The Forge's Heart

A Thor and Loki Story

transit umbra, lux permanet
-Shadow passes, light remains

The helm rested heavy in the crook of Thor's arm, as he walked along the stone-paved street: gleaming horns sweeping up, empty cheekguards braced against his wrist. When he turned a corner, into a narrow alley filled with shuttered windows, the morning sun fell on his back, and his shadow stretched out before him. He saw the horns' distinctive shape arching above his shoulder, as if, for a moment, Loki were still there at his side.

A muscle tensed in one cheek. He adjusted his grip on the helm, so that its shadow merged with his own, and vanished.

At the alley's far end, a broom-wielding boy appeared from an alcoved doorway and commenced a desultory sweeping, yawning. He glanced up as Thor approached, and his eyes fell at once to the helm in Thor's arm, jerked upward to Thor's face, and then dropped again, nervously, as he bent the neck to his prince.

"Good morrow, lad," Thor said.

"My lord," the boy responded, the words muffled by stiff lips. As Thor passed him, he saw the boy's eyes once more, sunlight glinting off the widening pupils as the boy stared at the helm, could not stop staring at it, stared openly.

Thor had taken four steps further when the boy's voice stopped him.

"Is it true, then?"

He paused, head bowed. Then, slowly, he turned and regarded the boy's face. The boy's cheeks were pale with amazement at his own temerity, but he met Thor's eyes squarely.

"Is what true?" Thor asked. He felt the burden of the boy's gaze, as if in this one Asgardian lad were bound up all the rumors and gossip and fear and grief that had swirled through the city for the past seven days.

Seven days since Loki fell.

"Prince Loki..." The boy looked down, biting his lip. "Prince Loki met his death in the cracking of the Bifrost?"

A long pause. Finally the boy spoke into it, a rush of words.

"We have heard only that he has died. But no songs have been sung! No one has said how or why? How it happened? No one knows anything..."

Thor sighed.

"Yes, lad. He fell from the bridge. He fell away. . ."

(I'm not your brother! I never was!

I could have done it, Father!)

He closed his eyes, for a moment, swaying in the fierce blast of raw memory. When he opened them, the boy had drawn back, a step.

"But then he is truly lost? There can be no death rites? No final journey upon the water? No lights lifted, to warm him on his way?" The boy swallowed. His brow was furrowed.

Thor looked away. "He is gone." He heard the harsh edge in his voice.

Another pause, longer.

"I . . . we . . . sorrow with you, Prince," the boy whispered.

Thor inclined his head. He realized that he was gripping Loki's helm so tightly that its edge was cutting a deep crease in the palm of his hand.

"I thank you," he said.

He knew the boy's eyes lingered on his back as he walked away.

Around another corner, and he found himself engulfed in noise and motion; he'd entered the Crafters' Square, and now he was surrounded by metalwrights and stoneworkers in leather aprons shouting orders to scurrying apprentices, and hovering skiffs unloading the morning's deliveries, and drifting pockets of heat from the glowing forges.

He increased his pace, eager to reach his destination before his presence registered, and the heavy object in his arm could make itself felt on the open street.

The workshop he sought was set back from the bustling noise, fronted by a walled courtyard and a gate molded of dull red metal. A fountain murmured gently along one wall, its blue tiles and cool water belying the smoky warmth that billowed out of the shop's entrance. Thor paused to fling back his thick cloak, and his eye snagged on a row of symbols, incised into the lintel above the door: the Valknut of Odin, Frigga's Wheel, his own Hammer, and the Nadr. The graceful, intertwined Serpent. Loki's sigil.

His jaw tightened. On how many doorposts and support beams in how many shops and households did those shapes persist? It was an ancient tradition from a more superstitious past: if the royal family is strong, then Asgard is strong, so we will carve the symbols deep.

And how long would it be, he wondered, before the shopkeepers and householders, all over the city, brought out their chisels and sanders and sorrowfully scraped and polished until the Serpent was a shadow of itself, and finally disappeared altogether? How long until three seemed the proper number for that line of royal symbols?

How had he never known that three was an infinitely smaller number than four?

He ducked his head under the lintel and entered the shop. In the dim orange light, a young woman looked up from her worktable. Her eyes flared in stunned recognition, and she scrambled to her feet; the bench on which she'd been perched teetered backward and fell over with a metallic clang.

"My lord!" she exclaimed, staring at him, and then abruptly bending the neck. Her eyes slid sideways, to rest for an awkward moment on the helm.

He bowed his head, briefly, in acknowledgement. "Are you the armorer Birna?"

"I? Oh. . . no, my lord. I am an apprentice, only."

"Summon her, then, if you please."

"At once." She dipped her head, again, and whirled away, scurrying with practiced ease around the large forge that dominated the rear of the workshop. Thor paced forward, several steps, his gaze drawn to it. Transparent panes of light shielded the room from the full blast of heat, but it was still uncomfortably warm, this close. He stared into its shimmering heart, until his eyes blurred in protest and footsteps approached from around the far side.

"I am Birna. You asked for me, Prince?" a voice said.

He looked away from the searing light to find a tall, leather-clad woman, studying him quizzically. Her face was plain, lined with many years of exposure to blasting heat, but her hands were beautiful, with the agile, clever fingers of an artist.

"I am told you are the best engraver in the city," he said.

"Aye." There was no arrogance in her voice, merely confirmation of fact. "How may I serve you?"

He walked to the worktable, gesturing for her to follow. A soft polishing cloth lay there, tossed to the side; with one hand he smoothed it out, and then set Loki's helm upon it. The light from the roaring forge flickered along the curve of the horns.

Birna contemplated it for a long breath, and then lifted her eyes to meet Thor's gaze.

"It was my brother's," he said, unnecessarily.

She nodded. "We mourn with you, my lord."

"I . . ." Now that he had come to it, now that the time had come to make his wishes known, his throat closed over the words, like a gate swung shut.

His hands curled into fists, and he rested them on the table, leaning forward. He forced the gate open, and his voice rumbled out, clipped and shorn of emotion. "I wish to have a likeness of this helm engraved upon my armor. Can you do this?"

"Of course." After a moment, she reached out two fingers, toward the burnished surface of the vambrace sheathing his forearm. "Here?"

His callused fingertips loosened the buckles, and he pulled the metal away from his arm, the leather lining its underside warm and stained with sweat. Birna reached out for it, but Thor hesitated. He smoothed a palm along its surface. What was a vambrace? A shield to the pulse, to the lifeblood as it ran between fist and heart? A weapon, to smash and crumple the throat of the enemy?

A safeguard to his life and an ally against his foes. Just as Loki had been.

As he had thought Loki had been.

He dropped it into the armorer's outstretched hand.

"Yes," he said. "That will do very well."

Her face had already relaxed into the abstracted expression of a craftsman, planning her work. "It won't take long. And you do not need to leave the helm, my lord. Take it with you. I can see that it is a . . . precious object."

He frowned, turning back to regard it.

Precious?

An empty helm. The space beneath its horns dark, shadowed, lifeless.

And suddenly, it filled in his vision with Loki's face, eyes gleaming, teeth flashing into a grin.

(Nervous, brother?

Nice feathers...)

And then that face was falling away, falling, the eyes darkening, the hand opening and releasing its grip on Odin's spear. His own voice screaming, hoarse with grief. Loki falling away from the Bifrost's broken edge, plunging into darkness, lost.

Dimly, he heard again the boy's voice, the boy from this morning, saying, "He is lost, then? No light to warm him on his way?"

Abruptly, his hands and body moving before mind and memory could gather themselves in protest, he seized the helm, spun on his heel, strode to the forge. With a wave of one arm, he shoved the lightscreen aside, and he hurled the helm into the forge's glowing, blue-white heart.

He heard Birna's gasp, and felt rather than saw her hand fling out in a jerky, aborted movement. Within the forge, in the dancing heatwaves, the horns of Loki's helm were sagging, falling, flaring into bright, molten light.

"Brother." His voice caught and rasped. "Light go with you, Loki. Peace, with you, my brother."

His head bowed. He heard nothing except the thud of his beating heart.

Only when the helm within the forge had disappeared completely did he become aware of hard stone, of pain, and realized he had sunk to his knees; he drew in a ragged breath.

A hesitant hand touched his shoulder.

"Prince Thor?" Birna's voice was unsteady.

He climbed to his feet, and silently unbuckled the other vambrace. As he placed it in her hand, he looked into her face, and almost flinched away from the bleak compassion he saw there.

"You will do this today?" he asked.

"My lord, I will do it at once."

Thor nodded. "I'll wait."

The sun was high when he emerged from the shop. He lifted his face to the light, and breathed in, a long draught of cooler air, and turned, and looked up at the row of symbols on the lintel. He lifted an arm, and pressed his fist against the last, feeling the carved lines of the Nadr under his knuckles. The sunlight overhead threw the curving edges of the design on his vambrace into sharp relief.

Then he walked away into the streets of the city, the lone Prince of Asgard, his hands empty now and his shadow falling behind him.