The Queen's chambers sat high in the palace, and the war came to them only as distant light and sound.
Frigga stood at the window with her hands folded and watched her city burn in patches. The impenetrable shield was gone. Ships she did not recognise were coming down out of the smoke, and ships she knew very well were rising to meet them.
She had watched Asgard stand against many terrible things in her long life. Frost Giants at the gates. Marauders from the outer realms. The occasional fool who thought the Golden Realm had grown soft in its centuries of peace. She had never, not once, watched it burn from the inside out.
Down near the harbour, lightning struck the same street three times in a row. She watched the blue-white flashes until the lightning struck a fourth time, and then she finally turned away from the window.
Behind her, Jane Foster was trying very, very hard not to panic.
"Shouldn't we be somewhere with fewer windows?" Her voice was steady, which was remarkable given the circumstances. "A cellar. A bunker. Asgard has bunkers, right?"
"This is the safest room in the realm," Frigga said softly. "Though not for the reasons you imagine. Come here, child. Stay behind me, stay inside the circle woven into that carpet, and whatever you see today, do not step out of it."
Jane looked down. She had taken it for an ordinary, if incredibly beautiful, rug. Now that she looked at it properly, the intricate pattern was not a pattern at all. It was writing. Dense, ancient, interlocking runes spiraling tightly inward. And it was very faintly, comfortingly warm through the soles of her shoes.
"What happens if I step out of it?"
"Then you will be standing unprotected in a battlefield." Frigga did not soften it. "Do not."
Jane swallowed hard, stepped into the center of the circle, and stayed there.
Frigga would have sent her elsewhere if there had been an elsewhere. With the city broken open from the harbour to the palace gate, the safest place in Asgard for Jane was standing behind the Queen of it.
Outside the window, the sky was bright with fire. Jane could see the shapes of the warships moving against it, black and angular, nothing like the graceful Asgardian vessels she had walked under in the shipyards.
They looked wrong.
"Those ships," Jane said quietly. "They're not like any I've seen before."
"No," Frigga agreed. "They are not."
"What are they?"
"They are the ships of the Dark Elves. A race that should have died five thousand years ago." Frigga did not turn from the window. "They have come for the Aether, Jane. The thing that was inside you."
Jane's blood ran cold.
"They came for me," she whispered in horror.
"They came for what they believe you carry." Frigga's voice did not change. "But they will not have you. Not while I stand breathing in this room."
Suddenly Frigga became serious and looked at the door.
"Your Highness," Jane whispered, her heart hammering. "What's happening?"
"Hush now, child."
The air at the far end of the chamber changed. It didn't just grow cold; it grew dead.
The heavy golden doors did not open. They did not swing inward. They rotted, dissolving into a cloud of coarse black sand that poured down onto the polished marble. The sound of it was dry leaves, and falling ash, and the end of a thing that had stood for centuries and would not stand again.
Then, the lamps went out. Not blown out by wind. Not snuffed out by magic. The flames stayed exactly where they were and simply stopped giving off light.
And out of the unnatural dark walked a man.
He was tall, lean, and he wore no bone mask like his soldiers. His face was pale as frost, high-cheekboned, and his eyes were flat and black as the space between stars.
"You are not welcome in my room." Frigga's voice was cold. "Invite yourself out for a chance to survive the afternoon."
Malekith smiled a thin, bloodless smile. "I have survived worse than you, woman."
"Who are you?"
"I am Malekith."
"The dead king of a dead race." Frigga looked him over the way one looks at damp in a wall. "So you have finally crawled out of the dark. You hid from Bor, and you hid from my husband, and I confess I thought better of you for it. It was the only wise thing your people ever did. It is the only reason there is anything left of them at all." Her hands stayed folded. "You really should have gone on hiding."
"Says the outsider." Malekith came another step into the room. "You are not Aesir. I can see it clearly on you. Your people handed you across to a warlord to buy an ending." His head tilted. "The finest mage of a fallen house, kept in a gilded room to bear his sons. Do they bow to you out there, I wonder? Or only to the man they paid you to?"
"You speak as though the marriage somehow diminished me."
"Did it not?"
"Has it? Whatever your forgotten histories call me, this realm calls me its Queen, and it has done so for a thousand years." Frigga's voice did not change at all. "And I chose him. I have gone on choosing him every year since. You would not understand the difference." She let it sit. "Nobody has ever chosen you for anything."
The words landed. Jane saw something cross Malekith's face, and it was not pain and it was not anger. It was colder than either. It was the look of a man hearing a thing that had been said to him before, in the dark, more than once.
"Enough."
Malekith's voice dropped, and the last of the light in the room leaned away from him. His eyes moved past Frigga to Jane, and something happened in his face.
Anticipation arriving and dying in the same instant.
Nothing.
"Where is it?" he hissed.
He was not talking to Jane. He had stopped considering Jane the moment his senses finished with her.
"You will have to be more specific," Frigga said. "We have a great many things."
"The Aether sang to me from this very room," Malekith hissed, taking a step forward. "I felt it across the dark. And then the song stopped. It is not here. Where is it? What have you done with it?"
"You have traveled a very long way for nothing, Malekith," she said, her voice perfectly even. "What you seek is not in Asgard. It was never brought to Asgard. That is the truth, and it is all the truth you will ever have from me."
"The finest weaver of falsehoods in the Nine Realms tells me she is not lying."
"I have never lied in my life. I have only ever let men believe what they came to believe." She moved, unhurried, placing herself square between the elf and the mortal. "You came believing I have your weapon. Nothing I say will change that. So."
"Then I will take the mortal." Malekith's eyes fixed on Jane with a hunger that made her blood run cold. "She carries the Aether's trace in her blood. I will tear the memory of it from her body, and I will follow that memory to wherever you have hidden what is mine."
"You will not touch her."
"Watch me."
Malekith moved.
One moment he stood ten feet away, still and composed. The next he was on her, a blade of pure shadow forming in his hand out of nothing, sweeping toward Frigga's throat with a speed no eye in the room could have followed.
Frigga met it with a sword of golden light that she pulled out of the air, and the impact made the whole chamber ring like a struck bell.
They broke apart.
And Malekith did not come back at her. He went past her, diving straight for the terrified woman standing on the carpet, because the woman was the only thing in this room he had crossed the void to find.
He got three strides.
Then, the room woke up.
Golden symbols rose out of the carpet, lines Frigga had woven into it thread by thread on quiet evenings across years. The tall mirrors along the wall stopped showing reflections and started showing her instead, a queen standing ready in every frame. And the circle under Jane's feet flared into a solid column of light, floor to ceiling, sealing her inside it like a jewel in a case.
Malekith stopped a foot short of it.
He looked at the column. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the woman who had put it there, and for the first time since he had come through her door, he gave her his whole attention.
"That is fine work."
"It is old work." Frigga had not moved. "Made to hold what matters in a house under attack. My collections. My treasures. The things I do not intend to lose." She let it sit. "You will not break it."
Malekith looked from the column to the Queen and back again.
"She is precious to you, then. This fragile mortal."
"She is."
Inside the light, Jane's hands came away from the surface.
She had been coming to this realm for years and had learned exactly where she stood in it. Nobody had ever said anything like that about her here. Nobody had ever said anything about her here at all.
"Then I shall enjoy this." Malekith turned to face the column properly. "I will take your enchantment apart, and then I will take your treasure out of it. No working in this universe has held against me for long."
"Perhaps not." Frigga raised her blade, her eyes flashing dangerously. "But long is a thing you would need time for. And I am afraid you have very little of it left."
She split.