The Watcher has a terrible morning in Marvel’s new What If…? story

The Marvel multiverse is turning literary.

In a new series of What If…? Books that leave comics behind will see authors from across the genre spectrum cracking their knuckles and messing with the comic publisher’s continuum of heroes and villains. First: What if… Loki was worth it? from Madeleine Roux (the Asylum series), a novel in which Thor is found dead, New York goes up in flames, Tony Stark goes to war with Asgardian technology, and Loki is banished to Earth, where he lives a life of ‘box wine, instant noodles and sort of from a regional performance group known as the Buffalo Bills.” Loki did an oopsie, and Roux’s book explores whether he’s worthy enough to set things right. Valkyrie comes along for the ride.

For What if… Loki was worth it? will be available in bookstores and other stores on April 2. Polygon has one piece of the puzzle to share: the story’s prologue, which takes readers into a particularly fearful moment in the Watcher’s life. If you thought running out of coffee was a five-alarm morning, read on to find out how it can be much worse.

It had been exactly nine hundred and sixty-seven years since the Watcher had discovered something that scratched the edge of her consciousness like a surprise. To be the Watcher meant to become an observer, a stranger, not only to events but also to emotions. Surprised, she thought, how strange, first amused and then quickly alarmed. She turned away from her idle musings and focused on that vague suggestion of a feeling. Surprise. What could it mean? Was it a prediction? An omen? A warning?

She had meditated on the loss, and on the irony of the Watcher losing even the experience of the loss itself. The Watcher brooded over this thought for decades, self-indulgently, she knew, but her job was to exist and monitor, not interfere. Then it occurred to her that perhaps the itchy, scratching, nagging surprise had been there for a long time, hanging on the edge, like an anxious, bouncing child waiting for her mother to notice her presence.

Have I been thinking, or have I been sleeping?

The unfathomable number of universes within the Multiverse available to her eyes unfolded before them, spreading out in an arc, as pleasant and orderly as a magician fanning their cards. Worlds could be seen that were bountiful, desolate, oceanic, volcanic, utopian, dissonant, flourishing, and devastated, each as colorful, strange, and mysterious as the cards of that same magician. No, not mysterious; nothing was unseen or unknown to the Watcher. She had assumed that such omniscience would bring peace if the mantle fell on her shoulders, and perhaps for a moment (a real moment for us, just a millennium for her) it did. Such things faded away. As all things did. As all these worlds visible to her would eventually happen. The Watcher sought and was guided by this feeling of ‘surprise’. Where did it come from? And why was she getting a sinking feeling now, a feeling that suggested her attention was too late?

This is pointless – I can’t be surprised. I know everything that has happened, will happen or is happening. And yet… And yet.

Her mind scanned the cards, searching the infinite, and a warm wave flowed through her, starting at her fingertips and ending at her scalp. As her eyes closed and the search continued, shocking bursts of color burst against her eyelids, followed by a scent.

Known. Comforting. Impossible.

Cinnamon and then something rich and biting that blew towards her on a cold morning breeze. A bell rang. A chant grew, magic words, sacred words. “Day leaves certainly grow. Day leaves certainly grow… ”

A being so powerful was not used to feeling powerless, but something still grabbed her. The smell. The bubbles. The singing. Before the eyes of the Watcher, the deck of universes, of worlds, was sharpened into individual rectangles, each decorated with symbols and numbers. A memory tugged at her from beyond her own existence. Unbelievable that it existed before her. How? Her hands hovered over the worlds that had, quite clearly, become maps. Cards covered with symbols. As if magnetized, her hands floated here and there, pulled, drawn, and finally anchored above one card.

The Guardian’s hands pressed down on the map; her senses were overwhelmed again. Images flashed quickly through her mind: a flowering tree suddenly withered, covered in disease and rot. The tree disappeared into the dust, giving way to a fall of chalices that tumbled and clinked and clattered onto a floor littered with blood-stained swords.

This was a memory, she knew it with absolute certainty, but still it couldn’t be. Nothing came before the Watcher. Soft, papery hands grasped hers and drew her attention upward, and there the Watcher saw a shadowy presence presiding over this mess of cups and swords. The stranger stared down at her and the Watcher sensed that she was not alone. Yes, this presence had taken her hands, but there was also one standing next to the Watcher, whose youth and vitality were as strong as the wild, bold flash of a solar nebula that produced a sun.

Just as suddenly as the statues and strangers had arrived and seized the Watcher, they had disappeared again. Alone again in the neutral, unbroken wilderness of space and time. She was alone, but not empty-handed. The Watcher had not felt her breathing or heartbeat for centuries, and slowly, perhaps a week later, she returned to herself. When she did, she was still holding the card, the card that conveyed a single, exciting emotion: surprise.

Something’s going to change thought the Watcher. Something is about to break.

On the card, a tree blossomed above her palms. Yggdrasil, the World Tree. It had not yet withered and imploded, as the disturbing visions had predicted, but there, almost imperceptibly, there on a high, tall branch, a green leaf shuddered and yellowed, clinging precariously to its home.

Yggdrasil could mean many things, but the Watcher, as he often does, had a suspicion.

So many worlds, so little time. Infinite possibilities, creating infinite realities. Long have I watched the trickster god sow chaos, why should his hunger for madness draw my attention now?

The small leaf on the big tree on a map the size of a world trembled again and began to fall.

Something is about to change. Something is about to break.