Falling.
An endless, merciless fall through nothingness.
The first thing I realized was not pain. Pain came later, in waves, like the tide against a shore you cannot see but feel with your entire body. No, the first thing was surprise. A dull, animalistic surprise of a man who fell asleep in his bed in Moscow and woke up… here.
Wherever "here" was.
Colors. Too many colors. They pierced my retinas like red-hot needles — purple, gold, black, purple again. The space around me twisted into spirals, tore apart, and stitched itself back together, as if the fabric of reality had decided to have a nervous breakdown.
A wormhole, my mind helpfully suggested. You're falling through a wormhole.
Thanks, brain. Very helpful.
I tried to breathe — and failed. Vacuum? No, not quite. Something surrounded me, some kind of substance, but it refused to become air. My lungs burned. Or what I thought were lungs.
Loki.
The name came on its own, uninvited, like the memory of a hangover after a corporate party. And with the name came a flood of images, sensations, an entire life that was not mine.
The golden spires of Asgard.
Thor's heavy hand on my shoulder.
Odin's cold gaze.
Frost Giants.
The Rainbow Bridge shattering into fragments under the strike of Mjolnir.
And the fall. That cursed, endless fall.
I am Loki, I thought. God of Deception. Prince of Asgard. Odin's adopted son. A Jotun by blood.
And also a twenty-nine-year-old system administrator from Moscow whose last memory was falling asleep during a third rewatch of The Avengers.
Irony? No. Irony is when something is funny. And I was not laughing.
Especially when I realized exactly which moment I had ended up in.
Cold.
It came suddenly, like a blow to the gut. Not the kind of cold you get used to in winter, not Moscow's minus twenty with wind. This cold was… cosmic. Absolute. It seeped beneath the skin, into the bones, into the very essence of what I was.
And the body — this body — reacted before I could think.
The skin changed. I couldn't see it — my eyes refused to focus in this kaleidoscope of madness — but I felt it. As if thousands of tiny locks snapped shut across my entire body. The temperature stopped falling. The vacuum stopped pulling air from my lungs.
The heritage of Jotunheim, a memory that was not mine whispered. Frost Giants are created to survive in the void between worlds.
Good. Excellent. Wonderful. I wouldn't die of hypothermia or suffocation.
That left roughly seventeen thousand other ways to die in the next few minutes.
I tried to focus. Loki's memory was… strange. It didn't replace mine — rather, it settled beside it, like a second layer of reality. I remembered my childhood in Biryulyovo and at the same time remembered the halls of Asgard. I remembered university and Frigga's lessons in magic. Two sets of memories, two personalities somehow stitched into one.
Magic, I thought. If I am Loki, I should have magic.
I reached for it — and found emptiness.
Not complete emptiness. Somewhere deep inside, a spark still flickered, weak as a lighter in the wind. But the reserves that Loki's memory recalled as a given — thousands of years of accumulated power — had been almost completely burned away. The fall through the Abyss had drained them like a vacuum cleaner sucking crumbs from a carpet.
Damn it.
No, seriously. Damn it.
I had ended up in the body of one of the most powerful mages of the Nine Realms — and I didn't have enough power to light a candle.
Time lost its meaning.
I don't know how long I fell. Minutes? Hours? Days? In the Abyss between worlds, such concepts don't work. I simply… existed. Trying not to go insane from the endless flow of colors and sounds that should not have been sounds.
Memory helped. Both memories.
I began sorting information the way I did at work when a server crashed and I needed to quickly understand what had gone wrong. Folders. Categories. Priorities.
What do I know about my situation?
First: I am Loki. God of Deception, Prince of Lies, and other pretentious titles. By blood — a Frost Giant, son of Laufey, enemy of Odin. Raised as an Asgardian, but my body is a hybrid. Cold is not my enemy. It is my ally.
Second: I just fell from the Rainbow Bridge. In the film — this is the end of the first Thor. Loki learns the truth of his origin, tries to destroy Jotunheim, loses, and voluntarily lets go above the Abyss.
Third: according to canon, the next stop is Thanos.
This is where my inner system administrator said: "Error. Critical error. Reboot recommended."
Unfortunately, there was no reboot button.
Thanos. The Mad Titan. A purple-chinned fanatic obsessed with wiping out half the universe. In the films he was… well, a villain. Terrifying, charismatic, but still a villain who could be defeated.
In reality — if this was reality now — he was Thanos.
A being who single-handedly slaughtered civilizations. Who collected Infinity Stones like a child collecting candy wrappers. Who, in the end, would snap Loki's neck like a chicken's.
That Loki. The movie one. The one foolish enough to try stabbing him with a knife.
I clenched my fists — or tried to, as my body still refused to fully obey.
No. No, no, no. I did not get a second chance just to die at the hands of a grape with a god complex.
Think, I ordered myself. You know the canon. You know what will happen. Use it.
What happens to Loki after the fall?
The films never show it directly. But from hints it's clear: Thanos finds him, breaks him (mentally and probably physically), and sends him to Earth with the Scepter and the Chitauri army.
The Scepter.
The Mind Stone.
The yellow Infinity Stone hidden inside alien weaponry. In the MCU its influence is shown indirectly — the Avengers' paranoia, aggression, division. But in the comics… in the comics the Mind Stone could control any mind. Amplify psionic abilities. Read thoughts. Control crowds.
And Thanos would give it to me.
More precisely, he would give it to Loki, believing I was a broken prince seeking revenge against his brother and conquest of Earth.
Idiot.
Well, not an idiot. Thanos was far from an idiot. He simply… didn't know who he was dealing with. He thought he was dealing with a desperate Asgardian whose self-esteem had been shattered.
Instead, he was dealing with me.
A man who knew Thanos would lose. Who knew about the Avengers, about the Stones, about the Snap and its consequences. Who knew that if things followed Marvel's script — Loki would die at the beginning of Infinity War, and then his variant would end up stuck in some bureaucratic prison outside time.
No.
I would rewrite this script.
The first glimpse of something other than chaos appeared suddenly.
Gravity. It returned with a jolt, yanking me downward — or upward? In the Abyss there are no directions — with such force that I felt my ribs crack. Two, judging by the pain. Maybe three.
The colors vanished. They were replaced by darkness — true, honest cosmic darkness, scattered with stars.
And rock. A lot of rock. Gray, dead, covered in craters.
I slammed into the surface of an asteroid at a speed that would have killed a human. Not just a human — it would have killed a normal Asgardian.
But I was not normal.
Loki's body — my body — endured. Not without consequences: I felt something snap in my left shoulder, felt the skin tear from my palms, felt my spine vibrate like a guitar string. But I was alive.
Alive.
I lay in a crater of my own making, staring at alien stars, and laughed. Quietly, hoarsely, more like a cough, but it was laughter.
First stage complete, I thought. Survival. Check.
Now there remained a small matter: not dying in the next few hours before Thanos found me and began breaking me.
I slowly sat up, ignoring the protests of every muscle in my body. I looked around.
An asteroid. Not small — the horizon was visible, but distant. The surface was littered with debris: chunks of metal, remains of what might have been ships, strange growths resembling petrified coral.
A dump, I realized. A cosmic junkyard.
And if my memory from the films wasn't lying, this junkyard was located in the Sanctuary sector. Thanos's territory.
Wonderful.
Just. Fucking. Wonderful.
I needed to move. Think. Plan.
I stood up — or rather, tried to. On the third attempt I succeeded. The body obeyed, but with obvious reluctance, like an old computer after a system update. Everything technically worked, but the speed left much to be desired.
First task — inventory.
Physical condition: terrible. Two or three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder (left — good thing I'm right-handed… was right-handed… is Loki right-handed too? Need to check), multiple bruises and abrasions. Nothing fatal. The body was regenerating, I could feel it — slowly, almost imperceptibly, but the process was ongoing.
Magical reserve: almost zero. That spark I had sensed earlier still smoldered, but it would suffice for at most a couple of weak illusions. Maybe one healing spell, if I could remember how to perform it.
Weapons: none. My — his — daggers remained on the Rainbow Bridge. Though…
I looked at my hands. The blue tint had already faded — the body had instinctively returned to its "Asgardian" form once the threat of freezing disappeared. But I remembered the sensation. Remembered how the cold had become not an enemy but a tool.
The heritage of Jotunheim, memory whispered again.
Frost Giants could create weapons from nothing. Ice harder than steel. Blades, spears, shields — whatever imagination allowed.
I concentrated. Reached for that part of myself that was Jotun.
And felt the cold respond.
It came from within, from the very core of my being. Not painful, not frightening — natural, like breathing. I directed it into my right hand, imagining a shape…
A shard of ice appeared in my palm. Small, crude, more like an icicle than a weapon.
But it existed.
I laughed again. This time — genuinely.
Magic was nearly depleted. But being a Jotun was not magic. It was nature. My nature.
The first trump card up my sleeve.
Now all that remained was to figure out how to use it against Thanos, the Chitauri army, and the Black Order.
An easy task, right?
I moved forward, limping and holding my left arm. Somewhere out there among the stars, the Mad Titan was waiting for me.
And I intended to disappoint him.