Merchant of Death... pfttt. Yeah right.

Intro

When Yggdrasil first came into being in the empty blackness of the void, its twin Death was also born. Death was Life's counterbalance, so whilst Yggdrasil created and nourished life, Death took it away.
However, the people that think there is no rhyme or reason to Death are wrong. Death only took those whose time had come, and it did not like when the balance between life and death was upset, so Death took upon itself the mantle of Yggdrasil's protector.

Death was also an observer to the nine realms, it monitored Yggdrasil's branches and its creations, but as more and more souls were born, Death needed to be in more and more places at once. So Death created the Reapers, they were plentiful in number and constantly growing. The Reapers' job was to guide the souls that they collected to Niflheim.
The souls of Niflheim were ruled over by Hela, one of Death's many underlings, chosen at birth for the very purpose of ruling and maintaining the realm of Niflheim.

When a soul is taken to Niflheim it is judged and placed in an area best suited for them. Niflheim was ever growing, as new religions and beliefs came into being, new sections of the realm were created in accordance with that belief's idea of the afterlife. For Christianity; Heaven where those who had the purest of souls went, and Hell where those who sinned resided. The Æsir's heroic warriors went to Valhalla and the ancient Greeks were divided between the sections of their underworld; the fields of Punishment, Elysium, the fields of Asphodel or Tartarus.

As times changed, so too did Death. Death could take many forms, and was never limited in its options. However it rarely ventured far from Yggdrasil's core, so it began to become restless. After many millennia of isolation, Death decided to venture out into the realms and experience the lives of the inhabitants of Yggdrasil's branches.

So, Death visited the realm of the Æsir, Asgard, and upon the question of how to best experience the life of one of its people it came to the decision to be reborn as an Æsir. As Death took upon the mantle of an Asgardian, it enjoyed the new experience of being among the living, and once one life ended, Death went to a new realm and began a new one. The very decision that Death had made would be one of its greatest yet.

Finally, it became time to travel to Midgard. On Friday, 29th May, 1970, Anthony Edward Stark was born to two parents by the name of Maria and Howard Stark.

The people of Earth could not have guessed at the significance of that singular event in its seemingly eternal history.