JOTUNHEIM: VICTOR
When he woke up, he was chained to the floor, he still wore his now-soaked jacket and before he could collect his bearings, Loki's voice echoed through the stone chamber: "You know, if you really believed in yourself, those tasks would have been a piece of cake. You're able to turn into a dragon, annihilated the palace of Hela, and you can't blast a rock with fire without moving? It's because neither your mind nor your heart truly wishes to join me. So I guess I will have no choice but to force you to join me."
Victor struggled mightily again the chains but they wouldn't budge. Victor tried shape shifting, but upon using the rune to change, the chains began to burn against his wrist. Loki laughed: "You might have learned to channel the rune by yourself. But ultimately, I know how best to restrict that rune, so Victor, don't try anything."
Loki flicked his wrist and Victor felt his world spin as his surroundings dissolved.
When Victor's world stopped spinning, the slab and chains that he was bound by disappeared. He was standing in an endless sea of black, he called out: "Loki! Come back!"
Suddenly from behind him a small, terrified voice sounded: "Victor?"
Victor spun around and before him stood Skylar, as pale as she was when she was alive, her hair blew in the non-existent wind, like a spectre. Victor ran to her: "Skylar.... How are you here...?"
Skylar smiled sweetly at Victor: "I'm always a part of you. I will always live in your heart."
Victor felt Skylar's hands hold his: "Skylar... I...."
Skylar spoke: "Hesitating again? Oh Victor... so many more people would be alive now if you would just act. It's funny all you ever do is act... act the hero, act the brave, act my friend. Well, since you won't be who you are, I will."
With that Skylar's hair blew on her face, obscuring it. When she brushed it from her face, there was nothing but a battered, bleeding, ghoulish face. Her skin was turning slightly green, her flesh was torn off and parts of her skull were showing. Her voice became a lower rasp as Victor recoiled in horror: "This is what I have become Victor! Because of you! This is what you have made me!"
Victor stumbled back as Skylar moved forwards hissing: "You are no hero. You wouldn't pass for a friend. So please Victor, who are you really?"
Victor felt his fire horns activate, he pleaded: "No! I'm not! This is a trick! You're not here!"
Skylar's hair began to yellow like rot: "You were the only trick. Because of you! Because of your lack of power! You weren't good enough, to save, to be a friend, to even be yourself!"
Skylar howled and exploded into black fires as Victor was backed into a wall.
Victor was breaking out in a cold sweat as the spirit spectre of Skylar vanished. He felt a certain wetness about his palms. When he looked down his hands were bleeding. The voice of Loki laughed in his head: "Your blood? Ha ha ha ha! Of course you'd think that. Do you not get the subtlety of it?"
Victor panted in his building panic: "Blood on my hands..." he whispered.
Loki's voice was tinged with pride: "Smart boy."
Victor's hands started pouring more blood out, Victor wrung his hands in fear, but blood kept spurting everywhere, the cave started to close in, the blood started pooling. Victor felt the blood slowly crawl to the height of his knees. He tried to ignite his hands to affect the constant stream of blood pouring from his hands but to no avail. The cave was barely large enough for him to move now, he was stuck in a solid box of stone and rock, with solid faces on all six sides. Victor's arms were slowly pinned to his sides as the volume shrank and the blood level as up to his waist Victor's mind began to go into a panic based frenzy. Victor screamed out: "Loki! Let me out!"
Nothing but silence.
Victor was mad with a visceral terror as the blood level slowly but inevitably crept up his arms, Victor struggled against the suffocatingly tight prison hewn of earth. The thick blood filled the room with a pungent ironic smell and it intensified as the copious crimson viscous liquid crept up to his neck as Victor was both paralyzed with fear and squirming with pent up panic based fear. In the final seconds before the blood engulfed him he heard Maximilian's voice: "You're drowning in the blood that you've got on your hands. The only friends you've even known, dead because of your lack of power."
Victor opened his mouth to say something but nothing but the blood poured into his guts, he choked and sputtered before blood rushed into his lungs. He tried to scream but only blood surged forth. His last thought before he blacked out was: "I'm sorry Skylar... I'm sorry Maximilian... I wasn't good enough..."
And he blacked out.
When he awoke he fell at the feet of Loki: "Well well Victor... let's do that again shall we..."
Victor sputtered and looked down at the fluids he coughed up, it was just water, it had all been in his head, yet it petrified him with primal horror. He choked out: "I don't bend... Torture me over the deaths of my friends, I know they would never say that to me. I can be my own powerful, I don't need you... I will never bend that knee to you."
Loki looked down at his son with contempt: "Perhaps I am going about this the wrong way. If it is freedom you value above all else... it is freedom I will take away."
With that, Loki snapped his fingers, and Victor felt himself go limp and collapsed on the floor like a limp ragdoll, his eyes and ears stopped functioning as his two most critical senses were nullified. Unable to see, move, or speak, Victor was left on the floor like a paraplegic as he was imprisoned within his own body, unable to do anything.
And it was terrifying.
