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Zia.
Now there was an intriguing Midgardian, gifted with a prolonged lifespan. He’d met them while messing with a cheap conjurer named John Dee, during the Elizabethan age. Zia didn’t look thirty yet. Loki had known them as both man and woman for centuries, as they were able to change gender at will; they’d used the ability from lifetime to lifetime to hide their immortality.
Zia understood what it meant to live far longer than a mortal. Zia knew what it was to hide behind glamours, to have to conceal your real self to fit in—to survive. Just as Loki wore the shape of an Asgardian despite his Frost Giant heritage, Zia had abandoned their name and identity time and again.
And as Zia stared into Loki’s eyes across the chaos of the show, he knew they could see through all this bullshit. Everything––the band, Loki’s outfit, all of it. Zia saw right through him, like red neon through raindrops.
The party had really ended.
Now it was time to have some fun.
Sylvain had inhaled deeply, preparing to unleash his woefully average voice on the spellbound audience, when Loki slammed an effects pedal, stepped forward, and pitched his strings taut on a chord. The shattering sound from his guitar stopped everything in the room.
And then he soloed as only a demigod could. He hammered and shredded all up and down the fretboard, unleashing a sonic wail, a solo for the ages that might have echoed in the Hammersmith Odeon forever. The crowd fell into awed silence.
Loki had found a way to express his mood at last. He even bared his teeth in a combative smile.
As the final note rang in the hushed auditorium, he raised the guitar and wielded it like an axe, smashing it against the N and I in the gigantic neon NIHILATOR sign. Sparks and glass showered down in a heavy metal rain as he kept swinging the guitar against it until it said only:
HILATOR
He looked at Zia, who only smiled enigmatically.
Sylvain shrieked in dismay.
Loki’s lip curled as he said, “Keep the crown. It’s your God and you don’t even realize it.”
He tossed the guitar straight at Sylvain and walked away, past the backstage chaos and panic among the roadies and music label reps and sycophants who were always waiting in the wings. He didn’t miss a step as he hit the emergency exit door and went right into the dismal rain of London, which lacked the power to wash anything away.
Fans chased him, begging for autographs. So Loki walked straight into traffic. A black cab’s horn blared as headlights illuminated him and the car tried to swerve away. Loki had already begun a spell to get him the hell off of this absurd planet.
In front of his admiring fans, the former guitarist for Nihilator vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.