Beyla - Loki

The Nexus Event

Long before Lamentis ever bled purple across the sky, a little girl played war on a gold-and-emerald floor.

She had carved heroes from scrap and villains from buttons. The heroes won because she said they did. Then a door of honeyed light buzzed open in the air, and soldiers in bronze stepped through, so neat they looked folded. A Hunter with kind eyes and a hard mouth checked a pad, checked the child, checked the air again as if the world had made a mistake.

"Variant," the Hunter said.

Sylvie—small, knees scabbed, hair a falling halo—smiled, prepared to offer them a wooden wolf who would happily eat any villain on command. The Hunter took her hand instead. A moment later, a different hand reached for the toy and dropped it in a glowing charge that reduced it to ash.

On the way to judgment, Sylvie stole the Hunter's device and ran into a forest of doors until she learned to live between them.

For all time. Always.

⸻

Lamentis groaned in its death throes, and Beyla learned that the universe could hold two kinds of endings in one breath.

They'd run until their chests burned and then run more. Now the three of them hunched behind a toppled tram pillar while meteors stitched the street like hot needles. Sylvie leaned into the metal, jaw set; Beyla leaned into Sylvie, fingers still wrapped around the other woman's wrist from the last mad sprint because letting go felt like losing a step she couldn't afford.

A slab cratered down where they'd been three heartbeats ago. Dust burst over them in shimmering violet clouds. Loki arrived late by one curse, hair full of glitter, expression caught between feral protectiveness and theatrical disdain.

"We require," he panted, "a ship, a miracle, or a slower apocalypse."

"I vote miracle," Beyla said, and then heard the sound her voice made and winced. Hysterical bells.

Sylvie turned her hand under Beyla's until their palms matched. "Fireworks," she said, almost teasing.

"We agreed they were terrible," Beyla managed.

"Only the ones that kill you." Sylvie didn't step away.

Loki did his best to wedge himself between them and the end of the world. "If you two are going to flirt, do it on a planet that isn't trying to murder us."

Another shockwave shuddered through the pillar. It drove Beyla and Sylvie closer, bodies finding stability in each other's lines. The noise thinned until the boom was a high keen you heard with your teeth, and in that narrow tunnel of sound their foreheads tipped together as if a magnet had been turned on low.

Sylvie's breath fanned warm against Beyla's mouth. "Tell me it's not just me," she said.

"It's not," Beyla whispered, the admission so simple it hurt.

Their hands slid—jaw, cheekbone, the polite map of a face becoming immediate—and the air itself kicked as the branch shot straight up from the Sacred Timeline, a perfect vertical spike. Beyla felt it like a third heartbeat, sudden and enormous: possibility breaking quarantine.

Golden doors hissed open.

"Variants sighted!" Hunter B-15 shouted. Collars snapped. Batons hummed.

Loki moved first, because of course he did. He grabbed the nearest Minuteman's wrist, twisted, got clipped anyway. He spat something filthy in Old Norse and pitched backward in syrup-slow motion, feeling the pain at full speed.

Sylvie shanked one guard and feinted the next, but a pronged baton found the gap in her ribs and slammed her to her knees. Beyla threw her hands up out of habit—the bees who had once answered her like kin—and watched the collar swallow her power whole. The haptic throb of the dampener made her teeth ache.