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Loki has Yggdrasil in his veins.
He won’t know it until the End of All Things, when the Ash is wracked with the unchecked forces of Chaos and her roots are licked with living flame. At that point, it will be painfully obvious, so obvious that he will wonder, in between black thoughts of vengeance and fire-orange madness, how he didn’t know it before. He will reach between the Tree’s branches to smother the stars and tear the worlds from their trembling confines, as easily as swiping birds’ nests to the ground and watching the eggs nestled inside them smash. Everyone, Everywhere, will feel Death and know how simply, how easily, it was inflicted upon them, and by whom.
But that is millennia in the future yet. And for now, Loki remains happily oblivious to the evergreen blood of Yggdrasil running through his veins.
In this, there is no one else like him in all the cosmos. There are those who wield Yggdrasil’s power: those capable of harnessing her energy and using it to shape the spaces around them. There are men and gods and creatures who have sacrificed—a loved one, an eye, everything—to taste even a single drop of the Tree’s endless knowledge, concentrated in sweet springs below each of her roots, packed into each ancient groove in her bark, sifted and hidden in her shining loam. There are many who have spent lifetimes searching for that knowledge and a few who have succeeded.
Loki is not one of them. Loki has never sought the Tree’s wisdom, never looked for her power in places none but the Norns was ever meant to go. He has no need of such trials, nor of the sacrifices man and god and creature have been made to perform to gain oneness with the Great Ash: for he is already one with her (though of course he does not know it yet). When his fate was created long ago, long before he was ever born, it was inextricably woven into that of the cosmic tree; he has never not been in connection with her, and he never will be, not even long after he is dead and the cycle has begun anew.
There is no one else in all the realms so closely linked to Yggdrasil—linked to her life, linked to her force, linked to the thrumming vivacity of her dew-jeweled leaves and the stout solidness of her boughs, swayed for now only by the cold wind between worlds. He is, as in so many things, unique in this. And though he does not know it yet, it isn’t really much of a surprise. Ragnarok, after all, will be Loki’s doing. And Ragnarok is not merely the End of All Things—it is the Undoing of All Things.
And how could Loki possibly unweave Yggdrasil, the Norns’ first and last and ultimate loomwork, unless he was just as intimately of her nature as They are?