It was bitter-sweet for Thor to be with the Avengers again. He had missed his young human allies, but it was hard to say his last visit to Midgard had been particularly pleasant. It would also be nerve-wracking to introduce the rest of the team to Loki again, as he wasn't sure that Tony had kept them up to date. But personal concerns had to wait. They were on a mission.
Thor and Ironman took flight as soon as they exited the building, Thor in the lead as he honed in on the intense magical signal that had somehow appeared in the city after he had already arrived with Loki. It actually became harder to pinpoint the Stone the closer they got. Its aura was too great to discern a vector, for Thor at least. His magical senses were nowhere near as refined as his brother's. Absolutely, he could tell there was a fourth infinity stone nearby, but only once Loki called his attention to it. The other three stones on his gauntlet were too distracting. Each was a blaze of glory in his mind's eye that was difficult to ignore. No doubt he could use the Mind Stone or one of the others to find the Time Stone faster, but he was more than a little nervous to try, despite Father's faith in his abilities.
Thor had a lot of innate magical strength, but he was not a well-trained magician. He would never be capable of the sophisticated sorcery Loki could do, like drawing the Aether out of Jane without hurting her. Moreover, despite Loki's theory that it was his fall through the Void that had destroyed his mind, and nothing to do with the Mind Stone, Thor still didn't trust the thing. He and Father had hastily read through some of the infinity stone lore available in Asgard's great library after Loki had identified the Mind Stone. All the legends associated with any of the stones had one of two endings for the wielders: accomplishing incredible miracles and amassing great power, or dying suddenly and horribly in the attempt. Usually, it was the latter. Thor preferred to protect the stones and not to use them except in dire need.
He led Tony in circles for a few minutes before finally settling down comfortably within the radius of where he thought the Time Stone might be. Tony landed beside him. "They've got some all-powerful infinity stone, an artifact leftover from the Big Bang, at New York University. As a MIT grad, I am insulted."
Thor looked at him askance and followed the direction of his friend's gaze. There was a collection of stone buildings linked by well-kept gardens, greenery, and paved walkways. There was a large park as well, divided from the buildings by the main road. The well-dressed humans wandering among the buildings were almost all adults but seemed unusually young nonetheless. A school of some kind, Thor concluded. He turned around. "No, it's somewhere over there," he corrected, gesturing expansively.
"It's in the Chinese takeout place? That's even worse!"
"Calm yourself, Anthony. I don't yet know precisely where it is, but it's too difficult to tell from the air. And please don't broadcast what we're looking for to all passers-by quite so loudly. There's a reason I told you to keep the, er, other one a secret you know."
Tony lowered his voice slightly. "I don't get it. Loki can point to it from miles away, but you're having trouble finding it right under your nose?"
Yes. "It's more difficult closer to it, like trying to find the center of a star from inside the photosphere."
"...Okay I think I get what you're saying, but that is possibly the least relatable metaphor I've ever heard."
Thor laughed. "Very well, how about this. You have a compass in your suit, yes?"
"A compass. Really. Do you take me for an amateur? The GPS in this thing is decades ahead of any commercially available navigation system."
Thor ignored his protesting. "Have you ever been to your planet's north pole?"
"You're thinking of the Capsicle, not me."
"Imagine what a compass would do if you were wandering around near the magnetic pole."
"Ah. Got it. I'm guessing the, ah, former Scepter-of-Doom is similar."
"All of them are, yes, so long as they are unshielded, as with my, er, fancy glove. The proximity of Mind was likely one of the reasons Loki or I didn't notice Time right away. Now, give the others our location. We should spread out to look for it."
Tony grumbled into his helmet for a moment, presumably talking to Captain Rogers and the other members of the team he had alerted earlier. "How will we know when we find it?" he asked.
Thor grinned. "Something tells me you'll know it when you see it. Just look for anything that seems out of place. Now, I'm going this way. You go that way. We should be less than a mile away from it."
Thor took off walking, but he didn't even reach the end of the street before an unseen energy blast slammed into him, throwing him off his feet. He lay dazed for a few seconds, listening to startled screams from the mortals around him, then sprang back up, eyes darting wildly as he looked for his attacker. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but he heard a low hum that was vaguely familiar.
"Point Break! What happened?" Tony called, zooming towards him on his jets, well over the heads of the fleeing civilians and disrupted traffic. His flight arrested suddenly in midair as he apparently slammed into an invisible wall. Ironman bounced and crumpled to the ground with a dented helmet. The air between them shimmered. The dark prow of a ship materialized, drifting lazily to earth like a fallen leaf. Its hull appeared entirely unmarred where Tony had collided with it, though Thor could not be sure from his position. Thor's eyes widened as the cloaking field lifted fully. The ship was enormous, shaped like an upright dagger, and black as night. It was the same Svartalf flagship that had led the attack on Asgard just hours before. It appeared totally unscathed from that fight, Thor noticed in despair, and muttered a brief prayer for his parents and friends.
A handful of smaller Svartalf ships decloaked in the sky above them, circling the area. These were the source of the energy blast, Thor guessed as he spotted the guns each of the small aircraft carried. Some of these did bear the hallmarks of battle with the Asgardian defenders. Hopefully, the Svartalf fleet had followed him through the Convergence so quickly because they had disengaged and retreated, not because the battle in Asgard was finished and won.
Thor cast around at his surroundings, spun his hammer, and half leapt, half flew over to the nearest open green space. The Dark Elves would care little about endangering human lives, so Thor would do what he could to take the fight away from the crowded streets. And away from Tony, who still hadn't gotten up.
The massive flagship set down, and its door opened smoothly. A dozen Svartalf foot soldiers marched out of it, followed by a being who was clearly their lord. He was shorter than Thor, but stature meant little the ancient and powerful race. His face was pale and bony, particularly in contrast with his thick, dark clothing. He would likely appear sickly to most inhabitants of the Nine Worlds. That also meant little though. The atmosphere of Svartalfheim was so cold and thick with storms, the Dark Elves were almost all as pallid as cave creatures. His hair was white, perhaps with age, but his kind were so naturally long-lived and had vanished into secrecy so long ago, even Asgardian scholars could only speculate on their life span, knowing little about their physiology. He carried a short staff but no other weapon. Thor had no doubt the being approaching him was among the most dangerous opponents he had ever faced.
The Dark Elf stopped about twenty strides away, leaned casually on his staff, and smiled. "Scion of Asgard, you have something in your possession that belongs to me. Surrender the Aether, and I shall let you go." He glanced around. "I will even leave this planet unspoiled. I understand it is a protectorate of yours."
"I doubt that, somehow," Thor snorted. "Who are you, anyways?"
The Dark Elf nodded at him pleasantly. "I am Malekith Shivaistha, King of Svartalfheim in your tongue. Well met." His smile hardened. "And I'm afraid I do not have the patience to negotiate gently with you. If you do not tell me where the Aether is, I will kill you. If you attempt to further delay me in my purpose, I will kill you."
"Kill me then. I'd like to see you try. Should be entertaining."
Malekith growled. "You have one last chance, Asgardian. Tell me where you have hidden the Aether on this pestilential planet, or I will kill you. And then I will simply retrieve the other artifact you seem to be hunting and bend that to my purposes instead. One way or another, the Shi will rise again. You cannot stop me." He paused. "Well?" he yelled.
Thor shook his head, raising his hammer.
Malekith snorted. "Kill him then." He turned on his heel and marched back towards his ship.
Thor threw Mjolnir as hard as he could. Malekith stepped nimbly to the side as it passed him and kept walking, even as his warriors ran towards Thor.
A beam of yellow light caught the lead elf in the throat, dropping him like a stone. Thor grinned and summoned his hammer back to him. Mjolnir ploughed through two more of the fighters at his urging, and he caught it easily. "Good of you to stop napping, Ironman," he said, without bothering to look for his friend. "Keep the fliers off my back, will you?"
Thor leapt into action. He trusted Tony to handle the smaller ships, at least until help arrived. Thor would keep Malekith busy on the ground. Five strikes with his hammer and four with lightning, and the Svartalf phalanx was scattered. A few of them got up again, but a second hit kept them down. Thor flew towards Malekith and swung Mjolnir at his head. Although he never looked back, Malekith ducked at the last moment, whipping around in the same movement to strike Thor in the side with his staff.
The blow felt like a whip on bare skin, despite his armor. He wasn't particularly injured, but it hurt. Thor's forearm shivered when he blocked the next hit, but he ignored it and lashed out again himself with Mjolnir. The blow connected and pushed Malekith backwards into the shadow of the ship. Malekith seemed at home in the relative darkness, however. He raised his hands, and the very air quavered around him. It was nothing like typical Asgardian magic, and the only time Thor had seen anything vaguely similar was when Odin and Heimdall had sent him to Midgard after Loki and the Tesseract, without the use of the Bifrost. If he looked with his magical senses rather than his eyes, it looked like Malekith was somehow siphoning invisible motes of dark matter out of the air, or perhaps creating it from the energy of his own body.
The elf clapped his hands, and the motes collided together. They annihilated in a shocking light and a concussive blast that blew Thor backwards to shatter a fountain fifty paces away. Thor staggered back to his feet and spat out blood from his bitten tongue. He eyed his opponent warily. The strange cloud Malekith had summoned was definitely dark matter, transformed to dark energy at the moment of decay, fortunately in much smaller amounts than Heimdall had used to throw Thor halfway across the galaxy. Still, Thor didn't know how to block that kind of attack. The Dark Elves were the only known species to have developed an affinity with dark matter and dark energy. It was notoriously difficult to work with the stuff, precisely because the only way to manipulate it was with gravitational fields, whether natural or artificial. There was no point in trying to defend himself with an electromagnetic shield even: a gravity-based attack would go right through it. He would have to prioritize the offensive.
Malekith bent over one of his fallen warriors. Thor ran back towards him, spinning Mjolnir to build up momentum and electrical charge for a more powerful attack.
Even as he ran, Malekith selected a grenade from the woman's belt, depressed the trigger mechanism, and tossed it casually in Thor's direction. It ignited in midair, then immediately started imploding, revealing the small singularity at its center, one of the most feared weapons of the Svartalf wars of old. Thor swerved, but unfortunately, his momentum carried him into the gravity well. He crouched and dug his hands into the ground, tried to pull himself back out with all his strength, but still he slid inexorably backwards, fragmenting the pavement beneath him as he went. The singularity was small enough it would tear itself apart shortly, but Thor had no desire to fall into its accretion disc before then or to be caught in the subsequent radioactive explosion.
He was too close. Cursing, he flexed his left hand. It was a risk, but he had to take it. He drew the barest power from the Space Stone to pull himself out of the gravity well. It was a strange sensation, moving with the Space Stone. It was better using the Infinity Gauntlet than it was with the raw Tesseract, at least for Thor. The ancient devices in the Gauntlet guided his actions. The first time he had used the Tesseract, it was like sling-shotting pell-mell across the cosmos. Now, it mostly felt like standing still, with the entire universe melting away beneath him and reforming from the palm of his hand in an instant, shifted and rotated slightly to accommodate his desired movement.
He reappeared back at Malekith's position in a burst of blue light. He had his hammer held in front of him and buried the hammer head in Malekith's gut. Malekith gasped in surprise and pain, or possibly just because Thor had knocked the wind out of him. "You have it here!" he wheezed.
Behind them, the gravity grenade finally exploded, the searing heat and pressure wave almost knocking both of them over again as it passed. Malekith's hand closed over Thor's wrist. Only now did Thor realize just how strong he was, as he didn't budge at all when Thor tried to pull away.
Malekith cracked his staff against Thor's temple, then twisted his arm and took him to the ground. He pressed the staff across Thor's throat, pushing it down with one knee to keep him pinned. Thor struck him with Mjolnir, but Malekith just shifted to kick his arm down and pin it with his other leg. Thor wriggled beneath him but had trouble throwing him off; the elf's balance was too good, shifting easily to keep his advantage no matter what Thor tried. Malekith closed his eyes and became strangely heavier, like a lead statue crouching over him. Thor had a sudden giddy thought that this must be what Loki felt like when Thor had set Mjolnir on his chest.
Malekith switched his grip. With his free hand, he softly felt around Thor's armor, searching for the Infinity Gauntlet, Thor knew. Thor gritted his teeth and focused on gathering a storm.
Malekith might be a king and a literal creature of darkness, able to summon incredible strength through manipulation of dark matter and dark energy, but Thor was the prince of Asgard, and his power was thunder and lightning. He had yet to meet a living creature that didn't fear three hundred million volts.
Author's note:
So, this lovely action chapter is also about gravity. The throw-away line in Avengers to explain Thor showing up of "how did the Allfather find enough dark matter to get you here?" (or something like that) always annoyed me. How is dark matter supposed to be a power source? (I know, I know, it just sounds cool and is scifi hand-waving, but it still annoyed me). So I decided to figure out a way to make that line work. Ish. I don't know enough high-level cosmology and math to understand what the current theories of dark matter and dark energy actually imply, but I read up enough to make an entertaining model for my own fiction. So: most people know that dark matter is the "extra matter" of the universe to explain the gravitational behavior of galaxies not accounted for by visible stars, nebulae, planets, and black holes. Dark energy on the other hand is the term for the mysterious energy causing the continued accelerating expansion of the universe. When you recall that E=mc^2, normal matter is about 5% of the universe, dark matter is about 27%, and the rest is dark energy. Anyhow, there is a class of theories about dark matter and dark energy called "interacting dark energy," with the basic idea being that whatever dark energy is, it's one and the same with dark matter. It interacts with ordinary matter through gravity and also causes expansion of space.
For the purposes of this fiction, the theory of interacting dark energy is cannon. That's part one. Part two is how to make that principle useful for my characters. There are a lot of theories about what dark matter actually is, materially (hahaha). One common explanation is WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles); these are fundamental particles that have the property of mass and hence exert a gravitational pull on other massive particles, BUT they don't have other significant properties to increase detection and they don't have enough mass to, for instance, distort passing light signals. An interesting proposed behavior of these particles is that they decay, producing other particles and energies. They even annihilate, which is instantaneous decay of fundamental particles when they collide with one another. One of the hypotheses of interacting dark energy is that dark matter decay produces dark energy (at least in part. The light flash in the story obviously wouldn't be dark energy). Again recalling E=mc^2, a small amount of dark matter can cause enormous gravitational, or possibly anti-gravitational, energy. Which is interesting since gravity is actually, like, the weakest of all the fundamental forces of the universe. Anyway, I think it as a perk makes the Malekith/Convergence storyline more thematically satisfying.
And yes, three hundred million volts is what the average lightning bolt has, according to google.
As for the title, I just thought it was funny. After all, levity and gravitas are somewhat apt descriptions of Tony and Thor but sound like they should describe the antics of a gravity fight...
