The Watcher has a terrible morning in Marvel’s new What If... Loki Was Worthy

26.03.2024 - 21:05 / polygon.com

The Marvel multiverse is going literary.

In a new series of What If...? books that leave the comics behind, authors from across the genre spectrum will crack their knuckles and mess with the comic publisher’s continuum of heroes and villains. First up: What If… Loki Was Worthy?from Madeleine Roux (the Asylum series), a novel that finds Thor dead, New York in flames, Tony Stark on a warpath wielding Asgardian tech, and Loki banished to Earth, enduring a life of “boxed wine, instant noodles, and some sort of regional performance troupe known as the Buffalo Bills.” Loki did an oopsie, and Roux’s book explores whether he’s worthy enough to make things right. Valkyrie will be along for the ride.

Before What If… Loki Was Worthy? hits bookstores and other outlets on April 2, Polygon has a piece of the puzzle to share: the story’s prologue, which whisks readers into a particularly anxious moment in the life of the Watcher. If you thought running out of coffee was a five-alarm start to a morning, read on for how things could be so much worse.

It had been exactly nine hundred and sixty-seven years since the Watcher had detected something approximating surprise scratching at the edge of her consciousness. To be the Watcher was to become an observer, a stranger, not just to events but to emotions. Surprised, she thought, how odd, first amused, and then quickly alarmed. She twisted away from her idle musings and toward that vague suggestion of a feeling. Surprise. What could it mean? Was it a prediction? An omen? A warning?

She had been meditating on loss, and the irony of the Watcher losing even the experience of loss itself. The Watcher ruminated on this thought for some decades, self-indulgent, she knew, but her job was to exist and monitor, not to interfere. It then occurred to her that perhaps the itching scratching nagging surprise had been there for a long time, lingering at the fringes, like an anxious, bouncing child waiting for her mother to notice her presence.

Have I been contemplating, or have I been asleep?

The unfathomable number of universes within the Multiverse available to her sight unrolled before them, spreading out in an arc, as pleasing and orderly as a magician fanning out their cards. Worlds abundant, desolate, oceanic, volcanic, utopian discordant, thriving, and ravaged could be seen, each as colorful, strange, and mysterious as those same magician’s cards. No, not mysterious; nothing was unseen or unknown to the Watcher. She had assumed that when the mantle landed on her shoulders, such omniscience would bring peace, and perhaps for a moment (a true moment to us, a mere millennium to her), it did. Such things faded. As all things did. As all these worlds visible to her eventually