Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati.....
I. THE BROKEN NOTE
The problem with being the God of Mischief, Loki reflected, was that everyone expected the joke. The grand reveal. The flourish. They braced for chaos like one braces for a storm—loud, violent, and ultimately passing. But true corruption, he had learned, was not a thunderclap. It was the silent, unseen rot in the foundation. It was the single, sour note in a perfect chord that made the entire symphony taste of ash.
He stood in the ruins of a temple on a forgotten moon of Vanaheim. It was not an Asgardian outpost, nor a Jotun haunt. It was older. The stones, slick with mildewed moss, hummed with a frequency that made his teeth ache and his newly blackened blood itch in his veins. This was a place of the Vanir, the old gods, the ones who understood magic not as a tool, but as a language. And here, they had sung a song of binding so profound it had once imprisoned a concept—Entropy's Echo.
The binding was broken now. Shattered not by force, but by Loki's particular craft. He hadn't used a spell; he had introduced a paradox. A simple, whispered question into the temple's psychic resonance: "If a song binds silence, what binds the song?" The ancient magic, literal-minded and rigid, had tried to compute the uncomputable. It had short-circuited. The runes were now just dead scars on the rock.
Before him, hovering where the altar stone had been, was the Echo. It wasn't a creature. It was an absence. A patch of reality that swallowed light, sound, and warmth, leaving behind a perfect, silent, hungry void. It was the first true artefact of his new craft—Ginnungagap's Kiss, the touch of the primordial nothing that existed before the gods.
"Hello, little brother," Loki murmured, his voice the only sound in the clearing. The void pulsed, a blot of anti-existence against the star-scattered sky.
Odin, in his arrogance, had locked away the Casket of Ancient Winters, fearing its power to unmake. Frigga had taught Loki seiðr meant for healing and illusion. But this… this was the magic of unmaking. Not frost, but nullification. It was the power of the lie so perfect it erased the truth. It was black not because it was evil, but because it was the colour of the canvas before the paint, of the page before the word.
And it was corrosive. The cracks on his skin, obsidian veins against his Jotun blue, throbbed in sympathy with the Echo. Using this power was a dialogue with oblivion, and every conversation left him less himself. His memories were becoming abstract—the taste of Frigga's honey cakes was now just the concept 'sweetness and loss'. Thor's laughter was the idea 'sonic boom of camaraderie'. He was becoming a library of definitions, not experiences. The price was monstrous. It was also the only coin he had left.
A shimmer of gold disrupted the moon's pallid light. The Bifrost. He'd expected company, just not this quickly. Heimdall's sight was proving annoyingly adaptable.
But it wasn't the Watchman who stepped onto the moss. It was Sif, her hair a blade of moonlight, her expression grim. Behind her, a dozen Einherjar, their spear-tips glowing with containment runes. Not an arrest party. A quarantine detail.
"Loki Laufeyson," she said, her voice stripped of its old, grudging respect. It was flat. Clinical. "You are leaking ontological decay. Surrender the anomaly."
He almost laughed. Ontological decay. So, Asgard's scholars had put a name to it. "Surrender? I'm not holding it, Lady Sif. We're having a conversation. It's a terrible listener."
The Echo, as if sensing new presences, extended a tendril of void towards the nearest Einherjar. The warrior didn't scream as his arm, from the fingertips up, ceased to have ever existed. One moment, a gauntlet gripping a spear. The next, a smooth, seamless stump at the elbow, as if evolution had simply decided arms ended there. The man stared, his brain breaking around the edges of the impossible.
Sif didn't flinch. She raised her sword, and the runes along its blade flared with a harsh, white light—Ur-Light, the first light from the dawn of creation. A crude but potent counter-force.
"You traffic in the unreal," she spat, advancing. "You break the rules of being."
"Rules?" Loki's smile was a thin, cold cut. "Rules are the stories the powerful tell to make their chaos look like order. Odin's rules built a golden prison. Mine…" He gestured to the silent, spreading void. "Mine simply open the door."
He didn't fight her. Fighting was Thor's idiom. Instead, he redirected. He focused his will, not on Sif, but on the story she told herself. The story of the unwavering shield-maiden, loyal to Asgard, her worth proven in battle. He took the silent song of the Echo and wove it into a single, devastating question, planting it in the heart of her psyche:
What are you without your loyalty?
The effect was not immediate violence. Sif stumbled, her sword's light flickering. Her eyes, fixed on him, glazed for a microsecond with a terrifying, free-floating doubt. It was enough. The Echo, sensing a faltering in the localised reality her will helped uphold, surged towards her.
Loki turned and walked into the shadows between the temple stones. He heard the shouts, the sizzle of Ur-Light against null-space, the choked sound of a man trying to scream with a voice that was being conceptually erased. He didn't look back. The thrill wasn't in the kill; it was in the introduction of the impossible question. Sif would live, probably. But she would never again be certain. And in a warrior, uncertainty was a more insidious poison than any blade.
His sanctuary was not a place, but a fold. A tiny pocket of twisted space-time he had carved using the Echo's principles, nestled in the blind spot between the branches of Yggdrasil. Here, the walls were not stone but solidified memory and stolen silence. In the centre, on a throne of petrified thought, sat his greatest creation yet.
It looked like a child's mobile—crystalline shards hanging from threads of metaphysical tension. Each shard held a captured moment: a grain of sand from the shores of time where past, present, and future bled together; a single tear shed by a Norn at a fraying thread; the last breath of a forgotten star. And at its heart, pulsing softly, was a sliver of the Echo itself. This was the Symphony of Unbecoming, a machine designed not to destroy, but to edit.
His plan was not Ragnarök. That was brutish, predictable. His plan was Revision.
Asgard's power was built on a foundational story: The Glorious Aesir, bringers of order, victors over chaos. But what if that story had a different first draft? What if the first draft showed Odin not as a wise king, but as a cunning thief? Showed Thor not as a heroic protector, but as a favoured, ignorant brute? The black magic wasn't in changing the past—that was beyond even the Echo. It was in changing the memory of the past, the story that gave the present its power.
He reached out a trembling, crack-veined hand towards the mobile. He would start small. A single, minor edit in the cosmic ledger. The Battle of Vanaheim's Ridge, a cornerstone of Asgardian-Valorous history. He would introduce a whisper, a shadow of a doubt: Was it courage, or was it a misunderstanding born of Odin's poor diplomacy?
He focused, channelling the silent power of the void through the Symphony. The crystals chimed, a sound like frozen glass breaking. He pushed—
Agony. White, searing, and absolute. It lanced from the mobile, up his arm, and into his soul. It was not a backlash of energy, but a correction. The universe itself, its foundational laws rejecting his edit. The cracks on his skin blazed with actinic light, and he felt something deep inside him snap.
He was thrown across the fold, crashing into a wall of memories that wept spectral tears. The Symphony trembled and fell still. The edit had failed.
Gasping, he looked at his hand. The obsidian veins were wider, deeper. They were no longer just on the surface. He could feel them inside, threading through his essence, rewriting him as he tried to rewrite reality. The symbiont was becoming the host. The power he wielded was not his to command; it was using him as a conduit, and it was burning out his circuitry.
A laugh bubbled up in his throat, raw and hysterical. The King of Black Magic was a peasant in his own court. The throne was a cage. The silence he commanded was slowly eating his own voice.
And then, a new sound. Not in his fold, but in the world outside. A deep, resonant boom that shook the roots of the World Tree. It was not the Bifrost. It was something heavier. Older.
It was the sound of a prison door, creaking open.
He knew, with chilling certainty, what it was. His manipulations, his introduction of unreality into the fabric of the Nine Realms, had weakened more than just Asgard's story. It had stressed the fundamental bindings of the cosmos. And in a cavern deep beneath the frozen plains of Niflheim, something that should never have been able to move again had just stirred.
The Wolf. Fenrir.
His chaotic magic had not just made him a king. It had made him a lockpick. And he had just unpicked the wrong door.
The thrill that shot through him was no longer one of mischievous triumph, but of sheer, unadulterated terror. This was no longer his game. He had been playing with a god's toys, and now a Titan was waking up to find its nursery in disarray.
The King of Black Magic looked at his crumbling hands, then towards the psychic echo of the Wolf's awakening howl—a sound of pure, mindless hunger that even the void seemed to fear. For the first time in his long, chaotic life, Loki felt a chill that had nothing to do with his Jotun heritage.
He had wanted to rewrite the story. Now, it seemed, the story was writing back. And the next chapter looked to be written in blood, void, and the breaking of all things—starting with him.