Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos

by Barry Lyga

Genres: YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

In Avengers: Infinity War a threat emerged from the cosmos—Thanos, a ruthless warlord who plans to collect all six Infinity Stones. Joined by his formidable allies, he will be near-unstoppable at achieving his goal. The Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man must join forces and fight side by side to stop Thanos, while the fate of the Earth and the universe lays in the balance.

In this new original novel by bestselling author Barry Lyga, learn the origins of the most feared force in the universe, and see how Thanos became the Titan consumed by his quest for power.

Release date: November 20, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 416

Sample

I’VE SNAPPED MY FINGERS.

And—

I am adrift in myself, alone with my past, my present. The sheer existence of me is at once a weighty and a weightless thing. Time is not an arrow or a line or any other convenient metaphor; Time is not an abstract notion.

Time is a Stone.

With the Stone, all history is open to me. I am in history. I am history. I witness it and relive it and experience it in the same quantum instant.

For the first time in years, I behold the orange-swaddled orb that is Titan. From a distance of thousands of kilometers, the planet looks the same as when I left, with no indication as to the havoc that lurks beneath the haze.

And then it’s years later, and my forces wage combat against Her Majesty Cath’Ar’s troops aboard the Executrix. Bodies spill into space as the Leviathans mass for a second attack run.

And now Korath tells Ronan:

“Thanos is the most powerful being in the universe!”

And Ronan, the fool, responds:

“Not anymore.”

Unmoored from the present, observing without interfering, I watch my life and my certainty as they play out. I am the foregone conclusion to my own prophecy. Korath’s warning has come true, and now I truly am the most powerful being in the universe, perceiving all reality from the vantage point of ultimate power.

Not much more than a boy, I tilt the glass to my lips. The liquid within is green, bubbly, and too sweet, tasting of melon and elderberries and ethyl alcohol.

I am a child and my father tells me, “Your mother went mad the moment she laid eyes on you.” There is a softness to his voice noticed only in retrospect, with adult eyes laid upon the childish past.

This changes nothing. Everything is done. Everything will be done.

Years later, my ship launches from the surface of Titan, bearing me into the unknown. I tell myself that everything I know lurks beneath that haze, and then I tell myself that it doesn’t matter.

Swaddled in the verdant energies of the Time Stone, my mind traverses decades at the speed of thought, spinning the jewel of my life from facet to facet.

“You’ll die there, Titan,” says Vathlauss, choking on his own blood and Kebbi’s poison. “You’ll die in the glory that is Asgard.”

I watch, paralyzed and helpless, as Gamora swings her battle-staff…

… and Daakon Ro postures and threatens on my viewscreen…

… and the Other speaks to me in the wreckage of the Chitauri staging base:

“Humans… They are not the cowering wretches we were promised. They stand. They are unruly and therefore cannot be ruled. To challenge them is to court death.”

I am striding through the bodies of Asgardians, the dead remnants of that once proud civilization, as Ebony Maw proselytizes to the few who still live.

I am beating the Hulk nearly to death…

… and hurling Gamora from the cliff on Vormir…

… and then—years previous—a voice, the voice of my only friend:

“You’re a coward, Thanos! A coward! You hide behind this ship, behind the Other and the Chitauri, and now behind those girls!”

Years leapfrog one another, spurting ahead in an instant, and I am aboard Sanctuary. The protective doors to my vault slide open, and the Gauntlet glimmers there in half-light, not quite gold.

I have seen this moment before. I have lived it. It is happening for the first time, the second time, the millionth time.

I reach for it.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll—”

THE PROBLEM WITH TITAN WAS THAT IT WAS PERFECT. AND even as a child, Thanos knew nothing was truly perfect. Every diamond had its flaw, and every saintly soul had its black spot of guilt, shame, or restless abnegation. Titan, too, suffered from an imperfection.

That imperfection, as best he could tell, was Thanos himself.

Son of A’Lars—the High Mentor of Titan, architect of the Eternal City—and Sui-San, his absent mother, Thanos was, at birth, a shock to his people. His appearance was a jolt of adrenaline to a body at rest. Distinguished from Titan’s populace by dint of his deformation and purplish hue, he was prominent in ways and for reasons beyond his control yet fixed permanently in his very physical being. On Titan, the people’s flesh reflected a range of splendid colors. But none was purple, the color of death, the color of ill omen.

Save Thanos.

From the Vast Salt Sea on the other side of the planet to the glimmering bronze range of cryovolcanoes just outside the Eternal City, Titan was a united world, more than the sum of its parts, a resplendent and cohesive whole. The Eternal City was a perfect blend of architecture and engineering, its soaring spires and towers nestled together in a collection of utmost harmony. A world absolutely in tune with itself.

Except.

For.

Thanos.

His skin color, along with a series of vertical ridges—furrows that made his flesh look as though it had been raked—widened his expansive jaw. These traits marked him a deviant, a mutated thing. Had his father been anyone but A’Lars, his mother anyone but Sui-San, he most likely would have been consigned to a medical facility somewhere. Poked and prodded his whole life, quarantined from polite society.

Instead, he was left in A’Lars’s care. Sui-San disappeared shortly after his birth.

He walked at six months. Not the drunken toddle of a baby, but the confident stride of a man. He could already hold himself erect, control the movement of his head and neck. He had complete coordination of his limbs, and his bearing was that of an adult.

Two days shy of his first birthday, he spoke. Not a word, but rather a full sentence: “Father, will there be a birth celebration for me, and will Mother attend?”

He’d been capable of speech for weeks but had waited until he’d fully parsed the nuances of sentence structure to issue his first words.

Before either of those milestones, he knew he was different in a world that prized conformity and unanimity above all else.

“Mother will not attend,” A’Lars had said. If his father was surprised by Thanos’s speech and his diction, he did not show it. “I will arrange for friends.”

I will arrange for… Those words preceded most of A’Lars’s statements. Thanos’s father rarely touched his son, rarely even looked at him. In regard to Thanos’s needs, he only ever said I will arrange for… and then did just that, with efficiency and aplomb.

Thanos wanted for nothing. Needed nothing.

Except to belong.

As good as his word, A’Lars arranged for friends: a collection of androids designed to look and act like toddlers. They were programmed to distract Thanos and keep him dumbly happy and content.

In time, he’d figured out their programming and rewrote their algorithms. He now had a coterie of robotic servants that amused him but accomplished little else. His restless mind craved more.

“Very well,” A’Lars relented. “School.”

Generations ago, it had been the common practice to install children in thought-cribs and educate them through direct cerebral interface. That practice had long fallen out of favor by the time of Thanos’s birth. It was now fashionable to add an interactive social element to education, placing a group of children together in a school, where they could theoretically enhance one another’s learning and also facilitate socialization.

Thanos was excited by the prospect of school. Other than the reprogrammed androids, he’d had no companionship, and he looked forward to meeting other children his age.

“Be polite,” A’Lars told him on their way to the education complex in their floater. “Speak only when directed to.”

“Yes, Father.” Thanos bobbed his head in agreement. Through the clear shell over the floater, he could see other floaters, the tops of buildings, and the distant mountain ranges of Titan. His world was beautiful and at peace, and he longed to explore every part of it.

“The teachers have been warned about your appearance,” A’Lars reminded him. “Try not to do or say anything upsetting or untoward.”

His appearance. Almost unconsciously, he ran one finger along his jawline.

At some point in Titan’s distant past, for reasons no one could any longer remember, the color purple had become associated with death, a connection that persisted to the present. When Titans died, their bodies were covered with purple shrouds. The lights in their residences were tuned to the violet portion of the spectrum for the grieving period.

He’d first encountered this association when his father received a visitor in their home. Thanos was four years old, and the visitor was an elderly woman, a friend of A’Lars’s parents, seeking advice from the High Mentor of Titan. She wore shades of purple from head to toe, including a veil covering her face, a veil that was the precise color of Thanos’s own skin.

The coincidence of her clothing and his own skin color thrilled Thanos, as coincidences often do to children. When she left, he babbled to his father about the color of her clothes, about the way the veil so perfectly matched his own flesh.

And A’Lars had explained, in blunt language, that she wore that color because she was in mourning. She was a widow, and so she wore the color of death.

Thanos’s excitement had curdled. Of all the hues his maladapted genes could have chosen to express, why did it have to be purple?

Now, at the education complex, A’Lars led him down a corridor, peering around and occasionally sniffing in barely disguised annoyance. “Uninspired design and workmanship,” he commented. “Do not allow your surroundings to infect your breeding, Thanos.”

“I will not, Father,” Thanos promised, fighting to match his father’s disinterested deportment. Inside, he was ecstatic to be among his peers; he knew his father disapproved of expression of emotion, so he suppressed his excitement.

At a doorway, father and son paused. Thanos waited as his father thumbed open the door.

This would be the first time in his awareness that Thanos would be separated from his father for more than an hour or so. He opened his mouth to say something, but A’Lars nodded curtly at him and said, “Don’t be late,” followed by, “Learn well,” before turning and striding back down the corridor they’d walked together.

Thanos nodded to himself, then stepped into the education chamber.

It was a smallish room with a series of twelve personal interface pods that could be arranged in any formation. At that moment, they were lined up in two ranks of six each, all facing the front of the chamber, where stood an adult in a gray tunic and slacks, his hands clasped behind his back. He had thick black hair pomaded to his skull like a helmet, and skin the color of a pale morning sky.

The teacher smiled and—to his credit—did an admirable job concealing his startled reflex at the sight of Thanos.

But Thanos noted it. The school had been advised he was coming. They knew who and what he was. And yet still, his appearance shocked.

“And you must be Thanos,” the teacher said. Thanos thought it an absurd thing to say—who else could he be?—but the teacher’s smile was pleasant, and Thanos bore in mind his father’s admonitions. So he simply nodded and said, “Yes.”

“Class, welcome a new friend and fellow learner: Thanos.”

Eleven of the pods rotated enough that the children within could get an unobstructed view of the newcomer. Thanos felt a frisson of panic at twenty-two eyes boring into him, then forced the panic away. They were children. Like him.

“Take the empty pod, please,” said the teacher. “Today we’ll be studying color and patterns.”

He scrambled into the pod. Its padded interior shifted into a cocoon as he settled into place. Now, here, he was comfortable. In his element. The interface pod was an older model than the one he had at home, but it was serviceable. He ran a few updates on its firmware, then connected it to the pod at home.

Colors and patterns. As the teacher spoke and the pod conjured images for him to absorb, he realized how incredibly bored he was already. He’d already learned about color from his father, from the nature of light to the manipulation of pigments. Patterns—from plaids to stripes, dots, and organics—were similarly old news to him. Was this really the best way for him to learn?

He tamped down his impatience. He had wanted this, after all; he couldn’t give up on it after a few minutes.

With a sigh, he switched his pod to accelerated mode and flashed through the lesson at twice the speed.

If the learning portion of school was dull, then at least there was the social aspect to look forward to. There was a break at noon for food and physical recreation. Thanos was no fool—he understood that the physical component was designed to tire out the students and make them more manageable. He felt he was already incredibly polite and deferential (having not pointed out two or three errors his teacher had made earlier), so he forsook the running around and wild play of his classmates and instead sat quietly in a corner, studying a rudimentary hologram of a synthetic neural pathway. If improved, it would make synths much more lifelike.

A cluster of children gathered not far from him. They spoke in hushes and murmurs, occasionally pointing in his direction. He did his best to ignore them, while at the same time wondering how he could engage them.

Maybe this had been a mistake, this schooling. Maybe he should have stayed at home. He had not imagined himself the center of attention, a thing to be spoken of and not to.

But just then, a girl named Gwinth approached him. “We have a question for you,” she said. And before he could say anything, she went ahead and asked it: “Why are you purple?”

Thanos blinked with something like confusion. No one had ever asked that simple question before. She seemed more curious than frightened or disgusted. Perhaps his father had overestimated people’s reaction to his appearance.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “It’s a mutation.”

“A what?”

As they spoke, the other children gathered around them. Thanos tried to figure out the best way to explain it, but the truth was that he only partly understood it himself. There were things called genes that made people who and what they were. Something had gone wrong with one of his.

“Where are the genes?” Gwinth asked, and ran her hands randomly over her body, feeling for them. Others followed suit.

Thanos shook his head. “They’re tiny. Microscopic.” A thought occurred to him and a light blossomed within—here and now, he’d been presented with a great opportunity. He had the attention of his fellows. They didn’t seem afraid of him or disgusted, just curious. If he could explain some part of himself to them…

The previous night, he’d memorized the layout of the school so that he would not get lost. Now he led the group—about ten of them—back down the hallways, to a bio lab for the older students. It was unused at the moment and it had everything Thanos needed.

He arranged his retinue around a workbench with a microscope filter, then rummaged around until he found a needle, typically used for pinning down samples. He had a different use for it.

As the clutch of children watched, their breaths held in unison, Thanos pricked the tip of his thumb with the needle. A gasp went up as the red bubble formed.

He squeezed a drop of blood onto the microscope filter and a light filled the room. A holographic image of his own blood, now projected into the air. A chorus of oohs and aahs rose up from the other children.

Pleased, Thanos fiddled with the controls to sharpen and clarify the image. Globules pulsed and danced across the room. The other children pointed and laughed with delight at the show.

“This is my blood,” Thanos explained. “And for comparison…”

He took the hand of a boy near him and poked at his thumb with the needle. A spot of blood welled up there and the boy shrieked as though gutted.

No one was pointing and laughing now. There was a moment of group silence, counterbalanced by the boy’s ongoing cry of pain and shock, and then the rest of the children howled as though they, too, had been jabbed.

And there, now, was the fear his father had promised. It washed around Thanos. It enveloped him.

Thanos dropped the boy’s hand and stood in stunned silence as the screams grew higher and higher around him.

Later, he waited in the office of the school’s proctor, alone. A sound caught his attention and he looked up.

A’Lars stood in the doorway.

“This experiment is a failure,” his father announced. “Come home.”

That night, Thanos stole out of bed and listened at the door to his father’s cogitarium, the study where A’Lars spent most of his hours in deep thought. A voice not his father’s came to him through the door.

“You know I revere you, A’Lars. We all do—”

“Then speak plainly,” A’Lars demanded.

“Your child. He is… different.”

“Indeed. You’ve noticed. I salute your perceptions.”

A’Lars’s sarcasm silenced the other for a moment. Then: “Perhaps there is something more suitable for the child of the esteemed A’Lars than a pedestrian school.”

“Without doubt,” A’Lars said smoothly. “Thank you for your time, your consideration, and your counsel.”

A’Lars switched off the comms, and Thanos, straining, heard his father mutter, “Dolts.”

It was irregular, to say the least, for a child to be withdrawn from school and taught by a parent. But A’Lars’s shadow was long, his fame all-encompassing.

And besides… everyone knew it was for the best.

While his father’s specialty was synthetic intelligence, he was something of a polymath and also dabbled in materials science and architecture, which had led to his prominence on Titan. There was only so much livable terrain on the planet, and A’Lars had figured out how best to use that space and, furthermore, how to protect it from the vicissitudes of nature. His skills translated into considerable fame and political power, making the absence of his wife and the grotesqueness of his son all the more shameful.

He was an indifferent father, but a challenging and unfathomably brilliant teacher. While Thanos resented the loss of the opportunity for companionship and friends, he had to admit—begrudgingly—that A’Lars was a more fitting teacher for him.

Praise was rare. His father would sometimes comment on Thanos’s intelligence as though it were a fait accompli, as though its very existence made Thanos’s enormous mental capacity exceptional and unexceptional at the same time. Lessons were quick and expected to be passed with one hundred percent understanding.

“Your intellect is your primary and best tool,” his father said once in a scarce shared moment. “Someday, if your achievements merit, you may have the honor of being called Tha-nos. Or perhaps even T’Hanos, though I’d advise you not to set your sights so high,” A’Lars cautioned.

“I am still lonely,” Thanos said, struggling to keep a note of whining out of his voice. He knew his father loathed such childish things.

A’Lars sighed in defeat. “I will arrange…” he began.

A’Lars was as good as his word and did indeed arrange something. He brought Thanos an actual, living boy. Several of them, actually. To vie for the role of friend. Only one passed muster.

Sintaa was, by definition, Thanos’s best friend, since he was Thanos’s only friend. Lean where Thanos was broad, Sintaa had an enviably smooth, normal-size chin and skin the acceptable color of raw peaches. He was possessed of a sunny disposition, in contrast to Thanos’s taciturn, withdrawn nature.

As the years passed, Thanos suspected that A’Lars had paid, blackmailed, or threatened Sintaa’s parents into having their child become his son’s friend. His father would never admit to such a quotidian and desperate tactic, but by the age of ten, Thanos could prize out certain words and phrases that led him confidently to this conclusion. Cruelly, fate and genetics had cursed him with a phenomenal mind, one that made him all the more keenly aware of his deformation and of the singular nature of his ostracism. From what he gleaned by watching news and entertainment holos, he realized the depth of his isolation, but was powerless to rectify it.

And yet Sintaa himself—regardless of what pressures had been brought to bear on his parents—seemed genuinely to enjoy Thanos’s company. Of all the children who had been paraded before him to audition for the role of “friend,” only Sintaa possessed an easy smile, a laconic and relaxed mien, and the glint of trouble in his eyes. Thanos attempted to resist liking him, and failed.

“You are the first thing my father has brought to me that I actually enjoy,” Thanos said at one point early in their friendship.

Sintaa grinned. He was too intelligent for his age, too, though not nearly as brilliant as Thanos. “I’m not a thing,” he reminded Thanos. “I’m a person.”

Thanos grunted in assent. “Of course.”

They played together in the chambers Thanos shared with his father, never in public, never at Sintaa’s house. Thanos had figured out a way to paint with light, devising a series of databrushes that collected photons and froze them temporarily in place, and they spent hours painting the air, watching the holograms glimmer and shine before they eventually corroded and bled off like slow fireworks.

“Can I ask you a question?” Thanos said.

Sintaa seemed surprised. He paused in mid-brushstroke. “You never ask questions. You know everything already.”

“I wish that were true,” Thanos admitted. “There’s much I do not know. Especially with regard to one thing.”

Sintaa sat back. The holograms danced and sparkled around him, flickering dreams caught and dragged into the waking world. “Ask.”

Thanos hesitated. For the first time in his life, he understood the idea of being nervous.

“What is it like,” he managed eventually, “to have a mother?”

Sintaa laughed. “Everyone has a mother, Thanos.”

Had Thanos been capable of blushing, he would have done so at that moment. “Biologically speaking, yes. But what is it like to have one, not merely to come from one?”

Sintaa’s eyes softened. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Opened it again. Closed it. It took many such cycles before he found his voice.

“I don’t know how to describe it to you,” he confessed. “It’s all I’ve ever known.”

It’s all I’ve ever known. Those words struck Thanos with a sharp pain he’d never experienced. More than the words, though, was the tone of Sintaa’s voice as he said them. There was a warmth and comfort there, and Thanos knew that this was what he was missing—the succor of his mother. As far as he could tell, every living thing on Titan had the love of its mother except for him.

“I don’t even know where she is,” Thanos said. “One of the few secrets A’Lars has succeeded in keeping from me.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Sintaa said, “I know where she is.”

By this point in his life, Thanos had the shape and height of an older child. His growth spurts were frequent and painful. At almost one and two-thirds meters tall, he had the appearance of an early adolescent, masking the mind of a genius. His skin had lightened somewhat since birth, but was still the hated and feared purple. He seldom ventured forth from his father’s house—A’Lars had told him many times that it was best not to upset people.

So today Thanos wore a cloak with a hood that covered his head and hid his face in shadow. Dragging the tail of the cloak along the ground, he approached a specific building not with fear, but rather trepidation.

Behind him, Sintaa nodded, encouraging him forward.

The building was nondescript and squat, a rare low structure in a city dominated by towering skyscrapers and floating edifices buoyed aloft by antigravity technology.

Sintaa had heard of it from his parents. They referred to it as a kind of hospital. Thanos knew what a hospital was, of course—a place where ailments were cured, injuries given balm.

Was his mother ill? Is that why no one would let him see her? But in that case, why not just tell him? Why the secrecy and the shame?

It didn’t matter: His mother was in there. That was all he cared about.

He hesitated just a moment at the door. He was a boy of ten, a child, and despite his intellect—or. . .