Thanos walked to the edge of the rift and looked down into the darkness.
His amber eyes could see far into the dark.
He saw the shape of the rock walls, the structure of the strata, and the ancient energies slumbering in the darkness.
He saw the seal, constructed jointly from Asgardian magic and the power of the Reality Stone.
It glowed dark red, like an enormous cocoon.
He extended his left hand.
The Power Stone lit up, purple radiance surging from his gauntlet and forming an energy beam that shot into the depths of the rift.
The beam struck the seal's surface, and the seal flickered violently.
Dark red and purple light intertwined, collided, and tore at each other in the darkness as cracks began to form across the seal's surface.
The cracks spread outward like a spiderweb, extending from the top of the seal all the way to its bottom.
The Soul Stone lit up as well, orange light joining the purple energy beam.
The two lights merged, forming an even more powerful and penetrating beam of energy.
Under the orange radiance, the cracks in the seal began to widen.
They grew from hairline-thin to finger-width, then from finger-width to fist-sized.
Thanos clenched his fist.
The seal shattered.
It shattered differently from a shield. A shield broke explosively, in an instant.
But under the power of the Infinity Stones, the seal broke slowly and painfully, like a heart being dug from a chest.
Fragments of the seal flew up from the bottom of the rift, spinning through the air and flickering with remnants of dark red light.
Then they gradually dimmed, turning into colorless, transparent shards before crumbling into dust and scattering on the wind.
Where the fragments vanished, a mass of dark red matter resembling liquid flame