Chapter Text
Loki had always found Alfheim beautiful. No matter what part of the realm a person visited, be it day or night, the sky was awash with color. Sometimes the sky was dominated by the gas giant the realm's inhabited worlds orbited, a wash of pastel rainbows in the day or glowing with vibrant bands of color in the night. At other times, the other moons would hang large and bright, the cities and landscapes on them marking them with interesting mixtures of geometric and natural patterns easily visible with even a simple spyglass. It was understandable to him that the peoples of Midgard considered Alfheim to be the realm of Heaven and called members of its native race Angels. The moons of Alfheim varied but were generally lush. Be it in the form of dense forests or teeming oceans it was a realm full of life, but its seasons were extreme and out of sync with other realms and the abundant life meant abundant predatory creatures: plant, animal, and fungus. Beautiful did not mean safe.
The largest moon, particularly where the capitol was situated, was a very mountainous place. Snow-capped peaks reached up into the crisp blue sky, so tall that standing in the valleys one would think they would scrape the other moons. The valleys were dense with vegetation and flowers much of the year. Many times, when Loki wanted to get away from people in general, he would come and camp out in those unwelcoming heights. He lived off his supplies and the occasional animal caught in a snare, but wildlife in the thin atmosphere of the snow-capped peaks was relatively sparse. The Alf themselves considered such trips to be a rite of passage for young men and women alike, and respected him for the care he took in leaving no trace of his camp behind in the pristine landscape.
Tolfdir's passing was sudden. One morning, while he was home with his family, he simply failed to wake. Loki left for Alfheim as soon as he received the message, delivered by an enchanted bit of clockwork resembling a hawk that Loki had made for his beloved tutor centuries ago. The gatekeeper had not dawdled even to ask if Loki had permission as he usually did before opening the Bifrost for him. The funeral ceremony was complex and beautiful, with three generations of golden-skinned elves singing in harmony through their tears at the loss of their patriarch. Loki helped to lay his old master in the soil as was their tradition by joining his children and other apprentices in casting the spell to sprout the seed planted atop his grave. The sapling reached knee-height before sundown thanks to all the magic and would grow to be a fine addition to the grove of trees that served as a graveyard for Tolfdir's village.
Every so often he would realize how much time had passed since he'd rushed out of the feast hall to demand Heimdall send him to Alfheim immediately and wince, but it hadn't yet sparked a desire to return. In his darker moods Loki wondered if the golden-eyed soldier had expected Loki to never return. Loki'd kept himself busy so he would not have to think about the loss. At first, he was socializing with Tolfdir's other students and ended up spending a week in one of Alfheim's larger libraries researching a number of interesting historical accounts of great feats of magic. Then he followed a fairy back to one of Alfheim's lesser moons to be introduced to their Queen Maleficent before running at full speed away from the flirtatious woman all the way to Midgard. He was caught up in the end of "The Great War" and amused by the assertion made by several of the short-lived locals that there would never be another one after this. He popped from one nation to another to gather a proper account of what sort of conflict would cause mortals to proclaim that they had had enough death to cause their war-happy little nations to give up fighting one another. He found some "News Reels" that allowed him to watch recordings from the front lines.
Then Loki spent a good hour looking slack-jawed over a field full of muddy trenches called Verdun. The locals would fill them in soon, but for now they were busy celebrating the end of the war and holding close those who had come out of the trenches more or less in one piece. The ground still reeked of blood, the breeze carried distant celebrations of victory, and the estimated body count blazed fire in his head. He'd read that Asgard and many other advanced cultures shied away from projectile weaponry of the sort the mortals recently developed because it made war too messy to sustain. It took the honor and bravery out of battle by making the enemy a faceless silhouette a great distance away and rewarding snipers and assassins over more honorable forms of combat. Other cultures dropped projectile weapons when they went into space and realized that poking holes in their own ships while traveling through the vacuum of deep space with stray bullets and ricochets was a bad idea, moving to laser weapons that could easily damage flesh but had no mass or electron blasters that could be absorbed by a properly grounded hull structure. Trench warfare with this scale of devastation was something mentioned in the histories as a passing fad, glossed over as something that was less important than the honor of true warriors or the practicality of blades. The reality of it was unsettling.
He left Midgard the next day after re-stocking his dwindling supplies. Then he took up his current project and lost himself in it; surfacing from his calculations and sketches only long enough to feed and water himself.
Loki had learned a lot about masonry and architecture in the last seven years, and of course he'd had to get his magic into the mix. He'd explained to the masters teaching him that it made sense since his initial interest in such things came from his discovery of the circle on his property, but there was a bit of murmuring about his unorthodox ways just as there always was. It just made sense that studying the structure of a building would spawn ideas about the structure of certain spells. It was a new way of thinking about how things could be fit together and hold themselves up, after all. Once the methods and structures were in his mind, he could use them a metaphor to shape the metaphysical. Of course, they hadn't let Loki actually test-build any structures that were held up by a combination of magic and masonry to let him study how such things were blended. Even though many of the capitol's most impressive structures were very obviously a mix of magical and mundane construction, no one seemed willing to entertain the idea that the male builders of such structures would have needed at least novice level understanding of the crafts the women who wove the enchantments into them used and vice versa. Otherwise, the efficiency of the spell work or the integrity of the architecture would have to be compromised - and they very clearly were perfectly complementary.
Loki had no such issues with this project. No one was even bothering to try and rebuild this old bridge and his initial failures wouldn't disturb anyone. The towns on either side were completely abandoned and had been for quite some time given the amount of snow and the level of decomposition of some left-behind supplies. He'd cleared out one of the houses to use as his own shelter, dumping the refuse that had gathered into the smaller building next door. It was smaller, but close to the work site and rather cozy even if he had to make a few minor adjustments in order to live in the over-sized space comfortably. He could use magic to reach the higher shelves, but the step he put in allowed him to climb onto the worktop if he was too tired from his day's work. The furs piled up in the bedroom made up for the fact that the dip in the floor was designed for people twice his height or perhaps an entire family to share. A few spells and a jar of mage fire gave him light to work by and kept the temperature at a reasonable level provided he didn't revert to his Aesir form. The few cracks in the mostly subterranean structure were patched over in a way that wouldn't last but worked well enough to keep any stray draft or bugs out.
The first thing he did was examine the remains of the old bridge to see what had made it crumble. It had been made out of good stone, but ice was an unrelenting force. The decorative pattern on the sides and the seams between the stones had been sealed both with mortar and with seidr. When the source of the seidr failed, or in this case was taken to another realm, the omnipresent ice was able to get into the cracks, scour out the mortar, and wedge the stones apart. In conclusion, the bridge fell apart because some lazy Jotun builder decided that the magic holding a bridge together should be tied to an item of great power instead of generated on site. If all their infrastructure was like this, then it was no wonder the realm fell to ruins so easily. A single point of failure for structures like this was ridiculous.
It wasn't a large bridge, as such things went, but it was very wide. The gorge it spanned was ridiculously deep. It was also located and shaped so that no matter what path one took the only way from one side to the other was roughly equal to (or in the case of one northbound road, greater than) circumnavigation of the planetoid. Simply put, the best way to go west without the bridge was to go east until you came up on the other side. Not ideal, and it was little wonder that the two cliff-side villages couldn't hold out through the long list of things broken in the war to get their bridge fixed before everyone up and left for the much more manageable terrain on the other side of the planetoid. It was even possible that it wasn't two villages, but one with the bridge in the middle that was no longer self-sustaining when cut in half.
Two months in, it was the footings that made Loki reassess the logic behind the bridge's power source. They were massive and when provided with seidr they lit up to reveal why it needed so much power. The bridge had been bracing the sides of the gorge as well as providing passage. With the lines of power glowing clearly to his sight, he could see that the house he was staying in didn't used to be the closest one to the edge. The net cast by the footings went wide, reaching out to hold back a large section of land that no longer existed to the south.
He really shouldn't have gone down into the gorge, but he could fly and he was curious. He found the remains of the finer homes and great hall that would have been the center of the town. He also found the center of the bridge, which had a very interesting structure.
Loki moved two houses down and set up camp in a house that was clearly for a large extended family at some point, sealing off the rooms he didn't need with walls of ice. The next day he was back at work designing a new bridge, being careful to disconnect the circuits that produced the netting in the new design so nature could shift the gorge slowly over time rather than all at once during a power failure. Complacency was a killer, after all.
The young mage cast a spell to check the date and sighed. It had been almost a year now, and his family would be quite irate about his disappearance. Maybe. Perhaps they had gotten gradually more and more used to not having him around and so hardly noticed his long absence. He had tried to keep up regular socializing with his father over the years as Tolfdir had advised, but it was always just a bit too inconvenient. He'd tried setting up regular games of tafl or cards, but important meetings with political figures usually overrode them. He couldn't manufacture very many things to study with his father or topics of discussion deep enough to require sharing a lunch. Loki had managed to snag a few quests out from under Thor and brought back tokens from grateful villages or trophies from dangerous beasts that had developed a taste for sentient flesh. It earned him a couple words of praise from his father upon his return from the quest and not much else. Between those tokens and the retrieved trophies from the palace the cozy room right off the entrance of Eldred Hall was now impressively outfitted as a place he could invite people to share an afternoon with him. Invariably the politicians who came to such meetings left agreeing with whatever policy position Loki wanted them to have, which prevented the adventuring from being a complete waste of time. His plan to become a properly trained architect by studying stonework had gone nicely so far, but it was hard to say if that pleased Odin or not as the king hadn't mentioned Loki's continued study of 'manly crafts' much at all.
Mother would miss him. That was always what drove him home, in the end, but he was so close to finishing.
The quarry where the stones for the original bridge had come from was still easily accessed after a few well-placed fireballs. It looked to be part of the local industry prior to the town's downfall. There were even some blocks already on rollers, abandoned with all the rest when the crumbling cliff side swallowed half the town. It had been hard work, but with some magic and liberal application of simple machinery he'd gotten all he needed gathered near the foot of the bridge so the he could shape them properly. He just had to figure out how to actually fit it all together without dropping anything down the gorge as there was a big difference between pushing the stones around on rollers and actually lifting them into place. He'd spent the last couple days mulling over that logistical problem while he finished cutting the last stones he needed to rebuild the bridge and welding the metal frame that would house the seidr-charged crystals and transmit the energy needed to keep it ice-free along the base of the structure. Being able to teleport and fly helped greatly.
For now, it was time to sleep. Loki flicked his wrist to extinguish the lights and settled into the furs. The Midgardian food he regularly left Jotunheim to purchase was filling and easily consumed. The manual labor and difficult engineering concerns exhausted his body and mind every day, ensuring dreamless sleep. His perimeter spells ensured that no predators would reach him even if the beasts of this realm somehow learned how to open doors. He slept well on a full stomach every day.
Loki woke with every nerve on edge. His perimeter spells were bent. Not broken as a wild animal would do, but shifted aside like a curtain. He could hear steady breathing from somewhere in the room. He laid still to feign sleep, materializing a dagger in his right hand, which was still buried under the furs. He couldn't hear any other sign from the intruder, so he would wait a moment more in case there was more than one before he…
"I have no intention of harming you," a low and vaguely feminine voice said. "I suppose watching you sleep was not the politest choice I could have made, but I hope you will forgive me given the circumstances. I am having some trouble believing you exist." Loki sprung up into a fighting stance, flaring the lights brightly a moment to startle the large Jotun. The Jotun anticipated the trick and simply blinked twice, effectively protecting her - zir - eyes from the worst of the flash.
"Why are you here?" Loki asked.
"There were reports of smoke seen in the distance. When I checked with our long-range defensive equipment, there were a few regularly occurring energy signatures that were odd, but small enough that they were being ignored. I came to see what was going on here, along with a few of my best warriors." Loki's heart sunk upon hearing that. He'd been caught by the Jotnar once, and while it hadn't been the most unpleasant experience of his life, he wasn't in a rush to enjoy their overprotective hospitality a second time. "Do you…? Your… Your name, little one," the Jotun asked, suddenly tripping over zir words, "What do you call yourself?"
"Logn," Loki lied.
"So, you are the same as the child that visited Tonder during the stormy season of the Capitol district?" Ze said, blinking a little as if ze was somehow emotionally invested in the situation. Loki looked over the Jotun before him, tracing the pattern of family lines that adorned the slim body. The father lines seemed familiar, but he couldn't quite place them. A relative of someone he'd met for certain, possibly of the child he'd saved given. That would make sense of the strangely strong emotion in the other's voice, at least, but the braiding was too complex on the leg and too smooth on the arms. The face was all contour lines, and even the mother lines were in sets of three instead of the ones and twos Loa's family had. Long, gently curved horns like those of a goat adorned Zir head. They looked remarkably like the helmet he'd been given when he came of age in Asgard.
"I am," Loki admitted. "I'm not hurting anyone by being here, this place was abandoned when I arrived."
"Why would you want to be alone?" Ze asked. Loki thought a moment. There was one good thing about interacting with the people of Jotunheim, and he might as well indulge in it. He'd remained unseen in his other trips, which meant enduring the harsh cold and being drained of seidr without much benefit beyond slaking his curiosity. He could be as honest as he pleased with these people an no one would fault him for the bend of this thoughts, given that he was considered a child and had a well-documented mental illness here.
"My master, the one who guided me over the last few centuries as I learned to use seidr properly, passed away from old age. I went to attend the funeral with his children and grandchildren and then I went for a walk after. I haven't wanted to go back," Loki said with a shrug. "Well, I have, actually, some nights more than others, but I'm not done here, and I want to finish more than I want to go home."
"And all of this?" Ze asked, gesturing to Loki's schematics. He'd left a few out for easy reference, but more had been laid out on the floor than what he'd been using.
"Something to do; something to think about instead of other things." Loki shrugged again. "Something I want to finish before I go back."
"You want to finish building a bridge, so you will feel less grief over the loss of your mentor?" Ze asked slowly.
"Yes, but recently I was thinking that I might not be able to finish. I could move and shape the stones as long as I used what was left in the quarry and my own tools, but there isn't sort of crane or other means of moving the stones into place now that I made them. I spent most of yesterday moving them around and double-checking the cuts, but I don't think there is much more I can do on my own. I hadn't really come up with a viable solution to that, yet."
"You are ridiculous and impossible. The longer I speak to you the surer I am that I have been drugged and this is all some fever dream." The other Jotun scrubbed at zir face. "Perhaps we can help you build your bridge, and when it is done - if it holds or does not - you will travel with us as we complete a survey of this district."
"Obedience in exchange for a favor?" Loki summarized, speaking slowly to stall while he mulled over the offer. It would be nice to know if his design worked. Before he had any time to think, he was answered.
"No," the Jotun said firmly. "I offer you the means to satisfy your grief in the manner you wish to, and in exchange you will follow us. I will not cage you; I will not demand obedience; I only ask that we travel in the same direction for a time. What you do after that will be for your own heart to decide." Another offer of adoption, and this one after only a few minutes in the same room. Was this just how adult Jontar reacted to an unaccompanied child?
"I don't need to be adopted."
"Of course, you don't need it," ze assured. "You have a home waiting for you, wherever you decide that may be. You could leave this place now, if you like, but if we help you with the bridge, I will want you to stay with us until the survey is complete."
"How long does this survey take?" Loki asked. The horned Jotun smiled brightly at him.
"That is a very good question. We have come here first, due to the unusual reports of course, but this is a standard patrol of the district that collects census data and requests for the crown. An exact count of the nights is not possible, but it usually takes two weeks. Going out of order will make it slightly less efficient, perhaps an extra day and night total added travel time. This province is smallest by more than half than the two neighboring ones that complete the district, with the eastern one - relative and not galactic east, these three planetoids are locked in a stable orbit as a unit - slightly smaller than the western," the thin Jotun explained. Loki nodded along in understanding. It was a bit more than was done by the regular patrols on Asgard. Each lord handled the count of his own people, and what would be the point of spoiling the count with Heimdall and the other means of magically tracking the population? Some oversight by the capitol would certainly be needed absent such ability.
"So, you will have the soldiers help me build the bridge and I will stay with you for two weeks, give or take whatever delays naturally pop up in the patrol?" Loki summarized. "Then I am free to go wherever I want."
"I have hopes, but yes, you are free to continue your wandering if you need to do so."
"You know my name, what is yours?" The Jotun startles at the question, looking pained.
"My name means 'eccentric moon' and I have been titled Prince," the Jotun responded, zir tone gentle against the formal phrasing. "Prior to dedicating my life to my children, I was titled Commander and led two of the armies of Jotunheim. These days, I go on the surveys to keep myself sharp and otherwise remain in the capitol where I train young shifters and changelings like yourself." Loki's jaw dropped. "I am, of course, perfectly willing to include you in our shape-changing drills as we travel. It would be more difficult, though not impossible, to bring you along if you refuse to use your abilities in front of us as you hid them in Tonder, but I should hope you would enjoy stretching your wings and claws with us."
"Yes, please," Loki said, slightly dazed by his luck, because he'd have to be every color of fool to pass up such an offer.