The throne knew before he did.
It shifted beneath him, not the usual slow adjustment of crystallized time responding to his posture, but something sharper.
A tightening.
A readiness.
The way a cat's ears prick forward before the sound arrives.
Loki stilled.
His hands, which had been tracing idle patterns on the armrests, went flat.
His eyes, which had been watching a civilization in the red-flecked branches invent the concept of zero, refocused on the space directly before him.
Nothing was there.
The void stretched empty and infinite, the tree blazing behind it, the silence pressing in from all sides.
And then the silence broke.
"Hello!"
She appeared the way a half-remembered dream appears when you're not quite asleep and not quite awake.
No flash of light.
No tear in reality.
One moment the space before his throne was empty.
The next, a young woman stood there, barefoot on the fabric of nothing, grinning at him like they were old friends who hadn't seen each other in a very long time.
Her dress was made of things that did not belong together.
Fish scales and flower petals.
The memory of a song someone had forgotten three universes ago.
Fragments of stained glass that hadn't been shattered yet. It shifted and rustled and occasionally burst into tiny rainbows that skittered across the void like startled fish.
Her hair was worse. It was not a color.
It was many colors, all at once, and none of them stayed where they were supposed to.
Blue bled into gold bled into a shade of purple that Loki had never seen before and suspected did not exist in any spectrum recognized by sane civilizations.
The colors moved like weather systems, slow cyclones of pigment chasing each other across her scalp.
Her eyes were mismatched.
One blue.
One green.
Or perhaps one silver and one gold.
Or perhaps both were everything, all at once, and the mismatch was only the beginning of what was wrong with them.
She was barefoot.
She was beaming.
She was the first being Loki had seen in longer than most stars had been burning.
"Who in the nine realms are you?" he demanded.
She clapped her hands together.
The sound was bright and sharp and left a smear of yellow in the air.
"Oh, I love that! Nine realms. So specific. So quaint. Most people say 'who in the world' but you said nine realms because you've been to nine realms. Or eight. Or ten. I forget which ones count. Does Jotunheim count? You were born there but you didn't stay. Does Asgard count? You lived there but it burned. Does the throne count? You're here now but here isn't really a realm, is it? It's more of a—"
"You're rambling."
"Yes! I do that. It's one of my things." She spun in a circle, arms outstretched, and the motion scattered rainbow sparks across the void like seeds.
"I'm Delirium. Of the Endless. And you're Loki. Of the tree. I've been wanting to meet you for simply ages. Well, not ages. Time is funny here. But I've been wanting to meet you since I first saw your colors."
Loki's mind snagged on the word.
"My colors."
"Your colors! The green. The gold. The little bits of red and blue that are starting to grow at the edges. They're beautiful. They're *new*. Do you know how long it's been since I saw a new color?" She stopped spinning and fixed him with her mismatched eyes.
There was something unnerving about the way she looked at him, not threatening, not hostile, but deeply, fundamentally *seeing*.
"Never. It's been never. You made a color that didn't exist before. That's very impressive."
"I made a color."
"When you sat down. When the tree grew. When you became what you are." She tilted her head.
Her hair cycled through orange and pink and a shade of green that was almost but not quite the green of his magic.
"What are you, exactly? I know what you call yourself. God of Stories. That's a good name. But you're also something else. Something that smells like my father."
Loki's expression sharpened.
"Your father."
"Father Time. But we just call him Father. Or Dad. I call him Dad. Destiny calls him Father. Dream doesn't call him anything because Dream is very formal and also a little bit afraid of him. But I'm not afraid. Dad is nice. He doesn't talk, he never talks, not once, not ever but he's nice. And you smell like him. Not like Destiny smells like him. Destiny carries the book, the chain, the order. You smell like the raw stuff. The tick-tock before it becomes a clock."
She drifted closer.
Her bare feet made no sound on the void.
"Were you baptized?"
Loki stared at her.
"Baptized."
"In Time. Did you let it flow through you? Did it change you into something new?" She was very close now, peering at him with the intensity of a child examining a particularly interesting beetle.
"Is that why your colors are different? Is that why you're a singularity?"
A singularity.
The word landed with unexpected weight.
Loki had been many things. A son, a brother, a villain, a hero, a god, a prisoner, a sacrifice.
But a singularity meant something specific.
Something that had never existed before and would never exist again.
"There are other Lokis," he said slowly.
"Variants. Copies. I've seen them in the branches."
"Yes! So many Lokis. Old Lokis, young Lokis, girl Lokis, alligator Lokis. The alligator one is my favorite, he's very green, but none of them are you. None of them will ever be you. You're the only God of Stories. The only Anchor. The only Loki who smells like Dad." She smiled, and for just a moment the chaos in her eyes settled into something almost like clarity.
"You're like us now. Not one of us. But like us. A godbrother."
"Godbrother."
"To the Endless. Not by blood, blood is for mortals. But by connection. By adoption. By Dad. He doesn't do things like this. He doesn't do things at all. But he did this. He let Time flow through you. He baptized you." She shrugged, a gesture that sent ripples of green and gold through her hair.
"I don't know why. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was curious. Maybe he just liked your face. Dad doesn't explain things."
Loki's fingers tightened on the arms of his throne.
The tree pulsed around him.
"Your siblings. They know about this?"
"Destiny knows. His book changed. All the words turned into pictures of your tree. Destiny never gets surprised, he's been surprised for three whole chapters now. Death knows something's different but she's not worried. Death is never worried. Dream knows something's happening in his domain but he can't figure out what. Desire is curious, which is dangerous. Despair is... Despair. And Destruction came back. He never comes back. But he came back for this."
"For me."
"For you. For the meeting. That's why I'm here." She spun again, arms wide.
"Destiny wants to meet you. All of us do. We're going to gather in the garden and talk about what you are and what you're doing and whether you're a threat or a friend or something else entirely."
"And you want me to attend."
"Yes!"
"I can't leave this throne."
Delirium's smile flickered.
"You said that already. Or will say it. Or are saying it. Time is—"
"If I leave, Yggdrasil falters. The branches wither. The timelines destabilize." His voice was calm, but something older and wearier lurked beneath the words.
"I am not a king. I'm a load-bearing wall."
"Oh." She fidgeted with the hem of her dress.
A shower of tiny silver fish scales drifted into the void.
"That is a problem. Destiny didn't mention that. Or maybe he did and I wasn't listening. I'm not always good at listening. Dream says it's my worst quality. I think my worst quality is that I can't keep goldfish alive, but Dream doesn't know about the goldfish."
"I can't leave," Loki said again.
"But I don't need to leave. Not entirely."
Delirium tilted her head.
He told her about the avatars.
The whispers he planted in unborn souls, the fragments of consciousness that lived and died and returned to the tree.
The cultivation.
The compost.
The slow, steady expansion of his divinity with every story that fed the roots.
"A full link is different," he said.
"Not a whisper. A connection. My consciousness inhabits a mortal vessel directly while my body remains here. Two bodies. Two perspectives. One mind. I used the technique once before, briefly, but never for an extended period. Never for something like this."
"Will it work?"
"It will have to."
She clapped again.
The yellow smear from before was still hanging in the air; she added a streak of bright purple beside it.
"Wonderful! When can you—"
"I need a vessel."
He closed his eyes and reached out with his awareness.
The infinite branches of Yggdrasil spread before him, every leaf a life, every twig a choice. He needed something simple.
Unremarkable.
A mortal no one would notice, in a reality no one was watching.
He found a shopkeeper on a quiet branch.
Middle-aged.
Soft hands.
A life so ordinary it barely registered as a story.
The man was asleep in a modest bed in a modest home, dreaming of modest things.
Loki reached out and took hold.
The link snapped into place with brutal, disorienting force.
One moment he was on his throne, the tree blazing around him.
The next, he was also lying in a narrow bed, staring at a dark ceiling, feeling rough wool scratch against borrowed skin.
Two hearts.
Two sets of lungs.
Two streams of sensory input flooding into a single consciousness.
The nausea was immediate. His thoughts echoed strangely, overlapping themselves.
He felt the tree through one set of fingers and the shopkeeper's blanket through the other.
He heard the silence of the void and the distant barking of a dog.
But the tree held steady.
His magic continued to flow.
The drain was present, a low, persistent tug at the edges of his awareness, but it was nothing he couldn't manage.
He sat up in the shopkeeper's body.
Flexed the shopkeeper's hands.
Spoke with the shopkeeper's mouth.
"Right," he said.
Only one voice emerged.
Good.
"I'm ready."
Delirium beamed and extended her hand.
Her fingers were stained with all the colors of the known universe and at least three that weren't.
"Don't think about it," she said.
"If you think about it, it doesn't work. But if you don't think about it, it works perfectly. So don't think about it."
Loki, who had spent his entire existence thinking about things, took her hand anyway.
The warmth of her fingers was the last thing he felt before the world dissolved into light and color and the sound of Delirium laughing.