The Darkness Cometh // Loki - Book 3 ✓

Chapter 11

Anna's eyelids flicker open, but the darkness lingers. Taking a mental inventory of her body and finding nothing out of the ordinary, she slowly pushes herself upright. The air is thick, weighing heavily on her lungs, and she can taste something bitter and metallic with each breath. Blood perhaps? It could be her own, but she can't see anything in the inky blackness to check. Nothing hurts, and there's nothing that feels like blood as she checks herself for injury.

Darkness clings to the air around her like a thick velvet curtain, and she's careful to feel the rocky surface around her before standing. After ensuring nothing is obstructing her bath, she takes a small step forward followed immediately by another. Within a few seconds, her palms brush against a rough wall of cold stone.

A dead end.

Rather than turning around and trying the opposite direction, she follows the rock - fingers training light on the surface so she doesn't lose her bearings - and heads to the left. She walks softly, both to muffle the sound of her feet shuffling on the ground and to prevent herself from tripping over any obstacles in her path, and her breath hitches in her throat as noise echoes through the emptiness.

The hair on the back of her neck stands straight up, and she shivers at the distortion. Twisted and echoed through the maze of rock, it is nothing more than a gruesome ghost to her ears, one that is indistinguishable from its original source. Highs and lows resonate and bizarre frequencies, vibrating her very bones, and she forces a shaky exhale.

Swallowing her fear, she keeps moving onward. After the trouble Sigyn went through to send her to Niflheim coupled with the sheer difficulty of dealing with someone like Hela, Anna realizes that she's come too far to stop now. Wherever she is, whatever is happening, she needs to keep moving.

Loki needs her.

She hears the noise again after a few seconds, this time closer, and she picks up the pace as the wall she's following twists through the labyrinth cut from rock. Louder and louder it grows, ripping through the shadows without mercy as her pulse begins to race. Every heart beat slams like a jackhammer into her chest faster than the one before, a potent cocktail of terror and anticipation coursing through her veins, until she throws all caution to the wind and breaks into a run.

With every step, her mind is screaming for her to stop, to run the other way, to avoid the unknown instead of heading straight for it. It's foolish, of that much she is certain, but while logic tells her to flee her heart says otherwise.

She slams against an unseen wall, scraping her arm as she navigates the abrupt turn and forces her feet to move even faster. Gathering her skirt, she lifts it with one hand to allow for more freedom of movement as she rushes toward her unknown destination. Toward the sound, echoing louder still with every passing second, until it's nearly deafening.

It's clearer now, lacking distortion as she moves closer to the source, and a sliver of hope runs through her at the realization that she knows the sound. She's heard it a thousand times before, so distinctive and familiar, and she can hardly believe that she didn't recognize it sooner.

Turning once more, her skin now riddled with cuts and bruises from running into jagged rocks as she navigated the maze, she skids to a halt as the dimmest of lights shines ahead of her to illuminate the darkness. She can barely make out what appears to be two figures, one in front of the other, in the distance.

The first is turned away from Anna, and she doesn't recognize them from this angle. She squints, taking a cautious step forward as the narrow pathway through which she arrived slowly begins to widen. She can't see the second figure, only hear them, so she shuffles to the right until it becomes obvious who is in front of her.

Fear runs through her, twisting her stomach in knots as everything around her ceases to exist. It's as if all of the oxygen whooshes out of her lungs, the shock rushing over her as she's pulled under by a tsunami of emotion. She's experienced a similar sensation once before when she was twelve. Her parents took her to the beach in Cornwall, and she wandered too far from the beach only to be caught in a deadly riptide. It happened so fast, and she was swept away in the blink of an eye, forced to surrender immediately to the sheer power of the deadly water. Before she could catch her breath and gather her bearings, she was slammed by a second wave. Sputtering, she blinked salt water from her eyes as her muscles screamed as she struggled.

Her father saved her then, always the attentive parent, along with a young lifeguard. There is no one to save her now as she stares ahead at the familiar face, painted red with his own blood, as Loki stands chained to the wall.

He's laughing.

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