For 30+ Advance/Early chapters :p
atreon.com/ScoldeyJod
The blue chains were agony.
It was not the vulgar, simple pain of a blade or a blow. This was a violation. It was a cold, intimate theft. I felt my Seidr, my essence, my very life-force, being siphoned from my body. It was a sensation of being unmade, a metaphysical un-spooling that made me remember the horrifying, sterile touch of the TVA's pruning stick.
I was pinned in the air, a sacrifice on a warlock's altar, thrashing against the bonds. Every movement was a useless, pounding struggle.
"Loki!" Daenerys screamed, her voice a raw sound of terror.
"Yes, my Queen," Pyat Pree's voice echoed, the sound a chorus of dry, dead hisses from all the Undying at once. His own face was alight with a horrifying, orgasmic pleasure, his blue-stained lips pulled back from his teeth. He was drinking me. "Watch your monster die. Watch your godling become... one of us."
I thrashed against the chains, my muscles screaming, but they were not physical. They were constructs of pure, parasitic magic, and they held me fast.
Daenerys stood alone, a small, trembling figure in the vast, pulsating room of corpses. She held the small, magical dagger I had given her, but she was surrounded. The desiccated figures of the Undying began to lurch in their thrones, their dead eyes fixed on her, their dry, cracked lips parting in a collective, soundless hunger.
She was terrified. I could feel her fear, a frantic, pounding terror that echoed in my own chest. But beneath it, I felt something else. Her fury.
She looked at me, trapped and in agony. She looked at her children, screeching and terrified in their blue, magical cage. She looked at the dead things staring at her, their hunger a palpable, physical wave.
This was the pyre, all over again. A circle of death, with her at the center.
My rage, a cold, divine fury, cut through the pain. Pyat Pree was a parasite. He was drinking my power. He believed me to be a sputtering candle, and he was gorging himself on what little fuel I had left.
He thought he was draining me. He had no idea what he was truly tapped into.
I stopped fighting. I let my body go limp in the chains, a move Daenerys mistook for defeat.
"Loki, no!" she sobbed.
A new, terrible smile spread across my face. It was a rictus of agony and pure, divine malice.
"You want my magic?" I snarled, my voice a low, pained growl. "You want to drink me? Then choke on it, you pathetic, dried-out corpse."
Instead of pulling back, I pushed.
I opened the floodgates. I let my core, my true essence, pour into the chains. Not just the green, chaotic Seidr he was expecting. I gave him the rest of it. I gave him the ancient, primordial cold of Jotunheim, the very blood of the Frost Giants that ran in my veins. It was an essence of pure, absolute-zero cold, a power so anathema to this place of dust and decay that it felt like I was tearing my own soul apart.
Pyat Pree screamed.
It was a sound of shocked, ecstatic agony. The blue chains flared, turning a deep, violent indigo, the coldness of my magic flash-freezing them. The warlock's body began to contort, his dead eyes widening in shock as a power he could not possibly comprehend flooded his system. He was a small, dirty cup, and I was pouring the entire ocean into him.
"Daenerys!" I roared, my voice raw, my body feeling like it was burning and freezing all at once. "The fire! Now!"
She understood. She understood instantly. This was our magic. Fire and Ice.
She didn't hesitate. She didn't aim for the cage. She didn't aim for me. She raised her head, her face a mask of terrible, beautiful fury, and she screamed one word. A word of command. A word of fire.
"DRACARYS!"
The dragons, her children, trapped in their cage, responded as one. They were the blood of the dragon, and their mother had called.
They opened their small mouths and breathed.
It was not the tiny plume of smoke Drogon had managed before. This was a torrent. A jet of pure, living, golden-red dragonfire. It blasted through the bars of their cage, not at Pree, but at the Undying.
The dry, ancient corpses, the dust-filled husks of the warlocks, ignited like paper. They shrieked, a high-pitched, tearing sound, as a thousand years of decay were vaporized in a single, cleansing inferno. The room became a furnace.
But Pyat Pree, the anchor, still stood, his body now convulsing, frost forming on his blue robes even as the dragonfire licked at the edges of the dais. He was overloaded, trapped between two opposing, absolute forces.
The chains. I had to break the chains.
"Again!" I bellowed.
Daenerys, her face shining with sweat and the reflected light of the fire, her eyes blazing, pointed at Pyat Pree himself.
"DRACARYS!"
The blast of fire struck him square in the chest.
At the exact same moment, I gave one final, brutal push, forcing the last of my arctic power into his corrupted heart.
The chemical reaction was absolute.
It was an explosion of pure, conflicting energy. Fire and Ice. The sickly blue light of his magic against the pure, living gold of the dragons. The burning heat of her rage against the absolute zero of my own.
Pyat Pree did not just die. He detonated.
He exploded in a silent, blinding flash of black frost and blue-green light. The sound was a deafening crack as reality itself seemed to tear and reset. The blue chains binding me shattered into a million pieces. The cage containing the dragons vaporized.
The collective, psychic scream of the Undying echoed for a single, agonizing moment, and then... silence.
I dropped, hard. I hit the stone floor with a bone-jarring impact, landing on one knee. My body was a screaming chorus of agony, my magical core a hollow, aching void. The world was a blur of black and red. But I was not helpless. I was on one knee, my head bowed, my breath sawing in my chest. I was a god, exhausted, but not broken.
The dragons, freed, were shrieking, flying in frantic circles in the now-burning room.
"Loki!" Daenerys screamed.
She ran to me, a frantic, desperate movement, stumbling over the smoldering robes of the dead. She fell to her knees at my side, her small hands grabbing my face.
"Loki, answer me! Don't you dare!" she sobbed, her voice cracking, her tears hot on my skin, which was now unnaturally cold to the touch.
I managed to lift my head. She was there, her face streaked with soot, her lilac eyes wide with terror, her silk robe singed. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
A slow, pained, but triumphant smile touched my lips. "A... 'sputtering candle'..." I whispered.
She choked out a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. "Liar," she breathed, her forehead pressing against mine. "My monster."
She kissed me.
It wasn't the slow, sensual claim of the garden or the frantic, possessive passion of the night. This was a brutal, life-affirming, desperate crash of lips and teeth. It was a staking of a claim, a confirmation of life. It was heaven on earth, found in the absolute ruin of a warlock's tomb. She kissed me with all the fire and fury in her soul, as if she could burn away the chill that clung to me.
A deep, rumbling groan shook the tower. The blue flames in the sconces died, plunging us back into darkness, lit only by the fires consuming the dead. The stone above us cracked.
"The tower," I grunted, pushing myself to my feet. My legs screamed in protest, my body aching with a profound, bone-deep cold, but I stood. "It's collapsing. The magic... it's undone."
"My children," she cried, pulling away, her eyes darting frantically.
"Here, Khaleesi!"
Viserion and Rhaegal, drawn by her voice, landed clumsily on her shoulders, hissing and snapping. But Drogon, the largest, the black dread, landed on my pauldron, his molten-gold eyes staring directly into mine. He wasn't hissing. He was... watching. He pressed his hot, scaled body against my cold armor, and I felt a strange, new warmth seep into me.
"He... he likes you," Daenerys whispered in awe.
"He respects a fellow predator," I growled, my body still protesting, but my strength returning.
Another groan, and a section of the ceiling collapsed, sending a shower of black stone and dust raining down.
"We have to go. Now."
I grabbed her hand. She grabbed the magical dagger I had made her, its light now extinguished. My Seidr was at its lowest ebb, but it was mine again, no longer being siphoned.
Hand in hand, with dragons clinging to our shoulders, we ran.
We plunged back into the dark, twisting corridors, but the illusions were gone. There was no throne room, no phantasmal tent, no vision of my past. There was only the black, oily stone, now cracking and groaning as the tower died around us.
We burst out of the black archway, collapsing onto the dusty ground outside, gasping for air. We were covered in soot, sweat, and the foul-smelling dust of the Undying. Behind us, with a final, agonizing shriek of stone, the House of the Undying, the ancient, diseased tooth of Qarth, imploded, collapsing in on itself in a cloud of black dust.
We were alive. We were free. And we had the dragons.
Daenerys didn't speak. She just launched herself at me, her arms wrapping around my neck, her body crashing into mine. I wrapped my arms around her waist, lifting her off the ground, burying my face in her neck, breathing in her scent—smoke, sweat, and that impossible, sweet fire.
She was trembling, her entire body shaking with the aftershock of terror and triumph.
"It's done," I whispered, my voice rough. "It's over."
"No," she said, pulling back, her lilac eyes burning into mine in the faint starlight. "It's just begun."