In the Light Between the Lines

Loki had died many times. At least he’d experienced death, even if the condition never seemed to stick. It was strange, though, being trapped in the Soul Realm. Unlike the souls that had Faded, he wasn’t dead. When Thanos came for him, he’d known he’d need a plan to make it out in one piece. The Tesseract had been key to his plan; once he figured out where it was, the Time Stone had been equally vital. Although he wasn’t overly fond of its keeper, the green Infinity Gem was a critical part of his plan to defeat Thanos. It had taken plenty of skill, masterful sleight of hand, and a silver tongue, to convince the wizard to let him use the Stone; thankfully, Loki was a master of illusion, and the God of Mischief to boot. So it hadn’t been particularly difficult (although it should’ve been) to get the wizard to give in.

“Where’re we going?” The child, Gamora, stopped. She crossed her arms over her chest, fixing Loki with a piercing stare. “We’ve been walking for hours. Either you tell me where we’re going, or you explain your plan. Until then, I’m staying right here.”

Loki sighed. “If you want anyone to believe you’re not actually a child, stop pouting and making childish threats.”

Gamora glared. It should be odd, Loki thought, to see the sharp, bitter soul of an adult shining through this child’s wide eyes. But when he looked in the mirror, he saw centuries of conflict, anger, and sadness set like chips of green ice in the pale canvas of his own eternally youthful face. Looking at Gamora, Loki felt a pang of recognition. There was something of him in her. An echo of his suffering, his anger, his loneliness and frustration. She was like him, in a way. Maybe in more ways than he knew.

“I’m not moving,” Gamora repeated. She planted her feet, tightening the cross of her arms. Her eyes shone a challenge. “Tell me now. Where are we going?”

Loki pointed to the distant horizon. The eternal, sunless orange sunset cast its dull light over the gray sand and clear, rippling water. “There’s a portal,” he told her, “inside this Realm, leading back to Earth. Have you been to Earth? Lovely place, if you disregard some of the more unpleasant species living there.”

Gamora cocked an eyebrow. She shook her head, red-tipped curls bouncing against her small shoulders. “I know someone from Earth.” There was sadness in her tone. Bitterness, and an undercurrent of longing. “Knew someone.”

Loki watched her for a long moment. He smiled slightly, looking away. “Ah,” he said. “Well, at least you have some sense of the place, then.” There was a beat of silence. He turned toward the horizon and started walking again. “I’ll tell you more,” he said, “if we keep moving. It might seem like there’s no hurry—being dead can put things in perspective, I know—but we’re just a bit pressed for time.” His lips curved into a half-smile around the word time. “The sooner we reach the stairs to the sixth level, the better.”

Gamora shot him a look. “The sixth level? What’re you talking about?”

Loki gestured to the sprawling, flame-colored sky overhead. “It’s an illusion,” he said. “The Soul Realm, or whatever you want to call this place, is made up of seven distinct layers. It’s the same with Midgard, Asgard, Jotunheim…” He trailed off, watching the sky. “Nature has a tendency to arrange itself in hierarchical social and physical structures, I’ve noticed. The Soul Stone’s structure is, in the scheme of things, predictable.”

Gamora frowned. “Which layer are we on now?”

“The fifth.” Loki held up his hand, and Gamora stopped. He bent a knee and brushed his fingers over the silver liquid beneath their feet. He straightened, holding out his hand. The liquid slid over his skin like a living thing. The droplets collected on his fingertips and fell, spinning and glittering, to the ground. Ripples spread, bullseye patterns fading to gentle swells. “When this surface is completely still, you can see reality reflected in it, filtering down through the layers above. When that happens, the Soul Realm and the universe are aligned. Whatever is outside of the Soul Gem can be seen by the souls within.”

There was a long silence. Gamora bent down and trailed her tiny fingers through the oddly viscous liquid. “When that happens,” she began, her tone slow and thoughtful, “we’ll know where Thanos is.”

Loki nodded. He began walking again. “In theory. And then we can put my plan into action.”

Gamora wiped her hands on her pants, jogging to catch up. She fell in by his side, her small body tense and upright. Each step was firm and measured. “You’ve talked a lot about your plan,” she said, “without ever saying anything important. When you figure out Thanos’s location, then what? You said you created a portal to the outside. How? Where? Which level is it on?”

Loki sighed. “That’s the tricky part,” he admitted. “The souls of the creatures Thanos destroyed are trapped on this level. The fifth level houses the newly dead—” he gestured to Gamora, “—such as you. And although I’m not actually dead, I find it to be the most comfortable.”

“Let me guess.” Gamora’s tone held a hint of resignation. “The portal is on the seventh level.”

“Yes.” Loki wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. Although she was trapped in a child’s body, Gamora seemed too quick-witted to fall for anything but the truth. “And unfortunately, the sixth and seventh levels exist to keep souls from crawling back out once they’re trapped inside.”

Gamora was silent for a long moment. “How long will it take,” she asked at last, “for us to reach the portal?”

“For us? It could take years.” Before Gamora could respond (and it looked like she had some unkind things to say about this piece of information), Loki continued, “but for the people outside, Thanos included, it’ll only be a week or two. At the most, we’ll be out of this stone prison within a month.”

“So time runs different here,” Gamora said, her frown deepening. “That doesn’t make sense. I learned everything I could about the Soul Stone. I never heard anything about a time difference.”

Loki smiled. “Oh, no. That’s because the time difference is my doing.”

Gamora looked up. Her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head suspiciously to one side. “How?” she demanded to know.

Loki’s smile turned mischievous. “Thanos attacked my ship, and slaughtered half of the Asgardian people—my people,” he added, with a twisted, humorless half-smile. He cleared his throat and pushed on. “Then he threatened to crush my brother’s head, and, honestly, I wasn’t entirely convinced at first that that wouldn’t make my life a lot easier. But because I need Thor—my brother, that is—alive for my plan to work, I had to save him. Although he doesn’t know it yet, he owes me a lot more than he thinks he does. Which is a lot already.”

Gamora gave him a sideway look. “You know,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, “you should meet my sister. I think you two would get along.”

Loki glanced down at her. “Is that right? I didn’t know you had a sister.”

Gamora shrugged. “Not by blood. I was a daughter of Thanos. She was a daughter of Thanos. I let her down to impress him, and he did horrible things to her for failing him. I didn’t mean for her to suffer, it’s just… well…” She faded off, shaking her head. Her eyes were full of bitter sadness. “Let’s just say I’m beyond invested in seeing Thanos’s smug, ugly head impaled on a spike. Or on my blade, preferably.” She spit to one side, eyes full of fire. “That creature deserves no mercy.”

“And he’ll get none,” Loki said. “Do you want to hear the rest of my plan?”

Gamora raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

Loki hid his smile and continued. “After I averted Thanos’s attention away from my brother by revealing the Tesseract, I just had to wait for my planned diversion to show up. He did, and it worked perfectly. Thanos was distracted just long enough for me to slip away. You see, Thanos was potentially too powerful to be tricked by my magic; his children, however, were much easier to deceive.”

Gamora’s eyes narrowed. He could tell she was trying to work out if this was an underhanded insult or not. She seemed to decide it wasn’t, or that it wasn’t a big enough deal to argue over it. “And then what happened?” she prompted.

“Then I used illusion magic to make it appear as if I were still aboard the ship. While Thanos was wrestling with my distraction, I slipped away. Using the Space Stone, I teleported halfway across the galaxy to Earth. Specifically, to the Sanctum in New York, where a conceited, arrogant, and insufficiently powerful mortal by the name of Stephen Strange was keeping the Time Stone locked away. I met with Strange to discuss Thanos’s arrival, and my plan to stop him.”

The light of realization filled Gamora’s dark eyes. “Oh,” she said. “You used the Time Stone to alter the temporal flow inside the Soul Gem.”

Loki looked down at her, somewhat surprised that she’d caught on so fast. “You’re very bright,” he said, then added, “for a mortal.”

Gamora raised an eyebrow. “You’re very useless,” she said, “for a self-proclaimed god, if you had to ask a mortal for help.”

Loki felt an itch of irritation at this. He straightened his spine and puffed up his chest. “I am more powerful than Thanos and his children combined,” he said haughtily, “and I will not tolerate being talked down to by a three-foot-tall child with what is honestly the worst dip-dye hairstyle I have ever seen in my extensively long existence.”

The three-foot-tall child grinned. “I would think a powerful god would brush off a mortal’s opinions without a thought,” she said. “But you obviously care what I think, don’t you?”

Loki didn’t grace the verbal jab with a response. “Do you want to know how my story ends, or not?”

Gamora shook her head, still smiling. “Fine. Continue. What happened once you got back to the ship? How did you survive Thanos and the Black Order?”

“Ah. That’s the best part.” Loki smirked, getting back into it. “Thanos and his Black Order never knew I was gone. Once I convinced the warlock—Stephen Strange, that is—to use the Time Stone—which was much more difficult than you’d think; my brother was fifteen minutes dead before I convinced Strange to turn time back and do it over again so that he’d survive—it was just a matter of viewing and sorting through as many potential futures as possible and figuring out which actions would lead to which consequences. Out of fourteen million possible futures, the wizard found one series of events resulting in a victory over Thanos. He explained everything to me, saying that he’d have to reverse time, effectively wiping his own memory of our meeting and his revelation about the key to our victory. Strange said that, once Thanos found the Soul Stone, Strange would use the Time Stone to dramatically slow down time within it. That would give those of us trapped inside time to get to my portal and escape before the Infinity Gauntlet dissolves, or explodes, or whatever will happen when its integrity collapses, possibly taking us all out with it.”

Gamora’s eyes widened. “I knew the Gauntlet was malfunctioning,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure what would happen if it failed.”

Loki shrugged. “Oh, nothing major. Just the end of the universe as we know it.” He smiled coyly.

“Then we need to move faster.” Gamora picked up the pace, her little feet leaving faded marks in the gray sand and shimmering, viscous waves. “We’re running out of time.”

“Very, very slowly running out of time,” Loki reminded her, and she slowed back to a fast walk.

“Oh,” she said. “Right.”

“You asked earlier how I managed to escape Thanos,” Loki reminded her. “Do you still want to know?”

“Yes.” Gamora looked up at him, eyes slightly narrowed. “How did you?”

“The wizard put an enchantment on me.” Loki wrinkled up his nose at the memory. It hadn’t been his proudest or most comfortable moment, but it had been necessary. “It allowed me to remember everything we discussed even after he turned back time to the moment I arrived at the Sanctum. I then used the Space Stone to return to the ship, leaving Strange none the wiser. At that point, roughly fifteen seconds had passed since I departed. No one had noticed my absence; my illusions fooled the Black Order completely.” Loki hesitated, wondering how to effectively dramatize the next bit. The end of his story was a touching and tragic one, and he wanted to do it justice. “After visiting New York, I used the Space Stone to open a portal on the seventh level of the Soul Stone. Strange had told me its location, as well as the finer details of the weeks and months that would follow Thanos’s initial victory. In the fifteen seconds I was missing from the ship, I spent a full Earth-year inside the Soul Stone. I planted Projectors—powerful objects capable of projecting a soul back into the physical word—throughout this Realm. The Projectors will allow those of us trapped inside to communicate with allies on the outside. I don’t know if you’ve seen them around, but they’re about the size of a Dwarf’s fist, and glowing orange.”

Gamora shook her head. “I haven’t seen them,” she admitted.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re with me; you don’t need them.” Loki held his head up, lengthening his stride slightly. “Anyway, once the Projectors were in place, I returned to the ship. Thanos took the Space Stone, but he was too late. Already, my plan was in full effect. In fact, him taking the stone was a big part of it.” Loki smirked at the memory of adrenaline and rushing, heart-thudding power that had accompanied that first moment of victory. “Thanos believed he’d defeated us. To stop him from killing my brother, I pretended to offer fealty to him and his cause. Knowing that he would sense a trap and attempt to kill me, I stood back in the shadows, using illusion magic on the body of a similarly-shaped and already-deceased Asgardian man. Thanos, caught up in the moment and in the rush of his new power, did not see through my illusion. He strangled the life from a dead man’s body, then tossed it aside, thinking he had killed me once and for all. And then, knowing Thanos would realize his mistake eventually, I returned to the portal I’d opened at the far end of the ship and stepped through into the Soul Realm moments before Thanos took full control of the Space Stone, causing the portal to close behind me. I’m not sure how fast the illusions on the corpse wore off after that, but it’s very possible—probable, even, given his rather limited intelligence—that my brother thinks I’m dead. Which wasn’t my intention, but it might be for the best. He’s a terrible secret-keeper, and an even worse liar.”

Gamora stared up at him with the intensity of a hunting falcon as he finished his tale. “It was a good plan,” she said. Her tone took on a hint of grudging respect. “Thanos still doesn’t know you beat him. If he’d suspected you were still alive, I’m sure I would’ve heard about it.”

Loki smiled, satisfied. “Thanos considers himself invincible. God-like. But he’s not a god, and he never will be. He’s mortal, and his plans are as weak and short-lived as mortal plans usually are. His limited understanding of the immense power he wields will be his undoing.”

Gamora nodded. “Thank you,” she said after a moment, “for giving me this chance.”

“From what I’ve heard,” Loki replied, “you have the best claim on Thanos’s life. You and your sister, who I would very much like to meet.”

There was another long moment of silence. “When we reach the sixth level, what’ll be waiting for us there?” Gamora asked.

“The Soul Stone will defend itself,” Loki explained. “To put it crudely, you’re like bacteria crawling into an infected cut. Hallucinations, recreations of painful memories, psychosis, confusion, and madness wait above. The Soul Stone is, for all intents and purposes, sentient. It is the most powerful of the Infinity Stones; its excess power comes from trapped souls. It won’t easily give up that power.”

Loki watched out of the corner of his eye as Gamora threw back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and set her jaw. “I’ll face anything,” she said, her voice low and dangerous, “to kill that monster for what he’s done.”

“Hold onto that anger,” Loki told her. “Revenge is a powerful motivator. It can raze cities to the ground and bring armies to their knees.”

“Revenge is powerful,” Gamora echoed, “but love is stronger. It is my love for my sister, for Peter Quill, and for the family I’ve made that will be Thanos’s undoing. When I kill him, and I will kill him, I want the last thing he sees to be my face. I want him to look in my eyes and see how much I can love, to see the depth of that feeling, and to know the truth. To know that I could have loved him, that I was capable of it all along. And to realize that I never did.”

Loki looked at her for a long, contemplative moment. “I can’t tell you how this ends,” he said. “But I promise you do play a significant part in killing Thanos. Hopefully that’s enough to convince you to fight your way past the Stone’s defenses and return to the realm of the living.”

“I don’t need convincing.” Gamora’s face was set in an expression of dark, fierce determination. “I’ve been waiting all my life to be free. When this is over, I will be.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Loki stopped. He gestured to a faint, mist-shrouded object rising out of the gray plains ahead. “Because those are the stairs to hell.”

Gamora smiled grimly. She clenched her little hands into fists. Without a word or a glance back at Loki, she marched across the glistening, rippling plain toward the shrouded stairs.