Yeah, that rapid update pattern definitely didn't last long. In my defense, since posting the last chapter, a Dresden Files book came out and I went on a trip to Colorado, where I got to meet and play with wolves and foxes at a wildlife center. Two of the wolves licked my ear. It was magical. Also, since finishing said Dresden book, I've been reading Dracula and watching lots of Dracula adaptations. I am thoroughly enjoying Spooky Season.
As the woman amusingly styled "the Ancient One" led them up the stairs and down a number of corridors, Loki kept looking around like his head was on a swivel, trying to take in every fascinating object there was to see inside the wizards' abode.
Every form of magic he had encountered had a feel and energy to it. It was informed partly by the character of the wielder, partly by their purpose in wielding it, and partly by its own inherent nature. He'd never met a fouler magic than what Ebony Maw used and which pervaded his abomination of a ship. Seidr, whether being used by Aesir, Vanir, Dvergar, Ljosalfar, or Jotnar, felt the same. It was what bound Yggdrasil together. It was life, it was joy, it was a glimpse of the most brilliant sunrise, the taste of the finest wine, the purest notes of song resonating in the bones. Even those who never learned how to use it for spellwork still put it instinctively into their crafts. There wasn't a sword or a tankard or a helmet or a cobblestone on Asgard that didn't have some of the magic of its maker in it.
Midgard didn't lack for a sense of magic just because its inhabitants had no seidr in them, but it was mostly a gentle, wild something strongest in the places where nature hadn't been overtaken by artifice. This building, however, sang an unfamiliar but enticing song from the floorboards to the ceiling. The native magic of Midgard was but a single instrument in the orchestra of the place, a single thread in the tapestry, and Loki was fascinated. He had to discover how these mortals had accessed this power. If it could be learned by those with no inborn seidr, what could a seidrmadr like himself do with it?
The Ancient One brought them to a room whose decorations vaguely recalled those of the region of Vanaheim whence Hogun hailed. She invited them to sit cross-legged upon cushions laid out around a low table and personally poured them small cups of tea. The wizard who had let them in, Kaecilius, took a position near the door like a surly guard.
"Now then," said the Ancient One after a sip from her cup. "Not quite a month ago, this relic, which has been kept safe by the Sorcerer Supreme since Agamotto himself, flared so bright that it illuminated Kamartaj and all three Sanctums." She performed strange gestures with her hands in front of the large, eye-shaped amulet hanging over her chest. The metal bands in the amulet shifted, and an iris opened to reveal a brightly shining green stone.
Thor jumped to his feet and took a step back, his hand on Mjolnir's haft. Loki noticed that as he put that small amount of distance between himself and the stone, the light from it dimmed. "I could not discern the cause," the Ancient One continued calmly. "But you have solved this mystery for me. Thor Odinson, your mind is not native to this time. How far in the future are you from, precisely? You asked for Stephen Strange, so it must be a few years at least."
"Why do you need to know?" said Thor. "If you mean to send me back, you will have a fight," His tone was quite enough to convey how strongly he meant the threat, but the thunder rumbling outside removed any remaining doubt.
The Ancient One looked no less serene in the face of a potentially hostile God of Thunder, but Loki's gaze shifted to Kaecilius, who was again in his combat stance. He prepared to summon a number of daggers to his hand if the man moved even an inch closer to his brother.
"Please sit down," said the Ancient One. "Kaecilius, I will have to insist that you leave if you cannot be a neutral observer." Kaecilius only resumed his previous stance with great reluctance, but Thor didn't move. "I am not going to send you back to your previous time," she said. Thor frowned. "I do, however, have concerns." She gestured to the cushion Thor had vacated. Thor glanced at Loki, who nodded from behind his teacup, and he slowly sat back down.
"I suppose that's how he knew where my flat was," Brunnhilde muttered. "And why he's so weird," she added.
"He comes by the latter naturally," said Loki automatically. Thor, alas, did not react. He'd become so much harder to rile up.
"How did you manage to use the Time Stone in this way?" said the Ancient One, ignoring them. "As far as I can tell from the writings of my predecessors and my own study of it, it is unprecedented."
"It wasn't deliberate," said Thor.
"Describe your experience anyway, if you please, with as much detail as you can, including the moments prior to using it. That may be essential. I have my theories, but they may be totally wrong."
Thor's brow furrowed. He did not leap about with Mjolnir for this particular recounting. "The battlefield was chaos when I arrived. The Avengers and their allies were being overwhelmed. I helped to turn the tide. Then thunder rumbled not by my hand, and I knew Thanos had joined the battle at last, but I didn't know where. There was a massive explosion of yellow light in the forest at the opposite end of the battle. It was the color of the Mind Stone, and I took heart. My mortal friends must have found a way to destroy it, so Thanos's designs were thwarted. Still, I fought my way nearer with the wrath of a berserker. I wanted to be the one to claim his life after…" He faltered with a glance at Loki. Loki put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Thor swallowed and continued. "Then the yellow explosion happened again, but in reverse, and there was an incredible surge of power."
"He undid it," said the Ancient One with a quiet satisfaction, as if she now understood something that had puzzled her for some time.
"All he succeeded in doing was pointing me to his exact location," Thor growled. "I threw my axe. Even with all six Stones, he could not deflect it. It struck his shoulder, incapacitating the arm wearing the Gauntlet. I reached him and finished the job, removing first the arm and then the head.
"My enemy was dead, but I had already lost nearly all I held dear. The Time Stone caught my eye. I don't know what possessed me to pick it up. It showed me all the futures I might have. Even the better ones felt hollow. The Stone burned to hold, but I clung fast. I turned my thoughts to the past and the many errors I had made. The burning became all-consuming, and then I was simply back on Asgard, at just the right moment to change it all. That is what I have sought to do ever since."
X
Thor's words reached Kaecilius as though from the opposite end of a long tunnel. The Valkyrie began to laugh then. She let out long, helpless peals of mirth, but Kaecilius didn't think anything had ever been less funny. Fifteen years he'd studied under the Ancient One, and she'd never seen fit to tell him that she possessed a relic capable of sending the wielder back into the past? The faces of his wife and son appeared in his mind's eye as they often did, though they looked accusing now.
Why had the Ancient One kept this from him? Why had she told him again and again that he must accept that they were gone? Was she too cowardly to allow this power to be used? Did she not trust him? Was he of greater use to her as a broken, childless widower than as a happy husband and father? His grief threatened to turn into rage, but he allowed none of it to show on his face. All those hours of meditation made it easy. He may yet get answers. If not today, then soon. He would learn everything he possibly could about the Time Stone, and it would not be her decision whether he used it to save his family.
He felt the Ancient One's eyes on him and would not meet them.
X
"Brunnhilde, are you well?" said Loki.
"Why wouldn't I be?" she said, voice still choked with laughter. "I only spent the first five hundred years or so after Niflheim wishing I could go back and change it all."
"Is there a reason she can't?" said Thor. "I don't see why I am more deserving of a second chance than any other, and she might right wrongs I have no hope of repairing."
"I don't doubt it," said the Ancient One. "But it is not so simple as having noble intentions." She held her hand over the large amulet she wore (which Thor was almost certain was the very same he had seen around Stephen Strange's neck), and the Time Stone floated free of its casing. "Look closely."
He leaned a little nearer, and the glow around the stone brightened. But that wasn't all. "Is that a crack?" said Loki. "In an Infinity Stone?" He smacked Thor up the back of his head. "You oaf! You broke an Infinity Stone?!"
"He played a part in that," said the Ancient One, talking over Thor's indignant noise of protest, "but I do not believe it was his doing alone." The brilliant green gem continued to revolve slowly above her outstretched hand. "I have studied and protected the Time Stone for many centuries. It is best used for peering forward and backward in time to discern causality and possible courses of action. It is capable of more, but to actually interfere with the material flow of time is unwise. Careful parameters should be set, and even then there are far more ways for it to go wrong than right. Add more Infinity Stones to the equation and the volatility increases by an order of magnitude. By using the Time Stone to undo the destruction of the Mind Stone, Thanos may have inadvertently created a link between them. A link that Thor unwittingly exploited."
"Then that's how he came back the way he did," said Loki.
"Only his mind, yes. And by doing so, he carried the strain on the Time Stone into this timeline as well. He hasn't merely come back in time, you see, or there would be two of him, and escorting him back to his native time would in fact be the prudent course. Instead, he has decoupled his consciousness from linear time altogether."
"What?" said Thor. He wasn't following this as well as Loki seemed to be, but that definitely didn't sound good. "What does that mean?"
The corners of her mouth turned down in a blithe sort of way. "On its own, nothing too serious. Most beings are so accustomed to traveling through time at a rate of one second per second that we would do it instinctively even were we able to do otherwise. If you have not already experienced episodes of temporal dissociation, I would not expect you to start having them. The real problem is that you and the Time Stone are clearly still bonded, or it would not react to your proximity as it does."
"Bonded?" said Loki.
"Yes," she said. "Should Thor encounter any insurmountable setback in his quest to save what he loves, he would trigger another reset."
"That's a problem?" said Thor. He wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea that he might end up doing everything for a third time, but it might take some of the pressure off to not make any mistakes.
"I would say so." She finished the last of the tea in her cup, set it down, and began moving her hands in strange ways again. A golden thread materialized in the air above the table, along with an image of the Time Stone. The two images crossed, and the thread looped back on itself. "If it doesn't stop at one," she said, "why would it stop with a second?" The thread crossed the Time Stone and looped back on itself again. And again. And again, until it resembled a coiled spring. It took a few repetitions of the process before Thor realized that the thin, gleaming crack in the Time Stone's image was growing.
"If you achieve all you hope to and everyone you love lives out their full lifespan and dies a natural death, do you know how to stop it from resetting then?" The golden thread continued to coil round and round. "This is why manipulating time is such a delicate business that we generally discourage. You are on a trajectory to repeat this cycle endlessly, until—" The thread came around to make another loop, and the Time Stone shattered, severing the thread at each of the points where it connected.
The image faded. Thor was horrified, but the Ancient One only smiled. "It is good you came here. I will need to consult Agamotto's writings, but I believe I can help."
X
"Look, look! It's Mr. Odinson on TV!"
"What, Peter?" May Parker pulled her headphones away from one ear and drew back from the window box planter she'd been watering.
"It's really him!" Peter insisted, practically jumping up and down with excitement. "Look!"
She followed him over to the TV, which was playing the local news channel. There was a slightly blurry picture of a man who did indeed look like the one who'd helped reunite Peter with her and Ben at the Stark Expo before launching himself into the sky with a giant hammer. She'd almost convinced herself it had been some kind of trick that they all fell for because of the stress of the evening, but there he was. It was impossible to mistake him for anyone else, and next to his photo were two more, of a man and a woman in clothing just as weird. She grabbed the remote off Ben's armchair and turned it up.
"—Multiple visitors to the little park in the Bronx claimed they saw the same thing, and we've had other reports flooding in from the surrounding area about the pillar of light that touched down, and, as we see in these videos, vanished seconds later, leaving an unknown woman in strange leather armor standing on the ground. Who this woman and the two men who were there to greet her are, we don't yet know. Many of these recordings are already going viral online, and theories include everything from a complete hoax to creative advertising for a new theatre show to Russian spies to aliens." The anchor turned to his co-host and added, "I think my favorite is the creative advertising one, Jan. How about you?"
"I'm gonna have to go with aliens, Larry," said Jan. "I'd love to know what kind of aliens wear outfits like that." She turned to the camera. "If any of our viewers can help us get to the bottom of this strange story, call us at 347-555-3960. We'll be right back after the break with more."
May looked at Peter and found that he was holding the handset and furiously punching in numbers. "You're calling in?" she asked, amused. This might just be the most inventive method he'd ever come up with for stalling on helping her with the chores.
"Yeah!" he said with enthusiasm. "What if we're the only ones who know his name and that he was helping Iron Man fight those drones?"
"Good point," she conceded. "We'll have to make sure this place looks its best if the news people want to come interview you about it, though."
His eyes went round and he nodded.
Hello again, tiny Peter! I needed someone to show that word is spreading beyond SHIELD's capabilities to contain about these weird people who show up in pillars of rainbow light, and who better than a baby spider for that?
It might not seem like it, but this chapter was a doozy. There are some things I needed this explanation of how Thor's time travel worked to do, and there are just as many things I needed it NOT to do. It took a lot of agonizing and discussing with Baby Bro to finally thread that needle. I'm pretty satisfied with the results. The only thing I was still slightly iffy on by the final draft was the idea that you could crack an Infinity Stone by using it too hard, but if you can use the Stones to destroy the Stones, then I think it's reasonable to assume that using one Stone to un-destroy another is pushing it.
Another element of this chapter that took multiple rewrites was Brun's reaction to learning that Thor got a do-over. She carries at least as much regret as he does for the tragedies in her past. Was she going to be pissed? Quietly upset? Nope, apparently she was going to bust a gut laughing at the sheer irony of it all. There may still be a conversation to be had about it, though.
Oh, my favorite thing is the bit where Loki's thinking about different kinds of magic. Pretty much the whole time I've been writing this, I've had a headcanon that there's no such thing as mass production on Asgard (or the other realms where they have seidr) because objects crafted by machinery would have no magic in them. This is such a core component of how I think Asgard functions and why it has a medieval aesthetic despite being highly advanced, but I couldn't find a spot to mention that idea in the story until now.