Arthur tried to steady himself. He tried to breathe.
He managed neither.
He had a high tolerance for pain. He had earned it the expensive way, over and over again, through gruelling rituals and injuries that should have killed him. He knew where his limits sat. He had spent his whole adult life pushing them further out.
This pain was completely past the line, and it was still climbing.
But he could still think, and he could still manage to move, which was more than most men would have managed. All that tolerance was good for something after all.
He reached for his magic to steady his thrashing heartbeat, and that was where he found the problem.
It did not come.
Not blocked. Not drained. He could vividly feel every strand of his power exactly where it had always been, but not one of them answered. Because not one of them was free to answer. His magic was occupied with something else entirely.
So he stopped pulling uselessly and looked closely instead. And what he found made no sense at all.
The Aether was not actively attacking him. There was no enemy here.
It had not forced its way into him as a conqueror. It had simply sensed the faint, lingering cosmic echoes of Space and Power and Mind woven deep through him, and to the Aether, Arthur Hayes had not been a jailer or a threat or even a man.
He had been the perfect vessel. By far the best one it had ever seen.
So it had poured inside him, spread out through every part of him, and happily settled down to rest. And that was all it did. Exactly as it had in Jane. Exactly as it had in Malekith. It had gone in and gone to sleep, doing nothing whatsoever, the way it had done nothing for thousands of years.
Which meant the agony currently tearing his body apart was not the Aether's conscious doing at all.
It was his own.
Arthur's body and magic were uniquely special, and that was the source of the whole disaster. Bringing the Aether into a core already touched by Space, Power and Mind had unwittingly completed a circuit he had never known existed. The Aether did not have to act. It did not have to want anything. Its mere physical presence was the catalyst.
It had instantly triggered a spontaneous, unstoppable magical resonance.
His magic was evolving. Expanding, deepening, ascending toward a true cosmic tier. In pure magical theory it was a miraculous breakthrough. The ultimate transcendent upgrade, arriving on its own. Free. Unasked for.
His teenage self would have wept with joy for it.
After what the Space Stone had done to him in that desert so long ago, the boy had dreamed hungrily of exactly this. All six Infinity Stones, one after another, evolving his magic into something that stood level with cosmic beings of the universe.
The boy had not known any better. The man did.
The man had done the math, and the math definitively said no.
Because despite the reconstitution ritual, despite the chi of K'un-Lun, despite the dragon's heart, despite years of conditioning under Ancient Magic and Death energies, his mortal frame still had a ceiling. A human body, however brilliantly reinforced, was still human, and it could not safely carry magic evolved by even two Infinity Stones.
Not even two. And he was currently sitting at four.
He had learned that specific lesson honestly and painfully. His early tests with the Power Stone had very nearly killed him, which was why every year of work since had gone through carefully engineered crystals instead. Tiny slivers at a time. Never the raw Stone itself.
But the old, dangerous dream had come back for him anyway. Completely uninvited, arriving at full speed. And it was killing him.
Lying on his side in the grey dust, with his own mutating magic tearing burning furrows through the inside of him, Arthur knew exactly what had to happen next.
He had to stop the evolution.
Because his body could not hold what he was becoming. It was failing already, breaking down everywhere at once, and this was only the beginning. Long before the evolution finished, there would be nothing left of him.
The Aether had to come out, and it had to come out fast.
—
"Arthur."
The voice came from very far away.
Jane Foster had finally woken up. Her very first act was to grab her own forearm frantically. She found nothing moving under the skin, and her whole face opened with relief.
Then, she looked across the grey ground and saw him.
He was on his knees, breathing in broken pieces, the veins of his hands and throat lit from underneath in colours that did not belong together.
"Arthur." She was already scrambling towards him. "What's wrong? Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need."
She reached out a shaking hand to touch him.
"Don't."
The word tore out of him in a raw, ragged gasp. The effort of speaking nearly took his vision with it, but he got a hand up and stopped hers four inches from his shoulder.
"Don't touch me. It will jump to you. You will not survive taking it twice."
Jane went absolutely still with her hand in the air. Then she put it down in the dust and sat back on her heels where he could see her, and did not move again.
She stayed there and watched him burn, and there was nothing at all she could do about any of it. No help to call. No phone to call it on. Just a dead world, and a man in agony because he had come to get her, and the wild useless wish that Thor were standing here to fix it.
Arthur spent the last clear piece of his attention being grateful for how quickly clever people do exactly as they are told.
—
Arthur stopped trying to endure the pain, because enduring it was losing. If the evolution finished, his body would finish with it.
His own vast magic was useless to him. Not blocked. Not stolen. Just busy. It was the very thing currently being rewritten.
But wizarding magic was not his only tool. He had spent decades making sure of that, and one of the things he had built did not come from inside him at all.
Ancient Magic.
It did not rise out of a wizard's core. It ran under absolutely everything, everywhere, drawn straight from the world a man happened to be standing on. And this world, dead and empty and silent as it was, had securely held an Infinity Stone in a socket for five thousand years. Whatever else this dead rock had lost, it still definitely had that residual charge.
Thin. But thin was definitely not nothing.
Arthur reached outward with his mind, and pulled hard.
Jane threw an arm across her face against the sudden, blinding flare of light. When she finally brought it down again, the man who had just been dying in the dirt was standing firmly on his feet.
He was burning brilliantly silver from somewhere deep under his skin. The dust had lifted off the ground in a ring around him and hung there, undecided about falling. Whatever horrific things had been happening to the veins in his face had stopped happening to it. He looked perfectly calm. If anything, he looked mildly irritated.
The Arcane Mage State multiplied everything he was five times over.
It did not solve the fundamental problem. The evolution went on exactly as before, climbing away underneath everything, and the empowered state did nothing to slow it at all. What it did do was make the man carrying the burden five times harder to physically break. The pain went from completely unbearable to merely appalling. His head cleared sharply. His hands steadied.
It bought him precious minutes, and not many of them. Soon the evolution would pass the point where even an Arcane-strengthened body could no longer safely hold it, and then the extra strength would only mean he took a little bit longer to come apart.
Arthur got quick to work.
He threaded Ancient Magic through his own body, weaving it carefully around his changing core rather than through it, pushing it deeply into every single place the red darkness had reached, and he began to draw it out.
It fought him. It had found the finest house in the entire universe and a warm place to sleep in it, and it did not want to leave. Every single red strand hooked and slipped and doubled back and tried another road, and Arthur followed each one, closed the road shut behind it, and pulled hard.
One bloody thread at a time. It took a very long while. Or, rather, about ninety agonizing seconds.
The last of it came out of his sternum in a thin ribbon and joined the churning mass hanging in the air in front of him, coiled angrily inside a sphere of blinding silver light.
The exact moment it left his body, the resonance died. His magic stopped mid-ascent, hung there a confused second, and settled back toward its old shape the way water finds its level. The burning agony banked down into an ache.
Arthur let out one long, shuddering breath, and allowed himself precisely three seconds of it.
Then, his iron concentration slipped. Half a fraction, no more.
And the Aether came straight back at him like a striking snake.