the cuckoo's child, by invitation

[purposeful_glory]

It is obvious from the time Loki learns to walk that she is not going to be very good at it. Normal toddlers fall, and often; she does it more, and longer. She has been practicing at walking for years before she can cross a floor smoothly nine times of ten, even if she does not sprawl completely every time she missteps.

She winces when she trips, not so much out of embarrassment or because she's hurt herself, but because the reactions are never good.

Falling is not a princessly thing to do.

Comments

[pythbox]

"And you should not touch strange magical artifacts you know nothing about," he adds. "The next one may not be so kind."

[alicornucopia]

"I didn't know. The door was unlocked," says Loki unhappily.

[pythbox]

"It should have been locked and warded so that none but Odin could pass it," says Frigg. "But even so, not all doors that you can pass are doors that you should."

[alicornucopia]

"How do I tell?"

[pythbox]

"You could ask me, or Thor, or a servant," he suggests.

[alicornucopia]

"Would Thor have known not to go in that door?"

[pythbox]

"Perhaps. She does know some things about where to go and where not to."

[alicornucopia]

Loki nods. "Okay. ...Father, my scepter's still in the room. Mother wouldn't let me pick it up before I went."

[pythbox]

"I will see what can be done about retrieving your scepter," he says.

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. I like it."

[pythbox]

Frigg smiles.

[alicornucopia]

"Are you done magicking me? Can I go?"

She wants to write.

She may have to come up with yet a fourth encoding.

[pythbox]

"You can go."

[alicornucopia]

Loki goes - hand on the wall - to her rooms.

[pythbox]

The scepter is lying on her bed.

[alicornucopia]

Ha, of course it is. Father is such a good sorcerer, it must have been him. She takes a fresh notebook from her pile of them, and hops up onto the bed next to it, and begins trying to pick her way through what the cube told her, without putting it into words.

It's so many tiny things - she numbers them, at first, because she doesn't know how many there are, and she gets to two hundred and nine. Then she invents little symbols that suit each one and puts them beside the numbers, and they should be hard to remember but they aren't because the cube told them to her.

She knows how to make these symbols spell long words, and what words will "sound" right and what words will not, and a little about what they might do...

There would need to be many many layers of building, words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters and books and series and corpuses and shelves and stacks and libraries of letters before they would do anything.

But they will do things.

They'll do things and she has them and they're hers.

Loki grins from ear to ear, and starts composing a spell.