Chương 80: Loki Looks

Loki The next day, I saw two of the security guards. They were patrolling around the cabin's perimeter. The raccoon kit marched with exaggerated military precision while the walking tree followed, growing small flowers and thorn bushes. They were the least threatening things I'd encountered in centuries. I did have to admit that the thorn bushes were actually quite effective for mundane threats. I watched them and tried to reconcile what I was seeing with what I'd expected to find.

These were the trickster king's forces. Unless, of course, they were decoys, carefully cultivated innocents designed to disarm visitors while the real operatives watched from concealment. I checked for real operatives watching from concealment. That was when I saw the squirrel from the previous day. She was still there on the cabin roof, eating another nut while watching me. I froze. She held my gaze for three seconds. Then she looked away, flicked her tail, and went back to her nut. She knew I was here.

She'd known since I arrived. And she hadn't raised an alarm. She didn't even tell the pack of werewolves who continued to repair the raccoon's cabin. That meant I wasn't considered a threat, which was insulting. In Asgard, a foreign god conducting surveillance would have been captured within the hour. They'd be interrogated and tortured. At minimum, they'd be confronted with overwhelming force and given a choice between submission and destruction. Here, the squirrel didn't seem to care that I was watching.

I had no idea how to take that. Not long after, the raccoon pushed open the doggie-door flap and waddled onto the porch. He was dragging a box of cereal with a frog on it behind him. The two patrollers spotted him immediately and snapped to attention. Curious, I sent my senses forward once again.

"Morning report, boss!" the kit announced.

"Northern perimeter secure. Eastern perimeter secure. Groot grew flowers on the south fence. I told her it was a tactical liability but she said they were pretty."

"They are pretty," the nymph added, her leaves rustling. The raccoon, Noyasunai, king of the tricksters, conqueror of Raven and Coyote, looked at them with an expression I could only describe as exhausted exasperation.

"Did anything actually happen on patrol?" he asked.

"I saw a suspicious bird," the kit reported.

"What made it suspicious?" the raccoon god asked.

"It was looking at me," the younger raccoon said.

"Birds do that, Rocket," Groot said.

"This one was looking at me suspiciously," Rocket added as if that was enough to win the argument. The raccoon god sighed and rubbed his face with one paw.

"Groot, was the bird suspicious?" The nymph thought about it carefully.

"I am Groot." Then, catching herself, she said, "I mean, it was just a robin, not even reincarnated or evolved. But Rocket said it had 'enemy combatant energy,' so I grew a thorn wall around it. Just a small one."

"You trapped a robin in a thorn wall. You know birds can fly, right?"

"It was a small thorn wall, and it did get out!" The raccoon closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he said, "New rule. No trapping birds. No declaring birds as enemy combatants. If an actual threat shows up, it won't be a robin. It'll be something bigger and meaner and you will not engage it. You will run. You will find me or Pierre or Tala. Clear?"

"Clear," they chorused, though the kit's expression suggested he considered this policy overly conservative.

"Good work by the way. You're now officially off-duty, so go have fun," Noyasunai said before watching them run off immediately. Then he started eating cereal out of the box while I processed what I'd just seen. On the surface, it was mundane. An adult was correcting children and setting boundaries. He was teaching them threat assessment in terms they could understand, which was nothing extraordinary.

But I'd spent twelve centuries in Asgard, where Odin's idea of training young warriors was to throw them into combat simulations that occasionally killed the slower ones. Thor's mentorship style consisted of hitting things in front of students until they figured out the technique. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. The raccoon had just gently corrected two small creatures without raising his voice and without threatening consequences.

He'd also done so without making them feel stupid for being wrong. That was either the behavior of someone with absolutely no understanding of how divine hierarchies worked, or the behavior of someone who had moved so far beyond divine hierarchies that he no longer needed them. The morning continued as I watched from my tree as the household came alive. The werewolf champion emerged and sat on the porch with the raccoon. They talked casually. Pierre was asking about supply runs.

The raccoon was complaining about the cost of drywall. At one point, Pierre made a joke about something I couldn't hear and the raccoon threw a piece of cereal at him. Then the squirrel descended from the roof and landed near the raccoon.

"Tala, did you eat my cashews?" the raccoon asked.

"Define 'your cashews.'" Quite the trickster answer, I thought approvingly.

"The ones in the cabinet. That I bought. With money. My money," the raccoon said, clearly a little annoyed.

"Those cashews are community property. I redistributed them," the squirrel said. The more I heard from her, the more I was starting to like her. As for the raccoon, who was supposedly the trickster king, he didn't act like a trickster at all, except maybe for the sass. The raccoon made a sound that, in a larger animal, would have been a growl.

"I'm adding cashews to the shopping list," he said.

"And I'm writing 'ABE'S — DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE' on the bag."

"That won't stop me," the squirrel told the raccoon, which made me smile. Yes, thumb your nose at authority! I silently encouraged her. They bickered like an old married couple. From what I'd gathered, they essentially were. In Asgard, Frigga and Odin's disagreements shaped realms. Their reconciliations altered the fates of nations. Here, the argument was about her eating his nuts. I was beginning to wonder if I had gone insane. After a while, Raven's name came up.

The raccoon muttered, "I'm getting really annoyed with Raven. I already took care of one of his problems and now… nevermind." I almost gasped when I heard what he said, as well as how he had said it. He'd said Raven's name the way someone might say "that neighbor who keeps letting his dog crap on my lawn." There was no fear and absolutely no reverence. There wasn't even caution, just annoyance. Pierre shrugged.

"Anything you need me to do right now or can I go home?"

"No, I'll handle it. Whatever it is, if Raven didn't want to mess with it, it's either actually dangerous or he's just being lazy. Knowing him, it's probably both. Just go home and spend some time with Shelly. Maybe that way she won't be so annoyed with me." The werewolf smiled, waved, and then walked away. The raccoon stood there, obviously lost in thought. Then, as if to himself, he said, "I swear, the next time Raven pulls this crap, I'm going to have Mom ground his ass.

See how he likes being on Gaia's naughty list." Mom. He called Gaia Mom. My mind raced. Gaia was the system itself, the planetary consciousness who could restructure reality. She created the framework that every living being on earth now operated within. She was, in the most fundamental sense, the closest thing this world had to a supreme deity. And the raccoon called her Mom.

Either he was insane, which seemed unlikely given everything else I'd observed, or he had a relationship with the world system that no other being I'd ever encountered could claim. The trickster gods, Raven and Coyote and Spider and Azeban, were his fathers in the divine sense. They had contributed the essence that created him. But if Gaia herself was the one who had carried that essence to term and shaped his awakening... Then Noyasunai wasn't just a new trickster.

He was the child of the world itself and he was threatening to tell his mother on Raven. I pressed myself into the tree hollow so hard the bark creaked. My heart was hammering. Every survival instinct I possessed was screaming at me to open a portal and run. This was beyond what the trickster networks had suggested. The fact that he'd built a church and animated the dead didn't seem surprising after that revelation. I should leave, I told myself. I should leave right now.

Open a portal, slip through, find another waystation between realms. There are plenty of dark corners in the universe where a minor Norse trickster can hide. I don't need to be here. I don't need this. My paw was already reaching for the dimensional threads. Then the squirrel did something that stopped me. She opened a metal lunchbox and pulled out something which she then threw at the raccoon's head.

"Don't get a big head, idiot," she said as the cucumber splattered across his nose. You go, girl, I egged her on. Smack authority in the face. Seeing the raccoon spluttering, unable to form a sentence while he tried to decide what to do, made me realize that maybe there was hope here, afterall. That night, in my tree hollow, I made my decision. He didn't smite his wife down, but instead stalked back through the doggie door, which made the situation even more ridiculous. That made up my mind.

I'd approach because I had seen something in the raccoon that I hadn't expected to find. I'd expected to find a tyrant, a schemer, or a madman drunk on power. I hadn't expected someone who was able to take a joke and might actually be approachable. I still didn't understand him. I still couldn't tell whether his apparent simplicity was genuine or the most sophisticated deception in divine history. The evidence supported both conclusions equally. But I was done watching from a tree.

Tomorrow, I'd walk up to the cabin and present myself honestly. Well, as honestly as a trickster could manage, which wasn't very honestly at all, but I'd try. And maybe, if the raccoon was what he appeared to be, I'd find something I'd been looking for since long before Ragnarök became inevitable. I closed my eyes but sleep still wouldn't come. For the first time in a long time, the sleeplessness wasn't because of fear. It was because of hope. And hope, for a trickster, was the most dangerous thing of all.