Asgard could have exploded and Thor would not have noticed. Anyway, it already felt like the world was falling down around him. His mother was dying in his arms and there was nothing that he could do about it. Malekith had attacked Frigga from behind, stabbing her through the back. The All-Mother had been speaking quickly to Jane that if anything bad were to happen, she was to run and hide somewhere in the palace when the Dark Elf had suddenly sprung upon her. Do not try to fight them. You will die. Hide somewhere in the palace until Thor can find you.

When Jane had seen the blade of the sword protrude through Frigga's chest, she screamed. Thor had luckily been nearby fighting a Dark Elf, but by the time he stepped through the doorway of the council room, Malekith was gone. Now as Thor held his mother in his arms, he choked on his own sobs. But he couldn't cry: he was going to be a king after all. A king had to be strong when everybody else was not. No, Thor's eyes remained dry. Jane gently ran her hands through Frigga's hair, trying to comfort the dying woman. Both mother and son appreciated this gesture. Soon Frigga's eyes were closing and with soft, inaudible words of love, her soul flew from Asgard and into the Eternal Realm.

Thor clutched at his mother, desperately trying to bring life back into her body. A thought drifted into his head: Who will tell Loki? Odin was no doubt on his way to the council room now, so he would find out soon. But Loki wouldn't know the disturbing events that occurred that day without someone going to him telling him.

Thor gently laid his mother down on the floor and stood. Without saying a word, he walked passed Jane and out of the council room. When he was sure that nobody was around, Thor let his indifferent composure drop and let himself weep. He leaned against a wall which cast shadows over him, hiding him from anybody's view. Sobs wracked his body and he shook like an earthquake. After a few minutes of nothing but crying and clenched fists, Thor forced himself to stop leaning on the wall continuing on to his destination.

He had always remembered he dungeons of Asgard being dark, but Thor had not been down in them for so long that he had forgotten how cold they were. He spotted the room –cell- that he was looking for. A familiar figure sat by the glass wall of the cell, reading a book. When Thor got to the glass wall, Loki raised his head from the book. Loki's mouth couldn't seem to decide on smirking or frowning so it contorted into a slightly sad and sadistic looking half smile.

There was a moment of silence before Thor said, "Mother is dead." His words rang throughout the dungeon. The statement was sudden and unexpected, cutting through the air like the blade of a dagger.

Loki's eyes narrowed slightly before he sharply said, "What?"

Thor swallowed hard and repeated what he had just said. "Mother is dead. The Dark Elves attacked. Their leader, Malekith, killed her. She died defending Asgard." After a second he quietly added, "And Jane."

Loki froze, staring at the white wall across from him. Thor waited patiently for a reaction from his brother, but none came. The Trickster just gazed at the wall across from him, his eyes emotionless.

"I'll leave you to your thoughts," Thor said and hastily walked to the steps of the dungeon. Guilt spread throughout his chest, but the God of Thunder was too overwhelmed by grief so he kept walking up the steps. As he got to the hallway that he had taken to get to the dungeons, Thor heard a sound that resembled that of a bomb going off in a wood pile. He took a deep breath, not daring to think about who had just made that sound, and walked down the hallway, tears streaming down his cheeks.

…

Loki heard footsteps echo through the dark halls of the dungeon. He had been reading a book that his mother had given him recently as a way to entertain himself; something to make the time pass quickly. Time could only go by so fast when you were in a prison cell. He looked up from his book and saw Thor standing outside of the glass wall of his cell. His brother's hair was tangled and matted down with something dark. The crown prince was extremely pale and his eyes were slightly red.

The prisoner laid his book down on his lap and looked at Thor. Loki expected Thor to say that he had just decided to take pity on him and come see his "brother" or that Odin had decided that he needed the cell to be put to better use rather than hold Loki and sent out the command that Loki was to be executed. Instead, he was met with a much different statement.

"Mother is dead," Thor said suddenly

Loki was not sure that he had heard Thor correctly. "What?"

"Mother is dead," Thor repeated. His jaw was set and his lips were pressed together. "The Dark Elves attacked. Their leader, Malekith, killed her. She died defending Asgard. And Jane," he added quietly after a second.

Loki tried to swallow, but it was like he had a rock stuck in his throat. His lungs refused to inflate and he had trouble focusing his eyesight on Thor. He gritted his teeth and stared at the wall before him, trying to concentrate on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. But breathing was so hard to concentrate on when the world around Loki was breaking; crumbling as if Mjonir had struck the ground a thousand times.

He heard Thor say something but his words were drowned out by the sound in Loki's ears. It was an overwhelming roar of voices that shouted and whispered and sang to Loki like haunting ghosts. Voices that jeered at him during his trial in front of Asgard. Voices that whispered false promises of love and friendship. One soft and soothing voice in particular that sang a lullaby to Loki and cradled him in its arms, assuring him that everything would be ok.

Black spots clouded Loki's vision and his lungs burned. He let out a breath that he had not realized he had been holding and gasped for air, trying to fend off the claws that were scratching at his lungs. Loki clenched his jaw tighter, desperately trying to prevent the coming hysteria. He never remembered being this tense before.

Loki felt something thin and smooth in his palms. He looked down and saw the pages of the book he had been reading were torn to shreds in his hands. The God turned his palms over and the little pieces of paper fluttered to the ground like snow falling from clouds. His breathing sped up. Loki had just destroyed the last thing his mother gave to him. Frigga's last gift to him and he had destroyed it.

There was an earsplitting CRACK as the bedside table that had been sitting neatly next to the bed was sent crashing into the wall. The sound of glass shattering filled the youngest prince of Asgard's prison cell. Books were ripped apart and thrown on the ground along with the legs and back of a chair. There was not a single foot of the cell that was not covered in debris of some sort. The walls glowed bright gold as wave after wave of magic hit them, making it look as if golden lightning had struck them.

Loki stood in the middle of the mess, breathing heavily, arms aching from lifting and throwing and tearing everything. His hair was tangled and frizzy from using up so much energy to produce the waves of magic that had struck the prison walls without putting so much as a dent in them. He stumbled across the floor to the nearest wall and slid down it so that he was sitting. Loki's feet were bloody from stepping on glass shard, but he felt no pain. Only a disturbing numbness that covered his body on the inside and outside.

Silence pounded against Loki's eardrums, but in his head he could hear the unspoken words of children and warriors and liars and lovers. He mentally pleaded with the voices to stop talking or his head might burst, but the voices only seemed to get louder. A memory forced itself to the front of his mind:

The tree was tall; so tall in fact that when someone looked up at it, they had to tilt their head almost all of the way back in order to see the top. Or at least, what seemed like the top. Branches stuck out of the tree's trunk like knives in the ground and they were arranged like that until the last branch, a very sturdy and long one, met the pink sky. The tree was the tallest one in all of the forest, going on above the clouds and making up Yggdrasil. But that was just the story that every child of Asgard was told whenever they saw the glorious tree. People had attempted to climb it, but none had ever been successful enough to get to the highest branch. It would have taken hours to get there anyway. Adults were usually too big to climb through the small spaces in between the branches and children were never allowed to climb the tree, their parents always fearing that they would fall off.

Loki saw the tree when he was running through the forest, away from Thor and his friends. He sprinted to the base of the tree, found good hand and foot holdings, and started to climb. Rough bark was the thing that Loki concentrated on as he climbed higher and higher, trying to avoid looking down. A branch snapped off in his hand and he gasped as he lost his hold on the tree. His heart leaped into his throat and his breathing sped up. Loki snapped his spine forward and grabbed at the small twigs until he found one that wouldn't break off in his hand the minute he pulled at it. The boy clung to the tree, pressing his cheek into the bark and breathing for a bit. After a few seconds, he started to climb again. Before he knew it, Loki had reached the last branch of the tree: the one that touched the sky. He swung his leg over the limb and crawled out to the middle of it, trying to find a comfortable position to sit in. When he could find none, Loki resided to just letting his legs swing freely under the branch and clutching onto the sharp pieces of bark on the top.

The view from the where Loki was seated was amazing: the whole of Asgard was spread out before him. Directly in front of him was the rest of the forest which touched a field of yellow grain before moving onto the village. The village was in the center of Asgard holding the stables, shops, and tavern for the commoners. Loki had been in the village many times with Thor and his friends and occasionally with his mother or father. Sometimes he even thought that he liked the village better than the palace, but Thor chided him for voicing this thought so Loki never mentioned it again. There was a path that snaked from the edge of the village to the glorious, golden palace that he called home.

A loud noise resembling the caw of a crow caused Loki to snap out of his day dreams and look around for the source of the sound. Something soft and thin skimmed past his ear making him jerk his head upward only to just catch a glimpse of ink-black feathers flying in and out of the tops of the trees. Huggin or Muninn, Loki thought. Where one of Odin's ravens was, the king or queen couldn't be far behind…

"Loki," said a voice from the ground. Loki tilted his head so that he could see who had just spoken and sighed. Frigga stood directly under the tree that he was in, a look of concern on her face. "Loki, I know you're up there. Please come down so I can talk to you."

A sarcastic response forced its way to the tip of Loki's tongue and he couldn't help but let it slip out. "Well you're already talking to me now, so it wouldn't really make any difference." He dared to glance over the branch he was sitting on and look at Frigga's expression: it had melted from concerned to stern. Loki winced out of guilt. He never snapped at his mother, even when he was at his angriest. She opened her mouth to say something (Scold me probably, the prince thought glumly), but seemed to change her mind and was silent.

After agonizingly long minutes filled with nothing but awkward silence, Loki spoke up. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. Why are you here?"

"Why do you think I'm here?"

"Because Thor told you that I was bothering him and his friends and then when they tried to confront me about it, I ran away. That's what he usually says anyway," Loki added quietly. He left out the part where Thor called him a coward, of course, because saying it out loud would only make it true and that would burn a hole in Loki's already unsteady ego. (I am not a coward, I am not a coward, I am not a coward)

The Queen sighed. She had come to find that as her youngest son grew; he started to speak more and more of Thor in a distasteful way. Rarely did she ever see Loki display any sort of affection toward his brother. But on the nights when she would catch Loki curled up in Thor's bed (most likely because of a nightmare), the two of them fast asleep, she would stand there and stare at the sleeping children trying to take a mental picture that she could remember at the times when Loki would look at Thor with nothing but disgust. Sometimes she wondered how Loki was capable of being so cold when his brother was so warm to him. Thor was no angel, though, and Frigga could see why Loki tried more often than not to try and avoid him and his friends. Words could cut just as deeply as knives, and children were somehow capable of inflicting the most painful wounds with their speech without a second thought. Frigga could sometimes hear the other children taunting Loki from the balcony overlooking her garden and the things they said were terrible to hear. When everything was silent, she would go down into the garden and comfort her son with soothing, softly spoken words that calmed Loki in minutes. Over the years, Frigga watched Loki quickly learn how to use his voice. The things he could do with words were amazing: harsh truths could not be told softer; complex spells slipped off his tongue easily. Nobody failed to be captured by Loki's stories: the ones that spoke of dragons and ruin, planets and stars, gods and goddesses. The lies that Loki spoke, though, were the words that people most paid attention to. Honey-dipped and sugar-coated, they dripped from his lips like rain from clouds. Loki's lies were so beautiful and elaborate and believable that it was almost hard to believe that they were in fact, lies. Loki used his new way of speaking to defend himself in verbal attacks, winning most of the time, but there were some times, like now, when Loki seemed to be too tired to defend himself and just took the blows as they came until when he could take them no longer, he ran.

"Why don't you tell me what really happened and then I'll tell you what Thor said? Do you think that that's fair?"

Loki ran a hand through his short hair, thinking about Frigga's offer. "Do I have to climb down?"

"Eventually you will," Frigga replied with a shrug.

"I was reading in the garden when Thor, Fandral, and Sif found me and asked me to spar with them. They insisted but I refused, and finally Thor said that I was just a coward and that they should just leave me alone. Fandral and Sif were not people to give up so easily, though, and they continued to jeer at me. Thor joined in and…and- I'm sorry, Mother. I am a coward," Loki concluded his story sullenly.

There was a moment of silence that seemed to spread on for forever until Loki was positive that Frigga had left for whatever reason. "No son of mine is a coward," came the Queen's reply as it filtered through the branches of the tree. Her words made Loki lean over to look at her again as he quietly said, "Sometimes I forget how different you and Father are. He expects me to be like Thor. You...you..." But Loki's sentence didn't need to be finished because Frigga already knew what her son thought of her: where Odin wanted Loki to be full of brawn like Thor, Frigga wanted him to be full of whatever he chose to be. Frigga was overjoyed the day that Loki had asked her to teach him how use magic, but Odin had frowned and said nothing. The All-Father's youngest son had never been his favorite and the only person who knew that was Frigga even though Odin had never told her that, but sometimes she sensed that Loki knew that too, and it broke her heart to think about how dejected her son must feel.

A warm breeze blew over the tree tops making their green leaves shake and silently fall to the ground. Black strands of hair obscured Loki's vision as he slowly climbed down the colossal tree. The boy let out a small sigh of relief when his feet made contact with the ground. He had not realized how edgy being up that high in the tree had made him. When Loki was sure that he wouldn't fall if he tried to walk, he took a step forward, right into Frigga's arms. His mother held him and he hugged her back feeling as if she were just a hallucination and if he didn't hold on tight enough then she would disappear and he would be alone.

(And Loki always felt alone, but never in the presence of his mother.)

"Please, please, please, do not let other people's words harm you. Words are your weapons. Never stop lying; singing; talking." It was a risky statement, especially on Frigga's part considering the fact that Loki could probably kill hundreds of creatures of any race with a simple lie, but the only thing she cared about at the moment was her son's welfare and she would deal with those problems later.

Loki bit his lower lip to keep it from trembling; to keep himself from speaking. He didn't want this moment- this beautiful, trust-filled moment - to be broken by his words; his weapons. No promises or lies would be spoken now. Just silence. So instead of speaking, Loki tightened his arms around his mother, filling their embrace with an implicit "I love you".

(Frigga never did tell Loki what Thor had said, and she would breathe a sigh of relief when she remembered that she would never have to tell Loki the awful things that his brother had said that day. Never again after that did she hear Thor utter something as vile as what he had that day.)

A mixture of a scream and a sob ripped itself from Loki's throat as hot tears rolled down his face. He clutched at his knees, the air, anything because his mother was dead. The only person to ever love him was gone, and nothing could bring her back.

Loki tilted his head up so that he was staring at the stark white ceiling of his cell. I miss you, he wanted to say. I love you. "Mother why did you leave?" Loki murmured, his voice hoarse. "You left me all alone down here." The broken God let out a small sigh and let his head rest against the wall. His eyes closed and he realized for the first time in a long while how tired he was. Loki's thoughts were muddled, his limbs were heavy, and he was just so, so tired. Sleep took mercy on him and he was pulled into peaceful darkness.