The Infinity Quest

If you wanted to hold the whole universe in one fist — every star, every planet, every living thing — you would need a very special glove.

Thanos needed a gauntlet. Not just any gauntlet — one strong enough to contain six of the most powerful objects ever created. He traveled to a world called Nidavellir, where a great forge hung around a dying star — a forge that burned with the heat of a sun going out, making it the hottest, mightiest workshop in all of creation.

The king of Nidavellir was a dwarf named Eitri. Not small, mind you — dwarfs in this part of the universe are enormous, with hands like boulders and beards down to their knees. Eitri had made magnificent things in his forge: weapons, armor, artifacts of legend. Thanos came to him with a commission.

Build me a gauntlet, said Thanos, made from Uru metal. Strong enough to hold anything.

Eitri built it. He sweated and hammered and poured molten Uru into the molds while the forge star blazed around him. He made the most beautiful golden gauntlet anyone had ever seen — with six empty sockets in the knuckles, waiting.

When it was done, Thanos thanked Eitri. And then he made sure no one else could use Nidavellir's forge ever again.

Then the hunt began.

The first stone was purple. Called the Power Stone, it was hidden inside a smooth round sphere — an Orb — on the planet Morag, in a temple half-swallowed by rising seas. Thanos sent his Black Order, and they tore through the Nova Corps — the brave space police of the planet Xandar — to claim it. CRASH. BOOM. The Power Stone sang with raw energy as Thanos pressed it into the first socket.

One.

The second stone was blue. The Space Stone — the Tesseract — that glowing cube Nick Fury had guarded, that Loki had stolen, that had been used to open portals across galaxies. It was aboard a great Asgardian ship, the Statesman, carrying refugees from the destroyed world of Asgard. Thanos boarded it. Thor fought him. Loki tried to trick him — and Loki was very good at tricks — but Thanos had been planning this for a very long time. He crushed the Tesseract in his fist and the blue Space Stone slid out.

"No more tricks," Thanos told Loki.

Loki looked at his brother Thor, and then he looked at the Stone, and then he made a choice that was braver than any trick. He reached for Thanos's throat.

Two.

The third stone was red. Liquid-like, shifting, called the Reality Stone — or Aether — it had been kept in a dusty, cluttered collection deep in a place called Knowhere, in the museum of a peculiar gentleman named the Collector. Thanos arrived. The Reality Stone poured into his hand like crimson water and settled into the third socket.

Three.

The fourth stone — the orange Soul Stone — was the strangest of all to find. It waited on the frozen cliffs of a world called Vormir, at the very edge of everything. A hooded figure guarded it, ancient and silent, who revealed a single rule:

To receive the Soul Stone, you must give up the thing you love most. A soul for a soul.

Thanos had walked to Vormir with Gamora — green-skinned, bright, fierce Gamora, the daughter he had chosen and raised and shaped into the greatest warrior in the galaxy. Gamora had believed for years that Thanos didn't actually know where the Soul Stone was. She had been wrong.

Gamora cried. She raged. She fought.

Thanos wept — and the tears were real, which made it harder, not easier, to understand.

He loved her. He had always loved her, in his enormous, broken, certain way. And he had decided the universe mattered more than what he loved. He let her go.

Four.

Now five stones glowed on the golden gauntlet: purple, blue, red, orange, and one more — yellow, the Mind Stone, already claimed in the long run of things, pulsing in the forehead of a being named Vision on the planet Earth.

And green — the Time Stone, the Eye of Agamotto, worn by a sorcerer named Doctor Strange.

Earth. That is where it would end. Where all threads led.

But first came Titan.

Thanos went home to the broken world of his childhood — a world of crumbled towers and empty fountains and wind through dead streets — and he sat among the ruins of his greatest failure, and he waited.

Because the heroes were coming to him.

He knew they would.

He understood heroes better than they understood themselves. They always came. They always tried. And he had an answer for every plan they had ever had.

So he sat in the ruins of Titan, with five stones glowing warm on his golden fist, and watched the sky for ships.

And somewhere on Earth, in Wakanda's golden city, a princess named Shuri was working very fast, trying to beat a countdown no one could see — trying to safely remove a yellow stone from the forehead of a friend, before the most powerful being in the universe arrived to take it himself.

The stones were almost complete.

One snap away from everything changing forever.