Odin chokes on blood; vision bathes in red. His fingers tear into the ashen dust as the dagger sinks in again, this time so close to his heart that he feels it touch a ventricle. It is a bizarre detachment he feels as the Odinforce separates from him, like a thin layer of skin peeling away all at once. The power surges stronger than ever as it battles to cling on, but just as a nova burns brightest near death, so does the Odinforce.

Through a veil of agonizing spasms in his chest and spreading pain and stars flashing before him, Odin watches as a volcano slumbering a mile away also sheds, but he realizes with a jolt that he is not hallucinating the layer after layer after layer of hardened sediment falling away. It crumbles like a sandcastle shaken by the residual tension of a high magnitude earthquake. He can't see Loki as he has crouched low enough to hold his hair back and traces the bloodied tip of the dagger against his cheek, but the ruckus from underneath the ground makes him slow his methodical ritual of torture. A minute of silence goes by, the eerie kind yet again which causes the hairs on Odin's neck and arms to stand, but from the charred ruins of what was the interior of the volcano rises a mountain of a beast as it tears its home planet apart.

It is a disoriented, smoldering Fire Giant. A hatchling, so to speak, but even as a hatchling it looms over them five times their size. It has woken just in time for the world to end.

It stumbles and puffs after decades of the dark nutrience of its mother's remains burning and breaking and hardening into a cradle fit for a king, but it does not pause when its settling eyes catch sight of their strange, tiny shadows. It roars, setting the land before it ablaze, and squashes the geysers—the resting places of Giants who never awakened—into flatland as it devours the distance between them.

Odin watches, blinking the stars out of his eye furiously, while Loki scrambles to his feet. The dagger drops with a sharp clink just next to Odin's ear while Loki throws his arms up over his head and the Giant's fist comes flying down way too fast. The force field he conjures blocks them both from harm, but the last minute enchantment and the unhinged force make him drop to his knees right beside Odin.

The first birth creates a chain reaction. A minefield of hatching volcanoes in the distance makes itself known through deep bursts and tearing contractions across all of Muspelheim. It makes the Allfather's bones shake. He braces the shards of the Odinforce that he's still got and reinforces Loki's force field while the Giant smashes again. The blazing fires of the infuriated Giant flare up so much that it glows stronger than the Sun, but it illuminates the hardest, cruelest, most unamused features on Loki's face as it burns.

"If there is one thing that pisses me off more than that old man's face, it is giant oafs smashing their fists into my business," he seethes. That is the moment Odin catches sight of veins of ice stretching beyond their force field. "Did your mother never teach you to ask before your barge in?" The cracking sound of pure ice snuffing flames comes one millisecond before the guttural scream of the Giant.

Odin's eye triple takes between them while everything else washes into a blur of colors. He's trying to think. If Loki can project such pure biological magic from the power written into his DNA, then where does his strength end? Where does it begin? What is for show and what is real?

Ice daggers form in Loki's hands as the Giant topples onto its backside, pushing itself as fast as it can to outrun the veins that stalk it.

"Crawl faster, you brute. This is what you wanted," Loki yells over the loud awakening still coming from miles away. With a shaky throw, one of the daggers tears through the Giant's foot. It melts with a frying hiss but leaves a gaping hole three times bigger than the entry wound.

Odin forces himself onto his feet. He feels dizzy from exhaustion and blood loss, in so much pain he can hardly keep himself from bending into two, but he would rather fight than wait to die. He stretches his arms out and traces runes into the sky. A sliver of the east wind comes to his command from the deep north of the closest celestial galaxy, one that has no sun, and he directs the surreal biting currents to wash over Loki as he charges straight for the Giant's head. It makes the runes all around his body glow, like stardust set on fire.

What the boy had intended to do was blind the Giant with frostbite, but instead it incinerates with a blinding burst of blue at first touch. Loki falls face first into the icy ashes left of it, but picks himself up and dusts it off immediately. The commotion was more than enough to catch other Giants' attention. Three claw and tear through their broken planet in their rage to avenge their deceased cousin.

Odin casts a glance to Loki, but Loki does not so much as seem like he's deliberately ignoring him. The reluctant truce has picked up again, which means Loki will resume his vengeance once the intruders into their personal drama are gone, but Odin is alright with that. He blocks the first incoming fist with his own force field while Loki bleeds a sheet of ice all around them within a ten mile radius.

It is a genius idea only he would think of.

With their own magically foraged weapons in hand—and sometimes two for both when Odin doesn't feel like he needs to keep his organs from spilling out of the gash behind his shoulder—the two slip and slide and skate around the Giants on the ice. They move too fast for them to keep up, and within minutes they too are reduced to icy ashes or their ectoplasmic fire skeletons.

#

Allfather knew it was too easy to be right, he just didn't want to put a damper on their honest success rate. He glances towards Loki ten miles away. He is on his knees sucking in deep breaths as he pushes the cold out of his veins through the palm of his hand and onto a hissing burn on his right arm.

The last Giant was a nasty fight for both. It was smarter, flared its feet up to melt their sheet of ice right in front of them, and it was faster, blocked or dodged both of their weapons or spells two out of three times, but in the end it fell as Loki sunk a strange, different dagger into its spine.

It was the giveaway.

Odin returns his focus into the distance. The burns he too had acquired fester deep, but he does not pay attention to them. He ignores the worsening pain in his chest as well. He is concerned with the fact that they had heard hundreds of Giants break through their nests yet only half a dozen ended up attacking. Where are the rest? Where are their fathers? Where by the names of the Norns is their King? He and Surtur have an abundance of unsettled business.

Loki gets back to his feet. He walks around the edge of the hissing pool of melted ice, across the ashes of two Giants, and straight for the opposite direction Odin is staring at.

The Allfather catches his arm. "How long have you carried the Casket with you?" he asks, and what sounded like a ridiculous question in his head now sounds like the most natural question to ask in the entire galaxy.

Loki tears his arm free. "Pardon?"

"You transformed a generous patch of pure magma rock into pure ice. You created living veins that followed your target too. I know the power of an Infinity Stone when I see it."

Loki's brows furrow. A corner of his lips twitch as he considers saying something, but then he shakes his head with a look of bewildered disappointment. Starts walking away again.

Odin follows even though each step makes the pain deeper. "What? Playing fetch for the one who holds your soul captive?" The accusation only makes Loki walk faster. "Tell me who it is and I shall carve the crest of the house of Odin into their spilled organs."

Not even a pause.

"Loki, speak their name or I will look for it. If I must be cruel to be kind—"

He bumps into Loki's chest. He'd turned all the sudden on his heels. Now, he peers at his father with an expression that cannot be defined.

"You look anything but well, Allfather," he says in a sweet tone, although a spark in his eyes tell Odin his words should be taken as mockery.

"The Odinforce is dying. Of course I am unwell."

"Yet you have not nodded off. It is nice to keep functioning, is it not?"

Odin's cheeks flare. "The Odinforce is not an entity whose actions I can predict. Should I have enough warning that it is failing, which I did, I can separate myself from it although I risk being unable to capture it again."

It suddenly strikes Odin odd that Loki's skin appears as marble as statues, but it also has a transparency to it that lets him see his veins are glittering. He blinks a little to quickly when he looks closer. There is something dark in them. As if Loki wasn't acting peculiar enough already, he draws closer to Odin with his hands reaching for his.

"Do you remember what happened, Allfather?"

Odin feels his blood start boiling as his son's fingers close around his. "I commanded you to tell me who—"

"Extraordinary," Loki says in a gentle tone. "Are you really so thick? What does your mind remember? A fight for the throne with a dagger and Gungnir? A magic trick? Me asking you kindly to leave Asgard?" Odin blinks. "Of course you'd choose to forget," he whispers, but the look on his face isn't anger, it is an apology. "This little runt couldn't possibly be stronger than you, could he?" After a moment of silence for Allfather to stew in confusion, Loki starts on his way again, but he trods with heavier, angrier steps across the rocks.

"Why are you so cross with me, boy?" Odin yells after him. "Tell me what I have forgotten." But Loki keeps on his path.

Odin grumbles and shakes some ashes off his clothes just to keep busy. What would Frigga say to see them like this? The thought makes sorrow well up inside his heart. He knows not what Frigga would say, but he knows she would not let Loki walk alone no matter the size of the mountain between them.

Just as he takes the first step to follow Loki again, a rumble of tectonic plates shifting and whining under their feet fills the silence of Muspelheim. First, Odin sees puffs of smoke rising into the stifled air from opening cracks. Next, he hears an odd sound, like the hiss of a snake stuck in a reverb room. Without another warning, a giant black snake tears through the ground right in front of Loki.

Appendages and guts of Fire Giants break away from its fangs. Loki falls as the ground under his feet peels back. With blood dripping out of his nose and his hair fallen across his face, he clenches his fingers together.

"Hela," Loki screams, and his voice sends a pulse through Muspelheim.

Before Odin can register anything else, Jörmungandr's gaping mouth tears into Muspelheim again with Loki disappearing into his belly.