~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!
Skye blinked her big eyes and kept nudging Coulson with her elbow.
"Go ask him — go ask Thor what Hermione's deal is!"
Coulson looked pained. As far as the Avengers knew, he was still dead, and he had no intention of revealing himself this early.
"I can't exactly 'come back to life' right now."
"Tsk. Coward." Skye pursed her lips. "Fine. If you won't go, I will."
She took a step forward.
The sky changed.
The clear afternoon sky split open, filling with countless enormous wormholes. They were several times larger than the ones that had appeared during the Chitauri invasion, vast, dark, like gigantic eyes staring down at the Earth.
Inside them, the scenes shifted constantly.
Ice. Darkness. Raging fire. Blinding light.
The landscapes of the Nine Realms cycled through one after another. An invisible pressure settled over everything, heavy and suffocating.
Everyone fell silent at once.
"Wh — what is that?" Skye's voice came out as a tremor. Gossip about Hermione was the last thing on her mind now.
Coulson's face went tight. He put it together immediately.
"It's the Convergence. Hermione mentioned this, the Nine Realms overlapping. Those must be the other realms, right there."
He hadn't finished speaking when creatures started falling from the wormholes.
They were hideous things. Some looked like giant lizards. Some had wings and moved like wild beasts. Others were nothing but writhing masses of flesh. The moment they hit the ground, they started tearing into every human within reach.
RAWR! ROAR! Howls and screams tangled together. The scene descended into chaos.
"Berserker Beasts from Muspelheim!"
Thor's shout cut through the noise. He shoved Loki's death to the back of his mind, raised Mjolnir, and charged.
The nearby military forces snapped into action, opening fire. Bullets, artillery shells, laser beams, the works. It wasn't enough. These creatures had thick hides and refused to die from anything normal weapons could throw at them.
May moved through the S.H.I.E.L.D. squad without expression, her energy rifle BANG BANG cracking out shots in rapid succession. She put a beam clean through the skull of a lizard-like creature. Green blood sprayed. The massive body crashed down.
Before she could breathe, a winged one dove straight at her.
Ward was already moving. He rolled sideways, dodged the lunge, came up with his weapon leveled, and pulled the trigger. RAT-TAT-TAT. PEW-PEW-PEW. The beams swept across the creature's hide and left a few scorch marks. That was it.
"Damn it — how thick is this thing's skin?!"
Ward cursed and slapped in a fresh magazine.
"This isn't working!" Skye crouched behind an overturned car, watching more creatures pour through the wormholes by the second. "We have to close the portals!"
Coulson's jaw was set. He knew how bad it was. He also knew there was nothing they could do about it.
"The Convergence isn't like the Tesseract," he said. "The Tesseract could be shut down. This one runs its course on its own. We can't stop it."
"So we just wait?" Skye stomped her foot. "We just stand here?!"
BOOM!
Lightning cracked across the sky, dozens of bolts, each one precise, each one finding a different creature.
"RAWR!"
Every monster in the area seized and convulsed. One by one, they collapsed. Thor sagged against a wall, chest heaving, looking thoroughly drained of his divine power.
"Now that's the Avengers!" Skye's face broke into relief.
The wormholes held still. A fragile quiet settled over the area. People started to breathe again, started to think maybe, just maybe, it was winding down.
Then everything changed.
A massive warship tore through the largest wormhole, flanked by a swarm of Dark Elf fighters. It descended with the weight of something inevitable.
Thor's eyes snapped to the ship's deck. To the figure standing there.
Malekith.
"Malekith!" Thor's voice cracked like a whip, his hands tightening on Mjolnir. "How are you here?! Where is Hermione?!"
There was a tremor underneath it. Barely there, but it was there.
Malekith looked down at him from the deck, unhurried. A slow, cruel smile crossed his face.
"You mean that Midgardian witch?" He almost sounded amused. "She is formidable. I'll admit that freely, I am no match for her."
He let the pause sit.
"But." His voice lifted. Something wild came into his eyes. "I have the Aether."
"She isn't here yet. That means I have time. Enough time to use the Aether and plunge all Nine Realms back into darkness before she returns." He spread his hands, almost gracious about it. "Even with all her power, there's nothing she can do about what's already done."
Thor's eyes went red. "I will not let you win. I am going to avenge Loki."
He roared and launched himself at Malekith, Mjolnir raised.
Malekith didn't move. Didn't flinch. He simply extended one hand, palm up.
Dark-red energy swirled in it, alive, obedient. The Aether moved like it was part of him.
A torrent of black-red power erupted from his palm and slammed into Thor.
BOOM!
Thor screamed. The impact hurled him backward, and he hit the ground hard enough to crater it.
He was still trying to get up when Malekith raised his hand again.
The particle stream swept outward in a wide arc. Wherever it touched, matter dissolved. Not destroyed, erased. Reduced to a formless darkness that swallowed everything.
Nobody spoke.
Coulson, Skye, Ward, they all stared, horror written across their faces.
This was the power of an Infinity Stone.
Thor forced himself upright, bleeding, ignoring it. He raised Mjolnir and screamed lightning from the sky. Dozens of bolts hammered down toward Malekith.
The black-red stream swallowed them whole.
No explosion. No resistance. Not even a ripple. The lightning just ceased to exist.
The human forces didn't stop. Guns and cannons roared. Energy beams laced through the air in every direction, directed at the Dark Elf warship.
It didn't matter.
Every single attack dissolved the instant it met the particle stream. Assimilated. Gone.
The darkness kept spreading.
"It's over," someone said quietly. "It's all over."
The Aether swept on, black-red and relentless, and wherever it passed, the world went dark.
Then, it stopped.
When the torrent reached a certain section of sky, nothing happened. The expected erasure didn't come. That patch of space just sat there, solid, immovable, like bedrock in the middle of a flood.
More than that. The stream's pressure seemed to tear something open around it, as though the space itself was a curtain, and the force was pulling it aside, revealing what lay behind. The black-red power battered against it again and again and couldn't move it a single inch.
Something was pushing back.
The silence that fell was a different kind than before.
Everyone had just watched the Aether eat lightning, eat artillery, eat everything thrown at it without slowing down. And now it couldn't move a patch of empty air?
"Impossible." Malekith's voice came out unsteady, stripped of its composure. "What power is that? What could possibly resist the Aether?"
No one had an answer.
Every eye locked onto that section of sky. The assault continued, relentless, and slowly, under the sustained pressure, the view behind the barrier came into focus.
A castle.
Enormous. Ancient. It rose into the sky with towers and turrets and countless lit windows, weathered stone that had stood for centuries.
It appeared before them all, immovable and impossible, as if it had always been there.
➤ Next: Terrifying Granny McGonagall
— .—— .—— .—— .—— .——
Enjoying the story?
Read 130+ chapters ahead on Patreon.
Join the free community tier for early access to the latest updates:
patreon(.)com/DarkGolds