BOOK 3. Trapped in Asgard after Odin's apparent death, Anna chooses an unlikely ally in her attempt to find Loki. While the realm is sealed from the rest of the Nine Worlds, her strange dreams lead her to the one place she'd never expect.
To him...
There are moments in your life when everything is rendered utterly insignificant. Like the entirety of your existence, every second in the sands of time, is meaningless when compared to the weight of one pivotal moment.
When something changes. When light goes dark. When the one morsel of hope you cling to, the tiniest sliver of good in your life, crumbles into dust.
And so it must go, as is often repeated. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Even if you hope that this might be the one thing that lasts. The one thing that survives the biggest murderer in the universe, that brutal and unforgiving menace known as time. Yet time knows no such boundaries. Time cannot withhold judgment.
In the end, even the gods shall fall to her mercy.
And so, the thinnest of cords is drawn between bodies. Two souls, so irrevocably intertwined that no matter the circumstance it is nigh impossible to distinguish one from the other, are brought to the edge of time's cliff. And that cord, that bond between them, the hair's breadth of sanity deep within the soul feels as if it's been cut. Severed by the Norns, cruel servants of time, until all sanity seeps from the body leaving nothing but a void in return.
Darkness.
The darkness cometh, and none shall escape its grasp. Long, frigid fingers curl around the base of your spine, creeping up - inch by inch - until you pray for sweet release, but none shall be granted to you. Nothing can keep you here, and nothing can steal you away. Cursed to live in eternal shadow while the darkness eats away at the remnants of your soul until madness descends in the deep, you remain.
Empty.
Unfeeling.
Insane.
A cry pierces the inky blackness, the velvet, impenetrable blanket of the deep wrapping heavily over his shoulders, as the burden of his failure weighs upon him. Nothing matters. Nothing matters. Nothing...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Gasping for air, Anna jolts upright. Her shoulders heave from the effort as she sucks in oxygen, her lungs grateful for the relief. Tears stream down her cheeks, grateful to escape the grasp of whatever held her, until she gradually comes to realize her surroundings.
The darkness retreated, replaced by a dense fog that clings to the air with every breath. It's so thick that she thinks she might be able to taste it, but when she inhales again there is no such resistance.
The ground beneath her is cold, several layers of ice and snow coating the earth beneath her fingertips, and she jerks her hand to her chest as it seeps into her...
"What the hell?!" Anna stutters to herself, shaking violently as she looks at her hand where it rests on the frozen ground.
Her skin is translucent, glowing eerily in the seemingly endless darkness, yet she can still feel the surface beneath her palm. Tracing her fingers up to her face, she can feel the surface of her skin - the sensation of her features reassuring beneath her hands - but there is no warmth there. It's as if her fingertips are gliding over cold silk, barely formed, and likely to slip away with the smallest gust of wind.
Shaking her head, she struggles to maintain her breath - which she isn't certain is her breath at all - as her mind races to find the answers. Sigyn said that her body and soul would be separated upon her arrival in Niflheim, but that doesn't mean she would be prepared for the experience in any way, shape, or form.
Especially not after what she went through to get here.
The darkness.
The torment was unlike any she'd ever experienced, and yet the pain resides deep within her soul instead of her physical body. It's like a bruise seated in the farthest reach of her existence, and fresh tears spring to the corners of her blue eyes at the memory. Fresh pain spikes through her, the fog around her seeping into her brain, as she struggles to remember what she saw. What she heard in the shadows.
Panic creeps in slowly, the unspoken memory shaking her to the core, as she stares at her surroundings without seeing.
"Midgardian," a voice whispers through the mist, and Anna's head jerks around to find the source. "Why have you come here?"
Her phantom heartbeat slams against her chest, the rhythm pounding heavily against the already tremendous ache in her soul, as she scrambles to sort out her thoughts. Glimpses - flashes of her life before - flicker through her thoughts, and she tries to grasp them as if clinging to grains of sand.
Then it hits her. A single word inhabiting the nothingness within her. A glint of light in the fog. She clings to it, her entire being hinging on this one word as the mist swirls around her to form a corporeal shape in front of her very eyes.
A heavy cloak rests over the being in front of her, masking any and all features from her view, as she focuses in on the one word. It brings clarity, slowly reviving her mind as if shaking the dust from the recesses of her thoughts, until - finally - it is all she can see.
"L-Loki," she stutters, choking on her tears in the midst of her receding panic. "I saw Loki."
Now Playing: "Better Love" by Hozier.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
