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Marvel: What If…Loki Was Worthy? is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2024 MARVEL
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House is a registered trademark, and Random House Worlds and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593724354
Ebook ISBN 9780593724361
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
By Madeleine Roux
About the Author
_146644694_
I have shot mine arrow o’er the house and hurt my brother.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
THE VASTNESS OF SPACE
NOW
IT HAD BEEN EXACTLY nine hundred and sixty-seven years since the Watcher had detected something approximating surprise scratching at the edge of her consciousness. To be the Watcher was to become an observer, a stranger, not just to events but to emotions. Surprised, she thought, how odd, first amused, and then quickly alarmed. She twisted away from her idle musings and toward that vague suggestion of a feeling. Surprise. What could it mean? Was it a prediction? An omen? A warning?
She had been meditating on loss, and the irony of the Watcher losing even the experience of loss itself. The Watcher ruminated on this thought for some decades, self-indulgent, she knew, but her job was to exist and monitor, not to interfere. It then occurred to her that perhaps the itching scratching nagging surprise had been there for a long time, lingering at the fringes, like an anxious, bouncing child waiting for her mother to notice her presence.
Have I been contemplating, or have I been asleep?
The unfathomable number of universes within the Multiverse available to her sight unrolled before them, spreading out in an arc, as pleasing and orderly as a magician fanning out their cards. Worlds abundant, desolate, oceanic, volcanic, utopian, discordant, thriving, and ravaged could be seen, each as colorful, strange, and mysterious as those same magician’s cards. No, not mysterious; nothing was unseen or unknown to the Watcher. She had assumed that when the mantle landed on her shoulders, such omniscience would bring peace, and perhaps for a moment (a true moment to us, a mere millennium to her), it did.
Such things faded. As all things did. As all these worlds visible to her eventually would. The Watcher searched, allowing this sense of “surprise” to guide her. Where was it emanating from? And why was she now filled with a sinking sensation, one that suggested her attention was overdue?
This is meaningless—I cannot be surprised. I know everything that has happened, will happen, or is happening. And yet…And yet.
Her mind scanned the cards, searched the infinite, and a warm surge traveled through her, beginning at her fingertips and ending at her scalp. As her eyes closed and the seeking continued, shocking bursts of color burst against her eyelids, followed by a scent.
Familiar.
Comforting.
Impossible.
Cinnamon and then something rich and biting that billowed toward her on a cold morning breeze. A bell tolled. A chant grew, magic words, sacred words. “Day leaves grow surely. Day leaves grow surely…”
A being this powerful was not accustomed to feeling powerless, yet something gripped her. The scent. The bells. The chant. Before the Watcher’s eyes, the deck of universes, of worlds, sharpened into individual rectangles, each decorated with symbols and numbers. A memory tugged at her from beyond her own existence. Inconceivably, it predated her. How? Her hands hovered over the worlds that had become, quite clearly, cards. Cards covered in symbols. As if magnetized, her hands hovered here and there, drawn, pulled, and finally anchored over one card.
The Watcher’s hands pressed down on the card; her senses were overpowered once more. Images flashed across her mind rapidly—a flowering tree suddenly withering, covered in blight and rot. The tree vanished into dust, replaced by a fall of chalices that tumbled and clinked, clattering down onto a floor littered with bloodstained swords.
This was a memory, she knew it with total certainty, yet it couldn’t be. Nothing came before the Watcher. Gentle, papery hands took hers, drawing her attention upward, and there the Watcher saw a shadowy presence presiding over this mess of cups and swords. The stranger gazed down at her, and the Watcher sensed she was not alone. Yes, this presence had taken her hands, but there was someone standing beside the Watcher, too, their youth and vitality as strong as the wild, brazen flash of a solar nebula birthing a sun.
As abruptly as the images and strangers had come and taken hold of the Watcher, they were gone. Alone once more in the neutral, uninterrupted wilderness of space and time. She was alone, but not empty-handed. The Watcher had not felt her breath hitch or her pulse race in eons, and by and by, perhaps over a week’s time, she returned to herself. When she did, she still held the card, the one that radiated a single, electrifying emotion: surprise.
Something is about to change, thought the Watcher. Something is about to break.
A tree flowered on the card floating above her palms. Yggdrasil, the World Tree. It had not yet withered and imploded as the unsettling visions foretold, but there, almost imperceptible, there on a high, high branch, a green leaf shivered and yellowed and clung precariously to its home.
Yggdrasil could mean many things, but the Watcher, as she so often did, had a hunch.
So many worlds, so little time. Infinite possibilities, creating infinite realities. Long have I watched the trickster god sow chaos, why would his thirst for bedlam draw my attention now?
The little leaf on the big tree on a card the size of a world shivered once more and began to fall.
Something is about to change. Something is about to break.
1
ASGARD
NOW LOKI LAUFEYSON CAME close to the cruel deed itself, and his hands were shaking.
Deep within the spires of Valaskjalf, his father lay before him encased in a wide tube of pure gold. The room glittered from the shine of it, from the halo around the sleeping figure, the quality of the light ever shifting, one moment soothing and the next bouncing with mischievous flickers and winks. It was gold all around them, lending the room the sense that it was a place out of time. A place of dreams.
A place where anything, really, was possible.
Loki knelt, both elbows digging hard into the kneecap for purchase, hands clasped, though his fingers continued to tremble. He delighted in a moment of destiny, but never worried about the weightiness of consequence. What were consequences to a god? They were little more than inconveniences. And anyway, ruminating ruined the fun. Even this, his most dangerous gambit so far, ought not to be humorless. No, humorless was this god before him, Odin Borson, King of Asgard, his adoptive father. This graying slab of a god, pitted with scars from innumerable battles, adorned with a beard like frosted white lichen. Stony. Unmovable. Odin found Loki’s jokes and pranks tedious, because for all his power and longevity, Loki’s father was a mirthless boar-pig.
What a waste.
“What is the shape of your dream, Odin?” Loki asked. He stood, feeling the blood rush through his legs to his toes. “I can’t tell you the shape of mine, for where there should be color and riot and symbol, there is nothing. Once, I dreamed of a man’s silhouette as he stood over me, and I thought it t
The door behind him opened and shut, and Loki hunched up.
He glanced over his shoulder, then regarded Odin again. He smiled, faintly, as if briefly distracted by an amusing and distant memory. Clumsy footfalls brought the dwarf to his side. She was of Nidavellir, a brilliant mind sorely overlooked, a surgical solution disguised as a blunt instrument. Loki had discovered her during a day of petitions before the royal court, an exercise his brother Thor detested and avoided whenever possible. As was so often the case, it was left to Queen Frigga to hear the complaints of the highborn citizens and the low and adjudicate them. Loki enjoyed sitting in on these court mundanities, finding value in the injustices brought before the queen—in such times, folk often let their masks slip, driven by sorrow or outrage to say more than was strictly required. Secrets. Crimes. Shames. Of course, Thor saw no worth in that currency. How could he? The golden child of golden gods never would wade into the darker currents running through the common streets and sewers of their society. Thor had no use for secrets or shame.
Loki knew better.
“Did you bring it?” he asked.
“I did.” Kvisa Röksdóttir, heaped in gray furs and leather and chains, produced a slowly pulsing crystal from inside the pouch hanging from her wide belt. The smell of the forges hung about her, a strangely sulfurous perfume. She held up the crystal to him, soot-stained lines of worry etched into her forehead. Before Loki could take the crystal, Kvisa hesitated, tugging it back. “My prince…”
“Is it him?” Loki nodded toward Odin. “Ah. His presence bothers you.”
She flinched. “It does feel strange to be doing this here. He was not the one who rejected my petition.”
“Queen Frigga speaks for him while he lies in the Odinsleep,” Loki said, impatient. He reached for the crystal again, but she denied him, closing the gem in her fist and clutching it to her chest. Ungrateful. Impudent. A serpent uncoiled in his stomach, and with it, the ugly but understandable urge to simply take the crystal from her. He could do it.
He should do it.
“We made a deal. To flinch now is cowardice.” His voice was a growl. His hands curled into fists. Ancient, angry magic gathered to him. He wasn’t going to have his lovingly crafted plan unravel, not now, not after he had just knelt by his father’s side and gloated.
“I don’t know,” Kvisa replied, shying away.
“You do know.” Loki sighed and let his better nature have a rare win. It might have been kinder just to rip the crystal out of her grasp, but there was more pleasure in gaining it correctly. Correctly, with manipulation. She had to give it freely. After all, a piece of Kvisa’s very soul was bound to it. “With your genius discovery,” he whispered, holding out his hand for what he was owed. His vivid green eyes flashed. “We will right many wrongs. Do not flinch, my friend.”
Kvisa didn’t look terribly convinced. Shifting from foot to foot, she gnawed her lower lip and glanced at the sleeping form of Odin. “Can he…Can he not hear us?”
With a flourish, Loki turned and banged on the glimmering barrier protecting his father. There was no commotion from within, though the noise echoed for a moment around the chamber.
“See?” Loki laughed to himself. “No one’s home.”
Gods, but she was a stubborn stone of a woman. Kvisa merely frowned, still clutching (petulantly, in his opinion) the crystal to her throat. And so Loki leapt onto the golden bed itself, landing on the barrier, the brightly dancing light bending around him, throwing irregular shapes against the walls and ceiling. Kvisa gazed up at him, already short, but now even smaller as he stood triumphantly on top of his father’s motionless body.
“Speak, petitioner, what is your complaint?”
Kvisa’s emerald eyes widened, and she pointed to herself.
“Yes, you. You, the petitioner.”
She smirked, blushing. Was she toying with him? That snake inside hissed, and venom burned through his veins.
“Svansi, the leader of my forge’s cohort, refuses to integrate my new design for the Destroyer…” As the dwarf spoke, she seemed to gain momentum and confidence, her words coming faster, tumbling over one another as she let the hand holding the gem fall to her side. Her knuckles turned white as she clutched it. “He is a fool, and so is the queen! My design is superior in every way, lending far greater control over the Destroyer. Perhaps…Perhaps there are minor issues of safety to consider, but such things are the enemy of innovation. To cling to the old way is stubbornness, and our cohort suffers for Svansi’s small-mindedness. He must be taught a lesson, for he will not listen, the queen will not listen…” Her eyes drifted to Loki, and a true smile appeared. No more smirking. “But Loki Laufeyson listens.”
“Yes. Yes. Let your words darken Odin’s dreams.” Loki laughed, elated. With his right boot, he stomped down hard on Odin’s head through the barrier. “Say it again! Louder!”
“Loki Laufeyson listens!” Kvisa cried, matching his joy. “He is a god of vision!”
He brought his foot down on his father’s face again and again, and together they laughed. “The only pity, my dear Kvisa, is that Odin will not be awake to see it.”
“He will know in time,” said the dwarf. Her eyes twinkled with the light blazing from the shielded bed. “Your better cleverness will be known, and so will mine. We will both have our revenge.”
At last. At last. She raised her callus-hardened hand and opened it, offering him the crystal. It pulsed with temptation. Loki did not flinch. He took the thing from her, a coil of whispers surging up from the gem, wrapping around his arm. It was Kvisa’s voice in the whispers, but ghostly, as if her soul was screaming.
“Thor departs on the morrow,” Loki murmured, fascinated by the cold power seething within the crystal. The plan would move forward now that he possessed the final piece of it. “My idiot brother thinks he is bound for Jotunheim, charged with no more than a simple patrol, yet he and the Destroyer will never reach their intended destination and the chaos will be breathtaking to behold.” Loki glanced down past his feet, staring at the face of his sleeping father. “Odin, old boy, your favored child will finally know shame, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
“Come!” he called, leaping down from the bed. “Come, there is much to prepare.” Loki could not wait to begin, taking gulping strides, luminous with the lure of imminent deviancy. “We must make certain that this new control system works properly and do all the fussing and so on now.”
Kvisa struggled to keep up, meeting him at the door. Glancing at his father one last time, Loki slid the crystal into his pocket. The ancient magic of before leapt to his grasp; he weaved and controlled with expert and eager hands.
“How will we reach the Destroyer?” she asked, brow furrowed. “It is never unguarded.”
“You know me better than that, Kvisa, I think of everything.”
The dark energy of his magic wound around them both, concealing them from any prying eyes as they left Odin behind. Outside, the palace was still, humming softly with far-off voices and the muted pitter-patter of footsteps. The sunshine in the corridor was clear and silver, falling through the high, slender windows mimicking the tall architecture of the hall itself. As they walked, they became nothing more than a trick of the light. They traveled quickly, unnoticed by palace guards or milling courtiers, Loki navigating through the lesser-used arteries of the place. They could not avoid passing by one of the three avenue-wide entrances to the throne room, this leg of the journey by far the most likely to result in trouble.
As they neared the crystal-white pillar before the opening to the audience chamber, he noted a big white body slumped on the ground. It was Thori, Loki’s hellhound, slumbering with his rubbery jowls draped across the marble floor. Steam rose lazily from his nostrils. He kicked his back feet, lost in dreams, but roused and whined as Loki came near.
