November 14, 2013
Arthur stepped out of nothing onto a dead world.
He did not arrive with the crack of Apparition, nor did he step through the sparking golden ring of an Eldritch portal. It was something different, because it did not look like Arthur had casr any magic at all. It was as though a crack in space had been sitting there on its own, one he had not made and could not have made, and he had simply stepped out of it.
The sky above was a deep bruised purple from one horizon to the other. The ground under his boots was grey dust and crushed stone, and it stayed where he disturbed it, because there was no wind on this world and had not been for a long time.
He stood in the silence and pushed a wave of sensing magic outward.
It rolled away from him across the plain, over the curve of the horizon, thinning as it spread, reading the whole dead ball of rock for miles in every direction.
He waited for a response. He waited for the distinct resonance of something ancient.
Nothing came back. No red anywhere on this world. Nothing that answered.
Arthur sighed.
"Not this one either," he said, to nobody at all.
He turned around, took hold of the empty space in front of him, and stepped back into the void.
That made ten.
—
Back in the workshop, Arthur ticked another location off on the holographic screen.
A dozen maps turned slowly in the air in front of him. Eve had been tracking the anomalies since the first one, and she had been thorough about it, sweeping every strange rumor on the planet and sorting the handful that were real out of the mountain that wasn't. It was the only reason he had any idea where to look at all.
The whole cosmic mess had started forty-eight hours ago. Gravity going wrong in small pockets of London. A car resting three inches above the pavement for eleven seconds. Children in a stairwell in Southwark finding a landing that opened onto somewhere else. Things vanishing out of sealed rooms and coming back hours later in the wrong order.
Arthur had known exactly what it was the moment the first report hit his screens.
The Convergence.
His memories of the life before this one were water in cupped hands after so long. Whatever he had once known about this had come from a film he had watched with half his attention, and half-attention thins to nothing across over thirty years.
Thankfully, he had not needed to rely on the film.
He had spent whole seasons in the Asgardian archives with the alignment texts, written by scholars who had watched the thing happen twice, and who had been precise about the astronomy and vague and frightened about everything else. And three weeks ago Harry had brought him a prophecy from a centaur, to say that nine wanderers were coming to one meeting.
The nine realms were falling into line. The walls between the worlds were coming open. It happened exactly once in five thousand years, and it was happening this week.
And with the Convergence came Malekith, the Dark Elves, the Aether… or the Reality Stone.
Another Infinity Stone. Another ancient enemy. Possibly another alien invasion on Earth. His quiet season, which had run several very good months, was over.
So for two days he had been chasing the anomalies as they surfaced, looking for one particular door in one particular abandoned building, and he had no idea which. The archives gave him the astronomy and nothing else. The film had given him a room with a stone in it and no address at all.
Which left doing it by hand. Opening and stepping through them one at a time, wherever Eve found one, scattered randomly across half of Europe.
Ten of them so far. Every one had led to dust.
His reasons for the search were simple enough, and they were not at all the obvious ones.
He did not want the Aether. He did not need the power. Not anymore. He had enough of it already to keep his wife and his children and his sprawling ridiculous family safe from very nearly anything the universe was likely to send, and more than that was not something Arthur lay awake dreaming about.
But not needing a thing is a poor reason to leave it lying around.
Because the alternative was Malekith holding the Reality Stone, and Malekith succeeding, and the universe returned to the primordial dark it had spent every year since climbing out of. That was not something a man got to shrug at and ignore.
So he would find it first, he would take it, he would lock it away securely in the dark, and he would quietly accept exactly what that made him.
The owner of four Infinity Stones.
He remembered Odin's warning in the Vault perfectly, and over the years he had grown wise enough to listen to warnings. He was not the arrogant, frightened child anymore, reborn into a magical universe and grabbing at every advantage within reach because being the strongest felt like the only safe thing to be. He knew more now. He understood the scale of what he was standing next to.
He knew more than the comics and the films had ever told him, too. They had made six stones in one gauntlet look like an engineering problem. It wasn't. Nothing in the archives of two civilizations recorded a single soul who had ever done it, which meant every word written on the subject was theory written by people guessing from a safe distance. Arthur had read all of it, and everything he understood said the same thing. If all six were ever brought together and used, the consequences would be beyond anything he could plan around.
He was not going to let it happen. He loved his family, and he was not going to let Thanos or anybody else cut his universe in half.
So he knew the risks.
The trouble was that the stones kept coming anyway. He had gone looking for exactly one of them, the Power Stone, years ago and on purpose. The rest simply arrived, one at a time, delivered to his doorstep like a series of letters he had never asked for.
Sometimes he wondered whether something out there was curious to see what he would do with them.
And there was the other half of it, which had nothing to do with Malekith or the Dark Elves at all.
Even if every Dark Elf stayed dead in his ship until the stars went out, the thing would still be lying in some forgotten place with the doors standing open. Waiting. Not for an army. For one curious person to walk down a dark corridor and find out what was on the other side of it.
He had thought about that long enough to do something about it.
Three days ago he had asked Thor, plainly, to keep Jane Foster away from the anomalies. Thor had promised to try. Thor had also admitted, with the rueful honesty of a man who had already lost this argument several times, that when Jane was inside her work she forgot food and sleep and weather and gods, and that a warning handed to her was less an instruction than a note left on a table.
Arthur had accepted that, because there was nothing else on offer. He had learned the hard way that he could not run the world by hand. He gave the warning, and if the warning was ignored, he would still be there to keep the worst of it from landing. That was the arrangement he had made with himself years ago and it had held up well enough.
It would have been simpler for everyone if people just listened the first time.
"Eleven," he said, and stepped into the thin place.
—
The eleventh world had two suns and no air at all, and Arthur had been standing under them for nine seconds when he felt the trace go dark.
Not trigger. A trigger he would have instantly known and even felt from the other side of a galaxy.
This went quiet instead. It went quiet the way a voice goes quiet when someone walks around a corner and keeps walking out of earshot.
He reached after it and found nothing in either direction. No snap. No moment. No last known position. Just a thread that had been there and now was not, and no answer anywhere as to when it had stopped being there.
The vanishing trace was Jane Foster's.
Arthur was back on Earth in a fraction of a second.
"Report."
"Dr. Foster is missing." Eve had it up before he finished asking. "Doctor Selvig called Director Fury five minutes ago. Selvig, Foster and Miss Lewis were investigating a cluster of gravitational anomalies inside a derelict factory in Camden. She walked away from the group and did not come back. Fury forwarded it to your secure channel ninety seconds after receiving it."
Arthur closed his eyes for the length of one breath.
He had a dozen questions. Why she had gone. What she had been thinking. What Thor had said to her, or failed to say, or said in the wrong order on the wrong evening.
Not one of those questions was worth four seconds of his time right now.
"Coordinates."
—
Camden was raining.
Arthur arrived in the courtyard outside the gates, in the mud and the noise, with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents sweeping the ground under floodlights and Selvig shouting at one of them and Darcy Lewis shouting back at Selvig while holding three phones and a metal probe.
He went past all of it without announcing himself. There was no time.
He pushed his senses through the building as he moved, past the rusted machinery and the holes in the roof, and found the tears in the fabric of space. Three of them. Two with agents standing around them under lights and instruments, and one thirty feet away behind a fallen concrete pillar, in the dark, with nobody near it at all.
Arthur went straight through the third one.