The Mind Stone Scepter

There is a long lonely stretch of Loki's life that happens between two big things. On one side, the secret of being a Frost Giant. On the other side, the great big mess that everyone calls the Battle of New York. In between, Loki fell. And the falling — that is where the trouble started.

You may have heard already that Loki, in a moment of terrible hurt, let go of the Bifrost. He fell off the broken rainbow bridge at the edge of Asgard and tumbled through the cold dark spaces between worlds. He did not die. But he was lost for a long time. Drifting. Alone. With nothing but his thoughts for company.

And his thoughts were not gentle company.

When you are very hurt, and very lonely, and you have nothing to do but think about everything that went wrong, your thoughts can become like wolves. They circle. They grow hungry. They tell you stories about yourself that are not true.

Loki was thinking many wolfish thoughts when he was finally found.

He was found by someone far worse than himself.

His name was Thanos. He was a purple titan, with a heavy chin and a kind of slow, terrible patience. He lived on a rocky world in the dark, and he sat upon a stone throne, and when he spoke, the air around him rumbled. He was the sort of villain who made other villains nervous. He had a daughter named Gamora and another named Nebula, but he did not really love them. He loved one thing, and one thing only — the Infinity Stones. There were six of them, and he wanted them all.

Thanos looked at Loki and he smiled, very slowly, in a way that was not warm at all.

"You are a long way from home, little prince of Asgard," he said. "Perhaps we can help one another."

Thanos gave Loki a long golden scepter. At the tip of the scepter was a curved blade, and set inside the blade was a stone that glowed bright blue. That stone was the Mind Stone — one of the six. And it could touch the inside of someone's head and change what they thought.

"Take this to Earth," Thanos said. "There is a small planet there, run by small creatures. They have something I want — a glowing blue cube called the Tesseract. Bring it back to me. In return, I will give you an army of Chitauri warriors. You may rule the planet. You may have the throne you have always wanted."

Loki took the scepter.

Now, here is the part of the story that took a long time for everybody to understand. The scepter was not just a weapon. The Mind Stone was alive in its own quiet way, and it was very good at finding hurts inside a person and pressing on them.

"You are above them," it whispered to Loki as he traveled. "You were born to rule. They are ants. They will love you, once they kneel."

Loki listened. He was tired, and he was angry, and he had no one to talk to. The voice in the scepter sounded almost like his own voice. He could not tell where his own thinking stopped and the Stone's whispering began.

This is important. Loki was not blameless. He made choices. But he was also being used by something much bigger than him, in ways he could not fully see at the time.

The Tesseract was hidden in a SHIELD laboratory on Earth. Loki appeared there, stepped out of a glowing portal — POOM! — and took the cube. He pointed the scepter at the agents in the room. One of them was named Clint Barton, but everyone called him Hawkeye. The Mind Stone touched Hawkeye, and Hawkeye's eyes went a strange foggy blue, and he became Loki's temporary helper.

Loki traveled to Germany. In a city called Stuttgart, he stood in a crowd of frightened people and ordered them all to kneel. He thought, in that moment, that this was what victory felt like. The whispering of the scepter was loud in his ears. But somewhere underneath, in a small unwhispered place, even Loki could tell something was off. The crowd kneeling did not feel like worship. It felt like fear.

And then the Avengers showed up.

There were six of them, and Loki had not really planned for six.

There was Iron Man, Tony Stark, in a red and gold flying suit. There was Captain America, Steve Rogers, with his round vibranium shield. There was Thor, of course — Loki's own brother, hammer raised, eyes furious. There was Black Widow, very quiet and very dangerous. There was Hawkeye, who had been freed from the Mind Stone's control. And there was Hulk. Enormous, green, and not in a great mood.

The six Avengers argued with each other for most of the early part of the story. Loki, secretly, helped them argue. He whispered things into the Helicarrier hallways. He used the scepter to stir up bad feelings. He thought, "This is easy. They will fall apart by themselves."

But they did not fall apart.

Loki opened the portal in the sky over Manhattan with the Tesseract. The Chitauri came pouring through — flying scooters, giant armored space-whales, soldiers with strange weapons. The city below filled with smoke and shouting and crumbled glass.

And the Avengers stood.

They fought together for the first time in their lives — six strangers becoming a team in real time. Iron Man flew with a nuclear missile up through the portal. Black Widow climbed onto a Chitauri scooter and steered it to where she needed to go. Hawkeye fired arrows that exploded. Thor swung Mjolnir. Captain America gave instructions. Hulk smashed.

By the end of the day, the Chitauri were gone. The portal closed. The army retreated.

And Loki was alone again — small and bruised and hiding in Stark Tower.

This is where the funny part happens. Even after everything, Loki could not stop being a little dramatic. Hulk found him standing in the penthouse lounge, and Loki tried to start a villain speech.

"ENOUGH!" Loki shouted, drawing himself up to his full height. "I am a god, and I will not be bullied by —"

Hulk did not let him finish.

Hulk grabbed Loki by the ankles. He swung Loki up. He swung Loki down. THUD! He swung Loki up. He swung Loki down. THUD! Again and again, side to side, until Loki was lying flat on his back in a Loki-shaped crater in the marble floor, breathing very shallowly.

Hulk walked off muttering one of the most famous lines in all of Marvel.

"Puny god."

The scepter was taken away from Loki. The Tesseract was taken away. Loki himself was taken back to Asgard in glowing chains, with a metal muzzle over his mouth so he could not talk his way out of anything.

It would be many years before Loki understood what had really happened on that long lonely fall. That Thanos had been steering him. That the Mind Stone had been whispering things in his ear that were not his own thoughts. He had still done wrong — he had still hurt people — but he had also been used.

And when he finally understood it, the complicated shame he felt was nothing like a clean simple sadness. It was tangled. It had threads of anger and threads of regret and threads of stubborn defiance all knotted together.

But here is the important part.

The little boy who had once turned apples into snakes in his mother's library, the one who had loved stories before he loved tricks — that boy was still inside Loki, somewhere. Quiet. Listening. Waiting.

Waiting for the moment when Loki would finally pick up the pen of his own story and write himself a different ending.

That moment was still a long way off. But it was coming.