Sigyn's Bowl: A Norse Myth Reimagined

I must be careful. I cannot spill.

I press my hands tighter against the sides of the bowl, holding it over Loki’s face. The some of the liquid within splashes out as another drop from above lands. It singes my wrists and I wobble. My husband screams at me as the poison sloshes out and burns his skin. I steady myself and then, slowly, I draw the bowl towards me.

Loki curses, shouts at me to hurry, but this is delicate work.

I climb the twenty-one steps out of the basin, then walk the four steps to the mouth of the cave. The going is slow. The rocks are slick under my feet. Three more steps and I am at the edge of a cliff. There is a bridge to my right that connects to the long, long stairway that leads back to the world above.

I crouch low, feel a blistering splatter on my naked foot when some of the poison spills on the stone. I breathe through the white hot pain.

Steady, steady.

I tip the bowl and send the poison into the chasm below. I stopped wondering what is at the bottom of that drop centuries ago.

Limping, I rush back to Loki, but the damage is done. His screams have been reduced to gurgles as he writhes against his bonds. The cave shudders, and there is a distant rumble of the earth above. I do not look at his face or at the intestines that bind him. I do not look up at the massive serpent knotted among the stalactites, mouth pried open by a silver bar. Instead, I look at the drip, drip, dripping, as I hold out the bowl.

In the absence of the acid on his exposed muscles and nerves, Loki grows quiet. His breath rattles and a soft whimper is tied at the end of each exhale. The sounds prick at my own lungs.

By morning, his face is handsome again as he sleeps. I feel the vise around my heart loosen a fraction as I study the high forehead and noble nose. The sharp cheekbones, the full lips decorated with faint scars that will never fully fade. I remember the blinding beauty of his smile when we first met and the whip of his scowl that would come later.

When he finally wakes, I don’t look away quickly enough to miss the burning in his green eyes. I focus on the bowl. We listen to the drip, drip, drip, until the poison starts to splash out and Loki curses at me. I take those twenty-eight steps again as his face is burned off one drop at a time.

I don’t sleep, so I cannot dream. But sometimes, I remember.

This time, I look back on the day I came here, clutching this bowl as I followed Odin and Frey. My sons Vali and Narfi—not yet men—walk on either side of me.

The gods ignored Vali’s questions. “Why are we here? Is this some kind of punishment?"

They shook their heads at sweet Narfi, who tried to appeal to their compassion. “Look at my poor mother. You didn’t even let her put on shoes.”

My boys stopped talking when they heard Loki’s voice travel down from the long stairway. “You will regret this, you mossy shitstain,” the God of Mischief sneered. “When I get free of this...”

Loki words trailed off once he saw us. Behind him, Thor held him by a thick band of metal wrapped around Loki’s torso. The purple bruise on his jaw was already starting to fade. His clothes were torn and bloodied. “What is this?” he demanded, his gaze bouncing wildly from me to our children to Odin. “Why are they here?”

Odin was the only one to speak, but he didn’t address my husband. Instead, he stepped up to Narfi who lifted his chin in defiance, even as his throat bobbed. Odin began to murmur something low and forbidden that I didn’t understand. It made the hairs on my arms and neck stand on end.

“No!” Loki shouted, straining forward as Thor held him fast. “No, please! Stop this! He is innocent!”

Thor reached over and clamped his hand over Loki’s mouth. He didn’t even flinch when Loki bit him hard enough to draw blood.

Vali began to twist and twitch. Then his arms began to snap and re-fuse. His spine leaped under his tunic and there was a tearing sound that was too wet to be fabric. He fell to his hands and knees as fur sprouted across his skin.

The screams of my son curdled into growls as a rabid wolf stood where Vali had been. It turned its red eyes on Narfi. Its claws clicked on the stone as it took one step. Then another.

“Vali,” Narfi said gently. He had the voice of a bard, soothing and beautiful. “It’s all right, brother.” He held out his hand and he smiled.

Vali lunged forward and ripped his brother apart.

After Vali bolted out of the cave, after Thor and Frey had bound Loki to the stone slab, after they had wound a huge serpent to the ceiling and walked out without looking back, Odin stood before me. I clutched my bowl to my chest, Narfi’s blood drying on the bottoms of my bare feet.

“You are free to go.”

He said the words to me so softly, I barely heard them over Loki’s shouts, interrupted by his own howls of pain with each drop of the snake’s venom.

I watched Odin leave and almost followed. But then Loki screamed my name. I hurried to him, tugged at the slick bonds that smelled of my son’s blood. Odin had whispered other words over these intestines, something that made them hold Loki impossibly tight, something that wouldn’t budge or tear when I clawed them with my nails or gnawed at them with my teeth.

The entire time, Loki thrummed with rage and agony. He screamed until he began to choke on the poison that had burned through his cheeks and nose, through the muscle and bone. The world around us began to shudder. I stumbled back, sobbing in fear and at my own failure. What could I do against such magic? I was a small goddess in the shadow of these giants.

I sank to my knees and my leg bumped the mixing bowl, sending it skittering a short distance. It was the largest I had in my kitchen. I hadn’t known why I would need such a thing, but Odin had told me to bring it before he led us here.

I crawled to it, the ground still damp with Narfi’s blood. Loki’s protests had been reduced to a wet wheezing. The rumbling earth had gone still. I heard the hiss of each drop of venom as it sizzled deeper into Loki’s head. I stood with the bowl in my hands. It was wide. Deep. It could hold much. But not enough.

Never enough.

“You stupid cow,” Loki hisses at me. The venom has begun to splash out again. The bowl is almost full. “Are you trying to kill me?”

It is a ridiculous question, even if it is rhetorical. The gods are too clever to create a punishment for Loki that would kill him. They hate him too much. If the poison works at him too long, his body merely heals at the same rate the venom burns, keeping him alive just enough to make sure he cannot escape into death.

“I’m sorry.” Then, because I don’t want him to think I’m being impertinent, I warn, “I will need to empty it soon.”

“Just throw it aside, foolish thing!”

My forearms begin to spasm. “I can’t. The poison will burn my feet.” We tried that tactic several times, in the beginning. At the bottom of the basin with the slick stone floor, no matter how hard I throw the poison away from us, it still pools around us until it finally dries. Last time, it had been days before the heels of my feet had reformed.

“Traitor,” he snarls. “You want to see me in agony like the rest of the Aesir.”

“Loki, no.” My arms and shoulders burn. My fingertips start to tingle and I feel the snap of panic in my chest. “That’s not true, my love. The bowl is full. I must—”

“You knew they would do this to me. You agreed to all of it.”

They are old words, but still sharp and serrated against the softness of me. I tell myself to stay steady but the liquid in the bowl shivers. “No,” I insist. “I love you. I am here only for love of you.”

I hear the twisting sneer in his voice. “That is worse, then. You are just a dense, useless woman. All you do is stand there, like you did when Odin turned Vali against his brother.”

I flinch. A dribble of venom lurches over the brim, slides down the side until it reaches the curve of my thumb. “Please, Loki, let me hurry and empty the bowl.” I begin to draw my elbows toward my torso. I lift my foot to take the first step back.

“You did nothing and now my Narfi is dead and Vali is lost. You are pathetic. Cowardly. I should have left you long ago.”

My foot hovers a moment, then drifts back down to its same spot. The bowl still catches the venom, but the drops are dangerously close to the rim.

“You did leave me,” I say. The words come out of me from a long distance. I finally look at him, his wakeful, whole features. His eyes are an impossible, virulent green. Beautiful and full of loathing.

“You left me three times, in fact,” I continue. “Each time you left, you went to the giantess Angrboda and had a child by her. All the gods knew about it, even me. Even our sons.” The rust has shaken off of my voice and my memories, too, are clearer.

I remember my boys as they were when they were very little. They had brown eyes like me, but ice-silvered hair like their father. Narfi had a mole next to his left eyebrow. Vali snorted when he laughed.

Something small and barbed twists in my gut. There is a high-pitched keen in my brain, like the sound of a dying animal. “I heard Angrboda’s children were punished, too, for belonging to you.”

I have never met Loki’s lover, but I must know her. I know how Loki’s touch must have lit up every cell in her body. How dreams of him must have haunted her sleep until he next appeared at her door. I know the weight of the memories she must store in the empty spaces left by her children.

I shift back and when the poison lands in the nearly full bowl, a small splash hits Loki’s cheek, and he flinches.

“Sigyn,” he says slowly. His tone has smoothed out. It is silk. “My dove, forgive my wretched tongue. This pain...it drives me mad.”

This our ritual: several days of silence, accusations crowding my protests, a change in my face that makes him stop.

The bowl wobbles again and a thimbleful sneaks over the rim and down the knuckles of my hand. I smell my flesh burning. The acid gathers at the edge beneath my pinkie finger before dripping down to Loki’s neck. He hisses at the pain. Some of it lands on my son’s intestines and smokes.

“The bowl is full, Loki,” I say. My voice is as shaky as my elbows. “I must go.”

The contrition in his expression tangles into a scowl. “Go then. I can’t stand to look at you.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Why not? What use are you anyway?”

You are free to go.

That first day, after Loki healed from the poison, he wept. He mourned our sons. He saw how my hands pressed against the bowl so tightly, and he begged me for forgiveness. For as long as we could, we ignored the sound of that dripping. The tremble in my arms.

I cried when I took away the bowl the first time. He told me not to worry, that we would be free soon. I only needed to hurry, hurry, hurry.

Soon enough, he realized I could not save him.

Now, I feel the tears hot on my cheeks, the patter of them on my collarbones. “What would you give to be free, husband?” I ask quietly. “What would you sacrifice?”

He rolls his eyes and turns his head as far away from me as he can. I don’t think he will answer me, and I am relieved. He is done with me for now. I will carry the bowl outside and dump the poison and race back to him. I will love him as he sleeps. I will stand vigil. I will shield. Forever.

“Anything,” Loki says at last. His tone is wretched. “There is nothing I would not give to be free of all this.”

Free of you.

I can feel the unspoken words slither against my skin. My hands burn and my eyes cloud with grief. “Very well.”

And I douse him in poison.

In the beginning of our time, Odin All-Father sacrificed himself to acquire the power and knowledge of the world tree. He hung from the branches, starving and bleeding. He experienced ceaseless agony until he finally cut himself down and rose to his feet as the greatest of all the gods. It took him nine days of dying to come back to his full life.

It takes Loki twice that.

When he wakes, there is no grand light or sudden jolt of his body as he sucks in his first whole breath. He merely opens his eyes, coughs a little, and sits up.

He looks up at me from the ground. I watch him from my perch on the slab. Beside me, the bowl sits, collecting the venom from the snake still tangled among the stalactites. I have decided in these past weeks that the snake is as alive and aware as I am. I hope one day it will be freed.

“Sigyn?” Loki asks. It is beautiful, the way he says my name. Full of wonder and surprise.

It took two full bowls to get enough poison to burn through the bonds. What little of Narfi is left, I have wrapped in my skirts. All that remains of my son, bundled up like frayed leather. I get down from the slab and begin to walk out of the cave.

“Sigyn, wait!”

After a long pause, I turn back to him. He is still weak and struggles to pull himself to his feet. My body wants to reach for him and hold him up, coo into his neck and feel his joy at his freedom. But I stay rooted. I grip the remnants of my son in my scarred hand and wait.

“Where are you going?” He leans heavily on the slab, his eyes bright with what I have seen countless times right before I had to take the bowl away: fear. “Are you going to tell Odin?”

I scoff. It feels like thorns in my throat. “I free you and you think I am now on my way to betray you?” I shake my head. The long pause between us is punctuated by the steady drip in the bowl. “I am going to burn Narfi’s remains and send his soul on. Then I’m going to find Vali and try to lift Odin’s curse.”

A number of expressions parade across my husband’s face. Incredulity, shame, curiosity. Relief. “Ah. Well, I have only just recovered and, though these are honorable quests, I have a prophecy to fulfill, you see—”

“Goodbye, Loki.” I turn on my heel.

This time, I don’t look back, not once. Not as I exit the cave and cross the bridge. Not as I go up and up the stairs. Not as I step out into the sunlight and feel grass underfoot for the first time in centuries.

I leave Loki with his plans and schemes and the drip, drip, dripping of poison gathering in a mixing bowl.