The Gauntlet Forged

Close your eyes and imagine a ring in space — not a ring you wear, but a ring the size of a small moon, spinning slowly around a star that has already lived its whole long life and collapsed inward until it is barely bigger than your school, but heavier than ten planets together.

That is a neutron star. And around it, built by the most gifted craftspeople in any realm, was the forge called Nidavellir.

The dwarves of Nidavellir were not small, the way dwarves are sometimes imagined. They were large and broad and strong — though not as strong as the work they made. Their king was Eitri, and his hands were the cleverest hands in the nine realms. He had made Mjolnir — the hammer worthy heroes carry. He would one day make Stormbreaker, the axe that could summon the Bifrost. Everything he touched became something extraordinary.

But before any of that, in the quiet years before the heroes knew what was coming, someone else came to his door.

Thanos.

Eitri heard the landing first — a great, heavy THOOM from the forge platform, the kind of sound that the stone remembered long after. He went to the great hall's entrance and looked out, and there was Thanos, surrounded by his Black Order: Corvus Glaive with his sharp blade, Proxima Midnight with her comet-staff, Ebony Maw gliding forward on whispering feet. Four terrible figures against the faint golden light of the cooling star.

Thanos walked up to Eitri, and Eitri, who feared nothing, felt something very close to it.

"I need something made," Thanos said. His voice was low and even, like a tide. "A gauntlet. Uru metal. My left hand. Six settings for six stones. You know what stones I mean."

Eitri said nothing.

"Two hundred lives depend on your answer," Thanos said. "Two hundred dwarves, who live on this ring and breathe its thin air and sleep in its stone halls. Your people. Say yes, and they survive. Say no — " he looked around the forge hall, at the furnaces and the bellows and the great mechanisms — "and they do not."

There are choices that feel like choices but are not, really. This was one of them.

Eitri opened the star ring.

You have to understand what that means. The neutron star at the center of Nidavellir was contained — regulated, channeled — by the ring of mechanisms that surrounded it. Opening the ring meant flooding the forge with heat so extreme it would have melted almost anything. But Uru metal was not almost anything. And Eitri's furnaces were not almost anything either. His smiths, all of them, went to work.

Three days they worked. Three days and three nights without proper rest, without silence, without the comfort of knowing this was going to be used for something good. The hammers rang. The Uru poured. The gauntlet took shape, setting by setting, joint by joint, each groove carved to channel a kind of energy that had existed since before the universe had a name.

When it was done, Eitri held it up and looked at it.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever made. It was also, he knew, the most dangerous.

Thanos walked forward, took the gauntlet, and pulled it onto his left hand.

He stood for a moment looking at it — the gleam of the Uru, the six empty settings like six open windows waiting for light.

Then he raised his other hand.

CRACK.

The forge mechanism groaned, buckled, and broke. Thanos had disabled the star ring, damaged the furnaces, made it impossible for any smith — however gifted — to ever use Nidavellir again. No weapons. No tools. No armor. The greatest forge in the nine realms was cold.

He had kept his promise, in the way that someone with no kindness in them keeps promises: technically, exactly, and without warmth. The two hundred dwarves were alive. They were just stranded on a dead ring around a dying star, with a king standing among them with burned hands and nowhere to go.

Thanos left.

Eitri stood in the silent forge hall, looking at his burned hands and the emptiness of the place where so much had been made, for so long.

In the deepest corner of his heart, a thought formed. Not a plan — not yet. Just a thought: someone would come. Someone worthy, who needed a weapon. And when that person came, Eitri would be ready.

He did not know yet that the someone would be a thunder god with heavy grief, or that the weapon would be an axe called Stormbreaker. But he held onto the thought anyway. That is what craftspeople do — they hold onto the possibility of the next thing, even when the last one was taken.

Thanos moved through the stars with a golden gauntlet on his hand, patient and certain, ready to begin.

And somewhere behind him, a forge that everyone thought was dead waited quietly in the dark.

Goodnight.