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Loki doesn't tell anyone what she's doing. They'd be disappointed; she'd get in trouble. And it's not hard to keep it secret; this is hardly a new habit for her, writing incessantly in incomprehensible ciphers. She still diaries, still processes, still makes her decisions - and now she also spell-weaves.
It is a long, hard, painstaking process. She has to come at it from both ends - peer at possible combinations of her symbols to see what makes sense, and come up with a visualization of her desired end result so she knows what parts she needs to build. She's never done this before, and keeps having to go back and edit things. One of the fourth-tier parts has so many third-tier parts in it that she takes weeks of trying just to hold them all in her mind at the same time and make them snap together into a single object she can keep memorized in its entirety. She spends a stack of notebooks as high as her waist working out another fourth-tier part, only to discover that she's got a key "word" wrong and has to start completely over because it affects everything else.
When she starts, she resigns herself to the possibility that her spell will take an entire year.
This estimate is soon revised.
It takes half a century of stolen time and backtracking and double-checking.
But it will be worth it, she thinks, if her mother will love her unreservedly, if she can keep up with Thor, if she can put her scepter - now a bit short for use as a cane, for a child her size - aside and run and dance. (If she can do magic.)
And once she casts it, it will stay forever.
She has just about built herself from atoms; there are separate bits of this spell for each muscle in her body in its current shape and accounting for its future growth (she's been reading anatomy) and connecting them all to her mind, directly, commanding their obedience.
She assembles the ninth-tier pieces into a single, unified whole, and it shines bright in her mind, and she knows exactly what to do with it, from cube-inspired knowledge stamped as bright in her thoughts as though she'd touched it yesterday.
It's all together now.
She wills it.
She knows the difference at once though there's no visible effect - even in how she holds up her head, how the last page of her notebook feels under her fingers.
She wants to get up, twirl, leap, pick up her scepter and brandish it like a sword, run down the halls whooping and show Thor.
But she doesn't. It wouldn't do to be conspicuous. (Heimdall is watching; she can't read the cipher but she can see the results.)
Loki is going to have to pretend to have outgrown her clumsiness, spend the next ten or fifteen years still tripping occasionally but less and less. Maybe she should get new shoes; maybe she should ask about learning to dance. Some outward excuse. Something less sudden.
She sketches a plan in her non-magical cipher, and sets about enacting it.
(Meanwhile, she contemplates what spell she should build next.)
purposeful_glory
Thor has been diligent about not teasing Loki for falling, although she still laughs.
She has also never stopped suggesting that Loki take up this or that physical activity, holding out the hope that maybe this is the one she'll be good at. She remains undiscouraged when Loki declines to try them.
Dance is the next thing she suggests.
She has also never stopped suggesting that Loki take up this or that physical activity, holding out the hope that maybe this is the one she'll be good at. She remains undiscouraged when Loki declines to try them.
Dance is the next thing she suggests.
That's very convenient. Loki makes a show of considering it, then takes her up on it, affecting tentativeness.
Thor encourages her with determined enthusiasm.
Loki takes her time, picking her way through very simple dance steps, slipping but not falling, soliciting that new pair of shoes, and gradually, with agonizing slowness, improving - there and everywhere.
Thor is so happy.
Frigg is pleased, too, and Odin grudgingly congratulatory, but it's Thor who really celebrates.
Frigg is pleased, too, and Odin grudgingly congratulatory, but it's Thor who really celebrates.
Thor is sweet. It really will be nice to be able to follow her in more of her activities.
(Meanwhile, Loki has decided to work on healing spells. This will have to be several different spells; there is just no compressing it into a single, perfect work of sorcery. It will certainly take hundreds of years, especially now that her time is divided yet again with the pursuit of various appropriately womanly things. But it could come in useful.)
(Meanwhile, Loki has decided to work on healing spells. This will have to be several different spells; there is just no compressing it into a single, perfect work of sorcery. It will certainly take hundreds of years, especially now that her time is divided yet again with the pursuit of various appropriately womanly things. But it could come in useful.)
And Thor, of course, is right there demanding that her sister be given the best possible lessons in all womanly pursuits. Sword and axe and mace and spear - she can pick a favourite when she's older, but she should try everything.
Loki does want to pick a favorite pretty soon. She wants to catch up, and that means some degree of specialization. She likes polearms best, and concedes that she should know something for closer quarters, too, such as the dagger.
Thor already favours sword and mace.
They make a good team.
They make a good team.
Excellent! That is good.
Loki still makes sure she has plenty of time to fuss over her cipher-filled notebooks. She can use a few fragments of her spell of grace, for the healing spells - but only a few low-level parts. It's going to be a long haul and she tries to make progress every day.
Loki still makes sure she has plenty of time to fuss over her cipher-filled notebooks. She can use a few fragments of her spell of grace, for the healing spells - but only a few low-level parts. It's going to be a long haul and she tries to make progress every day.
"You've always got your nose in a book," Thor says one day. "What are you doing? No one else writes this much."
"Some of them are just diaries, about what happened each day," Loki says. "The rest of it is private."
"Why do you keep diaries?" says Thor, wrinkling her nose. "Are you going to be a bard?"
"I don't think so. I just don't like to forget things that have happened to me. Bards go on about things that happened to people more interesting than them."
"But why do you want to remember things if they're not interesting?"
"They are interesting, because they're about my life," says Loki. "I am too interesting to be a bard."
"You haven't done anything interesting yet except stop tripping on things," says Thor. "Wait until you're grown up, then you'll be doing things worth a saga or two."
"I suppose," says Loki. "What do you imagine we'll do? Exactly?"
"Oh, fight battles and slay monsters and things," says Thor. "Maybe we'll finally get that bear that's been plaguing the northern villages for years. Did you hear? Mother sent four of her best ladies after it and two of them came back."
"Villages should not have to be plagued by bears," says Loki. "I hope someone else gets that one before we grow up, but there will probably be more bears making trouble by then."
"I want to kill it, though," says Thor. "Wouldn't that be glorious?"
"It would be very glorious, but then the village would have to have this bear problem for hundreds of years, waiting for you to grow up," says Loki. "If someone else gets this one, you can get another one, and then for those hundreds of years there will not be this bear problem."
"Or I could just kill it now," Thor suggests.
"The ladies who died," says Loki, "could you have beat either one of them in single combat?"
"I'm not ever going to find out now, am I?" she says indignantly.