On the Dark Elf warship, Malekith stood before the viewport and watched the Nine Realms arrange themselves in the slow, inevitable geometry of convergence. The alignment was almost complete — nine worlds threading toward a single axis, the distances between them collapsing to something that hadn't existed in five thousand years.
He turned.
Algrim stood behind him, still and composed, the way soldiers stand when they've already made the decision and are simply waiting for what comes next.
Malekith drew a silver-white dagger. "You will carry the curse."
"I'll give everything," Algrim said. "Like our people. Like you."
Malekith drove the blade into Algrim's abdomen in one clean motion, then produced the cursed stone — dense, dark, vibrating with something that had no natural business being near living tissue — and pressed it into the wound with his thumb.
"You will become the Cursed Warrior," Malekith said quietly. "This world will mark you until there is nothing of you left that it hasn't claimed. And when that happens, nothing our enemies have will be enough to stop you."
Algrim breathed slowly through the pain. His eyes stayed on Malekith's face. "I'll destroy them. Everything you need — I'll make it."
A Dark Elf soldier stepped forward and fitted a detection-blocking helmet over Algrim's head, sealing whatever the stone was already beginning to do inside him away from Asgard's instruments. Malekith gave the order to deploy.
The ship carrying Algrim broke toward Vanaheim.
In Asgard's dungeon, Loki was doing what he had apparently been doing since his sentence began — occupying a space with the theatrical precision of someone determined to make their imprisonment look chosen rather than imposed.
New prisoners were being processed into adjacent cells. He watched them come through with detached commentary. "Odin sends me new friends. The man is unfailingly generous."
"Don't you like the books I sent you?"
He turned. Frigga stood just beyond the cell's energy barrier, looking at him with the careful patience of a mother who had been doing this for a very long time.
The books were stacked beside his bed. Loki glanced at them. "So this is my life now. Reading."
"I've done what I can to make things comfortable for you."
"Has it occurred to either of you that comfortable and imprisoned are not actually compatible concepts?" He moved to the edge of the cell and looked at her directly. "You and Father — worrying day and night. You must be exhausted."
Frigga held his gaze. "Thor nearly died for you. The Dragon Ball tournament — he entered it to bring you back. He didn't win the wish, but he tried." Her voice was even. "You understand that the situation you're in is a consequence of what you chose to do."
Something shifted in Loki's expression. The defensive wit receded slightly. "Chose," he said. "You told me my whole life I was born to be a king. I made that real. That was the crime."
"You went to Earth. You hurt people."
"Compared to what Odin —"
"Don't." Her voice didn't rise, but it didn't need to. "A true king accounts for his actions. What accounting have you offered for Earth?"
Loki turned away. "The people Odin has killed across the Nine Realms make my campaign look like a misunderstanding."
"Your father —"
"He is not my father."
The words hit the room and stayed there.
Frigga was quiet for a moment. Then she said, with the specific precision of a woman choosing her words to land exactly where she intended them to: "Then I suppose I'm not your mother either."
Loki's jaw tightened. He didn't turn around. "No," he said, quietly, as if he were trying to convince himself.
"You can see through almost everything," Frigga said. "Except yourself."
She extended her hand through the barrier — or the image of her hand, her projection reaching through the field, the illusion perfectly rendered. Loki turned. He reached out. His fingers passed through hers, touching nothing but the cold air of the cell.
The projection dissolved.
Loki stood alone with his books and the cup he'd been tossing and the very specific silence of someone who had just lost an argument they couldn't admit they'd been having.
Meanwhile, in a lower cell, Algrim sat very still.
He reached into his own abdomen with two fingers and withdrew the cursed stone. It had been working since Malekith pressed it in — the transformation wasn't a switch thrown but a process already underway, the stone's energy threading through his biology and rewriting it in the language of the curse.
He closed his fist around it.
The stone shattered.
The energy that had been contained in it detonated inward, slamming through every cell in his body simultaneously. Algrim's frame expanded — joints cracking, muscle and bone recomposing at a density that hadn't existed in the room a moment ago. Dark energy poured off him in visible waves.
The other prisoners in his cell registered what was happening before the transformation was complete. They threw themselves at the energy barrier, screaming, clawing at the field with their bare hands in the specific panic of people who understand that the thing sharing their space is no longer remotely like them.
Algrim's roar shook the walls. He absorbed it — the raw disorientation of a body remade in seconds, the surge of power with no ceiling he could find — and stood.
One prisoner hadn't made it to the barrier. Algrim looked at him. Then he grabbed him and threw him into the energy net. The prisoner's scream lasted about a second before the net's charge overwhelmed him.
Algrim turned to the net itself.
He hit it with one fist.
The net — rated against every prisoner Asgard had ever processed — shattered. The discharge blew back in a corona of dead energy and Algrim walked through the gap it left.
The guards who had been drawn by the roar were already in position in the corridor. They took one look at what had come through the cell wall and held their ground, which was either professional discipline or an inability to process what they were seeing. They channeled power into their blades, silver light running along the edges, and attacked.
The swords hit Algrim's skin and did nothing. Not deflected — nothing. Like striking bedrock.
He took two guards by their armor and used the curse energy directly, a channel of force that burned through the contact points. They dropped. He stepped over them.
He wasn't moving toward the exit. He was moving through the cellblock, cell by cell, hitting each barrier until it broke, releasing everything inside. Creating enough noise, enough chaos, enough mass disruption to pull every soldier in the palace toward the dungeon and away from what Malekith needed them away from.
Above him, across several levels of palace stone, alarms began to sound.