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My wife is the cause of my journey. A viper, she trod on, diffused its venom into her body, and robbed her of her best years. I longed to be able to accept it, and I do not say I have not tried: Love won - Metamorphoses
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"What have you done?"
Loki shrinks away from the creature that, in her hubris, once called herself the All-Mother, who is nothing but a vessel for the gods she served. She listens in horror as Odin gloats, the light in her one remaining eye bright and inhuman, stripped of whatever coherence she has, just as Loki's mind is abruptly forced into clarity. After so long spent in the malestorm of insanity, it is all Loki can do to gasp out a final question at her once-mentor, fumble at the handle to the compartment door and fling herself out into the corridors, away from the creature inside the observation deck.
Loki is of no use to her now, so when she pushes aside the compartment door, Odin makes no move to stop her, just stares out the glass walls and laughs. Loki stumbles her way down the corridor, thinking of nothing but getting as far away from the thing that once was Odin as possible. She has spent so many years imprisoned that her mind reels at the thought of Odin just...letting her go. Her mind is still spinning with panic - this is a trap, it has to be, she'll never let you go - when she runs out of breath and slows to a stop. She reaches out to the walls of the train to steady herself, but she feels not smooth wood under her palms, but a slick, pulsating surface.
Loki's head snaps towards the walls of the train and she lets out a shriek of horror, snatching her hand away from the train walls. They look the same as when the Ratatosk Express took off, dark red paneling with intricate metal engravings lining the wall at intervals, studded with bismuth. But now, they're slashed open with claw marks, the engravings dented and in some places, completely shredded. The heat of the Bifrost coming in through spiderweb cracks in the windows has melted the metal in some places, warping the delicate designs int something far more sinister. There is blood glinting off the shining metal edges, making bile rise to Loki's throat, but the worst thing of all is the walls, the crimson expanse of it pulsating like a steady beat, with irregular lumps jutting out as if straining to break free.
Somehow, Loki knows that the golden pool of metal at the base of one of them doesn't come from the melted engravings, that they have been consumed by the train, by the Bifrost, by Yog Soloth in a way her mind cannot yet process. Distantly, she registers screams coming from the other compartments, and lets out a pained whimper. This is worse than all her nightmares, worse than any vision Odin forced into her head, and when she clutches herself in terror, Yog Soloth rears its ugly maw and grins.
The screaming, squamous things now embedded in the blood-splattered walls of the train shrink away from her. Faintly, she is aware of rainbow-hued tendrils creeping up her arms, thrumming with barely restrained menace, seeking to claim her, bind her, make her part of the Bifrost, part of Yog’Soloth as it has for so many of her former Asgardian brethren. Loki has seen the fabric of reality crumple and shred, churning and bubbling like an ocean minutes before the storm, driving her to madness, shredding the edges of her consciousness and replacing them with a swirling kaleidoscopic glare. After so long, sanity is a stranger, and something dark in her longs to curl up, take refuge in the familiar and return to the blazing madness of the void, even if it takes her mind.
The rainbow light outside flickers, and Loki’s gaze is unwillingly dragged to the view outside the train carriage. The Bifrost roils in neon waves, and while the scientist in her is transfixed, the tattered edges of her mind longs to rejoin with the light of the Bifrost. It would be so easy to give in, rejoin that rainbow mass. The glowing tendrils creep their way further up Loki’s arms, but she cannot move, rooted to the spot, while what is left of Asgard flinches away from the god-touched woman as she reaches out to press a shaking palm to the cracked glass. It would be so easy to just push through, and let the light take her. Yog Soloth’s growl of approval rumbles through the train, but she cannot bring herself to care. After all, she had taken part in the infernal creation of this train, it was her mind that had helped shape this abomination. This was her fault, in a way, that she didn’t think of something more permanent that might have stopped Odin. Baldur had died, she had his blood on her hands, and for what? A decade of having her mind twisted and broken till she was nothing but a trembling wreck, free for Odin to unmake as she pleased. What was one life in the face of that? Yes, it would take nothing at all for Loki to break the fragile glass of the window, to let the void in.
Then she senses it. Senses her. In the boiling chaos, her love glows like a beacon, her presence cutting through the screaming horde inside Loki’s mind, clear as a siren’s song.
A very familiar song.
Faint strains of a violin, a dance, Loki hands in hers. Gentle lights, faint against the dark Midgardian night, worlds away from the harsh rainbow glare of the Bifrost -
Loki wrenches her palm away from the window as if burnt. It’s an old, old song, and she can’t quite remember the words.
Telling her to run, hours in a plain white cell before Loki’s to be executed, spending what she thought were her final moments in faint wonder at how her ring caught and fractured the light into dancing kaleidoscopic sparks -
The glowing warmth of it travels its way through her chest, and she chokes on it, throat rough with disuse.
The woman before her turns away, and something in Loki keens at the abject sense of loss. She reaches out, just as the door slides shut, a faint cry as Loki is dragged towards Odin’s carriage, towards -
Loki starts humming Sigyn’s song - their song, and the tendrils ensnaring her arms fall away.
As Loki tears her gaze away from the windows, Yog Soloth retreats with an angry snarl, and for the first time in a very long while, Loki feels the loss of her love in her chest like a gaping wound. She gasps, her voice hitching on a high note, and for a moment, the carriage is almost silent.
Loki takes a deep breath.
The creeping threat of Yog Soloth is still there, the floors littered with fractured shards of bismuth as the no longer human screams of the train’s inhabitants echo down the corridors. The Bifrost’s menacing glow is reflected in the shredded metal engraving lining the walls, and really, it would be so easy for Loki to stop here, to turn back and surrender whatever tatters of her consciousness to the eldritch beings that encircled the train. They might even make it hurt less, if she came of her own free will.
She puts one foot forwards, then another, continuing her death march on into hell, towards Sigyn, singing all the while.