Loki wants to be queen one day and has not neglected learning to talk to people, learning the names of important sorts - but she has neglected assembling close friends (why should she do such a thing when she can tell them so little about herself?), and piggybacks on Thor's. So she is invited along when Thor decides she wants to go hunting for giant aurochs and thereby enjoy the supposedly superior flavor of fresh-killed beef one has personally killed.
And when Sigyn asks if he can come, well, nobody contradicts Thor when she says "Very well," even though this follows a longish pause.
Aurochs, come out, come out, wherever you are.
When Thor announces this plan, Volstagg moves to stand with Hogun and Fandral to stand with Thor; or to put it another way, everyone but Loki moves away from Sigyn.
Sigyn is amused.
"There was a battle with the frost giants, there, and I lingered for a bit afterwards, exploring and meeting the Midgardians and telling them hopelessly garbled stories. If you should happen upon any mortals who've heard the stories they will probably think you have a girls' name; Allspeak failed me. I got back the same day you first visited the practice hall, in fact."
"At first I thought they were doing everything by the genders of their little soul-animals - did you know that they keep their souls outside of themselves, in animals? It's the most curious thing; they'd always assume mine was hiding. Those are usually male animals for women, female animals for men - but sometimes it's not, and then, yes, they have their men fighting and hunting and so on and their women sewing and cooking for the most part. No magic to divide up, of course, if they've learned any I didn't see it."
"I've occasionally asked Father questions about how he'd go about inventing this or that magic, and while I believe he's considered fairly accomplished usually his opinion of the matter is that it's not feasible - I haven't given him this particular problem but I doubt it would distinguish itself."
"It's just so—" He gestures vaguely, unable to properly articulate his difficulty. "Imagine that you want to learn to read, but there is no such thing as a letter or a word, only entire books set out all of a piece. The finest of scholars can discern with careful study which part of the book is written on a particular page, and use that understanding to create new books. Except that it would not take me ten centuries in that scenario to figure out how letters worked."
"Landwurm."
It's enough to shake Loki's footing; she has a choice between tumbling down the "hill" or jumping. She chooses jumping.
This kicks aside enough of the moving bit of wurm to reveal that its face was right under her.
Its face is now displaying its many teeth, and advancing quickly after her while she reaches the peak of her leap.
But here is Loki, who doesn't want to be eaten by a landwurm either, and in fact probably holds this preference more strongly than Sigyn does, and who is currently in midair above its lunging jaws.
This logic comes to his mind all at once, not in an orderly chain but as a unified vision, and he draws his sword and hurls himself at the monster's head. He manages to get between it and Loki. Well done, Sigyn. Now the next step in the plan is to survive its redirected attention and, if he is very very lucky, stab it in the eye before it eats him.
Lævateinn shoots out to colossal length in her hands, bladed on both ends, and she kicks off the ground as soon as she hits it to leap back wurmward. She can't match the wurm's reach if it decides it wants to strike her, but she can be really hard to swallow, if she keeps her grip on her weapon.
The wurm gets stabbed in a coil. Its skin is thick stuff easily mistaken for mossy ground, easily scratched but not easily parted, and trying to cut it too deeply will make it easy to wrench her spear away - but all she wants is to re-distract it, away from Sigyn. Its jaws snap shut on air and it looks between its possible targets. Its coils shift beyond its swaying head.
"Run!" she hisses, except then a tree behind them creaks, and it turns out there is more of the wurm there.
There is more of the wurm everywhere.
"Fuck!"
Of course, the last one was much smaller. And he had a longer sword. But he can still manage it, if he is both perfect and lucky.
No good. The wurm is paying attention to Sigyn now.
Success. Bounding from coil to coil, he leads its head in a circle until the neck can twist no farther and he is close enough to scramble up the dorsal ridge - crouch atop its head while it rears in surprise, brace himself between scaly crests, take a two-handed grip on his sword, and stab the wurm's eye as precisely and forcefully as he can manage.
He is perfect. He is not lucky. Though he drives the full length of his sword into its eye, it is not enough; the monster is not slain. And a moment later, its violent thrashings dislodge him from his perch.
Loki stabs desperately at its length - she can't be sure of not hitting Sigyn herself if she goes for the head right now - but it's undeterred.
When Sigyn comes down again, he does so into the wurm's mouth, and he is swallowed, quick as a wink.
But Sigyn is not one to give way in the face of such trivial obstacles as being swallowed by an enormous monster. He draws a pair of knives and manages to get himself stuck in the beast's throat, although he lacks the proper leverage to climb back into its mouth from there, especially while it is still moving around so vigorously.
Except nobody's watching, now.
Loki blinds the wurm in its other eye with a blob of darkness, deafens it with a localized thunderclap, can't really do anything about its sense of smell but likes her odds much better when it's down two senses.
It flings coils at her last known location but she's not there anymore - well, not on the ground. She's vaulted up on Lævateinn, and the part of it stuck in the ground is all over spikes, and the wurm flinches back when it encounters them. The weapon is knocked over and Loki with it, but she has perfect grace, she lands on her feet, she shrinks Lævateinn and grows it out again, takes advantage of the retreating coils and confused sniffing head to advance towards the only final target on this thing.
She could cut it in half. Twice. It would be smaller then but not less alive. She has to get the brain.
One eye is occupied by a sword; getting past it would be difficult. She aims at her blob of dark. And Lævateinn is as long as she needs it to be.
The death isn't instant, and Loki is knocked away from her lodged weapon by a thrashing coil, which isn't good for her, she didn't wear her armor to go hunting aurochs -
But no one's watching. She fixes it. She fixes it and seizes the, what is this now, a swordstaff, and drives it a little farther into the landwurm's brain.
And when it's no longer heaving, only twitching, she shrinks Lævateinn out of the eye socket and turns it into a saw and starts decapitating the thing. She's not sure how far Sigyn is.
The blob of darkness disappears.
By this time, Sigyn has made a little progress on dragging himself back up the worm's gullet. It's slow going: crushed by the pressure, unable to breathe, and with a strong suspicion that whatever the reason his legs hurt like that, it will take more than a day's rest to cure. But it's a more appealing prospect than patiently waiting for death.
He's breathing, isn't he? He made a gesture. If that was a gesture. Come on, be going to live without help -
He's still coughing. Some blood comes up. That's never a good sign. Internal damage - maybe a punctured lung.
She'd better not take too much longer to decide.
His impression of a person injured enough to be slightly impaired but not enough to worry about permanent damage is impeccable. In the process of getting the head wrapped up to carry - it takes the pair of them working together to lift it - he acquires enough miscellaneous cuts to explain all the blood.
They go home, dragging the landwurm head and one particularly shapely aurochs horn to be fashioned into one of the various things you can make out of horns, and Loki has Sigyn's silence.
Isn't that good of him.
Years go by. Loki works in earnest on learning to turn into a bird. And then she suddenly spends a lot less time on that because she has abruptly Discovered Boys.
If she has complaints about her gender role in Asgardian society, at least she does not have complaints about the bit where she is welcome to discover boys in any way that suits her. Midgardian girls - and to a certain extent Asgardian boys - are constrained in this manner, but there is no particular reason Loki (especially given that she is a princess who decapitated a landwurm in recent memory, and isn't half bad-looking either) should not sidle up to pretty faces (pretty whatevers) who are loitering in a way suggesting that they're open to liaisons and liaise with them. Not all of these people are boys - why not be thorough in discovering her preferences experimentally? She can, it's completely socially acceptable, isn't that novel, and she has plenty of leisure time - but it's usually boys. Thor teases her, a little - comparing her to Fandral. Loki just laughs.
She calms down after a little while. Not that she stops, but other interests reassert themselves. And the shine's worn off random pretty boys (occasionally girls - who knows when she might find an exception to the pattern) who are mostly interested in her being a landwurm-decapitating princess.
Fandral doesn't have any sort of commitment from Sigyn. They just sometimes fuck. Sigyn sleeps around, this is known, this is (when certain people are full of mead) discussed in slightly too intimate detail without even the saving grace of cunning rhymes. This is, if one wanders into the wrong alleyway in the right neighborhood, witnessed. If Fandral preferred that people personally known to her stay away from her sometime-boytoy then this should have been made clear years ago and it hasn't been.
Loki hasn't touched him because involving complications in the ugliest possible case of blackmail has seemed like a bad idea. But it's been a while now, and his silence has been absolute, even to her.
And she could teach him the alphabet.
But first things first. She corners him alone one day. She grins, gives him a minute to flinch or signal if he plans on doing so, and when there is no sign she should back off, she kisses him.
And after enough kisses to establish that this is a thing that is happening now she drags him off to her room - her room with all its bookshelves and notebooks stacked three deep on each one - and has her way with him. This is also delightful.
Snuggles?
"Healing spells. A suite of them, I think jointly comprehensive. All-purpose visual and auditory illusions. And the first one - when I was little I tripped, a lot. I couldn't learn to fight, I'd have impaled myself on something before a week had gone by. So -" She waves a hand, perfectly graceful. "I fixed it."
"I am not at all sure that I can teach the alphabet," she mentions. "I have symbols for the atomic concepts but they are fairly indescribable. And my notation doesn't at all resemble any of the lectures on conventional magic theory I've snuck into, so I doubt I could work backwards from a typical spell and break it down from there either."
They are full of densely packed symbols. Two hundred and nine of them.