He Who Remains

Some questions are small. "Where are my shoes?" "What's for dinner?" "Do you want a hug?"

Some questions are big. "Why was I born?" "What am I supposed to do with my life?" "Is the world fair, and if not, who decides?"

And then there are the questions so big that asking them changes everything.

The question Loki and Sylvie were about to ask was the biggest of all. WHO was running the Time Variance Authority? WHY did the multiverse have only one approved timeline? WHOSE rules were these, anyway?

To get the answer, they were going to have to go to the strangest place in all of reality.

Let me set the scene.

Loki and Sylvie had been captured and dragged back to the TVA. The cells were waiting. The questioning was waiting. Mobius was confused and angry and a little hurt that his strange Loki friend had run off with the dangerous Variant. Even Hunter B-15 was wrestling with new feelings — Sylvie had earlier, in a moment of magic, accidentally let B-15 see a glimpse of her own real life on the sacred timeline, before the TVA had snatched her up. B-15 was beginning to understand that the TVA had been lying to her. To everyone.

So when the moment came, B-15 quietly opened a door. Loki and Sylvie slipped out. They grabbed a TemPad. And they aimed it at the strangest coordinate any TVA officer had ever seen. A place that wasn't supposed to exist. A place at the edge of the multiverse itself.

The Citadel at the End of Time.

They pressed the button.

ZWOOOOP.

They appeared in the Void.

Now you might be wondering — what is the Void? It's a place at the very edge of everything. Outside time. Outside the sacred timeline. It's where the TVA sends the things they prune. Pruned cars. Pruned coffee shops. Pruned animals. Pruned people. All of them, dropped into this junkyard at the end of the multiverse to be forgotten.

And circling overhead, in the gray-purple sky of the Void, was Alioth — an enormous swirling purple cloud-monster. Alioth was the TVA's biggest secret. Alioth ate everything that came to the Void. Alioth was why nobody had ever come back from being pruned to tell the story.

The Void was a graveyard. With a cloud-monster for a guard.

Loki and Sylvie had to get past Alioth to climb to the Citadel that floated on a tiny rocky island past the edge of the universe.

That was not easy. Alioth was vast. It moved like smoke and like a hurricane all at once. But Sylvie had a gift — she could enchant things, slip into their minds with her magic. She lured Alioth's attention, while Loki created illusions to confuse it. Together they distracted the great cloud long enough to slip past.

They reached the staircase.

The staircase wound up and up and up, into a sky of swirling purple light. They climbed it together, side by side. The wind tugged at their coats. The stone of the staircase was old and cracked. The Citadel rose ahead of them, dark and quiet, like a small castle built at the end of the world.

At the top was a tall heavy door.

Loki and Sylvie looked at each other. They had no idea what they would find inside. An army? A throne room? A monster? A god? They steadied themselves. They pushed the door open.

CREEEAAAK.

The hall inside was old and beautiful, lit by tall windows, with marble floors and a long carved table at the far end.

And at the table — sitting calmly, completely alone — was a man eating an apple.

CRUNCH.

He looked up. He smiled. He had the friendly, tired face of someone who had been waiting a long time.

"Hi," he said. "You're here. Come on in. Pull up a chair. There's a lot to talk about."

This was He Who Remains.

He was, he explained, the man who had been holding the entire multiverse together by himself for a very long time. He told them his story, slowly, while munching on his apple. He had not always been alone. Long ago, many versions of him had lived across the multiverse. Some of them were kind. Some of them were terrible. The terrible ones had started a war — the Multiversal War — and the universes had nearly destroyed each other.

He had survived. He had won. And in the aftermath, he had made a hard choice. He had built the TVA. He had set up the sacred timeline. He had decided that the only way to prevent another Multiversal War was to allow exactly ONE timeline to grow, and to prune anything that strayed off it. The Variants. The branches. The poor people who had done nothing wrong except be born in a slightly different version of the universe.

It was awful. He admitted it. But, he said, the alternative was a war so big nothing would survive.

"Now," he said, leaning forward, "you've come a long way. You've been brave. And I owe you a real choice. Here it is."

He held up one finger.

"Option one. You kill me. The TVA collapses. The multiverse blossoms into a million wild branches. Some of them grow into beautiful new universes. Some of them grow into terrifying new versions of me — versions who are not as friendly. They will come. There will be war."

He held up a second finger.

"Option two. You take my chair. You sit here. You keep doing what I've been doing. The pruning. The sacred timeline. You become the new keeper of the multiverse. Peaceful, but at a cost."

Sylvie went very still.

She had spent her whole life on the run because of this man. She had been a little girl in her bedroom when his TVA came for her. She had eaten in dumpsters. She had hidden in disasters. Every friend she had ever had was dead because of the TVA.

She wanted to kill him.

But Loki — and this is the surprising part of the story — Loki hesitated.

Because Loki had changed. The Loki who had landed in the desert and gotten arrested and put on the orange jumpsuit — that was a Loki who would have happily killed He Who Remains and grabbed the throne in the same motion. But this Loki, the Loki who had spent weeks with Mobius asking himself hard questions, the Loki who had watched the sky fall on Lamentis-1 next to Sylvie, the Loki who knew what it was to actually care about another person — THIS Loki paused.

Because he understood, suddenly, that chaos has a cost. He had loved chaos his whole life. But chaos always meant somebody else paying the price.

He turned to Sylvie. He tried to talk her down.

"Wait," he said. "Sylvie. WAIT. We don't know what comes next. We don't know what other versions of him will come through. We could be — we could be making it worse."

"You can't trust him," Sylvie said.

"I'm not asking you to trust him. I'm asking you to wait. Just for a minute. So we can think."

They argued.

They argued in the great hall of the Citadel at the End of Time, while He Who Remains sat at his table and finished his apple, watching them with patient, tired eyes.

And then Sylvie made her choice.

She stepped close to Loki. She looked at him with all the sadness in the multiverse in her eyes. She kissed him — gently, sadly, just for a second — and while he was still off-balance, she pushed him backward through a portal she had opened behind him with her free hand.

The portal snapped shut. The last thing Loki saw before it closed was Sylvie's face, and behind her, He Who Remains rising from his chair, raising his hands.

Then Sylvie struck.

And the multiverse cracked open.

CRRRACK. Branches shot out in every direction. Timelines that had been pruned for ages came roaring back. New universes, new realities, new versions of everything, blossomed across the great map of existence. The walls of the Citadel began to break apart.

Loki landed on his hands and knees, back at the TVA.

He looked around.

The TVA was not the TVA he had left.

There were enormous statues in the lobby. Statues of someone he had never seen before — but who looked a lot like He Who Remains. The officers were wearing different uniforms. The signage was different. Mobius walked past and did not recognize him. Hunter B-15 walked past and did not recognize him.

The variant universes had been freed. New versions of He Who Remains were already rising in some of them. Some were called Kang the Conqueror. Some had stranger names. They were the start of a great new conflict — the Multiversal War, the thing He Who Remains had spent ages trying to prevent.

Loki, in the middle of a TVA that no longer remembered him, stood up slowly.

His friends were gone.

The system he had just begun to understand was already broken.

And somehow — somehow — it was now up to him to fix it.

He had no idea, yet, what fixing it would cost him. But he was about to find out.

Sleep well, little listener. Tomorrow's story is the biggest one yet.

The story of Loki, alone in the dark, becoming the most important being in the entire multiverse.

Goodnight.