Chapter 173 - Arc 10 - Ch 7: Convergence Part 2

The Bifrost fired again.

This time was different. The previous activations had been surgical insertions, tight beams delivering platoons and companies in rapid succession. This one shook the ground. The column of prismatic energy that slammed into the scorched circle was wider than the others. The volcanic rock beneath the impact point didn't just scorch. It glazed, fusing into a disc of black glass thirty feet across.

A figure stepped through with the platoon exiting behind him.

Bor Burison carried Gungnir.

Tyson remembered holding it himself, back on the Bifrost bridge, trading blows with Loki in what felt like another lifetime. The spear's balance, the way it channeled energy into focused beams. He and Loki had both used it the same way, as a spear, treating the energy projection as a secondary function of a melee weapon.

Bor didn't use Gungnir like a spear.

Bor used Gungnir like a cannon.

He held the weapon horizontally at his hip, one hand on the shaft, the other bracing the butt against his forearm, and he fired. The beam that erupted from Gungnir's tip was a solid bar of golden destruction that swept across the battlefield in a continuous arc. It hit the nearest cluster of Dark Elves and erased them. Armor, flesh, weapons, all of it converted to superheated vapor in the beam's path. Bor pivoted at the waist and the beam tracked with him, cutting a swath through the enemy formations like a searchlight through fog. Where it passed, nothing remained but glowing trenches in the rock.

He fired again. And again. Each blast was a sustained, sweeping thing. The Dark Elf line didn't break. It evaporated.

Bor advanced through the gap he'd created without breaking stride, Gungnir cycling through another volley that cleared his flanks. Einherjar fell in behind him automatically, filling the corridor of destruction he carved through the enemy. He moved with purpose, pushing northeast through the thinning resistance, and Tyson realized the old king was heading directly toward him.

Despite not having been present for any of the battle, Bor seemed to know exactly where he was going and why. Someone on the Bifrost had been watching. Someone had briefed him.

Bor stopped ten feet from Tyson. "The alignment nears," he said, and pointed Gungnir skyward.

Tyson looked up. The sky above Svartalfheim had changed. Shapes pressed through the thinning barriers between worlds. The ghostly outline of a forest that might have been Vanaheim. A shimmer of golden spires that could only be Asgard. The boundaries were dissolving.

"We have a strategy to extract the Aether from his grasp, but it requires those willing to engage Malekith directly. To hold his attention while the trap is set." Bor looked at the smoking knot of compressed metal and flesh that had been the second Kursed. Then at the decapitated corpse of the first, visible forty yards away where Amy had left it. Then back at Tyson. "You created the opening that allowed our forces to establish this position. Your illusions drew their eastern flank before a single real blade was drawn. Would you stand among those who face Malekith? They will sing songs of this day. Of this battle. I would have your name among them."

Tyson looked up at the bleeding sky again. The Convergence was close. Minutes, maybe.

He nodded. "Point me at him."

Bor returned the nod, a single sharp dip of his chin, and turned back toward the advancing Einherjar, already barking orders in Old Asgardian.

Tyson turned to Jessica and Madelyne. Both were watching him, waiting. Jessica had her arms crossed, blood drying on her costume. Madelyne hovered three feet off the ground, her red hair stirring in a wind that didn't touch anything else.

He raised his hand and swirled, opening a portal, revealing the interior of the Temple of Valravn.

"Begin the preparations," Tyson said. "It's almost time."

Then he held Nexus out toward Madelyne, hilt first. "Are you ready?"

Madelyne looked at the Soulsword. She extended her hand, palm open, fingers spread. Tyson felt it immediately. A pull. Not physical, not telekinetic. Deeper. Something tugged at the place where Nexus lived inside him, the anchor point in his soul where the blade was forged and stored. It was the thread between them, the one that had existed since the day he'd taken a piece of himself and given it to her so she could live. That thread vibrated now like a plucked string, and Nexus responded to it.

The Soulsword dissolved from his hand. For a fraction of a second it existed nowhere, suspended between two souls that shared the same origin point, and then it reformed in Madelyne's grip. Her fingers closed around the hilt and the blade hummed, recognizing something in her that it recognized in him.

They'd discovered this by accident years ago. The fragment of his soul that lived in her body wasn't just a life support system. It was a bridge. Thin, fragile compared to his own connection to the blade, but real. Madelyne could hold Nexus. Could call it. Could feel its resonance the way Tyson felt it, like a second heartbeat.

His thoughts flickered briefly to Illyana. The connection between them was different in origin but similar in architecture. She'd helped him forge Nexus. If they'd had more time together, if circumstances hadn't pulled them in different directions, she probably could have done the same thing Madelyne just did. Reached across that bond and called his blade to her hand.

But they hadn't had the time. And now wasn't the moment to dwell on it.

Madelyne turned the blade in her hand. "I'll take care of it."

"I know you will."

Jessica uncrossed her arms. "Try not to be late."

"No promises."

Tyson turned to Amy. She stood apart from the others, her metal wings folded tight against her back, watching the portal. She hadn't moved toward it.

"You too," he said. "You can go back. This isn't your war. You've got no stake in what happens on Svartalfheim."

Amy looked at him for a long moment. Then up at the sky, at the Convergence bleeding the realms together, at the darkness pressing in at the edges of everything.

"You are wrong," she said. "In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, let there be light. That was the first act. The first word. Before law, before covenant, before any of it. Light. He separated it from the darkness and called it good." She brought her attention back to Tyson. "That is what Malekith seeks to undo. iNot a realm. The first thing that was ever made. The first gift that was ever given."

"I was cast out," Amy said. "I fell. I have spent a very long time uncertain of my purpose, or whether I still had one. But I know what light is. And I know that defending it is not a thing I need a stake in. It is the thing I was made for."

She straightened to her full height, which wasn't much, but the wings behind her spread to their full span.

"I'm staying."

Tyson looked at her for a beat. Then he smiled. "Alright. Glad to have you."

He turned back to the portal. Madelyne stood at its threshold, Nexus resting against her shoulder, the blade's faint psychic hum audible even from here. Jessica was already halfway through, one foot in Svartalfheim and one in Egypt.

"Good luck," Jessica said. She looked at Tyson, then at Amy. "Both of you."

"Luck is for people without a plan," Madelyne said. Then, quieter: "Come back alive. In time for your ritual. No improvising, stick to the plan. It's your plan."

"Yes, ma'am."

Madelyne and Jessica stepped through. The portal sealed behind them, the seam in the air zipping shut, and the dry heat of Egypt vanished, replaced by Svartalfheim's volcanic chill.

Tyson stood beside Amy on the scorched battlefield, the Convergence slowly aligning overhead, and turned toward the direction Bor's forces were advancing.

The Bifrost deposited them within the observatory. The bridge hummed behind him, alive with energy. Asgard spread out beyond, spires and towers rising against a sky that looked fantastical but beautiful.

Amy looked up at the city, and something crossed her face that Tyson had never seen there before.

"It reminds you of something," he said.

"Yes." She didn't elaborate.

The observatory loomed at the bridge's far end, the great golden dome where the Bifrost's mechanism lived. Einherjar lined the bridge at intervals. Soldiers moved with purpose. Weapons were checked. Orders passed in clipped Old Asgardian.

Bor stood at the observatory's entrance, Gungnir planted on the bridge beside him, speaking with a figure Tyson recognized as the Bifrost's gatekeeper. It wasn't Heimdall. This was thousands of years too early for Heimdall. The gatekeeper was a woman, tall even by Asgardian standards, with silver armor and eyes that held the same all-seeing quality Heimdall's would one day carry.

Bor saw them and broke away from the conversation.

"The Convergence reaches its apex within the hour," Bor said. The man didn't waste words. "Malekith will channel the Aether at the point of alignment. When he does, the Bifrost will seize it. The energy signature of the Aether is unmistakable. We will lock onto it and pull."

Tyson nodded. He knew this plan. Had known it before Bor opened his mouth.

He'd watched this scene play out on a movie screen, in a theater. The prologue to Thor: The Dark World. Bor's great victory over the Dark Elves. The Aether ripped from Malekith's grasp at the moment of activation, pulled across the Bifrost to Asgard where it could be contained. In the movie, it had worked. Malekith had lost the Aether, lost his army, lost everything except his life and a handful of followers who'd escaped into hibernation aboard a buried ship, sleeping for five thousand years until the next Convergence woke them and kicked off the plot of the middling Marvel sequel.

That was the version where nobody interfered. Where Bor's forces fought alone. Where Malekith escaped because nobody was positioned to stop him from reaching his ship.

Tyson was here now. Amy was here. Things were different.

Whether that made them better remained to be seen.

"The pull will take time," Bor continued. "The Aether resists separation. Malekith will feel it being torn from him and he will fight it. He must not reach the Bifrost beam during extraction. If he enters the beam while connected to the Aether, he will be pulled to Asgard with it, and we will have invited the wolf through our own gate and allowed him to keep hold of his weapon."

"So we hold him," Tyson said. "Keep him away from the beam until the extraction completes."

"The beam must be focused to contain an object of that power. It limits transport capacity. Five can travel with it. Three will engage Malekith directly. Two will remain within the beam's perimeter to secure the Aether once it separates." Bor studied him. "You were selected because you killed two Kursed. The Valkyrie..." he indicated Amy, "because she killed the third. And because five thousand of my Einherjar could not do what the two of you did in minutes."

"Valkyrie's not exactly the right word for her," Tyson said.

"I am aware of what she is," Bor said. The old king knew more about angels than Tyson had expected. "The word we use is for the false angels of Heven, of which she is not."

"The third member of your assault team is Valdyr." A soldier stepped forward from the Einherjar line. Lean by Asgardian standards, which still put him at about two-twenty of dense muscle, and he carried two swords in crossed back-scabbards. Asgardian steel, both of them, the metal carrying that faint golden sheen that distinguished it from anything forged on Earth.

Valdyr looked at Tyson. Looked at Amy. Gave a single nod. I know what we're walking into. I'm not interested in talking about it.

Tyson liked him immediately.

"The remaining two," Bor said, "are Einherjar specialists trained in containment wards. They will establish the perimeter around the extraction point. Your only task is Malekith himself. Engage him. Hold him. Do not let him reach the beam."

"And if we can do more than hold him?" Tyson asked.

"Then do more."

The old king turned back toward the bridge, and Tyson took stock of what he had to work with.

No Mjolnir. He'd left it in the Temple of Valravn deliberately. Bringing an Asgardian weapon, Thor's weapon, into a battle alongside Asgardians five thousand years in the past was the kind of temporal contamination that created problems. Questions he couldn't answer. Recognition he couldn't explain. The hammer was better off where it was.

No Nexus. Madelyne had it, and she needed it. The Soulsword was the key to accessing Limbo, to retrieving the hearts stored there, to preparing the ritual that needed to be performed during the peak of the Convergence. The battle on Svartalfheim was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The ritual was the point.

So Tyson was weaponless. Which meant he was exactly as dangerous as he always was, because he was never weaponless.

He flexed his fingers. Adamantium talons. Kaine's stinger sat coiled in his forearm, a spike that could punch through a steel plate; in him, it was adamantium and could punch through most anything. His telekinesis could throw a truck. His ferrokinesis could reshape metal with a thought. His remaining armor held enough adamantium to work with.

But reach mattered in a fight. Claws were close-quarters weapons. He couldn't rely on them against an Infinity Stone's wielder.

Tyson held out his right hand, palm up, and concentrated.

The adamantium responded. It peeled away from his armor in a liquid stream, flowing off his left forearm guard and across his body to pool in his open palm. He shaped it as it gathered, memory and will acting as the mold. The blade formed first, ninjato, the same dimensions as Nexus.

The copy sat in his hand, geometrically perfect and fundamentally hollow. The real Nexus had a core of Promethium, the source material of Limbo itself, the substance that gave the Soulsword its ability to cut through magic and anchor itself in his soul. Surrounded in lattice made from focused panels of the Alkali Lake Cerebro. This version had nothing inside it. A shell. A skin of adamantium shaped around empty air, light enough to move fast, sharp enough to cut anything, strong enough to never break.

It wouldn't disrupt enchantments. Wouldn't sever magical bonds. Wouldn't resonate with his soul or hum with psychic energy.

But it would cut.

He shifted his attention to his left hand and drew more adamantium from his right leg guard. Less material this time. The shape that formed was smaller, a dagger, curved slightly, with a ring pommel and a blade designed for close-quarters work. Muse. The knife he'd taken from Loki during their first fight on the Bifrost bridge. The original was Uru with enchantments layered into the metal and contained the essence of La Magra. This copy was the same hollow construction as the false Nexus, adamantium wrapped around nothing, all edge and no weight.

He didn't need weight. He needed geometry. A cutting edge that wouldn't dull, wouldn't chip, wouldn't snap. Adamantium gave him that. Everything else was technique.

Tyson spun the false Nexus once, testing the balance. Too light, predictably, the center of gravity sitting wrong compared to the real thing. He adjusted his grip to compensate. The false Muse he tucked into a reversed grip along his left forearm, blade running parallel to the bone, ready for a snap-draw.

Amy watched the process without comment. When he finished, she said, "You are resourceful."

"Probably should have thought of this earlier. I'm not resourceful, I'm under-equipped."

Valdyr had drawn both his swords during Tyson's preparation. He held them loosely, one in each hand, the blades angled down and back in a ready position. He rolled his wrists once, a small motion that set both blades spinning in tight circles, and then went still.

The gatekeeper's voice rang across the bridge. "The Convergence reaches alignment. The Aether signature is active. Malekith has begun."

Bor's response was immediate. "Activate."

Seven minutes. The alignment would last seven minutes. He had that long to secure the Aether, defeat Malekith, and return to complete the ritual. Over a decade of preparation came down to the next seven minutes.

No sweat.

The observatory's mechanism engaged. The great dome rotated, internal gears the size of houses meshing together, and the Bifrost's energy built from a hum to a roar. The bridge beneath their feet vibrated hard enough to blur vision, prismatic light intensifying until the colors bled together into something approaching white.

Tyson, Amy, and Valdyr stood at the beam's origin point. The two Einherjar containment specialists flanked them, ward-stones already glowing in their fists.

"Hold him," Bor said from behind them. "Whatever it takes."

The beam fired.

Color and sound compressed into a single point of overwhelming sensation, the Bifrost's energy wrapping around all five of them and pulling. Tyson had traveled by Bifrost before, but this was different. The beam was carrying more than passengers. It was reaching across the gap between realms with a specific target, threading itself through the Convergence's thinning barriers to find the Aether's signature on Svartalfheim. The energy vibrated at two different frequencies simultaneously, transport and extraction straining against each other.

Then they hit ground.

Svartalfheim materialized around them in a blast of displaced air and scorched earth. The beam slammed down in the heart of the Dark Elf position, a column of prismatic fire punching through the battlefield's perpetual gloom. Tyson's feet found rock and his senses exploded outward, cataloging everything at once.

Malekith stood twenty yards ahead.

The Dark Elf king was tall, gaunt, his face split down the center; half pale flesh and the other half black.

This wasn't the Malekith from the movies.

The Aether swirled around him in tendrils of deep crimson, reality-warping energy that moved like something alive, coiling and uncoiling from his arms and torso in patterns that hurt to look at directly. He stood at the apex of a stone formation, arms raised, the Aether pouring upward from his body toward the bleeding sky where the realms pressed against each other like tectonic plates.

The Bifrost locked onto the Aether immediately. Malekith's head snapped toward the beam, and his ruined face twisted with fury and recognition.

The two containment specialists peeled off, dropping to their knees at the beam's edge, slamming ward-stones into the rock. Golden light erupted in concentric circles around the beam's base, locking the extraction point in place.

Tyson raised the false Nexus. Amy spread her wings. Valdyr crossed his blades.

And the three of them charged.

The plan fell apart in the first three seconds.

Tyson had expected the Aether to be in containment, something the Bifrost could latch onto and grab. That was how it had looked in the movie. That was how Bor had described it.

But the Aether wasn't floating around Malekith. It was in him. Threaded through his body like a second circulatory system, crimson veins pulsing beneath his skin, the Reality Stone's power fused so completely with the Dark Elf king's biology that there was no seam between host and weapon. The tendrils reaching toward the sky weren't leaking out of him. They were extensions of him.

Bor's plan couldn't work. Not like this.

Tyson processed all of this in the time it took to cross five yards at a dead sprint, and then Malekith moved his hand, and the ground between them changed.

The volcanic stone rippled like water and became something else, the molecular structure rewriting itself in real time, solid rock transmuting into a forest of crystalline spikes that erupted upward in a wave. Reality warping.

Tyson threw himself sideways, ferrokinesis shoving him clear. A spike grazed his ribs, stopped by his armor. Amy launched skyward, wings beating hard, clearing the spike field entirely. Valdyr was already moving, both blades carving through the crystal formations as they grew, Asgardian steel shattering the transmuted stone, but more grew to replace what he cut.

"The extraction isn't working!" one of the containment specialists shouted from the beam's perimeter. "The signature's embedded in him!"

Tyson rolled to his feet. Malekith looked back at him.

The Dark Elf king hadn't moved from his position atop the stone formation. He didn't need to. The Aether did his moving for him. Crimson energy coiled around his arms in lazy spirals, and his split face wore absolute contempt. The way a man looks at an insect that landed on his dinner.

"You bring the Bifrost to my doorstep," Malekith said across the battlefield. "You bring it here, to the place where my people were born, where we ruled before light poisoned the void, and you think to steal from me with it."

More Dark Elves were converging. Dozens of them, drawn by the Bifrost's impact, soldiers in black armor carrying weapons that looked grown rather than forged. They moved in disciplined formations, flanking wide, trying to encircle the beam's perimeter where the containment specialists worked.

Tyson was already rebuilding the plan from the ground up.

The Aether can't be extracted while it's bonded to Malekith. The Bifrost needs a separable signature. Which means either I separate Malekith from the Aether, or I get Malekith himself into the ward-space so the beam takes him and the Aether together.

Option one was functionally impossible. The Reality Stone was an Infinity Stone. Tyson wasn't pulling that out of someone's body with willpower and good intentions.

Option two meant dragging a sorcerer wielding an Infinity Stone twenty yards backward into a containment circle against his will.

Great. Fine. New plan.

He reached for his illusions first. Jason Stryker's gift could override sight, sound, smell, and touch. He pushed it outward, targeting the approaching Dark Elf soldiers, rewriting what they perceived. The effect was immediate. The first rank stumbled, their formation breaking as their senses told them the ground had opened beneath their feet. Three swung weapons at phantoms. Two froze entirely, caught in loops of false input that left them standing slack-jawed on open ground. A squad on the left flank turned on each other, each one seeing an enemy where an ally stood.

But Malekith didn't flinch.

The illusion hit him and slid off. The Aether burned through it, the Reality Stone's fundamental nature rejecting any attempt to impose a false version of reality on its wielder. Malekith could feel what was real. The Stone told him. It was, after all, the definition of reality itself.

"Illusions won't touch him," Tyson said, loud enough for Amy and Valdyr to hear. "The Aether sees through them. But his troops are blind. Amy, Valdyr, keep the soldiers off the containment team. I need that ward-space active."

"What are you going to do?" Amy called from above.

"Something stupid. Keep the circle clear."

"You are not supposed to improvise," Amy reminded, but folded her wings and dropped. She hit the Dark Elf line like a meteorite, metal wings snapping wide at the last instant, the leading edges catching two soldiers across the chest and sending them spinning. She landed in a crouch and came up swinging, one wing sweeping low to take legs while she drove a fist into a third soldier's faceplate. The metal crumpled. The elf behind it crumpled with it.

Valdyr was already among them. He fought nothing like Tyson expected. No berserker fury, no Asgardian bravado. Precise. Both blades working in tight arcs, never overextending, never wasting a cut. He moved through the illusioned soldiers like he was pruning a garden, stepping past the ones frozen by Tyson's power and cutting down the ones still functional. Two kills in three seconds. A third four seconds later. He didn't make a sound.

Tyson turned back to Malekith and started walking toward him.

The Dark Elf king watched him come. The Aether pulsed.

"You are not Asgardian," Malekith said. "You smell of Midgard. Primitive. Come to play in the mud?" His head tilted, the black half of his face catching no light at all, an absence rather than a color.

"Even the Dark Elves are racist," Tyson mumbled. He kept walking. "Here's the thing, Malekith. Your plan's good. Convergence, Aether, lights out on the universe. Classic villain stuff. Very dramatic. But you've got a logistics problem."

Malekith's hand moved. The air between them thickened, reality bending, and the ground under Tyson's boots started to soften, stone becoming something with the consistency of tar. He pushed telekinetic force downward and kept walking, unaffected.

"Your logistics problem," Tyson continued, "is that you're standing thirty yards from an active Bifrost beam, and you're too arrogant to move."

Malekith's expression shifted. The contempt remained, but consideration joined it.

"You cannot compel me to move, mortal."

"No," Tyson agreed. He stopped walking. Fifteen yards between them. "But I can compel you to want to."

He reached for his telekinesis and grabbed the ward-stones.

The ward-stones ripped free from the rock with a crack of splitting stone, golden light stuttering as the containment circles broke. The two Einherjar specialists shouted in alarm, but Tyson was already gone.

He'd seen the problem the moment Malekith spoke. The Aether wasn't just powering the Dark Elf king. It was filtering reality itself through his perception, broadcasting a version of events outward like a signal. What Bor's gatekeeper had seen from Asgard, the Aether separate from Malekith, extractable, targetable, that wasn't a mistake in observation. It was what Malekith wanted them to see. The gatekeeper had looked at Svartalfheim and seen exactly what Malekith intended anyone watching to see.

The entire plan had been built on a lie.

Fine. New information. Adapt.

Tyson's mind worked through what he knew while his body moved. The Aether had latched onto Jane Foster in the films. A human woman with no powers, no defenses, no ability to interface with an Infinity Stone's energy. It had ravaged her. Burned through her cells like acid through paper, killing her by inches, because she had no framework to contain it. The Stone needed a host, but it didn't need a willing host. It was parasitic. It went where it could, bonded with whatever was available, and used that body as a conduit.

Malekith was stronger than Jane. He had thousands of years of Dark Elf sorcery backing his ability to channel the Aether's power. But the Stone itself didn't belong to him. It wasn't loyal. It was a tool that used its wielder as much as its wielder used it.

Which meant it could be taken.

Tyson had seized the ward-stones with his telekinesis, four of them, each the size of a fist, trailing golden light like comets as they accelerated to match his trajectory. They couldn't keep up. His telekinesis moved them fast, ripping them through the air at maybe eighty miles per hour, but Tyson himself was moving at multiple times the speed of sound.

The electromagnetic railgun technique was simple in concept and brutal in execution. Tyson generated opposing magnetic fields along his body, his ferrokinesis creating a linear acceleration channel using the adamantium in his armor and bones as the conducting rail.

The false Nexus extended ahead of him, adamantium blade leading, his body a projectile wrapped around a cutting edge.

Malekith reacted. Credit to him, he reacted fast. The Aether surged outward in a wall of crimson energy, reality buckling in front of Tyson like a heat mirage, the air itself trying to become something solid, something that would stop him.

Tyson stopped at the wall and moved around it. The forces on his body were incredible, but because he was moving by magnetism, with enough strength he could stop on a dime. He'd just have to pay for it.

Malekith twisted sideways. The false Nexus missed his throat by two inches and carved a line across his shoulder instead, adamantium parting Dark Elf flesh and the armor beneath it. Black blood sprayed. Malekith snarled, and the Aether detonated outward from his body in a sphere of crimson force.

His spider-sense screamed, and his trajectory reversed, almost automatically avoiding the reality-stuff.

But the ward-stones were still moving. Still on their telekinetic trajectory, still arcing toward Malekith's position, and the Dark Elf king hadn't noticed them because they weren't a threat. They were rocks. Glowing rocks, yes, but rocks. His attention was on Tyson.

Good. Look at me. I'm the threat. I'm the loud, obvious, stupid mortal who just tried to stab you in the neck. Keep looking at me.

"That all you got?" Tyson called.

Malekith turned to face him fully. The wound on his shoulder was already closing, the Aether knitting Dark Elf flesh back together with crimson threads that looked like living sutures. His split face was unreadable, but his body language had shifted. The contempt was still there, but wariness had crept in beside it. The mortal had gotten close. Had drawn blood. That wasn't supposed to happen.

"You are more than you appear," Malekith said.

"I get that a lot."

The ward-stones settled into position. Four points, forming a rough square around Malekith's stone formation, embedded in rock by telekinetic force. They weren't active yet. They needed to be triggered simultaneously, and they needed to be within the Bifrost beam's range to create the extraction field. Right now they were just inert rocks sitting in the dirt, thirty feet from the beam's edge.

Too far. He needed Malekith closer. Or he needed the beam wider.

And he needed to be touching Malekith when the wards activated to contain him.

The thought crystallized with the clarity of something inevitable. Rogue's power. The life-draining touch that could pull abilities, memories, consciousness itself out of a living being through skin contact. He'd used it on mutants, on humans, on Asgardians. Never on someone bonded to an Infinity Stone. But Rogue's power didn't attack the body, not really, if it had he never would've been able to kill Sabertooth when he first arrived.

The Aether was parasitic. It bonded to biology. If Tyson touched Malekith and started draining him, the Aether would feel a new host. A stronger host. A body reinforced with a healing factor, with adamantium, with a dozen absorbed abilities creating a framework that could actually contain an Infinity Stone's power without being destroyed by it.

The Aether would spread to him. It would try to bond with him the same way it had bonded with Malekith, the same way it had bonded with Jane. And then control of the Stone would become a contest between two minds, two wills, fighting for dominance over the same power source.

Malekith had thousands of years of experience with Dark Elf sorcery. He had the home-field advantage. He had been preparing for this moment.

But Tyson would be draining him. Every second of contact would pull more of Malekith's strength, his knowledge, his will, his very life force into Tyson's body. The longer the fight lasted, the weaker Malekith became and the stronger Tyson got. It wasn't a fair contest. It was a war of attrition where one side had a siphon attached to the other's fuel line.

He just had to get his hands on the Dark Elf king and hold on.

Tyson sheathed the false Nexus across his back and tucked the false Muse into his belt. He pulled the remaining adamantium from his damaged armor, stripping it down to the minimum.

"Amy!" he shouted. "I need thirty seconds on him. Thirty seconds of contact. Get me an opening."

Amy was forty yards away, buried in the Dark Elf line, her wings red with blood that wasn't hers. She'd carved a corridor through the soldiers trying to reach the containment specialists, and the ground around her was littered with broken bodies. She looked up at his shout, processed the request, and launched skyward without a word.

She never needed explanations.

Valdyr was holding the right flank alone, both swords working in that eerily precise rhythm, and Tyson pushed his illusions harder across the battlefield, thickening the false sensory data around the Dark Elf reinforcements. More soldiers froze. More turned on each other. The ones with stronger wills pushed through, but they moved slowly, fighting through layers of phantom input, and Valdyr cut them down as they stumbled into clarity.

Amy hit Malekith from above.

She came down like a lance, wings folded tight, her entire body a projectile aimed at the Dark Elf king's blind spot. Malekith sensed her, the Aether pulsing in warning, and he threw up a wall of crimson energy that should have swatted her aside like the others.

Amy punched through it. Through. Her fist connected with the energy barrier and it shattered, fragments of reality-warped air spinning away like broken glass.

Her fist caught Malekith in the chest. The Dark Elf king flew backward off his stone formation, hit the ground, rolled, and came up with the Aether screaming around him in a tornado of crimson fury. Amy pressed the attack, driving forward, wings snapping out to deflect the tendrils of reality-warping energy that lashed at her. They scored her armor. Drew golden light from wounds that weren't quite blood. But she didn't stop.

Tyson stopped thinking tactically for one second, and just watched. Amy had punched through an Infinity Stone's barrier. The Aether, the Reality Stone, a fundamental force of the universe, had shattered against her knuckles like it wasn't real. Everything he understood about power hierarchies, about what could beat what, needed a new variable. He'd brought Amy to this battle thinking she was a capable fighter who deserved the chance to find purpose. He was watching something else entirely. Whatever an angel was, her fundamental nature clashed with the physics of an Infinity Stone's power; the Aether couldn't rewrite her the way it rewrote everything else.

If God saying, "Let there be light," was the equivalent of the Big Bang, then God was a being whose existence predated the stones. If God made the angels, they were beings defined by a higher authority than a Stone born at the universe's creation. Against an angel's knuckles, the power to rewrite reality met something it didn't have the authority to edit.

Tyson closed the distance while Amy kept Malekith's attention locked forward.

The Dark Elf king saw him at the last second. The Aether lashed out, a tendril of crimson energy whipping toward Tyson's chest, and he barely avoided it, thanks to the warning from his spider-sense, and closed the final three yards.

His bare fingers touched Malekith's face.

Rogue's power activated on contact. The drain began instantly, a torrent of stolen life force flooding through the connection, and Malekith's consciousness slammed against his own like a battering ram. Memories. Thousands of years of them.

The darkness before light. The first stars burning to life and the Dark Elves recoiling from them. Wars fought in the spaces between realms. The Aether's discovery.

The Aether moved.

It felt the new host. The open channel between Malekith and Tyson, the bridge that Rogue's power created, and it poured through. Crimson energy flooded into Tyson's body, racing through his veins, and reality stuttered around both of them as the Stone tried to bond with two hosts simultaneously.

Malekith screamed in rage. His hands came up, clawing at Tyson's wrist, trying to break the contact, but Tyson was stronger and his fingers were locked around the Dark Elf's jaw like a vise.

The Aether tasted like burning. Fire was simple, chemical, something his healing factor could handle. This was the heat of creation running backward, the universe's first light curdled into something that wanted to unmake everything it touched. It flooded through the connection between his fingers and Malekith's face, and Tyson's body tried to reject it the way a transplant patient's immune system attacks a foreign organ.

His healing factor screamed. Every cell in his body lit up with conflicting signals, Sabretooth's regeneration trying to repair damage that wasn't damage at all but transformation as the Aether rewrote his biology.

Tyson pulled harder.

He imagined Rogue's power as a straw. A long, narrow channel punched through the barrier between two souls, and on the other end, everything Malekith was. His strength. His knowledge. His millennia of accumulated will. He pulled, and the channel widened.

Malekith's memories hit him.

A throne room. Dark Elves kneeling in ranks. He stood at the center, younger, unscarred.

"We were here first," Malekith said to his people, and ten thousand voices answered—

Tyson shoved the memories aside. They weren't what he needed. He needed the connection, the place where Malekith's soul met the Aether's power, the bonding point. He pushed deeper through the drain, pulling life force in great heaving gulps, and Malekith was weakening. Not fast. Not nearly fast enough. But weakening.

The Dark Elf king's hands were still locked around Tyson's wrist, and now they burned. The Aether poured through Malekith's fingers in concentrated streams, trying to sear through adamantium-laced bone, and Tyson's skin blackened and regenerated in rapid cycles; his healing factor and the Infinity Stone locked in their own private war beneath his flesh.

"You. You think you can drink me, mortal? I hold this power. I am bonded to it. I am part of it."

Tyson wanted to say something quippy; it was the perfect opening, but he couldn't speak through his gritted teeth. The Aether was in his chest now, wrapping around his heart. He pulled again, harder, and the straw widened into a tunnel.

Malekith's next scream was different. Less rage. More alarm. It was the moment the Dark Elf king realized this wasn't a tug-of-war he was winning. The Aether was moving, being stolen, leaving. Moving of its own volition, spreading through the open channel into a new host. Tyson's body, reinforced with adamantium, sustained by a healing factor, fortified by all the absorbed abilities, was a better vessel than Malekith.

The Stone knew it. The Stone didn't care about loyalty.

Malekith changed tactics. He stopped trying to break Tyson's grip and started trying to kill him outright.

Reality buckled. The ground beneath both of them inverted, stone becoming sky, gravity reversing. Tyson held on. His feet left the ground, his body swinging sideways as physics stopped making sense, but flying was neither new or disorienting. His fingers stayed locked on Malekith's jaw, adamantium grip anchored to bone.

The air between them solidified into black glass. Malekith was trying to encase Tyson in it, to seal him in a coffin of transformed atmosphere, and the glass crept up Tyson's arms. His telekinesis shattered it as fast as it formed, Ebony Maw's gift pushing outward in pulses that cracked the transmuted material like eggshells.

"Amy!" Tyson shouted. "The wards! Activate the wards!"

Amy had broken off her attack the moment Tyson made contact, reading the situation. She hit the ground near the first ward-stone and slammed her palm against it. Golden light erupted from the carved surface, and a pillar of Asgardian containment magic shot skyward and bent at a right angle, connecting to the second stone in a line of burning gold.

Malekith saw it and understood it.

"No." The Aether detonated outward from his body in a sphere of crimson force, the same attack he'd used before, but stronger. Desperate. The blast caught Tyson full in the chest and threw him, ripping his fingers from Malekith's face, breaking the drain, sending him tumbling across the rock in a spray of black blood that was half his and half the Dark Elf's.

The Aether went with him. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But a thread, a tendril of crimson energy still connected to his chest where the Stone had begun bonding, stretching between the two of them like a semi-liquid umbilical cord.

Tyson hit the ground, rolled, and came up on one knee. Malekith grabbed at the thread of Aether connecting them with both hands, trying to reel the escaped power back into himself, and the tug hit Tyson in his sternum like a fishhook caught behind his ribs.

Amy reached the second ward-stone. Slammed her palm down. The second pillar of gold erupted and connected to the first, two sides of a square now burning with containment energy.

"Two more," Amy called across the battlefield. "Tyson, you need to hold him inside the perimeter."

Malekith was pulling himself upright. The wound on his shoulder had reopened where Tyson's earlier cut had scored him, and the Aether was splitting its attention between healing its primary host and maintaining its new connection to its secondary one. The Dark Elf king looked diminished. Not even close to being defeated. But less.

"I can feel you," Malekith said. "I can feel you inside the Aether. You are not worthy of it."

"Worthy?" Tyson said. He stood. "Worthiness isn't something I've worried over for a long time."

The Dark Elf king was gathering the Aether into something massive, crimson energy spiraling inward like a collapsing star, and Tyson didn't give him time to finish it. Ferrokinesis seized the adamantium threaded through his skeleton and launched him forward. He crossed the distance between them in an instant and slammed into Malekith with both hands open, fingers finding the Dark Elf's throat.

Rogue's power bit deep. The drain reopened like a wound that had never really closed, and Tyson's momentum drove them backward, further into the space between the ward-stones. Exactly where Tyson needed him.

The Aether surged through the contact point. Tyson braced for the burning, for the sensation of creation running backward through his veins, but it didn't come. Not like before. The crimson energy flooded into him, and it didn't fight. It didn't try to rewrite his cells or unmake his biology.

It spoke.

Not in words or thought. The message was simple.

Use me.

Malekith's fist connected with Tyson's jaw. The blow carried the weight of Dark Elf strength amplified by whatever fraction of the Aether still answered to him, and Tyson's head snapped sideways, blood spraying from a split lip that sealed shut before the droplets hit the ground. He held on. His fingers tightened on Malekith's throat, adamantium claws dimpling flesh that the Aether was trying to reinforce.

"Get off me," Malekith snarled. He drove his knee into Tyson's stomach, and crimson energy detonated at the point of impact, trying to warp Tyson's abdominals. His healing factor rejected the transformation, cells reverting faster than they changed, and the pain was extraordinary but survivable.

Tyson pulled harder on the drain. Malekith's memories crashed through him. Battle formations. The taste of darkness, true darkness, the absence that existed before the first light. The moment the Aether bonded to him, and the relief of it, the feeling of incompleteness finally answered.

And beneath all of it, the Aether's voice. Patient. Waiting.

Use me.

Tyson reached for his illusion powers. Jason Stryker's gift, the ability to override senses, to paint false realities over true ones. He'd used it a thousand times. In fights, in the quiet moments where deception served better than force, in intimate moments. He shaped an illusion now, instinctively. Copies of himself flanking Malekith, three false Tysons lunging from different angles to divide the Dark Elf's attention.

The Aether caught the thought.

The illusions solidified.

One instant they were phantom sensory data projected into Malekith's mind, and the next they were real. Three copies of Tyson, flesh and blood and adamantium, their hands reaching for Malekith with fingers that could actually grip, actually drain. The Aether had taken his will, the shape of his intention, and made it true. Projected it through the fabric of reality the way his mutation projected it through the fabric of perception.

Malekith broke. He twisted away from the nearest copy, and it grabbed his arm. Solid fingers. Real contact. The Dark Elf king's shock registered, and the Aether's satisfaction resonated through Tyson's chest like a cat's purr.

He wasn't creating illusions. Not anymore. His will, given substance. His imagination, given weight and mass and the authority to exist.

The copies pinned Malekith's arms. The Dark Elf thrashed, the Aether erupting from his body in wild arcs of crimson lightning that struck the copies and passed through them into Tyson.

He pulled with everything he had. The drain widened from a tunnel into a chasm. Malekith's life force, his memories, his will, his connection to the Aether, all of it rushed through the contact point in a torrent that made every previous use of Rogue's power feel like sipping through a coffee stirrer. This was a dam breaking. This was a river changing course.

Malekith screamed. The Dark Elf king's body was failing. His skin greyed. His movements slowed. The pale half of his split face aged decades in seconds.

"You cannot," Malekith whispered. His hands had no strength left. His fingers trembled. "The darkness... was here first. Before your light. Before your..."

"I know," Tyson said. All of Malekith's conviction, his grief, his rage at a universe that had betrayed his people by daring to exist. Thousands of years of purpose draining into Tyson's body along with everything else, and he understood the Dark Elf king completely. Understood why someone would want to unmake creation. How simple it would be. How clean. Just turn it all off.

He let the understanding pass through him without holding it.

"I know," he said again, quieter. "But the darkness will never come again."

The third ward-stone activated. Amy's palm struck stone, the eruption of golden light, the containment field snapping into place on three sides of the square. Malekith's body jerked as the Asgardian magic closed around them both.

Malekith's eyes found Tyson's. The fury was gone. The contempt was gone. What remained was something Tyson recognized from every life he'd ever drained, that final moment of terrible clarity when a consciousness realized it was ending.

"It will consume you," Malekith said. "As it consumed me. As it consumes everything."

"Maybe," Tyson said. "But it's a cost I'm willing to pay."

He pulled the last of the Aether into himself.

Malekith's body went rigid. Then slack. The Aether evacuated its former host in a single convulsive rush, crimson energy pouring through the bridge between them like blood through a severed artery, and Tyson's body absorbed it all. His healing factor screamed and adapted and screamed again, cells restructuring around the new power source, and the world went red, then white, then settled.

Malekith crumpled. His body hit the rock, a vessel with nothing left inside, and Tyson let go of the corpse.

Amy struck the last ward-stone with her palm, and the fourth pillar of golden light erupted skyward and connected to the third, completing the square. The containment field snapped closed around Tyson and Malekith's body, Asgardian magic humming at a frequency that made his new Aether-enhanced senses vibrate in sympathy.

The sky split open.

The Bifrost came down like the fist of a god. A column of prismatic light, every color that existed and several that didn't, slammed into the containment field and swallowed it whole. The ward-stones channeled the beam, focused it, turned raw Asgardian transport energy into an extraction field that locked onto everything inside the perimeter.

The pull hit Tyson in his bones. The Bifrost seized him, seized Malekith's empty corpse, seized the Aether now burning inside his chest, and pulled. The volcanic landscape of Svartalfheim dissolved into streaming light. The last thing he saw before the realm disappeared was Amy, standing outside the ward-stone perimeter, her wings spread wide, watching him go with an expression that held no worry and no doubt.

— Rogue Redemption —

The Bifrost spat him out. Tyson's feet hit the gold floor of the observatory. The prismatic light collapsed behind him, the column of rainbow energy withdrawing upward into the mechanism overhead, and the sudden silence after the roar of interdimensional travel made his ears ring.

The great sword-mechanism at the center stood dormant, its operator absent. But someone had been busy while he was gone. The containment device sat on a raised platform to his left. A cylinder of metal and enchanted crystal, roughly the size of a coffin, stood upright, its surface covered in ward-runes that glowed a dull amber. Built for exactly one purpose: to contain the Aether.

Bor stood beside it. "You carry the Aether. The extraction will require time. The Stone bonds to its host at the cellular level. My sorcerers will need to—"

"No need." Tyson held out his hand, palm up.

He thought about the Aether leaving. Pictured it clearly, the way he'd picture any illusion before projecting it. Crimson energy streaming from his palm in a controlled river, flowing across the gap between him and the containment vessel, pouring through the crystal aperture at its top and settling inside like wine into a decanter. Every detail. The color, the movement, the way the energy would spiral as it left his body.

The Aether made it real.

Crimson light erupted from his palm. It streamed across the observatory in exactly the pattern he'd imagined, a controlled river of reality-warping energy that flowed into the containment vessel with the precision of a thing rehearsed a thousand times. The ward-runes on the cylinder flared from amber to white as they accepted the Stone's power, crystal panels sealing shut one by one as the Aether filled the space inside.

Almost paradoxical. He'd imagined an illusion of the Aether leaving, and the Reality Stone had made the illusion true. His will, given substance. His intention, given the authority to reshape what was. The same trick he'd pulled with the copies on Svartalfheim, but turned inward, applied to the Stone itself.

The last tendril of crimson energy left his fingertips. The black scales on his left hand crumbled to dust and fell away, revealing unmarked brown skin beneath. His vision normalized, the quantum probability clouds and magnetic field lines fading from his perception like a dream dissolving in morning light.

The containment vessel sealed with a sound like a cathedral door closing.

Bor stared at the device. Then at Tyson. Then at the device again. The All-Father's jaw worked once, twice, and Tyson caught the precise moment the old king decided not to ask how that had been possible.

"The Stone is contained," Bor said carefully.

Tyson looked up through the observatory's open ceiling, past the mechanism of the Bifrost, to the Asgardian sky beyond. The clock in his head was still ticking, and Svartalfheim wasn't finished. "I'll return to the battle shortly."

He raised his left hand and traced a circle in the air, and orange and gold sparks erupted, carving a portal into existence. Through the opening, his temple. Stone walls. Quiet air. The smell of incense and wood. He stepped through without waiting for Bor's response, and the portal snapped shut behind him.

The temple air smelled of incense and the mineral tang of crushed bone powder waiting in ceramic bowls. Jessica had drawn the circles. Three of them, concentric rings of veve symbols painted on the stone floor in a paste of ash and blood, each centered on a basin carved from black rock he'd pulled through a portal from Limbo. The basins sat low to the ground, wide-mouthed, their interiors stained dark from the preparation oils rubbed into the stone to seal the pores.

Jessica and Madelyne had arranged the hearts.

They'd done it while he was fighting Malekith, working from the lists he'd left pinned to the wall for just these circumstances. Three groupings, each tailored to the recipient as described previously. The hearts sat in their basins, dark and still. Waiting.

"You look like hell," Jessica said. She was kneeling beside her basin in a tank top and shorts, her dark hair pulled back.

"Fought a Dark Elf king. Absorbed an Infinity Stone. Gave it back." Tyson knelt between the three circles and began checking the veve lines for breaks. "Had to improvise a little, sorry."

Madelyne sat cross-legged beside her own basin, watching him work. Her red hair fell loose around her shoulders. She'd been quiet since he'd stepped through the portal.

Tyson placed his palms flat on the floor between the circles and felt the energy of the Convergence thrumming through the stone beneath him. It was everywhere right now. The alignment of the Nine Realms bled power into every dimension, every ley line, every scrap of ground on every world. His magical senses were weak, but he'd ensured his temple sat on a nexus point; the Nile provided life to the area, and the temple had been placed to channel the energy that naturally congregated around it. The Convergence turned that nexus point into a fire hose. "Calypso called on the Lwa to power the transformation. Papa Legba to open the door. Ezili Freda for the blessing. Agwe for the connection to nature."

"And the Lwa don't exist yet," Jessica said.

"Not for another few thousand years. Haitian Vodou develops from West African traditions that haven't been born yet. The spirits Calypso invoked are real, but they're not here." Tyson pulled the bowls of bone powder closer. "So I substitute. The Convergence provides the raw energy. My soul provides the intent and the bridge."

"Like what you did for me," Madelyne said. First words she'd spoken since he arrived.

"Similar. Smaller." He measured powder into his palm. "Raising you into a new body required me to act as the entire spiritual infrastructure. Anchor, conduit, and secondary source. This is simpler. The hearts provide the template. The Convergence provides the power. I just need to be the voice that tells the power what to do."

He stood and moved to the center of the three circles where the veve lines intersected. The bone powder felt chalky and warm in his hands. He cast it into the air above the first basin, Jessica's, and it hung there, suspended by the Convergence energy bleeding up through the floor. Sparks crawled through the powder like fireflies trapped in amber.

Tyson opened his mouth and began the chant. Not in Haitian Creole. The words wouldn't carry the right weight without the Lwa to receive them. Instead, he spoke in a language he'd pulled from Malekith's memories only minutes ago; Old Svartalfar, the tongue the Dark Elves had used before the universe had light. A language that predated man.

"I offer the hearts of these adversaries. Their strength. Their instinct. Their killing patience. Not to spirits. Not to gods. To the raw fact of what they were. Let their essence dissolve. Let it become something that can be taken in."

The hearts in Jessica's basin began to pulse.

The pull hit his chest. His own soul energy, the reservoir he'd built through years of living his life, absorbing lives and powers and memories. It flowed out of him through the veve lines on the floor, golden-white light tracing the painted symbols and feeding into the circles. The Convergence energy rose to meet it, and where the two streams merged, the air crackled with potential.

The hearts dissolved. They softened and ran like wax in a furnace, their physical forms collapsing into liquid that filled the basin's bowl. The fluid was dark red streaked with something iridescent, and it moved on its own, swirling in patterns that matched the veve symbols on the floor.

"Jess," Tyson said. "Go."

Jessica stood. She looked at the basin, at the swirling liquid that had been hearts moments ago, and her jaw set. She stepped into the circle, knelt, and plunged her face into the basin.

Her back arched. Her fingers gripped the basin's rim hard enough that the stone cracked under spider-strength, and a sound came out of her that was muffled by the liquid but still audible.

Tyson's hands didn't stop moving. He was already reaching for the bone powder, already turning toward Madelyne's basin. But beneath the discipline, beneath the rote execution of steps he'd rehearsed a hundred times in his head over the past decade, something had cracked open in his chest at the sound Jessica made. He'd designed this. Every painted veve line, every heart sitting in its basin; he had chosen all of it for them. The pain Jessica was enduring right now existed because Tyson had decided that this was necessary. That it was worth it. He believed that. But believing something was worth doing and watching someone you loved suffer because you'd decided so were two different animals entirely.

He was already casting powder over Madelyne's basin. The bone powder ignited above her hearts and hung in burning constellations.

"Their cunning. Their sight. Their power. Let it dissolve. Let it transform."

Madelyne's hearts pulsed and liquefied. The fluid in her basin was darker than Jessica's, almost black, with streaks of deep copper running through it. She looked at it, looked at Jessica still submerged and shaking, and slid forward on her knees to the basin's edge.

"This is going to hurt," Tyson said.

"I know." Madelyne put her hands on the rim and pushed her face into the liquid.

Her reaction was quieter than Jessica's. Her body went rigid, every muscle locking at once, and then she began to tremble. The veve lines pulsed gold beneath her knees.

Two rituals running. The drain on his soul was manageable. The Convergence was doing most of the heavy lifting; the cosmic alignment poured power into the circles like sunlight through a magnifying glass, and Tyson only needed to shape it, direct it, give it the intent.

He watched them both while the ritual worked. Jessica, shuddering with her face still submerged, her body fighting every instinct to reject what it was becoming. Madelyne, rigid and trembling, enduring privately, fiercely. He'd built a life around this, the training, the years of patience that Amy correctly pointed out did not come naturally to him, and all of it had been for the seven minutes he was inside right now. The planning was supposed to fall away when the moment arrived. You were supposed to feel certainty, or triumph, or at least the clean satisfaction of a plan executed. Instead, here he was, kneeling between two women whose bodies were being remade by a ritual he'd designed using knowledge of voodoo mashed with what he'd bartered from the lord of Hell.

He cast the last handful of bone powder over his own basin and spoke the third thread of the chant.

"Mass. Sense. Patience. Power. The predator that does not chase but waits. Let it dissolve."

His hearts liquefied. The fluid was thick, and it smelled like the ocean, and yet like blood. Tyson knelt at his basin. Through the veve network he could feel the other two rituals completing, Jessica's body absorbing the last of her fluid, Madelyne's transformation reaching its peak. He put his face into the basin and drank.

The liquid hit his tongue, and it tasted like raw meat and salt water. It poured down his throat and into his blood, and his healing factor tried to reject it, tried to purge the foreign substance, and he had to consciously override the response, force his cells to accept the change instead of fighting it.

The strength settled into his muscles. A new sense layered over his already enhanced perception, and suddenly he could feel both women kneeling at their basins. The basins cracked. All three, simultaneously, the volcanic stone splitting along fault lines as the last of the liquid was absorbed. Shards scattered across the veve circles, and the golden light in the painted lines flared once, brilliant, then faded to nothing.

Tyson lifted his head. The bone powder had settled from the air, coating everything in a fine grey dust. The temple was quiet again.

Jessica pulled back from her shattered basin. She was breathing hard, her hands flat on the floor. She didn't look up. Madelyne rose slower. She sat back on her heels, and her hands came up to touch her own face, her neck, her arms, cataloging changes that were mostly internal. When she looked at Tyson, it was sharper than before, and it held.

"Did it work?" Madelyne asked first. She was still touching her own arms, fingers pressing into muscle, testing. "You're the one with experience gaining new powers. Can you tell?"

Tyson closed his eyes. Something new in his body. One of the hearts in his basin had been Azazel's. He'd used the demonic mutant's power before. Both through direct absorption, and through Amora's amplification. He knew what that teleportation felt like.

He thought about the far wall of the temple. Twenty feet away, past the shattered basins and the fading veve lines.

The smoke took him. Black and sulfurous, it swallowed him whole, and for a fraction of a second he existed nowhere, suspended in the space between points, and then the smoke spat him out against the far wall. His feet hit stone. The displacement of air scattered bone powder in a grey cloud around him.

He thought about where he'd started.

Black smoke. Nowhere. Stone under his feet again, and he was back, standing in the center of the broken circles with the taste of brimstone on his tongue.

"It worked," he said.

Madelyne crossed the distance between them in three steps and pulled him into her. Her arms locked around his torso, and she kissed him. Hard, with intention, her mouth warm and demanding against his. Tyson's hands found her waist, and he kissed her back, tasting the copper residue of the ritual on her lips. Her fingers slid down his arm. Light, deliberate. She found the sling ring on his left hand and slipped it off his finger, and then she planted both palms on his chest and shoved.

He stumbled back two full steps. She was strong. The push had real force behind it, considering he was strong too.

Madelyne held up the sling ring, turning it between her fingers. "Now go finish this war. Usually, you're supposed to give a girl a ring; I'm not supposed to need to take it." She slipped the ring onto her hand. "Get that Stone and bring back our angel."

Tyson laughed, short and surprised, pulled out of him by the theft, the playful shove, and the look on her face. She stood in the dust-covered temple with ritual fluid drying on her chin and a stolen magical artifact on her finger, and she looked like she owned the place.

"Yes, ma'am."

Black smoke swallowed him, and he was gone.

— Rogue Redemption —

The battle was over. The clash of metal, war cries, and detonations had faded. All that remained was the low murmur of soldiers moving among the dead and the occasional sharp cry of a wounded man being found among the fallen. The Dark Elf ships lay scattered across the plains in burning heaps of twisted metal, driven into the ground like javelins thrown by a careless behemoth.

In the movie, the Dark Elves had crashed their own vessels into the Asgardian lines, killing thousands on both sides in a suicidal exchange.

With Malekith dead, the battle didn't end. The Dark Elves should have broken, scattered, surrendered. They didn't. They fought to the last. Every single one of them. Tyson watched an Einherjar squad pull a wounded Dark Elf from beneath a piece of hull wreckage. It lunged at them with a broken blade, snarling through a crushed jaw, until a spear took it through the chest.

No retreats. No surrenders. No self-preservation at all.

Tyson didn't know which was worse. The ships that killed indiscriminately, or the infantry that simply refused to stop dying. It was a slaughter. A genocide. The Asgardians moved through the field, finishing a job they took no pleasure in, and the Dark Elves met them with ferocity, having chosen extinction over defeat. Few prisoners were taken, because few allowed themselves to be taken.

He found Amy where he'd left her. She was sitting on a flat rock with her knees drawn up, watching the cleanup with a sad expression. Tyson knelt beside her, put a hand on her shoulder, and thought of Earth.

Black smoke. Brimstone. Amy's bedroom in the temple, warm and quiet and smelling of linen. He set her down, told her to rest, and teleported back before she could argue.

He was gone for seconds. The plains of Svartalfheim stretched in every direction, covered in the dead.

He stood among them for a moment. Not searching for anything. Not moving toward anyone. Just standing, with the sulfur taste of Azazel's teleportation fading from his tongue and the dead stretching out beneath a sky that had no sun and never would. A Dark Elf lay face-down three feet from his left boot, its fingers still locked around the hilt of a blade.

Tyson breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. Counted to three. Then he took everything he was feeling, the weight of a species choosing annihilation over surrender, and the quiet sick certainty that he might have been able to prevent it. He pushed it to the back of his mind. He'd think about it later. Probably at three in the morning, alone on the temple balcony, staring at the Nile. But not now. Now he had a Stone to steal, and the man who'd bury it was fifty yards away.

He found Bor at the center of the field, standing among corpses with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying the carnage. His armor was dented and dark with blood.

An Asgardian approached. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing battle-scarred plate and carrying himself with the bearing of a man born to command. Young, by Asgardian standards. Strong jaw, blonde hair matted with sweat and grime.

"Father," the Asgardian said. "The eastern flank is secured. The last pockets of resistance have been eliminated."

Tyson went still. Father. He looked at the young warrior again. Two eyes. Both whole, both bright, unmarked by the wound that would one day cost him one. Odin. Odin Borson, before he became the All-Father, standing in the aftermath of the war that would define his early reign.

"Well done," Bor said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Valdyr fell."

Tyson didn't respond immediately. He'd already guessed. The right flank had gone quiet in the final minutes, and that blade-rhythm had stopped, and he'd known without looking.

"He held the flank," Tyson said.

"He held many flanks. His name will be remembered."

Tyson doubted that. History remembered gods and kings. It forgot the men who held the flanks.

"Odin. This is Valravn. He is the one who slew Malekith."

Odin's attention shifted to Tyson with immediate interest. He clasped his fist to his chest in salute. "Then the Realms owe you a great debt, Valravn. I am honored." He paused, studying Tyson's face, his armor, his build. "Forgive me. I don't believe I've seen you among our ranks before."

"Valravn is a god of Midgard," Bor said.

Odin blinked. "Midgard?"

Before the question could go further, an Einherjar officer approached at a quick march and dropped to one knee. "Sire. The Aether. Shall we destroy it?"

Bor's expression didn't change. "If only we could. But its power is too great." He was quiet for a moment. "We'll bury it deep. Somewhere no one will ever find it."

The Einherjar saluted and withdrew.

"Odin," Bor said. "Gather the troops. I expect a full report on our status. The campaign continues once we recover our strength."

"Yes, Father." Odin gave Tyson one last curious look, then turned and strode away across the field of the dead.

Bor watched him go, then turned back to Tyson. "Valravn. Excuse me. I'll need to handle the Aether personally."

Bor and his Einherjar guard moved toward the Bifrost site.

Tyson fought under the name Valravn, and Bor would remember that name. Would tell stories about the Midgardian god who killed Malekith and asked for nothing in return. That version of events would survive. In Asgard's history, Valravn would be a hero.

He watched Bor's back, his Einherjar guard falling into formation around him. The Aether. The Reality Stone, wrapped in its liquid shell, too powerful to destroy and too dangerous to leave unguarded. Bor's plan was the same one Tyson had seen play out in the films. Bury it. Hide it. Hope nobody comes looking for five thousand years.

Tyson had other plans. He'd stood in Bor's vanguard and fought for Bor's cause. He'd held the line while the Bifrost delivered reinforcements. He'd killed Malekith with his bare hands and given the Aether to Bor's containment vessel because the plan required it, because trust had to be built before it could be spent. And now he was going to betray that trust completely.

He had to. The Convergence happened once every five thousand years. The Aether was an Infinity Stone. Thanos would come to Earth to collect the others, and when he succeeded, half the universe would die. Tyson needed the Reality Stone more than Bor needed it buried. That didn't make the betrayal better. Or maybe it did. Without question, it made it necessary.

He pulled the illusions over himself in layers. First, his own power, the sensory override that could fool eyes and ears. Then Loki's magic on top of it, a second skin of sorcery that bent light around him and erased his presence from the visible spectrum entirely. Two systems working in concert. Overkill for most situations, but the Bifrost observatory had a Watcher, and Watchers saw everything.

Almost everything.

Azazel's shapeshifting was a strange gift. The demonic mutant's biology had been malleable in ways that went beyond simple disguise. Tyson's skin rippled as he pushed the change through his body, features softening and rearranging, height dropping three inches, build narrowing from its distinctive mass into something more generic. Asgardian bone structure. Asgardian coloring. He studied the nearest dead Einherjar, memorized the face, the armor configuration, the way the helm sat on the brow, and copied it all. When he was done, he looked like any other soldier on the field. Unremarkable. Forgettable. One more battered warrior among thousands. He reshaped his armor to match with ferrokinesis.

Bor reached the Bifrost site. The king raised Gungnir. The rainbow bridge erupted. Color and sound and cosmic energy.

Tyson teleported.

Black smoke, tasting of sulfur, and he materialized on the Rainbow Bridge just outside the observatory's entrance. The Bifrost's activation washed over him in waves of color and vibration, and he stood in the middle of it, just another Einherjar waiting for transport, his stolen face blank and tired and appropriately battle-worn. The light faded. The colors settled. Bor and his guard materialized in the observatory ahead of him, and Tyson fell into step.

Nobody looked at him twice.

Inside the observatory, the Watcher stood at his post. Tyson kept his posture slack, mimicking the exhausted shuffle of the soldiers around him. Bor approached the Watcher and spoke.

"Find me the deepest place on Svartalfheim. Somewhere beneath the surface. Somewhere that has not seen light since the world was formed."

The Watcher turned outward. Tyson felt the weight of that perception sweep past him like a searchlight, but it was aimed at Svartalfheim, not at the soldiers standing in the observatory. The Watcher's attention was on Bor's request, on the billions of cubic miles of dark rock and empty cavern that made up the underworld of the Dark Elf homeworld.

"There is a place," the Watcher said. "Deep beneath the northern range. A sealed chamber. No passage leads to it. No creature has walked there."

"Good," Bor said. "Open the way."

The Bifrost fired again. Bor selected a small escort. Four Einherjar, the nearest soldiers at hand, to carry the containment vessel and stand guard while he worked. Tyson was the third one Bor pointed to.

He stepped onto the Bifrost with the others and said nothing.

They materialized in darkness. Absolute, total, the kind of dark that had weight and texture. Tyson's enhanced senses mapped the space around him: a cavern, roughly spherical, maybe a few hundred feet across, with walls of compressed basalt that had never been touched by tool or hand. The air was stale and mineral-heavy, undisturbed for millions of years.

Bor produced a light. A simple spell, golden and warm, that illuminated the chamber in a soft glow. The containment vessel sat between two of the Einherjar, a stone box reinforced with Asgardian metalwork, and inside it the Aether pulsed with a slow, sullen rhythm. Red light leaked through the seams.

"Set it down," Bor said. "Center of the chamber."

The Einherjar obeyed. They placed the vessel on the cavern floor, and Bor knelt beside it. He placed his hands on the stone and spoke words of sealing, old Asgardian, the language of binding and containment. The floor beneath the vessel shifted. Rock flowed like water, rising around the box, encasing it, drawing it down into the basalt until only the faintest outline remained visible on the surface. Bor spoke again, and even that outline vanished. The floor was smooth and unbroken, as if nothing had ever been placed there.

"It is done," Bor said. He stood. "This place will be forgotten. The Aether will sleep here until the end of all things."

They returned on the Bifrost. The observatory was busy now, soldiers cycling through in groups as the army withdrew from Svartalfheim. Bor moved toward the city with his personal guard, and the Einherjar dispersed into the flow of returning troops. Tyson moved with them, matching their pace, their posture, their tired silence.

He waited.

The Watcher left his post. Not for long. A brief absence, a moment to speak with an officer, his back turned to the bridge.

Black smoke. Brimstone. Gone.

He materialized in the sealed cavern beneath Svartalfheim's northern range. The darkness was absolute again, but he didn't need light. He knelt and placed his palms flat on the floor where Bor had buried the vessel. His telekinesis reached down through the rock, found the containment box, and pulled. Stone cracked and split as the vessel rose through the basalt, shedding dust and fragments, until it broke the surface and sat before him on the cavern floor.

Tyson opened it.

The Aether moved. It uncoiled from the vessel like a living thing, red and fluid and hungry, tendrils reaching for the nearest source of life. It found him. It touched his skin, probing, testing, searching for a way in.

He let it.

The Reality Stone had bonded to him before, had flowed through his veins and answered his commands, and then he'd given it back. It remembered him. The Aether poured into his body through his hands, his arms, his chest, flooding his bloodstream with warmth and power that tasted like copper and starlight. No resistance. It settled into him easily.

He reset the containment box, then teleported. Back to the temple.

His temple. Stone walls. Warm air. The shattered basins still lay where they'd cracked, and bone powder coated every surface in a fine grey film. Tyson stood in the center of the room with the Reality Stone humming in his blood.

Jessica was waiting for him.

She sat on the floor of the ritual chamber with her back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, and she'd been crying. Not the quiet kind. Her face was blotchy and red, and her dark hair stuck to her cheeks where the tears had run, and when Tyson materialized out of the black smoke, she flinched before she even looked up.

He dropped to a knee beside her and pulled her into him, one arm around her shoulders, the other cradling the back of her head. She was shaking.

"Hey. Hey, what's wrong?" He held her tighter. "We won. It's done. Amy's back; she's in her room; she's fine. I got the Stone. What happened? Why are you crying?"

Jessica didn't speak. Her fingers curled into the front of his armor, and she pressed her face into his chest, and the sound she made was nothing like the woman who'd faced down Dark Elves without blinking.

Tyson looked over her head. The ritual chamber was empty. Bone powder on every surface, shattered basins, fading veve lines. No one else.

Madelyne was gone.

He reached for her. The connection, the thread of shared soul that let him find her anywhere, the piece of himself that lived in her body and pulsed like a second heartbeat when she was near. He reached for it the way he'd reach for his own hand.

Nothing. Not distance, not silence. Nothing. The thread was still there, but it stretched into a direction he couldn't follow, pulled taut across some gap that his senses couldn't bridge.

"Jess." His voice was careful now. "Where's Maddy?"

Jessica pulled back from his chest. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, smearing tears and bone dust into a grey streak across her cheek. "She's gone. I'm sorry, Ty."

"What do you mean she's gone?"

"She had a vision. Of the future. She said she needed to leave, that it was the only way." Her hands were still shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs to stop it. "I tried to convince her it wasn't the right call. That we needed to talk to you first, that we needed to tell you. She wouldn't listen."

Tyson sat back on his heels.

"She showed me the vision," Jessica said. "And Ty, she was right. You can't see it. We couldn't tell you about it, because you'd change it. That's the whole point. If you know, you act differently, and it falls apart."

"Wait." Tyson held up a hand. "Maddy is gone. She left. Because she had a vision of the future, and I'm not allowed to know what it is."

Jessica was crying again. Not the quiet leaking from before. Real tears, running clean tracks through the dust on her face, and she nodded, and her jaw was tight with the effort of holding herself together. "I know you're going to hate me. But I had to, Ty. I had to let her go."

"Why would I hate you?"

Jessica took a breath, and the next part came out fast, like she'd been rehearsing it and needed to get through the whole thing before he could interrupt.

"Maddy switched some of the hearts."

Tyson went still. "Which ones?"

"She gave you the Abomination's heart and took Blackheart's." Jessica kept talking, the words tumbling over each other. "We were worried the demon heart would corrupt you. Blackheart was stronger than you. You couldn't beat him, and his heart carried all of that; the Hell-lord power, the corruption, the pull. Maddy was already in a demon's body. We thought it would integrate better with her physiology, that she could handle the darkness without it changing who she was."

Tyson said nothing.

"She also took Supergiant's heart. Said she needed all the psychic powers. All of them, consolidated. Telepathy, mind control, everything Supergiant had on top of what she already had."

Tyson let out a long breath through his nose. "Okay."

"She took Nexus."

He closed his eyes.

"And the sling ring."

His hand came up and squeezed the bridge of his nose. The sling ring that Madelyne had slipped off his finger not an hour ago, playful and warm.

Usually you're supposed to give a girl a ring. I'm not supposed to need to take it.

She'd planned it. She'd planned the whole thing, the kiss, the theft, the shove, the smile. All of it choreographed so he'd leave laughing instead of suspicious.

Jessica was braced for the explosion. Shoulders squared, chin up, ready to take whatever he threw at her.

"I came back with you to make sure you'd be okay," she said. "That you could make it through the millennia. And I know it's hard to see right now, but this is an important part of that. You said Jean was the strongest psychic in the world, and Maddy has her power. Has all of her power, plus Supergiant's, Maw's, the Spider-sense, all of it. I know I ruined your plans. But we need this, Ty. Whatever's coming, we need her out there with everything she can carry."

Tyson was quiet for a long time. He could hear Amy moving in her room, alive and safe and ignorant of what was happening twenty feet away.

"I trust you," he said.

Jessica's head came up. She stared at him, unsure she'd heard correctly.

"I know you want what's best for me. If this is it, if you think this is what has to happen." He looked at her and didn't look away. "I believe you. But Maddy didn't have to leave. We could have figured it out together."

Jessica shook her head. The tears were still falling, but something in her face had shifted, a certainty that sat beneath the grief. "She did. I promise you, she did. You'll understand one day."

She leaned forward and kissed him. Soft, and salt-tasting, and sad. Her hand rested on the side of his face, and her thumb traced the line of his jaw, and when she pulled back, her forehead stayed pressed against his.

"Thank you for believing in me," she said. "In us. I love you. You're a good man, Ty."

"I love you too," he said. But a small part of him wondered if it was true. Or if Madelyne had manipulated them both.

— Rogue Redemption —

Behind the Scenes

I made some choices in this chapter that may be controversial.

Chapter Length: My stretch goal is to tie up Rogue by the end of next summer, which means 12 chapters. I don't know if this is attainable, as my outline is very rough. But when it comes down to it, I'd rather put out a single 25k-word chapter than try to split it; I'd just be dragging the story out for no reason.Opening with Madelyn's intimate scene: Most relationships in this story got a long lead-up before the intimate scene (minus Calypso). Madelyne didn't get so much, as we didn't even get a full chapter of her presence. But Madelyne has been in the story, in the background, from the beginning. But this also ties in to the…The Time Skip: The Time Skip in this chapter was several times longer than the entire in-universe story up to this point. This will be normal going forward. The premise of the story should be clear now. This has become a time-travel story in which Tyson prepares for the rematch against Thanos. The original plan was to hit the major movies and events, throw in some comics and other media, and end on Infinity War. That plan still holds in a truncated version: Infinity War started at the beginning of Arc 10, and we'll work our way back there, with detours along the way.Madelyn's Betrayal: I know it may seem like another odd choice, but there are two parts to this. First, I wanted to differentiate Madelyn's personality from the Phoenix. Early in the story, it wasn't clear what was happening, and it seemed more like everything was Phoenix. But Madelyne has some cool moments in the comics, and I really wanted to dedicate an arc to Jean/Madelyn/Phoenix. I planned this in my original outline for Rogue as one of the last arcs before Ragnarok, leading into Infinity War. Here, the idea is being repurposed, truncated, and spread out. If you know Madelyn, you probably have some ideas about what I'm setting up. You'd be partially right.Amy Bypassing the Reality Stone: I'm not religious, so please don't take that as me putting my faith above Marvel lore. Per my understanding, the One Above All is the 'capital G' God, and the angels serve him. I thought it would be a nice touch to give Amy something unique beyond just being a stronger version of Heven's angels.Infinity Stone Acquisition: When Tyson first encountered the Mind Stone, it might have seemed like it was meant for him. It unlocked the White Room, which was a massive power-up. But there were drawbacks there. The Mind Stone is a manipulator; it's always been portrayed that way. It manipulated the Avengers and Loki, and we saw how Wanda turned out. Tyson was always meant to have the Reality Stone. It was my plan from the start; it fits Tyson's powerset too well, and it is also one of the easier acquisitions in MCU fanfiction.

— SPOILER ALERT —

Stop here if you don't want to be keyed into references you might have missed.

— SPOILER ALERT —

Going back in time was one of the only ways to get it, since Thanos arrived early. And since Tyson can't change anything, Thanos needs to get his hands on the Stones he had in their fight; it was one of the few boosts that might make a difference. This was also foreshadowed in the conversation with Stan in chapter 151, Arc 9: Chapter 18 - Sanctum Threshold. That conversation had lots of layers. It still contains hints for events that haven't happened yet. I'm not going to hit the whole conversation, as this chapter already runs long, but here's a small bit:

"New players entering the field. Some have always been there, watching, waiting."

"For what?"

"For the right moment." The old man tapped his temple. "The Mind is a terrible thing to waste, but it's an even more terrible thing in the wrong hands."

Stan not-so-subtly told Tyson that the Mind Stone wasn't meant for him. Some of his other words alluded to the Reality Stone. Plenty of readers caught that part.

But no one had the context at the time to recognize that one of the players that had always been there, watching, waiting… was himself. This future-Tyson had been (will have been? tenses in time-travel, ugh) in the background, preparing for Thanos. I dropped a ton of little hints of other things that were going on in Arc 8, and some of them were noted in comments as 'I see you're setting up ____'. And yeah, I was, but not in the way that it seemed at the time.