The planet opened up below the ship as they descended — green across most of its landmass, rivers threading through dense vegetation, the light hitting it at an angle that made everything look slightly more saturated than natural. The atmosphere read clean. The energy signature that Smith had noticed on approach was more pronounced now, rising through the rock layers from somewhere deep and central.
Not generated. Sourced.
Ego stepped off the aircraft with the ease of a man stepping onto his own front porch, because that was precisely what he was doing.
"Welcome," he said, "to my world."
Star-Lord turned a slow circle, taking in the view. "I've been to a lot of planets. This one's actually — it's good." He said it with the reluctant appreciation of someone who has prepared to be unimpressed.
Gamora looked at the landscape and said nothing. She'd seen what Thanos's idea of planetary improvement looked like. A world that was simply beautiful and intact felt almost strange in comparison.
Smith looked around and did his own assessment, less aesthetic than architectural. The size was smaller than Earth but larger than the Moon — significantly larger. The surface was extensively vegetated, watercourses visible from altitude, the terrain varied. Room for multiple Tree of Might plantings with considerable buffer between them. The energy emanating from the core would accelerate growth substantially.
He filed that and kept walking.
Drax touched one of the colorful bubbles floating at head height. It split into smaller spheres that drifted outward in a slow scatter. He laughed the way he laughed at most things — fully, without self-consciousness.
The castle, when they reached it, was large and comfortable and decorated with the particular aesthetic of someone who has had unlimited time and resources and has arrived at something that manages not to be garish about it. A fountain in front with actual fish making arcs through the falling water.
Gamora looked at Ego as they walked through the entrance.
"You survive in open space without a suit," she said. "You own a planet. What are you, exactly?"
Ego glanced at her with what might have been pleasure at the question. "A god, as far as the available terminology goes."
Star-Lord looked at Smith. "You flew into space and destroyed dozens of ships with your hands. Does that make you a god?"
"No," Smith said. "Not by any standard I'm applying to that word."
He was thinking of the Saiyan God — the form that had clashed with Beerus while the shockwaves from their exchange threatened to unmake the universe. That was the threshold at which the word stopped being metaphorical. Against that scale, what Smith could currently do was formidable but not divine.
Star-Lord looked at Ego. "If Smith doesn't qualify, how strong is a god actually?"
Ego smiled slightly. "I'm a minor one. At least as gods go." He looked at Drax. "In the days when I was as humble as our friend here."
Drax took this as the compliment it wasn't intended as and inclined his head.
In the palace's main chamber, Ego led them to a device that projected — the ship recognized it immediately, a visualization system integrated with the planet's own awareness. The screen showed the cosmos, and within it, drifting in the dark between stars, a brain.
"My earliest memory is flickering," Ego said. "Alone in the universe. Floating." He looked at the screen as though recalling the experience genuinely. "Over millions of years I learned to influence molecules. To think with more precision. I became stronger and larger."
The visual showed the brain acquiring a shell, then layers, then more layers, the sphere growing.
"Eventually — this planet."
He paused.
"But a planet wasn't sufficient. I wanted meaning. I suspected other life existed. I created this body—" He gestured at himself, the clone form, entirely convincing in its humanity. "And went looking."
Drax leaned toward Star-Lord and said, quietly and sincerely: "Does he have a—"
"Drax—"
"It's a legitimate question. If he's a planet, how—"
"I'm begging you."
Gamora put a hand to her face.
Smith looked at the projection display and felt something in his chest that might have been laughter, which he dealt with by focusing on the visualization instead. Drax's questions were genuinely logical from a certain angle, which was exactly what made them devastating.
Ego, who had apparently understood the concern, waved a hand. "I created this body, Drax. It has all standard biological functionality. Including the relevant parts."
Drax considered this, satisfied.
Star-Lord looked at the ceiling. "I didn't want to know that."
"My mother told the story of how my parents conceived me every winter solstice," Drax said, with the calm pride of someone sharing a pleasant tradition.
"Every winter solstice."
"It's beautiful."
"It's horrifying."
"You Earthlings are very unusual about bodies."
Star-Lord looked at Gamora for support. Gamora had found something interesting to look at on the far wall.
Ego's account continued — the wandering years, the discovery of other life, the slow accumulation of experience. He mentioned Meredith as he'd mentioned her before: with the warmth of something genuine, whatever else was true about him.
When he asked for time alone with Peter, Smith was already moving toward the door.
"I'd like to walk the planet," he said. "I've been curious since we arrived."
Gamora nodded. "Agreed."
Drax looked at Mantis. "Is there food?"
"I'll show you," Mantis said.
The planet was as good on the ground as it had looked from orbit.
Smith walked with Gamora along a ridge line above a broad river valley, the water a particular blue-green that suggested mineral content rather than pollution. Vegetation on all sides, dense and varied, everything growing with the aggressive confidence of a biosphere that has been running in optimal conditions for a very long time.
He was looking for the brain.
Not visually — the brain was at the planet's core, insulated under kilometers of rock and compressed energy. But the emanation it produced was directional if you knew what to feel for, and Smith was building a map of it as he walked.
"There's no animal life," Gamora said, looking at the forest.
"No insects. No birds. Nothing that moves independently." She looked at the river. "The vegetation is extraordinary. But the planet is empty except for us."
"This planet is Ego," Smith said. "Would you let parasites live on your skin?"
Gamora thought about that. Then: "Mantis."
"A useful tool he keeps close." Smith looked at the forest. "A useful flea."
Gamora nodded slowly, working through the implications, and then looked at Smith.
"You know about Thanos," she said. It wasn't quite a question.
"You didn't think Earth was completely isolated from the universe's information networks." He glanced at her. "You're his daughter. That's known."
Gamora was quiet for a moment. She looked at the river.
"I didn't know about the Dragon Balls until Ronan's bounty went public," she said. "I betrayed Thanos when Quill got the Orb. I don't know what's happened in his court since then." She paused. "But I know one thing. The Power Stone — the Orb — it's in Thanos's hands now. Nebula and Black Dwarf took it from Quill and me."
Smith stopped walking.
"He already has it," he said.
"Yes."
Smith looked at the river and said nothing for a moment.
The Power Stone was the most straightforwardly dangerous of the six — no subtlety to it, no complexity of application. Raw destructive output, planet-scale when fully channeled. With it in hand, Thanos was no longer theoretically dangerous. He was immediately, concretely dangerous, and the distance between one stone and six stones was now one step shorter.
"How long ago?" Smith asked.
"He had it before we left for Earth," Gamora said. "Weeks, possibly. I don't know the exact timing."
Smith filed that. The Infinity Gauntlet required all six. Thanos had one confirmed and was presumably aware of others. The Soul Stone was the most complex to acquire — Gamora knew where it was, her posture told him that every time the subject came near — and it would remain the bottleneck.
He looked at the forest and started walking again.
Gamora walked beside him. She didn't ask what he was thinking. She seemed to understand that the conversation had reached its natural end and that whatever came next was Smith's problem to work through.
That suited both of them.
In the castle's dining area, Drax was finishing a second plate of something Mantis had prepared and found entirely satisfactory.
He looked at Mantis across the table.
"How did you end up here?"
"Ego found me," she said. "I was still a larva. My home planet — there was no one left. He raised me."
Drax considered this. "So you're a pet."
Mantis considered the word. "Probably," she said. The honesty of it was complete and slightly heartbreaking.
Drax looked at her with the directness he applied to everything.
"He keeps you despite your appearance," Drax said.
Mantis looked uncertain. "My appearance?"
"You are," Drax said, "shockingly ugly." He said it with the same tone he would use to say the weather was cold. "But this is actually a good thing. Someone who stays with you despite that — they truly love you. Beautiful people can never know who is genuine. Ugly people always know."
Mantis sat with that.
"Then I'm glad I'm ugly," she said.
Drax looked at the window, where the river valley was visible in the middle distance. "Those ponds remind me of a lake on my home planet. I used to take my daughter there." He was quiet for a moment. "She looked a bit like you. The same quality of attention."
Mantis reached out and touched his shoulder before he could continue.
She felt what was there, and her expression went very still with the weight of it.
She didn't say anything. Neither did Drax.
In the main hall, Peter Quill stood across from Ego and felt the thing in his palms.
It had happened between one breath and the next — Ego's instruction, a shift of focus, and then light in his hands. Not light from an external source. Light from inside his own skin, rising up through his palms and steadying there.
He'd lost it almost immediately. Looked at it and it was gone.
"Again," Ego said, not disappointed, encouraging. "Focus. Feel where it comes from."
Peter closed his eyes.
There was something at the center of the planet that resonated — not loudly, not obviously, but there if you were quiet enough to notice. Like a sound you'd been hearing for so long you'd stopped registering it.
The light came back. Stronger this time, settling into his palms with the confidence of something that had always been there and had simply been waiting to be found.
He opened his eyes.
"Good," Ego said, and the word carried something genuine in it — relief, or something adjacent to relief. Decades of failure giving way.
"Again," Peter said.
He let it go and called it back, and the second time it came faster, shaping itself in his hands into a rough sphere — not precise, not controlled, but real.
Ego caught it when Peter threw it. He held it for a moment, then threw it back.
Peter caught it. Felt the weight of it, which was not like physical weight but was weight nonetheless.
He threw it back.
Ego caught it and laughed — the laugh of a man who had waited a very long time for something and was watching it finally arrive.
They stood there in the main hall of a castle on a planet that was also a god, throwing light back and forth between them, and for a few minutes Peter Quill was simply a person playing catch with his father, which was the thing he'd wanted since he was eight years old and had long since convinced himself he'd stopped wanting.