Chapter: 69
"Sif, Heimdall, why is my son lying on the ground in pain?" Frigga asked the two accusingly. Loki glanced at his mother before he went back to whining about the pain and indignity. He was also curing me and promising me that the vengeance of Asagrd will soon befall me. I was pretty sure it would not.
"Oh, that's because I kicked him in the balls!" I called out and waved to the Allmother.
She turned and gave me a glare. "And why would you do that!?"
"He tried to kill Thor with the Destroyer, and then when we came to Asgard to confront him, he tried to stab me with Gungnir over there," I said as I pointed at the spear that was still laying on the ground.
Frigga almost did a spit take at seeing the legendary Gungnir—the most powerful weapon in Asgard—just sitting on the ground like a discarded children's toy... A moment later, what I just said seemed to finally register in her mind. "Loki did what!?" She shrieked and glared at him.
"The winged wench is lying." Loki said from the ground.
"No I'm not!"
"Please Lady Sif, tell me what has transpired as of late. I feel like i've missed so much and yet it has only been but a few days." Frigga turned towards the other goddess and asked.
Sif started explaining the events of the past few days to the queen. By the end, the queen was not happy to hear about everything that had transpired the last few days, to say the least. Sif further went and explained that it was Loki who originally forced Thor and their group to storm Jotunheim after his coronation had been interrupted by the would-be Frost Giant thieves.
Frigga wasn't a multi-thousand-year-old goddess for nothing. It didn't take her long to start putting the pieces together, and the conclusion she arrived at was that Loki had planned the entire thing from the start to get Thor removed from his position as Crown Prince.
"Oh, Loki, how could you have fallen so far? What happened to you? Where has my slightly mischievous but still sweet sun gone ?" Frigga lamented solemnly.
"I'll tell you what happened," Azazel cut in. "Someone went and seriously messed with his memories–All of your memories actually. Thor, Loki, Sif, and even you, Queen Frigga. All of you got absolutely mind-wamied. And yet there was one person who seemed to recognize me on sight, no problem." Azazel said as he turned to Heimdall, who was looking nervous at the implications.
"Someone messed with our memories, that's preposterous!" Sif declared before pausing momentarily. I noticed that she looked like she was in pain, and she started clutching her head. "Isn't it..." she trailed off almost incoherently now. She started to sway a bit and looked unsteady on her feet. I walked over to her and gently grabbed her hand. I led her over towards the throne stairs, and we both took a seat on the steps. Sif rested her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes in pain.
Across the room, Frigga looked like she had come to an epiphany. She turned towards Asgard's watcher, who had served the royal family loyally for thousands of years—or had he. "Heimdall, is what this man says true? Someone manipulated all of our minds? And Odin just let them?"
Heimdall let out a tired sigh. "It was Odin himself who did it, using three of the Infinity Stones…" He trailed off. "Mind, Space, and Power. With those three, at great sacrifice to his own health, King Odin was able to manipulate the memories of every single being in the galaxy that knew about the previous Asgard."
"The previous Asgard? What are you talking about?" The queen asked.
"This city isn't Asgard. Asgard was an entire planet." Penemue explained. "In fact, the city we're currently in wasn't even Asgard's capital city. I remember it being at least ten times bigger than this one..." 10 times bigger!? This place was already gigantic as it was!
Sif and Frigga looked shocked at the revelation.
"But that's..."
"Impossible..."
Heimdall then started explaining to the whole room what had happened. Shortly following the Great Sundering—as the Goblins like to call it—Odin somehow ended up getting into a fight with a Celestial. Heimdall told us he wasn't exactly sure how the fight started, as it was so long ago. All he knows is that using the Power Stone to drastically amplify Gungnir, Odin was able to do what many thought impossible up to that point and permanently killed the Celestial. That opened up an entire can of worms across the entire galaxy—no, universe. Celestials being killable by beings that weren't other Celestials was thought to be an impossible concept. And up until that point the Infinity Stones were thought to be nothing but a myth. With it confirmed that the Infinity Stones did exist and were in Asgard's possession and could kill the previously invincible space gods, there was a mad rush to acquire them from many different parties all over the cosmos. The Celestials, in their panic at the death of one of their own and feeling that the whole universe was about to rise up against them, declared war on Asgard and tried to seize its three Infinity Stones for themselves.
From there, Heimdall went on to explain about a war that took place on a scale that I could barely fathom. Billions of Asgardian soldiers, all at the level of at least high class, along with many ultimate class beings, clashed with over a dozen monstrosities the size of entire planets. The battle was brief but incredibly brutal. In the end, the planet Asgard was completely ruined, and all that could be saved was a single city. Six more Celestials perished, and the remaining half of them fled back into the greater universe in fear of the same happening to them. Odin had severely taxed his own body by channeling three Infinity Stones at once repeatedly throughout the course of the war. On top of that, as the Sky Father, he drew his power from Asgard, so with Asgard destroyed, his power had drastically plummeted, along with all the other gods who did the same. Further putting an enormous tax on his body, he used the power of the three Infinity Stones one last time to purge the memories of that entire battle along with the deaths of the Celestials and the existence of the Infinity Stones as being anything more than a myth from the rest of the universe.
I personally thought it was pretty amazing that using just three Infinity Stones, Odin was able to pull something like that off. It also made sense why he couldn't use their powers to bring back Asgard, as none of those stones would have been able to do that. In order to restore Asgard, he would have either needed the Reality Stone or the Time Stone. The latter is in possession of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and the former is still hidden somewhere on the Dark Elf World, just waiting to be rediscovered.
"Even now," Heimdall said, "Odin is forced to hibernate routinely because of the strain those stones put on his body. That's the only thing that staved off his death from overusing them."
That was pretty insane. I understood why he made the decision to erase the memories from everybody though. With him and Asgard severely weakened it wouldn't have taken long for other forces to attack them and seize the stones for themselves. What I can't understand is why he chose to so heavily modify all the memories of those closest to him.
[You won't know unless you ask him or someone who he didn't mind wipe.]
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