Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

18 | The Throne Room

Methodologically, Y/N and Sigrid follow Loki's maps, Y/N pensively with her head bent to the parchment, Sigrid scouting ahead for landmarks with short, sharp energetic movements—like a stoat leaping easily between branches.

They only make it to the second hallway before the trail runs dry.

Pausing below a portrait of a large, serious man painted all in grey, Y/N consults her directions. They are supposed to follow the skirting board's golden engravings of twisted ivy until the pattern morphs into snake-looking dragons knotted together like plaited hair—

—but she has spotted where the ivy ends and it does not turn into dragons, but rather angular whippet dogs with forked tongues.

Unless they are the dragons?

Poorly carved, very ill dragons?

She turns to ask Sigrid's opinion but realises she can't hear the scuff of her strange lace-up thieving socks padding at her side.

Turning on the spot, Y/N's eyes search for her amongst the coffin-sized vases, lion-sized statues and pillars as thick as trees as though peering through the foliage of a marble jungle. She spots a wisp of flame-red hair before she sees Sigrid herself, her stolen servant's uniform blending into her surroundings like beige camouflage.

"What are you doing?!" Y/N hisses, hurrying to the other end of the hallway where Sigrid is dwarfed by a huge set of doors.

They're carved from wood rather than gold, darkened and smoothed with age. They're not carved or painted but rather studded with rows of pointed metal studs which have turned green like the old copper coins in Y/N's purse.

They're open ajar and, despite their prickly hedgehog-like spikes, Sigrid is pressing her face against the gap.

Y/N takes the young woman's wiry little arm and tries to drag her away. "Stop it! There might be people in there!"

"You've got to see this." Ignoring her desperate fingers digging into her elbow, Sigrid pulls away from the gap between the doors. It's left two pink lines down the centre of her face and they bend over her cheeks as she grins. "It's The Allfather's throne room!"

Y/N releases her sleeve. "...It is?"

"It must be. These doors look like they were built thousands of years before everything else, and the room on the other side has to have a throne at the end of it."

"What do you think it looks like?"

"Let's go find out." Sigrid takes her arm now, giving it a shake as if hoping to rattle loose Y/N's sense of adventure. "No one's in there."

Backing away, Y/N shakes her head. "If we're caught—"

"We won't get caught because we'll run. Come on, no one's around." As if turning to liquid, Sigrid slithers between the doors, her vice-like hand still clasped about Y/N's wrist.

Protesting, she's dragged through the gap, the doors passing on either side of her for several seconds like some awful, narrow hallway. She squeaks, thinking for a millisecond they're going to close and crush her bones—

—then she's spat out on the other side, squinting in the brightness as though she's just been born.

Immediately her nose stings with the smell of metal polish, every golden inch gleaming like a hall of angular mirrors. Blinking under the assault of their reflections, she takes a moment to make sense of what she's seeing; the walls, the view from outside, the statues and paintings and high ceiling all doubled in every surface which is smooth as a lake.