A Ballad of Ragnarok [2020 short fiction story competition]

I was two years old, free formed and light like the wayward embers of fire, when Odin, son of Bor, himself son of Buri, came to my lands and tore me away from them. Odin’s one eye was my first fully formed memory; a cold, unyielding blue that shivers even now in pitchest black. It swept over the sea of brown skin in front of him, meticulous and discerning and selective, tilling us over in his mind.  His eye, I was told later, crinkled in satisfaction when it rested on me. My hands were grubby and caked in dirt, my hair was black through the ink of my mother’s blood, and the coal littered around my feet. But he sensed magic in me, and in magic he sensed opportunity, and in opportunity, he sensed destiny.

Odin Allfathr was never denied a prize. My mother’s cries, howled out in the words that generations before her had spoken, fell lame and flat against Odin and his shield.  He had, at least, the decency to ask my name. Lakhan, he was told.

Odin laughed, soft and gentle and dismissive. “This is not a name for my tongue. I shall call him Loki.’ And just like that, in that soft and dismissive laugh that was plucked away by the winds, Odin ripped my name away from me forever.

***

The yawning halls of Asgard grew fat with my new brothers and sisters. And though they called me brother by mouth, the word never reached the light of their eyes. I was different. While the cold air that whipped through the halls made their snow white skin glow and pulse, it made mine dry and chapped and broken. The furs that they wore wrapped around them like a second skin; they could move and hunt as if they were naked. I grew sweaty in them instantly, and they clawed and suffocated me. Indian gods were not meant for the arctic cold of the north. The winds bit and snarled at me, and I grew miserable.

But within me was magic— the magic that Odin saw when I was two years old— and my magic then was eager and excited. It came to me not as a flood, but in bursts, like the spattered droplets of Holi paint. When it came, my skin sang, and my hair darkened, and I felt joy. 

My magic gave me fire; I remember it suddenly blossoming around me when the Asgardian winter hit its bitterest lows. Freya and Heimdall skittered away, and Bragi yelped in fear. The fire in my hand wound its way around me, snaking its way up my head, drenching me in a monsoon of cinnamon and warmth. I almost cried with joy as I felt my fingertips for the first time in years.

Thor, the prince of Asgard, who wore his immense maelstrom of power like a comfortable coat, watched the soft unfurling of my golden fire, and he beamed with joy, for now he had an equal.

Odin watched and said nothing. 

***

In the following years, my burgeoning magic garnered respect, at least, from the other gods, but their guard never fell away when I was in the same room. I saw it in the slightest clenching of their jaw, the way that their fingers tightened around their goblets. I was the exotic child displaying exotic powers that were beyond their comprehension. But I was allowed my suspicious powers because I was friends with Thor, and Thor’s aura forgave everything.

He was a friend I should never have had. Where I was small and lithe, he was huge, even then, and built like hard timber. He was crowned with blazing red hair and had eyes that were shot through with the gold of his electricity; I was dark and my eyes were mud. Maybe it was that we looked so comical that the friendship was accepted, or maybe they were convinced that Thor could crush me instantly if I harboured any inclination of exceeding my station.

***

And like the falling of snow, my name slowly drifted into the songs that the men of Midgard sang, in the precious moments when they were not butchering each other in an attempt to prise their way into Valhalla. What happens in the land of gods filters down in broken whispers to the lands of men, and so the songs reflected the image my brothers and sisters had of me. Thor was brave and valiant and mighty, but I was mewling and underhanded and devious. And it did not matter what I did, or how I achieved it, or how many lives I saved, I was always the Trickster. In a world where strength was a currency that dictated everything, the gods, and therefore the men, seethed that I survived with so little of it. 

I remember a builder, dressed in badly spun hessian, leading a broken horse, who came to the gates of Asgard. He promised to build the greatest wall they had ever seen, in exchange for the hand of my beautiful sister Freya. He promised to do it himself in one season, and not take a single drop of toil from anyone else, save his bowed and bent horse. The gods all agreed, for it was impossible. When it became apparent that he would complete his task, they grew outraged. They all gathered around Thor, simpering in delight as he drew his hammer, lightning crackling around him, but Odin hushed them with a word. He turned one electric eye at me and nodded. Let him solve this.

I had only spent two years clutching at my mother’s hip, but the magic that coursed through her coursed through me. I was marked indelibly by her culture and her way of life. We were raised to see animals not just as sacrifices or burden, but our equals and our peers; we were as much animal as man, and through being both, we were stronger. Under the empty night sky, I shifted and changed; my limbs lengthened and grew hooves, and I raced into the night.

I lured the builder’s horse away into the forest for days, long enough that he never finished his wall, and the hand that he was promised never became his. Months later, I kneeled before Odin, and gifted him the token of my fealty. My tribute was Sleipnir, my son, the fastest horse that ever lived and will ever live; a horse whose fleetness outstripped fire and wind, and prayer and thought.

I saved the life of a good man who did nothing wrong except keeping his word, I gave Odin a gift greater than any he had ever received, and the songs still lied. They sang that Thor crushed the builder’s head with his dread hammer Mjolnir, and that the gods laughed and clapped his back, and called him hero for saving Freya from the clutches of vermin. The bards could not bear to tell stories that bypassed rivers of blood.

And in Asgard, these gods who stood and watched and did nothing, they would lean over to me, and in their most supercilious tones would whisper: Loki, what was it like to fuck a horse? Now we know why Father brought you here from across the seas.

***

Somehow, in the bleak darkness of the years that followed, Sigyn found me. She picked up all my scattered and broken pieces, and with a patience and love that I had never been accorded, she slipped them back together again; less fluid, but also less brittle and less disjointed than before. When she bore me two sons, I felt like I owned every shining star in the gossamer sky.

***

“My son Baldur is grown too powerful,” said Odin, to me. “His mother, in her love for him, has bound him in spells that make him too dangerous. I cannot undo them.”

Of course. Odin, who had gouged out his own right eye in return for Sight aeons ago, now gazed upon the depths and glory of the danger that his own son held, and he trembled. 

He knew then, as he knew now, as he had always known, that there was no member of his lily white progeny who had the magic to undo what his wife created. And so, all those years ago, he had found me.

“Will you do this for me? Will you do this, and truly become my son?”

What is a mercilessly whipped dog to do, when he is offered a kennel?

I chanted my ghazals and wove all of myself into a spell that I wrapped around a sprig of mistletoe; I looked into the glowing face of Baldur, his eyes turning slowly cruel and cold with power, and I slew him.

I had never seen the gods so vicious or feral. I had brought down the monument to their own godhood, a walking testament to their power, and now their rage bled through. I turned to Odin, hoping that he would stop them; that he would say that he had seen the worlds crumble before Baldur and I had saved them, but he stood still and silent. And then he spoke.

“Loki, you have spat upon the house that took you in…”

“Took me in? You stole me!”

“... and gave you shelter and food and family and love…”

“Please, tell them that you ordered this. Tell them that I did not do this of my own accord…”

“... and you will pay in blood.”

And Odin loosed them on me, like wolves.

I had spent too much time with them, and in my dull and insecure stupidity, had shown them too much of my power. I changed from falcon, to mouse, to salmon, but they saw these changes, and they had stolen enough of my magic to follow me where I thought they could not. They trapped me and brought me to a cave, where they held my sons.

I begged Odin to let them go. I grovelled in the dirt; I bowed my head low and lay prostrate before him, and through sobs that splintered my ribs, I pleaded that they not touch my sons. Odin granted me my wish.

He changed my eldest to a wolf, and let him rip my youngest into pieces while I screamed until my throat was glass shards. Thor pinned my arms to my sides so that I could not move, so that I could only watch. They tied me to the rock with my son’s entrails, burned my face with acid and they forced Sigyn to watch, for this was the punishment for choosing to marry an outsider, a bastard like me.

And then they left. 

***

I have been here for decades. They think I am dead, and Odin believes the threats posed by Baldur and me are nullified. But Odin Allfathr, in all his strength and wisdom and power, is blind to why I am who I am. I do not come from their lands, and I do not believe in their stories. Where I come from, we believe in reincarnation. We believe in rebirth. Of soil tilled anew. Of growth from death. That the dead are not dead, but merely waiting to live again, and take in the wind and the sun and the land which was once theirs. 

He does not realise that I create futures outside the ones he can See. That I am the creator of miracles. I will break these chains when I die, and I will take my wife Sigyn, and my mother, and those that have been felled by the cruelty and the arrogance of the gods, and with my magic, I will build an army that they cannot comprehend. I will take this army, and I will march on Asgard and Valhalla and I will raze them to the ground until they are nothing but ash. I am no longer a whipped dog.

And my name is not Loki. My name is Lakhan.

Prithu Banerjee came 3rd in Burnt Roti’s 2020 short fiction story competition. Banerjee retains rights to this story. Please do not reproduce without contacting Burnt Roti.

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