The moment Aaron's clawed fingers had brushed against the Uru metal of Mjolnir, he hadn't just severed a connection; he had traced the call. The enchantment, a sophisticated celestial signal looped through the Bifrost's resonant frequencies, carried metadata—a return address stamped in the fabric of the cosmos. As the hammer in the desert fell silent, a set of coordinates burned themselves into Aaron's mind, shining like a lighthouse across a dark ocean of static.
Asgard.
He didn't hesitate. With Thor left contemplating his newfound impotence in the New Mexico dust, Aaron dissolved. He didn't simply fade; he collapsed inward, folding himself into the two-dimensional realm of shadows that stretched between worlds. The sensation was akin to sliding through a fibre-optic cable—cold, fast, and electric.
He emerged not in a dark alley or a derelict hotel, but amidst a blinding opulence that offended his preference for shadowy corners. The air tasted of honey and ozone. He stood upon a floor of polished gold that reflected his own twisted, grinning visage. High vaulted ceilings stretched upward, supported by pillars thick enough to hold up the sky.
He was in the heart of the Golden Realm. The Throne Room.
Sitting upon the dais, weary and draped in the heavy robes of sovereignty, was an elderly man with a singular, piercing eye. Odin Borson did not startle like a mortal; he stiffened, the air around him growing instantly heavy with the pressure of a gathering storm. Gungnir, the spear of heaven, slammed against the floor with a sound that cracked the stone.
"What manner of beast trespasses in the Hall of the King?" Odin's voice was a deep rumble, a subwoofer testing the structural integrity of the room. "And why does the enchantment of Mjolnir taste of rot and static?"
Aaron straightened his crimson pinstripe jacket, dusting off invisible specks of desert sand. He tapped his microphone staff on the gold floor, the *clack* echoing with a jarring, synthetic reverb that seemed out of place in this high-fantasy tableau.
"Greetings, All-Father!" Aaron announced, his voice projected with the clarity of a prime-time radio host, layered with the faint hiss of a vacuum tube warming up. "Or should I say, the Chief Administrator? I must compliment you on your security protocols. Robust, truly. But your firewall had a backdoor."
Odin rose, his eye narrowing. The magic in the room swelled, threatening to crush the intruder, but Aaron merely widened his smile, his eyes spinning like radio dials tuning into a particularly amusing frequency. He wasn't here to fight a Skyfather; he was here to deliver a monologue.
"You speak in riddles, demon," Odin warned, raising the spear. "What have you done to my son? What have you done to the hammer?"
"I merely unsubscribed him from your service plan," Aaron chirped, tilting his head at a sharp, inhuman angle. "That hammer... it was a crutch, wasn't it? A training wheel. 'Whosoever holds this hammer'—rubbish! It made him an actor, reading lines from a script you wrote. I simply stripped the DRM. I cut the cord. Thor is currently in a hole in the desert, holding a very heavy paperweight."
Odin's face darkened, the golden light of the room flickering as his rage disturbed the local reality. "You have stripped him of his protection? He is mortal. He is vulnerable!"
"He is free!" Aaron countered, his voice dropping an octave, losing its jovial bounce for a split second of eldritch seriousness. "As long as he relies on your battery pack, he will never generate his own spark. I've done him a favor. In a few days, the residual static of your enchantment will fade from his soul completely. Then, and only then, can he actually become a god, rather than just your employee."
Aaron turned as if to leave, his shadow stretching long and distorted across the immaculate floor, grasping at the pillars like sticky tar.
"Wait," Odin commanded, the authority in his voice potent enough to halt the wind. "You manipulate forces you do not comprehend."
"On the contrary," Aaron spun back, his grin splitting his face. "I understand the signal better than anyone. Speaking of signals, you might want to check the internal frequencies. You have interference coming from inside the house."
Odin paused. "Explain."
Aaron leaned on his staff, adopting a conspiratorial whisper that echoed loudly through the hall. "Your other son. The one with the penchant for green and the dramatic flair? He isn't mourning. He's plotting. He believes the... *creative liberties* you took with his biography. The lies about his heritage? He swallowed them whole, and now they are digesting poorly."
Aaron gestured vaguely with a clawed hand. "He's planning to kill Thor. A classic fratricide to secure the throne. He thinks eliminating the Golden Boy will prove he is worthy of the crown you never intended to give him. It's all very Shakespearean, isn't it? Tragedy, betrayal, the sins of the father... wonderful entertainment."
Odin stood frozen, the weight of the accusation pressing down on his ancient shoulders. The All-Seeing Eye had been blind to the dagger at his back.
"Why tell me this?" Odin asked quietly. "You are a creature of chaos."
"Chaos is fun, All-Father," Aaron said as his form began to dissolve into a swarm of inky tendrils. "But a story ending too early? That's just poor writing. I want to see what happens next."
Before Odin could cast a binding spell or hurl his spear, Aaron was gone. The shadows retracted, leaving the King of Asgard alone in the silence of his golden hall, the seeds of doubt blooming rapidly in his mind.
***
The transition back to Earth was instantaneous. Aaron materialised not in the dusty desert, nor in the dank alleyways of his rebirth, but atop the crowning spire of the Empire State Building.
The wind whipped fiercely at this altitude, cold and biting, but Aaron felt only the invigorating rush of the city below. New York was a grid of electric light, a circuit board of millions of lives buzzing with fear, hope, and mundanity. He walked to the edge of the maintenance platform, directly beneath the massive transmission antenna.
This was a better view. A better vantage point for the Broadcaster.
He placed a hand on the cold steel of the radio mast. Instantly, his consciousness expanded, bleeding into the city's infrastructure. He could feel the pulse of the radio waves, the cellular data streams, the emergency frequencies. He was the ghost in the machine, the static in the lullaby.
He turned his senses westward, thousands of miles away, tuning his mind to the faint, dying resonance of Asgardian magic in New Mexico. The link he had shattered was bleeding out. The metaphysical umbilical cord connecting Thor to Odin was severed, flailing in the ether.
"Now we wait," Aaron murmured to the empty air, his voice carried away by the wind.
It would take time. The system needed to reboot. Thor was currently a depowered mortal dragging a useless block of metal through the sand, likely cursing the heavens. But Aaron knew the physics of narrative and power. By stripping the enchantment, he had created a vacuum. And nature abhorred a vacuum.
In a few days, the last echoes of Odin's borrowed divinity would dissipate from Thor's cells. The biological and spiritual lock would disengage. Thor would have to find the spark within himself, without the hammer to jumpstart the engine. And when he did... the resulting voltage would be magnificent.
Aaron checked his pocket watch—a shadow construct that ticked backwards. The timeline was shifting. Loki's plans in Asgard were now compromised by paranoia. SHIELD was scrambling to decode the anomaly in the desert. And here, atop the world, Aaron sat ready to narrate the collapse.
"Stay tuned, listeners," he whispered, his eyes glowing red in the darkness above Manhattan. "The second act is just beginning."