The living room was quiet. The kind of quiet that follows violence.
Loki lay bound on the scorched rug, wrapped in steel cables that had been saucepans five minutes ago. He gritted his teeth and gathered his remaining strength, preparing to shatter both the magical and physical bonds with the full force of his godhood.
But Arthur did not allow that. He walked slowly toward him. He did not gather glowing energy. He did not cast a visible spell. He simply looked down at Loki and let the raw, ambient Death energy settle directly onto the bound god.
There was nothing to see. The floor did not decay. The air did not darken. But the sound in the room dampened. The light went flatter. The colour leached from the rug beneath Loki's body. A small patch of reality had gone quiet and still, as though it had become aware of endings.
Loki felt it like a wall of freezing water crashing over him.
His lifespan, normally so vast and distant that it was practically invisible to him, became horrifyingly tangible. He could suddenly, physically feel the distant end of his own existence. It was not closer. It was just there. For the first time in a thousand years, the heavy barrier between his soul and Death had violently thinned, and what waited patiently on the other side was watching him.
Every muscle locked. His breath stopped. His hearts hammered against ribs that felt fragile. This was not a spell suppressing him. This was an immortal god experiencing his own terrifying mortality for the very first time.
Arthur held the state for three seconds. Then he let it go.
Loki gasped loudly, sucking in air like a drowning man. He was shaking. Cold sweat ran down his pale temples. He looked up at the mortal standing over him, and for the very first time in the entire invasion, his green eyes held absolutely no rage.
Only pure, primal fear.
Arthur stepped closer to the bound god.
"For someone who threatened my children," Arthur said, his voice stripped of all warmth, "the only acceptable punishment is death."
Loki met his eyes. Defiance blazed in them, even now.
"Then kill me," Loki spat. "I am a god. I do not beg."
"I know you don't." Arthur straightened his posture, looking down at him. "And I want to end you. Very much."
The silence stretched.
"But someone made me promise not to."
Loki sneered, though the bravado was thinner than before. "Who? My idiot brother?"
"No," Arthur replied softly. "Frigga."
Loki went very still. The defiance did not disappear, but something shifted beneath it. Something old and complicated and well-buried.
Arthur let the name sit in the room.
"She asked me to try," he said. "When the time came. She asked me to give you a chance. She sees something in you that you spend a great deal of energy pretending does not exist." He studied Loki's face. "I promised her I would try. I keep my promises."
Silence.
"But you threatened my children. And I absolutely cannot let that go unpunished." Arthur's voice was flat, matter-of-fact. "So what exactly do I do with you?"
He turned away, thinking, and as he did, something shifted uncomfortably inside his chest.
A sudden surge of bloodlust washed over his mind. He looked down at Loki's exposed neck. It would be so easy. One spell. One quick snap, and the threat would be gone. Why should he honour a promise when his family had been threatened? He should kill him. He had to kill him.
Arthur stopped.
He turned his attention inward, searching for the source. The Mind Stone's energy was seeping through the Scepter's shaft, threading through his grip and into his consciousness. Subtle. Almost undetectable. A gentle push toward violence dressed up as his own conviction.
Arthur willed his magic against the intrusion and snapped the connection clean. He went further, following the thread back to its source inside the Stone and severing the spell at the root. The alien whisper died. The artificial rage drained away like water from a cracked glass.
He looked at the Scepter with a sudden, new understanding. Then he looked back at Loki.
Something about the god had changed.
The feverish intensity in his eyes had dimmed. Not gone. Dimmed. As though a noise that had been playing in the background of his mind for months had been turned down a fraction when Arthur severed the Stone's active enchantment.
Arthur understood.
"How long?" he asked quietly.
Loki frowned. "What?"
"How long has the Scepter been whispering to you?"
Loki's confusion was real. He did not know what Arthur was talking about. He could not feel the strings because the strings had been there so long they felt like his own muscles.
"Thanos gave you the Scepter," Arthur said slowly. "He gave you an Infinity Stone. One of the six most powerful objects in existence. And you never once asked yourself why he would hand something like that to a broken, defeated prince he found floating randomly in the void?"
Loki's mouth opened. Closed.
"He recognised my—"
"He recognised that you were angry and hurt and desperate, and that the Stone would do the rest." Arthur held up the Scepter. "This thing has been inside your head since the day he gave it to you. Not controlling you the way it controlled Barton. Nothing so crude. A nudge here. A push there. Every grudge amplified. Every impulse toward restraint dampened. You thought the hatred was yours, Loki. Most of it was. But the Stone made sure you could never let it go."
"You are lying," Loki breathed, but his eyes darted nervously.
"I just felt it myself. A few minutes of contact and it was already telling me to kill you. You have been holding it for months." Arthur paused. "You were never the conqueror, Loki. You were the leash. And the hand holding it belonged to the Mad Titan."
"I am not a puppet!"
"No. You made choices. Real ones. People died because of those choices, and you will answer for that." Arthur crouched in front of him. "But someone was tilting the board. And that changes things."
Loki's breathing was ragged. His eyes were bright.
"My moral dilemma is resolved," Arthur said, standing. "But that does not mean you go unpunished. It just means the sentence is reduced." He studied the bound god for a long moment. "Let us take a page from Odin's playbook."
Arthur closed his eyes and released his restraints.
The Arcane Mage State ignited. Ancient Magic flooded his body, and the air in the room changed. What he was about to do next required absolute, perfect control over Ancient Magic.
Loki, even bound and defeated, felt the change in the air and his eyes widened. The power radiating from the mortal dwarfed anything he had ever felt, maybe even from Odin.
"What are you?" Loki whispered.
Arthur did not answer. He pointed a glowing finger at Loki's chest and cast a highly complex, ancient binding spell. It was like the enchantment Odin had cast on Thor when he banished him to Earth. Arthur had studied the spell's architecture during his months in the Asgardian Archives, had deconstructed its runic grammar, and had rebuilt it using Ancient Magic as the foundation instead of the Odinforce.
Golden runes burned themselves into Loki's leather armour. They sank through the material, through the skin, and settled into the bone.
Loki felt it immediately.
The loss. The hollowing. His strength drained away. His magic, the vast, bright well of sorcery that had been with him since childhood, went dark. He reached for it and found nothing. Emptiness where power had been.
He was mortal.
Not the way Thor had been mortal. Thor, even stripped of his godhood, had retained superhuman resilience. Loki did not have that luxury. Arthur went above and beyond to ensure Loki did not have even that decency.
Now without magic, without divine enhancement, Loki was left with the physical capability of an average, unremarkable human man.
"No," Loki screamed, but the rage that should have powered the scream was gone. What came out instead was raw fear. "You cannot do this to me."
"I already have." Arthur's glowing eyes held no sympathy. "And now for the rest of your punishment. You should remember this one."
He waved a hand.
A portal sparked to life directly beneath Loki's body. The god looked down into the swirling, bottomless abyss, and his face went white with recognition.
"No," he said. "Not again. Not this."
He thrashed against the bindings, but without his Asgardian strength, they held him the way iron chains hold an ordinary man.
The floor vanished beneath him.
"Last time was thirty minutes," Arthur said coldly. "Consider this an upgrade."
Loki fell into the portal, and the scream that followed was different from anything he had produced during the invasion. Stripped of his powers, stripped of the performance, it was the sound of a frightened man falling into darkness with no way to stop.
The infinite falling loop. With Loki's magic bound and his body reduced to human frailty, there was no escape. Arthur was fairly confident the fall would not kill him.
Fairly.
The portal snapped cleanly shut.
Arthur stood in the ruined living room. Broken windows. Cracked walls. Scattered, dented cookware. A Loki-shaped scorch mark on the rug.
Winky, back in her human form, was already tidying up. She righted an overturned side table and began collecting the transfigured cables, turning them back into pots and pans with small, efficient pops of magic.
"How long will you leave the bad man falling, Master?" she asked, inspecting a dented saucepan with a frown.
"Until Thor is ready to go back to Asgard."
Winky nodded. That seemed fair. She set the saucepan aside, it would need replacing, and moved on to the broken windows.
Arthur looked at her. "You can bring the children home once you are finished. I've reset the wards to full strength."
"Yes, Master."
It was time to bring a definitive end to the invasion.
Arthur stepped into the Arcane State's full power. The air around him compressed, shimmered, and he was gone.
—
He fully expected to arrive in deep space just in time to deal the finishing blow. Instead, he arrived to a silent graveyard.
The massive fleet was in ruins. Support vessels drifted in pieces. Dead pilots and their chariots floated among expanding clouds of debris. The mothership was still intact, but barely. Its hull was scarred with impact craters and glowing breaches. Something had carved through the armada with devastating force and was now inside the command ship.
Arthur watched from a distance as the mothership began to shake.
The vibrations were visible from outside, the massive hull flexing and warping as though something inside was trying to tear its way out. The temperature of the surrounding space climbed. The breaches in the hull glowed brighter.
Brighter.
Then the centre of the ship erupted.
A column of golden light punched outward from the reactor core, expanding in every direction. The mothership came apart around it, peeling away in layers of molten metal and vaporised alloy. The light grew until it was a miniature sun hanging in low Earth orbit, bright enough to be visible from the ground below.
When the blinding light finally faded, the mothership was gone.
In its place, floating motionless at the centre of a spreading field of wreckage, was Carol Danvers.
Golden light poured off her skin. Her hair floated in the zero gravity, haloed by residual photonic energy. She looked like a small, irritated star.
She saw Arthur floating nearby and smiled sharply.
"You're late."