At first, Thor was eager. He was impatient, practically vibrating with the desire to regain his lost divinity and prove himself worthy once more. But when Marcus led him into a windowless chamber lit only by the flickering amber glow of terminal screens, a cold knot of dread tightened in his chest. In the center of the room sat a high-backed chair, bristling with jagged mechanical interfaces and neural-cables.
"I thought you were helping me find my power," Thor said, his voice echoing nervously.
"This is the way. Sit," Marcus replied. The Chief Librarian didn't look up as he adjusted the data streams on a nearby console.
"Will this actually work?" Thor eyed the chair's metallic restraints. "It looks less like a forge and more like an interrogation rack."
"Sit."
Marcus didn't offer a second invitation. He forced Thor into the seat with the effortless strength of a Space Marine. Before Thor could protest, a heavy, fully enclosed helmet was slammed down over his head, locking into the collar of the chair with a pressurized hiss.
"What is this?" Thor's voice was muffled, tinged with rising panic.
"A safety device," Marcus said tonelessly. He checked the neural-links one last time. "Of a sort."
"Wait—"
"Focus, Odinson. It begins."
Marcus's pupils flared with psychic lightning as he began to channel the Warp. He didn't give Thor a chance to refuse. He slammed his hand onto the activation rune, and a surge of raw psionic energy screamed through the machine.
This was no ordinary chair. It was a modified "Throne of Mechanicum," a relic salvaged from a fallen Knight-Titan that had served the Emrys family for generations.
Under Galahad's profane genius, it had been repurposed into a tool of mental conditioning. It used the power of a psyker to plunge the subject into a hyper-realistic "engrammatic simulation."
Thor didn't just see a vision; he was dragged into the grim darkness of the far future.
He witnessed the slaughter. He was cast into the Warhammer galaxy, a realm of perpetual, soul-crushing war. He saw twisted sacrificial rituals where hundreds of millions were butchered to appease thirsting gods. He saw mountains of skulls piled high in the shadow of daemonic citadels.
In these visions, Thor was no prince. He had no hammer, no lightning, and no divine protection. He was an ordinary man—a soldier of the Astra Militarum.
He followed the giants in power armor—the Angels of Death—into the meat-grinders of a thousand worlds. He experienced the terror of the Rangdan Xenocides, feeling the cold kiss of alien blades before waking up in a new nightmare.
He felt the sting of betrayal on the black sands of Isstvan V, watching the sky turn to fire as orbital bombardment erased his existence.
He fought the Tyranid swarms until his ammunition ran dry and he was consumed alive. He stood against the encroaching Warp on worlds that were literally dissolving into madness.
Then came the end. He was placed upon the surface of Cadia.
He felt the weight of the Cadian 1st as they stood against the 13th Black Crusade. He saw the "God-Machines"—the Titans—striding across the horizon, unleashing enough firepower to level continents, only to see them brought down like wounded beasts. He saw Space Marines, beings he once thought of as peers, dying in seconds under the weight of the daemon tide.
Finally, he saw the sky break. He watched the Black Stone Fortress descend like a tombstone for a world. And amidst the fire and the tectonic screams of a dying planet, he heard the roar of the Lord Castellan:
"Cadia stands! The planet broke before the Guard did!"
Thor's consciousness shattered along with the world.
When he finally opened his eyes, the helmet hissed open. He was back in the dark room, drenched in cold sweat, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
Marcus stood before him, watching him with a clinical, unblinking gaze. "Welcome back to the living, Thor Odinson."
Thor sat in silence for a long time. His eyes were no longer those of a boastful prince; they were heavy with the weight of centuries, filled with the shadows of a million deaths.
"Was it... all real?" Thor's voice was a hoarse whisper.
In Asgard, he had been a god among men, believing war was a glorious adventure to be won with a smile and a swing of his hammer. But that simulation—that hellish reality—had taught him the true cost of duty.
Marcus said nothing, letting the silence answer for him.
"I understand now," Thor murmured. He reached out with a trembling hand toward Mjolnir, which sat on a nearby table. "Tell Emrys... I thank him. He has shown me what it truly means to hold the line. He has shown me what responsibility is."
His fingers closed around the leather-wrapped handle.
The hammer, which had been an immovable weight for days, suddenly felt light—not because Thor had regained his arrogance, but because he had found a new, grim purpose.
Lightning erupted, a violent, white-hot discharge that forged a suit of scale-mail armor onto his body in a burst of ozone. A crimson cloak snapped into existence behind him, and a psychic pressure rolled off him that made even Marcus take a half-step back.
"The xenos think they can freeze this world?" Thor gripped the hammer, his gaze fixed on a point far beyond the walls. "For the innocent. For Asgard. They will find only thunder."
Marcus nodded, satisfied. The conditioning had taken. Thor had been forged into a weapon of the state.
However, at that exact moment, far across the cosmos in the gilded halls of Asgard...
Odin, deep in his mystical slumber, suddenly bucked against his bed. A spray of golden blood erupted from his lips as he felt the soul of his son being overwritten by the cold, martial zeal of a distant, dying galaxy.