Loki is amused too, and doesn't complain. "Well then. Shall we?"

"I've hunted before, but mostly when there was little chance of getting my dinner any other way. That, I find, does give a meal some flavour not found elsewhere."

"I hunted a lot when I was on Midgard. If there's a flavor to having personally done in your meat, I like it less than a pinch of rosemary and an onion."

"You were on Midgard?"

"There was a battle with the frost giants, there, and I lingered for a bit afterwards, exploring and meeting the Midgardians and telling them hopelessly garbled stories. If you should happen upon any mortals who've heard the stories they will probably think you have a girls' name; Allspeak failed me. I got back the same day you first visited the practice hall, in fact."

"The Allspeak failed you how? It got boys and girls the wrong way round? What a curious error."

"It took me a very long time to notice, because it swapped them both coming and going, after I had already told many stories. There were other garblings, but that was the most consistent."

"But then - the Midgardians also must have boys and girls the wrong way round," he muses. "Or you would have noticed right away."

"At first I thought they were doing everything by the genders of their little soul-animals - did you know that they keep their souls outside of themselves, in animals? It's the most curious thing; they'd always assume mine was hiding. Those are usually male animals for women, female animals for men - but sometimes it's not, and then, yes, they have their men fighting and hunting and so on and their women sewing and cooking for the most part. No magic to divide up, of course, if they've learned any I didn't see it."

"Now I want to visit Midgard."

"If I go again perhaps I'll see about bringing you."

Sigyn beams. "I would be delighted."

"You'd fit right in. Unless you like doing magic too."

"I don't know any," he says. "I tried to learn some once, and it was..." He shakes his head. "I don't quite know how to explain, but it was driving me mad and I stopped."

"Well and good, a sorcerer driven mad is no one's favorite neighbor."

He giggles. "Yes."

"But of course if anyone noticed you keep your soul inside of yourself they'd think you were awfully strange, so you'd want to keep moving around."

"Yes, that would be a problem," he acknowledges. "What do they do with their little animals in intimate moments, I wonder?"

"I didn't ask. Judging from the bawdy tavern songs it varies with the animal and the relationship in all sorts of ways, but who knows how accurate bawdy tavern songs are?"

"Bawdy tavern songs vary widely in accuracy, this I have learned."

"Indeed."

"Have you had much occasion to verify them?"

"...No."

"I have."

"And yet of the two of us I have heard by far the greater number of songs referring to such and such a character's soul being a duck and the implications this has for her evenings, so this confers you little expertise on Midgardian habits."

"What implications might those be, then?"

"Oh, it won't rhyme if I repeat it."

"Of course."

"If I do go back it probably won't be for a long time. I'm glad I didn't get attached to any of them. They die very young."

"Is it true, then? Less than a century each?"

"It's sad."

"Heartbreaking. And they have a fair number of wars amongst themselves, and even crude weapons and brief training can leave soldiers with septic wounds and missing limbs and not a real healer among them."

"Maybe we should bring a healer."

"Do you know some?"

"No, but I'm sure I could find one who'd like to go to Midgard and heal people there."

"They'd have their work cut out for them. There are many, many Midgardians, and they have such brief generations that there would be another batch by the time a healer had thoroughly covered even a few of their nations."

"They'd still be better off than if no one did anything. The real trick would be to find a way to make them less brief, I suppose. Maybe if I knew magic I'd try that."

"I've occasionally asked Father questions about how he'd go about inventing this or that magic, and while I believe he's considered fairly accomplished usually his opinion of the matter is that it's not feasible - I haven't given him this particular problem but I doubt it would distinguish itself."

"Well, so maybe I couldn't invent a spell to tap a mortal on the nose and make them stop dying so fast. Does it follow that there is nothing whatsoever to be done? I wouldn't think so."

"I'd certainly be delighted if something like that were invented. They have so little time."

"Well, if I give in and start learning magic, then ten or twenty centuries along when I am finally satisfied with my understanding it'll be the first thing I try. If there are still mortals by then."

"That's a long course of study. Does it usually take that long?"

"No. I did mention it was driving me mad."

"Why so? What's so maddening?"

"It's just so—" He gestures vaguely, unable to properly articulate his difficulty. "Imagine that you want to learn to read, but there is no such thing as a letter or a word, only entire books set out all of a piece. The finest of scholars can discern with careful study which part of the book is written on a particular page, and use that understanding to create new books. Except that it would not take me ten centuries in that scenario to figure out how letters worked."

"That... sounds very frustrating. I've never tried to learn anything as poorly organized as that. No wonder you stopped."

"I stopped as soon as I realized that it was stop or spend the next thousand years in pursuit of true literacy."

"And then you and your spare brain picked up feint-heavy combat skills instead."

"Oh, I already had those."

"Ah, here I was thinking you chose unconventional after ruling out convention."

"Oh, I was always going to end up a disgrace to society; the only question was precisely what manner of disgrace."

"What were your other candidates?"

"Oh, far too many to list."

"The highlights?"

"Many were the sort of thing one hears in a bawdy tavern song. And I don't remember the rhymes."

"Pity. The rhymes are often very cunning."

He giggles.

They've been moving into more sparsely vegetated areas throughout their hike, and have now come to a small rise, gently sloped, soft underfoot. It will be a good place from which to view any aurochs that might be beyond it.

Loki pauses, steps backwards, and says, "And what is it that you don't wish to alarm me with?"

"Let's hope it isn't hungry," says Sigyn, moving slowly away from the hill but keeping both it and Loki in sight. "The last time I was this close to a landwurm, I nearly died, and it's not an experience I yearn to repeat."

"I've never been this near one before." Sloooow stepping. "I wouldn't guarantee I'd die, but I don't want to try it either."

By this time, Sigyn has made a little progress on dragging himself back up the worm's gullet. It's slow going: crushed by the pressure, unable to breathe, and with a strong suspicion that whatever the reason his legs hurt like that, it will take more than a day's rest to cure. But it's a more appealing prospect than patiently waiting for death.

Well, Sigyn isn't right at the top of its throat, so she has to cut farther. She starts slitting open the underside of the landwurm.

He coughs one more time; reflects for a moment; and says, "Well. Who knew being swallowed by a landwurm could be so uneventful."

She snorts. She pulls one of his knives out of the walls of the wurm's esophagus and hands it to him.

"Thank you," he says. "If you are ever considering being swallowed by a monster, I have to say I recommend against it. If it'd had me another minute, who knows what could've happened. As it is, I may have to sit out the rest of this hunting expedition."

"Yes, I imagine so. I'm not in much of a hunting mood anymore either. Let's drag its head to the others," suggests Loki.

"...Is that a landwurm?"

"It was. Now it is a head."

"So I see! What a tale that must make."

"Oh, not such an exciting one," says Sigyn. "I put my sword in its eye. It swallowed me. She stabbed its other eye and retrieved me from its interior, somewhat the worse for the experience but still, as you can see, entirely undigested."

"He is indeed."

She shakes her head in amazement. "I can hardly credit it. A landwurm!"

"I've fought one before," he says. "Smaller. Disguised as a snowbank. I had a longer sword then. It didn't eat me."

Thor laughs.

"But we've somewhat lost our taste for aurochs in fighting this one."

"Ah well," shrugs Thor. "We haven't found any. I wonder if Hogun and Volstagg have had better luck."

"Maybe. Should we stay with the head while you look for them? I wouldn't like to find a pack of jackals gnawing on the trophy."

Loki peers at him out of the corner of her eye - is something wrong with her spell or is he just method acting? - but doesn't remark on it.

"Oh, don't worry about me. I'll be just fine by tomorrow."

"That's good to hear."

He grins.

Snuggles! Sigyn is ever so cuddlesome.

"...That sounds maddening," he says. "But perhaps less maddening than the reverse. And how did this come about?"

"Accidentally. I touched something I wasn't supposed to touch and came away with two hundred and nine little - concepts, burned into my brain. Assigned them all symbols. Got to work."

"Well. Isn't that something. Who else knows about this unusual hobby?"

"Heimdall, I must assume. No one else."

"And how maddening is it to invent writing with nothing but an alphabet to go on? Clearly you've had some success."

"Some, yes. It does however take a very long time to write an entire library."

"I imagine so."

"And starting over when there's a mistake is worse still. But I have a few things, and with the alphabet I can make them perfect."

"Perfection's hard to come by. What have you written so far?"

"Healing spells. A suite of them, I think jointly comprehensive. All-purpose visual and auditory illusions. And the first one - when I was little I tripped, a lot. I couldn't learn to fight, I'd have impaled myself on something before a week had gone by. So -" She waves a hand, perfectly graceful. "I fixed it."

"Oh, well done," he says admiringly. "And of course I am very grateful for your healing spells."

"I'm proud of them. They don't see very much use. It varies how often I can get away. The illusions help, of course."

"Oh, yes. They would."

"The illusion spell's usable in pieces, even," she remarks, "I could turn invisible or make simple lights before I could do fully animated images."

Ha. For that he gets a kiss.

Excellent. He loves those.

"Could you teach me one of your spells and then work backwards from that?"

"Maybe. I don't know. They snap together in my head from pieces. I write words and then I have them forever, same as the letters. Sentences paragraphs chapters books encylopedias spells. How does one usually learn a spell without the pieces?"

"Haphazardly and with difficulty. I stopped trying before I ever managed it."

"I mean, I can show you what they look like written down, if you like." She kisses him again, then rolls out of bed to pad towards the bookshelves. "Which one do you want to see?"

"I can't decide between 'whichever you think simplest' and 'a healing spell'."

"Less maddening than the other way around," is his conclusion. "Maybe not quite unmaddening enough. What exactly was it that you touched, to get all this?"

"The Tesseract. I doubt very much you can expect the same result. If it always did that then it would not be so forbidden."

"I don't expect the same result. I do expect that there must be some reason why it taught you the sorcerous alphabet instead of doing whatever it normally does to people, and I wonder if it is possible to find out what that reason is."

"I'm not sure. I'm lucky that no one listened to me when I said I was fine and all it did was tell me things and don't care to jeopardize that success."

"Well. I'll think about it. And I'll think about how to learn the alphabet and whether it will be worth the number of centuries I'd have to put into it."

"You could do more with the spells than I've managed."

"True. But there's a way I get with certain kinds of puzzle, and a way I get when I spend too long doing just one thing, and I would rather not be caught between the two for a very long time."

"Ah. I don't have that problem."

"It doesn't seem to be a usual one, but I am not a usual person."

"I've noticed that."

"What gave me away?"

This gets kisses instead of an answer. It's that kind of question.

Kisses! How delightful.