Smith watched the light playing across Star-Lord's palm and turned the question over in his mind. When Ego's original body had been destroyed in the movie he remembered, Star-Lord's power had vanished with it. That was the detail that kept pulling at him.
"That energy," he said. "Does it come from your own body, or from somewhere else?"
Star-Lord looked down at his hand. "From the planet," he said. "Beneath our feet."
That settled it. The divine power wasn't Quill's — it was borrowed. Because he carried Ego's bloodline, because he was a Celestial's offspring, he could pull from the planet's reservoir without asking permission. That was the only reason he'd been able to stand against Ego at all. If the power had been Ego's to revoke, that fight would have ended in seconds.
But the borrowing wasn't the full picture. Ego had been accumulating Celestial energy for millions of years. Quill was in his thirties. By Celestial reckoning, he was barely past infancy, and his own power hadn't begun to surface yet. It had simply never been given the time.
"Ask your father how to develop your own divine power," Smith said. "There has to be a method. Something to accelerate the process."
Quill blinked. He'd clearly been so focused on the borrowed power that he hadn't thought past it.
The borrowed power was a tool. His own would be something else entirely.
Nearby, Gamora had been listening quietly. "Only the power you develop yourself is truly yours," she said. "Nothing can take it from you."
"You're right." Quill was already moving. "I'll go find him now."
Smith watched him go, then turned toward the far edge of the clearing where the terrain broke into a ridge line. "I'm going to keep exploring."
Gamora considered that for a moment. "I'll come with you. The signal might be better further out — I still haven't been able to reach Rocket."
They moved away from the castle, walking the planet's surface. The biosphere here was dense and strange, lush in the way that things grow when nothing preys on them. No animals. No insects. Just growth, and silence, and the faint hum of something enormous sleeping beneath their feet.
Smith wasn't looking for a signal. He was looking for the brain.
He knew Ego's body and his constructed humanoid form were two separate things. The castle, the gardens, the man standing in the light giving speeches — all of it was assembled divine power, a projection. The actual Ego was buried somewhere beneath this planet's surface: a core, a neural mass, a point of origin. That was the true target. Everything else was theater.
They walked for a while. The communicator in Gamora's hand stayed silent.
Then the ridge broke open into a dark seam in the rock — a cave mouth, wide and deep, positioned at an odd angle to the castle, not too close and not too far.
Smith stopped. "Let's go in."
Gamora studied the entrance. "What do you think is in there?"
He glanced back at the castle, barely visible now through the tree line. "Good location for something Ego doesn't want anyone walking past by accident." He looked back at her. "We might find something interesting."
"You're still trying to locate his true form."
"Aren't you curious?"
Gamora looked at him the way she looked at most things — with the steady attention of someone who'd survived by reading rooms faster than anyone else in them. "Gods don't take kindly to being studied," she said. "If you find what you're looking for, that might not go well for us."
"I'm not worried about it," Smith said, and walked into the cave.
After a beat, Gamora followed.
The interior opened up immediately, wider and taller than the entrance suggested. Light came from somewhere — diffuse, sourceless, the way things were lit on a planet whose owner could arrange such things. The passage branched and curved.
Smith moved through it methodically. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn't here yet.
On the other side of the planet, Star-Lord found Ego in the gardens.
"Peter." Ego turned at his approach. "Is something wrong? I noticed your friend and Gamora went off on their own."
"They wanted to explore," Quill said. "Smith's curious about the planet."
Ego smiled. "As he should be. This is a remarkable place." He moved to a low bench and sat, gesturing for Quill to join him. "Women are like the sea, Peter. And men like us — we are the sailors the sea calls to herself. We move across her surface. We feel her pull. But we were never meant to belong to her."
Quill sat, watching him. "Sounds like something you tell yourself when things don't work out."
Ego laughed — a warm sound, genuine enough. "Perhaps. Or perhaps it's simply the nature of what we are. Your life will be extraordinary. The extraordinary life doesn't center on one person. It expands. It has to."
Quill hesitated. "You're a god. Extraordinary is kind of your default. I'm still figuring out what I am."
"You don't need to figure that out." Ego leaned forward slightly. "As long as this planet's power continues neither of us has to face what other beings face."
"You mean death."
"I mean limitation." He held Quill's gaze. "You can live forever, Peter. If you choose it."
Quill was quiet for a moment. "You're serious."
"Completely."
Quill absorbed that. Then, because he hadn't forgotten why he'd come: "That's actually why I wanted to talk to you. The power I've been using — it's yours. It's coming from the planet."
Ego nodded slowly, as if he'd wondered when this would come up.
"Can I develop my own? I have your bloodline. I can feel it working. But the power I'm drawing isn't actually mine."
Ego's expression shifted into something that looked like pride. "You grasped that quickly." He stood and began to pace, the way he always paced when he was about to teach something. "Yes. What flows through you now is mine — you've borrowed it. But your bloodline carries the seed of your own Celestial power. It hasn't manifested because you haven't had the time. I've had millions of years to build what I have. You've had thirty-something."
"So it's possible."
"It's not only possible — it's inevitable, with the right development. I'll teach you how." He stopped pacing and turned. "But for now, use mine. Familiarize yourself with how it feels. How it moves. Consider it an instrument you're learning before you build your own."
Quill felt the guard that Rocket's warning had raised in him settle down a few degrees. This was what he'd come for.
"Can I make things with it? Like — actual things?" He gestured vaguely. "A statue. Something strange and enormous, just to see if I can."
"You can make anything you like," Ego said, with the patient indulgence of someone who had spent millions of years making things. "But, Peter." His tone shifted. "We aren't here just to make statues."
Quill looked up.
"We exist with a purpose. A mission that no other beings in this universe are capable of fulfilling." Ego extended one hand. The light in his palm thickened and brightened. "Let me show you."
Quill looked at his own hand. Slowly, the same light began to gather at his fingertips.
"Come with me," Ego said.
Through the corridor window, Mantis watched the two of them walk deeper into the building together. Quill's fingertips glowing. Ego's hand on his shoulder.
She had watched this happen before. Not with Quill — but before Quill. Other children, over the years. They would be brought in like this, shown the light, led inside. And then they never came back out the way they'd entered.
She didn't stop to think about it. She turned and ran.
Drax was in one of the side rooms, stretched out on a low platform, deeply, completely asleep — the way only a man with an entirely clean conscience sleeps.
"Drax!"
He startled awake, sat up, and looked at her with the open, immediate alertness of a fighter. Then registered her face and relaxed. "I prefer women who are a little more generously built."
Mantis stopped. "What?"
"When I said I found you disgusting," Drax said, with great sincerity, "I was trying to protect your feelings. I didn't want to be direct about it."
"I'm not — that is not what I came here to discuss."
Drax immediately turned to the side and made a retching motion, shoulders heaving.
"What are you doing?"
"I couldn't help imagining it." He pressed one hand to his mouth. "Please don't put those thoughts in my head."
"Drax." She grabbed his arm. "I'm not interested in you. I'm not interested in your species. I need you to listen to me."
He straightened immediately. "There was no need for a personal attack."
"Ego got what he wanted," she said. "Star-Lord is with him right now. I should have told you sooner. I'm sorry. I was afraid." She met his eyes. "You are all in danger."
Deep in the cave, the passage opened.
They both stopped.
Bones.
Everywhere. Stacked against the walls, piled across the floor, filling the space in every direction — the accumulated remains of dozens of lives, maybe more. Large bones, small bones. Species Smith didn't recognize.
No graves. No markers. Just bones, left here the way things are left when the person who put them there isn't worried about anyone ever seeing them.
Smith stood at the cave entrance and looked at it. He recognized it for what it was.
He hadn't found Ego's brain. But he had found Ego's children.
"We have to leave." Gamora's voice was flat and controlled, but her hand had moved to her blade. "This is what Rocket was warning us about."
"I want to find his true form first."
She turned. "Smith." A different register than she usually used — not a correction, not a debate, a warning. "We don't have a ship. If this goes wrong, none of us can get off this planet under our own power. Not Quill, not Drax, not me. None of us." She looked at him steadily. "Their strength is not enough to survive in open space. Mine isn't either."
Smith looked at the bones again.
Then he looked back the way they had come, toward the distant castle.