Chapter Text
The first thing: forget everything you think you know.
It’s the best piece of advice Mordo could scrape up when a novice asked him for study tips some eight years ago, and he’s used it religiously on every recruit since. There are, however, some absolute truths.
Take cats for example; Mordo likes cats. He knows he likes cats because they’re cute and fluffy and, most importantly, they kill vermin. These are things that don’t change when he uncovers the secrets of the universe (unless there’s a contract between felines and rodents that he remains unaware of).
So, he’s delighted when the Ancient One brings the black cat they found after the Invasion of New York back to the Kamar-Taj.
“His name is Mischief,” the Ancient One says, the cat in question exploring his new surroundings with reserved grace. “He’ll be with us for a while.”
He doesn’t question that. A cat is a cat, and though they don’t have a mouse problem in Kamar-Taj, the cute and fluffy aspects still apply.
Mischief is an affectionate animal and often weasels his way between sorcerers and their books for scratches, propping his paws against the pages and staring down at the words with slitted eyes. Wong takes a video of him doing it to Master Hamir, which quickly circulates to the other Sanctums.
Aside from being affectionate, Mischief often follows the novices out for their drills, his bright green eyes rapt as he watches portals sizzle to life in the air.
Mordo can’t shake the fear that he’ll pounce on an Eldritch spark and burn his paws. Daniel assures him that won’t happen. The Ancient One simply smiles indulgently when he hesitates to stray too far from Mischief’s perch.
He makes sure to keep himself between Mischief and the portals as he monitors the students’ progress. Just in case. After the first few days, he admits that he's going a bit overboard and dials it back a notch to focus on the students.
Therefore, when he finds Kaecilius of all people staring at Mischief with a look of profound consternation, he hardly glances at the cat.
“What’s wrong?” Mordo shifts his stack of books so he’s holding them under one arm. The library just acquired a new collection written in Elder Futhark, in a language that nobody seems to understand. He’s been tracking down reference manuals all day.
Wong threw himself wholeheartedly into the translation project and Mordo is considering handing his section off to Kaecilius just to give him something to do other than angst and stare at the cat.
Kaecilius looks at him, then at the cat, then back to him. “What is that?”
“Just some reference manuals for the runic translations. We think it’s Old Norse. Speaking of, you’re better with Scandinavian lang—”
“Not that,” Kaecilius lifts his index, rotates it to point at Mischief, “that.”
Mordo resigns himself to either a pointless conversation or getting his mind blown. It’s fifty-fifty around here.
Mischief sits on one of the library’s long tables, surrounded by books. Over twenty manuscripts from both the general collection and the Masters’ section. All of them are open. Mordo tilts his head and says, “huh.”
The books are arranged in a grid pattern, like someone was cross-referencing materials from all of them. They’re alone in the library.
Not terribly out of the ordinary.
“Did you take those out?”
“No.”
Mordo shrugs. “Someone must have ducked out mid-project. If they’re not back by the time evening drills end, the librarian will clear it up.”
“No, that—” Kaecilius exhales sharply in the condescending way he does when he’s too irritated to be polite. Wong calls it his ‘bitch-mode’. “It was reading the books. Turning the pages.”
Mordo goes over to the table—mostly to put his things down because his arm hurts—and then greets Mischief with a hand down his neck before peering over the cat’s head to look at the books. They’re an interesting mix of intermediate practical manuals and advanced theoretical treatises, all of them on unrelated topics and in a variety of languages. He strokes Mischief’s soft fur as he tries to connect them. The only concerning volume is the Book of Cagliostro, but that's not forbidden for students to consult.
Kaecilius hovers over his shoulder, a diagnostic mandela spinning from one hand.
“Really?” Mordo raises an eyebrow. Mischief flops onto his side and bats at one of the books, lifting a page slightly.
“That creature is not what it appears. It may be a danger.”
“It’s a cat.” Mischief finally succeeds at turning the page. Such skill. It must be supernatural. Mordo has no idea how either of them still have a straight face right now. “Someone probably just left the books out.”
“If it is a cat, it’s not a normal one.” Kaecilius brings the mandela closer, and Mordo rolls his eyes. Whatever. It’s not like it’ll hurt him. Besides, on the off chance that Mischief is some sort of threat, it would be nice to know now.
The bright orange circle spits sparks as it locks onto its target. Mordo sees the danger a moment before it happens, far too late to stop it. Mischief rolls over, his tail swinging up—and too close to the mandela. It doesn’t make contact, but the heat is enough to shock anyone.
Mischief yowls and shoots out from under Mordo’s hand. He barely catches sight of the dark blur as it thuds to the ground and vanishes down the shadowed hall.
The two sorcerers don’t move. Kaecilius even keeps the mandela spinning.
The air smells like burned hair.
“So,” Mordo says. “Did you get anything?”
Kaecilius blinks. He looks down at the spell and sure enough: no anomalies detected.
“It hardly had the time to—”
“Put the books away or I’ll tell the Ancient One you burned her cat. And I’m giving you homework.”
The gall of these mortals. More than that—their sheer incompetence! How these humans can dare to call themselves masters of the mystic arts is truly baffling. Loki shelters in the Sorcerer Supreme’s monastic bedchamber to examine the damage done to his tail. Eldritch magic, it seems, does not play well with organic matter.
He needn’t have worried. A few singed hairs, nothing more. He’s done worse damage to himself as a child.
Loki flicks the ruined fur away with a brush of seidr, settling his sensitive Flerken instincts as he does. That Kaecilius fellow is getting to be a real pain. Retribution is in order.
Before he can get to plotting his revenge, the door slides open.
The Sorcerer Supreme—in this case, Sorceress Supreme—steps inside and immediately locates Loki sitting atop her low desk, directly on what feels like a decaying manuscript.
Loki curls his tail demurely around over front paws as though he isn’t sitting in the middle of her workspace.
Her room is as small as every other sorcerer’s chamber in this place, containing a desk, a sleeping mat on the floor, a set of drawers, and shelves stacked with papers. No chairs, only flat cushions. The vast majority of the space is dedicated to her moving meditations, marked by the padded floor and incense holders.
The sorceress closes the door behind her and glides to the shelf, sifting through the papers there. “Trouble, Mischief?” she asks.
Loki flicks his ear back.
“It’s only your third day here,” the sorceress says. “Have you told anyone what you are yet?”
He chuffs and hops down from the desk, crossing the room to her sleeping mat. The rough fabric feels like sandpaper against his sensitive paws, but he curls on it nonetheless and rests his chin on his wrists.
“I’ll take that as a no.” The sorceress abandons the pretense of searching through her shelves and kneels behind her recently vacated desk.
To his amusement, she gently closes the manuscript and sets it aside to reveal a tablet beneath. A laptop tablet, that is.
She lifts it so he can see the screen. “Do you know what this is?”
Loki chuffs again and shifts his stare from her to the window, watching the tiny square of dark sky for the occasional dot of star. Of course he knows what a tablet is. Asgard used the same tactile screen technology once, but changed to a three-dimensional illusion system during his infancy. Much cleaner that way.
The sorceress taps away at the little computer for a time, long enough for Loki to return his thoughts to revenge. Revenge of the petty sort, that is. Nothing permanent. It wouldn’t do to overstep when his alliance with these sorcerers is so new.
Kaecilius, too, seems to be a relative newcomer. Better than the novices running drills in the courtyard, but beneath the higher students such as Wong and Mordo. Given the number of students per class and the sorceress' longevity, Loki would assume there are several hundred master sorcerers roaming Midgard in secrecy. An entire society of them, at least.
But then why were Wong and Stephen Strange—the latter apparently not even aware of sorcery yet—the only two to aid in the battle against Thanos?
Trapped in Urðarbrunnr, he had a lot of time to puzzle out the details of the visions. Specifically, the timeline. He placed almost every event along a Midgardian calendar, extrapolating from cues in the backdrop and making use of Midgard’s rapid cultural shifts. He estimates Thanos’ arrival in about five years. A great many things can happen in five years.
Kamar-Taj could fall in five years. All these sorcerers could die before being even slightly useful to him. After all, Thanos is far from the sole threat to Midgard.
( We swore an oath to protect the Time Stone with our lives. )
Loki flinches away from the memory.
“Mischief?” the sorceress says. He looks back to her and finds her too-knowing eyes boring into him. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you sleep yet.”
He glares at her. He isn't tired in the least.
“Ah, yes. I can almost hear you now. ‘I am a god, you ignorant mortal’ followed by a rather obvious lie about how Asgardians don’t need rest.” The sorceress smiles. “But part of our deal was that I take you on as a student, and I wouldn’t allow any of my other students to neglect themselves as you do.”
Loki tries to scoff, only to chuff again. Count that among the downsides of being a Flerken.
Their ‘deal’ includes the donation of a good many Asgardian texts—the ones he stole from the Forbidden Archive during his pillaging of Asgard’s vaults. It’s no great sacrifice on his part as the texts there generally come from traitors’ desks, censored authors, and perverted sorcerers. It was also where the librarians stored materials they deemed inappropriate for the main archive. As such, the majority of it is erotic in nature.
The rest is still terribly amoral, but he’s already read those and memorized the good parts.
Seeing as the sorceress is resolute in having a conversation with him, Loki rolls onto his side and sprawls into his ásar skin. His bones crackle as they grow into place beneath his flesh, joints shortening, senses sharpening, and his skin tightening. Her sleeping mat is even less comfortable as an ǫ́ss.
He sits up and folds his legs in a way that feels wrong but he knows is simply his Flerken skin clinging to his hindbrain.
He says, “You presume too much.”
“I presume only what I know. And among other things, I know that Asgardians sleep, and more dangerously, that they dream.”
Loki knows bait when he hears it. She wants him to ask about her Asgardian friend, to cage him into admitting he isn’t really ǫ́ss. Her attempts grow more tiresome by the hour. He rolls his neck, spine popping. He misses the extra vertebrae. “My wellbeing is my own concern. I am not tired.”
“Loki—” he cuts her off with a sharp look. She sighs and starts again. “Mischief. If I am to be your teacher, you will need to trust me with certain things.”
They did not discuss it, but the sorceress never refers to herself as his master. He doesn’t know if it’s out of deference to his mastery of seidr or the people he associates with the word. He also doesn’t know how he feels about that. He settles for a sneer. “Consider it this way: I have been here for three days and all I learned came from my own reading and observation.”
“Is that not how you learn best?”
It is. Damn her. “Your writings are primitive, and your students’ understanding of it even more so.”
She hums. “And how does our magic compare to yours?”
“I’d hardly call it magic. Interdimensional fumblings, perhaps.” He plucks at the woven fiber robes she furnished him with. Green, of course. “Inelegant and utilitarian at best.”
Almost as if to mock him, the sorceress puts on her sling ring and creates a mini-portal out of which she pulls a steaming tea tray. Since he’s mature and emotionally stable now, he’ll ignore that.
He continues, “It’s so limited by humans’ lack of will that it can hardly be of use to any but the most advanced of practitioners.” The sorceress offers him a tiny cup. He accepts with a quiet, “Thank you.”
“Will. You’ve mentioned that before.” The sorceress blows the steam away from her own cup of tea to take a sip.
It’s still too hot for Loki, so he rests his cup on his knee. “Seidr isn’t like potions or your spells. It is a living thing. Control over it means control over your desire, over yourself. All else is secondary.” He pauses and tilts his head. “Alright, yes, incantations and arrays can be a part of it, as are magical objects and hand movements, but only as guidance to focus the will or anchor the power for long term use.” An oversimplification, but Loki can explain the exact functioning once the sorceress completes her own research.
“I see. And our magic relies entirely on knowledge and precision. It’s a system, a language.”
“Exactly. A single mistake turns the entire spell into useless hand-waving. The amount of study required to achieve the necessary precision for functioning is ridiculous relative to a human lifespan. You'd need to spend a third of your life in study before becoming a master.”
“You’re ignoring the spiritual component,” the sorceress says. “Some find fulfillment in devoting their lives to something great and impossible.”
“Even if they never see it through to the end?”
“Especially then.”
Loki considers this. His vision-self may have a point when it comes to humanity’s natural state. Sheep. They're all sheep. “How embarrassing. For them, that is.”
She shrugs. “It’s called being part of something larger than oneself. The universe is unknowably infinite and terrifying; there is wisdom in accepting that.”
“I’d sooner fuck a horse.”
“According to your Wikipedia page, you already have.”
He grimaces and turns his teacup on his knee. It’s a bit cooler now. “I’ve discovered a great many of the universe’s darkest secrets, answered so many of its mysteries, and seen more than you can dream. Few things have the ability to baffle me. Human storytelling is one.”
The sorceress smiles broadly. Not her false cheer or her cajoling smirk, but a grin that verges on laughter. She puts her tea down and covers her mouth.
“What?” Loki narrows his eyes at her while spreading his seidr to search the room. Nothing changed in the past few minutes, so she must be reacting to him.
She waves him off, still grinning. “Oh dear. Apologies—I’ve simply never spoken to someone like you. The wonder caught up to me.”
Loki’s scowl deepens. “I thought you had an Asgardian friend.”
“No, I don’t mean Asgardian.” She softens. “I mean like me.”
No-one’s like me, rests on the tip of Loki’s tongue.
( An old man stands, refusing to kneel even in the face of death and a power beyond his world.
There are always men like you. )
He blinks the vision away and sips the tea. It scalds his tongue but drags him to reality. Midgard. Kamar-Taj. The sorceress. He clears his throat. “By that, do you mean very tall and very pale? Because if that’s so, I should remind you that this is far from my natal form.”
“I mean old and still curious. Clever, but not cupiditous. Jaded, yet playful.” She says it all with a smile, but her eyes weigh heavy.
“I must disagree with that assessment, particularly on my lack of cupidity.” His lips twist bitterly. “Avarice and envy are my defining features.”
Her expression droops slightly. “According to whom?”
Sif, who grew up with him. Odin, who raised him. Heimdall, who sees all.
“Everyone,” he says. Loki takes another searing drink. He can sort of taste it now. A bit floral. Herbal, not true tea. Chamomile. “I feel compelled to add that your description is quite self-aggrandizing—do we have gargantuan ego in common as well?”
Her nose wrinkles when she grins this time. “Oh, most definitely. It was never in doubt.”
“Of course. After all, you don’t answer to any name but the Ancient One.” Loki swirls his tea. “What is your name, then? You know one of my secrets, won’t you tell me yours?”
Her eye twinkles. “Ancient One.”
“‘Twas a genuine request.”
“Have you considered that I forgot my own name? I am seven hundred years old, after all—quite old for a human. Positively geriatric.”
“My name was myth centuries before you were born,” Loki says flatly. “I am not calling you the Ancient One.”
She pouts, an odd look for her, and looks down at her drink. “From that perspective, I suppose it is a bit ridiculous. Very well. You may call me Aldis, if only so I am not subject to whatever nickname you would conjure for me.”
Aldis. Not terrible. He thinks he would have named her Þjóðgerðr. “Wise of you. Were it my decision, I would have called you Snail.”
“How lovely.”
“Yes, I thought so, too. You’re very slow for an alleged immortal master sorcerer.”
“Thank you for that. Now that you have a name to call me, won’t you get some sleep?”
Again with the sleep thing. Frigga never bothered him this much. Loki sighs. “Seven hundred years and you’ve not mastered the simplest trickster’s move. For shame, Aldis. I might need to actually name you Snail. In order to trick someone into a deal, and yourself out, you must first establish the terms of the deal. I made no agreements, and thus have no obligations.”
Aldis—yes, he likes having something to call her—does a poor job of repressing her smile. “Very well, Mischief. A deal, then. Not overriding our previous one, mind you.”
Loki nods. “I assumed not.”
“Sleep for six hours straight and I swear to craft you a sling ring you can use in your cat form.”
He mulls it over. Or, he makes a show of mulling it over when in reality he immediately accepted the deal. As much as it pains him to admit, he does need sleep.
Not that he’s tired—he’s as focused and energized as he’s ever been. That might be the Stones’ influence. They’re distant, in this form. However, instead of the strange presence, a growing ache twists in his belly where the pocket universe should be, trying to reach to this universe through a path that no longer works.
That’s another reason he’s interested in Aldis’ type of magic. It’s ungainly and utilitarian, but concrete enough to block the Stones’ organic ebb and flow.
His will is to stay awake; the Stones and his seidr will keep him awake.
But he hasn’t slept since escaping Urðarbrunnr.
He doesn’t... not fear it. His waking hours flash back to the visions he saw in that wretched Well—he doesn’t want to know what his sleeping mind will reveal to him. But he has to know eventually. He has to sleep.
Might as well get something out of the experience.
“I accept the terms of your deal,” Loki says, and ignores Aldis’ victorious look.
Spiteful to the last, Loki slides into his Flerken skin—quieting the pull in his belly to a dull presence—and flops down onto Aldis’ sleeping mat. He cracks open an eye to see Aldis calmly working at her desk as though he isn’t there.
He closes both eyes.
Now, to sleep.
When asked where the new materials came from, the Ancient One smiles serenely and says, “They were a gift from a new friend. Part of an exchange of knowledge, if you will.”
It doesn’t make sense. Then again, few things do.
Wong accepts the answer and trusts she told him everything he needs to know.
He ignores Kaecilius when he shows up instead of Mordo to help with the translation, giving him a ratty-looking series that seems to be someone’s personal journals and leaving him at that.
There are hundreds of volumes filling up the room, all of them handwritten and bound in leather. Nearly all of them are written on lambskin vellum, or something similar enough to fool his experienced eye.
While Kamar-Taj’s library is in more extinct languages than modern, only a handful are in Elder Futhark and they’re a different language.
As far as Wong is concerned, these books change everything.
Beyond the obvious information they carry, what little Wong has been able to translate indicates a distinct school of thought when it comes to magic. Possibly an entirely new form.
Wong has to physically stop himself from asking after the Ancient One’s ‘new friend’ when he encounters an explanation for quantum superposition in a millennium-old picture book with gory sketches in a child’s hand all over its margins.
He faces a similar impulse when he figures out that he is not reading a detailed genealogy and is, in fact, reading autobiographical erotica by an incredibly long-lived, well-traveled, and disgustingly incestuous nobleman.
He understands none of the metaphors or cultural references, but there’s only so many times he can read ‘powerful inheritance’ before he gets the gist. He blames it on the lack of gendered pronouns.
“Wong?” Kaecilius speaks for the first time since Wong told him not to.
“Master Kaecilius,” Wong intones, not looking up from a rune that should mean ‘to scream’ but is positioned as a conjunction. Maybe it means something completely different.
“These are Asgardian texts, are they not?”
Privately, Wong thinks Thor is just a random alien fucking with them and not actually the Thor. It’s what Wong would do. He’d pretend to be one of those wild Greek gods like Dionysus. Or Aphrodite.
“Perhaps,” he says. It would make sense for them to be Asgardian, though. He won’t tell Kaecilius that.
“We can’t use half of this.”
Oh, shit. Did Wong give Kaecilius the only relevant books here? Wong is halfway sure the one he has open now is a normal recipe book. He makes a questioning noise without outwardly reacting.
“Their source of magic is inherent in their species, and they draw that from the magic inherent in an extradimensional current they refer to as Yggdrasil. They use multiple words in reference to magic, but I believe the one unique to them is called seiðr.” Kaecilius pronounces the ð perfectly, the fucking bastard. “Many of the concepts appear to be transferable, but much of the text devolves into nonsense.”
Wong hums.
He slides a crate of books by the same man who did the incest erotica over to Kaecilius and takes the journal series for himself.
He wonders how Kaecilius will react once he figures out what he’s reading. It’s enough to bring a small smile to his face.
He returns to his probably-a-cookbook and tracks down enough instances of ‘seiðr’ and ‘breath’ to tentatively mark it as a potions manual. Even if they don’t have any of the ingredients—since it’s looking more and more like this is from an alien planet—some principles may still be of use. And you never know when interplanetary travel will be a thing.
Shifting over to the journals, Wong skims the parts he recognizes as daily logs: ate breakfast with so-and-so, task reminders, saw a cool bird, got to class late, and so on. He pauses over the longer sections of study notes. They’re organized and pristine, in black and blue inks with charts painstakingly copied from an instructor’s board.
This is a student’s journal. A very well-organized student at that. Wong re-evaluates his estimate of the student’s age over four times through the first journal. He eventually settles for a girl in her teens.
The deciding factor comes in the form of little comments sunken among the daily logs. Things like, [personal name] annoyed me and [?] during our [trip? walk?] so I turned them into a [animal? insect?] and Why doesn’t [personal name] like me anymore? They will not stop [looking at? dancing with? writing?] others but they will make bad wives and Wong’s personal favorite: [personal name] spends too much time with their [probably a slur] brother, I should kill them.
Yes, he does feel gross reading a teenage girl’s diary.
In his defense, she takes very good notes. And her personal drama livens up the otherwise dry topic. Kaecilius’ Post-It annotations ignore the teen angst and dig right to the implications of interdimensional entanglement.
Wong skips the already-annotated sections entirely, landing on the part where Kaecilius began having trouble.
He recognizes the problem immediately: it’s a cypher. He checks the other journals. They must be out of order because some are coded while others are mostly understandable; the one in his hands is unique in having both.
What happened to make her change? The number of coded journals indicates she kept it up for quite some time, so it wasn’t just a teen fancy.
Fortunately, Wong has the Internet at his disposal.
He tracks down the oldest known cyphers and runs them through a probability spell along with a couple pages of the journal and an uncoded paragraph.
He could keep reading to find something useful, but then he’d miss a show.
Kaecilius looks like he’s shitting a brick. His knuckles whiten around his pencil. His eyes are the only things that move, flicking over the vellum and to his reference notes almost frantically.
Wong’s lips twitch. He masters himself, taking a couple deep meditative breaths to steady his voice. “Have you found something, Master Kaecilius?”
He laces his fingers together while he waits for Kaecilius to answer.
Slowly, Kaecilius looks up. His blank expression doesn’t waver as he brings deadened eyes to Wong’s face. “This is pornography.”
“Is it?” Wong says.
“It is.” Kaecilius maintains eye contact. “This person copulated with an ox. Who is also their grandson.”
“Hm.” Wong looks down, considering. He’s cry-laughing inside. He looks back up. “Ew.”
Wong’s probability spell fizzles out as it finds a key and begins rearranging the runes according to the transposition cypher.
He’s almost disappointed that it jars Kaecilius back to his all-business no-anything-else self, the only remnant of their experience being the slight violence with which he returns the books to their crate.
“Wait,” Wong holds up a finger, “you may need to read those.”
Kaecilius freezes with an expression of utter dread.
“This author started using a cypher to code her journals once she started learning sex magic. And she decided to make that her specialty.” Wong feigns indifference as he reads the decoded runes. “It seems to be a widespread and extremely useful field.”
Wong hadn’t imagined it possible, but Kaecilius stiffens further before gritting out, “As I mentioned, humans will likely be unable to harness the same spellwork as Asgardians.”
“Sex magic works for all species,” Wong reads. “Regardless of their birth world.” Or realm , as it were. The Ancient One's new friend is totally Thor.
Kaecilius appears vaguely ill.
“Since you’re well-versed in the vocabulary already, I suggest you review the porn.” He slides the journals back to Kaecilius with a little smile. “And the sex witch’s diary.”
Wong delights in watching the other man struggle so obviously between his disgust and desire for knowledge. Sex magic isn’t really a thing in the Kamar-Taj, but from the way the girl wrote about it, it’s very much a thing in Asgard.
Finally, Kaecilius admits defeat by pulling the books to his side of the table, his face red as he opens the decoded journal.
Wong grabs the nearest tome, a thick, heavily bound monster of a thing. He puffs as he deposits it carefully among his reference sheets. He recognizes ‘animal’ and ‘energy’, nothing aside from that. He tries to open it, but finds the pages partially fused together by humidity.
He sighs and pulls out his bookbinding tools. Vellum is hardier than most materials, but it does occasionally require some cleaning up.
He opens the book to the first place it will allow him, towards the middle, and stares at the image painted there. A cat. It looks exactly like an orange tabby from Earth. Full-color, still bright and impossibly well-preserved given the book’s age. The text around it looks like it could be an encyclopedic entry—an incredibly valuable resource if he's right.
Also, the painting moves. Its tail flicks lazily against the abstract background, head turning this way and that with a bored expression.
Interesting.
He picks up the palette knife to start working the pages apart, only to stop dead in his tracks when the cat’s face splits in half and hurls a wash of tentacles onto the next page.