The battle was absolutely not over.
Inside a host, stillness was all the Aether did. It slept comfortably in the warmth. Outside, it had no patience at all. It only wanted back in.
Arthur caught the lunging parasite with a projected, solid wall of Ancient Magic. Catching it was hard, and it turned out not to discourage the thing in the slightest. It slammed violently against the shield again before he had finished bracing for the first impact, and then a third time, hammering at the same point with relentless, mindless patience.
Arthur held the line. The Aether quickly worked out that it could not get through him by force.
So the entire mass turned in the air, all at once, and shot straight for the defenseless Jane.
Arthur got a wall of light in front of that and stopped it. It flowed left and he closed left. It went right and high and over the top, and he closed those, and the moment an opening appeared anywhere it came back for him instead.
Him, then her. Him again, then her again. Without pause and without tiring.
It had no strategy at all. That was what made it exhausting. It wanted a body, and there were two in the room.
And then, somewhere in all that lunging, it stopped using force.
Arthur felt the wall go wrong under his hands. Not cracking. Thinning, the same way the extractor had gone, the light quietly forgetting it had ever been made.
He had been waiting for exactly this since the moment the cylinder vanished.
He poured Ancient Magic in behind the failure and sealed it directly over the red, a skin wrapped tight to every surface of the thing.
The thinning stopped at once.
It could still move. It could still throw itself at whatever it wanted, and it did, immediately, without any sign of noticing the difference. It simply could not touch anything anymore.
Which left Arthur holding a sealed skin around an Infinity Stone, and one entirely useless thought.
He should have built the extractor like this. One more layer, sealing the thing off from the room. An afternoon's work, eight months ago. He had put nine containments through solid vibranium and never once thought to cut it off from the outside, because he had decided it could not think.
Every single thing that had gone wrong today came out of that one gap.
Later. He could be furious about it later.
—
Arthur held the seal and made himself think.
He could not keep this up for long. The Arcane Mage State ran on what the world around him could give, and this world had almost nothing left to offer. He had drawn deeper than this from a living planet and held it for half an hour. Here he would be lucky to get a fraction of that time. And when the state inevitably dropped, he would be an ordinary man standing in front of a thing that wanted him specifically.
The obvious tactical move was to leave. Abandon the Aether, grab Jane, come back another day with a hundred contingencies and something better than a cylinder. He hated the thought, but it was still the best idea he had.
So he took it.
He reached for the dimensional weave and felt the shape of a gate begin to assemble.
Then, something went through the inside of his chest like a red-hot wire. His magic channels, cracked and raw from the resonance, refused the dimensional energy outright. The whole portal structure came apart in a shower of useless sparks.
He stopped immediately and filed the failure away to examine later. It was a very small problem compared to the one hanging in the air in front of him.
Apparition, then?
Arcane Apparition would certainly carry him out, but it was nothing like the wizarding kind. The energies involved were far more potent, and no ordinary human body could survive them.
Which made it a viable way for him to leave, and not a way for Jane to.
He could technically drop the Arcane state and Apparate the old way, except that meant two gambles at once. That his own magic would answer cleanly through the damage. And that he could grab Jane and be gone in the half second between the light going out and the Aether understanding that nothing was holding it anymore.
He did not like the math on either of those numbers.
A year ago, there would have been one more open door.
Winky.
The bond would have brought her here. One silent mental call and she would have been standing in the dust beside him inside a heartbeat, hands on her hips, being extremely angry about the messy state he had gotten himself into.
However, he had dissolved that bond and house-elf curse himself, with the Mind Stone, on a summer afternoon, while she cried and asked whether she still counted as family.
The artifact he had built afterward to do the same job was in his pocket, open and calling into a place that gave nothing back. Whatever the Dark Elves had done to this world before they hid a stone in it, it was closed. Signals simply did not leave this place.
Arthur looked at the harsh reality and did not regret his past choice for a single second. He would make it again on the same afternoon and in the same order, knowing exactly how badly he would want the bond today. His family's happiness and freedom came before absolutely anything else, and it was not even a close contest.
It only meant that nobody was coming.
And leaving Jane here was not on the list. It had never been on the list. There was no version of the list where that option appeared.
So running was out. Which logically left going straight through.
—
Arthur turned his full, undivided attention to the red coiling and striking inside his sphere of light.
Arthur knew for a fact that Aether could not be destroyed. Which left one option. Turn it into a solid. A stone that could be locked away. A stone that could never pour itself into the nearest living body the moment he blinked.
It should be possible, because that had been its original form, before the Dark Elves reshaped it for a five-thousand-year plan of universal darkness. All he had to do was undo what they had done.
Arthur concentrated heavily on the angry Aether. He closed the silver light in from every side and squeezed hard. The red mass compressed slightly. He fed in more force, and more, and it shrank to the size of a fist. Past that point, nothing. And the moment he eased off, it spilled back out to its old volume as easily as breathing.
He did not waste any more precious time on brute force.
Next he meticulously swept the whole mass, hunting for whatever the elves had left inside it, the way he would strip a curse off an old object. He could feel that something was definitely there. He just could not read it at all. It was built from nothing he recognized.
So he tried countering it with something of the same age. Nine Asgardian containment runes, forged out of raw light, locked firmly into a tight shell completely around the red mass, with Ancient Magic layered through them. He pushed both together, harder than he had pushed anything all day.
It compressed a little further than before. But nothing more.
Very little time was left now. The ring of dust around him had begun to sag. The light under his skin had dimmed from silver to something like a weak lamp behind a curtain.
Think.
It could be done. He knew that for a fact, because in the future, Thanos had done exactly this. Crushed the liquid Aether into a stone for his gauntlet.
So how?
Not with strength. Thanos was strong, but strength had just failed twice in Arthur's own hands, and Thanos was surely not stronger than nine Asgardian runes and the Arcane state combined. It had to be something else. Something the Titan had that nobody else did.
Death.
Arthur went very still.
He knew exactly what he had to do.
He closed his eyes, took a steadying breath, and opened them, and they were twilight grey.
The world changed the way it always changed. The dust went from grey to a faint dying blue. The black stone showed him a thousand slow years of its own ending. Jane burned in the middle of the plain like a candle carried down into a cellar. Warm, and finite.
And there was the Aether.
It looked exactly the same as it had a moment ago. Red, and turning, and endless. But he could see them now. Dark threads running through the sea of red, wound around it and through it, and they did not belong there.
Somebody had put them there. Five thousand years ago, layer on layer, straining at their work every hour of every year without one moment of rest. Holding a solid open. Keeping it a fluid. Keeping it hungry for hosts it was never meant to need.
Not a weapon.
A cage.
Arthur reached out calmly with the second tier of his power, and firmly told all of the dark threads to end.
There was absolutely no struggle. There was no effort at all. The bindings had been holding on for five thousand years, and the moment he touched them they let go together.
The entire plain went blinding red.
Arthur stood in it with his eyes closed and waited patiently. When the light finally faded, there was nothing in front of him at all.
Except a small red stone, the size of a plum, hanging in the quiet air. Perfectly still. Nothing left holding it open.
He watched it for a long moment, waiting for it to move.
It didn't.
Then he went looking for something to carry it in. He had pushed his luck enough for one afternoon.