Thor's fists pounded the invisible wall with a thunderous boom that rattled the pillars around him.
"Come on!"
"Break, damn you!"
But the shimmering force blocking him from Soren held firm, like a mountain refusing to budge for a storm.
Thor's face twisted with frustration. Inside the glowing barrier, Soren stood perfectly still, hand pressed against the ancient tablet, his body engulfed in a black mist.
Thor's heart hammered painfully in his chest.
There's dark elf magic in that tablet. And those cocoons, Gods help us if something hatches out of them.
He slammed Mjolnir against the force field again, sending cracks racing up the marble floor, but it was useless. Every blow bounced off.
Inside the barrier, Soren was oblivious.
His mind wasn't in the hall anymore.
A torrent of images spun through him, endless battles under starless skies, cold victories won by the dark elves, the bitter cries of dying light. Soren barely paid attention.
He shoved aside the grand tales of their lost glory with gritted teeth.
"Where is it?" Digging through the ocean of memories.
"Show me how you used the Aether."
"Show me real power."
But no matter how deep he searched, there was nothing. No rituals.
Only veiled hints wrapped in songs of vengeance.
Frustration burned his nerves raw.
Then, without warning, the ground beneath his mind's feet, if it could even be called that, cracked open.
Soren gasped.
A cold pull yanked his mental self downward, dragging him through darkness until he slammed into a new realm: a vast chamber walled in swirling lights, five faces, six shifting colors, a prism of ancient magic.
Last time, the barrier had repelled him like a gnat.
Now, it parted for him, beckoning him through as an old friend.
Soren didn't even have time to hesitate. His spirit plunged forward, drawn toward a forest of massive cocoons suspended in the air like swollen black fruits.
They pulsed gently, like breathing lungs.
The closer he floated, the more he felt it, the resonance of blood, the heartbeat of kinship. The dark elf essence inside him throbbed in reply, a silent roar only he could hear.
Soren narrowed his eyes.
"Still unborn, but strong..."
Even in their slumber, the beings within those cocoons radiated a terrifying vitality.
If they wake up fully...
Before he could move, another force seized his spirit, yanking him through the field of cocoons toward a solitary altar, suspended in a pocket of swirling black mist.
The altar was ancient, slick with a sheen of dark power.
Symbols in a twisting script, but not quite like the dark elf runes, covered its surface, writhing.
Soren's mental form slammed onto the altar.
"Damn it!"
It hit him, a surge of raw, searing knowledge crashing into his mind, ramming into every corner of his consciousness.
Spells, battle hymns, genetic codices, rituals of rebirth, histories carved in forgotten bones, all forced into him at once.
The muscles in his arm where he touched the tablet bulged unnaturally as the energy blasted into him, reshaping, rewriting.
In the real world, a black light bled from the cracks of the tablet, pouring into Soren's body. The veins along his neck and arms lit up with dark fire, pulsing as if something monstrous was trying to crawl into existence through him.
Thor watched with horror.
"SORRRREN!" Throwing Mjolnir again and again against the barrier.
"Let go of it, you bloody fool! It's eating you alive!"
But Soren didn't hear him.
Or if he did, he didn't care.
Inside, the altar's magic finally began to ebb, the flood slowing to a trickle. Soren staggered upright on shaky spirit-legs, clutching his pounding head.
"Too much..."
The world around him dimmed, the colors bleeding away.
At first, Soren could only sit there, breathing hard, as the last ripples of strange energy settled deep inside him.
It felt like standing at the eye of a collapsing star. His blood buzzed. His muscles felt too dense for his skin to contain.
Every breath tasted like the dark, sweet tang of raw magic.
Thor was yelling something beyond the shimmering barrier, hammering uselessly against the wall of force.
Soren heard none of it.
His hand finally slid free from the cold surface of the tablet, and he stumbled back, barely catching himself.
He clutched his chest.
"What the..."
Then, suddenly, understanding bloomed in his mind, an explosion of black fire.
He gasped.
Inheritance.
The inheritance of the Dark Elves.
The purest, noblest bloodlines, their strongest, sharpest minds, had once taken this knowledge into themselves, becoming gods among their own kind.
"You lucky bastard." He muttered to himself, a raw laugh catching in his throat.
"I stole five thousand years of power."
He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the echo of it: the ancestral land of the dark elves, the endless ages spent protecting this stone, waiting for a worthy heir who never came.
Until him.
Every cell in his body felt... Harder. Alive in ways he hadn't known were possible.
His skin, once pale and human, now shimmered faintly with a dark metallic undertone under the right light.
His senses, gods, his senses!
He could hear the creak of marble settling fifty paces away, smell the faint burnt-metal scent of the barrier magic holding Thor back.
Soren flexed his fingers slowly, marveling at the strength that coiled inside them.
But the elation didn't last.
A cold knot twisted in his gut. He remembered his original plan the reason he dared touch the tablet at all.
"I was supposed to strip the dark elf gene out of me after opening the tablet... prevent it from affecting my human body."
Now?
The dark elf blood inside him pulsed with a rich, perfectly harmonized with the energy he'd just absorbed. Severing it now would mean throwing away half his newfound power.
Soren scowled, running a hand through his hair.
"Now I'm stuck with it... and I don't even hate it."
Checking himself carefully, he was startled to find no rejection, no corrosion, nothing eating away at his human side.
If anything, the dark elf genes had blended with his original structure, strengthening it beyond anything he'd ever imagined.
Soren's mind tingled as he focused inward.
His Sage Magic Ability, something he had fought bitterly to levelup, now thrummed with tension, like a dam ready to burst.
"LV10."
"I'm about to break through."
He knew firsthand how excruciatingly slow magic progress became at high levels.
And that wasn't all.
Flickers of new spells danced at the edge of his mind, alien magic laced in shadows.
High Priest spells, forbidden techniques reserved for the commanders of the dark elf armies.
He raised a hand, and a thin tendril of black energy curled from his fingers, sizzling the air.
"Darkness itself bends for me now..."
He finally understood why Malekith and the other surviving dark elves had been so desperate to plunge the universe into darkness.
With this kind of power surging through your veins... who wouldn't want to rule everything?
A bitter laugh escaped him.
"Now I get it, you crazy old bastard."
Soren's extinguishing the black energy with a crackle.
But despite everything, a small thread of regret curled through his heart.
"I still didn't get the Aether particle methods."
"Not yet."
He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to calm.
"Maybe the elders of Asgard will crack those inscriptions later."
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream