MARVEL's Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos by Barry Lyga

Author:Barry Lyga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Hours later, Vathlauss had told Thanos what he needed to know. Or at least as much as he could. He was missing one eye and several teeth, along with a finger on his left hand. The finger had come off early on, and Vathlauss had laughed. “I suffered far worse during the five hundred and twenty-seventh war with the Frost Giants!” he exclaimed, then guffawed until Thanos shoved the finger into the empty socket where his left eye had been.

Now Thanos sat on the floor across from Vathlauss, who had passed out from the pain. Thanos’s clothes were stained with the Asgardian’s blood, which ran as red and as heavy as that of any mortal Thanos had ever encountered. His gloved hands in particular were thick with it, and some part of him thought that this was wrong. He was not a doctor, not a sterile seeker of healing. The blood should touch his flesh. He owed that much to Vathlauss, who had endured quite exquisite pain at Thanos’s hands. Pain so exquisite that both Cha and Kebbi had excused themselves under the guise of exploring the outpost for supplies.

And yet Thanos had remained. Had remained and had tortured this little godling for as long as it took. He’d felt nothing the whole time. No shame. No guilt. No nausea or revulsion. He was simply doing what needed to be done if he was to save the people of Titan.

He peeled off his bloodstained gloves, stiff and tacky, then dragged a finger through the blood. To feel it on his flesh. It was sticky and only partly dry. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger until it dyed his fingers black.

Every drop shed saves millions more, he thought. Every drop shed is another life preserved.

He rose slowly, stiffly. According to Vathlauss, a ship came through this part of the galaxy once a fortnight—an Asgardian ship bound for Asgard itself. Called the Blood Edda, it had permission to cross what he called the Bifrost, which was apparently some sort of special Asgardian wormhole technology that led specifically in and out of the kingdom.

“Odin’s vault is in the castle,” Vathlauss had said, choking on his own blood, pausing to catch his breath. “You can’t miss it. It’s the tallest damned thing in the kingdom. Once you’re aboard the Blood Edda, you can bypass the Bifrost and go straight to the palace.

“What you seek must be the Aether,” Vathlauss had continued. “The Infinity Stone.”

“Infinity Stone.” Thanos rolled the words over in his mind, feeling the heft of them, their psychic gravity. He’d never heard of such a thing before, but something in the way Vathlauss spoke the words, with an almost hesitant, reverent breath, told him volumes. The Infinity Stone. It existed. The artifact His Lordship had sought was not a flicker of madness in a dying man’s diseased head. It was real.

He said it again, musing: “Infinity Stone.”

“Yes. Bor, father of Odin, took it from the Dark Elves millennia past.”

“And you believe Odin still has it.

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