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Sythius would not speak, even when Loki commanded him several times to “Explain yourself! Get back here! Damn it, Rookie!”

Some part of Loki recognized the fact that the giant didn’t simply run off, leaving his mentor in the cobbles. His pace never picked up faster than Loki could keep up. Had there been more time to deliberate on this, Loki may have found himself affronted by such an action, but there wasn’t. Something had caught fire in Sythius’s eyes and his mind, and there was simply no time nor tolerance for questioning whatever it was.

Whatever intuition served the wild man for a compass led him and his young leader deep into the merchant stalls of the Middle Ring. Even the most shameless of hucksters seemed to know better than to get in Sythius’s way to sell him a pendant or a pair of boots. Some folks did try to stop Loki. The less observant of them offered sweets and toys; the smart ones offered boot-knives and swords that sheathed themselves in walking staves.

Loki ignored them all. He had eyes only for his monstrous charge.

They stopped, at one of the corners that made up the huge pentagonal shape of the ring. In between two storefronts was a single, neglected wooden door. It was reinforced by heavy, dull iron. It had the look of a portal that hadn’t been entered voluntarily in eons.

Sythius glared at the thing like it had personally offended him.

Loki forced his senses to sharpen, and thought for just a sliver of a moment that he could hear something behind that door.

Something like … breathing.

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Sythius changed faces at some point nearing the evening. It wasn’t something tangible that did it; it wasn’t some gradual shift, either. It just … happened. And even though Loki had been spending the entire day taking very special care to pay close attention to the big man’s mood ever since his first outburst, he hadn’t been able to predict this.

He’d looked one moment, and seen a look of grim neutrality — as though Sythius understood that there was a mission on, that he was supposed to take this seriously, but wasn’t sure why — and then he’d looked another moment and seen a look of savage fury.

Sythius’s anger wasn’t orchestrated. It wasn’t something that he built. It was simply there. For most people Loki had met, and for Loki himself, anger was a mechanism, something that slowly built and built until it had to be vented. The young officer had heard anger described as a good person’s natural response to the injustices of the world. Anything, in other words, that went against the teachings of the Four Saints, would bring anger out of the righteous.

For Sythius, though, there was no such process.

He seemed to not only elicit emotions; he became them.

Such that Loki suddenly found himself fearing not just for the object of the giant’s rage, not just for himself, but for the whole of civilization. The thought crossed his mind at least six times in as many seconds that — if he didn’t quell this monstrosity nestled in Sythius’s amber eyes — the White Wall of Phila would be torn down before dawn rose on its next day.