Jorma
Loki who growing up in the shadow of others, creates a magical being bound to his own soul. Through this bond, he learns about identity, self-perception, and the nature of connection in a world that never fully sees him.
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-> Told from Loki’s perspective.
-> Please be patient with me — English isn’t my native language, and I’m not that good at writing stories ;-;
-> Drawings are attached.
-> Character count: 8664
TW: loneliness, depression, self-doubt, trauma themes, emotional distress
I was still a child when I learned that loneliness has weight.
It pressed against my chest as I stood at the window of my chamber, watching Thor and his loyal companions rampage across the golden training fields of Asgard. Their swords flashed in the light, their laughter rang out like thunder. They were a unit, sweaty and drunk on victory, a brotherhood that seemed to consist of nothing but pure belonging.
Sif, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg—they circled my brother like moons around a blazing planet. They belonged together. They fit.
And me? I was the wrong shade in their flawless painting. The note that did not harmonize. The prince no one called for. What could I possibly have given them that they did not already possess?
“Loki doesn’t need that,” I once heard Sif say. Her voice was not cruel, merely matter-of-fact. “He’s too… different.”
Different. The word clung to me like sticky tar, seeping through skin and bone, straight into the marrow.
I rested my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. There was a pressure in my chest, as if something trapped inside me were struggling for air. As if I were drowning, though there was no water—only this suffocating, endless emptiness.
Why am I not like him? Am I ever enough? For Father? For Asgard? For anyone?
The questions burned. They ate through me, glowing hot, until I no longer knew whether I wanted to scream or to cry. But I did neither. I simply stood there, motionless and silent, as Asgard’s sun sank, the shadows stretched, and the silence grew so heavy that I felt I might lose my own heartbeat beneath it.
At some point—I do not know how long I remained frozen there—I could no longer endure it.
I sank to the floor. My hands trembled. Beneath my skin, magic prickled and churned, wild and desperate, as if it wanted to tear me open from the inside. Perhaps I wanted that too. Perhaps I simply wanted to create something that would stay. Something that would not abandon me.
So I closed my eyes and let it flow.
At first, there was only a shimmer. Green—the green of my magic, the very green Mother once called “beautiful.” Then something began to take shape. A form, supple and delicate, with scales that caught the fading light like liquid emeralds.
A snake. She was small. So small she fit into my trembling palm. Her eyes—two drops of molten gold—looked up at me.
And suddenly, something inside me broke. A sob, deep and raw, tore itself from my throat as if its edges were lined with barbs. I cried. I cried because she was there. I cried because I had been unbearably alone. I cried for all the pain I had inflicted upon myself without ever daring to name it.
“Please,” I choked out, my voice shredded by tears. “Please don’t go away.”
She slid around my wrist. Her touch was cool and firm. Steady. An anchor in the raging black sea of my isolation.
“Jorma,” I whispered. The name was a prayer, an incantation, a desperate promise.
She did not answer with words. But she answered. A sensation spread from her, through the contact, through the magical thread that now bound us. It was not simple joy. It was a deep, resonant sorrow. An understanding that reached down to the roots of the soul.
In that moment, between one strangled sob and the next, I understood.
I had not created a companion. I had shaped a mirror.
Jorma had been there every time I felt invisible. She was the silent witness to every night I wondered whether I even had the right to my place here. She was the essence of my loneliness, poured into living, scaled form.
The years that followed did not bring simple happiness. They were a slow, often painful path toward understanding.
Jorma became more real. Her scales grew firmer beneath my fingers, her breathing a familiar hiss in the silence of my chambers. Our bond deepened until it became something unbreakable—stronger than blood, more enduring than stone.
I told her things my tongue could never have spoken to any other being.
“I hate him sometimes,” I confessed one night, my gaze fixed on the dark canopy of my bed. “Thor. I hate him because everything comes to him so effortlessly. Because he never has to know what it is like to be invisible.”
Jorma hissed softly. Her forked tongue brushed gently against my cheek.
“But I love him too,” I whispered, and the truth of those words cut deeper than any dagger. “And that makes it so much worse. Because I love him and he… he doesn’t see me. Not really. No one does.”
At first, she was only an illusion—a trick I played on myself to fill the emptiness. But with every day I called her, with every secret I entrusted to her, she became… more.
“You’re mad,” Thor laughed once, when he caught me in the library with Jorma draped over my shoulder. “A snake as a pet? So typical.”
“She is not a pet!” I snapped back. And it was the truth.
She was a part of me. A severed fragment of my own soul, turned outward because the pressure of carrying it alone threatened to suffocate me.
Once, lost in my own pain, my concentration faltered. Jorma—who lingered in my chamber as a half-illusory presence—was not forgotten, but neglected, and the magical bond that sustained her grew thin and fragile. Suddenly, her panic pierced me like a knife. I felt her existence fray. Seized by raw terror, I ran back and found only her flickering, translucent image. With a desperate motion, I tore the remnants of the illusion apart and caught her as she fell into my arms, barely tangible.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, pressing her nearly insubstantial form against me. “I am so unspeakably sorry… I forgot you.”
She lifted her head. Her golden eyes were dull with exhaustion, yet there was no accusation in them. Only a deep weariness I recognized all too well—the weariness of always having to be strong.
You forget yourself, her gaze seemed to say. Always.
And she was right. I did.
There were nights when I lay awake, her cool skin beneath my hand, and wondered: Is this madness?
Then I remembered. The gaping void. The shattering nothingness.
Jorma was not madness. Jorma was survival.
She was the part of me that said, You are enough, when everyone and everything else fell silent. She was the voice that hissed in my ear when I most wanted to dissolve into nothing: Stand up. You exist. This is your foundation.
She taught me to see myself. Not through Odin’s eyes, always searching for the warrior. Not through Thor’s eyes, expecting the loyal companion. But through my own. Through hers.
And what I saw was not flawless. It was fractured. Shot through with fear, with rage, and with a sorrow so devastating it could have swallowed entire worlds. With a longing greater than all Nine Realms.
But it was also… precious. Because it was me.
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She has grown. She can be as small as an amulet or as vast as a lindworm coiling around the pillars of the world. She has a will of her own. Sometimes she defies me. Sometimes she protects me—even from myself.
She is a part of my soul. And I am a part of hers. Our pain is the same. Our loneliness we share. We are two ends of the same ancient thread, woven into a knot no one can ever untie—and I would not wish to untie it.
You may never fit into a world that was not made for you. The kind of love you ache for may never reach you. The emptiness will come. The silence too. And the question Am I enough? will echo through the halls of your mind until you believe it is the only truth you possess.
But it is not.
The only truth is this: you must learn to love yourself. Not despite your fractures, but because of them. Not as the radiant hero of a saga, but as its dark, complex author. You must cast the bravest, hardest spell of all:
To stand before the world in all your confused, frightened, brilliant, and broken splendor, and to say: This is me. And this is enough. Create your own mirror. Find that hidden, wounded part of yourself that has never known love, and embrace it. Give it a name. Let it stay with you until its touch no longer feels strange, but like a final homecoming.
It will hurt. By all the Norns, it will hurt. It is like stitching your own wound while you are still bleeding, with a needle made of your own sorrow.
But it is the only way.
For at the end of all days, when every door is closed and every voice has fallen silent, only you remain. And that being—this fragile, strong, lonely, wonderful weave of light and shadow—deserves to be loved. Above all, by yourself.
Jorma taught me this. Or perhaps I taught it to myself through her. It is the same.
And it begins with a single, desperate spark of magic in impenetrable darkness. With the decision to endure the nothingness no longer. With reaching out a hand… and taking your own.
Do it. It is the first step home.
Love yourself.
