisfied with make a society sexist?”

How the hell would I answer that. “Is there any issue to me going as a female?”

“No, it’s a matter of perception. Though some might raise an objection if you don’t conform to these established gender roles I mentioned before.”

My irritation spiked even more. At this junction, I would go as a female and raise chaos out of spite.

“Would you recommend I go as a male?”

“Not really, no,” Loki snorted a laugh and shrugged. “The gender roles apply to Dvergar. They can be quite accommodating to visitor’s cultural norms. So long you don’t shapeshift into a Dvergar, you’ll be fine.”

“Then why raise the iss—” I shut up and glared at the God. He was doing that to keep me off-balance and unfocused. I changed gears. “What exactly is my task while I stay with the Dvergar?”

“To learn. I arranged with their Loremaster to take you as his apprentice. You’ll have access to Nidavellir’s library and instruction on how to act like a deity in the multiverse at large. In return, you’ll give the Loremaster access to that encyclopedia of yours.”

“And how long will that last?”

“That’s between you two. Once the apprenticeship ends, I’ll take you back to Yznarian.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“An unaffiliated deity who owes me a few favors,” Loki said with a faint smile and raptorial eyes. “Favors I won’t collect until much further down the road. I expect you’ll take quite some time to establish yourself as the main deity in Yznarian after your tenure with Ragnar. He’s Nidavellir’s Loremaster.”

“What about the System?”

“Yznarian won’t have a System anymore, unless you find another System Core and installs it in that pocket dimension. I strongly recommend against doing so. Not only System Cores are a pain to get a hold of, but the powers-that-be in that world also loathed the yoke of the System. The reason I bound the System Core to you is to keep your duality intact. I know you wish to remain a mortal while dipping the tip of your little furry toes in the golden ambrosia of divinity. So be it.”

The way he said the last few phrases told me how much he thought of my convictions. But this way, I had the best of both worlds. I could still live and enjoy the everyday life of a mortal, while wielding the power of a deity, lest, lesser, minor or anything else in between. I wasn’t ready to become an ever-lasting, unchanging entity, bored for all of eternity.

“Did you remove the Broodmother’s Curse?”

“No. I decided your education under Ragnar would suffer a lot if you were trapped in a lower state of consciousness. Dealing with that curse is too much trouble, even for me. The tools to break it on your own are within your reach, you just need time. The curse is suppressed until you return and get reborn on Yznarian. Unless, of course, you decide to fully embrace your apotheosis and ascend to godhood.”

I knew the power of enchantments created with the sacrifice of one’s life. The Dragon Goddess’ last spiteful act against me. But once again, Loki let that not-so-subtle nudge to get me to embrace divinity. My reactance was flaring and I once more rejected it.

“Suit yourself,” Loki scoffed. “Come, let’s go to the realm of Myrkheimur, land of dark races.”

We started to walk side-by-side in the featureless void.

“Dark races?”

“Yes. The Dvergar and the Dokkalfár being the most important among them. Word of wisdom, never think of them as dark dwarves or dark elves. Midgard human’s modern fantasy did the two a disservice. But then again, you only had badly translated Viking poems to work out of. A people that was better known by their bloodlust, pillaging, and alcohol-induced revelry than their industry, navigating skills, and arts.”

I took that to mean that the commonsense view of the Vikings and the ancient Norse was biased and prejudiced. Since this view derived from the peoples who were most often raided by the Vikings, it was easy to see why.

Before I knew, the featureless void had changed into a cavern. A tunnel twenty meters tall and thirty-something meters wide, illuminated by fuck-all. I had no trouble perceiving things in the darkness. Loki was a God, so your bet as to how he was moving down the cavern tunnel without stumbling was as good as mine. The cavern looked natural, with rock formations, veins, and even the expected speleothems.

We walked for an hour in silence. My anxiety was rising, because I had no idea what would happen to me in Nidavellir. Which was a city in Myrkheim, not a whole realm. But at the end of the hour, I saw some pinpricks of flickering light. Torches.

*

*

The cave ended in a metal-framed wrought stone gate, guarded by four massive figures clad in ornate metal armor. The style resembled Greek armor, embossed to resemble a naked torso. But on closer inspection, the runic carvings along the trim marked it as clearly Norse.

“Halt! Who goes there?” One of them challenged with a booming voice.

We stopped a hundred meters from the gate guards. They were all tall and stocky, reaching two and a half meters in height and more than one and a half meters between shoulders. I could sense magic coming from their gear, including their weapons. These were fierce and fearsome warriors. But to the Dvergar, they were good enough to be gate guards.

I didn’t doubt the job of guarding the border gates was an important one. Haru walled an entire valley with enchanted walls to keep undesirables out of Windemere, so I could understand the sentiment. But on the other hand, guarding a border gate was not a job with a lot of glory or glamour attached to it. Unless Dvergar culture diverged radically from the norm, these four majestic warriors before me were what went for grunts in this place.

The core elite of the Dvergar army must wield artifacts in the same category as Mjollnir or Gungnir. Given that, in the poorly translated, biased poems passed down by the Norse the Dvergar were the ones who create such artifacts, it made sense they would have made more in the same power level for their own use.

“Loki,” another guard answered before either of us could. Before Loki could. I felt like a child in a creepy theme park out here, exposed and vulnerable. Unless someone prompted me, I would exercise my Miranda rights.

Tuisto manifested next to me, at the edge of my field of vision. The AI avatar was a hallucination projected into my mind by the System Core and couldn’t be perceived by the others.

“What do you want?” I asked the avatar through telepathy.

“Just stretching my legs,” the old man grinned. “And to let you know we are being scried upon.

“That comes with the territory, I guess. It’s Loki we are talking about. Who’s scrying us?”

“Your patron’s stepparent.”

That chilled my heart. Then I heard the guard say “kitsune” and snapped my focus back to the conversation between the Dvergar guards and Loki.

“What is the matter with be being a kitsune?” I asked them.