Waking in the void of endless white as was so familiar to Lucca, he felt nothing but incomparable calmness like nothing before. When he had first been drawn into this place, he acted calm, acted like his heart wasn’t pounding a mile a minute and yet, back then it couldn’t have been pounding harder. Though he thought the events leading to his arrival may very well have been a supporting factor to that.

With his head swivelling Lucca inspected every fibre of the solar abyss and onto every little particulate of light that held it together. It was strange, it was like he had been struck with an epiphany and awoke to something more than simplicities. That beneath the skin of everything was something more. For some, it was the enrapture of tendrils crossing across endless voids, for some it was hundreds of eyes on the inside of their heads, for even more… it was pure, unfettered darkness. He could feel that one sloshing around inside his head.

Lifting his hands he glanced down at them and found his skin slick with a tar-like sweat oozing from all his pores. When it left his skin, it would rapidly descend into smog before fading away.

His hands themselves were his own but nothing like what he remembered them to be. They had softened, paled, his skin had pulled taut over his bones and turned them skeletal. The nails he could only recall as being fractured and ripped free from his fingers had now returned and sharpened into ten jagged claws shaded a shade of metallic grey.

With his singular pale flame of an eye and a tilted head, he heard a whoosh as a figure once more came to loom over him, staring down at him without shadow and with two pearlescent eyes.

Lucca lifted his head and met with the cold gaze of god. A silence forming between them as Lucca noted a reflection in the deities eyes. There was no Lucca, no boy but a vaguely humanoid form cloaked in the blackest of smoke, within which he could see a single shimmering white orb dancing about like a wisp within fog.

“Hmm,” gods voice reverberated, “you have become something quite strange, Lucca White.” Its form shrunk, congealing smaller and smaller until he was only but a heads taller than Lucca was.

God stepped forth, closed the distance between them with a short stride that brought him kilometres closer and stopped at the infinitesimal distance of but a meter. “It is rare for you humans to develop into lesser deities, though you…” gods eyes narrowed, and he cast an analytical look over the boy’s body. “No. You are not quite there yet. You have the power, but it is lacking, just as your form is lacking in shape. Hmm,” god pondered to himself pinching his chin. “Tell me, Lucca White, do you want to become a god?”

Lucca tilted his head, there was anticipation to the deities voice and posture. Like he was staring at a diamond yet to be given form.

‘A… god?’ he thought, his wispy eye bobbing within the cloak of fog that was his head. Was this thing offering to make him his own god? But why?

Why would Lucca want to become a god?

Was the abyss not enough?

No, that’s not right. The abyss was more. The abyss was the land between lands, it was more than a meagre god.

“No.” He responded neutrally.

God frowned, his slit white mouth curled precariously down at the ends. “Odd, you mortals have a fascination with godhood, what with the consumption of your world and your myths. I know more than a few mortals who have scratched the boundaries of godhood. Few have truly ever touched it though. Yet I offer you the possibility to become a true god and you refuse it?” he sounded offended.

Lucca kept calm and face the deities tone head-on, “I don’t care. A god seems so…” dull, boring, irrelevant, old, “…Small.” Licking what he believed was his lip, Lucca failed to note the dingle tendril droop forth from his ‘mouth’ and snake around before retracting back into the void. “You seem so small… Loki.”

The name, it was familiar to Lucca, a name from his past long before his fall to this place. Loki, the god of mischief originating from the Norse mythos. He was the ‘younger brother’ of Thor and adopted son to Odin.

Though in reality, he was nothing more than the half-bred child of a female Aesir and an ice giant, a jotun, as well as the father to several other Norse entities such as Hel, Jormungandr and even Fenrir. All of whom were born by the giantess Angrboda.

Though this god presented himself as high upon the world, Lucca could see it all now, the falsities in this god and the minuscule size of this realm of only a single measly kilometre. Far beyond it, he could sense through the void and into the cosmos where he could feel other stars much larger than this all hanging precariously within the night in limbo like states.

The god’s eyes bolted wide, he hadn’t told these mortals his name, nor was it commonplace throughout any world. Only a few gods even knew of his existence and survival, but this mortal, he had? Had they betrayed him? Revealed him after so long?

Loki’s body trembled and bulged, and he rose to new heights, soaring even higher than the first time Lucca had met him. “I don’t know how you know that name Lucca White, but it is not a name you should speak so carelessly,” Loki growled and the noise came to ring inside Lucca’s mind, battering the depths like a rampaging bull within a china shop.

It didn’t hurt so much as a drew an uncomfortable whine from the boy, much similar to the unpleasant feeling of a sleeping foot or pins and needles one would get now and then. Lucca’s wisp-like eye paused at the centre of his cowl and trembled. “Get out.” Lucca muttered and ordered his mist to congeal around the invasive reverberations and pushed them out.

Loki halted, thoughts drawing silent that his urges at piercing this mortals mind had been so easily tossed away. Had he the capability to sweat, Lucca could feel he would. “No, you are no god.” The god's expression morphed, shifting from shock to horror in the span of moments, “Damned! Die you monster!” Coiling a hand into a city-sized fist, Loki threw it down at a speed to rival jets yet seemed to Lucca to be moving at a snail’s pace.

Awaiting it to come crashing down, Lucca hummed, his wisp blinking and his hand rose and with palm outstretched and fingers curled to bony claws to meet the descending fist. His mist coiled around his limb and condensed into a ball of concentrated darkness surrounding him like a shell.

But when Loki’s fist came down, Lucca’s body froze, and agony coursed through his mind. His condensed darkness was forced to dissipate. Lucca gasped, his voice unnaturally scratchy. He fell to his knee, catching himself from falling over completely. His cocoon had shattered taking with it part of his fog. He wasn’t strong enough. No challenge to even a weak god. If he tried to challenge him, Lucca knew he would die once and for all.

He had to escape.

Throwing his hand to the side he dispelled what little fragments of a shell remained and peered into Loki’s eyes. He gazed at the fabric of his flesh and observed what was beneath and it is there he found a path. A small seed, a portal through which he saw a little blue marble.

Loki shivered, never had he felt so naked before a human of all things. It was wrong. He was the god! He was the higher being! Not some measly humanoid… then why did he feel pangs of unnerving… it couldn’t be… fear?

No. Never. He scowled, pulled back his fist and prepared for another assault. Lucca White may resist once, but twice? No. His defences had already buckled beneath a single assault.

Sending his fist down, he expected to crush the boy and his soul thus severing him from what he was becoming. The void rippled with untold pressure as Loki bared his fist down and sent the realm shaking in the process.

And yet, something strange had happened. When he pulled back his fist there was no Lucca White, had he destroyed the vermin? Then came the feeling of stinging pain, something he had felt perhaps once before in his endless life.

There, nestled between his third and fourth knuckle was a small, barely larger than a centimetre cut, within it was a worm of corruption pushing itself deeper into his veins. “What?” Loki hissed as the insect dug through his palm and rapidly swam up his arm and towards his chest, squirming ever closer to that little opening he’d been keeping open.

“No!” It had been built so far from earth that not even the most observant of gods could find it, and yet this beast did. As his voice echoed through his chambers, he turned his astral form inwards and sent surges of his deific power to chase and stop Lucca. But it was too late, by the time his aura kissed the worms heel, it had already burst forth through the portal and back into the earth.

When he tried to give chase, to rip that beast back into his realm his aura was suddenly repulsed by some invisible law. The law that gods held no place within the mortal coil.

Loki brought himself to the portal, laid one hand atop its clear field and stared down at the monstrous fog billowing through the atmosphere and back to earth. No sooner did all the smoke dissipate with the winds, fading even from his eyes.

Pulling back from the portal, Loki’s visage turned a shade of grey. “I… I need to fix this.” He couldn’t let it live. Not an infantile Old one. If he didn’t kill it soon before its form solidified earth would be doomed and he would be sentenced to a fate worse than condemnation and death by his peers.

“My beasts,” he mumbled and cast his gaze through his thoughts to the hundreds of beating bodies of flesh lingering somewhere within his realm. Their forms all half-baked, not ready, not in the slightest. “Damn, damn, damn,” he began to hyperventilate, if he sent them out now the beast even with its mortal body would kill them easily.

“The humans, yes, the humans.” Urgency billowed from his voice and he shot his gaze to the godless world of Marga but quickly paled when he realized, “how have none of those mortals died!?”

Indeed, for the decades he left those few dozen not a single had met with malady or malaise. Instead, they thrived, formed families with one another and others. It was illogical, it was all so illogical. There had to be one but there simply wasn’t.

Loki thumped heavily onto his knees, his fingers clawing marks into his ethereal scalp. “What have I done?”