Chapter 19
Loki heard the footsteps of his chasers and turned to face them. Four agents stopped when they saw the rubble and ignored Loki.
"Woah, that's one ugly mother…" one agent uttered before turning around and running away with the others.
"That's not very nice," Loki wailed as he turned back to the rubble, noticing what had rushed the agents away.
Adam stood in the middle of the wreckage, larger even than he did earlier and indeed much uglier than before.
"You!" Adam snarled and plundered forward, stumbling on a few boulders as he smashed his way toward Loki.
Loki threw a magic barrier between him and Adam and turned to run back to the bridge to meet up with Mobius and hopefully with Idunn.
Somewhere in the middle of the universes.
A landmass floated as if it was the center of everything. Images hung like shattered mirrors in the air of lives not lived and timelines unexplored, destroyed by the TVA's minutemen.
A black smoke cloud appeared on this land and brought with it Idunn. She opened her eyes, black now, and looked around the area. Her previously golden skin was now bleak and nearly translucent. Her Asgardian armor was tinted darker and her hair was back to her original strawberry blonde.
The shattered and fractured images floated around off the edge of the land mass and she walked along the edge, scanning the closest pictures. Far in the distance hung several lines of light, parallel to each other and sometimes intertwined with each other.
"Where am I?" she asked no one in particular.
"The middle of nowhere," she answered herself, feeling a flicker of familiarity. She turned around and walked away from the edge. "Outside of time… and space… and reality."
She lifted the stone she still held in her hand and inspected it. As she moved it in her fingers, it sparkled in shades of purple.
"Death," she whispered as she closed her fingers over the stone. "What did Morbius say? It ends anything."
"Why did I come here?" she looked around again, hoping there would be a clue.
"Right now, nothing is happening in the real world…" she mused. "and everything is happening at once."
"Why here?" she asked herself again.
Ahead of her, there was a stone circle, much like Stonehenge and she stepped onto the smooth marble-like floor and walked into the center. She felt a buzzing sensation and watched as a dark purple rune burst out of her closed hand and projected itself into the air. Suddenly unsure, she looked on as the rune moved to one of the pillars and burned itself into the stone.
She looked at all the other pillars and saw that they each had a rune burned into them as well, save for a few.
Idunn walked to the pillars and ran her fingers over the runes, feeling a familiar warmth as she tried desperately to remember.
"Power, Time, Reality, Space, Soul, Mind," she whispered as she touched each pillar. "Genesis," she added as she touched the white rune and then stopped at the purple one, death.
"Why did I come here?"