The Last Shifter (a Loki romance)

Chapter 38

Loki froze, his jaw falling slack and his eyes bulging.

"I know. It's a lot to take in."

"A Shifter on the inside? I thought you were the only one left!"

"Technically I am, he can no longer Shift. But so did he. It's a very long story."

"Well we've got time, do tell."

"When the Great Destruction happened, I had to assume the worst, that everyone had been wiped out. So I gathered everything I could, which wasn't much, and escaped. I spent the next few thousand years wandering from one place to another, all across the Nine Realms, never staying anywhere more than a few days."

"But why?"

"If I escaped and I was one of the primary targets, do you not think others could have done the same? I don't know how many escaped and I met up with a few of them for brief moments only to get news literally the next day that they had been taken out by a minion of the Enemy. It was a hard life, one that I do not wish to relive ever again."

"How long did you run?"

"As long as I had to and then a couple centuries. I couldn't risk getting caught, not when I held the most important things. I had to keep them away from the Enemy at all costs."

"The rings."

"Yes."

"But if I remember correctly, you said that you were no longer than one thousand years when the destruction happened, only about my age. Why would you be the primary target?"

"To understand that, you must understand the government of my people. We were led by a council of ten, ten of the most powerful Shifters at the time. I am the child of two of those Shifters. I assume you've read the legend of Arda?"

"Of course, that was the first thing I did."

"The first thing you did when?"

"I overheard mother talking about a Shifter before sending her guards to get you and I decided to do a little research and see it was possible that one of you were still alive."

"Right. Anyway, those rings from the legend are the same ones I have, I'm assuming you've figured that bit out right now. They hold immense power, you haven't even seen a fraction of it yet. It is because of this power that made us at last able to challenge our Enemy. For as long as the Shifters had existed, we and the Enemy had left each other alone but now we had something that he wanted and we weren't going to hand them over so easily. When he heard that, he was angry and vowed revenge. Nothing happened for a long time but then, out of the blue, the council members began showing up dead. Along with their children or anyone else the rings would have been passed to. As a result, the rings went to the council members that were still alive. The last ones who survived were my parents and my aunt. As far as the Enemy knew, they had no children or anyone of close relations. In secret, the rings were passed to me while the public believed that they had been locked away in a vault on a faraway world."

"How did the enemy not know of your existence? You did not grow up locked away in a basement, did you? No, you told me you had that accident!"

"I shall explain it in the simplest terms that I can. Those who knew who I was didn't know me and those who knew me didn't know who I was."

"That makes no sense."

"It means that my parents didn't send me to the school meant specially for higher class Shifters, they kept me a secret, took on dual identities, and sent me to a normal school for all classes. Only a few of the council members knew I existed and even then, I exchanged no more than ten words with each of them. No one at the school I went to knew who I was and that is how I acquired a small, loyal friend group. The only catch was I couldn't tell them who I was. Ammon was one of those close friends. He didn't find out who I was until we met up again half a dozen millennia later."