An Anchor in the Infinite

The throne is alive beneath him, roots and tendrils of Yggdrasil’s veins coiling through his spine and ribs like cold hands. The green light rises from everywhere and nowhere, streaming through him in currents, threading his bones, humming in his teeth. Each branch is a pulse, each pulse a world, and each world a chorus that never stops. It would be beautiful if it didn’t feel like drowning.

Breath is optional here. He takes it anyway, letting air expand a mortal memory of lungs he doesn’t need. It does nothing to ease the press of time. The seat at the center is not a seat so much as a junction—his body, his mind, the conduit and the dam. The pressure climbs and then plateaus, like standing waist-deep in an ocean as the tide pushes insistently at his hips. A constant insistence. A need to hold, to keep, to not let go.

His fingers curve over the carved armrests, bark-smooth and warm. The glow paints his knuckles sickly emerald. He’s learned how to partition—how to split attention a thousand ways, how to cradle the newborn flicker of a timeline and starve the ones that will rot everything. He knows which threads need tugging and which will snarl. He knows what he saved. He knows what he cost. He knows he cannot stop.

It is not pain, exactly. It’s weight. It’s wearing a crown made of roots that pierce and hook and grow into you until you forget where you end and the tree begins. It’s silence so absolute it feels loud. He can conjure noise—recollections of banter and blades meeting, the devotion of his lies, the music of his own laugh—but this place eats sound, consumes it as willingly as it consumes time. He is god enough not to scream. He is man enough to want to.

He shifts his shoulders and the light shifts with him. He could let it bear him down farther, sink into the bedrock of endings and beginnings until there’s no Loki at all, only purpose. He almost does, when the ache in his chest spikes sharp as a blade being slowly turned. That ache lives under his sternum. It lives in the hollow of his throat. It lives where someone’s hand once settled, firm and grounding, where a voice—warm, wry—cut through the worst of it and made the word “friend” feel like a spell.

He closes his eyes and sees him. He doesn’t have to; he swore he wouldn’t. But vows made to himself are the easiest to break, and there is no one here to watch him fail.

Mobius, on water, sun on weathered cheekbones. Grease under nails, laugh lines etching deeper with joy. The flash of a grin when he’s right and knows it. A paper cup of coffee in one hand, a certain tilt of his head that meant: don’t lie to me, but if you must, make it good. A jet ski’s wake fan-sprayed into a glittering arc; Cleveland sky so ordinary it hurts. He lets the vision skim along the surface of his mind like a stone on a lake and makes himself stop it before it sinks. If it sinks, he’ll follow. He can’t afford to.

He swallows against a throat that is and isn’t dry. The throne hums, an echoing purr that touches the base of his skull. He is the weight-holder, the stitcher, the one who says no. No to sleeping. No to forgetting. No to reaching. It would be so easy to trace a single branch back to one man’s kitchen window and watch him pour sugar into his coffee like he always did too generously. It would be obscene to call it easy. It would be cruel. It would be pure selfishness to invite tenderness into this place and then sit perfectly still while it withers.

He tightens his legs around the pedestal’s base, calves braced, thighs tense. The green current pushes between them and through, a sundered river threading him open. It is intimacy without touch. It is pressure without release. The throne takes and takes, not with hunger but with function. He gives because he must, even when the body he’s chosen to remember wants other kinds of giving, other kinds of taking. Flesh remembers heat. Lips remember insistence. A name tasted in the mouth has its own electricity, and he can conjure that too, if he wants to punish himself.

He does not. Not now. His jaw clenches. The ache is a contained thing again, banked like a hearth fire. He lets the green pass through, collects it, diverts it, breathes with it. Each exhale is a corridor. Each inhale is a door swinging open onto countless rooms he’ll never step into. He thinks of the last time he slept. He thinks of the first time he lied for the right reason. He thinks of the word glorious and how it curdles in the dark.

The loneliness is a companion that never leaves. He names it honestly. He tries not to shape it into a face. It still shapes itself, unbidden and familiar, mustache silvering at the edges, eyes steady and gentle even when angry. He has been called monster, prince, villain, god, and he has carried each like a blade hidden in a sleeve. He has not let himself be called lonely out loud. Here, where no one can hear, he can say it: yes.

The roots flex. The light brightens. Time tightens like a fist, and for a moment he imagines that fist fitting into his palm, small enough to hold, warm enough to share. He imagines sitting on any other chair, at any other table, arguing about the best pie in a place that smells like burnt coffee and cheap lemon cleanser. He imagines mud on boots, wind on cheeks, a hand on his shoulder that anchors rather than binds.

He opens his eyes before the longing drags him under. The green is everywhere. It keeps moving. So does he. He keeps his spine straight, his gaze steady, his mouth composed. He does not let his fingers tremble against the living wood.

He lets himself think one word, very quietly, a secret pressed into the bark of a carved tree.

Please.

He narrows himself down to a thread. It’s like pulling a needle out of a sea of needles and forcing it through the eye of a single, chosen moment. The branches crowd, whispering, tugging—warfronts and courtrooms and wedding vows, meteor showers over deserts, a child holding a scraped knee—and he refuses them all, divining his target with stubborn, aching precision. The green turns thin and taut as wire as he lowers his attention along the spine of a single world until the hum resolves into the steady buzz of fluorescent lights, the slap of lake wind against sheet metal, the smell of gasoline and sun-warmed rubber.

Earth-616. Cleveland. 2022.

He doesn’t touch the branch. He hovers just above it, consciousness skimming like a dragonfly on water, no ripple, no interference. The view arranges itself in his mind with painful clarity. A storefront window reflects blue sky and a man in a polo shirt with a logo over his heart that means nothing and everything. The man steps into the sun, squinting a little, pushing a bright-bodied jet ski across concrete with practiced ease.

Mobius—no, Don—talks with his hands. He gestures at the hull, taps the control cluster with a knuckle, smiles at a couple in matching sunglasses. There’s a rhythm to it, a script he’s rewritten with his own cadence until it sounds like him. He slants his body toward the water at the dock, promising freedom in plain, practical language, that easy, confident patter that once sold sacrifices and second chances instead of engines and fiberglass. That voice lives in Loki’s ear like a memory of warmth. He lets it wash over him and keeps his grip on the throne so he won’t reach. He doesn’t reach.

Don laughs. It’s a short huff, head tipping, eyes creasing. He kneels to steady the machine as the husband climbs on and wobbles, hand automatically catching the stranger’s elbow without looking. The contact is casual, thoughtless, kind. It hits Loki like a fist. His chest tightens. He presses his tongue to the back of his teeth until the urge to form the name out loud recedes.

Sun bleaches the fine hairs on Don’s forearms. A smear of grease darkens the edge of his thumbnail. He has a small cut along one knuckle, nearly healed. His mustache is more silver than it was, his mouth as generous as ever when it turns to reassure the nervous wife. He crouches, leans in, points. The couple relax with him the way frightened recruits once did, the way Loki did without meaning to. It isn’t magic. It is.

He stands and props his hands on his hips, shirt stretching over a middle that’s earned by dinners eaten late in a quiet kitchen and weekends spent fixing what breaks. A line of sweat darkens his collar. Loki can almost taste the salt of it, could almost press his mouth to that patch of cotton, could almost feel the solid warmth of the body beneath. He doesn’t let himself.

Don jogs down the dock, one hand out as the jet ski idles in a bright shard of reflected sky. He coaches the man through a shaky circle, shouts something about throttle, laughs again when a spray catches his shoes. It’s all so ordinary it hurts. The ordinariness is the miracle. The ordinariness is the knife.

He follows Don through the rest of it: paperwork inside at a scuffed counter, a pen tucked behind his ear, a gentle joke about warranties. He watches the way he stands a little sideways to people, not crowding, offering space and presence in the same breath. He watches him choose a key tag, blue, because the customer said their kid liked blue. He watches him pause before hitting the button on a little drip coffee machine, brow furrowing like he’s trying to remember if he already had two cups or three. He watches him smile at a co-worker, writes a note on a sticky tab, fold it, tuck it under a stapler.

None of this is special to anyone but Loki. That’s what makes it unbearable. The light on the dust motes in the office is a revelation. The way Don rubs his thumb over the corner of a photograph taped crookedly to a metal cabinet—a picture of two boys grinning around someone’s retriever—is holy. The way he leans back in a swivel chair and tips his face up to stare at the ceiling tiles for three seconds before picking up the phone again is a prayer.

He allows himself a closer angle and feels the indulgence cut cleanly. The mustache is trimmed unevenly on one side. There’s a new crease at the corner of his mouth, created by smiling at strangers. His eyes—Gods, his eyes—are the color of lake water under thin clouds, and they’re content, but there’s a depth in them that reads like a bruise to someone who knows where to look. He’s happy. He’s whole. And something inside him is still reaching, even if he doesn’t know where to reach.

Don heads outside again when the couple returns from their test ride, triumphant and damp. He claps the man’s shoulder, shakes his hand, and then, when they’ve gone, he stands alone for a moment on the dock and closes his eyes. Wind lifts the hair over his ears. He breathes in like he’s tasting the day. The skin over his throat moves as he swallows. Loki matches the breath before he can stop himself and feels it catch.

He lets the vision linger a heartbeat longer. Don looks down at his hand, flexes it like something aches, and then shakes it off and goes back to work. Loki releases the branch as if it’s burning him and keeps his face carefully blank while the tree hums through his bones. He has taken what he shouldn’t, that tiny, stolen warmth, and tucked it under his ribs. It smolders, and he hates and craves the heat in equal measure.

He sits very still and does not look again. Not yet.

He lets the distance soften, lets the sound of the dock carry directly into him: lapping water, the chuck of rope against cleat, a gull’s thin cry. Don’s voice threads through it, steady and upbeat, easy authority wrapped in friendliness. “You’re gonna feel a little kick right here—yeah, that—don’t worry, you’ve got more control than you think.” He’s half performing, half coaching, but none of it is false. He believes in what he’s selling. Freedom in small, manageable doses. Speed without danger. A clean edge of joy you can hold in your hands and take home on a trailer.

Loki watches him tap the throttle housing with two fingers, watches the woman laugh and nudge her husband when the engine burbles and purrs. Don has the machine angled so light hits the metallic paint and makes it look like a thing from the future. He knows how to make a promise land. He always did. The promise is safer now. No one dies for this one. The promise ends with a picnic and sunburn and a story told later in a kitchen while ice clinks against glass.

Relief unfurls and tightens all at once. Don is alive. He is not looking over his shoulder. He is not clutching a TemPad like a talisman. He is not bleeding. He is not lonely in a way that stabs. He is lonely in a way that humans wear like a coat in winter—familiar and survivable. Relief tastes like iron in Loki’s mouth because it comes laced with a grief that doesn’t have an end. He misses the man who argued with him about everything and still sat too close, who made terrible coffee and saved his life and made him laugh at times he didn’t want to. He misses him with the part of him that never gets to go anywhere.

Don waves the husband on and jogs after him down the dock, sneakers slapping wood, knees bending with the grace of someone who knows his balance. He reaches to steady a wobble, one hand broad and callused on the stern, and the couple’s nervousness evaporates because Don’s touch says: I’ve got you. Loki feels the wordless echo of that touch in his sternum, the place that always relaxes when Mobius—no, Don—puts a hand there, just for emphasis, just to say I’m here, keep going.

He counts the details to keep from drowning. The fabric of the polo pulls across Don’s back where muscle still lives beneath softness. His neck is damp where sweat gathered at the hairline and wicked into cotton. His belt is worn smooth near the buckle from years of the same motion. His left wrist carries a faint white line, an old burn or cut that Loki doesn’t recognize, and the ignorance lands like a stone. There are stories he doesn’t know. There are injuries he didn’t tend, jokes he didn’t hear, nights he didn’t witness. Don’s life is long without him and quietly full.

Inside, the showroom is bright and ugly, track lights glaring off glossy bodies. Don stands at the counter with a pen between his fingers and the posture of a man who lives inside his day and doesn’t try to escape it. When the woman makes a face at one of the financing options, Don listens, nodding. “You don’t need all the extras. They’ll upsell you anywhere. Just take the essentials, and don’t let Carl talk you into the ski rack unless you’re actually gonna use it.” It’s gentle conspirator, the way he used to lean across a desk at the TVA and tell Loki to ignore whatever nonsense protocol pretended to be sacred that particular afternoon. Loki’s chest aches with something simple and sharp.

He watches the husband sign, hand shaking a little with the thrill of a purchase that means summer is real and time is theirs for a while. Don doesn’t stretch the moment out. He hands over the manual, circles a section with his pen. “Call anytime if something sounds weird. I’ll talk you through it.” It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s a life that satisfies him enough to make his mouth soft at the corners and his shoulders drop when he laughs. It’s a life that does not have Loki in it.

The dock calls them back outside for a last look, for more talk about torque and maintenance schedules. Don does the thing where he crouches and leans his weight easily on the balls of his feet, lazy and alert. He gestures with an open hand, never pointing. He waits for the husband to process and doesn’t rush him. Loki can almost feel the patience like heat. He can almost hear the conversation they should be having alongside this one. He wants to be petty and say the machine’s paint is garish. He wants to be generous and buy three just to see Don roll his eyes. He wants to say your mustache is crooked and your wrist hurts when it rains and the lull between customers makes you too aware of your own heartbeat and you stand in the doorway at closing and count your breaths to feel like you made it through the day. He wants to know if any of that is true. He will never ask.

Don reaches for a rag on a crate without looking and swipes a smear of lake water off the seat, efficient, domestic. The husband makes a sound of delight at some small detail and Don grins back, bright and unguarded. Loki feels relief again, ugly and grateful: this is good; let him have this. He refuses his own urge to be seen. He refuses to let that smile turn toward him.

The couple leaves with their purchase arranged and their voices high with plans. Don stands with his hands on his hips and watches their taillights until they turn the corner. He says something to a co-worker that makes the other man bark a laugh, then he steps into the shadow of the door and tips his head back against the frame. His eyes close. He breathes in, out. He scratches at the healed cut on his knuckle without looking at it.

Loki could pull back. He doesn’t. He keeps the sight of that small, tired, content moment and lets it hurt. He lets it be all the things at once: proof that he did the right thing, punishment for wanting anything else, a pledge he doesn’t know how to stop renewing. He swallows and the taste of lake air is still there, stubborn and damp. He looks at the line of Don’s throat and thinks of the last time he heard him say his name like it meant something to him that didn’t belong to the mission. He thinks of how easy it would be to build a life out of this—diner coffee, arguments about warranties, wind on their faces. He thinks of the roots wrapped around his calves and the light burning through him and knows easy is a word he doesn’t get.

Someone calls Don from inside. He lifts his head and goes. Loki follows him to the threshold and stops himself just inside it. He lets the scene go hazy at the edges again, pulls his sight back a fraction, enough to blur the details without losing the shape. He can hold this without tearing it. He can love this without touching it. He tells himself that and feels the lie slot neatly beside the others he carries for mercy’s sake.

It begins as a wrong note in a symphony he has learned to breathe with. A thin flare in the weave, not green, not the living shimmer of branching choice, but a pinprick of metallic gold winking in and out like a defective star. Loki feels it before he sees it, a grit under the tongue of the universe.

He focuses, not on Don now, but on the net around him. Threads vibrate against his senses, each line a life, a thousand lives, singing in their ordinary, vital way. There—the pulse. It crooks through the current just off the coast of Lake Erie, nowhere and everywhere, small enough to be ignored. He cannot ignore it. He narrows his attention, the way he used to pick a single lie out of a room of half-truths.

The gold flickers again, a tremor that should not exist. It isn’t the TVA’s brutal bronze. It isn’t the saccharine gleam of a TVA minute hand, either. It’s older and newer than both, a brightness with no texture. His skin crawls with it, an instinctive recoil from something that doesn’t belong. The tree around him hums, patient and immense, and he slips a hand into the branch’s light, fingers closing around the anomaly like he’s catching a spark.

It skitters. For a second, it resists. His lips press together. He applies a fraction more will, just enough to smooth a stray thread. The gold answers with a sharp pulse that clicks against his teeth. He feels it in his molars. It slides under him, not defiant, not compliant, simply untouchable—like trying to press a reflection back into water and finding the surface isn’t wet. He frowns.

Don’s timeline does not change. He is still inside the showroom, still laughing at something the cashier says, still picking up a receipt that fluttered to the floor. Loki holds steady and reaches again. The anomaly feels closer this time, a tick against the arteries of the timeline, feeding on nothing and somehow full. He pictures it like an air bubble in glass. His magic glides over it and gets nowhere. The flicker answers with a rhythm: two short, one long, a breath held, then gone.

He searches the adjacent threads—neighbors in time, tangents that never quite touch but create pressure. A man sets down his coffee and finds it on the other side of the table without having moved it. A bus’s route board lists a time that hasn’t existed in two years. A gull hangs an extra half-second in the air, wings stilled in a way that should be impossible. They settle back into place after, harmless, with that taste of metal in the back of his throat.

He can force it. He can push his hand, push hard, make the branch crack to be rid of a single blemish. The thought comes with the easy cruelty of old habits. He does not move. He knows what that does now. He knows what a fissure becomes if you pretend it is small.

Loki draws himself higher into the throne and lets the sensation of bark and light through his spine anchor him. He isolates the spark again, catalogues it. It’s not a traveler’s signature. It’s not a TemPad bleed. It doesn’t echo of He Who Remains or of Sylvie’s blade or of his own. It is a parasite’s flirt with the host, if a parasite could flirt without touching. He realizes he is naming things to stay calm.

He shifts his hold from brute influence to the other kind of magic he has learned here: the quiet suggestion, the adjustment of possibility. He nudges the air around the flicker to cool it, slows the clockwork of the nearby seconds, lays a gentle hand over the place it insists on pricking through. The gold tenses under him, then slips sideways and brightens, as if delighted he noticed. It leaves a residue—so faint he’d doubt it if not for the way his heart gives one wrong thud.

Don—Mobius—turns his head in the showroom like someone called his name from very far away. His mouth softens with confusion. He rubs the heel of his hand against his chest once and then lets it fall, shrugging it off. He does not know he’s standing next to a spot where time is trying to remember a different shape for itself.

Loki exhales slow, measured, and directs the tree to tighten its weave around that street, that block, that hour. The branches accommodate him, pliant to care. The blink of gold dims, not gone, not corrected, muted. He tries to ease it further and meets the same absence of purchase, like pinching light. It was nothing. It should be nothing. He hears himself thinking that and recognizes the lie.

He pivots his vantage, looking down through the layers he’s created, through the scaffolding of his own making. The flicker sits like a tiny star at the edge of a nebula, patient. He could let it run and see what pattern it draws. He could watch and hope that its hunger is small. He could pretend it will solve itself. He has never, in any life, been good at pretending the house isn’t on fire when he can smell smoke.

He drags his attention from the gleam to Don again as if to reassure himself that the simple things continue: a receipt bag, a water bottle, the ridiculous key lanyard looped through fingers. The ordinary persists. The ordinary is most at risk.

He turns back to the gold and speaks to it the way he would to a beast he does not want to startle. Enough. He presses the word into the weave. The pulse answers with a flicker like laughter, meaningless and precise. It doesn’t move away. It doesn’t come closer. It waits.

A coldness creeps under his ribs, not fear in the way he once knew it, but that quiet, deadly variant: foreknowledge. He cannot solve this from here, not with a stroke, not even with ten. The scale is wrong. The thing ignores the hand that holds all else. He could cheapen the branch around it, flatten it so thoroughly that nothing can catch, nothing can snag. It would be safe and dead. He is not that god anymore.

He withdraws a fraction, enough to stop grinding his teeth around the bright, bitter taste. He marks the coordinates: latitude, longitude, a Tuesday at two-forty-seven, the interval between one blink and the next, the fixed point for his own return. The tree hums, warm under his palms, trusting him to choose well. He holds that trust like a hot stone and keeps breathing.

On the dock outside the showroom, the wind lifts again. Somewhere far above the lake, a plane’s contrail leaves a white line that a moment ago was a fraction shorter, a moment from now will be longer. He watches the world's small continuances and the wrong gold heartbeat together, and he makes himself still. There will be a price for touching it up close. There will be a price for not. He has always understood prices.

He rests his head back against the throne and closes his eyes for one breath. When he opens them, the flicker is still there, waiting, patient as a hook in clear water. He does not reach again. Not yet. He lets the knowledge sit in him like a stone and promises himself he will not pretend it is anything else. He allows himself one last look at Don, at the line of his mouth as he speaks, and then raises his gaze back to the wound of light. It pulses once, sharp and bright. He meets it and does not flinch.

He tastes the wrongness like a coin left too long on the tongue and decides to end it. No flourish. No grand gesture. Only the smallest narrowing of will, the way a surgeon closes a cut with two clean stitches.

He gathers the branch in thought and pressure, nudging seconds into a tighter braid around the gold prick. It should fold, should become nothing more than a blip swallowed by the steady hum of choices advancing. He flattens eddies in the air where tomorrow and yesterday tug, instructs the hour to keep walking, asks the road to remember only the cars presently on it, the salt on its shoulders, the stains of last winter. He sends quiet through the lattice, a dampening field of intention woven from habits he’s learned since he sat down here and agreed to bear the tree.

The flicker brightens, then dims, as if blinking. He’s braced for resistance—sharp, brittle, like a splinter catching on cloth. Instead, his power passes through without friction. The gold does not push back. It simply is, unmoved, like a star seen in a well: present, unreachable, reflected without being contained.

He focuses again, this time with the fine control he reserves for living things he does not wish to harm. He splits the second holding the anomaly, elongates it into a softened loop that should make the space too viscous for a foreign signature to keep its shape. The loop folds. The anomaly pulses inside it, unaffected. He drains the loop and tries heat: nudges the stats of the day, warms the atoms around the point by a fraction of a fraction, just enough to blur edges. No change. He cools instead. The shine persists, an unbecoming grin cut into a face that should be placid.

A muscle ticks in his jaw. He turns power into patience, changes the angle of approach. He folds his sight until all he holds is one block, one breath, the slant of winter sun against a plate-glass window. He slows the parade of probabilities to a crawl, lines them up, pushes his thumb against each until they click into the outcomes least hospitable to aberrance. He locks traffic light patterns. He pins the route of a dog on its afternoon walk with a treat held at the exact pace to keep the owner and leash steady. He sands down coincidence. The gold doesn’t care. It occupies three nanoseconds like a monarch presiding, neither reigning nor deigning to be dethroned. He feels it like a ringing tuned to a note no ear should hear.

He breathes in through his teeth and reaches deeper—to the marrow of the branch, where story and physics share a bed. A thread of green slides out from his fingertip and into the wood, his will expressed not as force but as suggestion: this is not part of you. It doesn’t belong. Let it pass. The tree hears him and answers, a murmur of compliance and affection. The weave tightens. It should be enough. It is not.

The gold stutters, a playful rhythm he can’t map to anything he knows, and then does the most offensive thing yet: it remains. His own magic returns to him unmarked by struggle, the way a thrown blade would return untouched if the target had never been there.

He reaches for old instincts—breaking, cutting, cauterizing—and stops himself with an effort that feels like swallowing glass. He can flatten the entire hour into a featureless slab, harden it until it can’t take an impression at all. He knows the cost, knows the dead weight of that kind of safety. He refuses.

Fine. Then we do it the hard way.

He traces the residue the flicker leaves, bare as breath on cold glass. It’s the first concession he’s had: a smear of information so thin he has to hold the entire district still to listen for it. It tastes like nothing he’s catalogued. Not the brutalist bronze scent of the TVA, not the brittle cloy of a TemPad being overworked, not the ozone bite of a multiversal incursion. It’s clean. New in a way the word new doesn’t cover. And old, older than rules. His fingers curl against the throne’s arm, and he presses his thumb into the living wood until it protests.

On the showroom floor, Don’s laugh catches, then resumes, a hitch most people would miss. He tilts his head, not hunting, just curious, and then lets it go. Loki doesn’t. He angles his attention at the street again and finds the anomaly waiting like a hook in clear water, patient and greedy in the absence of movement.

He tries language next. He writes an instruction into the air, not words but shapes: depart, dissolve, unwind, unmake. The shapes land on the gold and blur. He twists grammar. He invokes authority. He reminds the branch: I am the hand that holds you. The branch agrees. The gold does not. It is outside consent.

Cold gathers under his sternum, the quiet dread that belongs to gods and doctors and all who have had something fail in their hands that should not fail. This is not defiance. Defiance would be a comfort. This is indifference. His rules slide off it like water off oiled glass.

He tests the edges of what it can touch. He brushes a nearby thread—the bus timetable that changed, the coffee cup that walked across a table—to see if the gold rides them, if it leverages the noise of small paradoxes to seed itself. He smooths those ripples, and they heed him, flattening obediently. The gold pulses, brighter for a half-beat, as if pleased. Returning to baseline does nothing to starve it. He tries chaos: allows three neighboring seconds to misalign, curious whether abundance confuses or bloats it. The anomaly licks at the spill like flame to spilt liquor, then sits back, sated by the taste if not fed by it.

He lowers his head and closes his eyes for one measured count, forces the impulse to hurl power until something cracks back down into his bones. His breath returns steady. The tree hums reassurance, the way a friend hums when you can’t say what hurts.

When he looks again, the light is exactly as it was, sharp and clean and impossibly sure. He pins its coordinates deeper: not just place and hour, but the interval between the blink of a pedestrian and the shiver along a length of chain-link fence, the scratch in a car’s clear coat, the angle at which the gull’s wing dipped. He takes its measure as if he can domesticate it by knowing it. He cannot, but the act steadies him.

He widens his focus to the city, searching for sister pulses. There are none visible, but the air feels primed, as if more could bloom if encouraged by neglect. He hates the recognition settling in him: this is new. Not merely to him, not merely to the TVA he dismantled, but to the tree itself. It didn’t grow with the rules he enforces. It falls alongside them, a parallel that doesn’t acknowledge intersection.

The dread sharpens into decision, cold and clean. He cannot fix this from here. The scale is wrong. The touch it requires is not the touch of a god across a thousand miles of meaning, but of a man close enough to feel the draft when a door opens.

He keeps his hands where they are, fingers flattened against the throne to keep from reaching again with power that will not bite. He memorizes the cadence of the pulse—two short, one long, the tease of a pause—and allows himself to accept that he’ll have to hear it up close. He looks once more at Don, at the set of his shoulders as he turns a key in a display ignition, at the small life Loki promised himself he would not disturb. The promise hangs in his mouth, bitter and necessary, and then the gold pricks at the edge of the hour like a smile he can’t ignore.

He sits with the knowledge and the dread together, lets them both root in him. When the light pulses again, he does not answer with more of the same. He does not answer at all. He only listens, and prepares to get up.