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Tony walked over the moor with a haunting sense that he didn’t belong here. The uneven ground held sharp rocks beneath the thin grass and dank moss and the mist was thick enough that Tony could feel it, wet and bitingly fresh in his chest when he breathed. He shuddered and staggered on. He didn’t know where he was going and only desperation made him so reckless, forcing him forwards.Time didn’t seem to pass in any way bar a growing fatigue in his limbs; the landscape didn’t change and the intensity of the bleary, milky sun stayed the same.“Come on,” he muttered. “Where the hell are you?” This is ridiculous, he thought angrily, but he pressed on and he didn’t voice his doubts. Up here it was harder to be scornful, what with the way the mist lay like a veil, seeming as if anything at all might emerge from it.The witch would only be found if he wanted to be, Tony had been told. All his life, he’d sneered and derided their superstitions as they tied red ribbons to their doorknobs on Midsummer’s and turned their coats inside out when herons passed overhead. But he was desperate and, loathe as he was to admit it, he had to acknowledge that he had seen people go up onto these moors fraught with sickness and return cured. There had to be an explanation, there had to be some way he could help Pepper.He kept stumbling onwards, his eyes on the ground in front of his feet, the mist seeming to be closing on him, but he tried to tell himself that it was only his paranoia. A sudden jut of grey rock caught his tired foot and Tony tripped forwards with a sharp cry, reaching out his hands, but they touched wet grass only to lose grip on it as he slid sideways and went into freefall with a shocked shout.It couldn’t have been long but it felt like he hung in the icy, rushing air for several seconds before the ground slammed into him and all the air was knocked out him as surely as if he’d been struck in the stomach with a walking cane.His chest feeling crushed, Tony grunted as he tried first to drag cold air into his lungs and then move. Lying on his stomach, he saw the fingers of his right hand twitch in front of his face and he tried to lift himself, to roll over, only to cry out as pain lanced all across his chest and down his left arm. There was a throbbing in his head, too, and a feeling of wetness. Tony lay there, his head turned to the side, and choked back the pain as he tried to pull himself together.Closing his eyes in frustration and something like the beginnings of despair, he opened them a moment later and recoiled in shock, only to grit his teeth against the wave of pain the slight movement elicited.A man was stood in front of him, only his legs in Tony’s line of sight where he was lying on his stomach, but Tony rolled his eyes upwards and found the man to be tall, his skin pale as the mist and his hands folded behind his back. He looked down at Tony with a slight, dispassionate frown. His figure seemed to shimmer in the mist and Tony couldn’t tell whether his eyes were deceiving him.“Wh-where did you come from?” Tony managed, strained. Speaking worsened the pain in his chest and he felt like there was something beneath his sternum, sticking into him.The man smiled slightly, his hair dark like a raven’s but for a sliver of silver, not like that of old-age but like thick strands of metal growing directly from the man’s scalp.“Here and there,” the man said in a smooth, pleasant voice, smiling agelessly. “The more important question is how you came to be bleeding on my heath.”Tony blinked and tried to drag his thoughts through the haze of pain in his head. Flexing his right hand against the wet moss, he clenched his jaw and dragged himself up to seated with a repressed gasp of pain. The man stood silently, watching, much as a bird prey perches on a ledge and studies the landscape.“I,” Tony started stiffly as he pressed a cold hand to his chest and it came away bloody. There was a sharp rock sticking out of the ground where he’d fallen and it had stabbed him shallowly in the chest, and bruised him all across his ribs where it hadn’t broken skin. Each breath hurt but he made himself focus on the pale man. “Are you the witch?” he asked. The man didn’t look mortal, that was certain, and the longer Tony looked at him, the more he wanted to look away.The man tilted his head and raised his hands in an elegant gesture. “I am Loki, neither witch by your crude meaning, nor mortal.”Tony clenched his jaw. “I need to help my sister,” he said. “You will need a little more faith and a little less doubt if you’re to reach your goal,” the man, Loki, said cryptically and Tony had to bite back a sharp answer. But Loki was right; Tony’s head was scrambling to find an explanation for Loki’s sudden appearance, for the way he didn’t seem quite solid, for the glinting, heavy silver in his hair. The Loki smiled like he knew what Tony was thinking, and maybe he did know, Tony thought, thoroughly unnerved.Loki made a small motion past Tony, pointing with a long finger. “Make your way lightly down into the hollow,” he said, “and watch where you place your feet. Do not eat anything; it is not what it seems. Don’t take too long. The dark is not your friend.”“What-” Tony started, but Loki was not there and Tony blinked, swallowing, “will I find?” he finished softly, to himself. He hadn’t seen nor heard Loki go; he had simply been there and then he had not. Damnation, he thought as a shiver crawled up his spine like an insect.It took a few minutes but Tony forced himself first fully up to seated and then, hissing under his breath as pain sparked through him, hot and distracting, he came dizzily to his feet. His ankle complained beneath him but it wasn’t sprained and held his weight well enough. His left arm felt achingly bruised but his chest throbbed something awful and, when he touched the back of his head, his fingers came away sticky with blood.He blinked as he steadied himself and then, very slowly, he put one foot forwards, and then another, in the direction the strange, ethereal man had told him to. The mist seemed less oppressive, revealing more of his way before him, and it lifted further as he moved down a steady incline. The rough moorland grass turned to a strikingly lush green and Tony stepped on it with a sense of foreboding, but continued forwards.He stopped when a perfectly circular cluster of buttercups appeared amongst the grass, glowing a lustrous yellow, and, gingerly, he moved carefully around them before carrying on. Dark shapes seemed to move beyond the folds of the mist, some of which looked like deer and others that had black eyes and were too tall to be human. Tony remembered his mother telling him as a child not to look too hard out of the winter at night lest he offend something with his staring, and he looked quickly away from the ill-defined figures in the mist, directing his gaze at the soft grass instead as he hurried onwards.Small bushes and shrubs began to appear, and not the harsh scratch of unflowering heather that had been up on the moor, but rich spreads of flora that Tony couldn’t identify, even though he’d lived just off the moor for all of his life. But this place didn’t feel local or even earthly and Tony felt his unease grow apace with his belief that the stories were true, and the vision he’d seen had really been that of the witch that was supposed to reside here.Berries that shouldn’t have been there in November hung in abundance, looking full and exactly like bilberries and wild strawberries, except that they were too perfect, too universally the same, and, parched and exhausted as he was, Tony didn’t touch them.A faint rustling up ahead made him slow his staggering step and, emotionally and physically drained, he looked warily at a rose bush that bloomed with perfect, red flowers but had thorns longer than Tony’s thumbnail. Tony kept walking, looking sideways at the roses, but he stopped when he saw that it was a small, rangy hare with ragged, bloody fur and black eyes that was making the rose plant rustle with its struggling. Its back foot was crushed in an evil-looking metal trap and Tony looked away down the hollow, towards where he might, just might, get the cure for Pepper, and then back to the hare.The light was fading steadily from the cloudy sky and Loki had said to hurry, but Tony couldn’t leave the poor creature in good faith and, wincing and gritting his teeth, he crouched down in front of it. The hare stilled, its skinny sides heaving in panic and pain, and Tony eyed the trap, which was half-embedded in amongst the rose thorns. Tony looked again at the sky, which seemed to be getting dimmer by the second, and thought, in for a penny, in for a pound.He pushed his hand in amongst the thorns, releasing a bitten-off cry of pain at the sharp jabs of the thorns, like half-a-dozen needles. He fumbled at the trap and managed, finally, to free the spring, even as the thorns cut his hand to a gouged mess by the time he took hold of the hare’s bloody leg and, gently as he could manage, freed it.“Go on,” he urged, only for the creature to snap around to bite him on the hand. He yelped in shock more than pain and snatched his hand in close as the hare bounded away. It stopped a few paces away in a very un-hare-like manner and turned back to look at him with those black eyes and Tony stared at it as he held his hand to his aching chest. Then the hare was gone and Tony went tiredly onwards, staring at the spot where the hare had stopped to look at him and wondering at the lack of blood, even though he had felt it, tacky and warm, under his fingers as he’d freed the animal.A minute or so later, a low, stone dwelling came into view and he approached it with a mixture of relief and trepidation.There was a dark red cloth hanging where there ought to have been a door and this was swept aside as Tony came to stand in front of it.“Do you wish to come in?” Loki asked with a slight, ironic tilt to his pale lips, with silver shifting amongst his dark hair.Too tired for any sort of retort, Tony just nodded. “Yes,” he said.Loki nodded. “Then do so,” he said, and disappeared back inside, leaving the cloth rippling in his wake.Tony came wearily inside and sat down in a chair the man indicated without even looking around, but when he did, he blinked in shock. The entirety of the ceiling was covered in shells of all shapes and colours and none like Tony had ever found on a beach, all of them meticulously arranged in marvellous patterns and assortments, like constellations.“But…we are so far from the sea,” Tony said, staring.Loki laughed quietly. A cup of tea came into Loki’s hands without Tony seeing him make it and Tony accepted it when it was guided into his cold, bloody hands.“Strange,” Loki said. “I find them all about the place.” Tony turned to blink at him as he clasped the warm tea-cup without drinking it. He looked down at the dark-green tea for a moment.“Can you help me?” he asked quietly.“I hear you met Narfi,” Loki said, disregarding Tony’s question, and pointed elegantly to where a hare was slipping under the heavy red cloth at the doorway. The same hare, Tony was sure, that he had freed from the trap, except that this one was entirely unharmed and looked sleek with health. “He is quite pleased with you,” Loki said.Tony nodded blankly before putting the tea firmly down on a stout table and gripping the armrest of his chair, grounding himself in the sting of the cuts on his palm. “I need to know if you can help my sister,” he said.Loki looked at him with the same, slight smile, but didn’t bypass Tony’s question this time. “I can,” he said. “But what can you help me with?”“What do you need help with?” Tony said slowly. He felt too tired to be negotiating with a witch, but as long as he got a cure for Pepper out of the deal, he didn’t think he cared if Loki bested him somehow.“Mm,” Loki said and brushed his shoulder-length black hair from his forehead. He looked at Tony like a thoughtful cat considering how best to climb a wall. “Perhaps you might be useful.” He beckoned Tony with his hand and Tony reluctantly stood up and came towards him, although that same sense of unease he got when he looked at Loki for too long intensified the closer Tony came.When Tony was in touching distance, Loki hummed, looking at the blood on Tony’s chest like it was edible.“Very well,” Loki muttered and Tony frowned nervously. “Give me your permission and I shall brew your sister’s cure.”“My permission to do…what?” Tony said. Loki raised his eyebrows silently and Tony took a wary step backwards, or at least he meant to, but he found abruptly that he couldn’t move.“Now, don’t flee, little mortal.”“I have to be able to give her the cure,” Tony hissed, fighting the invisible constraints on him but failing to shift them. “If you kill me, I cannot give it to her!”“Clever,” Loki said. “But I have no intention of stopping you giving it to her,” he said and Tony stilled, eying him guardedly. “You shall return to her in full health of body and mind to give her her cure. You’ll have a period of time to close off your affairs and then…you shall return to me as my familiar-spirit.”“Your familiar?” Tony echoed. There was no smile on Loki’s face now and Tony found himself unable to look on him but dropped his eyes quickly. Loki’s bargain was not weighted in Tony’s favour but it would give his sister her life and so he nodded silently, exhausted by all that had occurred. “I give my permission,” he said reluctantly.“Very good,” Loki said and Tony took a deep breath as the bounds around him dropped away, but he wasn’t given a moment before Loki spread his fingers and pressed his hand firmly to the raw wound on Tony’s chest, making him cry out. He instinctively cringed away, but again, Loki somehow bound him there and Tony could only groan and struggle weakly as pain shot through his chest- and then it was gone and Loki took his hand away and smiled.Tony shuddered and took several deep breaths, taking a step and then another away from Loki, because it was so intense, so disorienting being so close to him. He felt immensely better and he looked down in shock at his unbloodied hands and touched his head to find it not only healed but with no evidence of it ever being injured.He yelped in shock when he saw a blue glow and realised it was coming from him. he scrabbled at his shirt to look down at himself and found that where there had been the wound there was now a glowing circle in the centre of his chest and it pulsed like a firefly’s light, except that it was blue, and embedded in his flesh.“What did you do?” he gasped but Loki wasn’t even looking at him, but had crouched to stroke the ears of the hare, Narfi.“As I said I would,” Loki said simply and Tony grit his teeth against the absolute panic and forced himself to breathe through it.“Please,” he managed. “Can I have the cure?”Loki stood gracefully with a sigh. “Mortals are always so hasty,” he said, but he moved towards what looked to a workstation of a kind, with a stretch of honeyed wood cluttered with various things that Tony couldn’t fathom the use of. “It is what makes you both so curious and so frustrating.”Loki began to pick out various items as he spoke and Tony watched silently.“Tell me of this sister of yours,” Loki said, with his broad-shouldered back to Tony, his simple and yet strange black and green outfit shining very slightly with a light that shouldn’t have been there inside a windowless stone house. “What colour ribbons does she like to wear, and what do her nightmares consist of?”“Why could you possibly need to know that?” Tony said, baffled and shaken by whatever Loki had done.Loki was silent but Tony felt the temperature physically drop and his skin prickled. “Alright,” he breathed, his heart pounding, and quickly answered Loki’s questions, and all of his subsequent ones, as best as he was able.“Mm and what kind of a red is her hair?”An odd smell had arisen from whatever it was Loki was making using a mixture of physical items and movements of his hands, which seemed to fade into a pale blue like the glowing circle in Tony’s chest. The odour, of something burning, was making Tony dizzy.“Uh,” he struggled to bring Pepper’s hair to mind. “No, more- a soft orange, like- like- leaves in autumn.”“Excellent,” Loki muttered, cupping a faintly green thing in his hands. “The essence of her…of Pepper…is quite sweet, is it not. But with a steel backbone.” Loki hummed, sounding pleased and Tony frowned as he tried to recall whether he’d told Loki Pepper’s name but he was certain he hadn’t. He didn’t question it but just watched silently as Loki transferred the green object into a leather bag.“It is done,” he said. “She will recover herself. Ensure it is swallowed with tea within the next two days.”Tony took the leather bag when Loki offered it and looked from it to Loki with a multitude of questions hanging heavily on his tongue, but he didn’t ask them.“Thank you,” he said finally. “I will- return, then.”Loki inclined his head with a knowing smile. It was both friendly and unsettling. “I know you will,” Loki said and Tony nodded silently before moving on unstable legs towards the doorway. “Farewell, Tony Stark,” Loki said, his voice smooth.“Goodbye,” Tony said, turning to look over his shoulder at the dark-haired man before he turned away and shifted the heavy fabric away to slip out into soft dusk, the leather bag clutched in his hand.But he was not in a hollow amongst too-green grass, but back on the moor and shocked, he looked back at the dwelling he had come from only to find it gone. Turning away, he put a hand to his glowing chest and, shivering, he made for the town to deliver Loki’s cure to his sister.He knew he would find Loki again when the time came to return, whether he wished to or not.