Loki is more celebrated for killing the wyvern than she has ever been for anything else in her life. This was completely predictable, if... exasperating. At least it is a thing she legitimately did if you ignore the long-ago cheating to be able to even learn to pick up a glaive.

She has the wyvern's tail barb fashioned into a dagger; it will produce no new poison on its own, and much of what it had leaked out when she cut it off the beast, but it remains particularly dangerous and will do for the first few times she uses it, and it's possible she will be able to refill it along the grooves through which natural wyvern-venom would have flowed if she finds a kind of poison she'd like to use.

Her mother honors her both with the gift of a new weapon, Lævateinn, and with the opportunity to name her peculiar eight-legged foal that she intends to ride into battle when he is older.

She calls the horse Sleipnir (he's a very cute foal, if... leggy...) and she's thrilled with Lævateinn. It's a glaive... and an axe and a scythe and a spear and a staff and a pitchfork and any other longish melee weapon she can think of; it will change in her hands, its length and blade and weight, as she likes. It is old - well, it's indestructible, and never needs sharpening; it has had every opportunity to become old - and now it is hers. She loves it.

Being an official adult is pleasant in many ways; in others it changes little; and in a few it is wearing and irksome.

But she doesn't mind being able to go along when the frost giants make incursions into territory on Midgard. Odin does not much care about Midgard for its own sake, as far as Loki can tell; she only wants the giants confined to Jotunheim. Loki's motives are different (and would not much matter even if they contradicted outright: princesses are supposed to show up on campaigns of war).

To Loki's immense convenience, the Asgardians outnumber the giants by nearly ten to one and no one she cares about in the least is lethally injured such that she'd feel obliged to mysteriously heal them. The giants are driven away and it is made clear that they are to stop harassing the short-lived people of Midgard.

Loki finds herself charmed by the humans. They're technologically primitive - the Asgardians like a low-tech aesthetic, are rather dominated by this preference, but that's not the same thing. They live and die in, not an eyeblink exactly, but a medium-sized period of time. They keep their souls outside of their bodies and shaped like animals, and the children's can change, which is peculiar but endearing.

The campaign is over in less than a week, and that long only because the frost giants are dug into the mountains. Loki's new toy gets plenty of exercise. She finds it useful to spear it into targets and change it before hauling it out of them, as long as she's not surrounded by many opponents; when she is, she does well to curve her blade for tripping. Her fallback is the favored glaive shape, but Lævateinn's ability to get longer is invaluable against such - well - giant enemies.

They win, the giants leave, the Asgardians prepare to go -

"Mother?" dares Loki. "By your leave I would stay here - no more than a few years. To explore. I am curious about the ways of the mortals and about their world."