At times, when the heights grow tiresome and the warmth inside the lighthouse oppressive, Loki walks. It's an abhorrently human pastime, walking and thinking, as though one needs must facilitate the other, as though reminiscence is desirable and not merely the opening of a door onto a cruel and unpleasant landscape, as though there's enough ground on the Earth to walk to help one think all the things that need thinking, or so much as remember all the things held within an ancient head. As though he couldn't manage all of that just as well whilst standing in one place.

Still, he walks, and the chill in the salt air is in its own way comforting.

Generally, though, generally the paths he walks are empty, the open solitude of them a balm to a weary and irritable soul. Generally. Not today.

A suckling child sets his feet along the same path to the same sea and throws stones at that great, impassive beast, and Loki watches. Appropriate, maybe; allegorical, perhaps; a thousand years from now he could tell the tale of a lone young man building himself a sea wall stone by stone, throwing them with a curse into the face of an impassive enemy, up, up. And the sea wore it down, he'd say, because the sea always does. Time always does. Swallows even the young and invincible up and doesn't even have the decency to spit them out again.

There's a dismal thought. Loki slips down to the beach to scoop up a stone of his own, a large and heavy thing, and fling it out to sea. The splash should be satisfying. The boy's startlement might be more so.