The blast took Malekith off his feet, drove him straight through the broken stone, and threw him out onto the wide terrace beyond.
It had arrived with no warning, no words, and no mercy whatsoever.
Odin walked slowly through the ruined wall with Gungnir still humming dangerously in his hand.
He did not immediately look for the Dark Elf King. He could wait. His single eye found Frigga instead, and he looked at her the way a man looks at the only thing in the universe that matters. Head to foot, cataloguing, checking for wounds, for blood, for any sign at all that the creature who had come through her door had left a mark on her.
"Are you hurt?"
"Insulted, mostly." Frigga lowered her blade, and for the first time since Malekith had rotted her doors, she allowed herself to look tired. "I was so close to ending him. Half a dozen times. It seems the long peace has taken something out of my hand that I did not notice it taking."
"Then I will finish what you started." Odin's grip shifted on Gungnir, and the spear's hum dropped into a lower note that made the broken walls shiver. "Stay here. This will not take long."
"Odin."
He paused at the shattered wall with his back to her, the firelight from the burning city throwing his shadow long and terrible across the ruined floor.
She had not moved. Her voice had not risen. But there was something in the way she said his name that made him stop.
"Do not go out there and try to be young."
The words hung between them.
For a moment Odin did not answer. Then he turned his head, just enough to see her over his shoulder.
"I am the All-Father," he said quietly. "I am the King."
"That is exactly what worries me." Frigga's voice was soft, and it carried anyway. "The King can wait. The All-Father can be patient. But I know the man I married, and I know what he becomes when someone comes into his house after his family." She paused. "Be young if you must. But come back to me."
He almost smiled at that. It was not quite a warm expression, but it was real, and it was hers, and there was not another soul in the Nine Realms who could have put it on his face.
"I always do."
Then he was gone through the broken wall, and the blinding light of Gungnir went with him like a falling star.
Frigga stood there in the wreck of her room, and allowed herself three full seconds of being worried sick about him.
—
In the shattered streets of the lower district, Thor Odinson stood in the smoking ruin of what had been an elite Dark Elf assault squad.
He had been fighting for what felt like hours. The sky was still black with warships. The streets were still choked with smoke and the cries of the wounded. But the elves were breaking. The Einherjar were driving them back street by street, and the tide had turned.
Then he saw the shape come flying out of the palace.
It came from the high windows on the western side, tumbling through the air like a stone from a sling. It was small and dark and trailing black mist behind it like a broken wing.
The western side. His mother's chamber.
Thor's blood went cold. Mjolnir came up and he was already leaving the ground when the second shape came out of the exact same wall right behind the first.
There was nothing tumbling about this one. It went in a straight line, with the terrible purpose of a falling star, and the light of the burning city caught its golden armour and made it blaze.
Thor stopped where he was, twenty feet in the air.
His father had caught the Dark Elf King above the granary roofs.
Thor stopped worrying.
There was nobody in the Nine Realms who was a match for his father. Not on Asgard, not anywhere. A Dark Elf king, however ancient and however cunning, was simply not standing on the same field.
Still, he hovered and watched. He could not help it. The rare sight of his father in full battle commanded attention, even from a son who had seen it a hundred times before.
The All-Father was magnificent.
Below him, an elven gunship came screeching around the corner of the boulevard with its cannons swinging toward a street full of people who had not yet reached the shelters.
Thor looked one last time at the two lights falling away toward the plaza under the palace.
Then he dove down after the gunship, because the All-Father did not need him and the people in that street very much did.
—
Malekith had been thrown from the palace like a pebble from a catapult, and he had not yet found his footing.
The golden blast from Gungnir had been a thing of pure divine force. It had stripped away his shadows, shattered his wards, and sent him through three walls and a hundred feet of open air before he had begun to think about recovering.
He was still tumbling wildly when Odin caught up to him.
The All-Father did not waste a single breath on words. He did not announce himself. He simply arrived in Malekith's path with Gungnir already swinging, and the blow caught the Dark Elf king across the chest like a thunderclap.
Malekith stopped tumbling.
He did not stop moving. He went straight down, black and gold together, through the roof of the granary below. Things scattered in every direction, and he hit the floor hard enough to crater it.
He was on his feet in an instant. Odin was already there, Gungnir coming down like a death verdict.
Malekith barely got his shadow-blade up in time, and the two weapons met in a shower of golden sparks.
"You are persistent, Borson." Malekith grunted, his muscles straining against the weight of the spear. "You are also predictable. You have always believed you can win a thing by breaking it."
"I do not intend to break you." Odin's voice was perfectly calm. "I intend to outlast you. I have been doing it for thousands of years already."
He pushed, and Malekith went back a step.
—
What followed was not a battle. It was a lesson.
Odin gave nothing away. His strikes were measured and economical, and not one of them travelled further than it had to. He did not overextend. He had not overextended in a thousand years.
Malekith threw everything he had. Curses that would have turned lesser beings to dust. Illusions that would have fooled gods. Shadow-blades built to cut through the walls between worlds.
Odin answered all of it with the same terrible patience.
A curse aimed at his heart was turned aside with a flick of Gungnir's haft. An illusion that would have confounded the finest sorcerers in the Nine Realms was pierced with a single glance of his remaining eye. A shadow-blade that should have cut him in half was caught between two fingers and snapped like a twig.
"Your craft is impressive," Odin said, stepping through a wave of necrotic shadow that came apart against him like mist against a furnace. "For a creature of your scope."
"My scope?" Malekith lashed out with a blade of pure darkness. "I have lived for thousands of years. I have taken worlds. I have—"
"You hid." Odin's voice was flat. "You hid like a coward in the dark with your grudge, and you waited desperately for the universe to forget you, and it did. And now you have crawled out into it, only to find that it went happily on without you."
He caught the shadow-blade on the head of Gungnir and twisted. The blade shattered into a thousand pieces of dying darkness.
"Your time ended five thousand years ago, Malekith. You have simply gone on refusing to hear it."
Malekith came at him in a fury, all rage and shadow and no shape to it at all.
Odin stepped aside, turned, and brought Gungnir round in a blow that caught the Dark Elf square in the back and sent him through the far wall of the treasury.
—
The fight spilled out into the ruined streets.
Odin did not chase. He did not press the advantage. He moved with the measured precision of a man who had learned, over thousands of years, that power was a resource to be spent wisely, not a fire to be burned without thought.
Every strike he threw was calculated. Every blast from Gungnir was aimed with surgical precision. He did not waste a single drop of the Odinforce, because he could not afford to. Not with Hela waiting. Not with the Odinsleep approaching.
Let him run, Odin thought, watching Malekith scramble through the wreckage. Let him tire himself. Let him spend his shadows and his curses and his rage. He will be easier to catch when he is empty.
And Malekith was emptying. Every curse he threw was weaker than the last. Every shadow he summoned was thinner. Every illusion he conjured flickered and died faster. The Dark Elf king was burning through his reserves at an unsustainable rate, and Odin was letting him.
But there was something wrong.
Malekith was not fighting like a man trying to win. He must have known within the first exchange of blows that he could not possibly win, and he had gone on anyway. He had not tried to run away. He had not tried to beg for terms of surrender.
He had simply gone on throwing things. Curses, shadows, illusions, one after another, and not one of them thrown to hurt. They were thrown solely to stay alive.
He was buying seconds.
Odin's eye narrowed. He had seen this before. A desperate enemy, throwing everything he had, not to win but to distract. It was an old trick. A soldier's trick. And it only ever meant one thing.
There was another threat.
Odin's gaze went up toward the palace, toward the western wing, toward his wife's rooms.
Behind him, Malekith rose out of the rubble, and he was a ruin.
His left arm hung at a wrong angle. Black blood poured from a dozen wounds. His shadows were tattered, shredded by the force of Odin's attacks, and the bone-white armour that had survived five thousand years was cracked in more places than it was whole.
And he was smiling.
High above him, faint and humming, a thread of his own dark craft had gone taut.
Odin looked back down, because whatever else was happening tonight, this one was going to be finished first, and it was going to take four seconds.
"I have stood against the dark at the dawn of the world, Malekith. You are just a candle in a storm." Odin came toward him through the wreckage. "My father left one thing unfinished. I will see to it now."
Odin raised Gungnir. The spear began to glow with the terrible light of the Odinforce, and Malekith could feel the weight of it pressing down on him like a mountain.
But instead of running, instead of begging, instead of doing anything that a man in his position should have done…
Malekith's bloody smile widened.
It was a thin, cold smile, and there was nothing of defeat in it. There was triumph. There was the satisfaction of a plan arriving exactly where it had been sent.
"Borson," he said, and his voice was almost gentle. "You have been so focused on me. So certain that I am the threat. So determined to put me in my place."
He spread his arms, and the shadows around him began to rise like a curtain.
"But I am not the threat, All-Father. I never was. I am merely... the distraction."
Odin's single eye narrowed dangerously. "What have you done?"
"I have done nothing at all." Malekith let the smile stay exactly where it was. "But my Kursed has been very, very busy while you were playing with me."
High above them, the palace answered.
It was not a sound. It was a knowledge, a terrible certainty that something had gone horribly wrong. The top of the palace, the western wing, the rooms where he had left her, was crumbling.
"Frigga," Odin breathed.
He raised Gungnir instantly, and a blast of pure Odinforce erupted from the spear, so powerful that it shattered the walls around them and sent Malekith flying the length of the street.
Then Odin was gone, going up toward the palace with the speed of a falling star.
Malekith crashed through a wall and then another, and when he finally came to a stop, he was bleeding from a dozen new wounds. His shadows were shredded. His body was broken past mending.
And he was laughing.
"Run, All-Father," he whispered, coughing up black blood. "Run to your queen. I will be there when you are done."
He vanished into the shadows, and the darkness swallowed him whole.