Chapter 1
Steve Rodgers looked far below at the choppy ocean that, for decades, had been his home. It was in these very blue waters where fisherman found him, more than 60 years ago, frozen in a block of ice. He craned his head a bit and looked at the endless water, but the jet he was in rose and clouds obscured everything. He gaze fell to the floor.
How many times had he and his teammates rushed into battle to save something or other - a friend, an innocent in danger, a city, even. And today was no exception - out in the Quinjet exploring a strange call that had come in from a distressed German shipping vessel in the middle of the Atlantic.
Steve was always Captain America, even when the mask was off. Even when The Shield was locked up. He couldn't escape it. He was the most famous person on earth. As the owner of three Medals of honor, the president saluted him. And this fame followed him wherever he sent. Vacations were almost impossible. He had to rent out an island just to be left alone. His life belonged to people in need, Professor Xavier had told him once. "It's the price we pay for being extraordinary," he had said.
"Something on your mind, cap?" Hawkeye said from the front seat. He and Iron Man were discussing some new Artificial Intelligence weapons system. Bruce Banner was dozing in the back, his Hulk side not needed just yet. The Black Widow was flying the jet and Thor, having recently returned from Asgard, was enjoying being flown around for a change.
"All's well here," Steve said. In his head, however, he wished he was down in the ocean again in a deep, cold, solitary sleep.
"We're coming up on it now," black widow said. "Decreasing altitude so we can get a better look."
The Quinjet came down through the cloud cover and once again the sea filled the view. In the distance they could see the cargo ship that had radioed for help before the Coast Guard lost contact. The ship, however, wasn't alone.
"That's... what is that?" Hawkeye said.
The thousand foot vessel had run aground. Right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Where there should be nothing but waves there was an island, a mountain of stone floating in the middle of the churning water. Most of it was covered in huge blocks of granite, and it was wet with seaweed and algae. But it was no normal piece of land. Statues of some kind could be seen, and strange carvings seem to bring to mind templates or shrines. Atop the mountain, higher than an office building, was a cave with a huge door in it. The door was open. Beyond it was darkness.
"My radar is doing crazy things," said Black Widow. "It's like the island is both there and... not there at the same time. I can't get any heat readings from the ship." No life forms, she meant. "Lets go in for a closer look."
Thor studied mjolnir, his mystic Uru hammer, and observed the eldritch emanations that were coming from the head. "I am detecting something... Not quite magic," thor said. "But very powerful. I... don't think I've ever seen anything like it before ."
The stone island grew larger and larger as they approached. Captain America and Bruce Banner came into the cockpit to watch. So they all had a chance to see it emerge from the darkness.
Chapter 2
As the Avengers watched, something started to come out of the giant door. At first it seems like the hole was bleeding darkness. Dark vapors began to issue out of the door and then somehow solidify, and writhe on the ground, as if they were alive. Then a dark green ocean violently exploded out of the door, like a mass of something under unbelievable pressure. It was thick and viscous, and it began to pool, and grow. Arms reached themselves out of the muck, and a being started to pull itself to its feet in a matter of seconds.
Suddenly, where there had been only stone before, a nightmare of ooze and scales now stood in fury. Hundreds of feet tall, it had two long arms ending in talons. It had a gruesome, horrible head like an octupus, with a maw of tentacles and red eyes the size of dinner plates. From head to toe it was covered in slime and filth, even to the tips of its enormous wings. It opened it mouth and released a blubbering cry that could be heard hundreds of miles away.
Even beyond it's size, the creature had an aura so strong that psychics around the world screamed in agony. It radiated not only power, but a strength and presence that was as far beyond mortal as the earth is from the sky. It was a god, or a demon, or an entity so powerful that you felt helpless, scared and defeated just to look at it. The thought of how such a thing could exist, and what it meant that it was so much more than human, was too much to bear. It was a nightmare from the stars. And to look upon it was to give up all hope of living, or descend forever into madness.
Hawkeye, watching this unfold from the cockpit of the Quinjet, began to drool as his mind shattered into a thousand pieces. Tony Stark dropped his drink, his hair instantly running white as if dipped in paint. He tumbled off his seat onto the floor. The black widow, unable to turn away from the awful scene, screamed as she gouged out her own eyes with her fingertips. Banner's face was white, and he sunk back into his seat, devoid of all emotion or feeling.
"Ye gods..." said Thor, unbelieving. "What manner of beast is that?"
Captain America was unable to respond. His mighty heart, which had beaten steadily for more than half a century without ever even struggling, suddenly seized in his chest. As his organs began to fail and darkness began to fall over his eyes, if you looked very closely, you could almost see the smallest of smiles on his face.
Chapter 3
The towering creature was much faster than it looked. As Thor dart into the cockpit to grab the controls, one of its arms Arms shoot out to meet the speeding jet. The house-sized fist smashed into the jet, swatting it like an insect. The Quinjet, built of titanium and other incredibly strong alloys, was shredded like paper. Most of the inhabitants were pulped immediately, shredded into bits along with the ship around them. Iron Man's body was pulverized inside his metal armor, and banner, too shocked to transform, was killed instantly. The remains of the ship rained down onto the ocean and the island. Fiery pieces burned on the shore and a cloud of smoke in the air was all that remained where the jet once was. The mighty Avengers were no more.
Only one had survived the terrible attack. Crash landing onto the rocky ground was Thor, his helmet mangled and one arm hanging limply by his side. He couldn't see straight, and tried to catch his breath. He spit blood onto the earth, along with a few cracked teeth.
He breathed in and his guts immediately twisted and seized, as a terrible stench worked its way into his lungs. Like a herd of rotting cattle, it smelled of death, disease and rot. He vomited upon the rocks, again and again, until his stomach was empty.
That wasn't all. His arm was definitely broken. Shakily he stood and unlatched his hammer from his belt.
Where are my brothers in arms? Surely they must have found some way to escape.
Looking across the stony ground, Thor realized how wrong he was. He could see the broken wings of the Quinjet along with pieces of what used to be his teammates. The enormous creature was scooping up piles of each and licking off what his could with the mass of squirming tentacles that made up his face.
Gone... They are all gone.
As an immortal, Thor naturally preferred the company of his fellow asgardians, but nowhere had he seen such brave and kind company as he had with his fellow Avengers. They had tackled foes large and small. They had gone to and returned from the brink countless times, but always they were able to find some way to win. To make it back as a team, safely. But now, he had failed them.
Thor knew the horror that had killed them was no mere monster - it was some immense power from beyond the stars that craved only destruction and madness. But Thor had fought gods before, and lived to tell about it. The beast was too focused on eating human scraps and hadn't noticed him yet. Thorns eyes narrowed, and he made a grim promise that, as long as he was able to stand, he would send this vile thing back to hell. He began to swing his hammer in slow, powerful circles. The air whirred and began to heat up as mjolnir began to work faster and faster in the air.
"Vile thing!" He cried. "Today will be the last day you stain this world with your evil. Have at thee!"
Chapter 4
The beast was already charging towards him as he brought up his arm and sent his hammer screaming towards the monster's giant head. Trailing fire, the hammer flew straight and true and impacted the creature with the force of a hundred artillery shells. It crashed into the fleshy, green body with a crack of thunder, and the creature's top half exploded under the incredible force. Foul green rain and chunks of matter fell all over the island, and its feet crumbled beneath it in defeat. In a single blow, the creature was gone.
As always, the hammer whizzed back to Thor's hand, which he caught and gripped tightly. Even with one arm out of commision, he was still a force to be reckoned with. He looked at the lake of steaming goo, and gasped as it began to move. The scattered piles of unholy muck liquified and pools back towards the large pile. Running like little tides, the pieces flowed together, and a column rose from the base. Higher and higher it climbed, and then, before his eyes, it's features emerged and filed out. It was unhurt.
It lunged towards him, impossibly fast for a creature so large. But Thor was fast too, and took to the air by throwing his hammer and letting it pull him off the ground. A monstrous fist slammed into the earth where he stood a second before, leaving a truck sized crater. Thor flew wide circles around the beast, examining it from all angles. It wasn't until he was more than a 1000 feet away that the stench became bearable again. With great difficulty, he was able to wrap part of his cloak around his face to cut off the smell.
The creature bellowed from below, but made no use of it's enormous wings. Perhaps that were just a mutation, yet another disgusting growth from the hideous mass. It stomped about and tried to grab him from the sky with its enormous extending limbs. But Thor was ready this time, and kept moving.
It regenerates. How do I deal with that?
From his vantage point up in the air, Thor could see everything on the huge island: stone monoliths, crude statures of tentacled horrors, and the length of the German ship. The ship! The reason they had come here in the first place. He buzzed by, glancing in the windows. Outside of the damage to the hull where the ship had run aground it appeared undamaged. And completely abandoned.
Where did the crew go? Eaten? Or... something worse?
He couldn't help his fallen teammates now, but if there was a chance anyone was alive in this terrible place, he had to know for sure. He changed direction and sailed back around the side of the ship, using its bulk to hide him from the monster's view as long as possible. Then, holding his breath against the terrible stench, he hugged the ground as he flew up the mountain and into the only place that was hidden from view: the giant stone door from which the monster emerged just minutes before. Darkness swallowed him as he sailed into the unknown.
Chapter 5
The corridor led down at a step angle. It was about as wide as a subway tunnel, and broad steps were cut into the stone leading down and out of sight. With a thought his hammer glowed and illuminated the grey passage. Thor landed; it was impossible to fly without hitting something, even with some light. He tensed his fingers around the hammer and proceeded downward.
The walls of the cavern were impossibly smooth, as if carved by water. Or a higher power. But the steps were roughly hewn.
Could they be carved by slaves? Maybe the crew is down here alive after all, kept for some purpose.
He continued down in the depths, checking behind him often to see if the beast (or anything else) was coming. After a while corridors began to branch out of the central staircase. Shining his light down one of them, Thor saw a small chamber with a large stone in the center. He advanced cautiously down this new chamber. The room he found was ringed with large abscesses in the walls, each each eight feet high and three feet wide. In each one was a body. There were about a dozen of them - tall and blue scaled, with thin, angular limbs ending in webbed hands and feet. The head had large, bulbous eyes, pointed ears and a mouth full of wicked teeth, which were bared. The red, serpentine eyes were open. The stone in the center of the room appeared to be an altar. It was empty, but an ancient and faded stain appeared to be the bloody remains of a sacrifice. Or a meal.
Thor hurried back and continued downward. Thankfully, the horrific smell from the surface seemed to be receding. Instead it was replaced by a soupy, fishy smell, like a mountain of seafood left unattended in the summer sun for days.
More and more hallways branched off the main corridor, winding away into the blackness. Most appeared to have similar construction, but the interned creatures became markedly less humanoid. Arms were replaced with groups of pseudopods, or tentacles, or strange growths with eyes on stalks. The bodies became slug-like, or developed into bulbous masses of grey flesh.
This whole place should burn.
After descending for what seemed like an hour, Thor heard something. A chorus of waterlogged voices were chanting in a low, steady rhythm. It was no language Thor had ever heard before.
"Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
Steadying his nerves, Thor held his hammer high and stuck his head into the alcove.
Chapter 6
He had found the missing sailors, but they were never going home to their families. In the circular room eight of them stood around the flat, stone altar. They wore the same clothes, but barely. That was able the only thing that still connected them to the human race. Their skin has peeled off like a snake's, and hung off their faces and hands in clumps. Beneath it was a green, slimy flesh that exuded a smell like ocean water mixed with human waste. Their new webbed hands sprouted three-inch talons, which they clicked together while shuffling around the altar.
Their faces were the hardest to behold. They had doubled in size, shed all hair and were covered in green scales. Their mouths had grown and deepened, and now were covered in rows of finger-length razor sharp teeth. They continued to blubber out the world "Cthulhu" in strange, revered tones. On the altar before them was a sailor bound in chains. He wasn't moving. Thor stepped up into the room and saw one of the beasts bent over the poor sailor, doing... unspeakable things to him.
"Enough!" Thor bellowed. "Your foul existence is at an end." His hammer, which could shatter a building, make quick work of the frog men, who put up but token resistance. Soon the room was covered in green gore, and strange organs that began to dissolve almost instantly. Fortunately, the bound sailor was already dead. Thor placed his fingers over his eyelids and shut them.
He placed his hand on the cold stone wall and steadied himself. He hadn't completely recovered from tremendous concussion he received, although vengeance was an effective pain reliever. He had a moment to collect his thoughts. How had this all happened - His friends slain before his eyes? Himself - the God of Thunder - weakened and bloodied, cast aside like a gnat. It was all wrong.
This place is a cold, bottomless evil. This thing may be a god of death to half-breeds and nightmares, but it has gained it's last worshipper here. It's time to get rid of it once and for all.
Tightening his grasp on the enchanted leather strap of his hammer, Thor began to whir it until it was but a grey streak. Then, after it was moving fast enough, he cast it upwards and let the momentum shatter the stone above his head. The hammer's force broken the stone into powder, and pulled him upward and upward, tunneling through the pulverized rock. Through antechambers, storerooms and sleeping lairs he flew. Bones and still living beings were smashed to bits as he flew.
By my beard, how many creatures make their home here?
Finally, he burst through to the surface. He found himself behind the great creature, who towered above him and blotted out the sun. It was staring up at the sky, which was darkening. The air was beginning to have a strange taste to it, a coppery tang that made it hard to breathe. Thor got the feeling this thing was ready to make this planet its home.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
He flung his hammer and flew to the top of the stone gate, the tallest part of the island. He took a few breaths. He was about to attempt something he never had before, and he wasn't sure his body (or his hammer) could take it. Many times he had pushed this gift of his father Odin past all reason, and even magic had its limits.
There's no other option.
Thor began to spin his hammer in a wide circle over his head. Soon, it was moving so fast that it disappeared entirely. The humming sound it made grew louder and louder, until it sounded like a jet engine right before takeoff. The head caught fire and a small sonic boom blew his hair backward. Flexing his arms, Thor moved the hammer even faster. Now the head began to glow. White sparks of mystic energy began to jump off it. In the circle over his head, the air first grew dark with a thick mist, and then grew transparent. As the clouds parted, a strange sight no human had ever seen before was on the other side of the portal.
Thor's hands began to bleed. The wind of his hammer made it impossible to hear, and the increasing shower of sparks made even seeing difficult. By squinting, he could see that the noise and the heat of his hammer had caught the attention of the creature. It had turned around and was race toward him with frightening speed, like a rotting mountain of slime.
It's now or never.
"I made a promise to you, you demon," he said through clenched teeth. "And Thor keeps his promises."
With a cry, Thor released a huge upwelling of power stored in his hammer. Out from the circle of fire he created came a ring of energy that shot out at the speed of light. For a second, everything was light.
Chapter 7
Reed Richards was zipped over the ocean in a new ship of his own design. He had seen the Avenger's Quinjet disappear on the scanner just before he left the Baxter Building. He'd seen Quinjets come and go, so he wasn't too worried about his friends. However, he still grabbed his wife, brother-in-law and good friend Ben Grimm and were heading out to help. Also: he had detected strange energy readings of extradimensional origin and his scientific curiosity was pulling him there like he was caught in a tractor beam.
He had been running various scans on the huge mass that had appeared in the middle of the ocean as he sped toward it from 1,200 miles away. It weighed more than a million tons and was the size of a small city. How it stayed buoyant in the middle of the ocean he had no idea. He had been trying to penetrate its exterior and see what was inside, when suddenly..
"It's... it's gone!" he exclaimed.
"What do you mean?" Sue said. "What's gone?"
"The whole island. And I think... the Avengers too."
Chapter 8
There are many places that humans were not meant to see, roads that mortals should never travel. Sometimes, these places are not only dead ends, they are traps. You can get there if you try hard enough, but you can never leave.
Thor knew of a very special place that fit this description.
The island had come to rest on a plain, with rolling hills reaching out to infinity. The sky was light but it came from no sun. The trees that dotted the landscape were gray and had no leaves. Nor had they ever. It was a dull and lifeless place, and it was called Hel.
From her dark palace, the goddess Hela felt something intrude upon her realm. Hela was an imposing woman: Six feet tall and dressed in shimmering green armor and an emerald cloak. She was the undisputed master of Hel. It was where the ignoble Norse Gods came to reside after their death. They arrived and paid allegiance to their new, joyless lord. But whatever had just arrived was no warrior. And it had come uninvited.
She rose up from her throne of skulls and raced to the scrying pool in the center of her throne room. She stirred the waters with her hand and watched an image slowly form in the waters. A massive pile of rock and stone had appeared out of nowhere in the center of her Dead Wood. It had broken into her world a hundred feet or so above the ground, and had fallen and cracked to pieces on the packed earth.
She moved the focus of the pool around the great pile of stones, and saw strange visages of creatures and bizarre carvings and runes. "What is this? A castle?" she exclaimed. Then, on the top of the mountain, she spied that mystic hammer of that eternal thorn in her side, Thor Odinson. Or, to be more exact, pieces of the hammer. The leather-wrapped handle lay in the middle of a small pile of priceless shards. And just out of reach of them... the body of Thor himself. He lied on a bed of boulders, while fists the size of fishing boats slammed into him again and again.
She peered up and spied a giant unlike any she had seen before (and she had slain many enormous frost giants in her time). It was screaming and bellowing in anger through a mouth of green tentacles, stopping only to pound the weakening body of Thor now and then.
The scrying pool was fueled by powerful magics, so it was able to pick up the voice of Thor as he uttered his final words.
"Without my hammer, you are stuck here forever with the dead and dishonored. A perfect place for you to spend eternity."
Then the Thunder God, older than cities, countries, older than mankind itself, breathed his last.
Hela looked at her new neighbor. The undying monster lumbered off in search of something to torment. Behind him, scores of fishy and scaled creatures began to crawl out of the ruins.
Left with no one around to hear her, she said a few words to herself in old Norse.
"Uskit'r," she muttered, best translated as, "Oh shit."