Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati...
I. THE TASTE OF ASH
The first thing Loki became aware of was the taste of ash. Not the ash of fire, but the ash of dead stars, of extinguished possibilities. It coated his tongue, filled his sinuses, a gritty testament to what he had almost done. The second thing was the silence. Not the hungry, predatory silence of the Echo, but a hollow, exhausted quiet. The Symphony of Unbecoming lay scattered around him in his folded pocket of reality, its crystalline shards dull and inert. The mobile was broken. His grand design to edit the past had failed, and the recoil had nearly unstitched him from existence.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms. The obsidian cracks that mapped his body were no longer just black veins; they were canyons, fissures splitting open to reveal not blood or bone, but a deeper, starless dark. He was a walking wound in reality. The black magic, Ginnungagap's Kiss, hadn't just been using him. It had been replacing him. He was less Loki, God of Mischief, and more a sentient gateway to the primordial void.
And then he felt it again—that distant, seismic boom that was not a sound but a vibration in the soul of the universe. Fenrir. The great Wolf, whose binding had been woven by the gods with a ribbon crafted from the sound of a cat's footfall, the breath of a fish, and other impossibilities. His own meddling with impossible, reality-breaking magic had stressed those bindings. The Wolf was stirring, not with mindless rage, but with a cold, intelligent fury that Loki could feel even across the dimensional folds. It knew. It knew its cage had been tampered with, and it knew by whom.
A new sensation cut through the ash-taste and the distant dread: a pulling, a gentle, insistent tugging at his core. Not the void, but something… warmer. A thread of green-gold memory, familiar and almost forgotten. Frigga's magic. His mother's seiðr. Before the lies, before the throne, before the fall, she had taught him a charm. A simple, domestic thing meant to find a lost trinket, a misplaced book. "The heart remembers what the mind misplaces," she'd said, her fingers guiding his in the weaving of light. "All true seeking is a kind of remembering."
Why was he remembering it now? The charm was child's play, a flicker of candlelight against the black sun of the power he now wielded.
The tug came again, sharper. It wasn't coming from within him. It was coming from outside. From the ruins of the Vanir temple on that mildewed moon.
He had to go back. The thought was absurd. Sif and the Einherjar would have cordoned it off, summoned Asgard's best binders and theorists. It was the last place he should go. But Frigga's ghost in his memory pulled him, and a deeper, more terrifying instinct agreed. The answers, if there were any, lay not in advancing further into the void, but in retracing his steps to the moment it all began.
Moving through the folds of space was agony. His form was unstable, leaking tendrils of unreality. He arrived not in the temple clearing, but in the dense, grey woods that bordered it. The air was thick with the ozone stink of active containment spells. Golden domes of energy, etched with runes of stasis and negation, shimmered around the temple site. Dozens of Aesir mages worked in silent, grim unison. They weren't trying to destroy the Echo he'd left behind; they were trying to understand it, to build a conceptual box around the absence.
And there, in the centre of it all, stood Odin.
The All-Father was not in his ceremonial armour. He wore the simple grey robes of a scholar, his single eye fixed not on the containment field, but on the corrupted ground where the Echo had first been freed. He looked old. Not venerable, but weary. The weight of the kingship Loki had coveted seemed less a crown and more a millstone. Odin's spear, Gungnir, was planted in the earth beside him, not as a weapon, but as a focus. From it, delicate threads of golden light spread out, connecting to every mage, every rune, conducting a symphony of order against the silent cancer Loki had introduced.
Loki watched from the shadows, his own void-charged essence making him a part of the darkness. He could kill a dozen mages with a thought. He could shatter their careful constructs with a whisper of paradox. But Frigga's memory-tug pulled his gaze away from Odin, to the far edge of the clearing, near the crumbled temple wall.
There, half-hidden by a fallen monolith, was a single, shimmering thread of green-gold light. It was Frigga's seeking charm. But it wasn't searching for a lost book. It was anchored to the stone, pulsing softly. A marker. A message.
His breath hitched. She had been here. After the battle, after his disappearance. She had come to the source of his corruption and left… what? A trap? A memorial?
The pull was irresistible. Weaving an illusion was second nature, but now he didn't need to. He simply let the void within him unfold around him, a cloak of non-being. To the Aesir mages, he was a momentary chill, a flicker in the corner of the eye. He passed between their golden lines of power like a ghost through a net.
He reached the monolith. The seeking charm flared at his presence, recognising the signature of her magic entwined with his own from long ago. It didn't activate any alarm. Instead, it dissolved, and where it had been, a small, perfect illusion resolved: Frigga's hand, sculpted from light, pressing against the mossy stone. As he watched, the stone became insubstantial under the ghostly hand, revealing a hidden compartment. Inside lay two things.
The first was a lock of hair, silver-gold, tied with a strip of green silk. His own hair, from a lifetime ago. The second was a smooth river stone. As his void-cracked fingers brushed it, a whisper, not in his ears but in his mind, unfolded—Frigga's last spell, her final lesson.
"My son. True magic is not in the unbinding, but in the choice of what to bind. You sought the power of the un-made. But even the void was once whole. The greatest trick is not to break the rules, Loki. It is to understand them so deeply you can write a new one that the old ones accept. The Echo is not a weapon. It is a question. And every question contains the seed of its own answer. Remember what you were before you knew what you were not. Remember the boy who could find anything he'd lost."
The ghostly hand faded. The stone was just a stone. The lock of hair lay in his palm, a tangible thread to a self he thought the void had eaten.
A roar of pure, conceptual fury shook the clearing. Not from Fenrir this time, but from the containment field. The Aesir mages cried out as one of their golden domes inverted. The silent, hungry absence of the Echo was learning, adapting. It wasn't just consuming; it was mimicking. It had turned their own spell of order inside out, creating a bubble of chaos that began to rapidly expand, dissolving logic and form.
Odin shouted, thrusting Gungnir forward. A beam of pure Ur-Light, the light of creation, speared towards the anomaly. It didn't destroy it. It was absorbed, making the void momentarily glow with a sickly, brilliant light before growing even larger, now hungering for the source of the light itself.
This was Loki's doing. His little experiment was evolving beyond his control, feeding on the very essence of the gods.
He could leave. Let it consume them. Let it be Asgard's problem.
But Frigga's words echoed. "The greatest trick is to write a new rule the old ones accept." He looked at the lock of hair, then at the expanding nullity that was his creation. He understood now, with a clarity that cut through the void's whisper. The Echo wasn't just a hole in reality. It was a reflection of his own soul—a place where identity, history, and meaning had been erased. He hadn't summoned a weapon; he had given his inner emptiness a form.
And to fight a void, you didn't use a bigger hammer. You had to fill it.
Odin's Ur-Light was the problem. It was pure creation, yes, but it was opposition. It defined the void by fighting it, giving it shape and purpose. The Echo fed on definition.
Loki stepped out of the shadows. He didn't hide his form. The mages saw him—a nightmare figure of blue skin and black cracks, leaking darkness. They recoiled. Odin's eye swivelled to him, filled with rage and a despair so deep it mirrored Loki's own.
"Stop!" Odin commanded, the weight of the kingship in his voice.
Loki ignored him. He walked towards the blooming, silent chaos. He closed his eyes, not to muster the void within, but to push it down. To find, beneath the layers of betrayal, jealousy, and cosmic ambition, the simple, lost skill his mother had taught him. The seeking charm.
He held the lock of his own hair in one fist. In his mind, he wasn't seeking a trinket. He was seeking Loki. The original article. The truth of himself before the stories, before the lies, before the throne. He poured not power, but intent into the memory of the charm. He defined the search: Find what is missing. Find what was here before the hole.
He opened his eyes and released the charm. A wisp of green-gold light, absurdly fragile, fluttered from his hand. It didn't attack the Echo. It didn't resist. It drifted into the expanding nullity and was instantly swallowed.
For a heartbeat, nothing. Odin stared, baffled. The mages braced for a cataclysm.
Then, within the heart of the silent, hungry void, a single, tiny point of green light flickered. Then another. And another. They were not fighting the darkness. They were memory. They were the echoes of what the void had consumed: the lost arm of the Einherjar, not as flesh, but as the concept of a warrior's grip; the sound of Sif's sword cutting the air; the faint impression of the Vanir's binding song. And more—older things the void had touched in this place: the prayer of a long-dead acolyte, the warmth of sunlight on stone a millennium ago.
Loki's seeking charm, targeted at his own essence, was doing something unintended. It was seeking everything the void had unmade, defining it not by its absence, but by its original nature. The void couldn't consume the memory of a thing without first acknowledging that thing had existed. And in that acknowledgement, a foothold for reality was re-established.
The Echo shuddered. It wasn't being destroyed. It was being… catalogued. Filled with the ghosts of what it had eaten. The expansion halted. The silent hunger was replaced by a silent, crowded hum of a billion remembered things.
It was still a terrifying anomaly, a scar on reality. But it was no longer an active threat. It was a museum of absence.
The golden containment fields stabilized, easily containing the now-quiescent phenomenon. The mages stood in stunned silence. Odin lowered Gungnir, his single eye wide, staring from the pacified void to his son, the monster who had just performed an act of profound, impossible creation.
Loki swayed on his feet. The effort had cost him. The obsidian cracks on his skin had closed slightly, the void within him receding, forced back by the expenditure of something far more potent: a mother's lesson, and a moment of pure, unselfish intent. He didn't feel like a king. He felt like a tired boy who had finally found something he'd lost.
He met Odin's gaze. There was no forgiveness there, no understanding. Only a dawning, horrified comprehension of the scale of what Loki had toyed with, and the even more baffling scale of what he had just done to fix it.
Without a word, Loki let the folds of space take him. He didn't return to his throne of petrified thought. He went somewhere else, drawn by the final, lingering warmth of Frigga's seeking charm.
He appeared on a barren, wind-scoured plain in Jotunheim, not far from where he had been abandoned as an infant. There was nothing here. No temple, no power. Just ice, rock, and the howling wind.
And yet, here, the memory-tug was strongest. Here, Frigga's charm had led him. He knelt on the frost, the lock of hair still in his hand.
He understood now. The answer wasn't in the void, or in rewriting stories. The first draft of his story wasn't in Asgard's library. It was here. In the place of his origin, before the narratives of kings and giants had claimed him.
He pressed his cracked hands to the frozen earth. He didn't seek power. He sought the truth. Not the grand, cosmic truth, but the small, personal one. Who was I before I was anyone's son, anyone's brother, anyone's king or monster?
The ground did not yield secrets. The wind did not speak his name.
But deep within, the void he carried, now tempered by his mother's magic, finally fell silent. Not in hunger, but in… anticipation. It was no longer a weapon, or a throne. It was a blank page. And for the first time, Loki, the God of Mischief, the would-be King of Black Magic, considered that perhaps the greatest trick of all was not to write a new story over the old one.
It was to have the courage to write the first, true word of your own.
He sat back on his heels, the endless twilight of Jotunheim around him. The distant howl of Fenrir was still there, a ticking clock. Odin's judgment was still to come. The cracks in his soul were still real.
But for now, there was only the wind, the ice, and a single, fragile question that held more power than any void:
What comes next?
The silence that answered was no longer the silence of the abyss. It was the silence of a page, waiting.