There are moments when even gods feel something shift.
Not a sound. Not a sight. A tension—like a thread pulled too tight across the loom of fate.
Loki felt it while wandering the spaces between moments, where stories had not yet decided what they would become. He was not looking for trouble. He rarely was. Trouble, more often than not, came looking for him.
This time, it came quietly.
Too quietly.
A newborn's cry echoed through the roots of the world-tree, faint but wrong in its timing. A life beginning where none should have yet mattered. Loki paused, head tilting, a crooked smile tugging at his lips not from humor—but curiosity.
"That's early," he murmured to no one at all.
He reached out—not with hand or spell, but with attention—and followed the disturbance upward, past Midgard, past the watching halls, to the place where the old one sat.
Odin did not look up.
He never did when he was doing something he knew he should not be questioned about.
The All-Father sat upon his throne, one eye closed, the other distant, ravens whispering secrets into the silence around him. But Loki saw what the ravens did not speak of aloud. Beneath Odin's calm was motion—vast, deliberate, engineered.
A lattice of runes not carved into stone, but into possibility itself.
Loki's smile widened slowly.
"Oh," he said softly. "You didn't."
Odin had always collected warriors. That was no secret. Valhalla was proof enough—an eternal hall of blades and boasting, of glorious deaths polished smooth by endless retelling. But this… this was something else.
This was preparation.
Not choosing from the dead—but shaping the living.
Odin had built a system.
Not a prophecy. Not a blessing. A machine, cold and precise, hidden beneath layers of myth and silence. Something designed not to reward fate, but to forge it.
"To create the perfect Viking," Loki whispered, tasting the idea. "How very unlike you… and how very like you all the same."
The system reached backward, plucking a soul from the flow of ages and planting it deep in the soil of the first Viking age—before the names that would echo forever.
Before Ragnar.
Before the sagas hardened into scripture.
Before heroism learned its shape.
Odin was not cheating.
He was worse.
He was optimizing.
Loki leaned against nothing, arms crossed, eyes glittering. "You're afraid," he said, though Odin did not answer. "Not of them. Of what they've become."
Valhalla had grown stagnant. The same kinds of warriors. The same kinds of deaths. Bravery without imagination. Strength without change. Odin wanted more than courage—he wanted refinement. Evolution.
So he had chosen a host.
A perfect vessel.
And in doing so, Odin had made one small, delicious mistake.
He had assumed the kind of soul did not matter—only its compatibility with suffering.
Loki laughed then, a quiet sound that rippled through the unseen.
"Well," he said, pushing off the nothingness. "If you're going to build a system… you should really expect someone to test it."
He did not interfere with Odin's creation. That would have been crude. Obvious. Boring.
Instead, Loki did what he always did best.
He changed a single variable.
He reached not for a warrior, nor a king, nor a berserker drunk on visions of glory.
He reached forward.
Far forward.
Across centuries of iron and blood and belief, into a world of humming wires and cold light and endless repetition. He found a man not forged by battle, but by systems.
A modern mind.
An engineer.
Someone who understood loops. Feedback. Optimization. Someone who instinctively asked not what is, but how does this work—and how can it be better?
"Anders Skjold," Loki said, tasting the name before it ever belonged to a saga. "You weren't meant for a sword first. You were meant for the rules beneath it."
He did not grant Anders power.
He did not whisper instructions.
He only ensured that when Odin's system activated, it would awaken inside a mind capable of seeing it for what it was.
Not destiny.
But design.
The soul fell backward through time, threaded neatly into the body of a newborn cradled in smoke and fire. The system accepted the host without protest. Compatibility confirmed. Parameters satisfied.
And beneath it all, unnoticed by the All-Father—
An anomaly took root.
Loki watched the moment seal itself shut, fate knitting over the incision like skin over a scar. No alarms rang. No ravens cried out. Odin remained still, confident.
Loki's grin softened into something almost fond.
"He'll build different heroes," he said quietly. "Not louder ones. Not stronger ones. Smarter ones. Ones who change how wars are fought… how halls are filled… how Valhalla looks when the doors finally close."
He knew the price.
Odin would notice eventually. Odin always did. When he did, there would be chains. Punishment. Silence. Perhaps worse.
Loki accepted that as easily as breathing.
A trick completed was worth any cost.
Far below, in a timbered longhouse dusted with falling snow, a child slept in his mother's arms. His breathing was steady now. His fists unclenched.
For just a moment, unseen by gods or men, a flicker of blue light shimmered before closed infant eyes.
SYSTEM NOTICE:
Anomaly detected.
Cognitive origin outside age parameters.
Monitoring…
The notice vanished as quickly as it appeared.
The fire crackled.
The world turned.
And somewhere between laughter and silence, Loki disappeared—already planning the next joke the universe would not find funny for centuries.
The age of Vikings had not yet begun.
But it had already been changed.