The pools of fear in the child's eyes didn't dissuade Sui-San the Eternal in the slightest as she approached him. Tears still streaked his hideous face, and his purple hued arms were raised above his head, as if to block the blows his mother would rain upon him. Not that it would have mattered, for her son Thanos was immune to, as far as she knew, every form of harm. She had dropped him from cliffs as an infant, fed him to the vast, spiny, horrific beasts that roamed Titan's barren plains; on the night the grotesque mockery of Eternal perfection had been born, Sui-San had even tried to strangle the baby in his crib. Nothing she could procure had any effect on him. The abhorrent Deviant deformity in his genetics made him invincible, invulnerable to all her attempts to be rid of him.
Almost all.
A Queen knows her kingdom, and Sui-San was no different. She knew of the power the Eternals had harnessed, of the amber singularity that held sway over the peppering of the cosmos. The Soul Stone, buried beneath Titan's crust for so many centuries, keeping her people's skin youthful, giving them true claim to the title "Eternals". What she did not know was that the Stone had a soul of its own, a sweet voice that echoed through eternity to reach her in her dreams.
It told her that she had been in the right, so long ago, her hands ripped from around baby Thanos' throat as Mentor, her husband, threw her from the room. Her only error, the flattering gem had whispered, was her method. 'Take me,' it spoke. 'And the blight that grew in your womb will be lanced with ease. Titan will be free of him, your honor restored. Mentor will love you again.'
Such a persuading melody took root in Sui-San's neglected heart, and from then on she was the Stone's slave. When it implored the Queen of the Eternals to listen, she listened. When it baid she took the elevator deep into the bowels of the planet and retrieve it, she had. And, when the time had come to make herself a vessel for the Infinity Stone, to carve herself open and have machines place it inside her, to bleach her insides of the Deviant monstrosity that had grown in her, Sui-San had taken the plunged with no hesitation.
She felt it within her now, burning in her abdomen, a silent flame; unfathomably intelligent, yearning for her to loom over Thanos, wield its might and wipe him from existence. Sui-San's shadow is cast over the child, pruned chin, muscled physique and all. As she raises her arms and cosmic energy surges into her hand, she and the Stone are one.
In the last instant before she obliterates her shameful spawn, the Stone relents, and the tiniest fraction of its power it had doled out to her returns to its core. The heat that had sizzled in her stomach becomes a roaring inferno. Now the Soul Stone burns throughout her body, filling her with smoke; burning her out. It has betrayed her.
Sui-San gets half a scream out before the sound of roiling flames devours her voice, as well as her body.
Seek me.
Thanos opens his eyes, fresh tears staining his scarred cheeks, as well as dark spots of blood. The view that greets him is horrific. His mother, having once again come to his chambers late at night to make her hatred of him known, had blown apart somehow. Copious amounts of blood and viscera known and unknown splatter the walls and the ceiling of Thanos' chambers. Some of Sui-San, her left arm and smaller strips of flesh from spots he did not know, had ripped itself away from the rest of her body, but the greater portion of her was still mostly together; still warm, though silent she would forever be.
Thanos knew he should feel something; after all, it was not as though he despised his mother. To tell it true, he loved her. After all, hers was the first face that had greeted him in the world. She had suckled him at her breast, no matter how much she looked on him with shame. She had let him live in a palace, no matter how much she wished to abandon him in Titan's wilderness. If it were not for his mother, Thanos would not be Prince, or may not even have lived past infancy at all.
It perplexes him that for all this, he cannot muster one tear to mourn her passing.
His vexing is short-lived as the voice returns again. Something smaller and older and brighter than the sun itself commanded him.
'Seek me amongst the dead. I desire what you alone will harvest, Thanos of Titan.'
So Thanos kneels in front of the husk of his mother, steam from her still warm insides caressing his face. He digs methodically, scooping her flesh from her body. Ligament and bone parts under his Deviant fingertips. The mushing, ugly sounds that would no doubt come from rummaging around in a corpse don't dissuage Thanos for an instant. He can feel his prize drawing nearer, hotter, hotter, hotter- There! It's easily distiguisable from the steaming carcass around it. It's warmer, smoother, like a swirling whirlpool of fire between his fingertips. As if it recognizes him, the object warms even hotter. Thanos pulls his already mighty arms slowly from the sucking maw of carrion that was once his mother. Visible even through coatings of blood on his forearms was the stone which had called to him.
Liquids of all kinds oxidized and turned to gas upon touching it. It was beautiful, deeply amber and golden. Reflective surfaces within the gem cast minute white tree branches through it, all emanating from the white hot void at its center. In Thanos' hand, it spoke.
'Behold me, Thanos of Titan. I am warm, am I not? So too am I beautiful.'
"What are you?"
'I speak for the singularities. I am a piece of the divine made solid, given a gateway into the universe's fabric, which I was made to sew. So were you, Thanos of Titan. I have peered forward in time, and all that greets me is darkness. All of it wafts from you, standing triumphant in its center, wearing shining mail upon your arm. Eternity deigns you will wield the Gauntlet. You will hold all of us within it, and deliver to me what I crave the most.'
"And what do you crave?"
'Some of them approach now. You just might find out.'
The stone quiets just as the door to the room bursts open. It dims, its brilliant amber glory hidden for the moment, as Mentor, King of the Eternals, surveys the corpse of his wife and his ill-begotten son standing over her.
"Thanos?"
The mishappen Prince does not answer. Thanos' ears, eyes, and soul are all beholden to the lava colored stone in his hand. He hears his father snap his fingers, trying to get his attention, but the sound seems like it comes from the top of a very large hill, at the bottom of which Thanos sits. He does, however, find it odd that his father, as he did, sheds no tears for the slain Queen of the Eternals. In fact, looking up at Mentor, Thanos doesn't see the slightest, smallest twitch in his father's face. Mentor wears the same sour countenance he usually did, reaching domineeringly for his son's bulging bicep. No doubt he'd be punished again.
But his father had not even reacted to Sui-San's death. His father didn't care.
Terrifying fury burns in Thanos' forehead, pure and bright, just as Mentor touches his rippling, muscled form.
The stone lights again. Thanos is meshed by a second skin of scorching, orange light. Mentor immediately steps back, but the fateful chain reaction he has begun will not stop. The glowing casing expands, blistering and searing everything in its path. Bigger, bigger, bigger it grows, devouring the room in crushing, thermobaric oblivion. Sui-San's body turns to fine ash, as does Mentor, and the rest of the palace.
Thanos knows what he has started; knows what destiny the Stone and its vision has set him on. As his knees meet the lifeless, charred stone that had once been his home, now spread for miles around him . . .
The light pops, and in an instant, Titan is turned into a hellscape. Life leaves its surface as their ashen husks blow away in the rushing, flaming winds. Cities are flattened, smashed and incinerated. All of the wonders of a thousand thousand years of Eternal civilization, gone in an the blink of an eye. The planet is turned into seared, steaming stone, its entire breadth blasted a deep, dark orange.
Only Thanos remains. He stays silent, kneeling, with his eyes closed. The tears on his face had long since been evaporated in the colossal heatwave that had made him the last Eternal. His nose brings him the smoked scent of burning; nothing in particular, for everything the world over was on fire.
What was he to do now?
No long after he sees the luminescent, pale white hand upon his shoulder, hears the sweet voice of its owner, and feels the cold emanating from her that feels as though it could freeze Titan to its core, he knows.