Cover Up The Sun

Chapter 10

Loki roared across the sky on his metal chariot, the night air unfurling around him like soft cool wings of immense blackness. He strained his senses ahead of him to catch sight of his quarry; in the face of the wind he could scent nothing, and the snarl of the engine overwhelmed any sound he might home in on. He was left with his eyes alone to track his prey, and although his eyes were sharp and their night vision acute, a black helicopter was hard to pick out against a landscape of dark sky and darker ground.

Let there be light, then.

Rising up on his toes in the stirrups of the metal beast, steering precariously with his elbows, Loki raised his hands and made a gesture that encompassed himself, his mount, and a wide swath of air above and below. His magic stirred within him, tepid at first after its long dormancy, then rising to a rushing tide as it surged out of him. Loki had lived for many years, traveled much and seen many worlds and monsters therein, and spent just as many years perfecting the art of his illusion. It was a mastery that was put to the test, now.

From the inside it seemed as though veils of shadow, edges glimmering with starlight, had fallen about him; the huge sides heaved with imaginary breaths, the wide trailing tapestry of wings beat a steady rhythm as the creature rocked across the sky. The long, sinuous neck curved and bent, the chest swelled, and then a sizzling flash lit the air as a tremendous fireball split the darkness.The missile of flame shot out across the sky, leaving a comet's trail of light as it forged ahead. It lit the darkness as brilliantly as a flash of lighting, and Loki saw the silhouette of the helicopter swerve and jink madly in the air as it tried desperately to escape the fireball.

It was only illusionary fire, of course, as it was only an illusionary dragon. Illyana was on that vessel, and so there was no way he was going to risk hurling a real fireball her way. But like all the best illusions, it fooled more senses than just the eyes; his foes would smell the scorch of brimstone, feel the wash of heat over their faces, and hear the bellowing roar of a predator on the hunt, the sound of the motorcycle's engine multiplied by a thousand across the sky.

The helicopter seemed to be veering to the right, turning northwards, and that would not do; Loki was bound to the sky-roads, and he could not go where they did not lead. He raised one arm and the dragon obligingly breathed another blazing fireball, this one streaking forward to detonate to the right and slightly above the coptor. It swerved again, veering back on track, and Loki began to laugh.

It came somewhere deep in his chest, hot and sweet and wicked. It was not a pleasant sound, though it contained joy and mirth in equal measure to scorn and rage. Loki pushed harder on the motorcycle's accelerator, and the engine ratcheted up a notch as the wind around him increased. The wind resistance was incredible, furious gusts buffeting him from all directions, threatening to rip even his substantial weight off his mount.

From ahead of him there came the stuttering cough of Midgardian gunfire, and the brief flash of a muzzle lit up the outline of the dark copter. Good – all the easier to find them by. The shells whistled by him, overhead and below his feet and to each side as they passed harmlessly through the dragon's illusory body. He could tell that these were no scrap-metal bullets to be stopped by a simple force-shield. They had weight and momentum that would really hurt, if they landed – at the very least, they would knock him back a long way unless he had something to brace himself against.

He had nothing solid to stand on, and he did not want for any such thing. He sought not to stop the missiles but to deflect them away, not to block but to dodge, and he danced between the howling gusts of wind and the screaming shells alike. It was a terrible dance, where one wrong step would mean utter ruin, and it was beautiful.

Between the sky-walking spell, the shields, and the massive illusion he was maintaining, Loki should have been scraping the bottom of his energy reserves long ago. Instead he found a deep well of power within himself that he had never tapped into before, a dizzying drunken freefall of limitless potential. Light and dark, life and death, earth and sky, fire and ice – he did not balance himself between them, for balance implied stillness, and he was ever moving. He flung himself from one extreme to the next and back again, always changing to fit whatever form the dance required next, and here –