"You were...supposed to be...safe here," he choked out, voice trembling. Shoulders once hewn from the ancient celestial firmament now shook uncontrollably, rocked by silent sobs.
Through bleary vision, he studied the soft curves of her features one last time. And suddenly the brave, smiling face that had haunted his dreams since childhood was simply...gone. Extinguished like a flame cruelly pinched by the Titan's cruel fist.
His crimson-streaked gaze finally landed upon the fatal wound gaping obscenely from her abdomen, the telltale signature of a blade. A brutal, savage act that sliced Frigga's entrails as surely as it gutted Thor's very soul.
Shrapnel and debris littered the scorched, gore-soaked sheets of her marriage bed. The portrait of a loving family hung askew, pierced by rubble and blasted to ruin. It was a microcosm of the devastation wrecked upon their lives - the perfect nuclear heart of the Asgardian realm gouged out and left to spoil.
Thor howled until his throat was rent asunder, all sense of warrior's decorum shredded by his sorrow. He had been too late...for all his power, he could not save them. Could not save her.
And suddenly he was not a prince or a noble warrior, but a boy again grown in the protective cradle of a mother's unconditional embrace. A child sheltered from the harsh realities of a cruel universe for but a fleeting moment before it all came crashing down.
"A warrior's rage...is unwise," Frigga's gentle chiding came back as a haunting echo. She had spoken it so many times, ever the wise counselor seeking to temper her sons' fiery outbursts and insatiable arrogance.
Yet now, in this bitter nadir of defeat, rage was the only thing anchoring Thor's rattled psyche. It swelled in dolorous waves, flaring through his bones with unholy animus as he cradled Frigga's lifeless form.
He was undone, unmade to his very foundations. And from those ruined footings would rise an angrier, more brutal version of Thor, the idealistic prince executioner of the nine realms rendered to ash.
No more would he dishonor his family's memory by restricting his power. No more would he play at civility nor bite his thunderous tongue. The old Thor was dead, slain upon this bloodied alabaster altar along with the ghosts of his past.
Dimly, as if by cosmic providence, he felt a familiar weight appear in his empty palm. A hilt, worn with untold ages of combat yet thrumming with incalculable energy. The handle of his reforged weapon, returned from the ether itself to his hand as the first fruits of his rebirth.
The sudden crackle of unleashed lightning danced along the weapon's length and into his clenched fist as he beheld the blade - ancient Asgardian runes glowed with galvanic fire.
No more the sculpted mallet. Now they had reforged Mjolnir into something more profane... a sword hungering for wrath as voraciously as the nascent fire awakening in Thor's heart.
Hate was seductive with its siren song of succor, of deliverance. If he surrendered to that baleful rage, he could obliterate all in his path until his pound of bloody, broken vengeance was paid. The temptation for untold destruction beckoned with the tantalizing lullaby of oblivion - as seductive as sinking into the void to forever end his torment.
But something hardier than flesh anchored him to reality. A voice, or perhaps the fragile idea of one - distinct from the wanton urges stirring his heart towards the abyss. The tiny phantom whispering to live, to honor his debt to the light, however faint those embers now smoldered.
And suddenly the molten lightning simmered to a low simmer in his clenched fist. The blade's fell glow dimmed until it was but a mournful shimmer upon ancient steel.
The Fallen Prince (Thor)
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