Delirium had never seen this color before.
This was significant. Delirium had seen every color. She had seen the color of a baby's first laugh and the color of a star's final scream. She had seen the color of hope as it left a dying soldier's eyes and the color of love as it curdled into something unrecognizable. She had seen colors that did not exist yet and colors that had stopped existing long before the first universe was born.
But this color—this deep, pulsing, impossible green—was new.
It hung in the void like a heartbeat. No, not hung. *Grew*. It grew the way a tree grew, roots delving into nothing, branches reaching toward everything. It was the color of stories. The color of moments strung together like beads on a string. The color of time made visible, time made alive, time made *green*.
Delirium drifted toward it, her bare feet skimming the surface of non-existence, her dress trailing fish scales and flower petals and the ghost of a dream she had once had about a butterfly who was also a galaxy. She was supposed to be delivering an invitation. Destiny had said so. Destiny had said: *Go to the Anchor. Invite him to the garden.* And Delirium had said yes, yes, yes, because Delirium always said yes to things that promised new colors.
But Destiny had not warned her about the green.
It was familiar. That was the strangest part. The green was new—absolutely, undeniably new—but it carried something she recognized. A thread of gold beneath the emerald. A rhythm. A tick-tock hidden in the pulse of the branches.
It smelled like her father.
Not Father in the way Destiny smelled like Father—Destiny carried the weight of Time's structure, the book, the chain, the inevitability. This was different. This was Father in his rawest form. The tick before the tock. The moment before the sequence. The essence of Time before it became *Time*.
Delirium stopped drifting and simply stood in the void, her mismatched eyes wide, her kaleidoscope hair slowing to a crawl.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, *Dad*. What did you do?"
---
She had always been the one who noticed things.
The other Endless had their domains. Destiny read. Death reaped. Dream shaped. Destruction abandoned. Desire schemed. Despair endured. But Delirium? Delirium *noticed*. She noticed the things that slipped between the cracks of their grand cosmic purposes. The small things. The strange things. The things that didn't fit.
And this green did not fit.
It was not one of Dream's colors. Dream's colors were deep and rich and layered, the purples of imagination and the silvers of nightmare. This green was simpler. More fundamental. It did not create dreams. It created *stories*. Waking stories. Lived stories. Stories that happened in the light, not the dark.
But how could a story exist without a dreamer? How could a narrative unfold without the Dreaming to shape it?
Unless the stories were not being dreamed at all.
Unless they were being *lived*.
Delirium giggled. The sound was tiny in the void, swallowed by the green.
"Dream is going to be so confused," she said to no one. "He's going to be confused and annoyed and a little bit jealous, and he's going to pretend he's none of those things because he's Dream and he's very dignified. But I'll know. I always know."
She resumed her drift, following the green to its source.
---
The tree was magnificent.
Delirium had seen Yggdrasil before—or at least, she had seen the idea of it, the myth of it, the way mortals in certain realities imagined the structure of existence. But the myth was a charcoal sketch compared to the reality. The World Tree blazed with life, every branch a timeline, every leaf a moment, every root a consequence. It pulsed with emerald light that was not quite magic and not quite matter and not quite anything Delirium had a name for.
And it was *growing*.
That was the thing that made her stop again, her bare feet hovering an inch above the void, her mouth forming a small O of wonder. The tree was not static. It was not fixed. It was growing, expanding, branching, *becoming*, in a way that nothing in Delirium's experience had ever grown before. New branches sprouted from the trunk as she watched, reaching into spaces that had been empty a moment ago. New leaves unfurled, each one a story that had not existed before.
"How are you doing that?" she breathed.
The tree did not answer. The tree was not sentient. But the *throne* at its center—the throne she could just barely see, nestled at the point where trunk became canopies, where red-flecked branches wove among blue-specked branches in a dance of discord and harmony—the throne was occupied.
By him.
By the Anchor.
By the God of Stories.
By the being who smelled, impossibly, inexplicably, of her father.
---
Delirium approached the way she approached everything: sideways. She did not walk in a straight line. Straight lines were for people who believed in logic, and Delirium had stopped believing in logic around the same time she stopped being Delight. She spiraled toward the throne, orbiting the Anchor like a comet, trailing rainbow sparks and half-formed thoughts.
Closer now, she could see him clearly.
He was sitting. That was the first thing she noticed. Sitting on a throne of crystallized time—and it *was* time, she could see it now, the same gold thread that ran through the green ran through the throne, ran through *him*, woven into his very being like embroidery on a tapestry. He was lean and pale and dark-haired, with cheekbones that could cut glass and a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile.
His eyes were closed.
His hands rested on the arms of the throne.
His magic—a deep, rich emerald that matched the tree—flowed from his fingers into the branches, sustaining them, feeding them, keeping the whole impossible structure alive.
He was powerful. More powerful than anything Delirium had encountered outside her own family. He was Tier 7, whatever that meant—she didn't think in tiers, she thought in colors—but his colors were dense and bright and layered in ways that suggested he was still growing, still becoming, still *unfinished*.
And underneath all that power, underneath the godhood and the magic and the weight of infinity, he was lonely.
Delirium knew loneliness. She knew it the way Despair knew sorrow and Desire knew want. Loneliness was the color gray, the color of an empty room, the color of a song no one remembered the words to. And this god, this Anchor, this impossible new thing who smelled like her father and built trees out of time, was drenched in it.
"Hello!" she said.
His eyes snapped open.
They were green. Of course they were green. But not the green of the tree, not the green of his magic. A paler green. The green of spring. The green of something that had survived winter.
He stared at her.
She beamed.
"Who in the nine realms are you?" he demanded.
And Delirium, who had been waiting for this moment since Destiny closed his book, laughed with delight.
---
"I'm Delirium," she said, spinning in a circle. "Of the Endless. You're Loki. Of the tree. I've been watching you. Well, not watching watching. Not like Destiny watches. Destiny watches with his book. I watch with my colors. And your colors are *beautiful*."
The god—Loki—blinked. "My colors."
"Your colors! The green. The gold. The little bits of red and blue that are starting to grow. They're new. 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. "Never. It's been never. You made a color that didn't exist before. That's very impressive."
"I... made a color."
"You did! When you sat down. When the tree grew. When you became what you are." She tilted her head. "What are you? 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, which had been cycling through confusion and suspicion and something that might have been the beginning of amusement, 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, but he's nice."
"Father Time," Loki repeated slowly. "You're saying your father is the personification of Time itself."
"Yes! And you smell like him. Not like Destiny smells like him—Destiny is the sequence, the order, the book. You smell like the *stuff*. The raw stuff. The tick-tock before it becomes a clock." She drifted closer, peering at him with an intensity that made even the God of Mischief lean back slightly. "Were you baptized?"
Loki stared at her.
"Baptized," he said.
"In Time. Did you let Time flow through you? Did you become one with it? Did it change you into something new?" She clapped her hands. "Is that why your colors are different? Is that why you're a singularity?"
"A singularity."
"Yes! A one-and-only. A never-again. There are other Lokis out there—I've seen them, I've seen all of them, the old ones and the young ones and the girl ones and the alligator one, the alligator one is my favorite—but none of them are you. None of them will ever be you. You're the only God of Stories. You're the only Anchor. You're the only Loki who smells like Dad."
She paused, her brow furrowing.
"Dream is going to be very confused about that. Dream doesn't like things that are singular. Dream likes patterns. Archetypes. Stories that repeat. You don't repeat. You're a one-time-only story. That's going to bother him."
Loki was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before.
"You said I'm a singularity. That there are no other versions of me. No variants. No copies."
"No. There are other Lokis. But not other *yous*. You're the only one who sat on the throne. You're the only one who became the tree. You're the only one who was baptized by Time." She smiled, and for a moment the chaos in her eyes cleared, and something older and sadder looked out. "You're like us now. Not one of us. But like us. A godbrother."
Loki's fingers tightened on the arms of his throne. The tree pulsed around him, green and blue and red, steady and strong.
"A godbrother," he murmured.
"To the Endless," Delirium confirmed. "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 you into his domain. He let Time flow through you. He baptized you." She shrugged, a gesture that sent ripples of color 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."
"And your siblings? They know about this? About me?"
"Destiny knows. Destiny's book changed. All the words turned into pictures of your tree. Destiny never gets surprised. He's been surprised for three whole chapters now. It's very unsettling." She counted on her fingers. "Death knows something is different but she's not worried. Death is never worried. Dream knows something is 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."
Loki absorbed this information with the expression of a god who was rapidly recalculating his understanding of the cosmos.
"You mentioned a meeting."
"Yes! The meeting. That's why I'm here. Destiny wants to meet you. All of us want to meet you. Well, Dream doesn't want to meet you, he wants to investigate you, but that's practically the same thing. We're going to gather in Destiny's 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 cannot leave this throne."
Delirium's smile flickered. "You can't?"
"The tree requires my presence. My magic sustains it. If I leave—if I abandon this post, even for a moment—Yggdrasil will falter. The branches will wither. The timelines will destabilize." His voice was calm, but there was something beneath it. Something that tasted like fear and resignation and the slow, grinding weariness of eternity. "I am not a king. I am a load-bearing wall."
"Oh." Delirium fidgeted with her dress. "That's a problem. Destiny didn't mention that. Or maybe he did and I wasn't listening."
"However."
She looked up.
Loki's eyes were glittering. Not with magic. With something older. Something that had been part of him long before he sat on this throne, long before he became a god of anything.
"I cannot leave," he said. "But I do not need to leave. Not entirely."
And he began to explain.
---
He told her about the avatars. The whispers of consciousness he planted in the souls of the unborn, tiny fragments that lived and died and returned to the tree. He told her about the cultivation, the compost, the slow, steady growth of his divinity. He told her about the blue branches—the new canopy, the twin tree—and how they had appeared without his permission, without his understanding, without his control.
And then he told her his plan.
A full link. Not a whisper. A connection. His consciousness inhabiting an existing body, a mortal vessel borrowed from one of the infinite branches, while his true form remained on the throne, sustaining the tree. Two bodies, two perspectives, one mind.
"I've never done it before," he admitted. "The whispers are easy. They're fragments. They require almost no attention. A full link will be like running two lives simultaneously. The drain will be significant. The adjustment will be... unpleasant."
"But you can do it," Delirium said.
"I can do it." His smile was sharp and thin and entirely, wonderfully alive. "I am Loki. I have done impossible things before. I will do impossible things again."
Delirium clapped her hands. "Oh, this is going to be *wonderful*! You're going to meet everyone! And they're going to see your colors! And Dream is going to be confused, and Desire is going to be fascinated, and Despair is going to be right about everything, and Destruction is going to talk about cycles, and Death is going to be kind, and Destiny is going to read his book and pretend he knew this would happen all along even though he didn't!"
"Delirium."
She stopped spinning.
"Your father," Loki said slowly. "Father Time. You said I smell like him. You said I was baptized. You said I am a godbrother to the Endless."
"Yes."
"Is that why you came? Because Destiny sent you? Or because you wanted to see the colors?"
Delirium was quiet for a moment. The chaos in her eyes swirled slower, darker, deeper.
"Both," she said. "And neither. I came because you're new. Because you're lonely. Because you've been sitting here for so long with no one to talk to and no one to see your colors and no one to tell you that you're not alone anymore."
She smiled. It was a small smile. The smallest smile Delirium had ever worn.
"You're not alone anymore, Loki. You have a family now. A weird family. A complicated family. A family that's going to argue about you and investigate you and probably annoy you beyond all reason. But a family."
Loki stared at her.
He did not speak.
But the tree pulsed a little brighter around him, and the green of his magic softened at the edges, and somewhere in the infinite branches of Yggdrasil, a story that had never been told before began to write itself.
---
He chose a vessel. A mortal shopkeeper from a quiet branch, middle-aged and unremarkable, the kind of person whose life would leave no mark on history. The man was asleep. He would not even know his body had been borrowed.
The link was disorienting. Two bodies. Two sets of senses. The throne and the bed, the void and the bedroom, the infinite and the mundane. Loki felt the tree through one set of fingers and the rough wool of a blanket through the other. He heard the silence of eternity and the distant barking of a dog.
He focused. The tree held steady. His magic flowed uninterrupted. The drain was present but manageable—a low, persistent tug at the edges of his consciousness that he would learn to compensate for.
"Ready," he said, and this time only the avatar spoke. The body on the throne remained silent, eternal, still.
Delirium held out her hand. Her fingers were stained with all the colors of the universe and at least three colors that weren't.
"Don't think about it," she said.
"I am going to think about it."
"Then think about it, and we'll go anyway."
He took her hand.
The garden rose up to meet them.
And somewhere behind them, on a throne at the center of everything, a god sat alone, holding the multiverse together, while a piece of him walked into the unknown.