Venom and Chains
They hunted him. Loki knew they would come; he had always known that everything has a price, and now the bill had arrived and it was long and it was bloody. He fled north, as far as he could, and found a mountain with a view in all four directions. He built a house with four doors so he could see them coming regardless of which way. The sea lay below, and in the sea there was a rapids where salmon jumped, and Loki watched them and thought.
He sat by the fire and took cord and knotted it into a net, knot after knot, regular and tight, and studied his own work. He held it up against the firelight and saw the pattern of meshes and knots, and he understood he had created something new: a net. A tool for catching what does not want to be caught. In that same moment he saw them coming on the slope, small figures against the light, and he threw the net into the fire and ran to the rapids and turned himself into a salmon and slid into the water.
But Odin saw the pattern of the ash in the hearth, because the fire had burned the cord but left the shape behind, white ash against black coal, and Odin's one eye was sharper than most people's two. He understood what it was. They knotted a new net after the pattern, thread by thread, mesh by mesh.
They dragged the rapids once, and Loki jumped over the net the way a salmon jumps. They dragged it again with a stone at the bottom to keep it down, and Loki jumped again, higher, with a stronger stroke. The third time Thor stood in the middle of the current with the water up to his waist, and when the salmon leaped he grabbed it with his bare hands. The salmon was slippery as oil, and Thor squeezed harder, his fingers around the tail, and that is why the salmon has a narrow tail to this day. Thor's fingers shaped it, and the shape remained.
They dragged him ashore. He lay in the grass and was Loki again, wet and gasping, and his eyes were the eyes you see in animals that know it is over.
What happened next there is no gentle way to tell, and there is no reason to try.
Loki's sons Narfi and Váli stood there. They had done nothing. They were boys, sons of Sigyn, ordinary sons who had played in the grass and chased butterflies and slept safe in their beds, and now they stood watching their father lying in the grass with the gods' hands around him. The gods turned Váli into a wolf. It happened fast. His eyes went wild and his teeth grew and his hands became paws, and the wolf that had been his brother threw itself on Narfi and tore him apart. The blood sprayed across the grass and the screams stopped and what remained was entrails and bone fragments and a wolf standing there panting with a red muzzle.
With Narfi's entrails they bound Loki. They dragged him to a cave beneath the earth and laid him on three sharp stones, one under the shoulders, one under the small of the back, one under the knees. The entrails were wound around his body, and then the last thing happened: the entrails hardened to iron. They were no longer a son's innards. They were chains, hard and cold, and they held Loki motionless with his eyes open toward the ceiling of the cave.
Skaði hung a serpent above his face. The serpent dripped venom, drop after drop, and each drop burned like molten metal. It hissed when the venom hit the skin, and the smell of burned flesh filled the cave.
Sigyn sat down beside him. She had a bowl in her hands, an ordinary bowl, and she held it above his face and caught the venom before it struck. Drop after drop the bowl filled. That was all she could do. Hold a bowl. Sit in darkness. Wait.
But the bowl fills up. And when Sigyn must turn away to empty it, the drops hit Loki's face, and he writhes in madness from the pain, and the whole earth shakes. That is what we call an earthquake. Every time the ground beneath your feet trembles, it is Loki screaming.
Sigyn stayed. She had no oath that bound her. No duty. No god had ordered her. No law demanded it. Her sons were dead, one murdered by the other whom the gods had transformed. Her husband had killed Baldr and prevented his return and destroyed everything there was to destroy. She had every reason in all the worlds to stand up and walk away.
But she sat there with the bowl in her hands. And she sits there still. And she will sit there until the bonds break, and the bonds will break, because nothing holds forever, not even chains made from a son's entrails.
And the world went quiet. The kind of quiet that comes after the worst has happened, before the very worst begins. The gods went home to their halls and shut their doors and waited, and they knew the waiting had an end, and the end had a name.