The golden sky of Asgard was gone.
In its place hung a canopy of black metal. Dozens of colossal warships floated silently, blotting out the sun and casting long shadows across the glittering towers of the eternal city.
Then the great horns sounded.
The mournful blare of the Gjallarhorn rolled out across the realm, vibrating through the stone streets and into the glass of the palace. It was a sound the citizens of Asgard had not heard in many lifetimes. Among the men and women standing in the roads with their faces turned upward, there were some with centuries behind them who had never heard it even once.
Because Asgard was never besieged.
For countless generations, the Golden Realm had been the hammer of the universe. In Bor's day and in Odin's, Asgard brought the war to others. They were the conquerors. They were the protectors. And on the rare occasions some fool dared to strike back, Heimdall saw them coming from a galaxy away. The golden legions always had days to prepare a welcome that inevitably became somebody else's cautionary tale.
They had never been surprised in their own home.
And it showed.
The outer city came apart. Baskets dropped onto the cobblestones and stayed there. People ran blindly in whatever direction they were already facing, snatching children up against their chests. Half of them had no idea where the royal shelters were located, because in hundreds of years nobody had ever needed to know.
For a heartbeat, even the elite Einherjar stopped and stared.
Then the commanders started shouting, and a thousand years of drilled doctrine took hold. Shield walls locked together along the outer avenues. Heavy anti-air batteries spun into position and angled their barrels up at the blackened sky. The greatest army in the Nine Realms braced for whatever was coming down.
Down in the main courtyard, Fandral was running the evacuation.
His usual charming smile was absent. His drawn sword pointed left and right, cutting the terrified flow of civilians into lines and funneling them toward the bunkers.
"Keep moving! Leave your belongings behind! Children below ground first, and quickly!"
Sif stood at his shoulder, her double-bladed glaive already turning in slow, deadly circles in her hands. Her eyes never left the fleet.
A crack of displaced air split the courtyard, and the twins were simply there.
Pietro was bouncing on his toes, silver sparks crawling off his shoes. Wanda stood very still beside him, scarlet mist idling around her fingers.
"Put us to work," Pietro demanded. "We came here to help. Tell me what to do."
"Your courage does you credit, Pietro." Fandral glanced up, and a fraction of his old ease bled back into his voice. "But it is not as dire as it looks. That golden barrier can shrug off the burning of a star. We will have the civilians safely below ground long before it so much as flickers, and then the warriors of Asgard will go up and turn that fleet into scrap." He offered the boy a tight grin. "You may have some of it."
"Surely the enemy knows about the barrier."
Fandral turned. Wanda had not looked away from the sky once since they arrived.
"Of course they do. Everyone in the Nine Realms knows what Asgard can do."
"Then they knew before they came," Wanda said, her voice dropping to a chilling murmur. "They sat up there and let you raise it. Nobody does that unless they already have a solution."
"There is no cause for—"
Fandral did not get to finish.
High above them, the impossible happened.
The golden dome flickered. It shuddered once all over, vibrating like a struck bell. Then it came apart across the whole width of the sky, and the light dissolved into nothing.
The shield was gone. Asgard stood completely in the open.
Fandral did not move. Sif stared upward, her lips parted in disbelief.
"That cannot happen," she whispered. "Heimdall's blade only opens the way. The shield is fed directly from the core beneath the palace. There is no reaching the core from the outside. None."
—
Far below the palace floors, standing in the wreckage of his father's dungeons, Thor arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment.
The air smelled of ozone and blood. The riot was over. Volstagg leaned on his axe and breathed like a bellows. Hogun stood silent with his mace dripping. The absolute worst scum of the Nine Realms lay groaning in broken heaps where the three warriors had spent the last several minutes stacking them.
But the one who had started it all was not in any of those heaps.
Thor looked once at the empty corridor running deeper into the palace, and he forced himself to turn away from it. Mjolnir spun up into his waiting grip.
"The shield is down. To the surface."
—
Above the city, while Asgard was still making sense of the second impossible thing in ten minutes, the dark fleet stopped waiting.
Hundreds of Harrow fighters detached from the bellies of the great warships and dropped toward the city. Red plasma raked the golden towers. The first explosions blossomed along the harbour front, then the outer rings, then everywhere at once. The screaming in the streets found a desperate new register.
Asgard bared its teeth right back.
The anti-air batteries opened up as one. Thick beams of golden energy shot upward and tore through the black hulls of the descending fighters.
The sky instantly became a chaotic web of red and gold fire.
Far off, near the edge of the rainbow bridge, Pietro caught a glimpse of something worth stopping for.
A single Dark Elf fighter came in low over the water. From the high tower of the observatory, a figure in gold armour leapt clean across the open sky, landed heavily on the roof of the alien ship, and drove his sword two-handed down through the hull into the engine. The fighter lost power and dropped into the void. Heimdall rode it most of the way down and stepped off at the end as though dismounting a horse.
"Okay," Pietro said, to nobody. "That was cool."
"Pietro!" Fandral had his tactical voice back. "I need your speed. The eastern market is taking heavy fire and there are far too many people trapped. Get them to the lower vaults."
"On it."
"Listen to me first, boy." Fandral caught him by the shoulder, his eyes deadly serious. "Keep your own life safe. Absolutely no unnecessary risks. Evade and rescue, nothing else. If you die on my watch, Hayes will unmake me before my soul ever reaches Valhalla. Do you understand?"
"Loud and clear."
He was gone in a blur, leaving only a gust of wind behind him.
Fandral turned quickly to the sister. "Wanda, you can..."
He stopped.
Wanda was no longer standing on the ground.
She hung ten feet up in the air, red light pouring off her hands in ribbons. Her eyes had gone to embers. She was watching two fighters peel out of the melee overhead and dive on the crowded courtyard with their cannons charging.
Wanda raised her hands and closed them into fists.
The scarlet mist went up like two thrown nets and took both fighters out of the sky mid-dive. The engines screamed against her. The ships did not move another inch. They hung there, shaking and straining, pinned entirely to the air by her sheer will alone. Then she brought her hands violently together, and the ships obeyed.
They slammed into each other.
The resulting explosion was blinding.
Fandral and Sif watched the blooming fireball in stunned silence for exactly one second.
Then the problem arrived, because tons of burning wreckage do not magically stop being tons of burning, molten wreckage simply because the ships around them have died. All of it was falling now, and directly beneath it sat a residential block with its rooftops very close together and very full of terrified people.
Wanda threw everything she had at the debris. The scarlet light flared around the largest piece, slowed it, shuddered. But it was far too heavy, there was far too much of it, and it was coming down far too fast.
"Winky!"
Silver light flashed at the base of the falling sky.
Winky stood in the street beneath the wreckage and looked up without any particular urgency. Then she raised one long hand and snapped her fingers.
A wave of silver magic exploded upward like a hurricane. It hit the hundreds of tons of falling burning metal and blasted all of it sideways, out over the city walls, clean across the residential district, and sent plummeting harmlessly down into the deep, starry void beyond Asgard's edge.
Fandral and Sif slowly lowered their weapons, staring at the silver creature in absolute disbelief.
They had known Winky for years. To them, Winky was the quiet, exceptionally polite servant who baked legendary honeycakes and shepherded Arthur's children around the palace gardens. Watching her swat two burning warships out of the sky with a snap of her two fingers required a rather massive amount of mental adjustment.
"Wanda should not be learning Pietro's manners," Winky called up to the floating girl, smoothing the front of her tidy tunic. "No taking on too much. No showing off."
Wanda let out a shaking laugh, and the red light around her hands came back twice as bright.