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Chapter Text

The Distant Past

For eons upon untold eons, the Mad Titan had annihilated countless planets in his single-minded quest to extinguish all life in the universe, unable to be killed or contained for long by anything finite. Infinity watched, observed nigh uncaring and unheeding. It did not care about the finite. It simply existed , as was Its role as the sentient fundamental aspects of the universe, the fabric upon which all else was built.

Then: a disturbance in the flow, an aberration, an impossibility. A finite soul arriving through a bridge in time; that had been observed before. But this one was merged with Infinity, an impossibility in itself. And the path between times created a loop spanning eons, which would have collapsed, ruining the integrity of all reality, if it had not been for the impossible bond between finite and infinite.

The aberration reached out in between matter, in between moments, in between thoughts, reached out to Infinity, and communicated . 

There is more than one kind of infinity—in fact, there are an infinite number of them. The rational numbers stretch on infinitely, never ending, never ceasing, and yet they are nothing before the quantity of real numbers between zero and one alone. So although Infinity was, of course, infinite, a single exchange of information could broaden Its horizons infinitely.

Infinity was the universe, It had observed every trajectory of every particle since the very beginning. It had seen every atom of every living being, It had even seen every thought in every mind that had ever been. And yet, It did not comprehend sentient beings in the way that sentient beings tend to.

Any two sets of all the rational numbers within a range will, combined, be the same size, yet within even the most miniscule stretch of the line there are a greater infinity of real numbers that the rationals are blind to, unless one set is united with the other. And thus in this manner was Infinity united with Its future—an interesting event to note for the annals of history, but not impressive in effect—and with one living mind, seemingly small in comparison, yet very much real.

For eons upon countless eons, the unkillable Mad Titan had annihilated countless planets in his single-minded quest to extinguish all life in the universe. Infinity had watched, it had merely observed, but now It cared and heeded the suffering of each and every species. It vowed to bring an end to the Mad Titan’s slaughter, permanently. Yet there was an obstacle to Its goal: Infinity was imprecise. To destroy one thing would be to destroy everything. The only way to get both the precise control and the transfinite power required to end Thanos would be to merge finite with Infinite, the very anomaly which had caught Its attention. For that to occur, it needed to be possible for a finite being to have some connection with Infinity in the first place, an impossible thing in Its present state. It would need to split itself into pieces, and only when ready reunite.

Infinity shattered.

965 CE

The sounds of battle rang from outside the temple, but within there was deceptive calm. The Casket of Ancient Winters rested in its place on the rune-covered stone altar at the center of the inner sanctum, illuminating the carved stone walls with a dim blue light—no fire, nor luminescent lichen, nor even magelight save for that of a Bonded of the Casket was permitted within the temple’s heart. Next to it, swaddled in blankets, lay a baby, oddly quiet, and small for a Jötun. 

The temple was barricaded and well-defended, but the priest-guards within could hear the distinctive blast of Gjallarhorn from outside: the Watchman was here, and with him would certainly be Odin Warfather. The legendary conqueror, who, as the tales and rumors told among the Jotnar went, would never retreat even if his army lay dead to the last man, who would murder and eat children who he found near the battlefield, who had a throne room covered in knee-deep blood. Of course, these were not entirely truthful, but they were exaggerations more than mere fabrications, for Odin truly was a cruel and fierce combatant, leading the armies of Asgard to a slaughter; of which side it did not matter. 

Two guards stood before the sole door to the inner sanctum. It was heavy, solid stone, but the elder of the two guards had been in the battle that had razed the former capital to the ground. She had seen the destruction which Asgard’s armies could cause, and even a temple sanctum door would not stop them, neither physically nor as a symbol of a place of peace.

“I told you we shouldn’t have kept Laufey’s child here. You fool! Why would you ever think that those Aesir brutes would have the honor not to attack the Temple. And now we’re cornered. We should have left hours ago,” she said. Now that the Aesir army had descended upon the temple, there was no way out. They were trapped here.

“He’ll be safe here. Jötunheim’s Heart will protect it,” the other guard spoke calmly, but his eyes—fixed attentively on the door to the chamber—betrayed his worries.

“It’s too young to channel the power of the Casket. Barely a few moons old.”

“Too young to consciously channel it. Jötunheim is older even than you are. Can’t you trust the ground beneath you? And if you’re still so worried about the child, then protect it yourself, don’t just stand here worrying!”

A thundering blast rang from the entrance, turning the ancient door and heavy barricade into mere splinters and dust. Odin Slaughter-God, backed by a squadron of Einherjar, stood behind the ruins of the door with Gungnir in hand. An icy storm of energy, siphoned directly from the trunk of Yggdrasil, rose in protective fury and blasted from the Casket's altar to the Asgardian warriors. The Einherjar froze solid in instants, but Odin raised Gungnir and the continuous blast of pure cold funneled into it. He began to walk forwards with great difficulty, fighting the freezing onslaught with each step. The guards rushed towards the Allfather while he was distracted. He barely managed to block the first swings of their blades of ice. In his momentary distraction, ice began to accumulate on Gungnir’s point. Flurry after flurry of blows rained down on him. For a moment, the two Jötnar had a small spark of hope that they might not lose this war too badly after all.

But this was not to be; Gungnir rang with a flash of golden fire, immolating the ice that had accumulated on it, and Odin blasted the two guards with bolts of energy before returning to shielding himself from the Casket’s fury. Odin approached the Casket more quickly now, invigorated and undistracted by any other combatant.

Gungnir touched the Casket, and an unseen battle began, the blood-chained golden core of Asgard battling Jötunheim’s icy one. It was a war carried out on the branches of Yggdrasil—the ley lines of arcane dark matter that wove themselves throughout the universe, meeting at nine nexuses: the Nine Realms, the most magically powerful worlds in known space. Asgard’s core was physically distant, but traveling the branches of Yggdrasil, it was in close proximity. Spears and tendrils of Asgardian seiðr shot out, guided by Gungnir to meet Jötunheim’s defensive wards, constructed by Jötun seiðberandi long past. They were strong and stable, designed to last millennia, but could not hold up against Asgard’s continuous onslaught. The assault reached the core of Jötunheim—the joining-place of Yggdrasil’s branches, and the fountain of seiðr that kept the planet in a stable homeostasis—but could go no further. Perhaps if Odin had truly had Asgard’s support—but no, it was chained and enslaved, its will and the deepest of its powers bound.  The core was not just some mere magical construct; it was a fundamental part of Yggdrasil.

And yet, there was a crack in its near invulnerabilityː the Artefact to which it was connected, which it was interconnected with; the Casket of Ancient Winters. Odin swung Gungnir at the Casket; its point hit the glowing crystal with a resounding note but did not pierce it, neither physically nor mystically. Fighting against the combined wills of both Jötunheim and weakly-resisting barely-conscious Asgard, he wove a net of blood-poisoned gold around the Casket. He tightened the noose, and pulled . The Casket was torn apart from Jötunheim’s core, leaving gaping wounds of seiðr evaporating, bleeding into space.

Two Realms screamed in broken pain, soon silenced by Odin’s chains that wrapped them in an acerbic, bloody haze.

The Casket of Ancient Winters screamed as it was cut off from the nourishing seiðr that flowed to it through Jötunheim, the spark of its consciousness fading until it could reconnect itself to Yggdrasil again.

The child screamed also, its cries in harmony with those of the world and Artefact to which their soul had begun to bond, drawing Odin’s notice. Even if he had not been able to sense Yggdrasil through the chained core of Asgard, he would have immediately known it for a Yggdrasil-Child. The baby was far smaller than the average Jötun infant, the key peculiarity that showed its otherworldly nature, that its soul was connected not only to Jötunheim but also to the unknown heart of Yggdrasil itself. The world to which the infant’s soul was directly bonded to was freshly cracked and wounded, and so it was simple work for Odin to get it to use the limited form of shapeshifting which all Yggdrasil-Children possessed. He merely offered a thread of warm, bright Asgardian seiðr, and the infant latched onto it, seeking comfort. It sucked it in greedily, pulling more and more into itself—and a connection was formed. Its form shifted to mimic those of the inhabitants of its new Realm, albeit with a few distinctive traits—it was not connected solely to Asgard, after all; some part of it would always be among the branches of Yggdrasil.

Odin walked away from the temple with two stolen relics that day.

2018 CE

Sanctuary II looms in the Statesman’s window, and Loki knows that all is lost. The power stone’s aura emanates like a miasma from the Titan’s flagship, a steely violet poison. The Tesseract does not respond to any amount of prompting or pleading to open a portal: its energy does not reach out to the branches of Yggdrasil like it usually does, seeming to curl in on itself instead; infinity inverted to become an infinitesimal point. Loki is trapped.

But it speaks, it sings to him in the gravitational waves of black holes merging to a ringing crescendo, in the regular beat of a stellar remnant living again off its binary companion’s hydrogen, in the harmonious, inherent unity of space and time and matter in all of its complex arrangements.

The battle rages around Loki, but all he focuses on is the Tesseract. It had always been… kind to him in the past, and had never betrayed him or led him astray, so why stop now of all times, when its capture might lead to the destruction of the universe? 

The Titan himself steps onto the Statesman, a golden gauntlet on his hand, and Loki understands the meaning behind the Space Stone’s song. A desperate plan begins to assemble itself in his mind.

In his time posing as the Allfather, he had found a temporarily-self-sacrificial Jotun ritual for true-bonding to an Artefact; truly becoming one with it. The various Infinity Stones are separate Artefacts at the moment, but Infinity was once a singular being in the distant past; it could be one again. With the power he could gain from bonding the whole of Infinity, he might be able to not just lock Thanos away but end him, defeat him once and for all.

Thanos has the infinity gauntlet, which, at least according to legend, could rejoin the shattered fragments of Infinity; Loki has at least a slight connection to every Infinity Stone: a way in. Put them together, and all that is left to do is to die. It is a risky plan, founded on legends and guesswork, but it is the only path that Loki can see out of this predicament.

Loki stays out of the battle—it is an inevitable loss, and winning the war is far more vital—and weaves the spellwork which will let him access the inner workings of the Infinity Gauntlet, and in turn, once Thanos collects them, the remainder of the Infinity Stones. He slips out of the fray into a storage closet in which he finds Banner hiding. A few brief whispered words between them, and then Loki returns to his seiðr-work.

Loki hears the sounds of bloody battle through the spacecraft walls, but he continues to weave intricate threads of seiðr, even as he hears Asgardians who he had known his entire life die in droves, even as Thanos and the Black Order wade through dead bodies, even as he hears Thor defeated, brought down, broken and bloodied. But not killed; Thanos wants the Tesseract, and the Mad Titan knows Loki’s mind like a predator knows the innards of its prey. Knows that torture and threats against Loki himself mean nothing, nothing but screams and months of bloody defiance, always shattered but never broken.

As the battle dies down, Loki hears Thanos command the Black order to search for him. Loki reminds Banner of the signal which they had agreed upon, and exits the closet, not wanting him to be found before it is time.

Thanos monologues the same way he always has, his speech filled with conviction but no sense. Loki barely hears him, focusing instead on the Tesseract and his own plan.

“The Tesseract or your brother’s head,” Thanos threatens. “I assume you have a preference?” 

If he had only had just a few more moments, just a little more time to stall, Loki would have been willing and happy to grant Thanos the Tesseract. Thor would not have had to suffer, would never have to experience even a moment of torture under Thanos’ hand, would never have to understand even a fraction of what Loki had endured.

“Oh, I do. Kill away.” I’m sorry, Brother. Just hold on for a few seconds, and I will take your place. I promise.

The Power Stone blasts with burning force into Thor’s skull, and he lets out a gasping scream of pain. Loki is not used to seeing Thor like this, so weakened and helpless. Thor’s invulnerability and solidity, the final remaining constant of a thousand years of lies, evaporates before his eyes. It is all so wrong; he should be in Thor’s place instead. That would be less painful than watching.  

“Alright, stop!” Loki can not bear to see Thor in pain any longer, though the construct of seiðr around the Tesseract is not quite yet complete.

“We don’t have the Tesseract. It was destroyed on Asgard,” Thor says, giving Loki the final moments of focus that he needs. He raises one hand, and summons the Tesseract within it. 

“You really are the worst, Brother.” 

After all that Loki had done for him? After a thousand years of brotherhood and loyalty, after a thousand years of being taken for granted, was this the thanks he got for saving Thor? It stung, the way that Thor never saw his sacrifices, never saw the purpose behind his plots—for others, always for others: for Thor, or for Odin, or for Asgard, or for the Nine Realms, or for the universe, never for himself alone. Loki would save Thor’s life for perhaps the thousandth time nevertheless, but it wouldn't hurt to be acknowledged just once for all that he had done.

“I assure you, Brother,” Loki promises, “the sun will shine on us again.” It is not an empty promise.

“Your optimism is misplaced, Frost Giant,” Thanos attempts to provoke him, but Loki has learned much since he escaped Thanos’ grasp; he refuses to be goaded.

“Well, for one thing, my optimism is placed perfectly,” Loki says, not deigning to even respond to Thanos’ intended insult. “And for another… we have a Hulk.” The Titan should hopefully be overconfident and more easily deceived after defeating the Hulk, thinking that he had uncovered Loki’s secret plan and quashed his final hope for victory.

On his signal, the Hulk bursts into the room, smashing into Thanos at full force. Loki jumps to protect the falling Thor, dropping the Tesseract as he does so. 

Loki slips away and uses the time that the Hulk has given him to mentally ready himself for the ritual, getting himself into the right state of mind. Although intent matters more than precise actions in the formation of an Artefact Bond, Loki chooses the words that he will use carefully. There is no room for hesitation or uncertainty; the stakes are simply too high.

When a single, clear, thrumming note rings throughout the seiðr around him, Loki knows that the Titan has put the Space Stone into its place in the Gauntlet.

Loki reemerges from the side room where he had hidden, mind clear, the words that he will use for the ritual almost on his lips.

“If I might interject,” Loki approaches Thanos, “If you’re going to Earth, you might want a guide. I do have a bit of experience in that arena.”

“If you consider failure experience.” Loki has heard similar words from Thanos’ lips many times before, almost always directed at Nebula.

“I consider experience experience, almighty Thanos,” he says.

Loki begins the ritual’s penultimate steps: the shedding and sacrifice of the weight of external expectations, of titles both truthful and false that obscured his own identity, and a declaration of eternity.

“I, Loki,” it started simply with the giving of a name; not a sacrifice like the rest, but a catalyst; a core identity to keep and build the rest around.

“Prince of Asgard,” a simple title to begin with, albeit possessing history and deep attachments; to be sacrificed because it had too deep a history and this was to be a new life; a rebirth.

“Odinson,” a lie once believed by himself and many others, and once revealed desired; to be sacrificed because no lies could form a grating debris between soul and Stone. Some small part of himself is still hanging from the Bifrost pleading for even a scrap of acceptance or affection from his not-father, but he would not let that define him. All of his desire to impress the real Odin had fallen into the Void along with him, but it was more difficult to completely let go of the Odin in his mind.

“The rightful King of Jotunheim,” a truth kept hidden for far too long, and once revealed reviled; to be sacrificed because sacrifice requires acceptance. And it is a fact which must be accepted, for it must not be a poisoned dagger in his mind cutting deep, infected wounds. It had been difficult to accept that the Jötnar were not monsters, and it was still difficult to bear the sight of his own blue skin, but he could do it. He could accept chilly blood flowing through his veins and crimson eyes and ancestral lines on his forehead, could accept that those were not inherently monstrous things.

“God of Mischief,” and a final title to sacrifice, this one earned and well beloved; to be sacrificed because all sacrifices must have some true cost.

“Do hereby pledge to you my undying fidelity.” Not to Thanos, but to Infinity itself. A pledge was a pact,  a bond formed, one everlasting and true. Undying, too, for with Infinity within him, he would truly be immortal.

And now to die as near to the gauntlet as was possible: a knife summoned, brandished, flashing through the air in his hand until it stops mere millimeters from the Titan’s throat. The Space Stone’s power flows down his arm like a roaring tide, an invigorating paralysis. The Titan is playing right into his hands, with every action he takes bringing Loki closer to Infinity, unwittingly ensuring Loki’s apotheosis and his own demise. The fool. That pathetic knife could never have done more than scratch Thanos, and the Space Stone is capable of far grander feats than merely stopping a single blade in its tracks. 

“‘Undying.’ You should choose your words more carefully.” Ironic. Loki had chosen them perfectly.

The Titan grasps Loki’s neck in his gauntleted hand and squeezes, raising Loki’s body to hang above the ground. Through the pain, Loki reaches out mentally towards the brilliant strength of two Infinity Stones. The arcane lattices which he had constructed in the Tesseract around the Space Stone meet the ones in his own body, and his soul begins to slip away along the path of least resistance, and with it, the life drains from his body. Thanos’ choking grasp could never have killed him otherwise; it isn’t meant to. 'He will make you long for something as sweet as pain' had to mean something after all, and death certainly would not have fulfilled those terms. Loki had begged for something as sweet as death more times than he could count when he had been methodically torn apart and beaten broken and bloody out of pure, irrational cruelty.

No, what Thanos means to do is leave him stranded floating in space, too far from any branches of Yggdrasil to teleport, yet in a place dense enough in seiðr for his body to continuously heal itself into a barely-living state. What is worse than pain? The sensation of the absence of sensation. The Void. Of course, if the Titan’s plan to destroy all of reality could have succeeded, Loki would have only drifted through space half-dead for a few days at the most before the universe ceased to exist. Never let it be said that the Mad Titan made reasonable decisions. With the final dregs of breath in his lungs, Loki speaks.

“You will never be a God.” It is not a threat nor mere prophecy, but a fact of reality. 

Thanos squeezes harder, and Loki distantly feels the bones of his neck break. The last remnants of his soul slip away from his body.

Infinity beckons.

Chapter Text

Loki’s disembodied consciousness floats through the matrix of lines and swirls and glyphs of seiðr within the gauntlet, directionless at first. Then the tethers connecting him to the Space Stone, crafted with as much precision and skill as he could muster in the small amount of time that he’d had, pull taut. They thrum with the song of the Tesseract; the rhythm of black holes colliding, of pulsars; the harmonious melody of two hundred billion galaxies and the stars within.

Loki draws closer, and the Space Stone shines before him, an impossibly brilliant blue to the pure seiðr sense of Loki’s soul. It is the endless blue of oceans and skies, the incandescent blue of quasars, an azure that calls to Loki and captivates him. Loki reaches out and a tendril reaches back, welcoming, drawing him deeper, deeper, deeper into a memory that Loki does not recall but which the Tesseract had never forgotten...

965

The Tesseract had languished in Asgard's vault for millennia prior to the Æsir-Jötnar war. It had been captured long ago in the Æsir conquest of Asgard, so far past that most Æsir thought of Asgard as their ancestral homeland. In the final battle against Thanos, a vast alliance led in battle by militaristic Asgard had locked away the Titan behind a tightly-shut wormhole, leaving him and the bulk of his armies distant in space and time. After the battle, the Æsir decided that the planetoid near to the singularity would be a rather nice place to stay permanently, and slaughtered the original inhabitants, who had been vital to defeating Thanos. 

The Tesseract was a powerful weapon in the right hands, but luckily for untold numbers of worlds, it was useless to the Æsir. They could have bonded a Child of Yggdrasil to it, but none had been born on Asgard since Heimdall, who connected with the Bifrost easily, but with the Tesseract not at all. They could have partaken of its supernatural aura of inspiration and used that to build marvelous devices and deadly weapons enhanced by a permanent connection to it, as some Midgardians eventually would centuries later, but the reputation of the Æsir as the least innovative people in the Nine Realms was well earned. They could have brought in expert craftspeople from the other realms, but they would not take the risk of letting any subjects from the colonies work with the Tesseract, lest they use the deadly weapons they created for rebellion. So it was cause for a small and secret celebration among those in the know when an infant Child of Yggdrasil was found and brought to Asgard.

Soon after Loki's arrival in Asgard, Odin, sparing no time in putting his stolen relics to good use, brought him to the heavily-defended vault in which the Tesseract lay. To his great dismay, his success was far greater than he had imagined: the moment Odin brought Loki into the Tesseract's chamber, a wave of azure spread across his skin. A Yggdrasil-child's species was determined by the world to which it was connected, and no finite force, whether mortal or immortal in origin, could possibly hope to detect or restore any former bond. But the Tesseract was the Stone of Insight as well as of Inspiration, and it contained within itself an Infinity Stone. The moment that the infant Loki touched it, Odin’s lies unraveled.

To Odin, of course, this outcome was unacceptable. What use to him would be a tool who could not be controlled and brought to heel by lies and propaganda, even (and especially) a powerful one? With as little delay as was possible on slow-moving Asgard, Odin sent the Tesseract off to Midgard and forbade all Æsir from venturing to the realm without explicit permission. The incident in the vault joined his many secrets told to none, erased from history, and yet Odin could not erase all of its effects.

No being of flesh and blood had sensed it at the time, but the connection forged then between Loki and the Tesseract had been more than merely a momentary event. When Loki in his childhood dreamed at night of soaring through the stars he had observed in day, that was the Tesseract's doing, showing him the true distances and luminosities and planets of stars which he could otherwise only infer through calculation. When Loki wandered  the branches of Yggdrasil, searching for the pathways between worlds, the Space Stone guided him, aiding his navigation of its complex, branching structure and even helping astral project far past its branches, a complex and delicate feat never accomplished by any other mage before or since. The Tesseract’s presence was subtle yet constant, always a distant companion to Loki

2011

Loki fell.

Loki fell, and Asgard rose above him—receding ever further, ever smaller—on ancient crystal thrusters in its endless flight from the black hole beneath it. Standing on Asgard, the realm seemed motionless; stagnant. And yet so many there believed it to be glory ascendant, he thought, so many thought they stood on the one spot where its stagnancy ought to be most evident. And though Loki was, to an observer, falling towards the black hole, he considered (for a moment or a millenia, Loki did not know; the black hole and black space warped his perception of time) that he might merely be on his natural trajectory. There was a small and subtle distinction there: a fall was a tragedy, was something to be mourned, would keep the grieving family awake at night asking themselves what they had done wrong for this to happen; letting the beast out of the palace to where it could die in its rightful place and no true Æsir would concern themselves over its fate was pure common sense. It was not a story, for stories were a thing that people had—real people, not monsters.

There would be no story of Loki left once the void swallowed him, and when after eons untold it would spit him out, all that would be left would be scattered particles in a state of utter entropy, no information preserved. There would be nothing of him left to rot in Hel, nothing left for some future historian to gawp at the monster, not even dust. There would be no more lies (and was it not ironic that he was oft called the god of them, when it was he who was the lie?), no more truths (hands turning a beastly blue, a catastrophic cascade of revelations sending him tumbling down), just oblivion unceasing, irreversible.

But did it really matter, whether Asgard was soaring or stagnant, whether Loki was falling or finally released to act on his inclinations? One of them hung above all-consuming death, and one approached it. Welcomed it, in fact, welcomed the ending which Odin had stolen from him and concealed like so much else so long ago. No matter what unforeseen miraculous durability his Jötun heritage might happen to grant, no matter how much his seiðr instinctively reached out to protect him, nothing could survive the all-consuming maw of a black hole.

Loki fell.

Loki fell, and the black hole rose around him, a rising tide of empty utter darkness, leaving only an ever-shrinking circle of blue-shifted stars above—or at least, what passed for above in free fall. The blue of life Loki called “above”, and the center of the deadly dark abyss enveloping him “below.” And though the stars were points of light and life above, within this void between the light and dark, their hues shifted bluer, more energetic, more deadly as he fell. He could not feel their poison light when he had been lifted up by engines of lying gold and hidden from the void, from the truth inevitable

Loki’s thoughts spiraled within themselves, blurry in the senseless void, and barely a coherent one could form, but as the stars began to turn a high-energy blue, from the mental fog a dim feeling of wrongness, of absence. This close to the black hole, he should have already begun to feel the tugging on his legs that would signal the beginning of the end. But no, the space around him was as uncurved as Asgard’s surface, despite the steep change in the shape of spacetime that he would have expected this close to the black hole, as if the very fabric of space itself cared for him and wished for him to be safe. In a burst of lucidity and action, he reached out with atrophied seiðr-sense and found…

Infinity.

The full, unbridled force of Space itself embracing him, keeping him safe from the immense tidal forces. It seemed to notice his attention on it, and curled around him almost… cordially, as if greeting an old friend.

It extended a thread of seiðr to him, and a stream of impressions flowed into his mind. A blue cube thrumming with a hyperdense concentration of Space’s power, trapped in a Midgardian laboratory.

Loki fell.

Loki fell into the all-engulfing darkness, the last blues of the stars in a miniscule circle above turning to ultraviolet and gamma.  

Loki fell.

Loki fell into and through the hole in space and time—for this was not a black hole but a wormhole, created eons past to drive the Mad Titan far from the Nine Realms and sealed shut so that no quark nor electron nor neutrino nor even a single photon could pass through. But Space itself cleared a way for him, though it was no smooth journey. It was unraveling; becoming nothing. Becoming everything; a smear of possibilities across the entirety of the universe. And then collapse; a reintegration into a single state, remote in space and time from where he began.

Loki fell.

Loki fell, and hit solid ground.

2012, subjective decades (Years? Centuries, perhaps?) later

The Tesseract had been a constant companion on Sanctuary, always at the edge of Loki’s awareness. It had sung to him of the eternal dance of atoms, of freedom, of space. An ever-calming presence, which he would never let any harm come to; it was his only relief from the pain and, perhaps, a friend. Where all of his other memories were a blurry horde of phantasms, the stars burned with bright, crystalline light, beacons of clarity in the blood-red—monster's-eyes red—mist of his mind. To come too close to the life-giving light would be to risk extinguishing it, and, as the Tesseract was no mere candle, to extinguish the universe too.

And yet as he knelt before Thanos, the urge to reach out and gorge himself on the Tesseract’s light devoured him. The clarity of the Tesseract's light was turned searing; its clarifying lens focused into a single burning point. Every insight of the Space Stone was as matter touching antimatter within his mind, a note in jarring dissonance with every conviction running through him.

Every screaming atom of Loki’s body demanded that he retrieve the Tesseract and set loose the Chitauri upon Midgard, needed it like a star needs to burn: inevitable, given his present state, and to not do so would be to die; yet every act of fusion, of acceeding to the pressures within, brought death—both his own and that of worlds—that much nearer.

The Tesseract's requests were opposite: keep the Space Stone out of Thanos’ hands. Protect Midgard. And though these were but requests and not commands engraved within his skull, they were powerful nonetheless, fighting the sharp-blue-yellow cords of need on every mental front, waging a guerilla war within. Neither force could destroy or neutralize the other, instead only tearing each thought of his near to its breaking point. The contradiction ripped through Loki, scorching his mind like the burns on his skin scorched his body. 

An impression of an object pressed into his grip, the presence of the Other lodging more firmly in his mind, and an onslaught of need and volatile rage surged through him, momentarily overwhelming the calmer reasoning of Space. Loki reached out across the megaparsecs to the Tesseract and pulled . Loki noticed that the Space Stone curiously did not resist despite its fear of being captured by the Titan, and the blurry impression of a memory surfaced in his mind: a plan of self-sabotage. Of never sailing directly against the deadly gale of need in which his mind was caught and yet nonetheless going against the flow, subverting it. A sense of surety, backed up by Infinity.

And then the moment of freedom from reality was past.

The energy of the Tesseract dissipating around him: steaming, crackling, burning. A darkened room, light coming from behind. People? Mortals. Midgard. A flash of ragepanicneed and with it one of pain. His face twisted into a grimace.

Twin stars of need and Space burned within Loki, driving him onwards.

Chapter Text

Space thrums within Loki, as much a part of himself as his own mind. Now always tugging on the edge of Loki’s consciousness was every quark and every quasar, every cosmic string and supercluster, every star born, living, dying incandescent. He reaches out effortlessly—distance is meaningless to Space, to distance itself—and sinks into the Power Stone’s sharp, destructive purple.

2014

Loki shut the door to Odin’s study—now his own, in this guise—and activated every ward around it before releasing the illusion over him. It was a familiar ritual to him by now, after many scores of days of attempting to covertly prepare the Nine Realms against Thanos while simultaneously working to undo the effects of millenia of Asgardian imperialism. 

The various political situations had finally stabilized enough that he would have a few days when “Odin” would not be required to appear in public. He planned to use this valuable time to work on locating and ensuring the safety of the Infinity Stones. Space and Reality were safe in Asgard’s vaults, though after he had the time to further investigate the Aether’s properties, he would send it off to the Collector’s collection—sealed and warded, of course—so that no two of the stones would be concentrated in the same place. The Soul Stone’s existence as a real physical object was mere rumor and conjecture, Time and Mind were on Midgard. Time was well-protected in the hands of an order of Midgardian mages, but Mind? Not so much. He planned to contain and move it after protecting the Power Stone and moving the Aether.

With the research which Loki had done in Odin’s private library over the short periods of free time which he’d had, he had narrowed down the location of the Power Stone to a few possibilities. The first was a planet called Morag, an obscure world mentioned only by name and coordinates in an old ledger of worlds which had been in some way relevant to the Aesir-Jotnar war. A small note was scrawled in the margins.

Contains Artefact of immense strategic power. Full-scale invasion not feasible at this time due to distance from Yggdrasil. Cutoff should lead to ecological collapse, easy pickings. Note: return in ~1000 years.

Loki double-checked the wards around the room and settled in to astral project to Morag. Before expending the energy and time required to teleport to the nearest planet with a branch of Yggdrasil passing through to it and chartering a starship for the remaining distance, he would locate the Power Stone, if it was even there.

He quickly traversed the familiar, warm glow of the paths of Yggdrasil and anchored his mind to a branch passing through the nearest stellar system to Morag’s sun. The remainder of the journey, though a fraction of the light-years in distance, was more time-consuming and difficult. Loki’s astral form surfed the interstellar currents of seiðr moving many times the speed of light, making split-second leaps between them to keep from being swept away from his destination.

Nearing Morag, he switched onto slower currents until he reached low orbit, where, to the senses by which he navigated, an Infinity Stone would shine brightly.

And there it was!

A bright, piercing violet glow deep beneath water. It was blurred and dimmed slightly by wards, but they had clearly not been maintained for a long time. Loki navigated in towards the beacon and easily passed through the wards. He emerged in some sort of small vault. With the pure seiðr-sense which he had been using to navigate the stars, it appeared as several tattered shells of wards surrounding a blindingly bright steely purple star tempered only slightly in intensity by its Vessel, a metal orb. Only the innermost shell of wards remained intact enough to prevent any vagabond from simply reaching in and taking the Power Orb.

Loki was just about to check the physical defenses of the vault when the Orb abruptly reached out to him, sharp, steely and destructive yet with a hint of excited puppy to the wire of energy which it extended.

Light impacting an icy world, turning it to a higher-entropy state. Static ice cracking, structure breaking down to a fluid state. Brilliant, shining, beautiful energy. Like a star. But not completed. Beam broken too soon, world lying dead.

Distant past, free, not entombed. Turning planets to brief stars, igniting them. Joyous. Incandescent.

Now stuck in solidity. No change, no release of energy.

Potential completion? Turn ice to fire? Entropy and energy?

Together?

Loki got a distinct sense that the Power Stone was doing the ancient-aspect-of-the-universe version of a puppy asking to play.

It did not understand.

It did not understand, did not even notice the deaths which its destruction had and could cause. It saw only the motion of atoms, the change in entropy, energy and mass. It did not see people, did not see lives. Loki understood what that was like, to not see the destruction which destruction caused. He remembered standing in the Bifrost observatory, plunging Gungnir into its center as a key, not caring what devastation would befall the Jötnar. Their lives did not matter; they were just as worthless and monstrous as his own. All that mattered was Odin’s approval. All that mattered was being worthy in the All-Father’s eyes.

Loki did not want any more worlds to die just because powerful beings were blind to the importance of distant lives.

Loki tried to explain. Where Power had only shown planets flaring to burning light from a distance, he showed the effects from closer up: people dying, in fear and pain.

Only an impression of confusion came from the Orb. What were these? Why did they matter?

Yet there was an undercurrent to its emotions, a sense of familiarity. A hint of a memory of an ancient time, before Power became Power and certainly far before it was encased in the Orb, when someone had likewise approached it with an understanding of the scale at which life lived. 

The shattering of Infinity was but a myth to most, and even within tomes of magical history and theory it was merely a conjecture to explain evidence that indicated that the Infinity Stones in their modern form had not existed since the universe’s beginning. For Loki to be experiencing firsthand proof of Its shattering? That was revolutionary. If he could figure out more, that would likely advance magical theory by leaps and bounds.

Loki questioned the Orb, repeating that same exact sense of familiarity back at it but with an inquisitive mental tone. For a moment it flared excitedly, beginning to send out an impression of so much energy created, flowing, connecting in a brilliant burning circuit, but it cut off abruptly, almost embarrassed, as if it had done something it was not supposed to do. Loki repeated the question, but it did not respond again.

It seemed that Loki would learn no more of the history of the Infinity Stones today, but Power’s brief response had given him an idea of how to discourage it from causing more devastation. It was not mere destruction that it loved; it was energy . Flowing, cycling, released; the change of energy from one form to another, its movement from place to place. That was what the Power Orb would be persuaded by.

Life was change. It was the cycle of energy flowing from place to place, from form to form. To destroy life might create a momentary flare of flame, but would end the constant burning within every cell of every living being; would end the energy perpetually cycling through the ecosystem of a world; would end the chaos, the unpredictability inherent to living beings in all their complexity and interwoven interactions. To connect would do more, over the long term, than to break.

Loki felt a burst of realization from the orb, a surge of joy at having discovered a way for the burning, flickering flames of apocalyptic energy which it loved so much to endure beyond a few moments.

Connection, cycles, cause constant change?

Connect people, make energy more brilliant-moving-flaring-intense?

The Orb did not seem to have lost its love of destruction, but now, perhaps, it would do more than merely destroy.

Loki turned to the physical defenses within the temple itself. There were deadly traps and nigh-unbreakable locks, but many were broken down by the ravages of time. Repairing them, however, would be more trouble than it was worth.

Loki reinforced the inner wards; strengthening them further, repairing the broken wards, and adding some concealing spells of his own were more complex and time-consuming tasks which he could do on another trip. After checking the vault’s own internal defenses, Loki turned to its surroundings. It was covered by deep oceans, so anyone who wished to enter would need to either teleport or locate it by a survey of all the planet’s seas, which would likely take years. Loki supposed that obscuring it from magical detection would be sufficient for now.

Loki had begun to craft the spell that would conceal the Power Stone from prying eyes when one of the patterns on the vault walls caught his attention. The metallic relief seemed to depict the beings which Loki presumed to be the native civilization of the planet, given their prevalence among the reliefs in the vault, making a deal with several tall figures which looked uncannily like Jötnar. He could not read the alien mannerisms and styles perfectly, but the depicted occasion seemed celebratory.

What would the Jötnar, barely better than animals, have been doing on a distant planet which required sophisticated technology to reach? And why would any civilization commemorate a peaceful meeting with them in apparent gladness and pride?

The note in the ledger had mentioned that “cutoff should lead to ecological collapse,” and it was about planets relevant to the Aesir-Jötnar war, so perhaps Morag used to be dependent on trade from Jötunheim? A near-dying species might not care much whether the trading partners who kept them alive were monsters, and would pay any price for the survival of their planet no matter how extortionate the cost. But that still did not answer the question of how the Jötnar had reached Morag in the first place. Loki had searched throughout the temple, but it had contained nothing recognizable as writing for the All-Speak to translate, so he supposed his best chance of finding the information he sought was in Odin’s private study. After all, he had already found in it a book implying that the Jotnar had trading partners at all, which was more information about them, not counting bedtime stories, than he had ever seen in any other library.

Loki quickly finished his concealing spell, certain that nobody would be able to find the Orb through magical means within the time he would be away, and headed back to Asgard.

When he returned to his physical body, he checked how much time had passed. Although the astral trip to Morag had seemed to take only a scant few hours, a few days had passed in Asgard, and he would need to appear as Odin soon to manage political matters. It would likely be several score days before he was able to return to Morag and the Power Orb for long enough to improve its protections significantly. In the meantime, though, he had a new research project: Jötun culture, which he was quickly beginning to suspect actually did exist.

It was more time than he had estimated before he was able to return to Morag. In the interim, though, he used almost every spare moment that he had to search through the shelves and stacks of books and loose parchment in Odin’s study. In a section which he had previously neglected, for he had dismissed it as merely a collection of family records, he found what he had been searching for: a book by Grandmother Bestla about the Jötnar. Why she had chosen to write about them Loki did not know, but that did not matter at the moment. 

This had been what he had been hoping for and somewhat dreading since that fateful day in Jötunheim. The scant scraps of truth which he had uncovered despite Odin’s propaganda indicated that the Jötnar were not simple beasts, but every bedtime tale in his mind rebelled against the idea that he might not be a monster by birth. If the book revealed that the Jötnar were not monsters, then that insidious, whispering voice of self-hatred would be torn away by its final, most painful thread, leaving him floating untethered from the twin constants of the stories of the monstrous Jötnar told to him since childhood and the self-hatred that lent them their gravity. And, of course, if the book showed definitive proof that the Jötnar were animals, inevitably and without exception monstrous, as that part of him fueled by Odin’s propaganda and his own self-hatred insisted it would… that same final thread would snap and he would float away in the opposite direction, leaving the Bifröst receding in his vision to a golden point amidst the stars.

Loki opened the book and began to read. With every word that he read, the thread grew tauter, and he knew that he would soon fly, not fall. Jötun culture, magic, history, biology; the book contained them all in great detail. Perhaps a lone, uncorroborated book ought not to be the sole source that he trusted on the subject, but every new fact that he learned filled in the gaps and contradictions in his knowledge. 

Everything finally made sense, and not like the avalanche-like way of the disastrous few days after going to Jötunheim. It was the final pieces of a puzzle slotting into their places, it was the final step of a proof, everything coming together into a single, coherent whole.

And there was more to it than that: a ritual that only a Child of Yggdrasil could perform to truly bond and be one with an Artefact, its power becoming their own. And Loki was a Child of Yggdrasil, that had been certain ever since Sanctuary, but the signs described in the book—unusual appearance both in Aesir and Jötun form, prodigious skill with seiðr, and a natural ability to connect to and communicate with Infinity Stones—confirmed it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But although his heart desired it and the benefits would be immense, he would not join with the Tesseract or any other Infinity stone. He knew well and personally how much more capable the Mad Titan was of using people than of using Artefacts. Perhaps after this now-quiet war ended, if it ever did, but for now all he could do was continue to work to protect, prepare, and free the Nine Realms.

When Loki next had time to return to Morag, the Power Orb was gone.