Disclaimer: I do not own any of Marvel's characters; all elements belong to their respective creators.

Loki's P.O.V (point of view)

I thought I knew what evil meant. I supposed that it would always be clearly defined, easy for me to see what the line was between the malignant and the benign but, as I have discovered, it is not that intelligible.

As a boy, still naïve to the fact that I would never be king, I spent hours studying philosophy, furnishing myself with the menticulture that I believed a basic necessity in all quintessential sovereigns.

In all my studies, there was always the clear line between what was evil and what was good. There was no polysemy, all things were portrayed as black and white. None of the brilliant literati of yore ever thought to warn the young and the foolish of the vague and easily missed moral trap-doors which led many an unsuspecting individual to stray into the perverse, none realizing the peril until there was no return. It was to these vague traps I fell.

As I grew, I fought harder and harder to become my Father's heir, pushing myself to collapse in training and wearily devoting myself to my studies, vainly forcing myself to try to comprehend the nuances of science, battle strategy, civics, history, languages and ideology.

I lived and breathed to become the next ruler of Asgard but all it served to accomplish was to amass a wealthd of self-spite as Thor easily surpassed me in all areas of learning, both physical and mental.

No matter how determinedly I martyred myself for the contingency of taking the mantle of kingship, I could not stay astride my brother in this undeclared tournament with the crown as the prize.

I had always been slow, always the slower in battle, always far behind my brother in learning. I was not simple-minded, no, although I did not learn well from books, I was instinctual and cunning. It was this cunning that I began to use to try to give me an edge in this competition.

I began to lie. Small lies at first but slowly they became bigger lies. Lies told in order to keep up the charade that I was Thor's equal if not better and therefore maintain a chance for myself to become king.

As I accrued a greater lust for the crown, the boundary betwixt the light and the dark became foggier for me as my years of life wore on. As my acerbity and rancor matured, the scruples within me un-obtrusively fell away. Absent of thought, I banished my affection and sentiment of Thor from being factors in my decisions, instead replacing them with the far less painful lens of self advancing rationale.

No matter how I changed over the years I still felt assured that I was inherently doing what was altruistic; I was protecting Asgard from Thor's priggishness and gall.

I had not been cognizant of the decampment of my emotions until the day I learned that Thor had been chosen as the next king of Asgard. To my surprise I had felt nothing but jealousy and anger. No happiness for my brother, who, though immature, would soon be the most powerful ruler in the universe, nothing but my rage, suddenly alerting me to the bitter ache of emptiness where my heart and soul should have been.

That night, I laid in my bed, mentally groping through the darkest corners of my heart and mind reaching for the soul I had lost, only to find nothing, nothing but the throbbing pain of the void within my breast.

That was the day I had lost my soul. That was the day I realized that I was evil. I was no more of the light.

Author's Note: I know that Loki is often written as being more intelligent than Thor as well as having a far more tragic childhood but I felt that this was a more realistic interpretation of what led him to become evil.