Writer ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati.....
The first cut is not the deepest. It is the most precise.
Loki Laufeyson's blade, a sliver of obsidian honed on the whetstone of a dying star, parted the stag's throat with a whisper. Blood, hot and pungent with the animal's terror, did not splash. It flowed, defying gravity, snaking through the frost-rimed air of Jotunheim in a twisting rivulet towards the crude altar of packed ice. The stag's eyes, wide and liquid brown, clouded over, its life force siphoned away not by mortal means, but by a will older than the roots of Yggdrasil.
"Blóðgjöf til rætrnar," Loki murmured, the Old Tongue guttural and resonant in the perpetual twilight. Blood-gift to the roots. The crimson stream seeped into the ice, not melting it, but being consumed. Dark veins pulsed within the frozen altar, like a sudden network of black capillaries. The ground beneath his knees shuddered.
This was not Asgardian magic. Not the golden, song-filled seiðr of the Vanir, nor the rune-craft of the Dwarves. This was something older, hungrier. It was the magic that lingered in the spaces between realms, in the silence after the scream, in the first spark of betrayal. It was the power of consequence, of chaos, of broken things. Odin, the All-Father, in his gleaming hall of Valhalla, would have called it svart seiðr—black magic. A perversion. A poison.
Loki called it truth.
A year had passed since his fall from the Bifrost, since the lies of his parentage had unravelled like a poorly-woven tapestry. Odin was not his father. He was the cast-off child of Laufey, the Frost Giant, a biological curio adopted as a political pawn. Thor was not his brother. He was a reminder, a blundering, golden-haired symbol of everything Loki could never be: legitimate, loved, simple. Asgard's glittering lies had curdled in his gut. Their righteousness was a performance. Their justice, a convenience.
So he had come home. Not to the icy citadels of Jotunheim, where his blue-skinned kin looked upon him with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity—the runt, the Asgardian pet. No, his home was now the hinterlands, the blighted valleys where even Frost Giants feared to tread. Here, the fabric of reality was thin, scarred by ancient wars and forgotten curses. Here, he could listen.
And the world-tree Yggdrasil, in these blighted places, did not sing. It crooned. A low, seductive hum that spoke not of creation and order, but of entropy and potential. It showed him memories not his own: the primordial void of Ginnungagap, the first murder (Ymir's blood becoming the sea), the secret names of things that Odin had sacrificed an eye to learn, and then locked away. Loki realised then that the All-Father's great library in Asgard was not a repository of knowledge, but a prison for it. The most dangerous truths were bound, gagged, hidden.
He would unbind them.
The blood-ritual complete, the ice altar glowed with an inner, bruise-like light. From it, a shape coalesced—not a spectre, but a concentration of shadow and frost. It had the approximate form of a wolf, but its eyes were voids, and its maw dripped with rime rather than saliva. A vargr, a spirit of the deep cold, born of sacrificed life and focused malice.
"Seek," Loki commanded, his voice stripped of its customary silver-tongued charm, now flat and cold as a glacier's heart. "Find the threads. The loose ends in Odin's weave. His fears. His hidden shames."
The vargr tilted its head, then dissolved into the howling wind, a new kind of hunter on the scent of divine vulnerability.
Loki rose, wiping his obsidian blade on his thigh. His Asgardian leathers were gone, replaced by garments of tough, grey hide stitched with threads of his own hair and nerves from creatures that had no name. They were foci, conduits. Every piece of him was becoming a tool for the deep, old magic. He looked at his hands. The Jotun blue, which he had once despised and hidden, now seemed appropriate. It was the colour of twilight, of deep water, of a fresh bruise. It was the colour of power that did not come from a throne, but from the abyss.
A shimmer in the air announced a visitor. The form was insubstantial, a heat-haze in the cold.
"Loki." The voice was female, echoing as if from the bottom of a well. "You stir the pot that has been left to cool for millennia. The Norns are… agitated."
"Good," Loki replied, not turning. "They've grown complacent, weaving their predictable tapestry. A little agitation introduces texture."
The shimmer resolved slightly, hinting at a figure of immense age and sorrow. Karnilla? A distant witch-queen? Or something older? "You play with Ginnungagap's leavings. This power… it is not a tool. It is a symbiont. It feeds on you as you feed on it. You will not be its master. You will be its vessel."
"A vessel can be tipped," Loki said, a sly smile finally touching his lips. "Spilling its contents where it chooses. I am not Odin, to sit on a chair and call it mastery. I am Loki. I will dance in the spillage."
The spectral presence wavered, as if sighing. "The Wolf and the Serpent stir in their bonds. Ragnarök's clock ticks not by fate's hand, but by the hand of the one who oils the gears. You would be that hand?"
"Ragnarök is a story Odin tells to make his rule seem inevitable, part of a grand, tragic cycle," Loki spat. "I am rewriting the story. Not to prevent the twilight, but to author it. My version will have a different victor. Or better yet, no victor at all. Just… splendid, beautiful ruin."
The presence faded, its warning hanging in the frigid air. Loki was alone again with the whispering void. He closed his eyes, not in meditation, but in reception. He cast his awareness out, not through the golden pathways of the Bifrost, but through the mycelial network of Yggdrasil's rot, the decay that fed the new growth. He felt the vargr spirit, already crossing the dimensional seams, its consciousness a pinpoint of cold fury. He felt the deep, slow breath of the World Serpent, Jörmungandr—his child, cast into the sea by Odin—dreaming of the day it could bite its own tail and unmake the ocean. He felt the chaotic, fiery pulse of the bound wolf, Fenrir.
And he felt Asgard. A blister of arrogant light on the tree's limb. He focused.
In Odin's vault, past the Destroyer, past the Casket of Ancient Winters, was a room that did not exist on any architectural plan. Here, the All-Father kept his true fears. A lock of hair from the first being he ever tricked. A shard of mirror that showed not one's reflection, but the moment of one's greatest cowardice. And a book, bound in the tanned hide of a Vanir sorcerer who had discovered how to un-stitch a god's soul from their destiny.
The vargr spirit slid through the walls of this room like mist through a grate. It had no eyes, but it saw. It saw the lock of hair, and in it, Loki saw a memory not his own: a young Odin, not yet All-Father, betraying his own blood-brother for a sip from Mimir's well. The taste of wisdom was the taste of treachery.
Ah, Loki thought, a vicious thrill coursing through him. So the pillar of justice is mortared with guilt. How… useful.
The spirit moved to the book. It could not read, but Loki, through it, could sense. The spells within were not of construction, but of dissolution. They were the anti-matter to Asgard's matter. The svart seiðr in his veins hummed in resonance.
But then—a presence. Golden, warm, furious. Thor.
The connection shattered as the vargr spirit was exorcised by a bolt of lightning in a confined space. The last thing Loki sensed was Thor's roaring confusion, and Odin's weary, dawning dread.
Loki opened his eyes back in Jotunheim. A trickle of black blood escaped his nostril, sizzling where it hit the ice. A minor feedback. A price.
He smiled, wiping it away. The game was truly afoot. Odin had hidden wounds. And Loki, the God of Mischief, had just become the universe's most attentive physician of pain. He would probe those wounds, pour his new, old magic into them, and watch the glorious infection set in.
He was no longer the prince who fell. He was the rot that rises. The king of nothing, and of everything that festered in the dark. The King of Black Magic had found his throne, and it was the beautiful, terrible silence at the heart of a scream.