Chapter Text
Steve was almost glad, as they backed away; however bad this was going to be, he couldn't imagine anything being worse than what they'd been planning to do: to put a child, a child, to death, like some kind of horrible pagan sacrifice. Iphigenia, or the baby thrown off the walls of Troy.
And yeah, he got it, this could get a lot worse than death for her and for a lot of other kids too, but he still couldn't help feeling like someone had just handed him a reprieve. However bad this got, even if it went all the way—okay. God could handle restarting the universe. It was up to them to keep it worth restarting.
So he was grateful, and he was going to do—he was going to do something, he hadn't figured out what yet, but he was going to fight with everything he had, whatever it took, and he would've done that anyway, but he would be able to go into it glad because he hadn't had to be a part of that.
"Thor," he said. "What's the plan? How should we—" He stopped, turning, because Thor wasn't going to answer him. Thor looked like someone had just ripped him open from collarbone to groin and he just hadn't gotten around to dying yet. He had his arms around Loki and Hela, and if anything could have convinced Steve that this sacrifice they'd been planning was anything like the only way, it would've been his face: the utter lack of hope.
"Guys," he said sharply, but the others all looked the same way, hollowed out and nothing but despair in their faces, staring down into the pit. In Loki's arms, Hela looked empty, her eyes staring like a corpse and the arms and legs dangling limp, as though she'd pulled back inside herself to hide. Even the Hulk looked scared and miserable, hunching away like a kid expecting to get hit.
Steve followed their gaze down the steps and he thought he saw it, maybe, some hint of something moving that didn't have a shape his brain could fit to it, not even a weird half-imagined one like Yggdrasil, like the ants. "Listen to me," he said, turning away, "whatever this is—however this is going to end—we're not going to lie down for this. Clint—"
Clint stirred a little and looked at him. "Get up into those trees," Steve said, pointing. "Lay down some cover fire on those stairs. Nataha, stay with him, use your sense—if we can't see it, give us your best read where it is."
They both were silent, still; Steve reached up and shook Clint by the arm, caught Natasha with his other hand, gave them both a shake. "Come on, people, move!" he snapped, military crisp, and Clint shook his head abruptly like a dog and then jumped for the lowest branch. Natasha nodded once, stiffly, and was moving behind him.
Steve turned to the others. "Hulk," he said, and pausing added softly, "—Bruce. I need you as our anchor. Whatever this is, if anyone can hold the line, it's you. Can you do that?"
Hulk kept his head lowered, his shoulders hunched over. "Hulk not like it," he said, in a voice that was almost small. "Hulk scared."
Steve swallowed. "Yeah," he said quietly, "me too, pal. Can you be brave anyway?"
He hesitated, then he put his hand on Hulk's huge arm. Hulk looked down at it. "Hulk be brave," he said. "OK."
Tony hadn't closed his faceplate. The pale glow inside made him look sickly, deepened the shadows at the corners of his mouth. "Hey," Steve said, and he felt stupid, but touch seemed to be helping, so he reached in and—
Tony blinked once, twice, and slowly refocused on him. "Did you just boop me in the nose?"
"Well—" Steve said.
"No, forget it, fine, we're making a stand," Tony said. "It'll eat the universe over our dead bodies. Almost certainly that's going to be literally true, but we'll give it a hell of a case of indigestion. Got it. Where do you want me?"
"Stay off the ground and out of its reach," Steve said. "Look for any weaknesses, take any opening Hulk and Thor and I can give you." He reached out for Thor, and then even for Loki, and saw them stir too. "Thor," he said, "we need you in the front line, too. You, me, and Hulk. And Loki—Loki's her final line of defense."
He looked at Loki, who was staring at him with a sudden almost terrible look on his face. "Right?" Steve said to him, half challengingly.
"No," Loki said, and bending his head kissed Hela on her brow and then abruptly held her out; Steve caught her automatically and found himself with an armful of small dead girl. Hela stirred in his arms and her face went less empty; she looked up at him out of her green eyes.
"You are her final defense," Loki said. "Keep her safe," and with a nod to Thor he stepped up, on Hulk's other side, and shaped a glowing spear out of the air in his hands.
#
"It's moving," Natasha said abruptly, from just behind his shoulder, and Clint started to shoot blind, trying less to hit the thing than find it, just to even get at the shape of it. The taste of helplessness and despair was still lingering where Steve had somehow shoved it into the back of his throat, but he could move again.
His shots were hitting something, or more like not-hitting it: whatever it was, they were bouncing off. The ones that missed hit the ground, explosives going off and kicking up dust and dirt and dead leaves in a cloud that began to define a space, not so much a thing but vaguely where it might be.
And it was coming. The cloud stirred and moved, eddied around something almost flowing up the broken stairs, coming for them all. Down below, Loki suddenly said a word, something that rang loud and cold and hard in Clint's ears, and a blazing dart jumped from his hand and flung into the cloud at whatever was inside. There was a bright flash: impact, and Clint scowled. Fine, maybe he'd die petty, but it still pissed him off Loki had made contact and he couldn't put an arrow in the thing. Not that Loki's shot seemed to have done much good. Nithhogg kept on rolling gently and horribly up the stairs, getting closer.
Clint looked back at Natasha. She met his eyes; they didn't need to say a word. He hadn't used them, any of them, the explosives she'd brought him back. He had dreams about them sometimes though: dreams where he let an arrow fly and he saw too late that he'd put on one of the wrong explosives, dreams where he watched the arrow arc up and sink into the ground and burst, a thousand cracks spiderwebbing slowly out of it, and he saw them open into horrible chasms full of glowing silver light—chasms that grew, and grew, swallowing trees and cities, and he ran but they still came on until he fell with open hands grasping, and woke up before he hit the light.
Sometimes he checked his arrows twice just to make sure they were safe. Tony had given him another ordinary set of the same explosives and Clint had handed them back, made Tony change the color of the casings and add a notch on the back that he could feel with his thumb when he pulled the arrows out.
But now or never, he figured. "Get 'em for me, will you?" he said to Natasha quietly, and she nodded. While he put down another dozen shots, she got the compartment in the quiver open, and drew out the case. He could see her hands working quick and sure out of the corner of his eye while he kept firing, and then she said, "Ready." He reached over his shoulder, pushed the button, and when he slid his thumb over the smooth back of the first cartridge, a cold tingle crawled up his arm.
"Here goes nothing," Clint said, sighted down the line at the cloud, at the peak of it rising at the top of the stairs, and let the arrow go.
It flew, beautiful, shining, and it hit cloud dead on. The trigger went—he saw the blue flash—then nothing. Nothing happened.
Clint said, "Well, that was—"
Natasha drew in a sharp breath. "I see it," she said, harshly. "I can see it," and a shrill screaming noise like metal tearing was rising into the air.
#
Scary thing big and ugly! Scary thing yelling. Hulk not scared of scary thing anymore. Puny scary thing whining about stupid arrow.
Hulk smash scary thing in mouth. Maybe in mouth. Hulk not sure. Scary thing have lots of round holes with sharp bits. Maybe that one is mouth? Hulk smash it too!
Hawkeye hits scary thing again with arrow. Hulk see more of scary thing. Ugly. Hulk not like it! Hulk not want scary thing! Thor hits scary thing too. Loki hits scary thing. Hulk hits more. Hulk hits hardest. Hulk stronger than Asgardians, ha ha.
Other guy say watch out. Scary thing try to bite Hulk. Ha! That real mouth! Hulk smash it.
"Barton, spread your arrows!" Loki shouting. "The dark energy gives Nithhogg form we can strike."
More arrows. More of scary thing. Scary thing big. Scary thing very big. OK, maybe scary thing still scary. Hulk smash anyway.
Other guy say hit scary thing all at same time. "OK," Hulk says. Hulk poke Loki.
"What are you doing, you idiotic beast?" Loki snaps. Loki rude.
Hulk shove Loki. "Hit scary thing. Hit scary thing together."
Loki says, "What?" Dumb Loki. But Thor says, "Yes! Make ready!"
Thor swing hammer. Thor swing hammer round and round. Thunder. Hulk not like thunder. But OK for this. Scary thing also not like thunder, maybe. "Now!" Thor yells.
Hulk hit scary thing. Loki hit scary thing. Thor hit scary thing! Lightning! Scary thing yelling! Scary thing mad! Ha ha.
Tony Stark shoot scary thing too, in same place. Boom!
Hulk keep hitting scary thing there. Smash, smash, smash. Scary thing not go down. OK. Hulk keep smashing.
#
"Jesus," Tony said under his breath, hovering above. He could see the charred stumps of Clint's arrows sticking up out of the thing like stakes planted in the ground. It wasn't even a thing, just a misshapen lumpy grayish mound of mouths and teeth and flesh that didn't make sense. But the arrows were markers in featureless ground: he could look at them and get his bearings.
He didn't really want his bearings, though. The mass of the thing sprawled down the stairs and into the pit of the amphitheater, filling the space, but what had Tony fairly concerned was that it didn't stop there. Everything they were seeing was just—one little piece of something worse, something that had shoved into their world through the floor of the amphitheater. How big did a thing have to be to eat the entire universe? It didn't like the arrows or the good hard pummeling it was getting right now courtesy of Hulk and the Norse Wonder Twins, but it wasn't hitting back at them, not really. Maybe that was because they were biting its big toe and the hand coming to swat them was a few galaxies away.
Tony looked down into one of the open mouths. There was nothing he could see inside but black. "Jarvis, load up the probe subroutine into one of the mini-Jerichos," he said. "Let's take a peek inside."
"Twenty-three percent. Seventy-eight percent," Jarvis said, "—and ready." It popped up on his shoulder; Tony fired: the missile darted between three sets of teeth and into one of the gaping mouths, blazing, burning up its payload to create two tiny spotlights instead of an explosion. Jarvis threw up the 360-degree video stream on Tony's HUD as three screens: middle screen tiny figure of himself in the Iron Man suit framed between two jagged teeth; left screen the spotlight searching endless black, right screen the same.
"Stream's locked up," Tony said: the images weren't changing.
"No, sir," Jarvis said. "The data is coming. The rate is merely slow."
On the screen, he was getting a little bit smaller, but not by much. "Any other data?" Tony said. "What—hey," he said; the flashlight lines on both screens were curving. "Are those hitting something?" Tony said, starting to have a bad feeling.
"I'm getting very strange readings, sir. They may be unreliable."
"Like what?" Tony said.
"The probe is sending its data with timestamps from the future," Jarvis said.
Tony landed next to Loki and grabbed his arm. Loki yanked back his spear out of the thing's body and turned to glare at him. "What is this thing?" he demanded. "Is this a—is there a black hole in there?"
"Nithhogg is the singularity," Loki snapped at him.
"You mean a singularity," Tony said.
"I do not," Loki said. "I mean the singularity." He seized the spear in both hands and drove it into a staring eye; a blast of magic rippled out of it and scorched another half-dozen.
"So there's a black hole in there," Tony said. Or close enough anyway; Loki was just being a dick. "How the hell do you beat a black hole?"
"You don't," Loki said.
"Thanks, Negative Nellie," Tony said. "Would it help to get it out of the event horizon?"
"No!" Loki said. "The event horizon is all that protects us from interaction with its real nature."
"And what's that? Chaos?" Tony said.
"Of course not," Loki said. "We are chaos, Stark. Life is disordered and nonsensical; all existence is absurd and fragmented and imperfect. Nithhogg is perfection and order. Why do you think it hates us so? We are the flaw. And—" he interrupted to scorch another piece of slowly encroaching blob, "—this is hardly the time for a session of correcting your Midgardian fallacies!"
"See, that's where you'd be wrong," Tony said, and grabbing Loki managed to haul him back out of gaping mouth range for a moment. "Listen to me for a second. You know what this lets me do?" He tapped the glowing circle in his chest. "As far as I can tell, anything, as long as I can understand how it works. So you want me to start unraveling a black hole for you, start talking, and use words my puny human brain can understand."
Loki snarled at him, "What's between the square root of negative seven, and seventy-three times pi?"
"What?" Tony said. "That makes no sense. The square root of negative seven is an imaginary number, it's not on the number line, and why the hell seventy-three times pi, why not seventy-one or—"
"Shut up," Loki said, and spread his hands out flat, thumbs and index fingers touching to make a diamond. A latticework of white lines fell from his hands, twisting around one another into an incomprehensible mess. "Only your pathetic species would label numbers imaginary and then suppose that this meant they really didn't exist."
"They don't!" Tony said. "Unless you're operating in a different universe."
"Yes!" Loki said. "Precisely. Now go away."
"Have I mentioned recently how much I hate you?" Tony said, and took off just in time to evade the first real blow, a slowly extruded pseudopod flung out like a club: Loki barely dived in the other direction, and Thor whirled to smash the limb away from them both, back into the main bulk of the body.
"If you'll forgive my saying so, sir," Jarvis said, "that was a singularly unhelpful conversation."
"No, it was great," Tony said, blasting two climbing arms that were trying to get up at Clint and Natasha's perch as he circled away. "Another universe. Okay. Let's posit those two numbers exist on a meaningful number line in some universe — "
"Oh, certainly," Jarvis said.
"Shut up," Tony said. "What would that universe look like? What's in between them on that line?"
The hell of it was, it tasted like the kind of question he could have answered, if he'd only had a few years to wrestle with it and tear it apart and turn it inside out, the sort of thing he would have left in the back of his head to percolate and one day he'd wake up knowing all the answers — actually, usually the eureka moment happened while he was having sex, one of the many spectacular things about sex, which he would really miss if he died today, but the point was, right now he had about twenty minutes if they were lucky, and the way this day was going, luck did not really seem to be on their side.
#
Clint had spent all the altered explosives; now he was down to his last five arrows, and rationing those to fend off the limbs that were starting to come at them. Natasha had stayed with him; the thing down there wasn't on a human scale, not something her own weapons could touch, but she could aim him in the right direction.
Nithhogg had — soft spots: she didn't know what else to call them, but they looked different to her eyes, although she couldn't have described the difference in words: not color, not texture, not shape; they just pulled at her, the same way that all her other predictions had pulled. Like a moment of potential, something that didn't exist yet, but still might.
They lasted barely a moment and then faded away again. The harder Thor and Hulk and Loki hit, the more of them rippled away over the body. She'd been able to direct Clint well enough to hit some of them, and Nithhogg shuddered with those impacts.
She still didn't know how much good any of this was going to do. But she'd stayed; there was no better place for her to be, yet; and then abruptly she knew there was: she turned and saw Tony darting between swelling limbs, blasting them — halfheartedly, and she reached up and touched her communicator. "Stark," she said, "come over here."
He negotiated the battlefield to land a minute later. "Not that I'm ever sorry for a chance to ogle the two of you in your charming fight gear — "
"Give me the suit," Natasha said.
He opened the mask and stared at her. "What?"
She was increasingly sure. "Give me the suit," she snapped. "Clint, fall back with him to Steve. Whatever else you're trying to do," she said to Tony, "it's important: you have to focus on it. And I need to be in the field. Give me the suit."
He stared a moment longer, then his face went grim, and he nodded. "Step back," he said, and shut his eyes, facing her. The light in his chest blazed, and the suit came apart around him into a thousand pieces, flying across the space between them; she held still while it assembled itself around her body, displays on six layers spreading out around her peripheral vision, weapons systems and propulsion and armor condition, pieces of data slotting into her head like parts of an operation.
Tony looked small and vulnerable standing on the battlefield now in just his t-shirt and pants and sneakers, but the bright glow of the silver circle was still shining out from his chest. He opened his eyes and nodded to her. Clint said, "Come on, Stark. Nat, watch your back out there." He laid down his last arrows in a row in the dirt down the amphitheater path, kicking up clouds of dust, and he and Tony took off towards where Steve had dug in, behind a low hill near the lake shore.
"Please do inform me if I can be of any assistance, Ms. Romanoff," Jarvis said in her ear. "All systems are ready."
"Then let's go," she said, and threw herself into the air, looking for a chance.
#
Thor could only be glad, with what room was left in him for gladness, that his friends did not truly understand what they fought: either the enemy, or the cause. The horror of it would shred them, surely; he could only barely keep to the battlefield himself, and only because there was nothing else to be done which would not have been still worse: to lie down and die, or to flee uselessly for a scant span of days or weeks or years with annihilation ever at their heels.
But that annihilation was utterly certain. Soon he would die, and he would know as he died that Hela would die soon as well, and all he loved after her. Asgard would stand alone to the very end of that final terrible war, a lonely wavering citadel as the worlds fell to Nithhogg's eager maw and rot climbed up the trunk of Yggdrasil, but the eternal city too at last would come down as the tree fell, a terrible crashing ruin that would nurture no new life, only a cold and dreadful disintegration.
And Thor would know as he died that the fault was his, for he had been weak. He had yielded and allowed Loki to lure him back, instead of remaining in the golden hall; he had succumbed to Loki's need and love and despair. Yet he could no more regret that failure than he could cease to fight.
But despair closed in ever nearer. When Thor struck, he saw faint ripples travel away across the hideous, half-unformed body, dying out like a pebble flung into a deep ocean; if Nithhogg recoiled, it was only for a moment. And still the great worm crept further on towards them, its great bulk rippling and increasing, misshapen tendril-limbs forming slowly out to strike, all the while its strength went on coalescing into the single great fist that would bring them down, in the end, with a single blow like the death of a star.
The Hulk slogged on beside him, blows tireless and with the rhythm of war-drums; Loki too fought with all his art, all his skill, a thing of silver and shadows and glimmering light. But even his beauty was another wound to Thor's heart: that he should have Loki again by his side, that they should have found their way past grievance and hatred back to love, only to see it all unmade so utterly. Thor wept as he fought, and dashed tears from his face with the back of his hand as he drew Mjolnir back to swing yet again.
Thor looked at Loki again nevertheless, for strength. Loki's face was fey and wild and illuminated with the pale light of his power; his lips moved slightly as he fought, on and on, perhaps with a death-song, making a lament for them, the only one that ever would rise to the boughs of Yggdrasil, for what little that mattered now.
Thor did not dare look back towards Hela. He would look that way once only. He would look when it was too late for her fear, her coming agony, to break him of the strength to fight; in the moment before death fell upon him. Until then — he fought on.
#
Loki ducked and rolled beneath another blow, his blades severing the limb above his head as he came up; the shivering mass of it fell upon the stones of the amphitheater and disintegrated. He could not let thought touch him, for fear of despair. He remained inside his body only: this muscle tightening, this tendon drawing short, this finger placed here, elbow positioned here, point the toe, flowing with mathematical precision from one form to another, a turning now, arm snapping long, straight from the shoulder, lunge ahead, blade piercing the unreal flesh before him, sinking deep, straight out again, turn and step and step.
He shadowed Thor, and then the Hulk, letting his own blows echo theirs, driving into Nithhogg; then grudgingly, little by little, he began to fight at Romanoff's side, whose blows seemed to cause Nithhogg more injury, as though she somehow knew just where to strike. Each blow led directly to the next; she laid down starbursts of power from Stark's suit, constellations to mark the way, and Loki followed them with blades and felt the difference in the flesh he pierced, softer and more rotten, some essential weakness.
They struck again and again, and those soft places of corruption began to linger, for a second blow, a third; Nithhogg's body quivered and resentfully gathered towards them, trying to collect its strength. "Thor!" Loki cried, and saw Thor turn to look, saw him catch sight of the pattern; Thor in turn brought the Hulk's attention to it as well.
They were all fighting now in unison, following Romanoff's lead: an elaborate and whirling dance, that wound itself around the still-standing spikes of Barton's arrow-shafts, which still were fixing Nithhogg's shape. Loki realized, with a sudden, growing astonishment, that beneath that constraint Nithhogg was nevertheless putting forth still more of itself: more of its essence was pouring into that grey and swollen sac. This was no longer just a mere shadow of Nithhogg's being in the amphitheater with them: the worm was here, present.
Romanoff was firing without cease now, marking more and still more places out for them, as many as all their strength and speed could possibly reach. Loki slammed his swords into two of the deepest pits of rot and left them there, and then fell further back and switched to knives. He spent them as quickly as he could form them, diving and twisting among the spawning tendrils, many thin snake-limbs that reached for him, for the flashing arrow that Natasha made aloft, that tried to wind around Thor's legs and the Hulk's until they stamped them away.
Fighting and fighting, Loki almost did not have room for breath or thought, but one thought could not help but come creeping slowly in, foolish and unbearable and impossible: they were making progress. They were holding Nithhogg. It was absurd, but they were doing it, somehow; they were containing the destroyer of worlds.
And that — that — made no sense at all. Of course they were still going to lose, eventually; the terrible mass of the worm would overwhelm them at last. But even this brief moment was too much success. If Loki had been given a span of years, a century perhaps, to design a defense against Nithhogg, he might have crafted such a delay from their joined powers, but there had been no span of years; the sheer coincidence that they should have found a way —
"Wait!" he heard Stark yell. "Wait, I got it! I've got it!"
Loki halted, on the edge of the amphitheater, and saw: Thor and the Hulk and Romanoff stepping into places equidistant from him, arrayed as four points of a pentagram; he turned towards the fifth —
Stark had stepped in front of Rogers and Hela; he was drawing a ropey line of silver out of his chest, the ring blazing and his face caught in a rictus of strain. He was drawing it forth, and throwing the end to Barton, who tied it at evenly spaced distances to one arrow after another, launching them. One slammed into the ground at Loki's feet, only waiting for him to put out a hand.
"Pick it up!" Barton was yelling, over their comlink, through a hiss and crackle of endless static. "Pick up the line!"
Thor had already seized it at his point, smashing tendrils away with Mjolnir in his other hand; Romanoff dropped to the ground and took it up; the Hulk eyed it warily and shook his head and mumbled to himself and then at last put out his hand and grabbed it. Stark held the ends between his hands, ashen-faced but grinning savagely with victory, the idiot, and behind him — behind him —
Behind him, Hela put out her hand and reached into Rogers' chest, through his back. He sank to his knees, his face wide and astonished with agony, mouth open. For a moment, Loki thought he would collapse, would break beneath it; he did not. He held in total silence, arms fallen out from his body, chest arched up, until she drew her hand back out again, with what the dead had given him, and then he fell to the ground like a hollowed sack.
It looked like nothing, lying like a small dark seed pod in her hand, oval and unremarkable. She put it up to her mouth and swallowed it, and in the small fragile husk of her borrowed body, Loki saw her green eyes turn black.
Loki stood panting, trembling in all his limbs, understanding at last. The taste of being manipulated was sour and nauseating in the back of his throat, bitterly familiar. Oh; he had hated Odin; he had hated Laufey; he had loved Thor, who was a stranger to anything like it. But of course, Hela was not only Thor's daughter. She was his, and their grandchild.
The years of agony: those first days with the hot terrible burn of her growing beneath his heart, as he struggled desperately to find something, anything, that could house her before his spirit swallowed her own. The wrenching misery of watching her stumble in the first mortal body like a flailing puppet, arms jerking in spasmodic movements as she looked up at him with the wordless accusation of an infant: why have you failed me, father?
The grinding years of cowering in the shadows and low corners of human cities, the stench and refuse of Vegas, pretending to be a mortal, half making himself one, because every thought, every scrap of power he could spare, was all given to her, to the frantic effort to — save her. He wanted to laugh, helplessly, endlessly.
The sacrifices and promises he had made, the battles he had fought and the torments he had endured with the ash of despair always in his mouth, always, always; the thousand things that should have worked, the spells that failed, the bodies that disintegrated —
How long would she have kept him suspended in agony, always watching with patient green eyes, pretending to endure, while he failed and failed and failed again? As long as it took, surely; until Nithhogg at last picked up her scent and took the bait. When mortal bodies at last finally became inadequate — or rather, when Loki had believed them to have become inadequate — something would surely have come along; one desperate attempt would have worked a little, just a little, enough to prolong his struggle —
The cord was at his feet, trembling around the arrow, blazing. Nithhogg was gathering itself in sudden alarm, at last perceiving the trap; in another moment it would fall upon one of them, it would smash one of them with all its might, and the pentagram would collapse. "Loki!" Thor shouted, across the amphitheater. "Loki!"
Hela moved forward over the ground, her stick-body graceful as a dancer's now, sleek: there was no more use in concealment. She moved past where Barton knelt beside Rogers' body, and reached out to take the lines where they met; Stark fell back, stumbling, and sank to the ground staring up at her. She did not look at him; she only brought the two ends together, and joined them, and then turned to look over at Loki.
Loki stared at her, allowed himself the luxury of a final moment of refusal, a moment of violent and savage hate: I will not, I will not, though the tree falls forever I will not.
"Please, father," she said, simply, and he reached down and took up the cord.
The points drew taut. Where the lines crossed one another, a pentagon formed, enclosing Nithhogg's body. The worm thrashed, the endless mouths opening and closing, a silent shriek of fury. It rose into a column and sank again; it tried to eel out beneath; it tried to fling itself against the bindings. It rose and fell and rose again, struggling, a pinned insect writhing and trying to be free, while Hela held the reins in her small withering hands: her arms were blackening with power, her thin mortal garments falling from her like the papery leaves of summer's end and darkness spreading over her like ink in a pool.
She brought it low at last, the grotesque shuddering mass of it collapsing lumpen at her feet, and the silver cords went slipping out of Loki's fingers, out of all their fingers, to draw tight all around it. Hela stepped forward, swaying and stretched tall, a pillar of black and painful to look upon, her limbs almost undefined; but the ends of the silver lines were still clenched and blazing in one fist, and she laid the hand of a possessor upon the worm's stained and rotting flesh.
She looked around, no child anymore and Loki did laugh, helplessly, full of hatred and adoration: his daughter, bringing the worm to heel; and then he sank to his knees and wept, his hands scorched and flaking, marked with the raw charred line of the rope across palm and fingers, because his child was gone.