"Updates, Ebony."

Thanos waited only a few moments before his son's voice drifted out of the hijacked Nidavellan communication system. The sound was clear and silky, as if Ebony was there in the room with him. The Titan granted credit where it was due: the dwarves' reputation for technical expertise was well-deserved to reproduce organic voices so purely from so many lightyears away. He had great confidence in their ability to forge the Infinity Gauntlet for him within the day, given the right incentives and supervision. Their reputation for pacifistic dependence on Asgard was also deserved; it had taken Thanos less than an hour to subdue the whole stellar system with only three Chitauri leviathans to back him up. They would die with nary a whimper once he had what he needed.

"The Power Stone is found, my lord. Gamora retrieves it even as we speak. It was unprotected, surprisingly, forgotten and abandoned it appears on its most recent blood field with no warrior surviving to guard it, no warlord who knew its whereabouts left to care. I have therefore already dispatched the others to our secondary targets."

"Excellent."

"Yes... Corvus and Proxima should achieve Soul almost as soon. Proxima knows her task and will be about it." He hesitated. "Cull and Nebula will be meeting more resistance than we thought."

"Of what kind?"

"Asgardian. I heard the Space Stone shrieking through the Void, a disturbance rippling across the entire universe through the Convergence that fell silent again once it reached Terra. Unexpectedly, I also heard the Reality Stone briefly before Space activated... It seems likely the Space Stone and Reality Stone have both moved to Terra, although both are now muffled from me again. I do not know why Asgard is making a move so soon, let alone taking Reality from its secret prison. Not even the Puppet knew where it was exactly, after all." He hesitated again. "I trust all went according to your plan on Nidavellir?" he asked carefully.

"It did. If Asgard was alerted to our purpose, it was not from here," Thanos said sternly. "They would have come straight away to help the dwarves in any case, not divert in the opposite direction."

"Of course, my lord. Nebula and Cull are aware of the...aberration."

"You should be with them, my Ebony," Thanos said.

"My lord, I thought-"

"If you thought yourself a bishop and your brother and sister pawns, you were mistaken," Thanos interrupted. "No one of you is greater than the others, and all of us are lesser than our aim. There are two stones on Terra, fool. We cannot allow Asgard to take one, let alone both. Send word to Gamora and Proxima we must rendezvous in the Solar asteroid belt as soon as possible, and put the fleet on standby. Our clash with Asgard may well take place on Terra."

"This may work in our favor. It was always going to be difficult to access Reality where it was hidden behind the full strength of Asgard," Ebony said softly.

"This may also work against us, if Asgard does indeed have an Infinity Gauntlet and has already united two stones upon it," Thanos said impatiently. "Go, Ebony."

"As you command."


Malekith was proving extremely difficult for Thor to kill. Thor could lash out with brush discharges and electrical streamers from his own wellspring with ease, and had been doing so since the very start of the fight, but that was middling power that didn't do much more than tickle the Dark Elf. In order to make real headway, even he needed to harness storm clouds and updrafts to produce the vast electrical charges that were comparable to natural lightning and therefore more consistently lethal.

He had gotten exactly one good lightning strike on the creature. That one hit had stricken Malekith weak and stupid for all of seven seconds, long enough for Thor to get his hopes up and run over to inspect the corpse, before Malekith had shuddered awake again. The Dark Elf had promptly blown him off his feet with a wild, possibly blind, anti-gravity blast that also uprooted the tree they were under.

Now, every time Thor gathered strength and stirred the skies for another lightning bolt, Malekith leapt into the air to avoid grounding himself and toyed with the local gravitational currents so the clouds just wouldn't charge. The wind that should have been driving water up into the high-flying hail withered and fell back to earth along with the precipitation until Thor was weighed down in hot, sticky rain. After about ten failed attempts, Tony buzzed by his head hotly pursued by a Swartalf star fighter and begged him to stop. Only then did it occur to him how much he was complicating his friend's job with the unnatural electrical currents lacing the area and the small but frequent atmospheric discharges, not to mention inconstant gravity. Tony's arc reactor could absorb most electrical energy thrown at it, but the Iron Man navigation and aiming systems were not designed for Thor's modus operandi, no matter what Tony might say about them. The Svartalf ships on the other hand were well-equipped for lightning storms, given the horrible weather that plagued their home planet. They could probably navigate solely by gravitational vectors in a pinch.

Thor let go of the tempest. He sprayed Malekith with another cluster of relatively low-voltage shocks while he tried to come up with a new tactic he had not yet tried. Malekith had his own surprise though. There was a great wrenching sound in the air above them. Thor looked up despite himself to see a great gash opening up in the clouds, containing a strange, purplish haze. He gasped as the air around him grew suddenly cold and thin, a strong wind buffeting him as if he had transported to the peak of a mountain. The sky he glimpsed between the cloud banks started to turn red. He looked back at Malekith, who was watching the sky intently, the tip of his staff glowing a strange blue. With a jolt, he realized what had happened: Malekith had reversed the gravitational field within the cloud, creating a local vacuum and an incredibly powerful updraft. The red patch of sky was a developing sprite heralding a massive discharge. Malekith was summoning lightning, although there was no evidence he could actually direct it.

Thor cast his thoughts back into the clouds, trying to take control of the superbolt as it was born, but it screamed out of the sky too quickly. Fortunately or unfortunately, it split into a dozen streamers. Two of them hit Thor's outstretched hands with terrific power, paralyzing him momentarily as the return-stroke and restrikes volleyed through him painfully. One of the streamers hit Tony, but luckily it appeared to absorb into the arc reactor without incident. One of them hit the fountain, stepped potentials skittering outwards across the spray, fortunately causing no significant damage to the surrounding mortal infrastructure. A few hit buildings, trees, and signs. One tree split and a few lights flickered out, but everything was too sodden by now to catch fire. A large streamer hit one of the circling Swartalf ships, one that was clearly already damaged from Iron Man's antics. Its antigravity engine apparently short circuited, and the whole thing spiraled into a large stone building to be buried in rubble. The last hit Malekith's staff, no surprise to Thor as it had glowed with plasma instants before. Disappointingly, the staff proved an excellent conductor to the wet ground, with barely any visible current tracking into Malekith's armor.

As soon as Thor could move again, he flung Mjolnir at the side of Malekith's head... Malekith dodged easily, right into the path of a whirling hunk of metal flying unexpectedly into their midst. Malekith bellowed in anger as the chain attached to it wrapped around his leg and dragged him down. The thing spun into the ground, revealed in its sudden stillness to be some kind of overgrown battle-axe, on a metal chain as thick as Thor's wrist. Both combatants' eyes darted to figure out where the weapon had come from. Following the chain back to its owner, Thor was surprised to see an alien of a kind he had never encountered before standing next to the fountain. The warrior was a giant, easily twice as tall as he was, with thick armor and a thicker hide. His form bristled with many weapons, not just his axe-chain-thing. He had a surprisingly small head for such a massive body, leaving Thor with the possibly unfair impression of a big, dumb troll.

Malekith seemed to reach the same conclusion at the same time, glowering at their assailant with a disdainful expression eerily similar to Loki's when faced with one of Thor's more fanciful childhood plots. He grabbed hold of the chain to keep control of his own footing, then yelled across the green, "Who are you to come between me and my prize? I am Malekith, King of Darkness. You will come to fear my wrath."

The alien grinned, his wide mouth splitting his narrow face. "I am Cull Obsidian, Brother of the Black Order and Child of Death. I'm here to kill the Asgardian, but I'll happily kill you too."

"I don't think we've met," Thor called to him. "Why do you want to kill everybody?"

Cull shrugged. "You've got what I want. All part of the job... and I love my job." He yanked the chain, hard. Malekith barred his teeth and rode the tether, twisting around in mid air to disentangle himself. The movement transitioned smoothly into a spinning attack with his staff, but Cull managed to duck under it. The dark elf dodged one of the alien's swords moments later and used his staff to fling the blade back at Cull. It missed. Cull's second sword clanged and shattered against Malekith's armored shoulder, but apparently had enough weight behind it to knock him down to one knee. Malekith hissed in irritation and made a scooping motion with both hands. Cull fell upwards. Malekith had apparently reversed gravity on him, but Cull managed to hook his axe-chain around a tree to anchor himself to the ground. He drew an energy gun with his free hand and started firing rapidly down at Malekith, though the beams curved unnaturally away from the dark elf.

Thor shook his head. With luck, one of them would disable the other, but in the meantime, he would take advantage of their distraction to aid Tony. He looked to the skies, where Iron Man was still zooming back and forth between the two remaining Svartalf ships, trying to get them to hit eachother. Thor spotted a smoking crack in the hull of the one to the right. He grinned, spun Mjolnir, and let go. The hammer flew straight and true right through the hole, ripping through the interior of the ship. Darker, thicker smoke started wafting out, and the ship started listing. He called Mjolnir back to him even as he cast his thoughts back to the clouds and whipped up a fresh wind, piggybacking off Malekith's own incidental updraft. If he could gather enough charge, he could probably take out not only the remaining fully functional Svartalf ship, but also Malekith and Cull.

"Damn you, Asgard!" Malekith screamed. He slapped his hands into the ground, and everything fell as the gravity field across the whole park suddenly intensified. Thor stumbled to his knees. His updraft once again blew back down. Cull smacked onto his anchor tree, which broke beneath him. Iron Man swerved sharply down and only barely kept himself from crashing into the ground with his blasters. The listing Svartalf ship failed to correct itself and joined its fellow in the rubble heap, a great fireball blowing out of its damaged hull on impact. Seconds later, the flames rushed back inside, and the structure started imploding. It appeared at least one of the ship's complement of singularity grenades had just activated. Thor swore, but Tony, who was closer to it, swore much louder.

Tony flew up to circle the wreck. "Bomb! Big bomb! Clear the area!" he shouted in a hugely magnified voice.

"Tony! Get down and away and brace yourself!" Thor shouted at him, hastily following his own advice.

The remains of the ship exploded. The shockwave shattered the nearest buildings and all the windows as far as Thor could see, and a peppering of deadly debris destroyed the facades of the structures across the street. Ironically, several shards of the hardened alloy comprising the hull blew upwards and skewered the last Svartalf ship. It was also apparently strong enough to disrupt Malekith's own spells; gravity normalized instantly, much to Thor's relief.

"Wasn't that your ship, you maniac?" Cull growled.

Malekith spun around towards him again, and was hit full in the face with Cull's axe (and half a tree trunk) for his trouble. Thor could hear bones breaking even far across the park and winced. That wasn't so much a clean bite of a sharp blade as a bludgeoning. The Svartalf king staggered backwards, blood pouring from his ruined visage. Yet Cull was relentless, pulling the axe back only to hit Malekith again, this time taking him to the ground. And Cull kept attacking, again and again, stalking closer with each hit, although there was now no apparent resistance from Malekith.

Thor felt a twist of disgust. Malekith might have been a hardened and callous fighter, and Thor's enemy, but it was clear from Cull's bloodthirsty smile as he pummeled his opponent, he was a sadist through and through.

Cull was no match for Thor, though. The alien had taken down Malekith more by luck than skill, and Thor highly doubted Cull would be able to mount anything like the kind of defense Malekith had against his lightning. Thor raised one arm, rending the clouds into two twisting thunderheads. This time, it worked beautifully. The clouds turned black with rain, and the sky above them red with plasma. Quickly, Thor directed ionic leaders down towards Cull and Malekith, as well as laterally to the last Svartalf ship. He coaxed an upward streamer out of Cull's head... and there was an eminently satisfying attachment and a series of bright flashes as the lightning discharged most of the storm's voltage into Cull. Cull collapsed instantly, his body smoking slightly.

Thor smiled grimly, then turned his attention back to the sky. Between the two of them, he and Tony had the last struggling enemy ship grounded in a few more minutes. Thor found one last singularity bomb on a dead Svartalf warrior, called out a warning, and half-jumped half-flew up to set it at the top of Malekith's massive, knife-like flagship; about half of the ship's mass vanished into the event horizon before it exploded, and the remnants were relatively harmless raining back down onto now-empty streets. Tony expediently circled the Svartalf ships once more and shot his blasters into each damaged door and vent to set fire to their innards and remaining inhabitants. He nodded at the conflagration. "That should take care of all the Lucky Charms. I don't think even King Jareth over there could save his little goblin minions from the fire now."

Thor winced, but didn't say anything. Perhaps Captain Rogers would have, if he had arrived to help them sooner. Asgard did not dictate the behavior of its neighbors though, and the Iron Man was one of very few defenses against extraterrestrial attacks that Midgard possessed. In the short time since Asgard had renewed contact with modern Midgard, the humans seemed to have whole-heartedly embraced the philosophy of deterrence as their primary planetary defensive strategy. In Thor's opinion, this was embodied by the very existence of the Avengers. That name said it all.

This flame wasn't honorable, but Thor understood and agreed with Tony: they didn't need an endless parade of angry dark elves attacking their backs right now. He drew a rune of peace in the air and muttered a short prayer to the Norns for the dead. They turned from the pyre and picked their way over to Thor's fallen rivals. Thor grimaced. Malekith's corpse was a grotesque mess. Thor was glad he wasn't breathing, for the dark elf's sake. He was even gladder Cull was dead.

Tony shifted next to him, staring at the bodies perplexedly. He turned to Thor. "So... they weren't working together then."

Thor shrugged, just as confused. "Obviously not. It seems that Malekith was only after the Aether, his ancestral heritage. The other stones would have been a bonus, if he even knew about them." He poked the other body with his foot. "This one though... I've no idea who or even what he is. I've never seen his kind before. But if I had to guess, it is he, or his master perhaps, who is our greater enemy, the one seeking all the stones." He straightened. "Come. We should still try to locate the Time Stone..." he blanched as soon as he reached out with his magical senses again. "Wyrd, Urthandi, and Skuld," he breathed.

"What? Who? And why?" Tony asked.

"It's gone again," Thor said. How by the Norns did he miss that?

"As in 'poof' there 'poof' gone? Not just hightailing out of here? What are we looking for, a magician?"

Thor shrugged. "Perhaps whoever possesses it is taking advantage of the Convergence just as Malekith did." He blinked. "We should be looking for an anomaly."

"Great. How?"

Thor's eyes flicked towards his friend thoughtfully. "Your suit may be able to pick it up, from what you've told me about it before. Can you reach Jane? She would be able to tell you the energy pattern to look for."

"Worth a shot. Jarvis?" Tony fell quiet, though Thor could hear intermittent muffled muttering as he conversed with his computer in the privacy of his suit.

Thor awkwardly waved to some of the local humans who were bravely poking their heads out of broken windows and pointing at him. "Sorry!" he called to one woman who had come out to stare flabbergast at the wrecked alien spacecraft outside her building. A few vehicles with flashing lights Thor recognized as police cars pulled up, although well away from the actual battle arena as the streets were almost impassible. A handful of uniformed officers stepped out of them.

"All clear?" One of them called.

"Er, I think so," Thor yelled back.

"Anybody hurt?"

"Only the enemy, I hope," Thor reassured them. He stood up a little straighter and said in a more commanding tone. "Secure the area, please. Keep civilians away from any unstable structures and from the fallen aliens and their weaponry until, um, SHIELD arrives to take charge. And arrange a search to ensure no civilian casualties. And for these," he pointed to the nearest Dark Elf corpse, "do not approach any survivors. Ironman and I have urgent business elsewhere and will be departing soon." Tony gave a brisk thumbs up of agreement but otherwise offered no comment or further explanation.

The police officer saluted nervously and started directing their fellows to follow Thor's instructions.

A moment later, Tony shuddered. "That Doctor Foster and your brother are a terrifying combination, Thor. Let's finish this and get back quickly." Amusingly, he didn't seem remotely affected by the attention they were drawing. He flew twenty feet into the air and turned slowly on the spot, scanning the area. After a half circle he stopped and pointed. "Over there."

They flew over two blocks, landing on a surprisingly quiet, almost deserted, side street. Tony paced a circle around an ordinary area of sidewalk. He picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it. The pebble's arc inverted two feet from Tony's hand, and the stone shot into the air. It was clearly caught in a gravity current. They had certainly found the anomaly, but where it led, Thor had no idea.

"Now what?" Tony asked. "Do we check it out? I kinda don't want to without knowing a little more about where it goes and what we're up against."

Thor shook his head. There was something else in the area that had caught his attention. "No, not yet. But you should alert the police, or your government, and let them know the anomaly is here so no one accidentally walks into it. It will be growing as the Convergence continues, so they'll have to set a wide perimeter."

"Good idea."

Thor set off down the street, following his nose. Well technically, following the faint feel of latent sorcery. He stopped in front of an old building of red stone. It didn't look like a house, but there was no sign to label it as a place of business. He climbed the steps, and the feel of magic grew. There was spellwork woven into the very foundations of the structure. He had never felt anything like it before on Midgard. Tony followed him, just a step behind. At the top of the stairs, he raised his hammer. The front door to the building was slightly ajar. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. He gagged at the unmistakable smell of fresh blood. Now he truly followed his nose, further into the building, through an entry hall, past a staircase and what seemed to be a classroom...

They found a body in the hall. It was a middle-aged human male. Quite tall for a human, and slim. Blood from a stab wound stained his dark blue shirt. He had short cropped, loosely curling brown hair and a goatee. His eyes were still slightly open but fully lifeless, on a head that was no longer attached to his body having been neatly severed postmortem.

"Oh, damn," Tony said quietly.

Thor picked up the red cape that lay crumpled at the poor man's side and lay it over him. Oddly, the heavy fabric almost seemed to adjust itself, all the wrinkles smoothing out to hug the body with all the dignity of a genuine burial shroud. Thor shook his head at his own imagination. "There's nothing we can do for him, whoever he was. We should regroup."

"Yeah. I'll let the others know. Funny story: they only just got to Washington Square, along with a SHIELD infantry division. We can meet them there or back at the Tower."

Author's note: so yes, continuing the action but this time it's all about electricity. I tried to use actual terminology (as told by Wikipedia) to describe what was happening, even though most of us probably aren't up to date on lightning physics. Firstly, the "lightning" Thor can just throw from his hands at will isn't really lightning-lightning. It's more like what you get from a Tesla coil, therefore I called it "brush discharges" and "streamers." Streamers are the luminous, linear strands of plasma and are components both of Tesla coil discharges and natural lightning. Brush discharges are basically a dense collection of small streamers that don't travel very far from the source coil.

To recreate natural lightning, Thor in this story actually does it the same way real storms do. He makes a cloud and puts an updraft in the middle of it, because the collision of water and hail is what allows the cloud to ionize and therefore build a charge. As the cloud charges, the first thing that happens visually is the formation of a "sprite." This is actually in the sky above the cloud, a poorly understood field of positive charge buildup, and it doesn't happen every time with real life lightning strikes. The next thing that happens is the formation of a "stepped leader." This is an initially invisible channel of ionized air traveling from the charged area of the cloud to either an oppositely charged area of cloud or to the ground. As the stepped leader nears the ground, however, "upward streamers" will form, meaning a reactive plasma stream from the ground. These are visible, briefly, and there do exist very cool photos of them in the instants before a lightning strike. They are also (probably) related to the phenomenon of St. Elmo fire, which is a plasma luminescence around a conductive object (classically a ship's mast, but in this chapter Malekith's staff). Eventually, the stepped leader connects with one of the upward streamers, and that's when the voltage differential finally discharges and produces the bright flash as the surround air turns to plasma (!). The thunder follows, due to the shockwave. Each lightning strike is actually multiple discharges. The "return stroke" is the first bright flash traveling up from the point of attachment back to the cloud, but it is followed by a series of lesser restrikes, all in less than a second.

Interestingly, Malekith's ability to manipulate gravity on local scales allows him to interfere with Thor's lightning, because he can use it to change the air currents. It also allowed him to mimic Thor's ability slightly by creating his own updraft by the same token. What makes Thor's ability to weaponize electrical energies so unique is that not only can he make the storm, but he can direct the strikes, which Malekith can't do at all. Thor can nudge the stepped leader in the right direction and force upward streamers to form however he likes.

The second point to make in this chapter is the contrast with the way Thor thinks of "aliens" with the way humans like Tony do. To Tony, they're... Aliens, comparable to goblins or orcs in the hierarchy of beings, so it doesn't particularly bother him to potentially burn them alive in their own ships. It's a bias Tony at least is probably not particularly aware of at the moment. To Thor on the other hand, who is an "alien" and has much more experience in these matters, aliens are people, just people who come from Somewhere Else. He recognizes Tony's action for what it was: a massacre, even if he justifies it to himself as an act of war to protect nearby innocents.