"Stay still," the healer said again.
Jane lowered her arm and looked at Thor with the expression of someone who had just been given a genuinely interesting piece of information and was trying to be responsible about it. "Maybe someday I can protect you instead."
Thor looked at her with the particular helpless warmth that she seemed to produce in him reflexively. "I don't need you to be a warrior. I need you to be safe."
Jane smiled. She turned back to the diagnostic projection — a full rendering of her body's energy field in amber light, slow-moving, detailed. "Wait. This is a quantum field generator, isn't it? The resolution on the molecular mapping is —"
"Soul-refining furnace," the healer said patiently, not breaking stride with the procedure.
Jane sat up slightly. "Can it migrate molecular energy between substrates?"
The healer paused, glanced at her with an expression that suggested unexpected questions from patients were not a common occurrence, and nodded.
"That's a quantum field generator," Jane said. She looked at Thor like she was sharing good news. "The nomenclature is different but the mechanism is —"
"Jane." Thor was smiling despite himself.
"I know, I know, I'm lying down." She lay back.
The door opened.
Odin walked in with the steady authority of a man who owned the room, the building, and the planet the building was on.
"I leave for a few minutes and the healers are taking questions from the patient," he said. It wasn't quite directed at anyone.
Thor turned. "Father —"
"She is human," Odin said, not breaking pace as he crossed the room. "Humans get sick. This is what they do." He made a short gesture and every healer present smoothly relocated to the walls. "You brought her here because you believe we can help her. Tell me why."
"There's something inside her. Something I don't recognize. Smith measured and the energy is way higher than any mortal instrument can measure."
Odin stopped. He looked at Smith for the first time since entering, taking a proper measure of him — not a greeting look, a professional one. Smith had made no effort to suppress his baseline output since arriving in Asgard.
Odin's expression shifted from assessment to something that was almost appreciation. "Your growth rate has exceeded every projection I might have made."
"There are still walls," Smith said. "I just haven't hit them recently."
Odin gave a short, genuine laugh. "The Ancient One's confidence was not misplaced." He looked at Smith with the directness of a man who gave compliments rarely and expected them to land with appropriate weight. "When you're done here, go to my treasury. Take something as a gift — call it recognition of what you've become."
Smith nodded once. "Thank you, God-King." He had come to Asgard specifically to keep Frigga alive. Accepting something from Odin's treasury in exchange was not a difficult calculation.
Odin turned back to Jane.
"How could you possibly compare yourself to him?" The dismissal was total, the way only genuine bewilderment can be total. "You watched the Dragon Ball tournament and apparently learned nothing about how to evaluate strength. A complete waste of a good seat."
Jane stared at him. She looked at Smith — also an Earthling, standing right here, being treated like a visiting dignitary. She looked back at Odin. "What did you just —"
"Thor," Odin said, moving past her objection entirely. "Show me what you found."
Thor stepped forward. "The energy radiating from whatever is inside her reads at above what Smith machine can measure — and that was before the instrument it was measured on broke. Smith's assessment is that if Jane could fully deploy it, she'd have enough output to destroy a planet."
Odin was quiet for a moment. He looked at Smith, who confirmed it with a slight nod.
The God-King stepped to the bed and reached for Jane's arm without asking. The red energy moved visibly through her veins where his fingers touched her wrist — slow, rhythmic, the pulse of something ancient and thoroughly indifferent to the body it was housed in.
Odin's brow tightened. "This is not possible."
"It's protecting itself," Thor said.
"It's protecting her," the healer offered quietly from the wall.
Odin released her arm and straightened. He stood still for a moment, looking at nothing in particular in the way that people look at nothing when they're actually looking inward. Then he said, "Follow me."
The library was larger than it had any architectural right to be.
Smith tracked the scale of it as they walked in — the shelves receding to a ceiling distance that didn't match the exterior dimensions of any structure he'd passed through on the way here. Then he looked up and stopped thinking about the shelves.
From the center of the floor, a tree was growing. It rose through the ceiling and beyond — not a metaphor, not a model, but a tree of enormous scale, its upper branches lost in a distance that the room shouldn't have contained. And hanging in the space above it, distributed like stellar formations around a trunk, were nine clusters of light with distinct shapes and colors. The Nine Realms, charted in the branches of the World Tree itself.
Or a section of it.
Smith watched the light shift in the upper reaches of the branches and wondered, with genuine curiosity, whether this room occupied some folded space that connected to the actual Yggdrasil, or whether this was a representation built to scale that simply used dimensional compression to fit inside a palace.
Odin was already talking. "Some things predate the formation of the universe. The object inside her is one of them." He moved along the shelf nearest to him, not reaching for anything, just orienting himself in the space. "Before light existed, before the Nine Realms took their current form, there was only darkness." He pulled a volume and opened it without looking at the page. "The Dark Elves lived in that darkness. They called it home. And they built a weapon to restore it — to unmake the light and return everything to what it was before."
The illustrations were visible from where Smith stood. The Aether rendered in the old Asgardian pictographic style — a flowing, consuming red tide washing over a rendering of the Nine Realms.
"The Aether," Odin continued. "Not a solid. Not a liquid. A primordial force that can pass between states of matter and infect living hosts. Its goal, if a substance can be said to have a goal, is transformation — consuming whatever structure exists and replacing it with entropy." He closed the book. "The Dark Elves intended to deploy it during the last convergence. They were stopped. The Aether was hidden."
He looked at Smith directly. "You were staring at something."
"The branch above us," Smith said. "Is this room connected to the actual World Tree, or is this a model?"
Odin regarded him for a moment with an expression that sat somewhere between surprised and measured. "That is not a branch I placed here. This section of the library grew around it." He left a pause that contained several things he chose not to say. "It belongs to the tree, not the room."
Thor pressed forward. "The records say the Aether was destroyed with the Dark Elves."
"The records say the Dark Elves are extinct," Odin said.
Smith watched Odin's face carefully. The certainty was practiced. He filed the observation without acting on it.
Jane had been patient through all of this, which for Jane Foster represented genuine effort. "The book," she said. "Does it say how to get it out?"