Loki doesn't tell anyone what she's doing. They'd be disappointed; she'd get in trouble. And it's not hard to keep it secret; this is hardly a new habit for her, writing incessantly in incomprehensible ciphers. She still diaries, still processes, still makes her decisions - and now she also spell-weaves.

It is a long, hard, painstaking process. She has to come at it from both ends - peer at possible combinations of her symbols to see what makes sense, and come up with a visualization of her desired end result so she knows what parts she needs to build. She's never done this before, and keeps having to go back and edit things. One of the fourth-tier parts has so many third-tier parts in it that she takes weeks of trying just to hold them all in her mind at the same time and make them snap together into a single object she can keep memorized in its entirety. She spends a stack of notebooks as high as her waist working out another fourth-tier part, only to discover that she's got a key "word" wrong and has to start completely over because it affects everything else.

When she starts, she resigns herself to the possibility that her spell will take an entire year.

This estimate is soon revised.

It takes half a century of stolen time and backtracking and double-checking.

But it will be worth it, she thinks, if her mother will love her unreservedly, if she can keep up with Thor, if she can put her scepter - now a bit short for use as a cane, for a child her size - aside and run and dance. (If she can do magic.)

And once she casts it, it will stay forever.

She has just about built herself from atoms; there are separate bits of this spell for each muscle in her body in its current shape and accounting for its future growth (she's been reading anatomy) and connecting them all to her mind, directly, commanding their obedience.

She assembles the ninth-tier pieces into a single, unified whole, and it shines bright in her mind, and she knows exactly what to do with it, from cube-inspired knowledge stamped as bright in her thoughts as though she'd touched it yesterday.

It's all together now.

She wills it.

She knows the difference at once though there's no visible effect - even in how she holds up her head, how the last page of her notebook feels under her fingers.

She wants to get up, twirl, leap, pick up her scepter and brandish it like a sword, run down the halls whooping and show Thor.

But she doesn't. It wouldn't do to be conspicuous. (Heimdall is watching; she can't read the cipher but she can see the results.)

Loki is going to have to pretend to have outgrown her clumsiness, spend the next ten or fifteen years still tripping occasionally but less and less. Maybe she should get new shoes; maybe she should ask about learning to dance. Some outward excuse. Something less sudden.

She sketches a plan in her non-magical cipher, and sets about enacting it.

(Meanwhile, she contemplates what spell she should build next.)

Author: purposeful_glory	Loki doesn't tell anyone what she's doing. They'd be disappointed; she'd get in trouble. And it's not hard to keep it secret; this is hardly a new habit for her, writing incessantly in incomprehensible ciphers. She still diaries, still processes, still makes her decisions - and now she also spell-weaves. It is a long, hard, painstaking process. She has to come at it from both ends - peer at possible combinations of her symbols to see what makes sense, and come up with a visualization of her desired end result so she knows what parts she needs to build. She's never done this before, and keeps having to go back and edit things. One of the fourth-tier parts has so many third-tier parts in it that she takes weeks of trying just to hold them all in her mind at the same time and make them snap together into a single object she can keep memorized in its entirety. She spends a stack of notebooks as high as her waist working out another fourth-tier part, only to discover that she's got a key "word" wrong and has to start completely over because it affects everything else. When she starts, she resigns herself to the possibility that her spell will take an entire year. This estimate is soon revised. It takes half a century of stolen time and backtracking and double-checking. But it will be worth it, she thinks, if her mother will love her unreservedly, if she can keep up with Thor, if she can put her scepter - now a bit short for use as a cane, for a child her size - aside and run and dance. (If she can do magic.) And once she casts it, it will stay forever. She has just about built herself from atoms; there are separate bits of this spell for each muscle in her body in its current shape and accounting for its future growth (she's been reading anatomy) and connecting them all to her mind, directly, commanding their obedience. She assembles the ninth-tier pieces into a single, unified whole, and it shines bright in her mind, and she knows exactly what to do with it, from cube-inspired knowledge stamped as bright in her thoughts as though she'd touched it yesterday. It's all together now. She wills it. She knows the difference at once though there's no visible effect - even in how she holds up her head, how the last page of her notebook feels under her fingers. She wants to get up, twirl, leap, pick up her scepter and brandish it like a sword, run down the halls whooping and show Thor. But she doesn't. It wouldn't do to be conspicuous. (Heimdall is watching; she can't read the cipher but she can see the results.) Loki is going to have to pretend to have outgrown her clumsiness, spend the next ten or fifteen years still tripping occasionally but less and less. Maybe she should get new shoes; maybe she should ask about learning to dance. Some outward excuse. Something less sudden. She sketches a plan in her non-magical cipher, and sets about enacting it. (Meanwhile, she contemplates what spell she should build next.)
Author: pythbox	Thor has been diligent about not teasing Loki for falling, although she still laughs. She has also never stopped suggesting that Loki take up this or that physical activity, holding out the hope that maybe this is the one she'll be good at. She remains undiscouraged when Loki declines to try them. Dance is the next thing she suggests.
Author: alicornucopia	That's very convenient. Loki makes a show of considering it, then takes her up on it, affecting tentativeness.
Author: pythbox	Thor encourages her with determined enthusiasm.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki takes her time, picking her way through very simple dance steps, slipping but not falling, soliciting that new pair of shoes, and gradually, with agonizing slowness, improving - there and everywhere.
Author: pythbox	Thor is so happy. Frigg is pleased, too, and Odin grudgingly congratulatory, but it's Thor who really celebrates.
Author: alicornucopia	Thor is sweet. It really will be nice to be able to follow her in more of her activities. (Meanwhile, Loki has decided to work on healing spells. This will have to be several different spells; there is just no compressing it into a single, perfect work of sorcery. It will certainly take hundreds of years, especially now that her time is divided yet again with the pursuit of various appropriately womanly things. But it could come in useful.)
Author: pythbox	And Thor, of course, is right there demanding that her sister be given the best possible lessons in all womanly pursuits. Sword and axe and mace and spear - she can pick a favourite when she's older, but she should try everything.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki does want to pick a favorite pretty soon. She wants to catch up, and that means some degree of specialization. She likes polearms best, and concedes that she should know something for closer quarters, too, such as the dagger.
Author: pythbox	Thor already favours sword and mace. They make a good team.
Author: alicornucopia	Excellent! That is good. Loki still makes sure she has plenty of time to fuss over her cipher-filled notebooks. She can use a few fragments of her spell of grace, for the healing spells - but only a few low-level parts. It's going to be a long haul and she tries to make progress every day.
Author: pythbox	"You've always got your nose in a book," Thor says one day. "What are you doing? No one else writes this much."
Author: alicornucopia	"Some of them are just diaries, about what happened each day," Loki says. "The rest of it is private."
Author: pythbox	"Why do you keep diaries?" says Thor, wrinkling her nose. "Are you going to be a bard?"
Author: alicornucopia	"I don't think so. I just don't like to forget things that have happened to me. Bards go on about things that happened to people more interesting than them."
Author: pythbox	"But why do you want to remember things if they're not interesting?"
Author: alicornucopia	"They are interesting, because they're about my life," says Loki. "I am too interesting to be a bard."
Author: pythbox	"You haven't done anything interesting yet except stop tripping on things," says Thor. "Wait until you're grown up, then you'll be doing things worth a saga or two."
Author: alicornucopia	"I suppose," says Loki. "What do you imagine we'll do? Exactly?"
Author: pythbox	"Oh, fight battles and slay monsters and things," says Thor. "Maybe we'll finally get that bear that's been plaguing the northern villages for years. Did you hear? Mother sent four of her best ladies after it and two of them came back."
Author: alicornucopia	"Villages should not have to be plagued by bears," says Loki. "I hope someone else gets that one before we grow up, but there will probably be more bears making trouble by then."
Author: pythbox	"I want to kill it, though," says Thor. "Wouldn't that be glorious?"
Author: alicornucopia	"It would be very glorious, but then the village would have to have this bear problem for hundreds of years, waiting for you to grow up," says Loki. "If someone else gets this one, you can get another one, and then for those hundreds of years there will not be this bear problem."
Author: pythbox	"Or I could just kill it now," Thor suggests.
Author: alicornucopia	"The ladies who died," says Loki, "could you have beat either one of them in single combat?"
Author: pythbox	"I'm not ever going to find out now, am I?" she says indignantly.
Author: alicornucopia	"Well, fine, the ones who came back, but hadn't killed the bear. If you can't beat them, you shouldn't try the bear."
Author: pythbox	"Well enough," Thor says brightly.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki is satisfied; Thor might have a bad time of it trying to fight the warriors but they probably won't actually kill her. The bear has no such restraint.
Author: pythbox	Thor challenges one of them to a fight the next day. She loses, but it's closer than anyone was expecting. Except Thor, who intended to win.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki is appropriately impressed with the closeness of the fight, and decides she might need a better way to discourage going after bears, very soon.
Author: pythbox	Thor lapses in her neverneding encouragement of her sister's combat training, because she is too busy honing her own skills. She is even more aggressive during sparring than usual.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki does not require constant encouragement. She does, however, risk showing off a little to dodge excessively forceful blows when they practice.
Author: pythbox	Other fellow students are not so lucky; Thor sends multiple children, of their age or older, flying the length of the practice hall.
Author: alicornucopia	"You're in a mood, sister," Loki comments after this has happened three times.
Author: pythbox	Thor just laughs.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki has no further comment, although if the mood persists, she may suggest that Thor start sparring against groups - to spread around the damage more evenly, to up the challenge.
Author: pythbox	The mood persists. The other children start ganging up on her of their own accord, and she is quite pleased about it.
Author: alicornucopia	Well, as long as she's pleased and no one has a head injury. Loki does not know how to fix head injuries yet. Meanwhile, Loki is gravitating towards glaives. They combine all her favorite things about weapons.
Author: pythbox	And Thor has set her sights on the hammer - not hammers in general, but a particular hammer, one that currently rests on a pedestal in one of Odin's finest treasure rooms. It is reasonably common for a warrior to ask permission to lift it, but in the last several hundred years, no one who has tried has ever succeeded.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki has no comment on the hammer. Many of her healing spells will share similar foundations, so she makes a lot of progress in the first fifty years of work on the suite, and she also has to re-do fewer pieces now that she has the graceful spell under her belt. She has one that should work on serious injuries by her five hundredth birthday; it's the simplest, and she expects at least another century to go by before she can cure disease. She might put the spell intended to address non-injury-based deterioration aside for a while, once its pieces no longer overlap with the others. The only really old person she knows is Odin, who she would never dare heal and might not want to anyway.
Author: pythbox	The children grow older. The ones Thor has been tossing across the room become her close friends; they have many small adventures together. When Thor has grown to almost her mother's height, still a child but now close to becoming an adult, one day she challenges that lady to a fight again. And wins.
Author: alicornucopia	It could be nothing, but - "Sister? Why her?"
Author: pythbox	"No one's killed the bear yet," says Thor.
Author: alicornucopia	"...Sister, she went with three other ladies, and they failed, and lost friends."
Author: pythbox	"I am a princess of Asgard," says Thor, tossing her head. "You can come if you like."
Author: alicornucopia	Loki actually considers it. If the bear hurts her - or Thor - she can heal now - but - "I don't think you ought to go."
Author: pythbox	Thor shrugs.
Author: alicornucopia	"Truly," says Loki. "I think you should stay home. ...But if you are going to go, I will come."
Author: pythbox	Thor beams a grin and hugs her sister.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki smiles nervously and hugs back. She already worked it out when she decided what spell to craft: she'd rather a live sister who hates her than a dead one who didn't know she could have been saved.
Author: pythbox	"I want to leave tonight," she says. "There's just one thing I have to do first. I love you, sister! I'll come for you when it's time!" And she hugs Loki again and dashes off exuberantly.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki sighs, and picks out armor, and a real glaive, not a practice one. If she's lucky, they'll be able to beat the bear without her having to rescue either of them with healing magic. And then she goes after Thor to find out what this thing is. Loki can run quite lightly and quite fast, even armored.
Author: einridi	Thor is sneaking into a certain treasure room. She is not very sneaky, but it helps that no one except Loki is watching. She walks up to the pedestal on which Mjolnir rests, and she takes the handle in both hands and lifts. It comes up fluidly. Thor steps back.
Author: alicornucopia	"Sister," exclaims Loki. "How did you do it?"
Author: einridi	"The hammer judged me worthy," she says. "Let's get the horses."
Author: alicornucopia	Loki nods. She feels rather better about this expedition if Thor can wield Mjolnir. Her current horse is called Foglsöngr, and she's black-and-white piebald, and young still, eager to go. Loki saddles her up.
Author: einridi	Thor's horse is named Landhȧ́r, and she is a few years older than Foglsöngr but every bit as enthusiastic. It's a day's ride to the last known location of the bear. No one gives them any trouble on the way.
Author: alicornucopia	That's good; Loki would not like to have to explain this more times than she currently expects. She looks for signs of the bear, and for things that might be appealing to giant bears.
Author: einridi	That is good, because Thor did not have even that sophisticated of a plan for actually finding the thing. In the event, they do find tracks; finding this bear has never been a problem. Thor suggests that they dismount and lead the horses along the trail; she has never used Mjolnir before and is sure she could not wield it from the back of a terrified horse.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki agrees readily; she is now more agile on foot than on horseback. She carries her glaive in one hand and leads Foglsöngr with the other.
Author: einridi	And in an hour or two, they come upon the bear. It is much, much larger than anything or anyone Thor has fought before. Its shaggy hide is dotted with the broken ends of old arrows, and scars from the swords or axes of previous opponents. Its paws are each individually bigger than her head. It could bite her in half with a single chomp and not take much trouble about it. She takes a deep breath, raises Mjolnir, and charges with a yell as thunderclouds fill the sky.
Author: alicornucopia	...Loki's spell cannot actually resurrect the dead. And she would need to be conscious to cast it, even if all the difficult work of assembly is over and done. She suddenly regrets this very much, wishes she'd run and told Father, but there's nothing for it now. She circles around, looks for advantageous terrain - they'll need all the help they can get. At least she and Thor can flank it.
Author: einridi	Thor ducks under the swing of a paw and brings the hammer up against the beast's lowered head. She's always been a big, strong girl; she expects it to be a solid hit. She does not expect the bear's head to snap back with a loud crunch, nor for the hammer to keep going, dragging her arm in a full circle until she wrests control from it at the last moment and hauls it up to strike at an incoming paw. Claws screech on metal. Thor lets the hammer's incredible momentum spin her in another circle, and when she comes back around she dips low and swings high and leaps for the bear's face.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki finds high ground; it won't help her if the bear chooses to stand, but she has reach, with her glaive, and if the bear stands Thor can knock its hind legs out from under it; she reaches down and slashes at the animal's back.
Author: einridi	The bear does, in fact, start to stand. Mjolnir hits it in the chest. It falls over backward; Thor lands on its chest and smashes its already broken jaw one more time with the hammer.
Author: alicornucopia	Well, Loki's a little redundant, although she may have usefully distracted it. That's all right, Thor is okay so far, so is she, that's the point. She drops onto her stomach at the edge of the ledge she's standing on for reach and stability, stabs down at the bear's stomach; she'll be on her feet in a moment if it gets its footing back.
Author: einridi	It is not going to get its footing back. Not with its head looking like that. Thor stops hitting it when it stops moving; she jumps off, rolls, comes up facing the bear's corpse, and backs away warily, because with beasts like these you never know. It remains dead. She laughs. "Sorry I didn't leave any for you, sister!"
Author: alicornucopia	"There will be more bears," says Loki, and she pulls back her blade and leaps lightly down. "That was amazing."
Author: einridi	Thor laughs.
Author: alicornucopia	Celebratory dead bear hugs?
Author: einridi	Celebratory dead bear hugs! "I should clean my hammer," she says. "And you, you've blooded your spear, sister!"
Author: alicornucopia	Loki nods, and wipes down the blade of her glaive, still grinning. They aren't even hurt.
Author: einridi	Thor finds something to wipe blood and fur off Mjolnir. The hammer's head isn't even scratched from the bear's claws or teeth. It cleans up as good as new. "We should camp for the night, I think," she says. "It's too late to make it back home by morning."
Author: alicornucopia	"We didn't bring a tent or anything," Loki says. "Maybe we could go to the village it's been bothering and tell them we killed it and they will give us a place to sleep."
Author: einridi	"A fine plan, sister," says Thor, clapping her on the back.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki grins and goes to retrieve Foglsöngr.
Author: einridi	They make their way to the village, which is very happy to receive them, especially when Thor describes the slaying of the bear in vivid detail. Mead is provided for the ensuing celebration.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki likes the taste of mead just fine, but not what it does to her brain in any quantity. She accepts it, drinks slowly, and makes much of the also-delicious spiced fruit juice that is made available, of which she consumes a much greater quantity. She should have the healing spell for poison handled soon and then she'll be able to drink anyone she likes under the table, sing the runes backwards, and wake up the next morning chipper and free of discomfort; that will be nice.
Author: einridi	Thor makes many friends among the villagers, although she does not quite manage to drink any of them under the table. The princesses are put to bed on someone's floor, which Thor considers quite reasonable; she falls over and sleeps like a log, cuddling her hammer.
Author: alicornucopia	Loki makes herself as comfortable as possible and also sleeps. It's better than camping in the wilderness with no camping supplies.
Author: einridi	And in the morning, the villagers send them off and they return to Odin's halls. Where there is a much bigger celebration waiting.
Author: alicornucopia	Oh, good, they don't seem to be in trouble!
Author: einridi	They are not in trouble. Thor is treated with all the respect of an adult warrior, tempered with a certain amount of hair-ruffling, and Loki gets to sit in the halo of her sister's sudden fame and drink exactly as much mead as she feels like, because no one is counting tankards at this feast.
Author: alicornucopia	This is all to the good! Loki basks in reflected glory, cheers (and sips politely) when toasts are raised, and enjoys the feast.
Author: einridi	Thor feasts and drinks and feasts some more, late into the night.