At his voice, muffled sounds of coffin lids sliding open rang out one after another around the dark hall. Dark Elf warriors clad in gray-black armor and deathly pale masks staggered out of their hibernation pods.
His lieutenant, Kurse, strode up to Malekith and dropped to one knee.
"My king."
Malekith rose, his joints cracking. He walked to the warship's observation window and gazed at the dim stars outside. "The Convergence is about to begin again. The Asgardians hid the Aether for thousands of years, and now it has finally reappeared. Find the source."
Kurse rose, walked to the star chart console, and pressed several runic keys.
Dark red images rotated in the air, but the spatial barriers of the Nine Realms were squeezing against one another and slipping out of alignment, throwing gravity into chaos. The coordinates in the images kept jumping wildly, making it impossible to lock onto an exact location.
"The spatial fluctuations are too intense, my king," Kurse said gravely. "The Nine Realms are overlapping. The signal has been scattered across multiple dimensions. Pinpointing it will take some time."
Malekith's fingers tightened on the edge of the console, his nails scoring white marks in the black iron.
"Hurry. We must reclaim it before the Asgardians react."
Earth, London, an old factory in Greenwich.
Outside, the sky had gone completely dark. Darcy pulled her coat tight around herself, huddling beside a concrete pillar and shivering from the cold. Ian crouched on the ground, holding two crackers as he fed a wild rat that had crawled out of some gap in the brickwork.
Erik Selvig sat on a folding stool, his hands tucked into his sleeves as he stared blankly at the empty center of the factory.
"It's been four hours." Darcy glanced at her watch, biting