Magical Marvel: The Rise of Arthur Hayes

The four of them left the cobblestones at the exact same moment.

They rose into the air as if lifted by an invisible, massive hand. Their feet kicked frantically. Their arms windmilled in blind panic. The smartphone slipped from the tall one’s grip and shattered into pieces on the hard stones beneath him.

An invisible pressure clamped tightly around their throats, cutting off their air in an instant.

Loki stepped closer, looking up at them with his head tilted. He was enjoying this immensely.

"My brother always leaped before he looked too," Loki whispered, watching them kick and claw uselessly at their own necks. "But Thor is a god. You are just fragile meat."

"Please!" one of the other boys choked out, his face turning an ugly shade of purple. "We are sorry. Just put us down."

Loki ignored the desperate plea. He simply watched them thrash for a long moment, letting the terror fully set into their bones.

"There," he said softly. "I have given you your moment. When they ask, later, what it was like to meet a god, you may tell them the truth. You may say that he found you boring, and that he made you famous anyway, and that this was the greatest mercy he was inclined to offer."

He turned away from the floating boys before they had even finished screaming. He had already lost interest in them. He had said his piece and made his point. The choking noises they were making now were beginning to spoil the elegant atmosphere of the evening.

The peace of the plaza finally shattered.

Onlookers had finally noticed the men levitating. At first, cell phones had come out, raised high to film the bizarre sight. But idle curiosity quickly dissolved into raw panic as the crowd realized this was no street performance. The screams began, rippling outward like a wave.

Loki closed his eyes for a brief second, taking in their terror. It was exactly what he was owed.

Within minutes, the wailing of police sirens cut through the noise. Two patrol cars skidded onto the plaza, their blue lights flashing against the elegant museum walls. Four armed officers jumped out and raised their weapons.

"Halt! Put your hands in the air!"

Loki opened his eyes and sighed. They were all so dreadfully predictable.

He smoothly unclipped the Scepter from his back. The blue gem at its core flared brightly in the darkness.

He swung the weapon in a lazy arc. A pulse of cosmic energy erupted from the tip. It struck the police cars with the force of a detonating bomb, flipping the heavy vehicles onto their roofs and throwing the officers across the square.

That was the breaking point. The crowd dissolved into mindless, stampeding terror. Hundreds of people screamed and scrambled toward the exits of the plaza, trampling each other in their desperate bid to escape the monster in the golden armor.

Loki watched them run with mild disappointment. He did not want his audience to leave before the overture had even finished.

He slammed the butt of the Scepter hard against the cobblestones.

A ripple of brilliant green light washed outward. Suddenly, there was not one Loki standing in the plaza. There were twenty.

Identical, smiling illusions appeared at every exit and alleyway. They blocked the fleeing mortals, their glowing weapons raised. The phantom Lokis moved forward together in perfect synchronization, herding the terrified crowd back toward the centre of the square like a pack of wolves rounding up sheep.

The people backed away from the glowing spears, sobbing and clutching each other tightly. They were trapped in a shrinking circle of green and gold.

The real Loki walked slowly up the wide stone steps of the museum courtyard. He turned to look down upon the captive, trembling masses. The stage was set perfectly.

"Kneel before me," Loki commanded.

His voice was magically amplified, rolling over the crowd and echoing off the surrounding buildings.

The crowd simply stared up at him in frozen shock, unable to process the nightmare unfolding in front of them.

"I said, KNEEL!"

He slammed the Scepter down a second time. The booming sound cracked through the night.

Legs gave out. Fear overrode pride. One by one, and then in a great collapsing wave of submission, the hundreds of people in the plaza dropped to their knees. They pressed their heads toward the cold stone, weeping quietly in the long shadow of a self-proclaimed god.

Loki smiled. A deep, settling warmth spread through his chest. This was exactly how it was always supposed to be.

"Is this not simpler?" Loki asked smoothly, spreading his arms wide as he paced back and forth across the steps. "Is this not your natural state? It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you actively crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad, exhausting scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled."

He looked down at the sea of bowed heads, his eyes alight with victory.

"In the end, you will always kneel."

He began to walk through them. The Scepter trailed at his side. The crowd parted around him in absolute terror, scrambling backward without daring to touch him.

"I have walked among you for longer than your oldest histories remember. I watched your ancestors fight over the same worthless rocks your descendants will fight over. I watched them build cities and burn cities and build them again. I watched them invent gods and forget gods and invent entirely new ones. And in all of that time, in all of those centuries of grasping and reaching and warring, not one of you has ever been content."

He stopped in the centre of the square and turned in a slow circle, addressing all of them.

"You build your little towers and you call it ambition. You sell your lives for paper and you call it freedom. You crowd yourselves into cities the size of the kingdoms my father once ruled, and you tell yourselves you are free, because no one has yet bothered to put a crown on your head and tell you the truth."

He raised the Scepter slightly. Not as a direct threat. He wielded it like a teacher holding a pointer.

"The truth is that you have been kneeling already. To your employers. To your debts. To the small men with small offices who decide whether your children get to eat. You have been kneeling all along. The only difference I bring is pure honesty. I will let you kneel to something worthy of the gesture."

The square was silent except for the crying of a small boy and the soft, exhausted weeping of a woman near the front.

And then, slowly, an old man stood up.

He was thin and white haired. He wore a simple grey coat that had seen many harsh winters and a scarf his wife had probably knitted decades ago. His hands trembled slightly as he straightened his posture, but his back did not. He looked at Loki across the kneeling crowd with the steady, exhausted gaze of a man who had done this once before and had not enjoyed it the first time either.

Loki turned toward him slowly.

"Kneel, old one."

"Not to men like you." said the old man.

The square went very still. People held their breath, terrified of what would happen next.

Loki turned fully to face him. The smile that had been theatrical became something else. Something colder. Something that had been waiting for exactly this moment because it gave him an opportunity to make a point that words could not.

"There are no men like me," Loki said.

"There are always men like you," the old man replied without flinching.

Loki took a single, deliberate step toward him.

"And what becomes of those men, old one?"

The old man did not answer. He simply held Loki’s gaze with the steady, exhausted defiance of a man who had decided long ago that some things were worth dying for.

"Look to your elder, people," Loki sneered, pointing the Scepter directly at the trembling but resolute man. "Let him be a permanent example."

The blue gem blazed with blinding intensity, casting harsh shadows across the terrified plaza. The cosmic energy gathered rapidly at its tip, building into a high-pitched hum.

The old man closed his eyes, peacefully accepting his fate.

Loki fired.

Just as the lethal beam of blue energy tore through the night air, a blur of red, white, and blue dropped straight down from the dark sky.

A tall figure landed heavily in front of the old man. A heavy metallic clang echoed loudly across the cobblestones.

The deadly energy beam hit the vibranium shield head-on. The metal absorbed the cosmic blast in an instant and reflected it straight back to its source.

Loki, entirely unprepared for his own strike to return to him, took the reflected blast squarely in the chest. He was thrown backward, stumbling awkwardly down the stone steps, genuinely hurt and deeply surprised.

The smoke cleared to reveal a tall man standing rigidly in a blue tactical uniform. He slowly lowered his star-spangled shield, his bright blue eyes locking onto the Asgardian with unwavering resolve.

"You know," Steve Rogers said, his calm voice carrying clearly across the silent square. "The last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing."