Chapter 1 : THE GOD WHO
The last thing Ethan remembered was headlights.
A truck. Running a red. His hand reaching for the steering wheel, already knowing it was too late. Then nothing—no tunnel, no light, no floating sensation. Just a hard cut to black, like someone had ripped the plug from the universe.
He woke gasping.
Silk. The sheets were silk. Wrong. His bedroom had cotton, the cheap kind that pilled after three washes. This was liquid smooth, cool against his skin, catching morning light that shouldn't exist because his apartment faced west.
The ceiling was gold.
Not gold paint. Not gold leaf. Actual gold, carved into patterns of serpents and ravens, catching shafts of light from arched windows that belonged in a cathedral. His heart slammed against his ribs.
Get up. Move. Figure out what's happening.
His body obeyed, but wrong. Too tall. Too long. He swung legs off the bed—legs that weren't his—and nearly collapsed when his center of gravity betrayed him. Pale hands grabbed the bedpost. Long fingers. Elegant. Unfamiliar.
Memory crashed into him without warning.
Frigga's laughter echoing through training halls. Thor's hammer singing through the air. A childhood measured in centuries, not years. The taste of jealousy like copper on his tongue. Odin's eye, always watching, always judging, always finding him insufficient—
He doubled over, clutching his skull. These weren't his memories. They felt grafted, stitched into his consciousness with rough thread. He could feel the seams if he looked hard enough, places where Ethan Reyes ended and something else began.
Loki.
The name surfaced like a corpse from deep water.
His PhD thesis sat half-finished on his laptop—Trickster Archetypes in Norse Cosmology: A Comparative Analysis. He'd spent four years of his life studying this god. Reading the Eddas. Analyzing the Marvel interpretations. Writing seventy-three thousand words about how Loki represented the necessary chaos that kept cosmic order from stagnating.
Now he was wearing him like a suit.
Bathroom. Mirror. Now.
The room extended around him in impossible opulence. Weapons mounted on walls—knives, a short sword, things he couldn't name. A wardrobe taller than him. Books stacked on every surface, some bound in leather, some in materials that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking directly at them.
He found the mirror near the bathing chamber.
Loki Laufeyson stared back.
The face he'd seen in a dozen movies. Sharper in person—cheekbones like blades, eyes green enough to ache. Pale skin that had never known sunlight the way human skin did. Dark hair swept back from a high forehead.
He touched the reflection. The glass was cold.
"This is real," he said.
His voice came out smooth, accented in a way that didn't exist on Earth—something between British and something older, more precise. He tried again, pitching lower, then higher. Testing the range.
"My name is Loki," he said. The words fit wrong. Like borrowed clothes. "My name is... I am..."
Ethan Reyes. Twenty-eight. Doctorate candidate at Northwestern. Single. No pets. Dead.
Dead.
The panic he'd been suppressing broke through. His breath came fast, too fast, and the room tilted. He gripped the mirror's frame and forced himself to count. One. Two. Three. Breathe in. One. Two. Three. Breathe out.
When his vision cleared, Loki's face was still there.
"Okay." He spoke to himself, to the silence, to whatever cosmic mistake had put him here. "Okay. You're in Loki's body. Pre-Thor, based on the... everything. You studied this. You know this story. What happens?"
The memories—Loki's memories—offered fragments. A ceremony. Thor ascending. Something about a weapon vault.
The coronation. Thor's coronation. Loki lets the Frost Giants in to sabotage it.
But that was the old Loki. The one whose jealousy had festered for centuries. The one who'd eventually try to conquer Earth, get imprisoned, escape, die, and come back more times than made narrative sense.
Loki walked to the wardrobe. Green and black leather. Gold accents. A helmet with horns that looked physically impossible to balance.
What are my options?
He could play along. Become Loki. Let the timeline unfold as it should—the invasion, the deaths, the eventual messy redemption. Or...
He stopped.
Or I could change things.
His academic brain kicked in, analyzing the situation like a research problem. If he was here permanently—and the dead-in-a-car-crash thing suggested he was—then this timeline was his life now. Every death he knew was coming could potentially be prevented. Every disaster could be... steered.
Frigga dies in Dark World. Protecting Jane Foster.
The memory-that-wasn't-his supplied her face. Warm eyes. Patient hands correcting his grip on a training blade. The only person in Asgard who saw something worth nurturing in the second son.
Something tightened in his chest.
He crossed to the balcony before he could think about it. The doors were heavy, carved wood inlaid with silver runes, but they opened silently. The air hit him first—crisp and clean in a way Earth hadn't managed in a century. Then the view.
Asgard sprawled below.
Golden spires catching morning light. Waterfalls cascading into nothing, defying physics he'd spent twenty-eight years accepting as immutable. The Bifrost bridge, actually rainbow-colored, stretching toward what his memories told him was Heimdall's observatory. Ships drifting through the sky like clouds with purpose.
For one moment, he forgot to be terrified.
This was myth made real. Every story he'd ever studied, every symbol he'd traced through centuries of human imagination—it existed. It was beautiful in a way that hurt.
His hands gripped the balcony railing. Stone, worn smooth by Loki's touch over centuries. His touch now. Whatever version of him this was.
First step: figure out what I can do.
The memories suggested magic. Illusions, shapeshifting, something called seiðr that most Asgardians dismissed as "women's work." But when he reached for it—tried to feel whatever internal mechanism made it function—he found nothing. Like groping in a dark room for a light switch that had been removed.
He held out his hand and concentrated. Willed something—anything—to happen.
A spark. Green, barely visible, dying before it fully formed.
Shit.
The power was there. He could sense it now—a reservoir somewhere deep in his chest, like a muscle he'd never used. But whatever connection Loki had built over centuries of practice... the transmigration had severed it. Cut the wires between intent and execution.
He'd have to rebuild from scratch.
The thought should have been discouraging. Instead, something in him—the part that had loved puzzles since childhood, that had chosen academia because learning was better than any drug—stirred with interest.
I have magic. Actual, real magic. I just need to figure out how to use it.
A knock at the door shattered his concentration.
"My prince?" A woman's voice, respectful and professional. "The Queen requests your presence for final preparations."
The coronation. Right.
He took one last look at Asgard spread below him. Somewhere in this realm, Thor was probably practicing his victory smile. Frigga was arranging details with a mother's careful hand. Odin sat on his throne, waiting to transfer power to the son he'd always favored.
And somewhere in the vault, the Casket of Ancient Winters waited—the prize that had drawn Frost Giants here in the original timeline.
I didn't invite them. So either someone else did, or...
He couldn't finish the thought. Didn't want to consider what it meant if some events were locked, destined to happen regardless of his choices.
"A moment," he called back.
He crossed to the wardrobe and stared at the ceremonial armor. Green leather, gold plates, the ridiculous helmet. Loki's memories supplied the correct way to don it—clasps and buckles in sequences his fingers already knew.
Act like him. Move like him. Until I figure out what I'm doing, no one can know.
The dagger by the bed caught his eye. Simple, elegant, perfectly balanced for throwing. He tucked it into his belt, the weight oddly comforting.
One last breath. He straightened his spine, arranged his features into something he hoped resembled Loki's default expression—amused, slightly bored, secretly calculating.
Then he opened the door.
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