by Alex Irvine
They sat in silence for a while after that, two sisters realizing just how much time they had lost. I needed a sister, too, Gamora thought. I didn’t want to be the one who always won…but if I hadn’t, Thanos would have done to me what he was already doing to Nebula.
That was in the past. Could they let it stay there, now that Nebula seemed to have gotten the killing urge out of her system? Gamora hoped so. Lost in thought, her sister silent beside her, she noticed a bright-blue light shining from down a cave passage. “What’s that?” she wondered aloud.
Maybe it’s a way out, she thought. They headed in that direction.
CHAPTER 16
After his talk with Gamora, Peter had retreated to his room and sat by himself, looking out the window and listening to Awesome Mix Vol. 2 on repeat. The tape had reached Meredith and Ego’s special song for the fourth time when Ego appeared in the doorway. “You all right, son? I saw your girl stomp off earlier, in quite a huff.”
“Yeah,” Peter said.
Ego heard the music. “It’s fortuitous, you listening to this song.”
Peter perked up.
“A favorite of your mom’s,” Ego explained.
“Yeah. Yeah, it was.”
“One of Earth’s greatest musical compositions,” Ego said. “Perhaps its very greatest.”
“Yeah,” Peter agreed. Ego definitely understood him. He understood everything Peter felt. This was what Gamora couldn’t see.
“You know, Peter, you and I, we’re the man in that song,” Ego said. He started speaking along with the chorus of the song, eventually explaining what he was driving at. “He loves the girl, but that’s not his place. History calls upon great men, and sometimes we are deprived of the pleasures of mortals.” Ego had crossed the room to Peter while he spoke. Now they stood together near the window.
“Well, you may not be mortal,” Peter said, “but me—”
“No, Peter. Death will remain a stranger to both of us, as long as the light burns within the planet.”
Wait, Peter thought. Seriously? “I’m immortal?” Ego nodded. “Really?”
“Yes. As long as the light exists.”
“Like, I could use the light to build cool things, like how you made this whole planet?”
Ego smiled at Peter’s enthusiasm. “Well, it might take a few million years of practice before you get really good at it, but yes.”
Peter excitedly explained his new plans.
“Whatever you want,” Ego said, just like any father says to a son with grand dreams.
“I’m gonna make some weird stuff,” Peter warned. His gloom about Gamora was lifting. This place was his destiny. He belonged here. For the first time in his life, he belonged.
“But you know, Peter,” Ego said, more serious now, “it is a tremendous responsibility. Only we can remake the universe. Only we can take the bridle of the cosmos and lead it to where it needs to go.”
He held out his hands. Peter did, too. Blue light blazed to life between them. “Wow,” Peter said. It was going to be a long time before he got used to that.
Ego watched him for a moment, then seemed to reach a decision. “Come with me,” he said. They walked away together into the palace.
Mantis watched them from the shadows. It was happening, just as it had happened thousands of times before…but now, maybe at last she could do something about it. She hurried to Drax’s room and woke him up. “Drax! Drax! We need to talk.”
Drax saw her and rolled over. “I’m sorry. I like a woman with some meat on her bones.”
“What?” She was confused.
“I tried to let you down easily by telling you I found you disgusting.”
He didn’t understand why she was there. “No, that’s not what…” She paused when she saw him acting like he was about to throw up. “What are you doing?”
“I’m imagining…being with you…” Drax gagged.
“Drax, that’s not…I don’t like you like that. I don’t even like the type of thing you are.”
He stopped and looked hurt. “Hey, there’s no need to get personal.”
“Listen!” she said. They were wasting time. “Ego’s gotten exactly what he wanted. I should have told you earlier. I am stupid. You are in danger.”
That got his attention. She began to tell him the story, and now he was listening.
Ego and Peter walked through the grand hall with the holographic dioramas of Ego’s life, from his first creation to Meredith Quill’s pregnancy.
“Now you need to readjust the way you process life,” Ego said. “Everything around us—including the girl—everything is temporary. We are forever.”
“Doesn’t eternity get boring?”
“Not if you have a purpose, Peter. Which is why you’re here. I told you how all those years ago I had an unceasing purpose to find life. But what I did not tell you was how when I finally did find it, it was all so…disappointing. And that is when I came to a profound realization. My innate desire to seek out other life was not so that I could walk among that life. Peter, I have found meaning.”
He touched Peter’s face and a vision exploded in Peter’s head. The endless reach of space and time, filled with millions of stars—no, billions—coming into being and burning themselves out, billions of years flashing by in an instant. The entire cosmos in his mind, in a way he had never before conceived. Peter gasped. “I…see it. Eternity.”
Gamora and Nebula had finally reached the end of the passage.
It was not a way out.
It ended in a vast chamber, with a thronelike structure on one end and light shining down from a distant hole in the ceiling. And that light fell on an endless pile of bones. Thousands of them, maybe millions, a hillside of bones that reached far above their heads and extended into the darkness on either side of them.
The skulls of every conceivable alien race, jumbled here together in the cold radiance of Ego’s light.
“Oh my God,” Gamora said. The truth behind the beauty of his planet was even more monstrous than she could have imagined.
Nebula took it all in for a long moment. Then she said, “We need to get off this planet.”
CHAPTER 17
Rocket had long since lost the ability to count the space jumps when the Third Quadrant finally blazed through the last one and slammed into a parking orbit around Ego’s planet. It felt bizarre to be back in regular space-time. Rocket looked down at himself to see whether he was normal again. Yondu and Kraglin groaned in their seats. Groot, sitting in his own chair, threw up.
“What you doing, boy?” Yondu demanded when he could speak again.
“I could tell by how you talked about him; this Ego’s bad news! We’re here to save Quill.”
“For what, huh?” Yondu was scornful. “For honor? For love?”
Rocket was up and out of his chair, looking for guns and his bag of bombs. “No, I don’t care about those things! I wanna save Quill so I can prove I’m better than him. I can lord this over him forever.” Yondu stared, then started laughing. “What are you laughing at me for?”
“You can fool yourself and everyone else, but you can’t fool me,” Yondu said. “I know who you are.”
“You don’t know anything about me, loser.”
“I know everything about you.” Yondu was out of his chair now, too, facing Rocket. “I know you play like you’re the meanest and the hardest, but actually you’re the most scared of all.”
“Shut up,” Rocket warned, but Yondu didn’t care. He was going to get this sorted out once and for all. If they were going to fight together, they had to drop the masks and admit what they really were.
“I know you steal batteries you don’t need, and you push away anyone who’s willing to put up with you,” Yondu said, not pulling any punches, “because just a little bit of love reminds you how big and empty that hole inside you actually is.”
“I said, shut up! I’m serious, dude.” Rocket was just about ready to fight.
Yon
du wasn’t mad anymore. He was sad, vulnerable. Rocket was amazed to realize that Yondu was actually reaching out to him. Trying to connect.
“Just like my own parents,” Yondu said. “Who sold me—their own little baby—into slavery. I know who you are, boy…because you’re me.”
They stared each other down for a very long, tense moment, with Kraglin watching off to the side, wondering which way things were going to go.
Eventually, Rocket let out a sigh. “What kind of a pair are we?”
“Kind that’s about to go fight a planet, I reckon,” Yondu said.
“All right. Okay! Good!” Rocket liked the sound of a fight…but when Yondu’s words sank in, he paused. “Fight a what?”
After she and Nebula found their way up out of the caves, Gamora raged through Ego’s palace until she found Mantis and slammed her up against a wall. “Who are you people? What is this place?”
Drax was also there. “Gamora, let her go.”
She ignored him, keeping a grip on Mantis’ throat. “The bodies. In the caverns. Who are they?”
Too late, Gamora realized she’d made a mistake by touching Mantis, whose antennae began to glow. “You are scared,” she whispered.
Gamora flinched, feeling the emotion intensify. Every fear she’d ever felt was present again. Her stomach knotted up and her heart raced. She dropped Mantis and stepped back. The feeling began to fade, but she could still sense the intensity of it. Her hands surprisingly shook a little.
“What did she do to me?” Gamora said.
Drax was solemn. “She already told me everything.”
Nebula and Gamora looked back to Mantis. What was “everything”? Was there more than a secret pile of bones deep in the caves under the planet’s surface paradise?
“The bodies are his children,” Mantis said slowly.
The meaning of this sank in. If they didn’t do something, the bones of Peter Quill would join that pile, and Ego would move on to the next in an infinite roster of children he had sired all across the universe. “We need to find Peter and get off this planet,” Gamora said.
“Ego will have found him and won him to his side by now,” Mantis said. “He has a way.”
Impatient, Nebula asked, “Can’t we just go?”
“No,” Gamora said. “He’s our friend.”
“All any of you do is yell at each other,” Nebula answered. “You’re not friends.”
“You’re right,” Drax said, pausing to consider his words. “We’re family.” He looked at Mantis, then Gamora. “We leave no one behind.” Then, with a look back at Nebula, he added, “Except maybe you.”
CHAPTER 18
In the open space of the great hall, Ego created a hologram of endless planets, all lit with the blue energy of his essence. “I call it the Expansion,” he said. “It is my purpose, and now it is yours as well.”
Mind still filled with the cosmic vision, Peter said, “It’s beautiful.”
“Over thousands of years I implanted thousands of extensions of myself on thousands of worlds,” Ego said. One of the display holograms showed him sowing a radiant plant that took root and spread his blue essence down into the planet. “I need to fulfill life’s one true purpose: to grow and spread, covering all that exists until everything is…me.”
The planets in the hologram transformed, becoming shining blue spheres.
All identical. All Ego.
“I only had one problem,” Ego went on. “A single Celestial doesn’t have enough power for such an enterprise. But two Celestials…now that might just do.” The closest display now showed Ego’s human form embracing an endless series of aliens, just as Peter had seen him embracing Meredith Quill. “Out of all my labors, the most beguiling was the attempt to graft my DNA with that of another species. I hoped such a coupling would be enough to power such an Expansion. I had Yondu deliver some of them to me. It broke the Ravager code, but I compensated him generously, and to ease his conscience, I said I’d never hurt them. And that was true. They never felt a thing. But one after the other, they failed me. Not one of them carried the Celestial genes…until you, Peter. Out of all my spawn, only you carry the connection to the light.”
Ego threw his head back and his voice echoed from the vaulted ceiling. “For the first time in my existence, I am truly not alone!”
Peter blinked and the vision of the cosmos receded a little. It was still there, a vast sensation that a normal human mind could not have comprehended…but part of him was human, and that part mattered, too.
Ego saw the change in Peter. “What is it, son?”
“My friends,” Peter said.
“Well, you see. That’s the mortal in you, Peter.” Ego sounded dismissive.
“Yes.”
“We are beyond such things.”
Maybe you are, Peter thought. But I don’t think I am. At least not yet. “But my mother,” he said. “You said you loved my mother.”
“And that I did. My river lily, who knew all the words to every song that came over the radio. I returned to Earth to see her three times, and I knew if I returned a fourth, I’d never leave. The Expansion—the reason for my very existence—would be over, so I did what I had to do.” Ego paused. His voice was full of regret as he gazed up at the glimmering blue array of planets. “But it broke my heart to put that tumor in her head.”
The vision of the cosmos vanished from Peter’s mind. He replayed Ego’s words to himself. Put that tumor in her head. “What?”
Ego turned away from the vision of the Expansion to Peter. “All right, I know that sounds bad—”
Peter drew both of his pistols and lit up Ego with a barrage, firing until he had blasted away most of Ego’s upper torso. Where the blasters had destroyed Ego’s physical body, a skeleton of blue energy remained. Peter kept firing, as if each shot were venting a little of the shock and fury he felt, but Ego withstood the barrage without going down. Peter stopped firing. He still seethed from the betrayal, but he couldn’t kill Ego with his pistols. He had never hated someone this much in his life.
Ego, half his head still human and the other half a flickering blue plasma skull, looked at Peter and said, “Who do you think you are?”
“You killed my mother!”
“I tried so hard to find the form that suited you,” Ego raged. He transformed until he was a dead ringer for Peter’s fantasy father. “And this is the thanks I get?” Then he was Ego again, fully restored and his face contorted with rage. “You really need to grow up.”
Peter was shocked to realize that Ego had never really cared about his mother. She was just a means to an end for him. All his romantic talk about his river lily, it was all a lie. Peter couldn’t get a grip on how quickly he whiplashed from joy to betrayal. While Peter grappled with the huge emotions, Ego raised a tendril of energy from the back of the hall and curled it down to spear his son through the back.
Peter spasmed and twisted on the end of the tendril. “I wanted to do this together,” Ego growled. “But I suppose you’ll have to learn by spending the next thousand years as a battery!”
Not long after they got themselves sorted aboard the Third Quadrant, Rocket heard Gamora’s voice over the comm. “Finally! Rocket!”
“Keep that transmitter close by so I can find you,” Rocket answered. “I’ve got an old piece of construction equipment Yondu once used to slice open the Bank of Azkaveri.”
Yondu had explained Ego’s secret to him, and from the sound of it, Gamora and the gang down on the planet were in the know now, too. Maybe Mantis had told them. Gamora started to explain. “Ego’s—”
“I know,” Rocket said. “Get ready.”
Kraglin punched the release switch and the small drilling vessel dropped away from the Third Quadrant. Yondu gunned it toward Ego’s planet, which was no longer a smooth sphere with pockets of brilliant blue.
Now it looked like Ego’s angry face.
CHAPTER 19
Peter hung in the air, impaled on the spike of
Ego’s energy. Ego walked up to him and took his tape player. Peter tried to resist but couldn’t. Ego pressed play and the music that Peter’s mother had loved filled the room. Ego quoted the lines along with the music. He raised the hand holding the tape player, taking in the vast holographic vision of the Expansion. “Peter. This is the sea.”
Ego clenched his fist, crushing the tape. The song cut off and blue Celestial energy flashed out of Peter’s body, streaking down into the center of the planet. He felt it reach the planet’s core, Ego’s pure essence. His Celestial power merged with Ego’s and the core flashed a blinding white. Peter could see the entire universe at once again, the cosmic vision returning to show him the beginning of the Expansion. All across the universe, the plants Ego had rooted exploded into monstrous, scintillating blobs of life. The ice cream shop in Missouri where Meredith Quill had kissed her spaceman, way back in 1980, was crushed by the spreading blue. On other planets, the same thing happened. Heaving masses of blue Celestial essence overwhelmed cities and spread over remote landscapes. Terrified people watched or ran, unable to believe what they were seeing.
Back in the great hall, Ego leaned his head back and smiled. The Expansion! At last it was happening.…
With a crash, Drax interrupted him by kicking in the great hall’s main door. Ego glared in his direction, energy crackling around his body, but before he could do anything, Yondu’s drilling ship smashed through the palace roof.
“Hey there!” Yondu sang out—and a split second later the ship crashed down on Ego, driving him into the floor with a boom that shook the room’s mighty pillars.
The tendril of energy holding Peter disappeared and he fell to the floor. Gamora ran to help him. “I told you something didn’t feel right.”
“‘I told you so’? That’s what I need to hear right now?”