The weary prince's boots thudded against the iridescent Rainbow Bridge with each bone-tired step. Crimson streaked across Thor's chiseled visage, matting his golden locks as rivulets of sweat and blood mingled undistinguished. Mjolnir hung limply at his side, its trademark energy flickering with waning reserves.
Asgard was a mere glimmer of its once resplendent glory in the distance. Her grand spires and gleaming architecture lay in smoldering ruins, a tragic monument to the Titan's wrath. Thick plumes of acrid smoke billowed across the war-torn realm, blotting out the dying embers of Yggdrasil's brilliant light.
Death had a stifling presence about the ethereal city. In the hollow pits of his heart, Thor already knew even before reaching the ruined palace gates - they had lost. So many brave warriors fallen, sacrificed upon the bloodstained altars of Odin's foolhardy conquest.
His soul felt rent asunder from the pain and loss, every labored footfall stoking his anguish like stoking the embers of a dying flame. His friends, slain by the hand of Thanos's Black Order. Citizens dying in untold droves. And his own family...Norns, what had they suffered?
Each step resurrected a fresh wail of anguish reverberating in his mind. His greatest wounds were not carved into his marred flesh, but rather the soul-sickening regret carved from Hela's cruel bargain.
Why...why had he been so arrogant, ignoring his destiny as a protector for so long? Instead he'd revelled in the glory of conquests and barroom brawls until it was too late. Now he wandered the shattered ruins, the last of Odin's line laying in crumbled disarray like torn relics of a fallen empire.
Whatever life remained in the eternal city seemed to have drained away like blood from a mortal wound. Only death's unnerving silence answered his guttural cries.
"Mother? Father?! ANSWER ME!"
No reply came but the hollow winds whistling through toppled masonry. Thor seethed, hauling his battered frame towards the splintered palace gates. His boots crushed the ancient seals upon the intricately carved doors, sending a macabre symphony of groaning stone ringing out.
Ash and debris rained down in dusty plumes, stinging his bloodied eyes as he pressed onward into the bowels of his home. The grandeur of Asgard's halls and courtyards were reduced to mangled landscapes of rubble and smashed relics. This could not be happening...
Battle-weary Einherjar troops lay strewn among the dead and dying in the wreckage. The mighty king's personal guard, protectors of the realm eternal, were scattered like rag dolls in the aftermath. Long stood they resolute against demonic invasion, until the brutal onslaught of Thanos's outriders swarmed them under like a pestilent tide.
Frigga...where was his beloved mother? The Queen of Asgard and its eternal light? Thor's heart clenched with rising panic as he surged towards the royal wing. Through a shattered portico and up spiraled granite steps he ran until his lungs burned.
"Frigga? Moth-" A gut-wrenching wail tore free at the sight awaiting him.
The queen's opulent chambers were utterly ruined. Splashes of crimson trailed across the flagstones, framing the pale corpse illuminated by a shaft of harrowing sunlight.
A body clad in gossamer robes and golden filigree lay crumpled in an unceremonious heap upon the marble floor. Singed tendrils of hair framed the slack, lifeless expression of his dearest friend, his soulmate, his ever-stalwart mother.
"No no no no, Norns please no..."
Thor stumbled forward in disbelief, shaking hands smearing fresh blood upon his mother's papery cheeks. He tasted the salt of his own anguished tears as his forehead dropped in a futile debasement of prayer.
"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.
He would not surrender as so many had to the Titan's cruel campaign of annihilation. Not yet. Not while he yet drew breath and Asgardian steel rested within his grasp.
Because Thor, son of Odin and heir to the golden realm eternal, was not merely a god of thunder. He was also a god of healing rains, of providence and reckoning.
A Thunderer whose crackling might was tempered not by restraint, but by purpose.
They had taken everything from him - his kingdom, his friends, his family. Until all that remained was a cold forge, grimly hammering out some semblance of a new path forward. A new reason to keep fighting when by all accounts, the struggle was already lost.
Thor's next breath burned like dragonfire through his broad chest as he rose from the sanguine pool with a newfound, simmering resolve. No more tears, no more regrets.
Only the sobering reality of reckoning yet to be delivered unto those who had wrought such senseless cruelty.
Reverently, he laid Frigga's body to rest upon her bed, catching one last glimpse of her serene features before covering them with a silken sheet. Though every inch of his being mourned that she deserved so much more than a hurried, unmarked burial, already his instincts railed against allowing further desecration.
It took every straining sinew for Thor to step away from his mother's side. His boots traced the edge of her deathbed before creaking to a standstill in the eerie silence.
As his haunted gaze swept over the ashen, bloodied wreckage anew, a strange acceptance settled over his riotous heartbeat. This ruin was but the first scar in a campaign that would span the stars themselves until the last of the Titan's followers drew their final, gasping breaths.
The callous appetite of vengeance still seethed within his marrow like venom. But lancing through that bilious tide ran clear currents of purpose, of rebirth and redemption.
Thunderers were to be nourishing rains in times of famine, warding off drought with their revitalizing showers. But they also bore righteous lightning unto transgressors, the storms of divine reckoning. And by the Norns, such a cleansing tempest would soon shatter across the cosmos until justice was rendered for all his kin.
His grip flexed around the hilt of the reforged Mjolnir - a blade tasting searing purpose with each faltering heartbeat as he departed the ruined chambers. Each soul lost would become embers fueling Thor's own burning path to atonement.
Such was the duality he embodied as an Avenger. A savior and a judge, thunder and lightning given flesh and steel. No longer would he forsake either heritage, not while his family's murderers still fouled the stars with their every breath.
His new destiny burned bright before him, forged in this crucible of sorrow and drowned hopes. Thor bowed his head, whispering a tormented farewell into the deathly still air.
"I will rain vengeance down upon them, my love. I swear it. Not just for you, but for all of them...they will burn as you did."
And so marched the fallen prince, steady footfalls thundering like the heartbeat of an ancient apocalypse down the shattered halls of Asgard's once gleaming throne room.
There would be no fanfare nor grand entry upon the scorched dais overlooking the twisted, corpse-strewn battlefield. Only a solitary silhouette, relic of a kingdom unchained yet resolute against tides of oblivion.
The sky itself trembled as if in dread before the gathering forge of godly wrath. Distant thunder growled in ominous warning as the prince's simmering blood lust reached a fever pitch.
Sheet lightning crackled and split the ashen heavens, blinding arcs searing from Thor's form to ground in jagged fissures spanning hundreds of yards. All crimson and white fury, measured yet inexorable as the coming of Ragnarok itself.
And through that maelstrom of undying vengeance came a deafening peal of thunder, a volcanic bellow of outrage and defiance that shattered the choking silence at last.
"YOU'LL BURN FOR THIS, TITAN!" he roared, hoisting Mjolnir high as the blade glowed like a star gone supernova. "DO YOU HEAR ME?! I'LL UNMAKE YOU FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE!"
Another blinding shock wave rumbled forth, birthing a lightning storm of Thor's ire alone. This was his birthright, his sworn duty - to reap apocalyptic tempests across the realms until the final ember of injustice was snuffed out forever.
In that harrowing moment, his conviction burned as bright as any dwarf-forged blade or dying star. Thor would stop at nothing until vengeance had been rendered for every shattered home, every life extinguished by the Titan's cruel purge.
Or he would spend the untold ages of eternity wandering that scorched path in pursuit of reckoning.
So spoke the Thunder Lord of Asgard reborn in fire.