Chapter 34 - God's Might.
Loki vanished. This time completely. The flames around them died with her, every last one, and the scene changed without warning. Dhira stood in a burning landscape, the details unclear but the heat real, and he turned slowly with his eyes carrying that particular stillness that comes after a long fight, present and measuring everything.
Then he heard a familiar voice.
He turned. Dia was walking toward him through the smoke. He watched her approach and didn't move toward her. His eyes tracked her with the same quiet vigilance he had been carrying for the last hour. He didn't know if she was real. He stopped her midway with one hand raised.
"Stop. Say something about Loki."
She froze. Her expression shifted. Then she said, "Turn around."
He turned. There was no one there. He was already turning back when something drove into his chest. He looked down. A dagger. Loki stood in front of him, her hand on the handle, the blade buried deep. She tisked softly.
"Tu tu tu. Missed the heart. Don't say this goddess is heartless anymore." She pressed it harder. Dhira moved to respond and found he couldn't. Chains of molten iron erupted around his wrists and ankles, binding him mid-motion. He pulled against them. They didn't shift. He pulled harder. Nothing.
Loki watched him struggle with something close to fond amusement. "Foolish mortal. These are the chains that bind the great giant Shurter. Don't try, Dhira, don't. Even my foolish nephew would have difficulty with—"
The chains cracked.
She froze.
In all her centuries, in every encounter she had catalogued and every mortal she had ever underestimated correctly, she had never once seen that happen. The silence that followed was genuine, and so does the moment of collapse. Dhira didn't give it space to last. He pulled the dagger from his own chest in one motion and drove it into Loki's chest before she could recover.
And he didn't miss, he aimed and pierced the heart.
Her eyes went wide. A thin line of red appeared at the corner of her mouth. Blood touched his hand, dark and warm, and it wasn't his. God's blood. Dhira didn't pause. He tried to push the blade upward to finish it.
Then he felt it.
Not heard. Not saw. Felt. Something enormous gathering in the air around him, the way pressure builds before something structural gives way. His instincts, trained across a hundred and seven battles, screamed at him with a clarity that felt almost physical. He looked at Loki. She had come out of her shock. The blood in her mouth hadn't stopped but her eyes had changed, and she was smiling. "Aren't you cute."
He released his grip and threw himself backward with everything he had.
"GOD'S MIGHT."
The words left her mouth and the world went with them. A light erupted that had no business existing inside any scale he had encountered before, blinding and total and carrying a heat that wasn't heat but something older. Dhira had already left the ground. He crashed into a green mountainside far away, rolled, and came to a stop. He got up slowly. He had dodged it. He knew with complete certainty that if he hadn't he would not be standing. The residual pressure in the air alone told him that.
He jumped back to where Loki had been standing.
He stopped when he got there.
In front of him was nothing. Not emptiness in the ordinary sense. Nothing. No trees. No mountains. No earth worth naming. The ground had dried completely, cracked open in long fractures that ran in every direction, a wasteland that stretched all the way to the horizon without interruption. The air above it still carried residual heat that had no source anymore. What silenced him wasn't the destruction itself. It was the scale of it. The place he had come from and the place he was standing in now looked like two different worlds separated by a single moment.
Footsteps behind him. Dia arrived first, her eyes going wide as she took in the view. Then she looked at his chest. "Dhira. You've been stabbed." He didn't answer. She reached for the feather at her neck immediately and pressed it to the wound without asking permission. Aatreya arrived behind her and looked at the scorched horizon. "Loki," he said simply.
Dia stared at the dead land. "This is completely dead," she said quietly. "No way."
Dhira crouched and pressed his hand into the cracked earth. The soil turned to sand under his fingers immediately. He stayed there for a moment looking at his hand, at the blood still on it. Not his. Loki's. Warm and dark and real. God's blood on a mortal's hand.
He looked at it for a long time without speaking.
Far away on Planet Chaos, Ares sat alone in front of a massive bone fire, eating from a bowl with the unhurried quiet of someone with no need for company. The fire burned orange and steady, casting long shadows across the obsidian floor. When he felt something. The bonfire in front of him flared purple. He glanced at it and than looked back.
Then Loki stepped out of the flames.
She stumbled slightly on landing, which was unusual enough that Ares noticed it even though he didn't look up immediately. What made him look was the sound. A soft repeated dripping hitting the floor. He paused, and turned his head.
Her hand was covered in blood.
She stood there looking at it with an expression that carried neither panic nor pain, just a kind of detached study, like examining something that belonged to someone else. After a moment the blood began to burn purple at the edges and dissolved away. She sat down in the nearest chair without speaking. Ares watched her. "You look weak," he said, his German accent sitting heavy on each word.
Loki reached across the table and picked up a black cup. The moment her fingers touched it the material shifted to gold. She held it without drinking. "Dhira," she said. Just that. Calm as a weather report.
Ares paused mid-bite. His eyes narrowed slowly. "What about him? Isn't he dead?"
"I think not." She set the cup down. "He overcame my poison. And became stronger."
Ares raised an eyebrow. "Stronger?"
She looked at the hand that had been bleeding, flexing it once. "If he was an ant before, now he is a bigger ant."
Ares looked at the same hand. "An ant that bites back."
Loki didn't argue with that. She picked the cup back up. "Don't worry," she said, her voice carrying its usual lightness but sitting slightly differently underneath it. "He has his hands full now." Her Swedish accent fleeting.
The fire crackled between them and neither spoke again.
Far away Dhira was crouched at the edge of a small pond, washing his hands. The water clouded dark around his fingers where Loki's blood mixed with it and dissolved really slowly, it's blood of God, it won't go off that easily. He watched it go without expression.
Dia appeared behind him. "We're ready to leave. Aatreya said not to take much time." Dhira nodded and wiped his hands and started to stand. His foot slipped on the wet edge. Dia reached forward immediately and caught his hand, the same hand that had carried the blood. Something passed between them in that contact, invisible and silent, something neither of them felt or noticed. He steadied himself. "You alright?" she asked. "Fine," he said, and they left.
They rode across the barren land that would eventually become desert, Aatreya ahead and Dhira and Dia behind. The ground was cracked and pale under the horses' feet, the air still carrying faint residual warmth from what Loki's power had done to it. Dia pulled her horse alongside Dhira after a while. "So how was Loki? How did you fight that?"
"It's Loki," Dhira said. Not for the first time. "Fighting her was difficult. Too slippery. Too unpredictable. Her illusions and magic make her a different kind of opponent from anything else. She almost killed me."
Dia remembered the chest wound, how close to the center it had been. "Did you win?"
"No. She ran. We were both injured. She stabbed me in the chest. I stabbed her in the heart."
Dia blinked. "In the heart? She wouldn't survive that."
Dhira looked ahead. "She's a Mayakaar. A magician. Even if she had been lying dead in front of me I wouldn't have believed it was over. People who know magic are very good at leaving or in Hindi, very good at running away."
Dia nodded slowly, processing that. Then she tilted her head. "By the way. What does she look like? Is she scary?"
Dhira glanced at her. "Didn't you see her when we crashed in the forest?"
Dia frowned. She went quiet for a moment digging through her memories and then something surfaced, a scene in the forest, Dhira with a beautiful woman, close together. Doing something intimate. Her eyes went wide. "No way." Her voice filled with something between shock and accusation. "You slept with Loki."
Dhira froze. His head slowly turned mechanically and looked at her the way a person looks at someone who has just said something that doesn't deserve a serious response. "Why would any sane person do that? Much less 'i'?"
"But you were on top of her, your hands around her neck—"
"We were fighting." He said it flatly, cutting her off mid-sentence. "I would never. Not ever. Not with that." He looked forward again with an expression that made clear the subject was physically unpleasant to him.
Dia opened her mouth, thought better of whatever was about to come out of it, and closed it again. She looked down at her hand instead.
One vein near the surface had turned red. Visible clearly through the skin. She frowned at it. Probably an infection. A bug bite maybe. She pressed her hand near the feather of Samuel at her neck and the feather glowed faintly. The red vein faded and disappeared. She turned her attention back to the road.
Some time later it was back. Redder than before. Moving slightly faster beneath the skin than it had any reason to.