i was just an only child of the universe [ strange + loki ]

[becloaked]

and then i found you; and then i found you

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[becloaked]

One of the very first things that Stephen had learned as a sorcerer trainee was that there were a lot of books throughout the universe that had dangerous knowledge, and the head librarian of Kamar-Taj did their best to collect and contain these books. Irrusaem's Codex. Dineth's Aspects of the Soul. The Book of Cagliostro. Dozens of others. Most of them are heavily warded in the library, but every now and then a few escape.

Ovae's Treatise of the Cosmos, as far as Stephen is aware, used to be at Kamar-Taj about a thousand years ago. Last seen a century ago in the hands of one Loki of Asgard, but rumor said that he'd passed it on to another location before the burning of Asgard. Stephen has chased other rumors until they ran dry, spoken to minor gods, and everything has come up empty.

Now, as Stephen sits under a gently spinning model of the known universe and watches a star go dark, he bites back a sigh, and resigns himself to going to the end of time.

Loki, as told by Thor, is dead at the hands of Thanos. Thor had told him at Stark's funeral, his features worn with grief, about how Loki had tried to take on Thanos only to get his neck snapped. A final death, this time, and not one of the many tricks Loki had pulled before. But he needs to know what Loki did with that book, and so, his thoughts have turned to another legend: a green eyed god that sits at the roots of Yggdrasil, a god of stories, a changed god with a crown of heavy horns and a sad smile. If anybody would know, it would be him.

Last week, he used a corrupted book of magic to dreamwalk into his own corpse and stop the Scarlet Witch from killing a teenager. This week, he supposes he's going to have a look at the end of time. Just another Tuesday.

It takes a day of preparation to get the right reagents and collect a relic from the currently rebuilding Kamar-Taj. America had offered to help, but he's not going to a dimension so much as he's going between them, so he has the Staff of Realms instead, a deceptively simple wooden staff that can slice open doors to the worlds between, and beyond.

He comes upon a crumbling stone dais, roots entangled as far as the eye can see glowing with threads of green. Yggdrasil is so impossibly huge that Stephen can only see the base of the trunk as a wide swath of color, and a smear of glowing leaves far, far beyond. And there the God of Stories sits, most of him obscured by the roots, and because Stephen has long since learned that he should probably try to be a tiny bit polite when he meets new gods, he dips his head, the Staff of Realms held low and non-threatening.

"I would seek an audience with he who knows the multiverse," he calls. "I come with no intent to harm, only to help. All I desire is information."