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Most Asgardians believed that those who died in battle would feast in Valhalla, while all the rest would be condemned to rot in Hel. Other Realms had their own beliefs about what happened after death; the mortals, so fractious and brief yet so inventive, had many thousands of them. There were tales of powerful mages who had returned to life and had recorded in the medium of their own souls a meeting and bargain with death. Loki himself had not much cared what would happen to him after he died. Thor and whoever else was with him (in this particular case the Asgardian refugees and Sakaaran gladiators) would be alive. That was what mattered.
And yet of all the many afterlives which Loki had heard of, none had included a modern Midgardian hospital waiting room.
He had only passed through one once before, but it was clear that this place was a hospital waiting room. The smell of antiseptic lingered in the air, and at the center of the room two people sat at the interior side of a ring-shaped desk: one speaking through a telephone, and the other talking to a family in distinctively Midgardian clothing. Loki could not see to the other side of the room, but the side at which he sat had a dozen or so identical chairs, only three of which were occupied, and a fish tank in one corner with a child pressed up unhygienically close against it. Nothing seemed immediately amiss, and by the standards of the few Midgardian hospital waiting rooms which he had encountered it seemed perfectly normal.
If this was some hallucination of his oxygen-deprived brain in his last moments, it was an awfully strange one in its sensibilities of Midgardian normalcy. But who or what was he meant to be waiting for?
A man (likely a nurse, judging by his garb) entered the room. For a brief moment, so quickly Loki almost missed it, he froze up and blinked as if in disorientation or surprise. Checking his clipboard for reassurance, he called out, “Mr. Odinson?” It seemed that Loki would get the answer to at least one of his many questions soon.
Loki got up and walked over to him. After all, if he wished to figure out what in Hel (perhaps literally) was going on here, observing and subtly asking questions would certainly be a good start. Again, upon seeing Loki come over to him, the man seemed momentarily disoriented.
“The surgery on Dr. Banner was successful and there were no complications,” the nurse said. That was odd. Why would Banner even need surgery in the first place, when the Hulk would emerge to protect him if he was badly injured and he would be physically sound when he returned to his own body? If this was, somehow, real, he ought not to reveal his weakness, his ignorance of even the reason why he was here.
“So I take it the Hulk did not emerge during the operation?” asked Loki.
“No, haven’t you heard? The Hulk hasn’t been able to come out since-”
A bleak place of frayed edges, destruction and creation.
“Dr. Banner is free to go, and will be here shortly.”
Loki would have bet his head that the nurse had been about to mention Thanos. Was it the mere mention of the Mad Titan’s name that caused the odd vision (or was it a flicker of memory?), or was that just a coincidence?
Though he had just mere moments ago said that Banner would come to Loki rather than the other way around, the man began to lead Loki through the corridors of the hospital. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but as Loki walked, his pace never seemed to quite match up with the speed at which he traversed the hallways. It took just a bit too long to pass by one painting here, a doorway to another branching corridor flashed by just a bit too quickly there. Always too little for Loki to be sure that it was not a trick of the mind or the eyes, but it lent the hospital an aura of wrongness.
He turned a corner, and Banner was there, walking towards him. The same flash of disorientation, this time from both Banner and the nurse.
“I thought we were going to meet up at the waiting room,” Banner said. “Well, you can teleport me from anywhere.”
“I apologize, I am not familiar enough with this Realm to know the location of the nearest secret path,” Loki said. Teleportation, as opposed to travel between Realms, only required him to know his location and destination relative to the planet on which he stood, but Banner did not know that and Loki did not want to reveal that he was ignorant of even where on Midgard this hospital was and where he was supposed to teleport Banner to.
“Didn’t you only come with me since you can teleport? I can’t think of any other reason why you would come with me, so I must have decided to go to New Asgard, but my memories are a bit blurry after…” he trailed off, eyes blank, frozen. Then, a quick blink, his body relaxing once again, and he seemed to have forgotten his momentary confusion.
“Of course. I just need a map with the precise locations and I should be able to quickly calculate where the paths should be,” Loki reassured him. Bruce pulled up a map on his phone and showed him the locations of the hospital and “New Asgard.” He looked at the map long enough to make it seem as if he was doing some calculation, and then began to lead Banner out through the vaguely-wrong corridors, reassuring him that the nearest path was luckily conveniently nearby.
When they exited the hospital, the slight incongruency between Loki’s steps and the rest of the world still did not cease. It was not just the hospital then that had something wrong with it, but reality itself. The effect seemed to be getting stronger, too: the edges of Loki’s vision seemed to be almost frayed.
In the corner of the hospital parking lot, Loki told Banner to take a deep breath and brace himself for the journey. He reached through the fabric of the world, from one point in space to another, and pulled .
A bleak place of frayed edges. Home of Death and the Norns, shadowy, ever-shifting figures. The edge of reality.
A moment of the usual interconnected web of bright seidr that Loki saw while teleporting, a moment to realize that this was unusual, that this was wrong , that he had seen that same place before at the hospital.
And then they were in New Asgard, right outside of the landed Statesman. Banner stumbled and his cheeks flushed slightly green, but not nearly as much as Loki would have expected from the unexpected sight. Just the usual startlement of suddenly being in a new place. Loki ducked away from the Statesman and its surrounding tents and part-constructed buildings to organize his thoughts, a surprisingly easy feat as the refugees and ex-gladiators seemed to have eyes only for Banner.
While walking past the newly and hastily constructed tents, a colorful tapestry caught his eye. It was of traditional Asgardian style, depicting some old important battle or other. There was a large gash tearing through it, the edges of the hole beginning to fray. Although hung on a simple commoner’s loom, it had clearly been expensive, woven of silk with highlights of gilded thread. Perhaps it had been a noble’s tapestry that one of their servants had rescued from Surtr’s fires. Some repair work had evidently been started, but whoever was fixing it had left it briefly abandoned, leaving behind various skeins of thread, including one of valuable gold.
Loki traced the unraveling edges of the tear in the tapestry. What would it be like, he wondered, to live on a tapestry, and then one day feel the very ground beneath your feet fray to incoherence? Would one notice the threads sliding against each other first, each step slightly out of coherence with reality? Would one, slipping across a fold from place to place, momentarily sense the hole in the world? And how would the hole be perceived by one used to seeing only thread?
Loki reached through the fabric of the world as he would to teleport, but this time, he reached to nowhere.
A bleak place of frayed edges. Home of Death and the Norns, destruction and creation, endings and life, shadowy, ever-shifting figures. The edge of reality.
That was what Loki saw when he emerged from the tatters of a self-unweaving dream. Well, not exactly saw. This was a purely conceptual place, every loose thread of it a metaphor turned visual by his mind trying to make sense of it.
A presence which felt of death and endings appeared by Loki’s side. Their figure was ever-shifting, for no single visual metaphor encapsulated Death themself. A rotting corpse, a fire’s coals, a skeleton, the Mad Titan, a stellar remnant, all those and many more overlaid upon each other.
YOU HAVE ESCAPED YOUR AFTERLIFE-ILLUSION. I OFFER YOU LIFE, IF YOU OFFER ME A WISH THAT I DESIRE, AS HAS THE ARRANGEMENT ALWAYS BEEN. BEFORE YOU MAKE YOUR OFFER, YOU MAY ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE DEAL AND I WILL ANSWER ALL OF THEM WITHOUT LYING.
Death’s words entered Loki’s mind directly, not even bothering with the illusion of sense-data which the rest of this place gave him. So the life-after-death which he had experienced had been a mental illusion, and a very sophisticated one at that, so much so that Loki had not felt any trace of its illusory nature. Mental illusions, after all, depended on their target’s expectations, leaving their mind to fill in the gaps, and as such required the target to be an active part of them. If the core idea of a mental illusion, in this case his own conception of what would happen to him after death, did not include the target even as an uninvolved perspective or as a simple lack of consciousness, it would decohere out of paradox.
But now the fraying tatters of the dream had unwoven around him, and Loki had a deal with Death to make.
“How many chances do I have to make you an offer?” Loki asked.
ONE.
Then he would need to make that one chance count, and be absolutely certain that his gift would be accepted before he offered it.
“How would my offer be implemented?” He did not want to offer something beyond his means and then be bound by geas to perform an impossible task for Death.
ANYTHING THAT YOU OFFER WILL OCCUR WITHIN REALITY UPON MY ACCEPTANCE OF THE DEAL.
That was a relief, but also a somewhat odd answer: a deal typically involved some cost or at least effort on the part of both involved parties. So it was not that beings of this realm were unable to directly affect the world in the ways that people could and thus required living servants; there must be something or someone here, after all, that could grant any wish that a person might think of. But Death likely was, nonetheless, restricted somehow. But how much?
“Why have this deal at all?”
I CANNOT INFLUENCE THE UNIVERSE OUTSIDE OF SUCH DEALS.
Then this was Death’s only way to pursue their agenda. But what exactly was that?
“What do you desire?”
THAT, I OUGHT NOT TO TELL YOU.
A very different type of answer from the past few, vague and uninformative where the others had been clear and unambiguous. But wasn’t that a very particular choice of words. Not “can not” or “must not;” Death was not prohibited from speaking of what they wanted. Not “will not” either — Death was required to answer all questions, and it was apparently as part of some sort of arrangement, so there was likely no loophole allowing non-answers. But “ought not to,” at first, seemed to be just as much of a non-answer as “will not,” only implying that there would be negative consequences to telling their desires. That was just a scrap of information, but it was a scrap that Loki could perhaps use.
So what did Death desire? Likely something that a person would want to prevent from occurring even more than they would want to live, and if told, would avoid making the deal entirely, robbing Death of their only chance of bringing it about. But people had, in the past, made this deal, and none of them had been particularly cruel and malicious, at least not according to what Loki knew of them. What they had offered Death, however, was lost to time.
“What have people offered you in the past?”
THAT IS NOT WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF QUESTIONS WHICH I CAN AND MUST ANSWER.
Then that line of questioning would not work. However, there was another entity here in this place of frayed edges. Creation. The mythical Norns. Loki could feel their conceptual impression in the far distance, but space here was just metaphorical here, wasn’t it? He imagined himself standing next to them, and in that moment he was there.
The Norns were just as ever-changing as Death, and it was easy for Loki to see why tales portrayed them as three different beings. Their shifting forms mostly kept to three distinct types: the youth, in the beginning of their life; the adult, in the prime of their life; the elder, nearing their end.
Just as Death’s words had, the Norns’ words came directly into Loki’s mind without bothering to present themselves in a veneer of audible sound.
IF YOU HAVE COME TO ME SEEKING ANSWERS, I AM AFRAID THAT I TOO AM RESTRICTED BY THE COMPACT BETWEEN MYSELF AND DEATH IN WHAT QUESTIONS I MAY ANSWER. I CAN ONLY ANSWER THOSE OF YOUR QUESTIONS RELATING TO MY DUTY, WHICH IS TO WEAVE AND REPAIR THE FRAYED EDGES OF THIS UNIVERSE.
Again with the extremely specific wording. “This universe,” not merely “the universe.” Well, these beings’ ability to answer questions was greatly restricted, so Loki supposed that overly particular word choice was one of the few ways in which they could imply additional meaning which only few would recognize, whether that recognition was something which they desired or not. That sort of answer must be in the gray areas of their agreement — enough to count as an answer, but not enough to count as saying information that they were not free to give. And in this case, the hidden information was that this was not the only universe. But were the different universes simultaneous or successive?
“Will you continue to have a task to do after this universe ends?” Loki asked, meaning to confirm that the Norns would only be the Norns for this present universe.
YES.
A bit of Loki’s startlement bled into his illusory physical form. That was certainly a surprise. But he had said a task, hadn’t he, and the Norns had separately specified that they would answer questions relating to their duty and that their duty was to weave the universe.
“What will be your duty after this universe ends?”
TO CUT THE FINISHED STRINGS OF THE WORLD.
To end them, but with an implication of having no choice over which strings were cut. That was likely Death’s present task, wasn’t it? And if the Norns would get Death’s task in the next world, then perhaps Death would get the Norns’ task. And of course, Loki could not and would not assume the thought processes of cosmic beings at least as ancient as the universe, but if they did want to have agency over the universe, then Death would desire for the universe to end so that they could be the Norns of the next. Or perhaps Death’s desire to end the universe was simply part of the ancient and eternal arrangement between the two beings creating and maintaining the universe, a way of ensuring that each would have their turn at each role in time, but that would have the same results as desire for power anyways. And, as even the most self-interested of people who returned to life would not want the universe to end immediately upon their resurrection, if Death told them what they desired, they would not want to grant it.
But people had, in the past, made that deal. And Death, as eternal in nature as they were, would likely be very patient. A wish granted to them would only need to bring them closer to their goal for them to judge it to be worth it. Whether each person incidentally offered a wish beneficial to Death or judged the risk to the universe to be low enough to be worth a second chance at life, over time the universe would be gradually steered towards its end. And that end would likely be soon, Loki knew, if the Mad Titan acquired all of the Infinity Stones. He already had two of them, and as he got more, each new one would be easier to take by force, and he would almost certainly succeed in his omnicidal goal. The universe was well on track to its ending, so at this point the only thing that Death would desire in their deal would be to turn the near-certainty into absolute certainty.
So now, the real question was, how could Loki turn a certain death into certain life? If one imagined the universe as a woven tapestry, as the metaphorical structure of this place of frayed edges suggested, the Mad Titan’s end goal was to burn every part of it at once, leaving nothing to remake. However, a tapestry could be destroyed just as effectively, albeit more gradually, by unraveling it, but then at any point it could be repaired. That was the Norns’ duty, but was there a limit to it?
“Is your ability to repair the frayed edges limited?”
YES, IF TOO MUCH IS FRAYED AT ONCE IN EXTRATEMPORAL TIME.
Extratemporal time. This place must be going along a different timeline from the universe’s, then.
Still, if he offered too little to be frayed, Death would not accept, and if he offered too much, it would be unrepairable. But perhaps there could be a way…
First, Loki would have to ensure that Death was not listening in on this conversation.
“Will your role in the next universe involve listening to conversations which you are not a part of in the space which will correspond to this one?”
NO.
Good. Death could, in fact, be deceived.
“Is there some way to improve your ability to repair the fabric of the universe? If so, what is it and how could it be brought to here?”
YES. ANY REAL MATERIALS, PARTICULARLY FIBERS, BROUGHT THROUGH A LARGE ENOUGH FRAYED REGION WITHIN REALITY. I WOULD VERY MUCH DESIRE TO HAVE ACCESS TO REAL MATERIALS.
Perfect. The way his plan was shaping up, that would likely happen anyways, and Loki could also perhaps use the Norns’ desire for real materials as a bargaining chip.
“Would removing the Mad Titan from all of time be a hole that you could currently fix?” Simply erasing any person from ever having existed, particularly one with such a vast and disastrous impact as Thanos, would result in paradox because there would be things which should not have happened, people who should not have died.
NO.
“Would it be possible for you to fix it with real materials available?”
YES.
“If I bring you real materials to use, would you, in exchange for that, be able to let me choose the way that the world is woven until it is fixed?”
YES.
‘Then I propose that as a deal between us.”
I ACCEPT THE DEAL.
Then everything was just about ready for the final deal. Loki shifted himself to Death’s location.
“In exchange for my life, I offer for Thanos to be removed from all of time.”
YOUR BARGAIN IS ACCEPTED. KNOW THAT WHEN YOU ARE IN REALITY AGAIN, YOU WILL NOT REMEMBER THIS.
That might be a slight hindrance to his plan, but as the universe unraveled, there would be more holes to these frayed edges, so he should hopefully regain enough memory of this time by the time he had to pass back through to here. The Norns would be waiting for him and the fragment of reality which he would bring, and then the universe would be whole and living once more.
A hole opened between the Frayed Edges and reality, Death on one side and life on the other.
Loki picked up the skein of gold thread beside him. Seemingly pure Asgardian gold on the outside, yet its core was of durable silk colored Jotun-eye crimson. Fitting for the thread that would aid him in reweaving the universe.
A hole opened between the Frayed Edges and reality, death on one side and Life on the other.
Loki stepped through.